Discriminations

According to this report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Hampshire College students walked out of class today to protest the administration’s “insufficient commitment to fighting racism.”

Among other things, the students were calling for additional faculty and staff positions in multicultural affairs, mandatory “anti-oppression training” for all employees, and residence halls exclusively for students of color and for “queer-identified” students.

If “queer-identified” students deserve a dorm of their own, what about “straight-identified” students? Shouldn’t they be able to have a dorm of their own, i.e., one that excludes “queer-identified” students? Moreover, shouldn’t there be separate dorms for black “queer-identified” students and Hispanic “queer-identified” students? Without such separate dorms, those students would be forced to reject one of their core identities. And let’s not forget the Jews....

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On a number of occasions I have criticized Theodore Shaw, the Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense Education Fund (see here, here, here, here, here, and here for examples), but for once I hope he’s right about something.

Next Thursday he will be giving the keynote address at a symposium at the Indiana University Law School entitled “The Place of Race in Post-Affirmative Action America.”

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I have written a number of times about Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s recent conclusions that diversity turns Americans into “turtles” and generally makes them isolated and distrustful. Now comes Eduardo Porter, writing an “Editorial Observer” piece in the New York Times, “ Race and the Social Contract,” that without citing Putnam makes some very similar points. The Left, it seems, is becoming increasingly aware of some downsides of diversity.

Porter agrees with Friedrich Engels’ view of the obstacle to working class solidarity in the United States — that because of our “many small groups, each of which understands only itself ... [,] the dissimilar elements of the working class fall apart” as soon as it begins to form. For Porter, however, now quoting William Julius Wilson from a decade ago, the real problem is that diversity makes whites selfish and greedy:

American whites rebelled against welfare because they saw it as using their hard-earned taxes to give blacks “medical and legal services that many of them could not afford for their own families.”

The Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser correlated public spending in Western Europe and the United States with diversity and concluded that half the social-spending gap was due to the United States’ more varied racial and ethnic mix. The other half was mostly due to the existence of stronger left-wing parties in Europe.

Americans are not less generous than Europeans. When private charities are included, they probably spend more money for social purposes than Europeans do. But philanthropy allows them to target spending on those they personally believe are deserving, instead of allowing the government to choose.

Here is Mr. Porter’s main point:

This breakdown of solidarity should be unacceptable in a country that is, after all, mainly a nation of immigrants, glued together by a common project and many shared values. The United States has showed an unparalleled capacity to pull together in challenging times. Americans have invested blood and treasure to serve a broad national purpose and to rescue and protect their allies across the Atlantic.

Still, racial and ethnic antagonism all too frequently limit generosity at home....

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According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are elevating the issue of faculty “diversity” to one of their primary “bread and butter” issues.

I was struck by the discussion of one professor’s research.

“Diversity is inevitable. It’s going to happen,” said Henry Lee Allen, a sociology professor at Wheaton College in Illinois who spoke on a panel that examined the views of unionized faculty members of color on the issues of workload and productivity on their campuses. “The question is how it’s going to happen and who’s going to lead it,” he said. “Are we going to be proactive or reactive?”

Prof. Allen’s references to the plight of minority faculty members also raises questions about why anyone would want to be one. Along the way he manages to catch and display a ubiquitous red herring of affirmative action debates, although he himself seems to believe it’s a prize fish.

Mr. Allen, who has studied various education issues for the National Education Association over the years, said his research shows that “unions matter, but they could matter more” in the lives of ethnic-minority faculty members who say they are trying to cope with a variety of job-related issues, among them post-affirmative-action backlash, the tenure process, and the syndrome of believing that jobs are being handed out to “unqualified minorities.”

Now, here’s the red herring, although it takes a faculty member to refer to a red herring as a “syndrome”: “the syndrome of believing that jobs are handed out to ‘unqualified minorities.’”

Although I’m sure that some critics of affirmative action do sometimes say that it awards positions to unqualified applicants, careful (and even sloppy) readers will note that I’ve never said that here. My belief, and I believe the belief of most serious critics of race preferences, is that lowering standards that are applied to everyone else for minority students results in the admission, hiring, etc., of applicants who are less qualified than those they displace. If that weren’t true, there would be no need for the preferences.

From the American Heritage Dictionary:

syndrome: a characteristic combination of opinions, emotions, or behavior

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I don’t agree with everything Pat Buchanan says, by a long shot. But I do agree with everything he says here.

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“An Equal Playing Field?” has been UPDATED. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to determine whether the UPDATE is serious or a joke.

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Regular readers will know that I don’t believe there is any such thing as “reverse discrimination.” A policy or practice is either discriminatory, or it isn’t. My beliefs aside, I wonder what people who do believe that “reverse discrimination” is distinguishable in a meaningful way from ordinary, garden variety discrimination would make of the following recent development in Louisville. (HatTip to Hube)

Faced with a lawsuit they say they couldn't win, officials with Jefferson County [Kentucky] Public Schools say they will no longer consider race when hiring or transferring teachers....

“After consulting a variety of experts, we determined there was no way to enforce it,” said district personnel director Bill Eckels, citing last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling rejecting the district’s policy of similarly using race in determining student assignment.

The teacher assignment policy had required that most Jefferson County schools maintain their percentages of black instructors between 7 and 22 percent, depending on the grade level.

In September 2007, [Laukhuf Elementary teacher Lorraine] Hill filed a federal lawsuit, arguing that the district’s policy had unconstitutionally denied her interviews and a transfer to Cane Run or Wellington elementary schools, which already had too many black teachers.

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From Wikipedia:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase from the Roman poet Juvenal, variously translated as “Who watches the watchmen?”, “Who watches the watchers?”, “Who will guard the guards?” “Who shall watch the watchers themselves?”....

The essential problem was posed by Plato in the Republic, his work on government and morality. The perfect society as described by Socrates, the main character of the work (see Socratic dialogue), relies on laborers, slaves and tradesmen. The guardian class is to protect the city. The question is put to Socrates, “Who will guard the guardians?” or, “Who will protect us against the protectors?” ....

First, some background. Several years ago, as discussed here, the Young Republican Club at Michigan’s Grand Valley State University held a satirical but politically pointed bake sale to highlight the unfairness of racial preferences, offering cupcakes blacks and women at a lower price than they charged men. These “bake sales” were a popular form of protest against racial preferences on college campuses across the country, and they were often effective enough to elicit outrage and even outright repression.

The effect at Grand Valley State, however, was unusual, and a bit more extreme, since the protesters and their faculty advisor were complicit in the suppression of their rights. The Club’s leaders resigned. As I wrote at the time, quoting an article that no longer seems to be available:

Paul Leidig, the club’s faculty adviser, said “the club supported the idea of the bake sale as a satirical form of expression against affirmative action.”

But Leidig, who also is chairman of the Ottawa County Republican Party, said he did not know the students planned to use a racially biased price scale when he approved the event.

“Had I known that, I would have not approved it,” he said.
As a result of the controversy, Leidig said he advised the students to consider a leadership change to acknowledge they respect the fact people were offended by the bake sale.

As the Grand Rapids Press reminds us in an article today,

Valley State University clamped down three years ago when a student group attempted to apply affirmative action principles to cupcake pricing.

White men were charged $2; blacks and white women were charged 75 cents; Asians and Latinos were charged 50 cents and American Indians were charged a nickel.

Many potential customers complained the bake sale was just plain tasteless, and university officials put the College Republicans on probation for violating a policy requiring financial transactions be nondiscriminatory.

The Michigan Civil Rights Commission will meet Monday at GVSU’s Allendale campus to take testimony about what can be done to create a learning environment that’s amenable to all.

“Free speech and hate speech can be difficult to balance,” said Harold Core, the commission’s spokesman.

And who is watching these watchers, holding them up to the ridicule they deserve? Not the Grand Rapids Press, whose reporter writes with a pseudo-profundity that echoes the emptiness at the core of the Civil Rights Commission:

The bottom line: One student’s right to free speech often straddles another’s right to live and learn on a hate-free campus. Sometimes it is not easy to separate what’s acceptable and what’s not.

Oh wait. That wouldn’t be a parody....

ADDENDUM

As F.I.R.E. pointed out in its letter at the time to the president of GVSU,

at least one GVSU administrator is on record suggesting that the real reason that the university is trying the students for their political expression is that some people found it “offensive.” GVSU Director of Student Life Bob Stoll was quoted in a March 25, 2005, article in The Grand Rapids Press as saying, “To do something this offensive is not appropriate.”

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Read this review of this book.

From the review...

Soon after landing a newspaper job in my early 20s, an editor asked if my parents were really proud of me.

The question perplexed me, and it was only years later that I understood the implication.

What the editor meant was “Hey, you’ve graduated from college and have a good job as a journalist, AND you’re a Hispanic woman. Your poor underprivileged parents must be beaming.’’

In Joey Gonzalez, Great American, Tony Robles tells the story of a third-grader who dreams of studying hard, learning a lot and growing up to be a great American.

Then one day, his teacher says that because he is something called a “minority,” he isn’t smart enough to become a great American on his own. But there was something called “affirmative action’’ that could help him compete.

According toTony Robles, a Puerto Rican who grew up in New York, affirmative action has hurt many black and Hispanic children, who learn early on that they will never get the credit they deserve for working hard and trying to succeed on their own, so why bother?

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I have added to and UPDATED my post below about Newsweek’s handling of race issues.

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Most defenders of racial preference insist, against all available current evidence, that they believe in the ideal of colorblind equality, in the principle that everyone should be treated “without regard” to race, ethnicity, etc., but they immediately set their professed dedication to that principle aside by maintaining that it is impractical to implement that principle because “the playing field is not level.”

To the best of my knowledge none of these defenders of race preferences, of treating everyone with regard to their race, etc., has defined what he or she means by “level playing field” and how we will know when it has become level. It would be useful if every now and then — say, one out of a hundred or so times a journalist quotes one or another preferentialist defending his or her privilege using that well-worn phrase — the preferee were asked to give a definition.

For example, on Thursday Ward Connerly spoke to a “largely hostile audience” at Truman State University in Missouri. (Since the audience was identified as being at a university, the “largely hostile” adjective was largely redundant.) Afterwards,

Jasmine Pampkin, a sophomore accounting major from St. Louis, said Connerly’s vision of a race-blind society is an ideal that doesn’t match her own reality. Pampkin, who is black, receives a $500 scholarship each semester from a campus multicultural affairs office, as well as an academic scholarship to help defray the estimated $11,000 annual costs of tuition, room and board at the liberal arts school.

“I would love to be able to be looked at just for my academic achievements,” she said after Connerly’s speech. “But I don’t feel it’s an equal playing field.”

It would, or at least might, have been enlightening if the Associated Press reporter who wrote the article quoting her, Alan Scher Zagier, had asked one or two follow-up questions. For example, in what ways, I wonder, does Ms. Pampkin believe her current “playing field” is not “equal”? Does she believe that if the state of Missouri is barred from awarding benefits based on race, the same administrators who gave her two scholarships totaling $11,500 would immediately then discriminate against her because of her race? (That discrimination, by the way, would also clearly violate the pending Missouri Civil Rights Initiative.)

Another follow-up question might ask Ms. Pampkin why she is afraid that she would not receive the scholarships if her race were not “taken into account,” as the euphemism goes. Is she less poor than the recipient who would otherwise receive the funds? Are her grades less good? If either of those, why does she think she deserves the scholarships? What would she say about the tilt of the playing field to the would-be recipient who, but for his or her race, would have received the scholarship?

In practice (or to stick with my metaphor, real games), it seems to me that the beneficiaries of racial preferences and their defenders don’t want “a level playing field.” They want a set us rules that rewards them and penalizes the other players — they should be required, say, to gain only 7 yards for a first down, not 10; their touchdowns should count 9 points, not 6; they should not be penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct because they come from a group that has been subjected to so much of it; etc.

Rev. Wright is right at home playing this game.

UPDATE [30 March]

From Al Sharpton at one of the 2004 Democratic candidate debates:

“We’ve been told we had three minutes,” he said at a candidates’ forum as a 2004 presidential candidate.

“My good friend Senator Edwards spoke for five. So Joe Lieberman told me that, in the spirit of affirmative action, I get seven.”

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Obama now says he would have left Trinity United if Rev. Wright had not retired and if did not apologize.

“Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying at the church,” Obama said Thursday during a taping of the ABC talk show, “The View.” The interview will be broadcast Friday.

And why only now, after the eruption of controversy? Does Obama expect us to believe that he knew nothing for 20+ years of Wright rants that would offend “people”?

This belated, highly conditional statement that he “would have” left the church if... strikes me as a classic example of someone standing in a hole continuing with his digging.

