Archive for General
We’ve blogged about the U.S. Naval Academy lowering its standards for minorities a few times. In a “diversity” outreach effort, the school practices two-tiered admissions, assessing black applicants under a separate and lower standard than other applicants. Professor Bruce Fleming, a professor at the Academy, publicly exposed this practice.
Walter Williams, author of such books as More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well and Liberty versus the Tyranny of Socialism: Controversial Essays, goes further by revealing that the Naval Academy offers remedial help for black applicants. But it’s worse than it sounds:
“Many black students are admitted to the Naval Academy through remedial training at the Naval Academy Preparatory School (NAPS) in Newport, R.I., which is a one-year post-secondary school. Finishing the year with a 2.0 GPA, a C average, almost guarantees admission to the academy. A C average for remedial work is nothing to write home about. Occasionally, when students don’t make the 2.0 GPA target, the target is renegotiated downward. Minority applicants with SAT scores down to the 300s and with Cs and Ds grades (and no particular leadership or athletics) are also admitted after a remedial year at the Naval Academy Preparatory School.
“Bruce Fleming, an English professor at the academy for 22 years, teaches a remedial English class and finds that in his spring 2009 class, most of NAPS’s students earn Cs and Ds and many are on probation. About seven years ago Professor Fleming was on the admissions board, where the standing instruction is not to write anything down because ‘everything is ‘FOI’able’ — meaning it can be demanded under the Freedom of Information Act. Such an instruction highlights the dishonesty of race preferences. The dishonesty doesn’t stop there. The academy will go to great lengths to retain black students. When Professor Fleming charged a black student with plagiarism, he was not properly informed of the hearing and subsequently the student’s peer group found him not guilty. Honor violations by black students are usually ‘remediated.’”
Naturally, such practices stigmatize all black students, even those admitted based on grades and scores and not skin color. But that’s the reality of lowered standards. Unless one wears a sign around his neck that lists his grades and scores, he will be considered an “affirmative action” admittee if he’s black.
So much for racial progress, eh?
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Addressing an audience at the NAACP National Convention, president Benjamin Jealous acknowledged that racial preferences are unpopular and face future defeat (with a shout-out to Ward Connerly):
“And we will need all those friends and many more because I’ll tell you this: The days of Ward Connerly beating us at the ballot box are nigh. We are going. You know, the only question about affirmative action isn’t whether or not we need the hammer. The only question is whether or not the hammer is big enough.”
Indeed, racial preferences are unpopular, as voters in California, Washington state, Michigan, and Nebraska have shown. A measure to bar government racial preferences in Arizona will appear on that state’s ballot in November 2010.
Jealous invokes Martin Luther King, Jr., and his view that poor whites and poor blacks have more in common than perceived. He concedes that blacks aren’t the only Americans facing problems related to poverty and shouldn’t be the only ones to benefit from preferences (although he uses the term affirmative action):
“And the only conversation about affirmative action should be in addition to there being a gender ‑‑ no replacement here ‑‑ in addition to there being gender‑ conscious affirmative action, in addition to there being race‑conscious affirmative action, if we should do as a country what so many college campuses have done with first‑ time college admissions and say there should be class‑ conscious affirmative action too. It should be class‑ conscious.”
The American Civil Rights Institute supports class-based affirmative action, which would benefit a much wider range of people. This type of affirmative action doesn’t generate the kind of opposition racial preferences do. After a long history of fighting racial discrimination, it’s backward and hypocritical to allow “reverse” discrimination in order to make up for past discrimination. Such a practice is unsustainable, as even Jealous recognizes.
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The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald says what many people don’t want to hear. Commenting on Ricci v. DeStefano, she cuts to the chase in City Journal:
“The main function of the race industry today is to repackage problems of black underachievement as instances of white racism. For decades, the vast majority of alleged discrimination violations have been manifestations of the black-white performance gap, whether in academic achievement, crime rates, or poverty-producing behaviors like illegitimacy and dropping out of school. The race industry cloaks such problems in the language of rights and racism—pushing the achievement gap offstage, keeping alive the phantom of ubiquitous white bias, and generating jobs in the race industry. Thus, employment and educational standards that no one would otherwise think twice about are suddenly viewed as legally suspicious, without any reason to think them flawed except that blacks do not meet them at equal rates.”
People have to blame something or someone for the academic achievement gap between blacks and whites. Blaming blacks themselves or otherwise seeing the gap simply as a reality of the differences between groups of people are politically incorrect propositions.
Leftists and preference apologists prefer to blame “the system,” institutionalized racism, or the more ridiculous-sounding “test bias.” New Haven’s promotional exam, an objective civil service test, “merely favored those who had studied hard and prepared themselves to become captains and lieutenants,” Mac Donald writes.
As Mac Donald notes, had blacks passed the test in satisfactory numbers, criticisms that imply memorizing information negatively impacts blacks, for instance, would not have come up. She also notes that New Haven had already tinkered with the exam to remove any alleged bias against minorities. For example, the questions were below 10th grade reading level, and minority firefighters were “oversampled” in developing the test.
