I’m still trying to work myself up to discuss the discussion of the Supreme Court’s recent decision and opinions in the racial school assignment cases, but so far I’m having too much trouble taking the Democratic/liberal overheated rhetoric — “turning back the clock” … “turning the Court upside down” … and primarily “overturning/undercutting Brown” — seriously enough to write about it. But I’m getting there.
Meanwhile, I’d like to point to two responses on opposite ends of the good sense spectrum: Abigail Thernstrom’s sublime piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Supreme Gibberish,” and NYU (former Harvard) law professor Derrick Bell’s ridiculous “School Diversity, Another Way,” in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
I have only one important thing to say about Abigail Thernstrom’s article: Read The Whole Thing! Her conclusion:
…. And so, alas, with Justice Kennedy we end up with the court’s familiar and utterly unprincipled formula: Racial sorting is sometimes OK, but sometimes not. It all depends.
Where does this leave us? What precise limits does the Constitution place on race-conscious policies? Unwilling to simply follow Justice Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson and declare that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” the Supreme Court has been trying to draw bright lines between the permissible and impermissible for many a decade — and mainly producing a lot of what can only be described as barely decipherable gibberish.
Thursday’s decision was an important opportunity for the high court to settle this issue. Four justices seemed ready to do so; the signals were mixed. But in any case, they would not have had Justice Kennedy to create a majority. “As an aspiration, Justice Harlan’s axiom must command our assent,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “In the real world, it is regrettable to say, it cannot be a universal constitutional principle.”
Why, indeed. Justice Kennedy no doubt meant “aspiration” as something like a fond, forlorn hope, but in fact I think it was he himself who aspirated. One of my dictionaries defines aspirate as “(Phonetics) Pronounce a sound with an exhalation of breath.” His opinion pronounced a sound, but it signified nothing; it made a sound but it said nothing. But maybe I’ve got it backwards. Maybe Kennedy’s opinion aspirated in the medical sense, “draw (fluid) by suction from a vessel,” since it indeed sucked all the principle out of equal protection and, choking on it, regurgitated it as pragmatic, impenetrable phlegm.
For Whom The (Derrick) Bell Tolls…
Prof. Derrick Bell’s article reminded me of nothing so much as Mary McCarthy’s famous comment about Lillian Hellman: “Everything she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Or in Bell’s case, just about everything he says about the Court’s opinion is wrong (though some of his recommended response to it is not). I don’t have time to discuss every paragraph, but here are enough for you to see what I mean, taken pretty much one after the other proceeding through his article, though not all the way through it.
Actually, the suspense in the liberal camp was generated more by the hope that springs eternal than by a willingness to recognize that a majority of the current court is determined to strike down any laws or policies intended to remedy past and continuing racial discrimination
Actually, these cases had nothing to do with remedies. They were not so proposed, and they were not so decided. Seattle’s schools had never been segregated, and Louisville’s were declared unitary, i.e., no longer displaying the consequences of segregation, by the federal courts seven years ago.
“[C]loser monitoring” is a rather substantial understatement. Initially developed by the court in the late 1930s to authorize closer monitoring of government policies challenged for denying equal protection and due process to members of minority groups, [strict scrutiny] has been restructured during the Rehnquist and Roberts courts to strike down affirmative-action programs.
Actually, strict scrutiny developed to require treating people differently because of their race to meet very, very stringent requirements of public necessity, etc. It has been used by the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts for the very same purpose for which it was created. It is the preferentialists like Bell and the Louisville/Seattle dissenters who now believe that not all racial discrimination should be subject to strict scrutiny.
In its new guise, the standard of strict scrutiny offers little support for black people seeking to challenge racially discriminatory practices that do not overtly mention race. But it enables any white person to challenge policies intended to remedy past discrimination, because those policies are typically couched in racial terms. Application of that standard dooms even modest programs to achieve racial diversity in school systems where neighborhood housing patterns are racially segregated, usually as a result of discrimination, that are easy to recognize but hard to prove in courts.
What Bell means by “racially discriminatory practices” is not what most people mean. He means any practices or any results from any unseen practice or “structural” whatever that lead to anything resembling a racial imbalance. He thus does what all preferentialists do — equate racial imbalance with “segregation” — although even Bell recognizes that not all such “segregation” is the result of discrimination. No matter. He would correct it anyway, since in practice if not in theory he regards any racial imbalance as by definition caused discrimination and thus any effort to “correct” any racial imbalance as an effort “to remedy past discrimination.” Similarly, he regards “racial diversity” as the presence of a satisfactory (to him or other preferentialists) racial balance, not simple the presence of people of different races.
The Seattle and Louisville decision places in jeopardy similar plans in use by school districts across the country. Given the nation’s racial history, it is hypocritical for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to assert that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The suggestion cruelly conflates minor cures with the major disease. Were he a medical doctor, Roberts would ban the use of vaccines that are fashioned from the disease-causing virus.
Note well! Bell said one true thing: this decision no doubt does place in jeopardy other school assignment programs that, like Seattle’s and Louisville’s, were based on race. But he is wrong to see those assignments as a cure rather than as a continuing infection of assigning benefits and burdens based on race.
Writing the majority opinion, Roberts chose to ignore continuing resistance to school desegregation. Yet it was the pandering to that resistance that helped put those who appointed him in office. And it was precisely that resistance, in the decades following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, which ruled that public schools could not be separate but equal, that led courts to acknowledge that using racial-balance remedies to comply with Brown could not work — given the willingness of so many white people to leave integrated schools.
