[This post has been edited since it was originally posted —jsr]
Richard Kahlenberg, a Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation, has long supported affirmative action based on class rather than race. (See his 1996 book, THE REMEDY)
I have no problem with Kahlenberg’s preference for class-mixing over race-mixing as a basis for school policy, but I do think he often minimizes the offensiveness of race-based policies. In this year-end report for the Century Foundation, for example, in listing the Supreme Court’s rejection of “voluntary” integration plans in Seattle and Louisville as one of the low points of the year, he writes:
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial integration plans in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington. Unlike affirmative action in higher education, where white students can argue that through hard work, they have earned a right to admission at a particular college, and should not have their race held against them, the case of nonselective public schools has no issue of merit or deservedness at stake, and so the Supreme Court decision that race could not be a factor even in assigning students is particularly troubling….
I find this passage particularly disturbing, and a good example of why I disagree with those of my fellow critics of race preferences who base their objections heavily on their affection for merit. If, like Kahlenberg, one objects to racial preference only where “merit or deservedness” is “at stake,” then, like Kahlenberg, one will see nothing wrong when a white or Asian child is denied his or her preference for a school close to home, or a school with some special programs, solely because of his or her race. In fact, if distributing burdens and benefits based on race is wrong only where “merit or deservedness” is compromised, then there would be nothing wrong with, say, counting black votes as worth more than white or Asian votes (perhaps each back vote could be counted as equal to 1.4 white votes to make up for the 3/5 of a person apportionment compromise in the original Constitution) or, for that matter, with racial segregation where there is no invidious intent and facilities are in fact “separate but equal.”
Neither the 14th Amendment nor President Kennedy’s and President’s Johnson’s executive order implementing affirmative action in the federal government nor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 nor the principle at the core of “The American Creed” said that people should be treated “without regard” to their race, creed, color, or national origin only when treating them “with regard” to race, ethnicity, etc., would deprive them of what they deserved because of “merit,” however defined.
Along with John’s 1.4 votes for blacks, maybe it’s time to pay reparations for denying women the vote for so many years. Let’s deny men the right to vote for the next 150 or so years.
In a certain field of work that I study, most of the workers are men. This is due to the fact that women historically did not want to go into this field. Now, it has been proclaimed that there aren’t 50% women because women were discriminated against. (But, how can that be if they didn’t even exist to apply for positions in the first place?).
So, a plan has been approved to “make” the ratio of women to men 50:50. In order to do so, it has been proclaimed that only women will be hired until the ratio equalizes.
Very few positions in this field open up every year. Given the death/retirement rate of men, you would have to hire only women for about 30 YEARS in order to equalize the numbers.
So, basically, you would have to kick a whole generation of men out of this field in order to achieve “balance.”
Note that this discrimination is completely asymmetric. That is, there were NO women discriminated against in the first place. There were simply no women who wanted the jobs at all.
ACF — Since men are incarcerated at about the rate of ten men for every woman, we need to close this gap in order to overcome this presumptive sexism against men. Let’s make applying make-up while driving a felony.
From IHE:
“African American and Mexican American students have been applying to U.S. law schools in consistent numbers and with increasingly strong credentials over the last 15 years, at a time when the combine capacity of the schools has grown. Yet the number of people from those ethnic groups who are actually enrolled in law schools declined over that period, a situation laid out on a new Web site produced by faculty members and students at Columbia University’s Lawyering in the Digital Age clinic”
Check out the link to the “new web site”:
http://www2.law.columbia.edu/civilrights
The “best practices” are a real hoot:
http://www2.law.columbia.edu/civilrights/best%20practices.htm
If one interprets school district demographics as a distribution, then the policies overturned by SCOTUS are just another form of socialist redistribution. Kahlenberg writes that “the case of nonselective public schools has no issue of merit or deservedness at stake”, but this utterly ignores whatever motives the parents (remember them?) may have used to choose where to live. Redistributive policies have typically been hostile to the nuclear family (in effect and at times by intent); race-based school assignment is no different. Having the state’s desires for schoolchildren supersede the wishes of the parents is ultimately counterproductive to the Seattle and Louisville public schools anyway, as white flight (and Asian evasion?) will be accelerated.