Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…
The austere and backward-thinking Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigration Rights By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) is determined to overturn a race-neutral law and put government discrimination and preferences back on the books.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that BAMN filed suit this week challenging—again—Proposition 209, which barred government discrimination and preferences in California.
BAMN contends that racial minorities have a constitutional right to preferential treatment, and says Prop. 209 “promised a ‘color-blind’ Constitution. But this was and is a lie…[It] has created a racial caste system in which the state’s most prestigious schools train mostly white students and students from some Asian backgrounds while admitting Latina/o, black and Native American students at only a third of their presence among the high school graduates of the state.”
Did BAMN’s lawyers really think “color blind” meant “equality of outcome”? Any reasonable person knows there’s no such thing. A color blind government policy removes discrimination and preferences. A color blind government policy keeps race and ethnicity out of the equation, a goal civil rights movement participants and supporters fought to reach.
BAMN also asserts that Prop. 209 violates the Equal Protection Clause “by forcing minority students and their supporters to sponsor an onerous and almost certainly futile statewide referendum in order to secure the adoption of lawful affirmative action programs. Every other group, however, retains the right to secure a change in admission policies that are in its members’ interest by a simple majority vote of the Regents or their subordinate bodies.”
Every voter acts in his own best interests. Sometimes, he also acts in the best interests of his group(s). Doing so doesn’t make the individual or group necessarily wrong or the law unconstitutional. People who voted for and against Prop. 209 did so in their best interests. One side lost, and the other side won. Is BAMN arguing that the whole process is unconstitutional, because the minority doesn’t get its way? Isn’t this how the process works? Otherwise, why permit a voting process at all?
BAMN cites Grutter v. Bollinger to support its quest for California to discriminate and prefer based on race. The Supreme Court held that the University of Michigan law school’s use of race in admissions to achieve a “critical mass” of minorities was narrowly tailored to further a compelling interest in “obtaining the educational benefits that flow from” skin deep-only diverse student body. However, the court didn’t compel states to consider race in admissions; states may consider race in admissions. The majority of voters in California do not want their government to consider race.
Incredibly, BAMN says California’s law barring racial discrimination and preferences is akin to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that states were permitted to enact laws that separated the races, as long as segregated facilities were “equal.”
In Plessy, the government mandated racial discrimination. It set out specifically to keep the races separate. In contrast, Prop. 209 bars the government from such actions. A racially neutral standard won’t ever produce equal outcomes. No law can do that. But the law does assure individuals that their state is not permitted to deny them college admission, a job, or a contract because they’re black, or white, or Asian, or a woman, or a follower of Joseph Smith.
BAMN also invokes Brown v. the Board of Education to bolster its claims, a double shame. The court held that racial segregation denied black children equal protection of the law. States created separate schools for different races. Prop. 209 doesn’t do that. If some schools end up majority one race, it isn’t because the government mandated separate schools. A consequence of a racially neutral law is that a school may end up majority black or white, but not by government mandate. That’s the point. Solving this “problem” shouldn’t be within the government’s purview. The government is restrained from coercing individuals and/or treating them differently based on race.
In hilariously hyperbolic language, BAMN calls California’s race-neutral law a “Tuskegee-like experiment” and implies minority students are “suffering” under the law. That’s the way to lift people up — speak of them in terms of oppressed victims too ignorant to help themselves.
Read the full text of the complaint.
Before I go, I must include this quote from George B. Washington, BAMN’s lead lawyer. He told the Chronicle that his group must overturn the law, because the American Civil Rights Institute was “going to go and play bully boy with minorities in states like Utah and Arizona.” As we mentioned earlier this week, Utah seeks to bar its government from discriminating against and preferring individuals or groups based on race.
Good for Utah and for the doctrine of racial neutrality.
Thursday, February 18th, 2010,
by La Shawn Barber,
Filed under: Judiciary| |
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Last week, the Boston Globe published an op-ed about a topic we’ve covered on the blog several times. Thomas Espenshade is an author of a Princeton University study that revealed students of Asian descent face discrimination at elite colleges and universities.
His research showed that a black student with 1150s and a white student with 1460s had the same chance of admission as an Asian student with 1600s, top scores. Download his 11-page Power Point presentation for a quick view (PDF).