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Newsweek has an article, “Obama’s Postracial Test,” discussing the impact the campaign to pass initiatives in five state barring racial preferences will have on Obama’s claim to be a post-racial candidate.

The article is afflicted by all the usual liberal biases. The subtitle, for example, asks “How will the Democratic candidate deal with potentially divisive ballot initiatives calling for an end to affirmative action?” Why, some of us are left to wonder, are efforts to end favoritism based on race deemed “divisive” while the racial favoritism itself isn’t? Another example: it mentions — not once but twice — that Ward Connerly has, or seems to have, “a wealthy donor base” without ever mentioning that he has been outspent in every one if his initiative campaigns, in Michigan by about 4 to 1.

Still, without ever asking clearly and directly how Obama can claim to help us transcend race and lead us into a jolly postracial future while continuing to support policies that treat some people better than others because of their race, it does manage to get that question across.

ADDENDUM [29 March]

The assertion that any questioning of affirmative action, especially any attempt to prohibit racial preferences via state initiatives, is “divisive” is a constant refrain coming from opponents of colorblind racial equality. This notion that the fires of our cultural civil war are being stoked by radical extremists trying to abolish a deeply entrenched domestic institution is reminiscent of identical charges from earlier opponents of racial equality leading up to an earlier civil war.

For a generation many historians (Civil War “revisionists”) echoed Southern sentiment by placing a disproportionate amount of the blame for the coming of the American Civil War on the abolitionists, militant opponents of slavery whom they regarded as uncompromising extremists.

The abolitionists at the time — and their subsequent defenders — replied with great force that it was the evil institution of slavery itself that was disruptive and (to use our contemporary word) “divisive,” not those attempting to put an end to it.

Today, as then, it is the practice of racial discrimination and those who defend it who are truly “divisive,” not those trying to abolish it.

UPDATE [29 March]

Take a look at this Newsweek article on Obama and race and see if you can figure out from it a) what Obama believes about affirmative action and b) what the Newsweek author believes Obama believes about affirmative action.

II could do neither, although it might have been easier for most readers to figure out how he would approach the impending state initiatives to prohibit racial preferences, which were mentioned in the article, if the author had seen fit to mention that Obama went into Michigan in 2006 and campaigned against the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, on which the current initiatives are modeled.

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Judged by the power of his analysis in several books that are almost breathtaking in their perception, Shelby Steele really is an intellectual Superman.

I have mentioned his most recent, and most timely, book, Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, several times (here, here, here). He was interviewed by ABC News yesterday (or at least the published report appeared yesterday). You should definitely read the whole thing, but I was particularly struck by two things in it.

First, he discussed an Obama statement from a post-Speech interview that may go a long way towards explaining why Obama appears incapable of separating himself from Rev. Wright, no matter what the reverend said or says in the future.

After the March 18 speech in which he addressed incendiary remarks by Wright, Obama told ABC News’ Terry Moran that blacks do not have “the luxury” of “being selective.”

“During the course of this campaign,” said Obama, “there have been moments where people say, ‘Well, I like Barack Obama, but not Al Sharpton. I like Colin Powell, but not Jesse. I like Oprah, but.’ You know, those of us who are African-American don’t have the luxury.”

Asked by Moran what he meant by saying blacks “don’t have the luxury,” Obama said, “I don’t have the luxury of separating myself out and being selective, in terms of what it means to be an African-American in this society. It’s a big complex thing. It’s not monolithic.”

Steele told ABCNEWS.com that he considered Obama’s comments to be revealing.

“It’s a very interesting statement. It’s profound,” said Steele. “What would be keeping him from having the right to be selective about all of those people? Of course he has the right to be selective.”

“What he is really saying is that he’s afraid,” Steele continued. “What Obama is saying is, ‘I’m afraid if I am less than receptive to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, they’re going to call me an Uncle Tom, they’re going to call me a sellout.’ The terror of Barack Obama’s life has been that blacks would reject him. That’s why I call him a bound man.”

That point was made eloquently in an open letter to Obama from Lionel Chetwynd, who was disappointed Obama missed “the teaching opportunity I hoped you would evoke: not explaining Wright’s outrage to me, but explaining his outrageousness to him.” Be sure to read this whole letter, and then save it to re-read later. It’s that good.

Finally, the most dramatic observation in this interview, or in any interview I’ve read, is Steele’s dramatic assertion that “[Affirmative action] did more damage to black America than segregation did.”

I hope, and bet, we’ll be hearing more about that.

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Peter Slevin, a self-described “staff writer” at the Washington Post, a self-described “newspaper,” wrote an editorial yesterday, in the form of a news article, about efforts to promote what Slevin was pleased to call “[Ward] Connerly’s self-described ‘civil rights initiative.’”

Does Slevin, the self-described “staff writer,” believe his article would have been misleading if he had omitted “self-described” and simply used the name of the initiatives that are being proposed, such as the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative, and left off the quotes? Could some intrepid researcher check the archives and let me know whether the Washington Post described the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as, say, “Martin Luther King’s self-described civil rights act?” Has it described any civil rights legislation in that manner?

Proponents of the initiatives firmly believe that insisting that their “state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting” is in fact a “civil rights” measure. Critics of the initiatives, who want to preserve racial preferences, habitually complain that such language somehow misappropriates civil rights language, even though it closely tracks the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other civil rights measures. Shouldn’t Slevin, the “self-described” staff writer, acknowledge that his use of “self-described” and his gotcha quotes echo the language of initiative critics?

The substance of self-described “staff-writer” Slevin’s self-described article is no better than his politically slanted language. Here’s how he begins:

CHICAGO -- Sixteen months after voters in Michigan voted to kill affirmative action in the public sphere, opponents of preferences based on race and gender are pushing five more states to ban the practice.

Foes of affirmative action, which is meant to address current and historical inequities, delivered 128,744 signatures to Colorado authorities earlier this month. Similar organizations in Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska are circulating petitions as civil rights groups and educators are mobilizing to defeat the measures.

As I’ve commented a number of times, it’s really interesting that defenders of affirmative action almost always insist that it does not rest on racial preference — until, that is, citizens rise up to abolish it, at which time they insist equally loudly that to abolish racial preference is to abolish affirmative action. Go figure.

Next, the self-described “staff writer” asserts that “affirmative action ... is meant to address current and historical inequities.” Really? That’s certainly not what the defenders of affirmative action at the University of Michigan argued in court in either Gratz or Grutter. They insisted their only rationale was “diversity.” Does the self-described “staff-writer” think they were lying? Disingenuous? Misinformed?

Finally, self-described “staff writer’s” self-described article quotes a number of opponents of the initiatives that would require colorblind racial equality. For example:

“As we feared, Connerly’s attack on equal opportunity in Michigan has metastasized,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. “We know that most Americans support equal opportunity. They know that diversity is good for business, good for the classroom and ultimately good for the country.”

UPDATE [28 March]

David Nieporent makes an excellent point in his comment below:

the defenders of AA — and that includes the media — never talk about what AA is. They always change the subject and talk about what the motives of the people who implemented it are.

And the converse is equally true: opponents of affirmative action are described as people who oppose “equal opportunity,” support “white privilege,” etc., rarely as people who oppose double (or triple) standards based on race. Their their motives, goals, intents, purposes are usually mentioned only when they are slandered (supporting white privilege, etc.).

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If your heart is weak or you’re easily shocked you may want to take two aspirin and sit down before reading the following, but two education researchers recently presented another dose (here’s the first one I discussed) of shocking, shocking findings at the convention of the American Education Research Association.

It appears — are you sure you’re ready for this? — that highly desired, highly selective elite colleges actually strive to enroll the brightest students and that as a result the proportion of their entering classes with high SAT scores has actually been increasing! Wow! Who’d a thunk? We are in debt to Catherine L. Horn, of the University of Houston, and John T. Yun, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, for unearthing this explosive data, especially because of its ominous implications for our subject, affirmative action. (These findings were reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, here, and InsideHigherEd, here. My quotes are from the latter, since it requires no subscription.)

Well, I’m sure you can all see why higher education researchers are so concerned about the surprising fact that high scoring students are in increasing demand in selective colleges. But for anyone to whom the frightening implications of this demand for quality are not apparent:

The shift is “extreme,” Horn said, “suggesting a real shift in admissions toward very high-scoring individuals.”

Raising the issue in this way is sensitive for supporters of affirmative action, even if they are skeptics of standardized testing. As Horn noted, two of the Supreme Court justices most critical of affirmative action, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, wrote a dissent in the Michigan law case in which they pointed out that the law school could easily have a diverse class without affirmative action. They said that a law school like Michigan’s could set admissions policies that were relatively open or relatively elitist, and that the former would result in more diversity than the latter. If Michigan really wants diversity, the justices said, it could just lower standards.

“No one would argue that a university could set up a lower general admission standard and then impose heightened requirements only on black applicants,” the justices wrote. “Similarly, a university may not maintain a high admission standard and grant exemptions to favored races. The Law School, of its own choosing, and for its own purposes, maintains an exclusionary admissions system that it knows produces racially disproportionate results. Racial discrimination is not a permissible solution to the self-inflicted wounds of this elitist admissions policy.”

It could be, I suppose, that Horn sees a dichotomy but not a “strict” one. Perhaps she’s a loose constructionist when it comes to interpreting dichotomies. In any event, she made it clear that she was not endorsing any lowering of standards in order to achieve “diversity.”

“What we’re talking about,” she insisted, “is a reconceptualization of merit.”

ADDENDUM

I’m reminded, as I often am when encountering explanations of this sort, of Gen. McClellan’s explanation after one of his retreats that he wasn’t retreating but merely changing his base (rather like “redeployment” out of Iraq). These arguments are frequently good for morale ... of one’s opponents.

The spirits of the Confederate soldiers were good. Northern newspapers had reported McClellan’s description of his withdrawal to the James as a “change of base”, and when the story got to the men, they would loudly laugh at the loser of a dog fight and call out: “Look at him changing his base!”

A few more points about this latest research. Scholars on another panel at the convention addressed Justice O’Connor’s hope or prediction or evasion or whatever that affirmative action would no longer be needed in 25 years. And their conclusion: “The unanimous opinion: no chance in hell.”

Scholars examined a range of demographic and educational data showing how little progress has been made in narrowing key gaps in the educational opportunities available to black and Latino students. Given how slowly American education changes, they said, the idea that the need for affirmative action will disappear in 20 years is almost impossible to imagine.

They implicitly assume that there’s no difference between “educational opportunities” and educational achievement. They assume, that is, that disproportionate educational achievement among different groups is a reflection of correspondingly disproportionate “educational opportunities” available to those groups. Elite U, it follows, denies “educational opportunities” to blacks by requiring hight SAT scores.

In addition, they assume that preferential treatment will be necessary until all groups are identical in all respects. As Yun (Horn’s co-author) put it,

For O’Connor’s vision to work in 20 years, minority and non-minority students would need to be “virtually indistinguishable” on a range of academic qualities, and the gaps in educational opportunity are too wide today for that to be viable.

Finally (at least for now), in addressing the effect on “diversity” of the elite colleges’ emphasis on high test scores, the Chronicle of Higher Education article linked above reports the following:

The researchers say that, by focusing so heavily on high scorers, the elite colleges they examined are ignoring promising minority students with lesser scores, increasing the competition for high-scoring minority students, and potentially “simply ‘pricing’ themselves out of the ‘market’ for a more diverse learning environment.”

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Mark Paul, an old friend (don’t hold that against him), has a fair and balanced survey of the blogosphere’s reaction to The Speech on his blog, Moonbats and Wingnuts, that, well, surveys blog reactions to various issues.

UPDATE

Some of you may be interested in some comments I just emailed to Mark. If not, don’t read what follows:

.... I feel like I’ve been blogging about nothing else for a week. That’s probably because I’ve been blogging about nothing else for a week.

As the glow of the rhetoric recedes I suspect most people will come down off whatever cloud they were lifted to not all that far from where they stood before, perhaps with some new thoughts but more likely with more arrows in their ideological quivers. I know I did.

After a week of constant reflection (or, some will no doubt think, after a week of writing based on little reflection), I still believe that the most likely implication and effect of The Speech is unfortunate: as InstaPunk argued (though with more in-your-face provocation than I like), Obama’s pre-speech prevarications arguing that Wright and his church are “conventional,” “typical” black churches are both seriously wrong and do a serious disservice to the black community, and hence to the nation at large. Standing in that hole when he gave The Speech, he compounded the damage by continuing to dig, arguing in clear effect that blacks of Wright’s generation (our generation, or at least mine!) can’t be expected to be free of vituperative paranoid delusions (inventing AIDS and introducing cocaine to commit genocide against blacks, etc.). This refusal to judge black discourse by the same standards applied to white discourse makes the double standards involved in racial preference admissions look quite mild. But if Wright’s ravings had been limited to racial animosity toward “greedy whites,” etc., I think they could and would have been much more easily forgiven. It is Wright’s anti-Americanism that is toxic, and I suspect that’s why Obama tried to change the discussion to race.