I suspect there are at least two explanations for Roberts’ alleged lapse: 1) The efforts that Bell would regard as aiming to desegregate schools have nothing whatsoever to do with desegregation and everything to do with fining-tuning racial balance. 2) In any event, no such “resistance to school desegregation” had anything to do with the cases from Seattle and Louisville. Since neither Seattle’s nor Louisville’s schools were segregated, their discontinuing assigning students to schools based on their race will not lead to anything even remotely resembling “resegregation.”
Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s dissent properly condemns the court for undermining the half-century-old promise of integrated primary and secondary schools proclaimed in Brown. His long and ringing dissent may become the elegy of the school-desegregation era.
Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion and Justice Thomas’s concurrence were based on what Brown decided, and the principle of colorblind equality underlying that decision. Justice Breyer’s dissent, however “ringing,” was based on his interpretation of something Brown “promised.” But if we’re going to decide present and future cases on the basis of promises in past ones, I much prefer the first Justice Harlan’s “promise” of a colorblind Constitution.
Despite the majority’s efforts to distinguish the public-school case from the four-year-old decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, which narrowly approved some use of race at the college level, it is clear that, in the majority’s view, all school assignments, however well-intended, must be colorblind. Given the language in the majority opinion, it is not difficult to predict that, were it heard today, Grutter might well be decided differently.
We should not forget that the Grutter decision, while hailed by its liberal supporters, was endangered from the start. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor provided the swing vote by describing in her majority opinion the law school’s admission process as a “highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file, giving serious consideration to all the ways an applicant might contribute to a diverse educational environment.” In that process, she found, race counts as a factor, but is not used in a “mechanical way.”
What Bell is saying here is that Justice O’Connor foolishly took the “diversity” argument seriously, rather than recognizing it for what it plainly was — simply another way of describing, with a bit of camouflage for the overly squeamish, what Bell and others wish she had frankly endorsed, naked racial balancing. Bell, however, is probably right in supposing that the Roberts Court would have reached a different conclusion in Grutter, though that is not certain; Kennedy, who dissented in Grutter, may well have gone the other way in O’Connor’s absence. Unguided by principle, he is as likely to fall one way as another on any given day.
While O’Connor, heavily influenced by the multitude of amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs urging the value of racial diversity in corporate and military life, provided the fifth vote in the law-school case, her departure from her general opposition to affirmative-action plans prompted strongly worded refutation by the four dissenters that very likely deterred university legal staff members from considering going forward with minority-recruitment-and-admission efforts.
Such efforts were discouraged further in Michigan last year when the state’s voters approved a proposition barring affirmative action in public education, employment, or contracting. The proposal gained a 58-percent majority, but more significantly, almost two-thirds of white voters supported ending affirmative action, while only about one in seven black voters approved its elimination. Public opposition to any form of affirmative action remains so strong that, had the court approved the voluntary plans in the current case, the anti-affirmative-action groups would probably have sought voter approval for barriers in the states of Washington and Kentucky.
Actually, as you’d think Prof. Bell would be aware, there already is such a “barrier” in Washington. I-200 was approved by a majority almost as substantial as the one in Michigan. It proved, alas, not substantial enough to constrain the Seattle school board or the Washington Supreme Court (discussed in Addendum II of this recent post). Since Prof. Bell equates opposition to racial preference with support for segregation (or “resegregation”), he obviously regards the “white voters” who approved these state barriers against racial preference as the moral equivalent of the white voters who supported segregation in the Deep South and elsewhere. Thus it is no surprise that he is not bothered by the prospect of telling majorities that they have no right to insist that their states treat everyone without regard to race, even though that is precisely what the 14th Amendment (at least if “liberally construed”) did.
Actually, nothing in Prof. Bell’s argument is new. His criticism of the Seattle/Louisville decision, in fact, is remarkable similar to his criticism of Brown itself. In a typical 2004 speech, for example:
“New York University Professor Derrick Bell provocatively suggested last week that generations of black children might have been better off if the case had failed.”
“From the standpoint of education, we would have been better served had the court in Brown rejected the petitioners’ arguments to overrule Plessy v. Ferguson,” Bell said, referring to the 1896 Supreme Court ruling that enforced a “separate but equal” standard for blacks and whites. While acknowledging the deep injustices done to black children in segregated schools, Bell argued the court should have determined to enforce the generally ignored “equal” part of the “separate but equal” doctrine.
In fact, Prof. Bell would do well to consider the earlier views of … Prof. Bell, since that earlier Prof. Bell not only criticized Brown but also rejected the goal of racial balance in every school:
In 1976, Bell said he came to the same conclusion in an article titled Serving Two Masters, which stated, “Our clients’ aims for better schooling for their children no longer meshed with integrationist ideals. Civil rights lawyers were misguided in requiring racial balance of each school’s student population as the measure of compliance and the guarantee of effective schooling. In short, while the rhetoric of integration promised much, court orders to ensure that black youngsters received the education they needed to progress would have achieved much more.”
Perhaps you can figure out what Bell wants and what legal theory or principle he believes supports his preferences.