(Incidentally, Espendshade called for a project to close the racial academic achievement gap between the races “with the same scale, urgency, and sense of importance as the original Manhattan Project.”)
According to the op-ed, Princeton spokesperson Emily Aronson said “no particular factor is assigned a fixed weight and there is no formula for weighing the various aspects of the application.”
The op-ed’s author, Boston College teacher Kara Miller, shares this bit of news: “A few years ago, however, when I worked as a reader for Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions, it became immediately clear to me that Asians – who constitute 5 percent of the US population – faced an uphill slog. They tended to get excellent scores, take advantage of AP offerings, and shine in extracurricular activities. Frequently, they also had hard-knock stories: families that had immigrated to America under difficult circumstances, parents working as kitchen assistants and store clerks, and households in which no English was spoken….But would Yale be willing to make 50 percent of its freshman class Asian? Probably not.”
Do colleges and universities keep Asian admittees below a certain percentage?
“There are a lot of poor Asians, immigrant kids,” University of Oregon physics professor Stephen Hsu told Miller. “But generally that story doesn’t do as much as it would for a non-Asian student. Statistically, it’s true that Asians generally have to get higher scores than others to get in.”
Americans of Asian descent typically aren’t as vocal about discrimination or nearly as successful spreading collective guilt as other minorities. Perhaps op-eds like this, along with Espenshade’s research, will change that.
States like California banned discrimination and preferences in government-supported colleges and universities. Consequently, Asians account for about 40 percent of students at these schools, Miller notes, although they account for 13 percent of the state’s population. It’s possible that in states where preferences are permitted, colleges and universities redline Asians so the student body can reflect the population.
If any group should support bans on preferences and discrimination, it should be formerly oppressed minorities. These bans protect all individuals, regardless of race, from being judged by their race. The government’s intent to benefit these minorities is irrelevant. The authority to treat people differently based on race is a proverbial double-edged sword.
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010,
by La Shawn Barber,
Filed under: Achievement Gap| |
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The inimitable economist Thomas Sowell has written an article on Berkeley High School’s proposal to eliminate science labs to divert funds to closing the racial academic achievement gap.
“This is a proposal to redistribute money from science to social work, by providing every student with advisors on note-taking, time management and other learning skills…The point is to close educational gaps among groups, or at least go on record as trying. As with most equalization crusades, whether in education or in the economy, it is about equalizing downward, by lowering those at the top. ‘Fairness’ strikes again!
…
“In keeping with the rhetoric of the prevailing ideology, our education professor refers to ‘privileged’ parents and ‘privileged’ children who want to ‘forestall any progress toward equity.’…In the language of the politically correct, achievement is equated with privilege. Such verbal sleight of hand evades the question whether individuals’ own priorities and efforts affect outcomes, whether in education or in other endeavors. No need to look at empirical evidence when a clever phrase can take that whole question off the table.” [emphasis added]
Truly maddening. The professor accused parents who stress education of trying to keep others down. As Sowell notes, somewhere along the way, achievement became a synonym for privileged. Only in a PC-saturated, Alice-in-Wonderland kind of world is such a thing possible. People of Japanese descent in Canada and the U.S. tend to have higher incomes than other minorities and even whites. Given past discrimination against this ethnic group, does the privileged accusation make sense? Of course not.
“Achievement by overcoming obstacles is a special threat to the left’s vision of the world, and so must be magically transformed into privilege through rhetoric…Those with that vision do not want to even discuss evidence that students from different groups spend different amounts of time on homework and different amounts of time on social activities.” [emphasis added]
Sowell appeals to common sense–rather than wrong-headed social engineering schemes to take from one group and give to another–when discussing how individuals can improve academic performance: change attitudes, priorities, and behavior.
George Leef at the Phi Beta Cons blog writes:
“Welcome to the world of the education experts, where families that encourage children to work hard in school are ‘privileged’ as though they were our equivalent of European nobility, and where the primary educational goal is ‘equity’ among designated groups rather than assisting all pupils to progress to the best of their ability.”