But lest you think me entirely negative, I did have one constructive suggestion for O in a recent post. Since he tried mightily to equate “white resentments” with Wright’s rage, why not come up with a new approach to affirmative action: “Don’t End It; Expand It! (to all races)”

Finally, in another example of agreement across partisan lines, I do agree with your pro-Obama emailer who whined that the Wright business is “a Swift Boating of Obama.” (On the other hand, I followed the Swift Boat charges and replies with some care and think that what the Swift Boaters said about Kerry was about 93% correct.)

Here’s another way of saying that blacks like Wright “can’t be expected to be free of vituperative paranoid delusions.”

Most of the discussion of the Wright affair has dealt with whether or not Obama can be held responsible for Wright’s rants; nearly all his defenders maintain that he can’t. But that discussion, I think, largely misses the point. If one believes Obama, even Rev. Wright himself can’t be held responsible for what Rev. Wright said.

In the final analysis, Obama’s defense of Wright — that he shouldn’t be held to account for what he says since he is little more than a vessel filled with the hate America poured into him — reinforces the exact same bitter victimology that Obama in his race-transcendent mode says he wants to overcome.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:54 PM | Permalink | Say What? (12) | TrackBacks (0)

One thing can be said with confidence about much of the research that wafts up like malodorous mist from the swamp of our schools of education: it never ceases to amuse. Take a recent study (Please!) of 43 colleges’ 30-second recruiting videotapes, described by Peter Schmidt in the Chronicle of Higher Education, based on a paper summarizing the study recently presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.

The authors, two assistant professors of education at the University of Alabama, “analyzed the images, narration, characters, scenes, and music in the ads, applying key concepts from the field of critical race theory.” These ads “depict their campuses as overwhelmingly white, privileged environments, likely deterring many minority students from applying.”

The researchers found that the overwhelmingly majority of the students and alumni depicted in the advertisements were white, with minority members generally being depicted only as token members of larger groups. The common image of a group of students strolling the campus, for example, typically depicted three or four white students and a single student of color.

Schmidt’s review of the summary paper is short, and so it’s not possible to tell from it whether the authors presented any evidence — or, in the absence of evidence, any compelling exposition of “critical race theory” — to support their conclusion that videos portraying majority white institutions as, well, majority white institutions have in fact dissuaded minority students from applying, or why they are likely to. That is, do they seriously believe that minority students don’t know that majority white institutions are majority white institutions?

Moreover, does “critical race theory” provide a sound basis for concluding that every minority student in a group containing three or four non-minority students feels him- or herself to be merely a “token”? Are there any Asian students in those groups? If so, are they ever the “single student of color”?

Do the authors, drawing as they do not only on “critical race theory” but its “key concepts,” seriously propose that every institution actually be split 50-50 between minorities and non-minorities, or merely that they be portrayed that way for recruitment purposes? If not 50-50, what? Obivously 75-25 or 67-33 won’t do.

Finally, why is it necessarily bad if some students are dissuaded from applying to majority white institutions? Don’t they then apply to historically black institutions? Do the authors believes that’s bad? If so, perhaps in their next study they will apply their “critical race theory” to an analysis of the recruiting videos of HBCUs, concluding that by presenting those institutions as majority black they will deter some students from applying.

ADDENDUM

An example of applied critical race theory at the University of Wisconsin?

The University of Wisconsin at Madison recently admitted that school officials could not find an existing example of racial diversity during a sports event there, so a publicity photo on the cover of its 40-page fall admissions brochure was doctored to include a Black student among a crowd of White football fans.

Attempting to explain the reason that the Black student was added to the photo, Paul Barrows, vice chancellor for student affairs at UW-Madison, said a lack of diversity can be a vicious cycle, since the scarcity of minority students can intimidate other prospective non-White students.

“You’ve got to have enough people so that if I’m a young Black student, I’m not the only one in class, the only one in the dorm,” Barrows said.

Barrows said the university will reprint all 106,000 copies of the brochure, which will cost about $64,000, to remove the picture of senior Diallo Shabazz, who said he had never even attended a football game. University officials said they won’t discipline those involved because they admitted their mistake and apologized to Shabazz....

The fact that officials couldn’t find a photo of White and Black students together may not be surprising. The percentage of Black students at UW-Madison has decreased from 2.19 percent in 1980 to 2.15 percent in 1999-2000.

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Gregory Rodriguez, the almost always interesting syndicated columnist, gets it exactly right in today’s Los Angeles Times:

His rhetoric entangled him in race in exactly the wrong way.

In some ways, Barack Obama’s speech on race last week was as brilliant as it was nuanced. But for all its rhetorical beauty, it was also an enormous step backward and, in the end, a rather self-serving call for more discussion about racial grievance in a country that has already done way too much talking.

Until last week, so much of Obama’s appeal lay in the fact that he was not asking us to talk about the racial divide. Instead, he offered himself as a living and breathing symbol of racial reconciliation; his very origins pointed to the goal of unity and, from his own account, created in him a desire to bring together opposing sides.

Throughout the campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s surrogates repeatedly tried to bait Obama into talking about race; they worked to pigeonhole him (and marginalize him) as the “black candidate.” But in the end, it was Obama’s own alliances that tripped him up and obliged him to directly address a subject (one that he now says we “cannot afford to ignore”) that he had so deftly avoided — or as the Obamaphiles had it, transcended. For all the kudos the Illinois senator has received for his candor, the very act of delivering Tuesday’s address was a defeat. Obama was a much more powerful force for racial progress when he so effortlessly symbolized it, rather than when he called on us to address “old wounds.”

Those who praised the speech did so in part because it acknowledged the grievances that lie on both sides of the nation’s most intractable racial divide. But that’s also what was so wrong with it. The discussion of racial grievance -- and other group grievances -- has long since become an institutionalized part of American life, literally and figuratively. There are advocacy groups, think tanks, foundations and scholars who sometimes have produced groundbreaking work but who also have served to reaffirm the idea that American society is a federation of opposing, static and permanently aggrieved identities. Rather than push us beyond race, the institutionalization of racial identity as defined by grievance perpetuates the divisions of the past. The one new thing Obama’s speech added to the dialogue was the inclusion of whites to the list of aggrieved (and angry) parties.

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After the South Carolina primary Jack Tapper of ABC News headlined one of his blog posts: “Bubba: Obama Is Just Like Jesse Jackson,” referring to the following comment of Bill Clinton that was widely regarded as a race-injecting put-down:

Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.

I must admit that I never understood why comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson was regarded as such an insult by so many people who had never been seen in the ranks of Jackson critics, but let’s let that pass. The point is that all Democrats agreed that Obama’s strength and appeal was based in large part on the fact that he had studiously avoided running as a black candidate.

Now, as a result of the Wright affair, Obama has become the black candidate, or at least much more of one than he had been before. Race, with the help of The Speech, has been moved from the balcony up to the front row of the campaign. As a result, in an irony that has been too little-appreciated, in an important, perhaps an all-important, respect, Barack Obama has in fact become Jesse Jackson.

For a number of years, if not decades, Jesse Jackson has used the threat of discrimination complaints and protest demonstrations to persuade or shame or extort (choose your own verb) corporations to hand over various kinds of benefits to blacks. Now listen to Robert Novak this morning, giving voice to a widespread concern and fear among the managers of a possible new corporate target, the Democratic Party:

Super-delegates, though they were inclined to Clinton no longer than three months ago, now flinch at rejecting Obama. They fear antagonizing African-Americans, who have become the hard-core Democratic base.

There will be chaos at the convention. If you think 1968 was bad, you watch: In 2008, it will be worse.
UPDATE [25 March]

Barry O’Bama? Jack Kelly writes today on RealClearPolitics:

Super delegates should vote for Sen. Barack Obama because he’s black, many pundits are saying -- though not in precisely those words.
....
If Sen. Clinton’s opponent were Barry O’Bama, charming Irish-American pol with the gift of gab, these arguments would have more resonance. But, as columnist Bob Novak notes, the super delegates “fear antagonizing African-Americans, who have become the hard-core Democratic base.” Geraldine Ferraro, who Sen. Obama unfairly likened to his racist pastor, was right. Sen. Obama wouldn’t be where he is today if he weren’t black.

Many who suspect Sen. Clinton is right about Sen. Obama’s electability still would rather nominate him than her. Better to lose an election than to split the party. Besides, if angry blacks stay home in November, Hillary won’t be electable, either.

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On a number of occasions I’ve asked, Do Preferentialists Prefer Plessy? And my answer is always the same: yes. As I wrote here:

It is one of the many ironies in the strange career of racial equality that in order to defend racial preferences liberals today rely on purposefully ambiguous language resulting from the desire of the framers of the 14th Amendment to preserve segregation and states rights, while the critics of racial preferences, who are usually viewed as conservatives, echo the radicals who wanted to proscribe all racial distinctions. Today ... these “conservatives” are much more likely than liberals to honor Justice John Marshall Harlan’s eloquent assertion in his Plessy v. Ferguson dissent that “our Constitution is colorblind.”

the legal theory underlying the Plessy decision is that equal protection does not require colorblindness and hence that racial discrimination can in many circumstances be reasonable and hence constitutional. The preferentialist argument today is an unwitting echo of Plessy.

Harlan cannot contend that the text of the document “as it’s drafted” mandates his conclusion. From Harlan’s opinion, we learn essentially nothing about We the People’s original understanding of the relevant constitutional provisions. Worse, the modern consensus, among legal historians, is that as a matter of history, Harlan had it wrong!

Arguing that Thomas and those who agree with him reach their conclusion about the unconstitutionality of racial discrimination “simply star[ing] at the Constitution and declar[ing] it so” is about as fair and accurate as saying that supporters of racial preferences don’t even look at the Constitution at all.

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According to Marci Hamilton, a respected law professor at Yeshiva University (spending this year at Princeton), the provision for state initiative, which allow citizens to directly enact law or change their constitutions, is not a good idea.

In a thoughtful and interesting article she describes how the anger, bitterness, and bad behavior of a group of BAMN demonstrators at a Federalist Society panel at the University of Michigan supports her dislike of direct democracy. (By the way, there is either a serious typo or a serious misstatement in the article: “... Grutter ... held that the University of Michigan's affirmative action program could not use race as a factor in its admissions decisions.” Grutter, of course, held the opposite.)

The protesters were members of a group that strongly opposed Connerly’s efforts to end affirmative action on the basis of race (and opposed, as well, the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter). The group goes by the name BANM--By Any Means Necessary - an unfortunate choice as it connotes extremism and even violence, but also one that conveys quite clearly their sense of frustration with the Prop 2 process and result.
....
... [O]n the whole, this was a very bitter group, and part of that bitterness seemed to rest in their sense that they had been betrayed by the initiative process. More than one BANM speaker charged that those canvassing voters in favor of the initiative told them that it was not, in fact, a “ban on affirmative action.” Its title as a “civil rights initiative,” also was a betrayal of first principles for them. They said that many had voted in favor of the initiative thinking it was simply a ban on discrimination, instead.

Connerly responded that his canvassers had been active and clear: You could still have affirmative action on the basis of socio-economic and other factors, but race or gender or ethnicity could not be among the criteria. Unfortunately, his formalistic response did absolutely nothing to assuage BANM’s frustrations. When their community heard the phrase “affirmative action,” they explained, its members understood that it involved preferences for race. Accordingly, they reaffirmed that the canvassers’ statements were in fact misleading, even if that was not their intent.

The controversy over affirmative action is obviously a social problem that is hyper-charged with emotion and that plays into deeply-held beliefs and values, and the lawmaking process that ended over one and a half years ago had not succeeded in resolving public tensions. To the contrary, it had only reinforced those disagreements and resentments. The result was a frustrated group of citizens -- calling itself By Any Means Necessary in no small part because its members felt disenfranchised by the routine means by which the process operated.

Hamilton’s preferred solution is subject to similar criticisms, and thus is no solution to the problem she sees with initiatives.

Had this issue worked its way through the legislative process, Michigan might well have reached the same result, but at least the legislators could not have criticized the resulting legislation on the ground that they had been deceived - as ordinary voters could do, quite persuasively. It is legislators’ job, after all, not to be deceived, but rather to do their homework to understand the proposals with which they are faced. Moreover, as legislators are approached by a wide variety of interests, especially on such a hot-button issue, they would have heard many sides before casting a vote; individual voters typically only hear the pre-packaged messages the interest groups concoct. Finally, had the initiative instead been a bill in the state legislature, and had it still passed, the members of BANM might have disliked the result, but they would not have the same sense of disenfranchisement and fraudulent manipulation of the process. Instead of now having to deal with the fact that their state Constitution had just been amended by fellow citizens not fully understanding what was at stake, they would have a clear choice: work to unseat those elected representatives who had betrayed their interests. That is the system of accountability that the Framers put into place at the federal and state levels.

