Over a year ago I wrote (here, and on the same point here):
According to a fascinating front page article in today’s New York Times, it has begun to dawn on Lani Guinier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and other preferentialists at Harvard and elsewhere that you’d better be very careful what you subsidize, for you’ll certainly get more of it … and it may not be exactly what you had in mind.
One of the dirty little secrets of racial preferences, now beginning to leak out, is not only that most of the beneficiaries are middle class or actually rich — that has been known if not advertised for a good while — but that most are not even American, or if they are American they are of very recent origin. 8 percent of the undergraduates at Harvard are black (still “underrepresented,” says Guinier), but “the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.”
Now comes Malcolm Kline, executive director of Accuracy in Media, who cites some new evidence to the same effect [HatTip to reader Rick Palmer]:
Nearly half of the blacks attending colleges and universities considered top of the line are either immigrants, the children of immigrants or biracial. “Scholars who have examined the Black presence in elite colleges and universities have reported that 41 percent of Black freshmen at 28 selective schools identified themselves as immigrants, children of immigrants or mixed race,” Ronald Roach writes in Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
At some schools the proportions are even higher. “Harvard professors Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Lani Guinier pointed out during a Black alumni gathering in 2003 that the children of African and Carribbean immigrants and children of biracial couples together comprised two-thirds of Harvard’s Black undergraduate population,” Roach writes.
It is good to be reminded of who actually benefits from affirmative action at elite schools, but Kline should have quit while he was ahead. Instead, he writes:
It should be noted that Guinier lost out on her chance to become America’s first lady attorney general because she had employed an illegal alien to work for her as a domestic. She had to withdraw from consideration for the top law enforcement job in the Clinton Administration because of the controversy that surrounded the disclosure that she had failed to pay her employee’s FICA contribution to social security.
Perhaps Accuracy in Media should hire a fact checker, for 1) Guinier was nominated to head the civil rights division of the Justice Dept., not to be Attorney General; and 2) her nomination was withdrawn because of the firestorm of controversy generated by some of her publications, not any problems she may (or may not) have had with legalities surrounding hired help.
One of Clinton’s early picks for AG (IIRC, Reno was Number 3) had those problems, but indeed it wasn’t Guinier.
“Lady attorney general”? These guys want to be my trusted source for exposing bias?
So I suppose the others were “gentlemen Attorneys General”? Sheesh.
It was Zoe Baird and then Kimba Wood, Clinton’s first two Attorney General nominees, who had the illegal-immigrant nanny difficulties. Wood thought she was in the clear because, unlike Baird, while she knew her nanny was illegally in the country, at least she’d paid her Social Security taxes. Janet Reno was the third try; evidently the only way to find a high-powered female lawyer who has not hired an illegal immigrant to mind the children is to seek one who has never had children. Make of that what you will; it seems to me that there are a lot of women raising children and working hours as long as any lawyers’ who somehow manage to do so without hiring undocumented workers.
Right, Michelle, and I refuse to believe that there have never been men elevated to these positions who had undocumented household help. Double standard?
Oh, and thanks Nels – that drives me crazy too.
I thought Bernie Kerik (for Homeland Security?) got blasted for nanny troubles.
meep, possibly, but that was after.
“”Lady attorney general”? These guys want to be my trusted source for exposing bias?”\
That was no lady, that was a potential attorney general!
I did indeed err in my one-paragraph riff on Lani Guinier. That other media outlets made the same error is of no comfort to me. Thank you for linking to the piece. You will see that I have excised the erroneous paragraph on Guinier. That it survives on your page and forms the thread of discussion here is, of course, your call and probably all for the best. Please feel free to visit our sites and dissect other articles that appear there (www.campusreportonline.net and http://www.academia.org). On the former page, I have written a longer version of this note. There are too many questions about affirmative action that remain unanswered, and, too frequently, unasked.