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010,
by La Shawn Barber,
Filed under: Achievement Gap| |
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Lawmakers in Utah are attempting to ban government racial preferences via a state constitutional amendment. Last week, the state’s House Business and Labor Committee approved the resolution, which heads to the full house for consideration. According to the Associated Press, there’s little evidence that preferences are “being used or has caused problems” in Utah.
Of course, it doesn’t matter whether there’s evidence. A ban would give notice that no government entity may prefer or discriminate against individuals or groups based on race. Republicans control the Utah legislature, and the governor is a Republican. These factors increase the measure’s likelihood of passing. A two-thirds vote of the state house and senate and the governor’s signature are required to amend the constitution.
Several states already ban government racial preferences. For example, in 1996, 54 percent of voters in California banned preferences. The same year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in Hopwood v. Texas that racial preferences in college admissions was unconstitutional. In 1998, Washington state voters banned preferences by 58 percent. Ten years ago, former Florida governor Jeb Bush banned government preferences. In 2006, Michigan voters banned preferences by 58 percent, as did Nebraska voters in 2008.
Monday, February 15th, 2010,
by La Shawn Barber,
Filed under: General| |
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I’ll have to check the Civil Rights Act to confirm, but I’m pretty sure this is illegal, too.
In fact, “whites-only” anything is viewed as the ultimate form of unfairness, injustice, flat-out racism, and the root of all the world’s evil.
Conservative groups likely will challenge the scholarship program. Will liberal groups do the same? They balked at a satirical whites-only scholarship offered by College Republicans at Boston University a few years ago. Surely they’ll balk over the Oregon League of Minority Voters’s scholarships.
I’m surprised people still come up with such schemes, given their clear illegality. Why would the voters’ group risk wasting resources on litigation and undermining its credibility with donors?
A decade ago, a federal judge ordered two historically black colleges in Alabama to set up programs to attract white students after both schools accused the state of treating predominantly black colleges differently than predominantly white colleges. It’s safe to say most whites aren’t inclined to apply to predominately black colleges. To sweeten the pot, at least one of the colleges offered a whites-only scholarship. A black student named Jessie Tompkins sued. Tompkins was represented by the Center for Individual Rights. (Source)
Because the Oregon League of Minority Voters receives some public funding, it’s also safe to say the whites-only scholarship won’t stand, nor should it. Only privately funded sources like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are allowed to prohibit people of certain races from applying for money. (No whites need apply.)
The minority voters group must know the race-based scholarships won’t stand. Could it be a publicity stunt to “raise awareness” among mostly white Oregonians to do their part to narrow racial disparities that have little to do with racism and a lot to do with individuals’ personal choices and/or lack of responsibility?
Thursday, February 11th, 2010,
by La Shawn Barber,
Filed under: General| |
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Civil rights industry types are worrying about the wrong thing, as usual.
For instance, the University of California’s Civil Rights Project argues in its 130-page “Choice Without Equity” report that charter schools have been a “civil rights failure.”
Are the researchers implying that government officials are blocking school doors so children can’t get in? Is there some law still on the books that mandates separate charter schools for different races?
No. The Civil Rights Project is up in arms because charter schools tend to be predominately one race or another—not by government mandate, but by choice, a word that sticks in the craw of liberals, unless the topic of discussion is abortion.
Whereas the civil rights movement’s focus was dismantling legal segregation, today’s movement focuses on racial bean counting. The top priority is not to give students of all races a quality education; it’s to put minority students next to white students. Otherwise, their civil rights are hanging in the balance. (Cue panic riff.)
According to the report, charter schools—government schools with fewer rules and regulations than traditional government schools, and attended by choice—are more segregated than traditional government schools. Charter schools tend to be located in urban areas. “As a result, charter school enrollment patterns display high levels of minority segregation, trends that are particularly severe for black students.”
What’s wrong with that? According to the researchers, “Decades of social science studies find important benefits associated with attending diverse schools, and, conversely, related educational harms in schools where poor and minority students are concentrated.”
The researchers use words like severe and harm and intensely and segregation and white flight and apartheid to insinuate something sinister is going on. To them, there is: choice.