Initiatives, it seems to me, are thus rough analogues of the courts’ power of judicial review and the executive’s veto power. If they were easy to launch and easy to enact, Hamilton might have a valid point. As it stands in most states, and certainly in Michigan, she doesn’t.

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Most of the discussion of what Obama didn’t say in The Speech concerns, reasonably enough, his relationship with Rev. Wright. But there’s also a good deal more that he didn’t say, and insofar as one believes potential leaders should address important matters of policy in a presidential election, at least one of those other omissions, on affirmative action, may prove to be much more revealing than his eloquence on slavery and the roots of black anger.

First, let’s review what he did say that is either about, or closely related to, the affirmative action debate. The following, I believe, is everything:

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working– and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze — a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns — this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination — and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past — are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds — by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

Enough has been said, here and elsewhere, about the false parallelism between “white resentments ... over welfare and affirmative action” and Wright’s blaming America for 9/11 and inventing AIDS and importing cocaine to murder blacks, and enough has been said about Obama’s implication that white resentment against affirmative action, though real and even understandable, is somehow misdirected, since the “real culprits” causing their pain are corporate greed, etc. Enough has not been said, however, not nearly enough, about what Obama did not say.

He opposes “wish[ing] away” these “white resentments” and acknowledges that they are “real [if misdirected] and must be addressed. Not just with words but with deeds,” but those deeds — all the “investing” in good things — does nothing to redress what whites themselves (and Asians, while we’re at it) regard as the root of their resentment, racial double standards. How are white and Asian Americans supposed “to realize that [black] dreams do not have to come at the expense of [white and Asian] dreams” as long as blacks receive preferential treatment based on their race? Obama doesn’t say.

To see, concretely, what was not said, open Obama’s speech in one window and this excellent article from the Buffalo News today, surveying the racial landscape of Buffalo, in another.

Ready? Here are excerpts from several of those quoted in the Buffalo article. First, a white firefighter:

Eugene Margerum is a living example of this flip side of affirmative action. He is one of 13 white firefighters locked in a legal battle with the city in a reverse discrimination suit.

“We were told we can’t be promoted because we’re non-African-Americans,” Margerum said.

In September, a State Supreme Court justice found that civil service promotions lists had been set aside for racial reasons and granted the firefighters the right to sue the city for financial damages. But U.S. District Judge John T. Curtin blocked the case until he hears another suit brought to federal court by black firefighters.

Margerum is adamant that he has “no ax to grind against the black man,” he said. “I have no animosity toward anyone. But wrong is wrong.”

He believes it’s not only ethically wrong but dangerous to put race above qualifications when hiring and promoting firefighters.

“We transcend all that,” he said. “We have to . . . [Firefighters] are willing to die for their fellow man.”

Margerum said being told he won’t be promoted because of his race was deeply hurtful.

“What’s wrong with being white?” he said. “Why would I feel ashamed of being white?

Buffalo Police Officer Kenneth Barney, who is African-American, believes that the only way the Police Department was going to become more diverse was through a court order.

When Barney joined the police force in 1982, he was part of Curtin’s ruling that brought hiring quotas for women and minorities into the police and fire departments because of evidence that those groups were being excluded.
“I remember hearing officers saying, ‘This department is going to hell,’ and they were talking about the hiring of black officers,” Barney recalled. “If they didn’t have that ruling, it would have been business as usual with that old boys network.

“It was so political back then that you didn’t have to take a police test, and when you finally did have to take a test, their uncles and aunts were on the civil service commission and helped their cousins and their family members to get in,” he said.

As far as I can tell, he would tell them both, in effect, that he feels their pain (haven’t we heard that before?), that their pain is real, and that we should “address” it, not just with words but deeds. Yes, but what words? Remember, words are not “just words.” They’re important in their own right (not Wright). Thus I don’t believe it is asking too much of Obama to tell us what words he would use in a meeting with Margerum and Barney.

And deeds? The only deeds I see proposed in Obama’s speech are “investing” in (that’s liberal-speak for raising taxes to pay for) better schools, more opportunities, etc. Now, those proposals may or may not be wise — reasonable people can disagree about that — but it’s hard to see how they would do anything to reduce the resentment that both Margerum and Barney feel.

Obama was widely praised for his fluency with “nuance” and “complexity,” but in this case, as in so many others, nuance and complexity can provide artful dodges of hard issues. A prospective leader who based a large part of his appeal on his ability to handle the race issue better than anyone else should be able to do more than “address” the issue in a nuanced and complex manner.

For what it’s worth, I think the fascination of intellectuals, academics, and media pundits with nuance and complexity largely misses the point. The primary characteristic of the conflict over race in America is not that the problem is nuanced and complex; it is that it is hard. There is no solution that will satisfy everyone, but that doesn’t mean some solutions are not far better than others.

What are Obama’s solutions (other than all that investing)? What will he say to the citizens of Missouri, Colorado, Arizona, Nebraska, and Oklahoma who will have to decide in November not only who they want to be president but also (assuming his fellow Democrats don’t succeed in keeping the initiatives off their state ballots) whether they want to prohibit their states from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, anyone based on race or ethnicity?

Whatever he says will no doubt be fluent, elegant, nuanced, complex. But what will he say? So far, he hasn't said.

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Over the years I’ve discussed the work of Colbert King, a deputy editor at the Washington Post, on a number of occasions (one, two, three, four, five, six). But his column today may be the prizewinner, answering as it does the question that everyone has been asking: “Why Obama Stands With His Church.”

The reason? Once you see it, you’ll kick yourself (I know I did) for not thinking of it yourself: “Absalom Jones and Richard Allen.”

Really. Jones became the first black Episcopal priest and Allen founded what became the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. They’re the reason Obama, no planning his campaign to transcend race and bridge the gulf between black and white, sat mute for 20 years while Rev. Wright accused his country of inventing AIDS and importing cocaine in order to kill and imprison blacks.

For some reason, however, Rev. Wright does not cite Jones and Allen as his spiritual progenitors. Instead, he cites the founder of Black Liberation Theology, James Cone, a professor at Uniion Theological Seminary. What this Cone holds is not ice cream but teachings such as the following (as quoted here):

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill gods who do not belong to the black community.

... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.

According to a 1995 book, Soul in Society by Gary J. Dorrien, Mr. Cone said, “White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very existence of divinity. ... That is why whites are finding and will continue to find the black experience a disturbing reality. ... God could not be white because white is the color of oppressors.”

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Discussing The Speech this morning, Charles Krauthammer wrote that it played on “white guilt.”

Obama’s purpose in the speech was to put Wright’s outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, “We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country,” and then proceeds to do precisely that. And what lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.

This contextual analysis of Wright’s venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It’s the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That’s why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt, while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.

[According to Warren] “The War” bestowed two lasting legacies: it gave the North what he called “a treasury of virtue” — no matter what the U.S. did subsequently, the act of freeing the slaves (even if done as a by-product rather than a purpose of the war) provided such stockpiles of moral virtue that it could never be depleted.

The South, by contrast, was provided with “the Great Alibi.” All subsequent problems could be blamed on The War and the Yankees. Nothing was ever the South’s own fault.

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You know we’re getting overloaded with racial inanity when even I am getting tired of it. Yesterday, only two days after AOS (After Obama’s Speech), we had a double dose.

In Dose 1, after all but calling his grandmother a racist in The Speech, Obama described her as “a typical white person” because of her racial fears.

Is this another example of Obama’s now well-known belief that whites and blacks come from fundamentally different cultures, cultures so far apart that they both require the bridge of his conveniently bi-racial self to bring them together?

In Dose 2, John Kerry (remember him?) outdid even Dose 1.

Kerry said that a President Obama would help the US, in relations with Muslim countries, “in some cases go around their dictator leaders to the people and inspire the people in ways that we can’t otherwise.”

“He has the ability to help us bridge the divide of religious extremism,” Kerry said. “To maybe even give power to moderate Islam to be able to stand up against this radical misinterpretation of a legitimate religion.”

Kerry was asked what gives Obama that credibility.

“Because he’s African-American. Because he’s a black man. Who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country.”

Now, I certainly don’t want to excuse Kerry for these absurd comments, but I do think it’s important to understand where they come from. Before you call his comments offensively stupid, it’s necessary to remember that he is a liberal, and thus it’s necessary to put his unfortunate remarks in the context of liberalism’s history over the past forty years or so.

Liberals of Kerry’s generation formed their political identities in a period when liberalism was rapidly abandoning its former devotion to colorblind equality, a devotion some of them fondly remember from their youth. They have been forced to live their subsequent political lives under conditions alien to the experience and hence beyond the comprehension of most non-liberals — conditions that require them to struggle constantly to reconcile their professed commitment to the principle of racial equality with their determined practice of affirmative action policies built on the contradictory principle of racial preference.

The cognitive dissonance produced by this conflict between principle and practice has led most liberals to jettison their former belief in colorblind equality in favor of an identity politics where everything is seen through the lens of race or ethnicity or gender.

Seen in this context, as it must be, Kerry’s support for Obama because he’s black and his belief that Muslims will like America better with a black president should not be dismissed as lunatic raving, which unfortunately many right wing pundits and talk show hosts have done, but understood as the product of the peculiar liberal experience in modern America.

This distorted dismissal of one of America’s core values is not an aberration limited to John Kerry. It is quite common in liberal ghettos scattered across the country — in academia, editorial offices, and, yes, even the pulpits of many churches.

In short, even though most Americans may be unfamiliar with how disaffected liberals are from a principle they had thought was fundamental and hence widely shared, this delusional race fixation is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between those who have kept the faith of the without regard principle and those who have abandoned it.

And finally, the fact John Kerry acknowledged that even his own grandmother, a “typical” old white liberal, once made him cringe by letting slip that she believed people should be treated without regard to race should not be taken as evidence of his callous insensitivity or her extremism but rather as further evidence that all of us have skeletons in our closet and thus that we need to come together for a national dialog on equality.

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Nicholas Kristof’s OpEd’s are almost useful barometers of which way the winds are blowing in liberal America (or at least liberal Manhattan, often but not always the same). Today’s column suggests that the biggest disagreements among liberals over Obama’s speech is whether it was the greatest oration since the Sermon on the Mount or only since Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream.” Kristof is a moderate on this question, saying that “it was not a sound bite, but a symphony” and “he best political speech since John Kennedy talked about his Catholicism in Houston in 1960.”

The only part of the Second Coming of Obama that Kristof rejects is what he regards as an error “in an earlier speech — the 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention that catapulted him to fame.”

In that speech, Mr. Obama declared that “there is not a black America and a white America... . There’s the United States of America.” That’s a beautiful aspiration, and we’re making progress toward it. But this last week has underscored that we’re not nearly there yet.

As I’ve said here a number of times, I don’t believe this vision is true. But insofar as it is (James Taranto points to some supporting evidence for it here), it is clear that the leadership required to bridge this gulf will have to be considerably more robust than can be provided by a parishoner who listened passively to the anti-American paranoia for 20 years, even bringing up his daughters listening to it, while doing nothing to heal it until his own political ambitions required some comment.

Obama’s speech suggests to me that he is ideally qualified — not to be president but to be the ambassador from black America ... once diplomatic relations are re-established.

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Katharine Seelye’s article in today’s New York Times looks at Pennsylvania in asking, “Did Obama’s Speech Reach the Voters He Needs?”

Her answer seems to be, probably not, but what I found most interesting was the following quote from former member of Congress from Philadelphia, and current Clinton-supporting Penn professor, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who praised the speech.

But she noted that many of the state’s Democrats outside of the suburbs are basically conservative.

“In the close-in suburbs, where Democrats are more progressive and are doing well, his speech will be read in a positive manner,” she said. “But for those farther away from the city, I’m not so sure. The race conversation is something that has to be had, but people are more willing to have it if they’re in that progressive camp to begin with.”

Regarding the difficulty of having the sort of “race conversation” M-M would like to have, I think the problem is not that the stupid rubes are unwilling to talk but that M-M doesn’t like what they say.

Liberals trying to have a “race conversation” remind me of the author who talks non-stop about his work and then turns to his lunch companion and asks, “But I’ve talked too long about myself. Tell me, what do YOU think of my latest book?”

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I have added a long UPDATE to my post on Obama’s Speech.

[And now — 19 March 11:20 a.m.] — I’ve also added a short one.