John – Either you do not understand or you faking ignorance – The US Supreme Court is supposed to be a court of JUSTICE – justice is the blending of law & mercy to make a correct decision – The US is a Sexist & Racist country White European-American Males are the dominant social group – Discrimination against White European-American Males is not the same as Sexism against Women or Racism against People of Color because White European-American Males are the dominant social group in the US
Morality says that the Strong should suffer for the weaker – White European-American Males should suffer for Women & People of Color because of Sexism against Women & Racism against People of Color
Consistency isn’t a strong suit of the left. Hypocrisy is.
I do not really understand why this subject needs much elaboration.
The left loves “the people” in the romantic abstract, but hates people in reality. That has long been the dilemma of the left. My children are grown. If they were still school age, I would not hesitate to simply move out of a neighborhood where schools are crippled by the violence and disdain for education that so many black children bring to school. When it’s your child, you are don’t care about liberal fantasies.
And, the reason black children are doing so poorly in school is because they are performing badly. The causes of this are not segregation. The causes are the failure of black family life, fatherless children and lack of repect for education.
This is just another round of limousine liberals blaming middle and lower class whites for the failures of blacks. Those same limosine liberals sure don’t send their children to schools rendered useless by the violence and lack of respect for education that is the unfortunate reality of schools that must deal with large numbers of black children.
Just browsing around, I could not let stand without response, the absurd statement of FreeMan (above). He stated: “The US Supreme Court is supposed to be a court of JUSTICE – justice is the blending of law & mercy to make a correct decision.” This is as wrong as it can possibly be. The duty of the Supreme Court is to APPLY THE LAW, and if that application results in miscarriage of justice, then it is up to the people and their elected representatives to change that law. This mistaken idea about the proper function of the court has done great harm, and will continue to do so until corrected.
N- Bashing Christian Shouting Thomas – Who created a society where Black Afrikan Men could not rule? – US Slave system – Willie Lyunch Rules 1712
i agree with Shouting Thomas 100%. no way i’d ever send my kids to a school full of violent hooligans. if these ultra-diverse and predominantly black schools had good track records of achievement, then white parents wouldn’t feel the need to send their kids elsewhere. in fact, if these schools were excellent schools, then a white parent’s placing his child in another school could be reasonably interpreted as “racist,” or at least as being based on factors other than what’s best for the child. all of this is pretty obvious, and thus like Shouting Thomas said, nothing more needs to be said about this.
i thought mr. bell’s medical doctor analogy was an excellent one though.
Racially balanced schools do not produce racially equal outcomes. The root of the racial test score/achievement gap is not solely caused by racial imbalance in schools, nor is it based solely on economic class.
This article was in the National Review by Arthur Hu, a Chinese American activist, almost ten years ago on Sept. 15, 1997 and is relevant today.
http://www.nationalreview.com/15sept97/hu091597.html
AMERICA’S SCHOOLS
EDUCATION AND RACE
The performance of minority students in affluent areas refutes the prevailing educational shibboleths.
ARTHUR HU Mr. Hu is a writer living in Kirkland, Washington..
DESEGREGATION is at a crossroads. As many analysts are declaring the integration experiment a failure, Harvard’s desegregation guru, Gary Orfield, keeps telling us that minority education could be fixed if only we desegregated more. Educators and the media routinely slam city schools for poor minority performance while holding up affluent suburban districts as models because of their better test scores. Yet, if Orfield is right that segregated districts don’t produce equal outcomes, no one has answered the more important question, which is whether “integrated” districts produce equal outcomes.
Oddly, while the courts have used inequality as the justification for busing, Orfield himself notes in his 1991 book The Closing Door that there isn’t much direct evidence that busing creates more equality. Almost as a footnote, he concedes that you would have to examine data broken down by race within mixed districts to prove that busing actually resulted in better performance for minorities.
After some cursory research — a few phone calls to local school districts, a ride on the Internet — I tracked down reports that do chart test scores and grades against race, not only in the worst but also in the best districts. The reason that people like Gary Orfield don’t have the numbers is that it’s safer to uphold the myth that minorities will perform as well as their white peers in good suburban schools than to expose the reality that the racial gap exists even in the best suburbs.
Test scores and grades for blacks in integrated urban neighborhoods aren’t any better than those in predominantly minority ghetto areas. Some affluent suburbs did no better than nearby urban areas, and even at the best suburban schools blacks on average lagged behind their white classmates. But a bigger secret is that even the poorest Asians tended to get better grades — if not test scores — than more affluent whites. Asians from poorer suburbs consistently outscored Euro-Americans in nearby more affluent suburbs. For all the talk about the superiority of schools in Japan or Korea, Asian-Americans are also nearly two years ahead in math, just as far ahead of their classmates as students in their ancestral lands are, even when they go to the same schools that fail other American minorities.
In short, predominantly minority schools have low test scores because minorities have lower test scores regardless of the segregation factor, not the other way around. And American schools would match Asian schools if they were dominated by Asian students. Perhaps that chilling reality is the reason that every newspaper I have contacted has chosen to ignore these data.
California’s 1994 CLAS (California Learning Assessment System) test introduced massive multiculturalism and had several questions for which more than one answer was counted as correct. Yet nobody noticed that elementary-school blacks and Hispanics did just as poorly in predominantly minority areas of Oakland, East Palo Alto, and Alum Rock as in legally integrated San Francisco. At Grade 10, only 10 to 15 per cent of black students got 3 or better in math whether they went to integrated San Francisco, the segregated communities of Contra Costa County, Oakland, or Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County. Asians continue to stampede into Cupertino, home of the founders of Apple Computers, because of its excellent schools. But US News (April 21, 1997) highlighted the poor performance of blacks there, and they lagged the state average on the CLAS.
