Roger Clegg has an interesting article in NRO celebrating the first anniversary of the Grutter decision. Well, not exactly celebrating it, but at least noting that after a year things aren’t as bad as we feared they would be and that there are even some grounds for guarded optimism.
Along the way he makes a nice point about preferentialists struggling mightily to hold on to an image of themselves as the good guys.
Their insistence on racial balance, and their recoiling from its absence, have at the end of the day only weak rational explanations, and so must also reflect something psychological. For them there is a deep-seated appeal, to both their social aesthetics and their social-engineering instinct, to classrooms that all look like America.
Or perhaps it is a mixture of atavism and nostalgia: A desire to be, or pretend to be, Atticus Finch or Thurgood Marshall. The fight against Jim Crow was a moment of glory, and who can blame people for wanting to re-enact it? We have Civil War re-enactors, and Civil Rights re-enactors. The former are mostly harmless; the latter are mostly not.
John:
I enjoy reading your blog daily. Did you see this this morning:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/education/24AFFI.final.html
How Prof’s Gates and Guinier propose this comports with any rational constitutional principles is not clear. As I read the implications of their observations, diversity is not the goal they are interested in, but rather compensation for descendants of slaves imported into the US and its predecessor constituent colonies. As a matter of history, of course, African – West Indian Americans were also descendants of slaves, albeit not slaves “owned in the USA”.
The mischief continues….
Keep up the good work. Your blog in my opinion is one that always contains fair comment as opposed to cant and rhetorical bs. Thanks for taking the time to produce it.