And another [19 March 9:55 p.m.]

And another, UPDATE V [20 March 12:45 p.m.]

And another, UPDATE VI, notes and extended comments from Roger Clegg, a must-read. [20 March 1:05 p.m.]

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BAMN and friends never abandoned their effort to find some court, somewhere, that would tell the citizens of Michigan that they lack the authority to prohibit their state, through a constitutional amendment, from discriminating on the basis of race.

Now they have failed one more time.

A federal judge today dismissed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionally of Proposal 2, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative that banned race and gender affirmative action in university admissions and government and public school hiring and contracting

“We’re appealing immediately,” said Detroit lawyer George Washington. “We don’t think in the 21 Century that laws should be passed that are intended to have the effect of excluding black and Latino students from the universities in this state.

UPDATE [8:45 p.m.]

Read Judge Lawson’s opinion here, and the Center for Individual Rights press release here. Terry Pell, Michael Rossman, and the other attorneys and staff of the Center for Individual Rights deserve to be commended for their victory.

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Read it here. It’s much better than my partial draft. I think it was a great speech, and if a speech can save his candidacy my bet is that this one will.

It left some questions unanswered, such as why he dissembled in implying that he didn’t know of Wright’s “incendiary” remarks until he began his campaign, or why he said (I believe falsely) that “typical” black churches applaud ministers telling congregations to sing “God Damn American,” and a few other decidedly un-new politics of hope evasions and misdirections, but I suspect these will be forgiven. In any event, we’ll see.

UPDATE [1:35 p.m.]

Before all the responses pour forth, I’m struck by one delicious irony: Obama is a candidate whose entire campaign rests on the meaning and power of “just words,” and yet he implores us not to judge Wright by his words.

UPDATE II [19 March 1:15 a.m.]

Now that I’ve read most of the responses to Obama’s speech, and learned from all of them, here are the issues that stand out for me. I apologize for not linking to others who have mentioned these same points:

• the false moral equivalence between objections to busing, affirmative action, welfare, on one hand, and Wright’s “God Damn America” condemnation against the United States for inventing AIDS and importing cocaine to murder blacks, claiming we invited 9/11 by our actions, etc.;

• the false moral equivalence between his grandmother’s “confessed ... fear of black men who passed her on the street” and Wright’s anti-white and anti-American ranting. Obama stops just short, if that much, of calling his grandmother a racist, but he never comes close to calling Wright a racist;

• a lingering wonder about why Obama, who excuses Wright’s vituperations as the understandable anger of an old man caught in a time warp nursing old wounds, would want his young daughters exposed to this outdated anger week after week. Rev. Wright and his clone-like replacement weren’t and aren’t simply expressing personal opinions; they were and are teachers instilling their values;
  

It’s too bad Obama didn’t settle in Atlanta or Montogmery and join one of Martin Luther King’s churches, or one of the thousands of similar congregations spread across the country. If he had he wouldn’t be having the problem this speech was an attempt to contain. It is hard, as Obama has discovered, to present oneself as the necessary engine of racial transcendence when one identifies with, and immerses oneself for 20 years in, a church that is a seething cauldron of racial resentments.

Early Monday morning (it seems like much longer ago) I asked, Are Mainstream Black Churches Hotbeds Of Vituperative Anti-Americanism?

It may well be that the most disturbing defamation brought to light in the controversy surrounding Rev. Jeremiah Wright was not one of Wright’s many slanders against the United States but what I think is a slander against black churches in the United States by Barack Obama.

Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety — the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

In fact, the speech goes beyond arguing that Rev. Wright’s church is “conventional” and “typical.” It argues that his anger, and by extension even his very expressions of anger, are typical of black America, or at least those older than 60.

For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table....

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In the final analysis I think a large question Obama left unanswered is, where, if anywhere, does he draw the line? Are any views so vile that those who shout them should be excommunicated from, or at least removed from positions of leadership and respect in, any community devoted to the principle of respect for all its members? If so, what are they? Should there be room in the fold for the David Dukes as well as the Jeremiah Wrights?

Obama’s mistake, I think, lies in failing to recognize the boundary that lies somewhere on a path that begins with understanding hatred, moves through excusing it, and ends by tolerating it. At bottom his speech is a plea not simply for understanding Wright’s anger but for excusing it, and thus for excusing Obama himself for tolerating it, for not getting up and walking out a long time ago.

Many Democrats, it is already clear, will be all too happy to do that. Many others won’t.

UPDATE III [19 March 11:20 a.m.]

Here’s an early example of what I regard as a terrible impact of the speech. Rick Wilson, a Republican media consultant/ad maker, is quoted saying that Obama

wants the authentic black image but he also wants to keep all his safe, suburban Obamacans in line. Well, you can’t have both. They’re mutually exclusive.

B.O. (Before Obama), it used to be that some blacks would denounce others as inauthentic (Oreos, etc.) only if they were conservative, shared Clarence Thomas’s views, etc. Now, thanks to the Obama-Wright connection, the bounds of authentic blackness may have been dangerously narrowed to those willing to associate themselves with Wright’s rantings.

UPDATE IV [19 March 9:55 p.m.]

Kudos to Joan Walsh, writing in Salon, not a source known to be hostile to Obama or other Democrats:

It is worth saying there are many wonderful black churches in Chicago, and throughout America, with inspiring social ministries, where nobody preaches, as Wright did, that the U.S. directly introduced AIDS to black America “as a means of genocide,” where ministers acknowledge the awful history of slavery and persistent racism in this country but can still bring themselves to say “God bless America” and not “God damn America,” and where a legitimate critique of American foreign policy stops short of calling 9/11 “a wake-up call that “people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West went on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.”

Obama’s claims to relative ignorance of such statements have always been disingenuous....

UPDATE V [20 March 12:45p.m.]

Abigail Thernstrom guesses that she’s “not supposed to like Senator Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech,” but she does anyway, “celebrating its subtlety, seriousness, and patriotism.” For those of us who liked the sound of the speech but are troubled by much (not all) of the content, this article is a good place to find an argument that it was not as bad as we thought it was.

For an argument that it didn’t quell one of the most reasonable doubts raised by Obama’s long association with Wright, see Peter Wehner’s discussion. He writes:

I don’t for a moment believe that Senator Obama shares Wright’s manifold and manifest hatreds. What bothers me — particularly as one who has had good things to say about Obama in the past — is why Obama apparently never raised any concerns with Wright about his rhetoric or the black liberation theology being practiced at United Trinity. This was the obvious and appropriate thing to do.

.... If Obama isn’t willing to voice his concerns and objections with Wright and stand up for his country as it is being slandered by his pastor, what can we expect from Obama when he is asked to stand up against some of the world’s worst dictators?

What he didn’t tell us why, in an institution and with an audience with which he presumably has a great deal of influence, he did nothing to attenuate these hateful teachings, teachings to which his young daughters were being exposed.

Why should we believe he can be a leader who can be a bridge between the races in the country as a whole if he has exerted such negligible leadership in his own church and with his own pastor/mentor of 20 years?

UPDATE VI [March 20 12:50 p.m.]

And now comes Roger Clegg, who provides a DISCRIMINATIONS exclusive: both notes and conclusions. My comments would have been better if I’d waited to read Roger’s before saying anything. (You’d think I would have learned that by now.)

Basic outline: (a) short history of the struggle for “a more perfect union”; (b) Obama’s (unifying) life and campaign; (c) condemnation of Rev. Wright’s remarks but refusal to disown him; (d) why the anger of Rev. Wright’s generation is understandable; (e) white people have anger, too; (f) what black people need to do; (g) what white people need to do; and (h) concluding discussion of social justice issues (in a nonracial vein).

Re (a): Okay, although any good conservative will get nervous at any good liberal’s quest for “perfection,” which is a leitmotiv of the speech.

Re (b): No problem here; indeed, the focus on unity and transcending race, and the praise for America, in this part of the speech will remind many voters of why they really would like to vote for this guy.

Re (c): The Rev. Wright problem is the reason that Obama is giving this speech, and he certainly makes clear that the venom from Wright’s sermons, that many people are upset about, upset him as well. But he declines to “disown” Wright, for two reasons--one explicit and one implicit. The explicit reason is that Wright is “like family,” has many admirable qualities, and has done many good things, for Obama in particular. Linda Chavez explains why this is unpersuasive on National Review Online yesterday.

Re (d): The implicit reason is that we ought to cut Wright and those of his generation some slack, because they are understandably still angry about America’s sad history of discrimination. This is the worst part of the speech, for a number of reasons. First, being angry doesn’t justify racist paranoia and, in particular, doesn’t justify Obama sitting through those sermons. The conceit of Obama’s speech is that America’s history of discrimination and a desire to improve race relations has some connection with his decision to support Rev. Wright, but that’s just not true. The Wright controversy is not crude “gotcha” politics; this is not equivalent to the Geraldine Ferraro matter; people have legitimate, substantive concerns about why Obama was willing to have a close association with this pastor. It’s also false and condescending for Obama to tell us that America has “never really worked through” its racial issues. Finally, and most troubling of all from a public policy perspective, is Obama’s discussion of why “so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced” to slavery and Jim Crow. For instance, “segregated schools” do not explain the black-white achievement gap; crime is not caused by a shortage of “parks for kids to play in”; “the erosion of black families” has gotten worse as discrimination has diminished (interestingly, Obama can bring himself to say only that this latter is “a problem that welfare policies for many years MAY have worsened”). These problems, like anything else, have manifold causation, but it is counterproductive and, really, meaningless to say, “The reason I got pregnant is because my great-great-grandfather was a slave.” Suggesting otherwise raises the fear that he might be open to really bad ideas like reparations.

Re (e): He is certainly right to acknowledge that white people have “legitimate concerns” about busing, affirmative action, and crime. But then he implies that these “resentments” have “distracted” whites from what they should really be upset about--things like “questionable accounting practices” and “lobbyists” and “economic policies that favor the few over the many.” Yeah, right. Obama is just wrong to suggest that the white resentments are nothing more than a mirror image of black resentments. BTW, notice how everything here is in black-white terms--i.e., no mention of Latinos, Asians, and everyone else? That’s deliberate: Obama would have a hard time being so patronizing about, say, the “resentment” of the daughter of an Asian immigrant being discriminated against in college admissions.

Re (f): The way out of this “racial stalemate”--bad phrase, BTW: As Obama acknowledges, we are making significant progress--is for blacks and whites (again, nothing about Latinos, Asians, and everyone else) to do the following, and here is some music to conservative ears: Blacks need to “bind[] our particular grievances … to the larger aspirations of all Americans” (is this a suggestion to move away from racial preferences?); and to “tak[e] full responsibility” for their lives--which Obama acknowledges is a “quintessentially American--and yes, conservative--notion of self-help”--and to “demand[] more time from our fathers.” This last is a cowardly oblique reference to what is really THE problem in the African American community, namely the fact that 7 out of 10 children are born out of wedlock. The fact that that problem gets only this oblique mention, along with one other brief and less-than-candid allusion in part (d), shows just how un-brave this speech on race relations was.

Re (g): What white people need to do is acknowledge that discrimination still exists and must be addressed, as must “the legacy of discrimination,” by ensuring good schools and social services and by enforcing the civil rights laws vigorously and the criminal laws fairly. Well, it seems to me that, if you read my (f) and (g), you get the impression that Obama is saying that, with regard to race relations and racial progress, the ball is mostly in black America’s court--and, of course, he’s right.

Re (h): This is basically just a nice liberal stump speech. Silly, but not about race.

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Kristina Wilfore is executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which supports “progressive” ballot initiatives. In an address to the Take Back America conference in Washington (presumably they are trying to take back America from the people who are trying to take back their states via initiatives BISC doesn’t like), she described supporters of initiatives prohibiting racial preference as mere pawns of a right-wing agenda.

“Social issues — they’re the dog whistle to their base,” said Wilfore, who posited that these ballot initiatives serve as wedge issues that force Democrats to divert money and force candidates to define themselves in stark ways.

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In an attempt to put the Wright wreck behind him Obama plans to give a speech tomorrow on “the larger issue of race in this campaign.”

Here’s a part of what he could say to redeem himself and his campaign:

My desire to see our country transcend old racial antagonisms, and my belief that I could help bring about that transcendence, was my primary motive for entering this campaign. I had hoped to wage a campaign that itself was an example of what we as a nation could do, but I have failed in that effort, and I hope you will allow me to explain my failure.

When I first arrived in Chicago I was angry, like many young black men of my generation. I was bitter. I resented what my country had done over the years to black people, to people with whom I had come to identify myself. But I soon realized that anger was not only self-destructive; it was corrosive of the kind of society I believed we could, working together, create.