Meanwhile, the Asians of the Chinatown ghettos in San Francisco scored as well as children of affluent engineers in Santa Clara County. Asians in Santa Clara County scored as well as whites in posh San Ramon Valley or Cupertino. Asians in Cupertino scored as well as whites in Palo Alto, the best district in the Bay Area. Blacks in San Ramon Valley scored no better than state average for all races, while Asians there outscored every other race and community.
The Seattle Times annually slams Seattle’s math scores (just the 50th-percentile for Washington as a whole) compared to suburban Bellevue’s 67th-percentile performance, and highlights the race gap as an urban problem. But broken down by race, whites score at about 67 in either city, but blacks score worse in Bellevue, at 34 compared to 40 for Seattle. Seattle has an “African-American Academy,” but its test scores are virtually indistinguishable from the city average. Suburban inequality is much the same at nearby Issaquah (41) and Redmond (35), even though there are no minority ghettos in the suburbs, and there has never been any news coverage of racial differences in performance there.
Seattle is one of the few cities where Asians are so poor and white parents so highly educated that white students score better even in math. But Asians still have the highest grade-point average in the city. In the suburbs, Asian 8th-graders score 74 in 59th-percentile blue-collar Renton, hopping rungs over whites in 67th-percentile Bellevue. Asians in Bellevue score 82, equal to top-ranked Mercer Island’s 83. Asians in Mercer Island score an astounding 90, not far below the average at the best Lakeside private school.
Meanwhile, nobody ever asks in print why fourth-graders in nearly all-white (but poor) Edmonds or Mukilteo scored only 34 to 44, as badly as Seattle’s blacks. Nobody ever demanded that they be bused into richer school districts to remedy this inequity.
The Boston Globe also offered no explanation why black students who entered the Metco voluntary busing program from Boston with 50th-percentile scores didn’t score as well as their new suburban classmates in 88th-percentile Newton. Yet the whites from working-class Revere or Brockton have an SAT average of 411 — near the national black average. No Italian-American Revere youth dripping with gold chains and roaring upon his ’82 firebird could expect that sending him to Newton for four years would turn him into Ivy League material. Yet the Harvard gurus remain mystified.
Fairfax County near Washington, D.C., has a 569 (1996) SAT math average, good enough for the University of California at Riverside. But Fairfax’s black average of 465 isn’t any better than “Can’t we just get along” Los Angeles. The black suburb of Prince George’s County is among the top 30 per cent of U.S. counties in average household income. The school district proudly claims that its black students perform as well as their “counterparts” throughout the state — but that’s only their black counterparts. Measured by Maryland’s MSPAP (Maryland School Performance Assessment Program) test, it ranks as 22 of 24 districts in the state.
It is widely accepted that test scores increase with family income. However, SAT breakdowns for 1995 show that even the most affluent blacks, from families with incomes over $70,000, have average scores of 426, lagging behind whites or Asians from families with incomes under $10,000. But Asians from families with incomes under $10,000 have average scores of 482, ranking them with whites from families making $40,000. And it is not just test scores. Oakland’s poor school system highlighted its low 1.8 black GPA to justify Ebonics. But GPAs aren’t any better in integrated Seattle or San Francisco.
Data books and health surveys all show that even in cities like Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco where the per-capita incomes of Asians are no higher than that of blacks, it is Asians, not whites, who have the best outcomes. The omission of Asians from the local news stories is probably deliberate because their statistics don’t support the thesis that racism and poverty are the reasons for poor outcomes. As much as the activists continue to deplore the model-minority “myth,” except in the most distressed Asian refugee communities, Asians generally have the best grades and test scores; the lowest rates of special and remedial education, dropouts, and expulsion; the highest rates of attendance; and the lowest rates of arrest, teen pregnancy, AIDS, and substance abuse.
If civil rights can be measured by affirmative action, multiculturalism, and desegregation, then they have massively succeeded in almost every urban school district in the country. Compared with Asians, blacks in California are at or near parity among teacher hires, college faculty, staff, and principals, and they are twice as well represented among superintendents. American history books now look like African-American history books, even casting revolutionary sailors as blacks, while Asians are all but completely absent from indexes. Yet these nifty educational strategies have utterly failed to raise black grades and test scores.
Last year, with little fanfare, Lawrence Steinberg, B. Bradford Brown, and Sanford Dornbusch released a new book, Beyond the Classroom that offered a very different explanation from the standard “racism and poverty” for why different groups perform differently in school. “Of all the demographic factors we studied in relation to school performance, ethnicity is the most important . . . In terms of school achievement, it is more advantageous to be Asian than to be wealthy, to have non-divorced parents, or to have a mother who is able to stay at home full time.” They found that no matter which school they looked at, Asians got the best grades and test scores, and blacks and Hispanics the worst. The problem was not the schools, but the attitudes and habits of the students themselves. The underachievers didn’t fear failure, didn’t study as hard, skipped class more often, and blamed their failures on racism. The overachievers didn’t tolerate failure, hung out with overachievers, spent the most time studying, and attributed their success to individual effort.
IRONICALLY, it is an even darker secret that blacks and Hispanics can succeed solely on the basis of merit. Brian D. Ray, President of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) did a study that shows that minority home-schoolers are in the 80th- to 85th-percentile of home-schooling students.