Although whites attend charter schools in lower proportions, they’re “overrepresented” in charter schools in the Southwest and states like North Carolina. In the West, the study notes with alarm, whites are the lowest percentage of students in traditional government schools, but the highest percentage of white charter school students. Again, what’s wrong with that? Watch the researchers make a leap (emphasis added):
It would be very damaging to invest public money in schools that finance white flight from regular public schools and take with the departing white students, state and federal funding badly needed for the students left behind in even more segregated regular public schools. The fact that a number of these “white flight” schools do not report any students on free lunch suggests that they may be segregated by both race and class.
It’s all in the way you frame it. The researchers assign underhanded motives to white parents, rather than viewing them as people exercising school choice. What motives do they assign black parents for doing the same? Well, none. Most are given the choice of an inferior traditional school, according to the report, or an inferior charter school.
On the one hand, the researches call segregated charter schools a civil rights issue; on the other hand, they say charter schools’ supposedly “superior academic education performance” is “not sustained by the research.” So why all the complaining about segregated charter schools?
The researchers acknowledge that charter school enrollment almost tripled this decade, and received “increased level of funding and support from federal, state and local education agencies,” yet charter schools dominated by one race or another are problematic to them.
The selling point for charters is they claim to offer a better education than traditional government schools. The researchers are not convinced, and in any case, they believe lack of skin color diversity undermines the schools. If a predominately black charter school receives its share of funds, why is the school’s racial make-up a cause for concern? (Can you imagine a group of white parents complaining that their kids have to sit next to other white kids in school? Do parents of black charter school kids complain about the schools’ racial makeup? I fervently hope not.)
Ironically, America was transformed by a movement that sought to end government-mandated, race-based school enrollment decisions. Today’s civil rights industry wants the government to do the exact opposite.
What a shame.
The answers offered in the report on how to solve the segregation crisis aren’t groundbreaking or insightful, just the same old dated “civil rights” complaints. Among the recommendations to “promote diversity and prevent racial isolation” in charter schools are more rules and regulations. Make charter schools more like magnet schools (“specialized” schools with geographically open admission polices to draw whites — these schools still end up mostly one race or another). Other recommendations include providing free transportation, community outreach, and — surprise! — reducing choice.
Parents with choices exercise those choices. Too much government coercion, and they’ll choose a different school. Neighborhoods play a big role in the racial make-up of schools. Just short of telling people where to live, there isn’t much the government can do about that.
Addendum: Are charter schools a civil rights failure? Some of the answers on the National Journal’s education blog are priceless.
Thursday, February 11th, 2010,
by La Shawn Barber,
Filed under: Diversity| |
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Through the years, racial preference proponents have talked about the so-called benefits of diversity. Preferences benefit minorities by virtue of their being preferred over the majority and non-preferred minorities (people of Asian descent, for example). What’s difficult to assess is how campus diversity benefits non-preferred groups.
In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan law school’s use of race in admissions to achieve a “critical mass” of minorities was narrowly tailored to further a compelling interest in “obtaining the educational benefits that flow from” skin deep-only diverse student body. The court said the law school’s critical mass rationale “is further bolstered by numerous expert studies and reports showing that such diversity promotes learning outcomes and better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce, for society, and for the legal profession.”
One of the reports the court relied on to make this assessment was the Gurin Report. Patricia Gurin, a psychology and women’s studies professor, said racial diversity “has far-ranging and significant benefits for all students, non-minorities and minorities alike,” and that interacting with racially diverse peers “is positively associated with a host of what I call ‘learning outcomes.’ Students who experienced the most racial and ethnic diversity in classroom settings and in informal interactions with peers showed the greatest engagement in active thinking processes, growth in intellectual engagement and motivation, and growth in intellectual and academic skills.”
Duane Ellison, of the National Association of Scholars, submitted a response brief to the court challenging Gurin’s study. For example, Ellison says Gurin’s work is statistically flawed…”inconsistent and…trivially weak.”
“Gurin defines her own idiosyncratic diversity variables, which she labels ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘democracy outcomes…[b]ut, Gurin finds no statistical correlation between a racially and ethnically diverse student body and her ‘learning outcomes’ and democracy outcomes.’ Her statistical output shows that taking an ethnic studies course, participating in a diversity workshop, discussing minority issues, and other measures yield exceedingly weak correlations with learning and democracy outcomes, at least some of the time. At other times, she finds nothing, no statistical correlation.”