That realization soon led me to the Trinity United Church of Christ and its powerful, charismatic minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Rev. Wright himself was angry, to be sure, but his anger was channeled into a constructive, muscular Christianity on behalf of his congregation. His was, and is, a righteous anger for justice, and his mentoring based on his liberation theology literally changed the course of my life.

Because of his profoundly positive effect on my life, on Michelle’s life, and the lives of so many of his flock for years I did not hear how his anger might sound different, and threatening, to those in whose lives he had not been such a positive force for good. I literally did not hear the angry sermons -- which now sound so appalling not only to many of my fellow countrymen but to me as well -- that have been played non-stop on TV for the past few days. If I had heard them in person I would have been moved to take action sooner than I have. But even though I did not hear those particular, and particularly offensive, sermons, I heard enough through my membership in his congregation that I should have been alerted earlier than I was. Anger for justice can be liberating, but too often it turns into bitterness, and bitterness can never be the basis for building an open and accepting multiracial community, which is what we as a nation must do.

My failure to hear how Rev. Wright’s anger sounds to others was a serious personal failing, and for that I would like to ask, if not your forgiveness, at least your willingness to give me a second chance, because I still believe that I have been blessed with the ability, through no inherent worth of my own, to help us heal these wounds. I know what it is like to be angry, but I also know that anger is not the answer. I will never turn my back on Rev. Wright the man, for he has been an invaluable mentor to me, but I do urge him, and the many thousands who share his anger, to lay it down, to recognize that color is only skin deep, that as Jesus and other great religious leaders have taught us, we are all of us God’s children.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to be Americans at this time and place have a unique opportunity to place the racial conflicts that both caused and grew out of slavery and segregation and discrimination behind us. I have changed, so I know we can change. Yes, we can.

Why, you may ask, do I offer him this way back? First, I’m confident no one close to him will see these words, or be willing to pass them on even if seen. Second, I doubt that Obama would be willing to confess failing on the level laid out here. But also because at this point I’ve come to suspect that, largely because of the damage done to his campaign by the Wright wreck that no rhetoric can repair, he would be easier for McCain to beat than Hillary. Thus I wouldn’t regret it if my suggestions actually did provide some help to him.

UPDATE [10:10 p.m.]

Hmm. Obama seems to be headed in this direction.

In an interview with PBS’s “NewsHour” on Monday, Obama suggested that Wright’s tone in speaking of white America was partly a generational difference borne out of the bitter experiences of discrimination in an earlier era.

“When you look at somebody like a Rev. Wright who grew up in the ‘50s or ‘60s, his experience of race in this country is very different than mine,” Obama said in the PBS interview.

“We benefit from the difficult battles that were [taking] place,” Obama continued. “But I’m not sure that we benefit from continuing to perpetuate the anger and the bitterness that I think, at this point, serves to divide rather than bring us together.”

Here’s what Obama did say. He did a much better job of speaking for himself than I did speaking for him. I suspect this will redeem his candidacy.

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In an otherwise good column on the Ferraro affair, Robert Novak writes that

Obama, as the first African-American with a real chance to become president, has exposed an ugly racial divide in what was supposed to be a colorblind Democratic Party.

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Thomas Edsall, political editor of the Huffington Post, appears to think that the most important political fact about the Wright wreck is that it has made conservatives angry. Thus, his attempt to gauge the amount of damage is to survey the liberal reaction to the “explosion of commentary in the conservative blogosphere.” Presumably liberals aren’t, on their own and apart from fearing what conservatives will make of Wright, angered by Obama’s long association with angry anti-Americanism.

One of the liberal responses he cites earns the dubious distinction of being the stupidest comment to date:

Former Democratic presidential candidate and Colorado Senator Gary Hart, noting that campaign aides, advisers and surrogates are playing a larger role in this election than ever before, said “the legitimate side of this is the desire to know the influences on the candidate. The unhealthy side is the imputation of guilt, blame, or evil to the candidate based upon some flaw in the increasingly wide circle of ‘advisors’.” Wright’s conduct, Hart said, “is relevant only if Senator Obama had listened to this tripe and not objected or walked out. Otherwise, he cannot be held accountable for the excesses of a man, even a minister, who holds extreme and unacceptable views. Otherwise, what about his banker, or barber, or doctor, or shoe salesman?”

I don’t know what kind of shoes Gary Hart wears, but I do know where both of them are right now: in his mouth.

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Two editorial writers for the Kansas City Star ask how the wreck of Wright will affect some important endorsers of Obama in the midwest.

Two of Barack Obama’s most important endorsements from America’s Heartland are from Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

But how will the controversy that now surrounds Obama and his long-time pastor, Jeremiah Wright Jr., affect those endorsements?

At the very least, both Midwesterners will face pressure from Missourians and Kansans to back off their earlier enthusiastic support of Obama.

Both Sebelius and McCaskill will be watching very closely in the days ahead as Democrats in their states react to Wright’s offensive words.

At some point, Sebelius and McCaskill will have to decide how strongly they will campaign for Obama in the light of those remarks.

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It may well be that the most disturbing defamation brought to light in the controversy surrounding Rev. Jeremiah Wright was not one of Wright’s many slanders against the United States but what I think is a slander against black churches in the United States by Barack Obama.

Rev. Wright, in case someone just arrived from Mars and doesn’t know, has blamed the United States for the 9/11 attacks, said the U.S. invented AIDS to infect black people, and urged his flock to sing “God Damn America,” not “God Bless America.” Most of the recent commentary (including here) has been devoted to parsing Obama’s attempt to distance himself from his ranting pastor, but lost in all this are several statements by Obama that may be far more damaging in the long run than any of Wright’s harrangues.

I am referring to Obama’s several recent statements that, as he asserted to reporters and editors of the Chicago Tribune on Friday, that Wright’s church “is a very traditional African-American church....” Before the Wright wreck he had told the same thing to a group of 100 or so Jewish leaders in Cleveland last month:

It is a very conventional African American church. If you go to, if you were there at the church, you would be hearing gospel music and people preaching about Jesus. It is very conventional in that sense.

Fox News has also noted Obama’s attempt to portray his church as just another conventional black American church.

Typically Obama says he has attended the church for 20 years and if one were to go, they’d find a “very conventional African American church” where you would hear gospel music and “people preaching about Jesus.” In Ohio just a few days ago, Obama told voters, “You would feel at home if you were there.”

Obama’s assertion is self-serving. If he can persuade people that his church is a simply conventionally black, then any criticism of Wright or his church can be dismissed as racist. More important, many commentators might be dissuaded from such criticism for fear of being called a racist.

I think Obama’s argument is flatly wrong. I don’t believe most black churches in the country are seething hotbeds of anti-Americanism. But perhaps even more striking, I think his argument undermines his own campaign. Insofar as he persuades people that Trinity United Church of Christ is typical of black churches, he will have persuaded many people that they do not want any product of such a church as president of the United States, and perhaps even in lesser offices and positions. He will, that is, have done more damage to race relations in the United States than even a Louis Farrakhan, George Wallace, Al Sharpton, or David Duke could do.

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Obama has said that he only learned of the “controversial” nature of some of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons on the eve of his presidential campaign, an assertion that has led many to wonder how he could have been oblivious to Wright’s extreme views during the first 19 years of his membership in Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

There are already on the record reasons to doubt Obama’s obliviousness defense. First, as the New York Times reported over a year ago, Obama rescinded his invitation to Rev. Wright to deliver the invocation at his campaign announcement explaining, as Wright told the Times, that “You can get kind of rough in the sermons....” Obama must have heard something in those 19 years to say that last year.

Another example, as Rich Lowry discussed two days ago in National Review Online, Obama’s first autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, reveals knowledge of Wright’s proclivities based on the first sermon he ever heard. Lowry quotes Obama’s discussion of that sermon, the sermon from which the title of his autobiography was taken. Here’s an excerpt:

“It is this world [Wright preaches], a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world! On which hope sits!”

And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. As the sermon unfolded, though, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate. The reverend spoke of the hardship that the congregation would face tomorrow, the pain of those far from the mountaintop, worrying about paying the light bill…

Correspondent Jim Davis attended a service at the church during which Wright referred to “white arrogance” and “the United States of white America.”

The church members in attendance that day included Obama, whose book “The Audacity of Hope” takes its title from a Rev. Wright sermon. [Emphasis added]

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Someone should tell Susan Estrich, former Dukakis campaign manager and continuing Democratic talking head, that when in a hole one should stop digging.

Offering her 1¢ worth on the Ferraro firestorm (originally it was 2¢ worth, but I devalued it based on content), Estrich writes:

I don't think she in any way meant to put Obama down by pointing to his race as an essential element of his appeal. It is an essential element of his appeal. That doesn't mean he's the affirmative action candidate. It doesn't mean he's unqualified or undeserving.

It’s always interesting to see what friends of affirmative action say about it when they’re not being careful.

ADDENDUM

I find it interesting that those who support racial preferences most vociferously also deny most vociferously any suggestion that anyone actually received something of value because of his or her race. They describe as racist the demand for colorblind equality, but they also describe as racist any suggestion that any individual’s success or failure can be attributed to the preferential treatment extended or not extended to that individual’s racial or ethnic group. Finally, they describe as racist any suggestion that the practice of racial preference calls into question the earned accomplishments of members of preferred groups.

Go figure.

ADDENDUM II [16 March]

Obama seems to agree with Estrich that “affirmative action” results in the selection of those who would not have been selected but for their race. As he stated in an interview with reporters and editors of the Chicago Tribune on Friday, Ferraro’s “implication was that I was an affirmative action beneficiary.”

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Most of the comment I’ve seen about Obama’s relationship with his ranting, raving minister misses the point, as do his various replies yesterday. The point isn’t whether he agrees with Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s anti-American, Farrakhanian fulminations; it’s his judgment in choosing him as a pastor and mentor and remaining in close association with him for 20 years, until he realized the association might cause him political problems.

That passive, unquestioning association with a race-obsessed church, of course, calls into question Obama’s desire and/or ability to “transcend race,” one of his strongest appeals to many of his supporters. And his recent denial that he had heard any of Wright’s rantings is positively Clintonian (see my discussion of the “Clintonian Denial Style”) in what it doesn’t deny:

The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign.

In his response to Hillary’s red phone at 3:00 a.m. ad, Obama said:

“We’ve seen these ads before. They’re the kind that play on people’s fears to try to scare up votes,” Mr. Obama said. “I don’t think these ads will work this time, because the question is not about picking up the phone. The question is what kind of judgment will you exercise when you pick up that phone?”

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Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego, is a new member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Her Statement accompanying the Commission’s report on affirmative action in law schools is a very good summary of UCLA law professor Richard Sander’s “mismatch” research, and its implications, on which the report is largely based.

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ColorLines has a long article about the campaign to eliminate racial preferences that, even with its undisguised pro-preference biases, is better than one might expect.

One of the things that makes it interesting is that the preferentialists it approvingly quotes, recognizing a friendly forum, are a bit less guarded and circumspect than when they are talking to the mainstream press. My favorite of several revealing quotes is from David Waymire, spokesman for One United Michigan, the main umbrella group that led the opposition to the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. That initiative, like similar ones passed in Calfornia and Washington and on the ballots of up to five additional states next November, barred the state from “discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group” based on race, ethnicity, national origin, or gender.

MCRI passed in Nov. 2006 with 58% of the vote, but according to David Waymire “No one who understood this issue rationally voted for the ban.”

So, 58% of the voters in Michigan were either dumb or irrational. No wonder these people have such trouble generating support and thus try so hard to keep initiatives requiring colorblind equality off the ballot.

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I have now [14 March 9:45 p.m.] UPDATED Ferocious Response To Ferraro’s Remarks for the fourth time. Please read that UPDATE (and the previous three) if you haven’t.

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With so many black members of Congress, why have there been so few black senators and why is Obama the first black candidate with a real chance to be president?

According to a fascinating article in today’s Wall Street Journal, Abigail Thernstrom argues with great force that a great deal of the blame must be laid at the feet of the Voting Rights Act.

“The Voting Rights Act perplexingly integrates the Congress by separating people into different congressional districts on the basis of race,” political scientist David Lublin has noted. The statute has conferred on minority candidates a unique privilege: protection from white competition. In theory, there are no group rights to representation in America. In fact, the 1965 statute has created a system of reserved seats for blacks and Hispanics.

Almost all members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been elected to fill a reserved seat. They run in what Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has called “segregated” districts. These are districts devoid of the normal political pressures that encourage candidates to move to the political center. Candidates win ... by emphasizing their racial bona fides, their commitment to representing black interests, and their far-left convictions — matching those of most black voters. It is not a recipe for winning in statewide and other majority-white settings.