There are formal schools where blacks and Hispanics do well, too. The December 2, 1995, Economist highlights the Barclay Elementary School in Baltimore. It adopted a severe prep-school curriculum and zero-tolerance approach toward spelling mistakes to get suburban-level 60th-percentile scores in a city where failure is the norm. Seattle’s Zion private school boasts test scores above average with a largely black student body. The story of how Jaime Escalante fashioned a class of Advanced Placement calculus whiz kids out of a barrio school was made into a movie.
Whitney Young Magnet High in Chicago rivals many suburban schools. With a student body that is mostly black or Hispanic, it ranks above the 99th percentile among state high schools in 8th- and 10th-grade math and writing, and has ACT (American College Testing) averages that make it the equal of Asian-dominated Lowell in San Francisco. The best SAT scores in Georgia aren’t in a rich white suburb, but at Davidson Fine Arts Magnet in Richmond with a 42 per cent black student body, near an Army Signal Corps base.
At the college level, Martin Vaern Bosangue of Mt. San Antonio Community College near Los Angeles found that black and Hispanic students who took a calculus workshop and studied more hours than whites and Asians who started with higher SAT math scores wound up getting better grades than even the Asians.
Economic and race-based interventions have never been shown to achieve the equality that was set as their justification in the first place. After all, the numbers that matter are not the percentage of blacks on the staff or in the classroom, but grade point average, reading and math test scores, and hours spent on homework and attendance. As Thomas Sowell and Lawrence Steinberg observe, if students of all races worked equally hard, their disparate rates of success and failure would plausibly lead to explanations based on, on the one hand, racism and poverty, or, on the other hand, innate superiority or inferiority. When they differ on every measure of effort, what else would you expect?
No Stanton – You do not understand the traditional & necessary role of Courts to protect Special Classes or the politically powerless – the duty of Courts is to blend law & mercy to protect the rights of the politically powerless
I’m speaking from experience, FreeMan. I actually moved from San Francisco to Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn in 1976. My family was one of the first families to live in this majority black neighborhood. I sent my kids to public schools that were almost entirely black, with a few Hispanics mixed in.
Even though my kids were in grade school, gang violence made it impossible for them to walk to school alone. They were subjected to racial taunting and threats by black kids every time they walked down the street. The schools were a mess, unable to function as a result of violence and discipline problems in the classroom.
This was in the pre-Giuliani era in NYC. The streets were in the hands of drug dealers and prostitutes. Petty gangsters stood on the street corner and threatened me every time I walked by.
Black men drew knives and guns on me in several instances. I could not walk to the subway without some black gangster walking behind me muttering: “What are you doing in this neighborhood, you white bastard.”
So, I am well acquainted with this subject. I ceased caring about whether my daughters grew up in an integrated environment and I got them the hell out of there before they were killed, maimed or raped by black gangs.
And, I don’t really care about any names you might like to call me. My daughters are still alive, educated and prospering. I know, now, just how racist blacks can be. So, the attempt to invoke white guilt that you and Cobra practice so often is just wasted on me. Your constant attempt to sell me on the “whites murder blacks” rhetoric doesn’t move me at all. Blacks murder whites. In fact, blacks murder whites at an astonishing rate.
You and Cobra are the ones who need to answer for violent crime. When are you going to condemn the epidemic levels of black on white crime?
Shouting Thomas – I was not attempting to invoke White European-American guilt on you – but showing the hypocrisy of 1 that claims to be a Christian yet stereotypes most Black Afrikans “as violent & have a disdain for education” Shouting Thomas believe it or not Black Afrikans are created by God & followers of Christ are supposed to show positive concern for Black Afrikans as Christ did – I will not apologize for all the Black Afrikan Crime against White European-Americans because I didn’t do it – I do not expect you to apologize for all the White European-American Crime against Black Afrikans including current maintenance of the negative racial stereotypes against Black Afrikans & the US Slave System against Black Afrikans – Finally do you tell your Black Afrikan current Church members that you believe that most Black Afrikans are “violent & disdain education”?
“negative racial stereotypes”
Hmmm. So, you condemn negative racial stereotypes? Does that include your regular as rain condemnation of WHITE MALE EUROAMERICANS? Does that include the “only whites can be racist” laugher that even other minority groups have started to offer as excuse for minority racist language, behavior and crimes?
Let me guess. “Only whites can stereotype.” Did I guess right, huh?
Here’s reality:
The high school graduation rate for whites: 78%, for blacks: 55%. The graduation rate for black men is 48%.
One out of three black men is in jail, or on probation or parole on any given day.
From the Department of Justice: “At yearend 2005 there were 3,145 black male sentenced prison inmates per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared to … 471 white male inmates per 100,000 white males.”
Stereotype?
Mikem – your posting is ALMOST TOO silly to respond to – but for the benefit of those who are sincere or don’t understand I will answer your deception “White European-American Male Supremacy” in the US is not a negative racial stereotype it is a factual report – I am not denigrating White European-Americans I am identifying the hypocrisy in the system that has claimed since 1868 that Women & People of Color are supposed to be treated = to White European-Americans Males but are not because of Sexism against Women & Racism against People of Color
“…is not a negative racial stereotype it is a factual report – I am not denigrating White European-Americans…”
Then neither is Thomas. He is pointing out facts. Indeed, they are facts that have already been “adjusted”, rationalized and glossed over for decades because people are more concerned with feelings than with helping black Americans help themselves. Better to pretend there is no problem, or worse, that it is intractable (a code word, in this case, for genetic) than to be seen as “racist” by blaming that part of the black culture and community that produces it.