“The Court’s majority and minority opinions are assiduously silent about the only reason why anyone views the New Haven firefighters’ exam through the lens of race at all: the gap in cognitive attainment between blacks and whites.”
There’s the often unspoken rub. Generally speaking, blacks tend to score lower on standardized tests than whites, but people frequently discuss the gap without reference to this fact. And it gets us…nowhere.
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The New York Times published a story about Lieutenant Ben Vargas, the lone Hispanic who joined a lawsuit with white firefighters in Ricci v. DeStefano. Vargas says he was knocked unconscious by someone he suspects was a black firefighter for joining the lawsuit. His own brother, also a firefighter, turned against him. Vargas, who received the sixth highest score on the promotions exams, was called a turncoat and an Uncle Tom for standing up for his rights.
Black Americans are all too aware of the epithet “Uncle Tom,” which refers to someone considered subservient to whites, an accommodating token. A black person is branded an Uncle Tom for veering from the group in any way.
When one goes against prevailing opinion, derision is to be expected. In group-think, individuals are not allowed to express opinions different from the group’s. What’s good for the group takes precedence over what’s good for the individual. As black conservatives know, going against the grain takes courage. Standing up for what’s right is difficult but worth the effort.
“I consider myself an American — I was born and raised here,” Vargas said. “I love my people. I love my culture. I love our rice and beans, our salsa music, our language — everything my parents raised us with. But I am so grateful for the opportunity only the United States can give.”
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A few years ago, white parents in Seattle and Jefferson County, Kentucky, sued the school districts for assigning students based on race, a policy they said violated their rights to equal protection of the laws. The schools claimed they used race only as a “tie-breaker.” The cases made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared the race-based school assignment programs unconstitutional.
The court contended that “remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination is a compelling interest under the strict scrutiny test,” but because Seattle was never court-ordered to desegregate, and Jefferson County’s desegregation order had been dissolved, remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination wasn’t involved in the case.
“The school districts have not carried their heavy burden of showing that the interest they seek to achieve justifies the extreme means they have chosen–discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments.”
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, Jefferson County still relies too heavily on race when assigning students, so says Ted Gordon, the lawyer who challenged Jefferson County’s assignment plan. “They cannot use race as a factor. Here we are again.” (Source)
A family of Indian descent wanted their daughter to attend Stopher Elementary, their neighborhood school. The district assigned her to Shelby Elementary, a school 20 miles away. Gordon said the district likely assigned a certain number of black students from the Shelby neighborhood to Stopher through a race-based assignment plan, which Gordon says violated the Supreme Court’s ruling, and assigned the child of Indian descent to Shelby for racial balance.
Jefferson County School Superintendent Sheldon Berman insists sending children to certain schools based on the color of their skin is necessary to preserve “diversity in our community.”
Why do school districts classify and assign students by race, although Brown v. The Board of Education was supposed to end this practice? One reason is that some schools will become heavily black. Why is that a problem, you ask?
If you know the answer, please share it with me. I’m dying to know.
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In April, Bucknell University deans shut down a racial preferences bake sale that a conservative student group hosted to illustrate the unfair and demeaning nature of lowered admissions standards based on race. The school cited a discrepancy between prices at the time of application and at the time of sale. A technicality.
After almost three months, the issue’s still hot. The story recently was covered by the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. From the Inquirer:
The “affirmative-action bake sale”…was shut down by the administration in April. But it didn’t end there…Bucknell president Brian C. Mitchell has received about 100 letters, e-mails, and phone calls protesting the administration’s response.
The controversy at Bucknell – a 3,500-student liberal arts university in Lewisburg, Pa., about 75 minutes north of the state capital – is not unique.
College campuses across the country frequently must deal with delicate issues of free speech, political posturing, and race relations.
Affirmative-action bake sales, usually held by conservative groups, have been cropping up on campuses for years, much to the chagrin of many administrators – although Kutztown University a few years ago let one go on and used it as a “teachable moment.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) became involved after the school shut down the bake sale. The organization successfully defended the free speech rights of student groups who held similar demonstrations at the College of William and Mary, Northeastern Illinois University, DePaul University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. FIRE is on fire. Keep up the good work.
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The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) published a 20-page study (PDF) titled, “Racial, Ethnic and Gender Preferences in Admissions to the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy.” Among other things, the authors found that both service academies lower standards for black admittees, and the academic qualifications gap between blacks and whites is “substantial.”
The gap between Army admittees is smaller than the Navy’s gap, and the one between whites and Hispanics is smaller. The study concludes that Hispanics don’t benefit from preferences in the Army’s admissions, and there’s no evidence that Asians receive preferences at either academy.
“In fact, there is evidence that the Asian applicants with the same academic qualifications find it somewhat more difficult to obtain admission than do their white counterparts at both academies.”
According to the report, the tougher the school’s standards, the more it uses race preferences. No surprises there.
In a section titled, “Computing the Odds of Admission,” the study shows that the odds of black-to-white admissions is 4.44 to 1, Hispanic-to-white odds 3.32 to 1, and Asian-to-white odds .67 to 1.2.
