Discriminations

One of the dirtiest little (or big) secrets of the race preference industry is that it depends on the practice of “race norming,” selecting the most attractive applicants from various approved racial or ethnic groups. One of the least objectionable aspects of this practice is that it is flatly illegal, at least in employment. As I wrote here,

In 1991 Congress amended Title VII (42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2) to prohibit “race norming” (grading applicants, test takers, etc., only in comparison with members of their own racial or ethnic group) even where such norming is claimed to be necessary to achieve diversity.

A new software program is on the market to try to help universities increase the diversity of their admitted classes while avoiding discrimination litigation.

The program, Applications Quest, sorts students whom admissions officers have already deemed as qualified for admission into clusters of similar applicants based on a number of factors, such as hometown, major, GPA, race and legacy status.

The software will then recommend that a university admit the member of each cluster who has the most unique characteristics.

Because admissions officers review applications “holistically,” they run the risk of being biased towards different groups, said Juan Gilbert, the developer of the software and a computer science professor at Auburn University in Alabama.

This leaves universities open to being sued by rejected applicants who claim they were not admitted on the basis of race.

According to Gilbert, use of the Applications Quest programs avoids these issues because the admissions decisions are “reproducible and measurable.”

Race discrimination in, race discrimination out.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Say What? (4) | TrackBacks (0)

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATEd]

Prevarication often leads to contradiction. When you don’t tell the truth, it’s hard to keep your story straight.

Rev. Wright on Bill Moyers show last Friday:

BILL MOYERS: You know, you mentioned Senator Obama. In the 20 years that you’ve been your [sic] pastor, have you ever heard him repeat any of your controversial statements as his opinion?

REVEREND WRIGHT: No. No. No. Absolutely not. I don’t talk to him about politics. And so here at a political event, he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician. I continue to be a pastor who speaks to the people of god about the things of God. [Emphasis added]

And I said to Barack Obama, last year, “If you get elected, November the 5th, I’m coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.” All right? It’s about policy, not the American people.

UPDATE

Wright, of course, is not the only prevaricator in this sad affair. As Karl Rove observed yesterday, discussing Obama’s various responses to the mentor he is now pleased to call his “former pastor”:

Well, look, his problem is that we’ve had four different stories from him. On the 13th of March, he came out and said, “There’s nothing particularly controversial in Reverend Wright’s statements.” Then he said he wasn’t in the pews when those controversial things were said. Two days later, he came out and said in a speech in Philadelphia that what ... Reverend Wright said was reprehensible but he could no more disavow him than he could disavow his own grandmother [jsr: although he did remove him from his religious advisory committee]. Then, 10 days after that, he said, “Well, if Reverend Wright had not been retiring,” then maybe, he, Obama would have left the church.

One of the most revealing things about the current media storm over Wright is the way most of it unwittingly but revealingly portrays Obama as a victim of the mean, nasty, egotistical Wright. Poor Obama. Such a nice guy! Such a nice post-racial, post-divisive campaign! Poor Obama, poor us for possibly losing our savior to Wright’s insistence on nailing him to the cross of “the black church.”

Lost in this new crucifixion melodrama is any sense that Obama is responsible for what is happening to him (even that construction unfairly makes him a victim). Obama chose this man, his church, and his vision. Perhaps he did so only instrumentally, as a politician (and a conventional, not a new, one) on the make, but he stayed a loyal and docile member of the flock. He didn’t have to do that. He could have left at any time.

Lie down with Wrights; wake up with wrongs. Obama made his own bed; no one forced him to, or forced him to stay (unless Michelle...). As a result of his own actions this post-racial, post-divisive candidate has exacerbated more racial, religious, and cultural (“bitter/cling”) strife into our politics than anyone on the national stage since George Wallace.