You are a hypocrite. This is yet a milder version of the “only whites can be racists” laugher. Talk about “Too silly”.
By the way. You did a person switch there, much like Cobra does. You must have forgot which avatar you are supposed to be today.
To Cobra and Freeman
Whites do not have the monoply on racism. This article is from a Chinese American perspective.
http://www.tabunka.org/newsletter/black_racism.html
Black Racism
By: Ying Ma
UMJ NEWS Volume 2.30
This is a true story, the Chinese man was abused by African American.
In what passes for discussions on race these days, small problems are often blown up large, while real traumas are completely ignored. For instance, despite what President Clinton’s “Race Initiative” panel has said, the very rawest racial conflicts in present-day America don’t even fit into the tidy mold of white-majority-oppressing-colored-minority that activists constantly promote. Though civil rights groups and most of the media studiously ignore this fact, the nation’s most fractious racial battles are now conflicts between minority populations. Particularly horrific is the animosity directed at Asian Americans by blacks in low-income areas of urban America.
At age ten, I immigrated from China to Oakland, California, a city filled with crime, poverty, and racial tension. In elementary school, I didn’t wear name-brand clothing or speak English. My name soon became “Ching Chong,” “Chinagirl,” and “Chow Mein.” Other children laughed at my language, my culture, my ethnicity, and my race. I said nothing.
After a few years, I began to speak English, but not well enough to trade racial insults. On rides home from school I avoided the back of the bus so as not to be beaten up. But even when I sat in the front, fire crackers, paper balls, small rocks, and profanity were thrown at me and the other “stupid Chinamen.” The label “Chinamen” was dished out indiscriminately to Vietnamese, Koreans, and other Asians. When I looked around, I saw that the other “Chinamen” tuned out the insults by eagerly discussing movies, friends, and school.
During my secondary school years, racism, and then the combination of outrage and bitterness that it fosters, accompanied me home on the bus every day. My English was by now more fluent than that of those who insulted me, but most of the time I still said nothing to avoid being beaten up. In addition to everything else thrown at me, a few times a week I was the target of sexual remarks vulgar enough to make Howard Stern blush. When I did respond to the insults, I immediately faced physical threats or attacks, along with the embarrassing fact that the other “Chinamen” around me simply continued their quiet personal conversations without intervening. The reality was that those who cursed my race and ethnicity were far bigger in size than most of the Asian children who sat silently.
The racial harassment wasn’t limited to bus rides. It surfaced in my high school cafeteria, where a middle-aged Chinese vendor who spoke broken English was told by rowdy students each day at lunch time to “Hurry up, you dumb Ching!” On the sidewalks, black teenagers and adults would creep up behind 80-year-old Asians and frighten them with sing-song nonsense:
“Yee-ya, Ching-chong, ah-ee, un-yahhh!” At markets and in the streets of poor black neighborhoods, Asians would be told, “Why the hell don’t you just go back to where you came from!”
When it came time for college, I left this ugly world for a beautiful school far away. Finally, it was possible to pursue a life without racial harassment backed by the threat of violence. I chose not to return to my old neighborhood after college, but I am often reminded of the racial discrimination I endured there. On a bus not too long ago I saw a black woman curse at a Korean man, “You f—ing Chinese person! Didn’t you hear that I asked you to move yo’ ass? You too stupid to understand English or something?”
In poor neighborhoods across this country Asians endure daily racial hatred just as I did. Because of their language deficiencies, their small size, their fear of violent confrontations, they endure in silence. Unlike me, many of them will never depart for a new life in a beautiful place far, far away. So each day they grow more bitter against a group that much of America refuses to acknowledge to be capable of racism: African Americans.
In a fair and peaceful world, racial harassment will be decried without regard to its source. The problem today is that prominent black leaders rule out even the possibility of black racism. Activists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson intone that racism equals “prejudice plus power,” and that since blacks in America lack power, they are simply not capable of practicing racism against anyone. John Hope Franklin, chair of President Clinton’s race panel, angrily insists that racism is something suffered, not dished out, by blacks. Many black professors, writers, polemicists, and politicians repeat the same mantra. What might appear to be black racism, writes syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, actually boils down not to racism but to acts of crime and rudeness from the perpetrators, and tough luck for the recipients.
Rationalizers of black racism ignore the fact that identical actions inflicted by whites would be universally decried as intolerable. Ultimately, their arguments simply grease the skids for further traumatizing of “unlucky” victims. And to real-life casualties of racial animosity, motivation is not especially relevant. Loss is loss. Pain is pain.
Unfortunately, Asian Americans-and especially their leaders-have failed to speak out on this matter. Complaints from wounded individuals regularly boil into public view, however. In mid-August, I attended a crowded press conference held in New York’s Chinatown to discuss Indonesia’s history of discrimination against ethnic Chinese (which peaked this May in a wave of bloody anti-Chinese riots). One woman at the event began to hysterically scream out her frustrations over black American racism against Asians. The woman, Mee Ying Lin, shouted, “Chinese suffer from racial discrimination by blacks every day. We should help persecuted Chinese overseas, but why is no one dealing with our own troubles in America?”
Rose Tsai, head of the San Francisco Neighbors Association, and candidate for a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors, suggests that everyday Asians rarely defend themselves against ghetto racism because “Asian culture is just not that confrontational.. Asians are unlike blacks who got to where they are in politics by being militant.”