“[W]e find preferences in favor of blacks at both academies, preferences in favor of Hispanics at Navy but not at Army, and preferences against Asians at both academies. We find that the odds ratios for blacks and Hispanics relative to whites are significantly greater at the U.S. Naval Academy than at the U.S. Military Academy.”
The implications of admitting students with much lower qualifications are far-reaching. As the study notes, these students will have a more difficult time academically and graduate at lower rates.
Whites and Asians with superior credentials are rejected in favor of less qualified blacks.
“At the Naval Academy, 131 Asian rejectees (41 percent) and 2,640 white rejectees (42 percent) have both math and verbal SATs equal to or higher than the black admittee math and verbal SAT medians. There are 69 Asians (50 percent) and 1,232 whites (25 percent) rejected by the U.S. Naval Academy who attained a class rank equal or better to the rank of the black admittee median.”
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Asian groups have complained that the University of California’s (UC) recent admissions changes will negatively impact students of Asian descent. These students account for 40 percent of all undergraduates at Los Angeles, 43 percent at Berkeley, 50 percent at San Diego, and 54 percent at Irvine. Americans of Asian descent account for about 12 percent of California’s population and four percent of the U.S. population.
The American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly wrote a piece for the Sacramento Bee about this issue. He recounts a conversation he had with a UC administrator:
“I asked him why he considered it important to tinker with admissions instead of just letting the chips fall where they may. In an unguarded moment, he told me that unless the university took steps to ‘guide’ admissions decisions, UC would be dominated by Asians. When I asked, ‘What would be wrong with that?’ I got an answer that speaks volumes about the underlying philosophy at many universities with regard to Asian enrollment.
“The UC administrator told me that Asians are ‘too dull – they study, study, study.’ He then said, ‘If you ever say I said this, I will have to deny it.’ I won’t betray the individual’s anonymity because to do so would put him in a world of trouble. Yet, it is time to confront the not-so-subtle hand of discrimination against Asians that masquerades as ‘building diversity’ at many campuses.”
As Connerly notes, the effort to attract more black students to a campus isn’t a bad thing per se; it becomes so when schools discriminate against other racial groups to achieve this goal. Since California voters barred their government from preferring or discriminating against individuals or groups in hiring, contracting, and admissions based on factors like race, Asian admissions to the UC system have risen.
Consequently, UC eliminated its policy to automatically admit the top 12.5 percent of all students based on statewide performance and reduced reliance on grades and scores. Since Asian students tend to score higher on standardized tests and achieve higher grades than whites, blacks, Hispanics, and other groups, the new policy likely would reduce their numbers.
UC didn’t count on Asian groups protesting the new policy, but the “proposed UC admissions policies are so egregious and so dramatically discriminatory against Asians that these groups could not remain silent – and have credibility within their communities – as the grass-roots opposition from within specific Asians groups began to surface,” Connerly writes.
Americans of Asian descent are not a typical grievance group. Will UC’s discriminatory polices change that?
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With a preferences supporting biracial president in the White House and a preferences supporting “wise Latina” judge awaiting confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, there’s no time like the present to openly debate the fairness of so-called affirmative action and the means by which to end it once and for all.
The National Policy Institute (NPI) notes that Democrats are worried about how their support for preferential treatment for minorities will affect Democrat-voting white working class voters, and rightly so. With a biracial man sitting in the Oval Office, it’s difficult to argue that Americans should keep the bar lowered for black Americans in perpetuity. An excerpt:
During the 1970s and ’80s, programs to increase representation of minorities in public- and private-sector hiring, college admissions, and government contracting ignited many of the most searing arguments in American politics and helped remake the Republican and Democratic electoral coalitions. But since then these issues have provoked only rare skirmishes, as a combination of political, economic, and cultural changes have reduced their visibility and immediacy to all but a handful of activists on each side. “You had an environment where it wasn’t on the top of the radar screen for anybody,” veteran Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio said…Now Sotomayor’s nomination is forcing these issues back into the spotlight. And they have quickly proved as polarizing as ever.
NPI points out something that will impact the “affirmative action” debate as well as Sotomayor’s confirmation. Republicans may be reluctant to strongly challenge Sotomayor for fear of being called racists (which people call them anyway). Republicans have tried unsuccessfully to woo Hispanics, so offending them should be the least of their concerns. Defending what is right should be the focus.
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Linda Chavez isn’t hopeful that Republicans will do the right thing. “I regret to say that it is probably going to be one or two short questions, that they have no appetite for this.”
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According to a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University, 55 percent say “affirmative action” should be history, and 71 percent disagree with Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion in Ricci v. DeStefano.
A majority of Americans (70 percent) aren’t buying the “diversity” argument for preferences in government hiring. Apparently, those folks aren’t in decision-making positions in government entities, where such thinking runs rampant. An even larger percentage opposes preferences in the private sector (74 percent).
Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, offers insight:
“Whether it’s a belief that the statute of limitations on past wrongs has run out or economic pressures on workers, programs that supporters call affirmative action and opponents label racial preferences are unpopular with most American voters.”
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