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[15 March – NOTE: This post has been UPDATED, twice three four five times]

By now everyone knows that Geraldine Ferraro, former Vice Presidential candidate, recently said that

if Obama was a white man he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.

First, Hillary Clinton said “I do not agree with that.” What precisely, I wonder, does she not agree with. Does she believe, for example, that any black person ever benefits from being black when applying for a prestigious job?

Next, let’s turn to Sen. Obama’s response:

I don’t think Geraldine Ferraro’s comments have any place in our politics or in the Democratic Party. They are divisive. I think anybody who understands the history of this country knows they are patently absurd,” he told the Allentown Morning Call. “And I would expect that the same way those comments don’t have a place in my campaign they shouldn’t have a place in Senator Clinton’s either.

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said Ferraro should be dumped from the Clinton campaign, and Jan Schakowsky, an Obama supporter and Illinois congresswoman, said

I respect every person’s right to promote his or her candidate, but any and all remarks that diminish Senator Obama’s candidacy because of his race are completely out of line.

Can a party that can’t talk about its candidates without putting its collective foot in its mouth govern the country?

UPDATE

If you’re not interested in grammar, stop reading and return to your regularly scheduled activities. If you are, you may be interested that Ferraro’s actual quote —

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept

I heard the crucial excerpt from Ferraro’s interview several times on the radio today, and she clearly said “... if Obama were a white man ... And if here were a woman....”

The mood of the Demographic party regarding race and sex may be especially sour right now, but Ms. Ferraro clearly knows her subjunctive mood. That’s more that can be said for the AP reporter.

UPDATE II

In a subsequent interview Ms. Ferraro also said,

What I find offensive is every time somebody says something about the [Obama] campaign, you’re accused of being racist.

I wonder if she, or any other Democrat, also finds it offensive that every time somebody says something critical of affirmative action they’re accused of being a racist.

UPDATE III

Query For Ms. Ferraro, Her Critics, And Her Defenders (If There Are Any Besides Mickey Kaus)

If minorities had not been the beneficiaries of preferential treatment based on their race for the past 40 years or so, would anyone even consider asserting that Obama owed his success to his race?

In his criticism of Ferraro’s “malicious foolishness,” Time’s Joe Klein writes:

In fact, what Ferraro was really doing here — whether she was consciously aware of it or not — was to raise the specter of affirmative action in a state whose white working-class population has a history of being sensitive to such appeals.

And now a question for Obama’s fans:

The most eloquent admirers of Barack Obama that I have read (and discussed here, here, here, and here) — Stuart Taylor, Jr., Edward Blum, George Will — and one I haven’t, Andrew Sullivan (HatTip to Mickey Kaus) — “What does [Obama] offer? First and foremost: his face” — all argue that Obama’s greatest appeal is that he literally embodies the hope that we can finally transcend race. Would he embody that promise, or hold out that promise in some less corporeal form, if he were not black?

UPDATE IV [14 March]

The Columbia Journalism Review is widely regarded as the most important monitor of the nation’s press. As such, in many respects it reflects, even embodies, the very essence of the elite/establishment/”drive-by” (pick your adjective) media. A long article there today by Megan Garber reveals, unintentionally, why an increasing number of people no longer look to the elite, mainstream media (or its monitors) as an arbiter of the acceptable.

In discussing (quoting Peggy Noonan and referring to Chris Matthews) how “unsettling” the Ferraro controversy is, Ms. Garber writes:

.... The lines of permission when it comes to talk of race are so taut right now that any attempt to bend them threatens simply to snap the strings of discourse altogether.

This week, snap they did. Ferraro’s comments about Barack Obama —“if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position”— were far beyond the constraints of acceptability when it comes to our accepted text of racial discourse.

But what qualifies Ms. Garber for the crown as political correctness queen for the day is her comment that Ferraro’s remarks violated “the constraints of acceptability when it comes to our accepted text of racial discourse.” (And she says this even though recognizes in the next breath that Ferraro’s comments “conveyed a kernel of truth”!)

Has CJR published a list of those “constraints”? Do they come from the same mysterious source as the “permission” writers on race need to receive?

My problem, I’m sure, is simply that I’m not one of “us.” That, no doubt, is why I was never sent a copy of the rules laying out the “constraints” setting the boundaries of “our accepted text of racial discourse.”

UPDATE V [15 March]

See this March 15 post, “The Affirmative Action Candidate”

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“In diversity,” says Terryl J. Ross, director of Oregon State University’s office of community and diversity, “maybe the two most important words are ‘I’m sorry.’”

And LaVonda Wagner, who became Oregon State’s women’s basketball coach despite her concerns about OSU’s lack of “diversity,” said at a recent Martin Luther King breakfast meeting that “in dealing with issues of race, Oregon State needed to ‘get comfortable being uncomfortable.’”

To see why there is, or needs to be, so much sorrow and discomfort at Oregon State, read Peter Schmidt’s excellent, long article about the hothouse racial atmosphere there in the Chronicle of Higher Education. If you can’t access it online, go to a library. In the meantime, here are a couple of my favorite nuggets that reveal a problem with “diversity” that can’t be emphasized too much (though I try as hard as I can to emphasize it too much):

Among the people who say they have come to see Oregon State’s campus as a racially hostile environment is Shannon S. Warren, a recent graduate who now plans to work here as a research associate in the ethnic-studies department.

Ms. Warren, who formerly served as director of multicultural affairs for the student government and as president of the university’s Black Student Union, says some of her professors here expressed surprise when she excelled academically. They seemed to call on her in class discussions as if they thought of her as a spokesperson for her race....

“It is really hard on this campus,” agrees DaMarcus Redeau, a senior who works as a liaison for the university’s black cultural center. “Sometimes you go to classes and your classmates and teachers don’t understand where you are coming from — like every day you have to educate somebody.”

Where Ms. Warren is offended that people regard her as a representative of those mysterious, different, “diversity”-providing blacks, however, Mr. Redeau is offended because people don’t recognize his difference, that where he’s “coming from” is very different from where they (whoever they are) come from.

Here’s my concluding thought: as long as we’re race-obsessed, we’ll be race-obsessed. (How’s that for profundity?) The way to reduce the racial temperature on campuses, and elsewhere, is to start treating everyone, and insisting that everyone be treated, without regard to race.

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According to eminent Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson in a New York Times OpEd today, it’s the red phone in Hillary’s 3 a.m. ad. After “[r]epeated watching of the ad on YouTube,” Patterson writes,

I realized that I had only too often in my study of America’s racial history seen images much like these, and the sentiments to which they allude.

I am not referring to the fact that the ad is unoriginal; as several others have noted, it mimics a similar ad made for Walter Mondale in his 1984 campaign for the Democratic nomination. What bothers me is the difference between this and the Mondale ad. The Mondale ad directly and unequivocally played on the issue of experience. The danger was that the red telephone might be answered by someone who was “unsure, unsteady, untested.” Why do I believe this? Because the phone and Mr. Mondale are the only images in the ad. Fair game in the normal politics of fear.
....
I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

Oh, wait

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“We live side by side but not together.” That’s how one person recently described “the fallout from decades of race-based affirmative action policies.” People, she said, “were fed up.”

Those people are in Malaysia, which just handed the governing party a surprise rebuke that was based heavily on a long-simmering rejection of Malaysia’s “affirmative action” policies.

Unless the Democrats succeed in blocking or undermining civil rights initiatives now underway in five states, some voters in the United States will have the opportunity to express their rejection of race preferences policies next November. In that regard, the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative just submitted nearly 129,000 signatures to the Secretary of State to place the CCRI on the ballot. Only 76,000 are required.

UPDATE [11 March]

Malaysia's resurgent opposition today decided to abolish affirmative action policies favouring ethnic Malays in the states ruled by them, a move that may sound music to the ears of the minority Indian and Chinese communities.

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Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama nor any elected, appointed, or self-appointed Democrat that I recall raised any objection when the Democratic National Committee voted to deprive Michigan and Florida of their convention delegates if they violated the DNC “rule” against moving up their primaries. None of them complained about “disenfranchisement,” “unfairness,” etc.

Now that those delegates might actually be important, however, the hue and cry has been raised. Gov. Rendell of Pennsylvania asks, “How can the Democratic Party go to Denver and deny the people of Michigan and Florida, two crucial states, a voice in this, in this nominating process?” Gov. Granholm of Michigan says it would be “reprehensible” and “intolerable” not to seat the delegates already selected by the voters in the Florida and Michigan primaries.

My favorite recent comment, however, comes not from these johnny come latelys who bled for the poor disenfranchisees in Florida and Michigan only when their candidate needed them. It came yesterday from none other than the “rule” instigator, DNC Chairman Howard Dean himself:

Everybody, including me and, I think, both candidates, wants to find a way to seat Florida and Michigan,” Dean said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “But it has to be done in such a way that you don’t change the rules in the middle of the game.”

The only way I can see for him to accomplish this is by doing what I suspect he and the Dems will do: change the rules at the end, not the middle, of the game.

ADDENDUM: A Do-Over?

Everyone seems to think that the only problem with Florida and Michigan imitating Bill Clinton’s well-known fondness for mulligans and simply voting again is the money — who would pay for the expensive new primaries? But I wouldn’t think that would be an insurmountable problem.

We’re all familiar with corporations putting up enough money:

Nearly all new stadiums nowadays are named after whatever corporation bids the highest price for the naming rights, whether or not there is a strong connection to the city.

A bigger problem, I would think, is that even this solution would seem to reward the states for breaking the DNC “rule.” Their new primaries would immediately be elevated to the most important of this campaign season, millions more dollars would be spent in the two states than would have been spent if they’d followed the rules. Finally, I would argue that allowing do-over primaries is still changing the rules in the middle (or end) of the game by seating the delegates after the states had been warned their delegates would not be seated if they moved up their primaries. Mulligans are no more appealing in politics than they are on the golf course.

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Mark Steyn:

Well, we will have Hillary Clinton to kick around some more, at least for another few weeks. The Mummy (as my radio pal Hugh Hewitt calls her) kicked open the sarcophagus door and, despite the rotting bandages dating back to Iowa, began staggering around terrorizing folks all over again. “She is a monster,” Obama adviser Samantha Power told a reporter from the Scotsman — and not a monster in a cute Loch Ness blurry long-distance kind of way but something far more repulsive and in your face

The Clintons, a horror film that never ends

It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . .

Put your own movie analogy in here. Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction – whoosh! she’s back at your throat! – has often occurred to me when covering the Clintons these many years. The Oscars host Jon Stewart compares them to a Terminator: the kind that is splattered into a million tiny droplets of vaporised metal . . . only to pool together spontaneously and charge back at you unfazed.

The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: unkillable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy. You can’t escape; you can’t hide; and you can’t win. And these days, in the kinetic pace of the YouTube campaign, they are like the new 28 Days Later zombies. They come at you really quickly, like bats out of hell. Or Ohio, anyway.

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Writing in the Weekly Standard this week, Stephen Hayes gets it exactly right.

In the speech that launched his meteoric rise in national politics, the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama called for a politics of hope, denounced “those who are preparing to divide us,” and offered a direct challenge. “I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America--there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America--there’s the United States of America.”

It was a moving speech, filled with hopeful sentiments. But two years later, Senator Barack Obama, with two years’ experience in the Senate and his eye on a presidential run, taped a radio ad attacking the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), going out of his way to defend racial preference policies that by their very definition divide Americans into blacks, whites, Latinos, and Asians.

MCRI, in short, was an effort to bring about the very America whose hymn Obama sang at the 2004 Democratic Convention. So, how did he respond? Not only by opposing MCRI, but by actually making an advertisement opposing it:

This is Senator Barack Obama. And I'm asking you to vote no on Proposal 2. We've made great strides in our society towards fairness and opportunity for all people. But whether we like to admit it or not, there's still barriers to women and minorities reaching their full potential. Proposal 2 may sound like a reasonable way to move towards a Michigan that is blind to differences in sex and race but don't be fooled by the reassuring rhetoric. If the initiative becomes law it would wipe out programs that help women and minorities get a good education and jobs. It would hurt initiatives that help women and minorities build their own businesses. And it would eliminate efforts to help our children enter fields such as science, engineering, and mathematics. Proposal 2 closes these doors to many in Michigan and it moves us further away from a country of full opportunity. Proposal 2 is wrong for Michigan and it's wrong for America.

Race-neutral policies are “wrong for America”? A measure that echoes the 1964 Civil Rights Act is just “reassuring rhetoric”? The same campaign that paid for Obama’s ad ran an ad comparing the end of racial preferences to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Read the whole thing.

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Reading As Racial Harassment (March 6) has been UPDATED.

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This interesting Harvard Crimson article argues that “one undeniable downside” of affirmative action at Harvard is “the element of disrespect it introduces onto our campus.”