Tsai explains that Asian involvement in politics is at a nascent stage, that it is difficult for her organization even to convince Asian immigrants to vote, let alone make a political stink against racial harassment. “Asians are just not used to standing up for our own rights,” says another Bay Area Chinese activist with frustration.
That might explain the quiescence of recent immigrants who speak imperfect English. But what about the growing cadre of Asian activists? They are far from passive or non-confrontational. In just the past two years, organizations like the Asian American Legal Defense Fund, the National Asian-Pacific American Legal Consortium, the Organization for Chinese Americans, and others have voiced loud condemnations of “racism” in American society. But they have focused on events like the recent investigation of Asian donors of illegal campaign funds, the Republican opposition in Congress to Bill Lann Lee’s nomination as director of the Office of Civil Rights, a cover drawing for National Review that showed the President, Vice President, and First Lady dressed in Manchurian garb, and even a recent cover photo for this magazine that showed a handsome Asian male scowling angrily at the camera.
If vocal Asian activists are able to work themselves into a frenzy attacking everyday political tussles and editorial cartoons for their alleged racist motivations, they are obviously capable of confrontation. Why then do we never hear these national activists condemning black racism against Asians in our inner cities?
Some Asian-American activists say the reason they have not confronted anti-Asian racism among blacks is because the tension does not exist on the national level, but is merely confined to some local areas. Karen Narasaki of the National Asian-Pacific American Legal Consortium claimed in a recent interview that black animosity is different in each city and ought to be handled differently in each case by local organizations. David Lee, executive director of one such local organization, the San Francisco Voters Education Committee, concurs: “There may be a few communities and a few areas where tensions exist-so it is better for community groups rather than a national organization like the Organization of Chinese Americans to deal with such problems.”
Representatives of national Asian organizations also cite resource constraints to explain their quiescence. They say black-Asian clashes are not a serious enough national issue to expend scarce time and money on.
There is a difference, however, between not being able to expend effort and not wanting to. Asian activists on the national level also matter-of-factly justify black racism in inner cities as a direct result of competition between Asians and their black neighbors over limited economic resources.
Narasaki, while acknowledging she is not an inner city expert, insists that many black and Asian conflicts “have to do with the lack of economic opportunities” in cities. Echoing this refrain, Stanley Mark, program director of the Asian American Legal Defense Fund, asserts that “we can’t talk about race without talking about economic disparities.”
In this vein, Asian activists consistently mention that racial problems occur when Asian merchants move into predominantly black neighborhoods and flourish. The vicious year-long black boycott of a Korean store in Brooklyn in 1990, and the looting and burning of Korean stores in south-central Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King riots serve as shining examples of conflicts linked to economic disparities.
The excuse of economic disparities fails miserably to justify violence and harassment, however. For some observers, it also brings up memories of Nazi persecution of Jews, African attacks on Indian merchants, and recent murders, rapes, and robberies of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. All of these atrocities were committed against people deemed economically well off by larger masses facing difficult times.
In any case, the economic disparities rationale falls apart in the many instances where racism flourishes in the absence of class differences.
At San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point public housing complex, for instance, low-income Southeast Asian residents, who are in the minority, have consistently encountered racial harassment from their black neighbors. Racial slurs, physical threats, violence, and destruction of property have festered for years. Philip Nguyen of the Southeast Asian Community Center, who has worked on the case for years, notes that there are no economic differences between the Asian and black families in the complex. The Asians, he says, are very quiet and have made every effort to befriend the black residents, yet serious friction has persisted for ten years.
Joe Hicks, executive director of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission, painstakingly tried to bring blacks and Asians together after the Rodney King riots. He believes that “much of the hostilities are due to blacks’ jealousy of Asian economic success, a sense of alienation, and the self-perpetuating belief that blacks will always lose out in the racial equation in America.” He adds that “certainly economics gives a basis to many of the problems,” but asserts that “even if tomorrow we can have a level playing field for both racial groups, we would still have animosity and racial strife” because prejudices would still remain.
Asian activists who are not otherwise inclined to ignore prejudice are often strangely anxious to apologize for black racism. In interviews, they note that Asians harbor many prejudices against blacks too. This explanation, however, has no power to explain the kind of harassment I and many others like me experienced as young immigrant children beginning life with no animus toward anyone.
Asian prejudice toward blacks surely exists. But whatever biases might be harbored in the minds of Asian immigrants, many of whom had never seen a black person before arriving in the U.S., they certainly don’t rate at the level of destroying black people’s property, scaring their elderly folk, or threatening and assaulting their children-the kinds of pressures Asians in many urban areas now endure routinely. Asian youths in particular typically start out with little or no inclination to distrust or dislike African Americans. Young Asians are usually far more willing than their parents to accept a new country and new friends, including black ones. In many cases, it was only after innumerable frightening chases, assaults, and humiliations that Asian attitudes toward blacks turned defensive. Those of us whose open minds were confronted with hostility and hatred will never accept the insulting assertion that our suffering resulted from our own prejudices.
It seems that leaders of the Organization of Chinese Americans, the Asian American Legal Defense Fund, and related groups are disconnected from the real concerns of many of the Asians they claim to represent. David Lee, whose Bay Area organization is attempting to promote local dialogue among minority journalists, believes that a fundamental disconnection exists between the national Asian spokesmen and the new majority of Asians who are recent immigrants. The prominent Asian civil rights leaders, he notes, tend to be American born, to speak little of their ethnic languages, and to be unable to read the local ethnic newspapers. Many of them do not know or understand the problems in low income areas, because they live comfortable middle-class lives. And so “it is not surprising that they are silent about black-on-Asian discrimination,” Lee summarizes.
