Gloomy, Nay-Saying Liberals

In an interesting OpEd in today’s Los Angeles Times, David Lehrer and Joe Hicks of Community Advocates, Inc., a LA-based human relations organization, point out that liberals consistently pooh-pooh the ability of minorities (their ostensible wards) to compete and perform.

In the 1996 campaign against Proposition 209, which ultimately banned racial and ethnic preferences in University of California admissions, opponents predicted the near-disappearance of disadvantaged minorities from UC campuses. Minorities, they said, wouldn’t be able to compete; the playing field wasn’t yet level.

Today, seven years after the implementation of Prop. 209, the playing field still isn’t level, but the purveyors of gloom and low expectations were wrong. American Indian, African American and Latino admissions to the UC system have gone from 18.6% of total admissions in 1997, the year before elimination of race-conscious admissions, to 20.6% in 2005.

And now they’re doing it again.

This same lament of low expectations and stereotyping is playing out now over the state’s high school exit exam, threatening to rob minority students

Say What? (3)

  1. john August 28, 2005 at 6:09 pm | | Reply

    One of the main problems with preference programs is that they do perpetuate the idea that minorities are simply intellectually inferior to “whites”. It’s easy for such beliefs to persist when different grops are judged by different standards, with the actual extent of preference frankly unclear.

    Under a flat numerical (or at least ethnicity-neutral) process, however, it becomes far harder to deny that many minorities, by any measure, are in fact qualified to compete at the highest levels. There are in fact african-americans, hispanics, and native americans that excel on standardized tests, as well as in high school and college, and such students are likely to do more to dispel myths and reduce prejudice than all the diveristy admits in the country. Unfortunately, under the current framework, those students are essentially hidden by the system.

    (It might be interesting to do a study of how the removal of AA in California has affected ethnic prejudices and perceptions. We already know that the ban has not decreased levels of minorities in the UC system overall [it’s actually increased them].)

  2. staghounds August 29, 2005 at 8:31 am | | Reply

    I wonder what would have happened if back in 1960 or so, Lester Maddox and George Wallace had started policies along the lines of, “The Supreme Court has ordered that our schools may no longer separate negro from white. Since we all know that negroes are inferior, we will now implement programs to insure that negroes are accepted to selective institutions. These programs will create lower standards for admission for negroes, since they are not able to meet the standards white applicants can. We will call the programs ‘affirmative action’.”

    Oh would that they had.

  3. Anita August 30, 2005 at 12:33 pm | | Reply

    Why would they had? That’s malicious. Let’s keep everything on a civilized level. It’s good that they did not, and they should not be doing it now.

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