UPDATE: Obama, Loyalty, And Betrayal [4 May]

This week Matthew Continneti has an excellent article in The Weekly Standard arguing in effect that Wright is right ... about Obama. Like Karl Rove (quoted above), Continneti too lists a litany of Obamian contradictions re Wright:

 “These days, [Obama] says, he attends the 11 a.m. Sunday service at Trinity .  .  . every week. .  .  . His pastor, Wright, has become a close confidant.” (Chicago Sun-Times, April 5, 2004)

• “Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church.’ ” (Obama campaign statement reported in the New York Times, April 30, 2007)

• “[Wright] is like an old uncle who sometimes will say things I don’t agree with.” (February 25, 2008)

• “I don’t think that my church is actually particularly controversial.” (March 2, 2008)

• “I can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community.” (March 18, 2008)

• “I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday. .  .  . The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago.” (April 29, 2008)
  

Consider: Obama was raised, apparently with love and affection, by his white mother and, even more so, by his white grandparents. Nevertheless, in his young adulthood he decided to abandon or at least minimize his bi-racialism and identify completely as a black man. Recently, in campaign mode crisis management, he decided to in effect to equate the views of his white grandmother, “a typical white person,” with Wright’s racial rants, famously saying he couldn’t “disown” either.

Of course that comment about his grandmother was widely regarded as pretty disowning, and now Obama has shown he was in fact equally capable of disowning Wright when his consistent views were “amplified” at the National Press Club loudly enough for everyone to hear. Is it possible, however, to sever his connection with Wright without also severing his ties to Wright’s congregation, a congregation in which he was a loyal member until the pastor became too embarrassing?

I don’t think so. Although I haven’t seen any news reports investigating this question, I would guess that Wright’s current and continuing congregants don’t feel they themselves were very well treated by Obama’s about face.

Thus I don’t think it’s going too far to say that Obama has been disloyal to the two communities that raised and nurtured him, no doubt with an eye on both occasions to his being accepted by a new community that would better serve his personal ambitions.

What if he succeeds? That is, what if he is accepted by the larger community with which he wants to identify, that of the United States as a whole, is elected president ... and then at some point in the future gets a better offer? Will he then treat the rest of us the way he’s treated his white family and his black pastor and his flock?

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As I write I’ve just been listening to Rev. Wright at the National Press Club. I’ll probably have more to say after he completes his speech and a transcript becomes available, but I was struck enough by something he said early on to blog it now.

The attack on him, he said, was not personal, not against Rev. Wright the man, but “against the black church.”

So, he is the church. Presumably his view that he U.S. government conspired to create AID to commit genocide against blacks and his view that the U.S. deserves what it got on 9/11 are thus part of that church’s catechism.

Bull.

9:35: Wright was asked how he felt about America and being an American, since some have called his sermons unpatriotic. He replied that he'd served in the Marine Corps six years and asked how many years Cheney had served. That was his entire answer.

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One of the most common arguments in support of racial preferences is that they are needed to “level the playing field,” or sometimes “until the playing field is level.” Or sometimes both, as in the following statement by Brandon Davis, political director of the regional chapter of the Service Employees International Union:

We think until we have a level playing field, affirmative action must remain in place as one of the most effective tools to level the playing field for women and minorities

Their level playing field obviously has no room for citizens being allowed to vote on whether they want to allow their state to continue practicing racial and ethnic discrimination.

SEIU are not the only culprits. The umbrella organization coordinating the anti-petition drive “has also hired local workers through the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now to do similar work as paid canvassers.”

How appropriate. ACORN is one of the few groups in the country who almost make BAMN seem wholesome. If you’re not familar with it, do a Google search on “ACORN and fraud.” After you sift through the relevant hits among the 322,000 I just got, come back and tell me what you think. The first hit that came up on my search, appropriately enough, from Gateway Pundit, happened to involve a record-breaking case of fraud b ACORN ... in Missouri.

Here’s the latest on the Missouri ACORN/democratic voter fraud scandal...

Kansas City officials say this is the most irresponsible and extensive voter registration abuse in Missouri in the twenty five years they have been on the job with the Kansas City Board of Elections.