Bong Hwan Kim, executive director of the Korean Youth and Community Center in Los Angeles and an active member of the Black-Korean Alliance that attempted to bring African- and Korean-Americans together in the eight years before the south-central riots, describes a disconnection in the Korean community between first-generation immigrants and acculturated second generation residents with less familiarity with inner-city life. After the shops of Koreatown were looted or burned, he reports, the more suburbanized Koreans pushed inter-ethnic bridge-building efforts, while the first-generation immigrants who toiled in menial jobs, bridled at having to sit across the table from those who looted and burned their property. Meanwhile, few of the prominent national Asian organizations even condemned the violence perpetrated against Koreans in L.A.
Stanley Mark of the Asian American Legal Defense Fund argues in defense of the national Asian organizations that people hear less from the Asian leaders about black-on-Asian racism than white-on-Asian racism simply because there is less of the former than the latter. Mark insists he knows of no case where an Asian was seriously hurt or killed by a racist black American.
Underlining the disconnect between national and local perceptions, Liu Yu-xi, an organizer of the New York coalition of Chinese Americans that mobilized hundreds of thousands of normally politically apathetic Chinese to protest Indonesian violence against Chinese residents, chuckled at Stanley Mark’s ignorance of cases of black racism. Liu, who has known of many racially motivated physical attacks against Chinese in New York, observes, “Such crimes are reported often in the local Chinese papers, but the national Asian activists obviously do not know how to read Chinese.”
When asked why prominent Asians have said little about racial harassment by African Americans, Bill Tam of San Francisco’s Chinese Family Alliance flatly stated, “I think they are afraid to say anything.” To him, it appears that Asian leaders are often fearful of the national black leadership. National Asian organizations generally follow the lead of black civil rights groups like the naacp so slavishly, another Bay Area activist told me, that even when the latter’s stances (for instance, on quotas and preferences) are opposed to the interests and beliefs of many Asian citizens, the Asian activists don’t challenge their allies.
Rose Tsai of the San Francisco Neighbors Association was a little more blunt: “Most Asian leaders do not wish to acknowledge that there exists a problem because they do not want the minorities to fight amongst themselves.” As a result, national Asian spokesmen speaking for their brethren are without any inkling of the real problems they face, or what kind of racism is dragging them down. Recognizing the complex issues between blacks and Asians, Philip Nguyen of the Southeast Asian Community Center has a simple proposal: “Fight, not against or for any group, but against racial discrimination.”
Ying Ma, who immigrated to the United States in 1985, is a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taend98c.htm
Mikem – Shouting Thomas denigrates Black Afrikans by stating the majority of Black Afrikans are violent & disdain education
Mikem – the US Slave System created the disfunctional “culture” in Black Afrikans through the Willie Lynch Rules 1712
“Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion and Justice Thomas’s concurrence were based on what Brown decided, and the principle of colorblind equality underlying that decision.”
This is one of the primary mistakes made by the plurality and commentators such as yourself. The decision in Brown was not based on the principle of colorblindness. Some of its rhetoric has been selectively culled to support that position. On the contrary, however, the reasoning in Brown turned upon the stigmatic and oppressive effect of segregation upon black students, not upon the fact that blacks were “classified” on the basis of their race.
Smmenen – I think that is an arguable point, though I’m not persuaded. But what is not arguable is that the NAACP LDF urged the Court, as it had in many earlier cases, in no uncertain terms to base its decision on the principle of colorblind equality. See, for starters,
http://www.discriminations.us/2007/08/historical_brownout.html
“I think that is an arguable point, though I’m not persuaded.”
If you parse out the reasoning in Brown, say, putting it in standard form and logically analyzing it, there is really no question on this point. You might not be convinced, but there is no real doubt about it. Brown’s reasoning is crystal clear. It is not at all about racial classifications or colorblindness. Note also that the two are not the same. Kennedy’s concurrence, for instance, would inscribe the anti-classification principle as a narrow tailoring precept, permitting race-conscious decision-making (such as site selection) whereas Justice Thomas would proscribe all race-based decision making (colorblindness).
So, you’re sticking with your argument that the Court in Brown flatly rejected the clear argument that the plaintiffs put forward? That seems hard to believe.
All of the evidence you’ve marshaled to support the contention that the primary argument of the Brown plaintiffs was a colorblindness paradigm has no bearing on what the court *actually* said. It’s very simple: Either the court articulated a colorblindness rationale in Brown or it did not. It, in fact, did not. You do not seem to believe this despite the crystal clear language and reasoning of the Court. If you’ve ever seen a Court case argued, plaintiffs say all sorts of things. The only relevant document is the opinion of the Court.
Your attempt to create a false dichotomy between either accepting or rejecting the colorblindness paradigm is just silly. “So, you’re sticking with your argument that the Court in Brown flatly rejected the clear argument that the plaintiffs put forward? That seems hard to believe.” Just because the court did not articulate a colorblindness rationale does not necessarily entail a rejection of anything the plaintiffs argued. It doesn’t speak to it one way or the other. The Court decided to approach the question not from a colorblindness perspective but from an understanding of the harm of segregation on black children.