In other words, the relationship between doing all of these race-focused things and racial and ethnic diversity on campus is not strong enough to sustain the diversity-benefits-everyone argument. Yet, the Supreme Court relied on this study to decide racial discrimination was constitutionally permissible.
With the intro out of the way, I’ll point you to an article at Benzinga.com that summarizes a new study by two Duke University professors, Peter Arcidiacono and Jacob Vigdor (pictured), challenging the diversity-benefits-everyone argument. The person who wrote the article noted that increasing minority representation “usually” entails lowering standards for those minorities, a fact that isn’t expressed nearly enough.
According to the study, evidence strongly suggests that racial preferences themselves have “a negative net impact on students not directly targeted by the program.” The researchers found weak evidence of a relationship between campus diversity and postgrad outcomes of whites or Asians.
“Our empirical results cover a broad range of outcomes, including earnings, educational attainment, and satisfaction with both one’s life and one’s job. Across these varying specifications, we fail to find any significant evidence that white or Asian students who attend more diverse colleges do better later in life. Moreover, the strongest evidence we uncover suggests that increasing minority representation by lowering admission standards is unlikely to produce benefits and may in fact cause harm by reducing the representation of minority students on less selective campuses.”
In other words, whites and non-preferred minorities don’t benefit from racial bean counting in admissions. Let’s be honest. Is that one of the goals of “affirmative action”? I say no. Asserting that whites and others will obtain certain educational benefits because they’re surrounded by preferred minorities is part of the advertising claim to sell the obviously discriminatory policy. Some whites buy the product; some don’t.
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010,
by La Shawn Barber,
Filed under: Diversity| |
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Last month, the Department of Justice sued New Jersey and its Civil Service Commission for using an exam that “discriminates” against blacks and Hispanics, because these groups scored “statistically significantly lower” than whites.
Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez (pictured) said, “This complaint should send a clear message to all public employers that employment practices with unlawful discriminatory impact on account of race or national origin will not be tolerated. The Justice Department will take all necessary action to ensure that such discriminatory practices are eliminated and that the victims of such practices are made whole.”
Speaking at the left-leaning American Constitution Society, Perez said his department has “dusted off the disparate impact theory. If the fact support the use of disparate impact theory, whether it’s in the housing context, the voting context, the employment context, we will use the disparate impact theory because every court that has ruled on this has said that it is permissible to do so.”
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg writing at NRO’s The Corner points out that during Obama’s recent State of the Union speech, he said his administration “will once again” file suits against civil rights violation and workplace discrimination, implying that the Bush administration didn’t file such suits. If that’s the case, Obama missed a big one. In 2007, Bush’s DOJ sued the New York City Fire Department for discrimination.
Furthermore, “‘the employment discrimination’ that the Obama administration is challenging is not really discrimination at all,” Clegg writes, “it’s the use of written and physical tests that are nondiscriminatory by their terms, in their design, and in their application, but which have a politically incorrect ‘disparate impact’ on this or that racial, ethnic, or gender group.”
Disparate impact creates are a no-win situation, figuratively speaking. Racial disparities in employment tests typically result in discrimination charges, and the employer ends up watering down the test. But the disparity remains. Just short of eliminating tests altogether, which fire and police departments seem reluctant to do, the employer will face discrimination complaints. If the employer tosses test results or adjusts them based on race, he’s in violation of the law.
The solution carries such a high and convoluted burden of proof. The employer must make sure the test is job related, a business necessity, and there are no less discriminatory alternatives for selecting employers.
Thursday, February 4th, 2010,
by La Shawn Barber,
Filed under: Barack Obama, Judiciary, Roger Clegg| |
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I’d be remiss if I didn’t excerpt Walter Williams’s tongue-in-cheek column on Townhall, “We Need Diversity.”