That’s saying a lot considering there were 16 convictions of election crimes since 2004 in the St. Louis area alone!
....
Dan Riehl has news of previous ACORN scandal in 2003 and 2004 in Missouri.

“The playing field will be level when ....”

To get the ball rolling, I will submit the first entry:

“... when the cows come home and the lions lie down with the lambs.”

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Joe Klein of Time Magazine, who was not a Weatherman but is a weathervane of liberal Democratic opinion, blasts the irresponsibility of the mainstream media!

Discussing what the Pennsylvania primary did to Obama, “who entered the primary as a fresh breeze and left it stale, battered and embittered,” Klein writes:

In the course of six weeks, the American people learned that he was a member of a church whose pastor gave angry, anti-American sermons, that he was "friendly" with an American terrorist who had bombed buildings during the Vietnam era, and that he seemed to look on the ceremonies of working-class life — bowling, hunting, churchgoing and the fervent consumption of greasy food — as his anthropologist mother might have, with a mixture of cool detachment and utter bemusement. All of which deepened the skepticism that Caucasians, especially those without a college degree, had about a young, inexperienced African-American guy with an Islamic-sounding name and a highfalutin fluency with language. And worse, it raised questions among the elders of the party about Obama's ability to hold on to crucial Rust Belt bastions like Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Jersey in the general election — and to add long-suffering Ohio to the Democratic column.

Now, it’s true that Klein himself doesn’t see that he’s indicting himself and his colleagues, but that’s nothing new. He doesn’t see many things, such as the relevance of “so-called character issues” in a presidential campaign. No matter that Klein would no doubt say (actually, he did say) that none of this “new” information speaks to character and judgment, that it is merely “sludge,” “caricature,” “scurrilous trash.” He either doesn’t see or doesn’t attach any significance to Obama’s elitist attribution of xenophobia, racism, etc., to the bitter clinging of the angry rubes, at least in part because he shares it. Re-read the following:

[All the sludgy trash slung by ABC] deepened the skepticism that Caucasians, especially those without a college degree, had about a young, inexperienced African-American guy with an Islamic-sounding name and a highfalutin fluency with language.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Say What? (6) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning E.J. Dionne writes:

The result of the 2008 election may come down to how voters decide to define Barack Obama. Is he Adlai Stevenson or John F. Kennedy?

Since the operative question about Obama concerns presentation and perception rather than actual identity and character, I have a much better way to pose it than Dionne’s false alternative between Kennedy and Stevenson. Here’s how I put the question in an email to a good friend back in February:

What a fascinating show future president Obama is putting on! It will be even more fascinating to discover whether he is:

a) Jimmy Stewart, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington;

b) Robert Redford, in The Candidate;

c) Peter Sellers (Chauncey Gardner), in Being There; or

d) Laurence Harvey, in The Manchurian Candidate.

It will also be interesting to see whether, in the remaining primaries, Hillary goes after his record (raising capital gains to 39.5%, a close mentor/minister who praises Farrakhan and calls Israel “a racist state,” etc.) or leaves that to the Republicans. So far, the only thing Clinton Inc. has accused him of is being black (a half truth?).

I could see that appeal after his maiden speech at the 2004 Democratic convention (“There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America,” etc.) Later, for the first part of the primary campaign, he seemed more like a cross between Redford and Sellers, a balloon floating on good looks, good “presentation,” and the hot air of “hope” and “change.”

More recently, however, my “perception” of him has soured a good bit, and not only because he’s become the Wright man for the job or because of his bitter, clinging rhetorical errors (pronounced “Ayers”). Or perhaps those errors are merely indicative of what strikes me as even more ominous: the gaping chasm between how he “presents” himself — the bi-racial, post-partisan healer — and what there is of an actual record in his present and past, that of a hard left ideologue.