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Charles Krauthammer almost always gets almost everything right. His column today, however, contained an uncharacteristic near miss.

His basic point — that Obama’s promise to transcend race, rise above the old politics, and unite us once again as one nation is contradicted by his own performance in the Senate — is certainly true, but Krauthammer misses what I think is the most fundamental and telling evidence of that contradiction: Obama’s utterly conventional, utterly partisan, utter old Democratic orthodoxy on racial preferences.

Krauthammer writes, accurately enough as far as it goes, that “Obama does transcend race; he has not run as a candidate of minority grievance,” but then he on to say that “his vision of America is unmistakably post-racial.”

Really? There is, to be sure, a nice post-racial vision of American unity in Obama’s rhetoric, such as his appeal to “young and old, rich and poor, black and white, Latino and Asian — who are tired of a politics that divides us” and his verbal insistence that “the choice in this election is not between regions or religions or genders. It’s not about rich versus poor; young versus old; and it is not about black versus white.”

But all that, as Hillary might say, is just talk. When it comes to speaking unpopular truth to those who don’t want to hear it, Obama has ruffled no pro-preference feathers. As I have pointed out too many times to cite (but a few examples are here, here, here, here, here, and here), he may think of Americans as one people and not as “black and white, Latino and Asian,” but he has moved not one inch from his support for the government treating some of those groups better because of their race or ethnicity, and others worse. On the contrary, he actively campaigned against the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which now requires (it passed with 58% of the vote) the state to treat it citizens without regard to their race, ethnicity, or gender in education, hiring, and contracting.

Until he does I for one don’t believe at all in his “Change You Can Believe In.”

ADDENDUM

If it were true that Obama were serious about viewing us as one American and not as “ “black and white, Latino and Asian,” male and female, etc., etc., he would be about the only Democrat who does. Also, if were serious about this “vision,” he would have to distance himself from the official Democratic Delegate Selection Rules for the 2008 convention that I discussed at some length here. As I read those rules (as I stated in my former post), they state the following:

1. “[D]iscrimination in any state party affairs on the ground of race, color, creed or national origin” or “status” is prohibited. Delegates will not be seated in the absence of assurance that no such discrimination has occurred, but

2. “[T]he national and state Democratic Parties shall adopt and implement affirmative action programs with specific goals and timetables for African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian/Pacific Americans and women,” but

3. Neither these “goals” nor “timetables” shall be accomplished “either directly or indirectly by the Party’s imposition of mandatory quotas at any level of the delegate selection process or in any other Party affairs,” but

4. In the selection of at-large delegations preferences shall be given to African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian/Pacific Americans and women if necessary to reach affirmative action “goals,” and

5. ll state delegate selection plans must “provide for equal division between delegate men and delegate women and alternate men and alternate women within the state’s entire convention delegation.” In addition, “as far as mathematically practicable, [they must] also provide for equal division between district-level delegate men and delegate women and district-level alternate men and alternate women.” Nevertheless,

6. The requirement of an “equal division at any level of delegate or committee positions between delegate men and delegate women or committeemen and committeewomen shall not constitute” a quota.
   

State Democratic Party diversity plans vary widely. Alabama has only one goal: Its delegation should be 35.4% black. Florida has a wider range of goals: 21.9% for blacks, 10% for homosexuals of either sex, 7.6% for Hispanics, two Native American delegates (which is less than 1% of the delegation), and two Asians or Pacific Islanders. California’s is even more complicated: 26% Hispanic, 16% black, 10% disabled, 9% Asian or Pacific Islander, 7% under age 30, 5% homosexual men, 5% homosexual women, and 1% Native American. The Michigan Democratic Party seeks to pick ArabAmericans for 3% of its delegates. Fourteen states (and Puerto Rico) specify the percentage of delegates that should be homosexual....

Sometimes state parties must scramble to meet their goals. The Tallahassee Democrat reported that the erroneously listed race and sexual orientation of some potential delegates caused last-minute difficulties in firming up the Florida delegation. “The [state party] executive committee met at Tallahassee Community College to elect 23 party officers and elected officials, plus 39 at-large delegates,” the paper said. “Contenders for those seats were listed by race, gender and sexual orientation, and [a party official] explained how many had to be picked to meet ‘goals’: a delegation 20% black, 50% female and 10% gay.”

Would you trust a party that governs itself in this manner to write civil rights laws (and appoint judges to interpret those laws) that would bar quotas?

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Colorado: The Good Guys Win A Round, posted yesterday, has been updated.

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Given an unexpectedly honest faculty report at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, it appears that “affirmative action” hiring violates not only the principle of colorblind, non-discriminatory equality but also well-established administrative hiring rules and procedures.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chancellor Harvey Perlman was hoping for a diversity plan, a faculty- and student-generated statement on how UNL could best recruit and retain women and minorities.

What he got was a report largely written by a pair of faculty accusing UNL of violating Board of Regents bylaws by making more than 20 percent of its faculty hires from 1998 to 2004 without competitive searches with the goal of boosting its racial and gender mix.

During that time, according to the report, UNL made 61 of its 301 faculty hires without announcing and advertising its open positions.

Of those 61 hires, all but 16 were women or racial minorities, says the report, dated Feb. 29.

The university says its hires are perfectly compatible with regents policies, which prohibit discrimination but also encourage affirmative action in some cases to increase the number of women and minorities in fields in which they are underrepresented.

The Legislature, in fact, provided state money to NU to increase diversity after it mandated in 1997 that the university reach the midpoint of its peer institutions in employment of women and minority faculty or risk losing funding, said Linda Crump, assistant to the chancellor for equity, access and diversity programs at UNL....

Many opportunity hires aren’t even related to race or gender, she said. The university sometimes has to act quickly to hire a research faculty member before grant money runs out and can’t waste time on a search, for example.

Further, she said, non-competitive hires only happen with the support of the faculty in a given department....

“Race or gender is never the sole factor (in a hire). We follow the law.”

Indeed, as I understand Ms. Crump, she’s defending the position that it’s fine to hire on the basis of race or sex so long as there is at least one additional, non-race or -sex based qualification, such as, I assume, basic literacy. But I wonder: exactly what law is UNL following when it says it’s O.K. to hire on the basis of race or sex so long as those factors are less than 100% of the reason for the hire?

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Keith John Sampson, in his early 50s, does janitorial work at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), where he has been accumulating credits toward a degree in communications studies. IUPUI, however, apparently has a rather narrow view of the sort of communication that is provided by books. Recently Sampson got into a good deal of trouble by reading — on his own time and in the employee break room — a book that some of his co-workers didn’t like, or rather a word in whose title they didn’t like, Notre Dame Vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan .

Last November Sampson received a letter from Lillian Charleston of the IUPUi Affirmative Action Office.

The letter begins by saying that the AAO has completed its investigation of a coworker’s allegation that Sampson “racially harassed her by repeatedly reading the book Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan by Todd Tucker in the presence of Black employees.” It goes on to say, “You demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your coworkers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence … you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black coworkers.” Charleston went on to say that according to “the legal ‘reasonable person standard,’ a majority of adults are aware of and understand how repugnant the KKK is to African-Americans …”

Sampson was ordered to stop reading the book in the immediate presence of his coworkers and, when reading the book, to sit apart from them.

Last week, Sampson received a second letter, dated Feb. 7, 2008, and postmarked Feb. 21, 2008, from Charleston in which the AAO says they were unable to draw any final conclusions as to whether or not Sampson’s choice to read the book was intentionally hostile, and therefore no adverse disciplinary action will be taken at this time.

The matter does not seem to be resolved, however, as Sampson has recently learned that the incident is now being investigated by IUPUI Human Resources. Todd Tucker, author of the book, has recently become involved in defending Sampson’s right to read the book, which is available at the IUPUI library as well as the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library.

UPDATE [6 March]

Turns out I was late to this party. The Volokhers already nailed this one.

UPDATE II [7 March]

Protein Wisdom has some interesting observations about this affair, including a pointer to a remarkable document on the IUPUI Affirmative Action web site, Myths and Facts About Affirmative Action, that is a good example of what passes for analytical thought in the affirmative action industry these days. (HatTip to reader Fred Ray.) Presumably this document reflects the wisdom of Lillian Charleston, IUPUI’s affirmative action director for 16 years and, according to this bio, a “nationally recognized” expert on affirmative action.

A couple of examples:

• It is a MYTH that affirmative action involves discrimination against whites or Asians. It can’t, because blacks are incapable of discrimination.

  The parameters of discrimination based on race are distinguished by the power dynamics. Reverse racism is not, therefore a reality if people of color are not in positions of power and perpetrating the discrimination.

• It is a MYTH that affirmative action involves preferential treatment of any individuals or groups based on race or ethnicity. Why? Because “race and ethnicity are not solely considered for admissions. Thus, there is no such thing as preferential treatment.”

• It is a MYTH that affirmative action harms whites and Asians. “Though affirmative action is believed to have harmed white men, this contradicts the reality that white men hold structural power in society today.”
  

Even though she propagates views such as the above, I don’t know that I would fire Ms. Charleston. But I do believe I would put her in Mr. Sampson’s position and him in hers.

UPDATE III [1 May 2008]

Thanks to F.I.R.E., Mr. Sampson has been cleared of all charges. Reading in public, apparently, is no longer regarded as racial harassment at Indiana University - Purdue University.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

About two weeks ago I wrote about Deviousness And Duplicity From Colorado Preferentialists, which discussed the effort of opponents of colorblind equality to defeat the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative by “dissembling and confusion.”

Those opponents proposed a fraudulent initiative of their own whose first clause purported, in language identical to the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, to prohibit all state preferential treatment of individuals or groups based on race, ethnicity, etc., but whose second clause obliterated the first by stating that it applied only to those measures that had already been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. As I wrote in my former post,

What this initiative would do, if passed, is ... absolutely nothing, which is the clear intent and purpose of its proposers. It would prohibit all race/sex/ethnic preference programs by the state, except those that are consistent with any that the Supreme Court has not explicitly found unconstitutional. It would, in short, prohibit only preferential programs that are currently illegal.

In short, the proposed initiative is a fraud, clearly intended to deceive voters into thinking they are prohibiting preferences when the effect of the initiative would actually be to preserve them....

[t]he proposed initiative is nothing more than a Trojan horse. It is designed to trick voters into believing that they are voting to limit thepower of the state to engage in discrimination and preferential treatment when in fact they would be voting for a measure that allows the state to engage in all discrimination and preferential treatment allowed under the United States Constitution....

Proponents of preferential treatment may now appeal this ruling to the state Supreme Court, but at least for now sanity has prevailed in Colorado.

UPDATE [6 March]

Vincent Carroll, the editor of the editorial pages at the Rocky Mountain News, has an excellent column on the “remarkable cunning and cynicism” of the opponents of colorblind equality in Colorado who, he writes, have “broken new ground in the abuse of initiative process.” Read the whole thing.

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Watching universities confront the possibility of having civil rights imposed on them is almost humorous. Almost. A case in point is the University of Arizona, as revealed in this article in the Daily Wildcat.

“We’re trying to educate our campus,” said Ezekiel Gebrekidane, a chemistry senior and member of the African American Student Advisory Board. “We’re going to be the victims at the end of the day.”
....
If the initiative is added to the statewide ballot and gets passed, organizations like the UA’s Martin Luther King Jr. Student Center would have to open the door to everybody on campus or lose funding, Gebrekidane said.

Victims of what? Equality?

“It’s not about black or white,” Gebrekidane continued. “It’s about protecting diversity groups.”

Oh. O.K. And what, exactly, is a “diversity group”? Arizona students seem to be a bit unclear on that point. For example, Ruthie Fesahazion, a senior public health major, said

she thinks everybody needs to be aware that the bill could affect a larger population than just racial groups.

“My biggest fear is the wording of the [Arizona Civil Rights Initiative] is so jumbled, people will vote for it,” she said. “These are your fellow classmates. It can be somebody who looks like you that fits into one of these underrepresented communities.”

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Missouri opponents of colorblind equality are hauling out the same arguments that have been tried, and that failed, in California, Washington, and Michigan.

The latest example is the charge by a group opposing the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative that supporters of the initiative are “deceptive” for describing a proposal that would ban preferential treatment based on race, etc., as a civil rights measure.

“This isn’t about civil rights. It’s about banning affirmative action,” claimed the director of the opposition group. Affirmative action remains necessary, he said, because “we don’t, as a society, have a level playing field yet.”

Because we don’t yet have “a level playing field,” opponents of colorblind equality believe, we must continue to keep the playing field slanted by preferring some over others based on their race, ethnicity, or sex. And we must continue doing that until such continuing discrimination results in an absence of discrimination.

Fat chance.

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