The obsession with diversity is focused on increasing the representation of racial minorities in any given arena. It almost never goes the other way. No one seriously demands that the NBA or NFL be more racially diverse. The only thing that matters is how well an individual can play. It just so happens that individuals of African descent are better, on average, than others. (Are Samoans counted as “black”? They’re definitely not “African American.”)
“According to the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport report titled ‘The 2008 Racial and Gender Report Card,’” Williams writes, “the percentage of black male basketball players in Division I was an all-time high at 60.4 percent. It was 45.9 percent in football and 6.0 percent in baseball.
“Diversity is worse in professional sports…One can understand the absence of concern for diversity in professional sports; they are in it just for the money. But one is left flummoxed by the lack of sports diversity in college sports. After all, you can’t listen to any college president or provost speak for more than five minutes before the word “diversity” drops from his lips. Colleges take diversity seriously and they spend tens of millions of dollars on it. Juilliard School has a director of diversity and inclusion; MIT has a manager of diversity recruitment; Toledo University, an associate dean for diversity; Harvard, Texas A&M, California at Berkeley, Virginia and many others boast of officers, deans, vice presidents and perhaps ministers of diversity. But, in what appears to be the height of deviousness and deceit, these diversity-driven administrators allow sports, the most visible part of the college, be the least diverse and least inclusive.”
For those who say black players dominate certain sports teams because they’re better than whites, imagine the same statement turned around: whites dominate certain professions because they’re better than blacks.
“It should be remembered that diversity creed holds that we are all equal and would be proportionately represented by race across all activities but for the fact of discrimination and oppression.”
Using that logic, whites and Asians are underrepresented in American basketball and football because of discrimination and oppression. If you think that’s ridiculous, some assume blacks are being oppressed and discriminated against because they’re underrepresented in certain professions.
“But La Shawn, that’s different.” How?
Consistency is the bane of PC’s existence.
Williams lists disparities among lighting-struck victims, job-related deaths, cervical cancer rates, and more. Diversity advocates serious about their jobs will have their hands full making sure a range of colors, sexes, nationalities, body types, etc., are represented in these groups.
(You have to laugh at this stuff to keep from tearing your hair out at the disingenuousness of diversophiles.)
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010,
by La Shawn Barber,
Filed under: Diversity| |
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In a recent Townhall column, I wrote about the Berkeley High School Governance Council’s proposal to cut before- and after-school science labs and divert resources to “equity grants” to narrow the racial academic achievement gap The council called the gap at Berkeley, the widest in the state, “unconscionable.”
At BigJournalism.com, Linda Seebach, formerly of Rocky Mountain News, brings up an important yet overlooked point in the debate (emphasis added):
“Enrollment this school year is 14 percent Latino, 26 percent African-American, 34 percent white, 16 percent in a category the district calls multi-ethnic, and approximately 8 percent in a variety of Asian groups. But students make very different academic choices. Berkeley has six component schools, four of them officially designated ’small schools,’ averaging around 200 students each; about 500 in the International High School; and the rest, a majority, in a fairly traditional program called Academic Choice. For instance, one of the small schools, called the Community Partnerships Academy, has 51 percent African-Americans and only 7 percent whites. Another, the School for Social Justice and Ecology, is 44 percent African-American and 20 percent white. In contrast, the international program is 21 percent African-American and 44 percent white.
“These choices play out in the science classes as well. The AP science classes are only 10 percent African-American and 53 percent white, while the science classes without additional lab time almost exactly reverse the proportions, with 51 percent African-American and 9 percent white.”
The choice idea is one I considered as well. I know in the scheme of things, students’ academic choices carry little weight in “diversity” arguments. If there’s a disparity, its cause must be racial discrimination and/or lack of funding. If black students choose science classes at lower rates than other students, where’s the logic in depriving other students to divert more funds to black students? Doesn’t it essentially penalize Berkeley’s science lab students for being…white and Asian?
Unless the school is preventing qualified black students from attending science labs, there’s no issue. If presently unqualified black students wish to take more science classes, school counselors and teachers (and parents) should advise them to take the necessary preparatory classes earlier in their academic journey.
Simple-minded, I know. I can’t help it.
(Hat tip: Discriminations)
Monday, February 1st, 2010,
by La Shawn Barber,
Filed under: Diversity| |
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