I don’t want to argue this here, but consider: When has Obama ever bucked his party on a matter of substance? He has taken firm positions on two issues, doing away with Bush’s tax cuts and raising the capital gains tax to 39.5%; and pulling out of Iraq as quickly as he can get the troops packed and loaded on transports. Entirely aside from the merits of these positions, since a good half the country is firmly opposed to tax increases, and a significant number of people regard unconditional retreat as a national security disaster, how would attempting to achieve either one of these goals move us beyond or above the bitter partisanship of the past decades? How would either inviting Rev. Wright to the White House, or pointedly refusing to invite him, contribute to bi-racial good feeling?

I wouldn’t yet say that Obama is The Manchurian Candidate, but on the other hand I don’t think it’s paranoid or out of order to pay more attention to “where he’s coming from,” Manchuria or not.

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One of the contradictions in the defense of “diversity” at many institutions is that those same institutions often practice the opposite of what they preach, sponsoring racially and ethnically separate dorms, clubs, graduation ceremonies, and even academic majors (Black Studies, Chicano Studies, etc.).

You might think that one place where such officially sanctioned racially exclusive activities would no longer be permitted is the University of Michigan, after the passage in 2006 of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. But if you did, you’d be wrong.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—For graduating students, sharing the pomp and circumstance of spring commencement with some 30,000 people is a great thrill. But for a number of students, it is equally, if not more, rewarding to be recognized for their accomplishments during smaller events that—although open to all—celebrate diverse groups at the University.

In recent and upcoming days the Black Celebratory, La Celebración Latina, the Native American Student Association Graduation, the Lavender Graduation, the Ginsberg Awards for Service and Social Action, among others, honor graduating students in venues that allow for more individualized recognition of their achievements.

“The en masse celebration of commencement is an occasion to be remembered at U-M, but through these smaller events we seek to recognize the uniqueness of diverse groups, and to honor their academic success and contributions in a more personal way,” said John Matlock, associate vice provost for academic affairs and director, Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives ( OAMI ).

Also held earlier this month were the Rosalie Ginsberg Awards for Service and Social Action and the 29th Michigan Leadership Awards Ceremony. The Ginsberg event recognized U-M and local partners for their commitments to community service and social action....

Provost Teresa Sullivan and Vice President for Student Affairs E. Royster Harper recognized student leaders, organizations and programs during the April 3 Michigan Leadership Awards ceremony. Each year the Division of Student Affairs recognizes exemplary achievement by students who exhibit enthusiasm and initiative, and who provide formal or informal leadership and service to the University community. Also recognized are those who demonstrate a steadfast commitment to learning, education and living, in support of the quest for social justice in human relationships. A student organization is recognized at the event for providing a program that enhances the community and its institutional values, and by fostering student involvement....

At Michigan, apparently, racial/ethnic/sexual identity is an accomplishment in itself, worth celebrating.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Say What? (6) | TrackBacks (0)

I have added an UPDATE to my Emendations Upon Clarifications (Of Obama on Affirmative Action).

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As I discussed here, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a terrific piece two days ago by Kevin Ferris. Today, perhaps in a misguided attempt to be balanced, it ran an atrocious one by George Curry on the “Continuing relevance of affirmative action.”

Before I discuss Curry’s article, however, I can’t resist telling you more than you want to know about “currying favor.” (If I had an editor, he would make me cut this as too snarky and not really relevant. But I don’t. If you insist on reading edited articles, go get a newspaper.) Here’s how the dictionary built into the Apple operating system, based on the Oxford New American Dictionary, explains the term:

curry favor ingratiate oneself with someone through obsequious behavior: a wimpish attempt to curry favor with the new bosses. [ORIGIN: alteration of Middle English curry favel, from the name ( Favel or Fauvel) of a chestnut horse in a 14th-cent. French romance who became a symbol of cunning and duplicity; hence ‘to rub down Favel’ meant to use the cunning that he personified.]

Curry criticizes both Obama’s and Clinton’s comments on affirmative action in the recent Philadelphia debate, charging against both of them that they were in such “a rush to show how concerned they are about poor whites, they failed to accurately define the issue.”

The accurate definition, according to Curry, taken from an old and now no doubt discarded U.S. Civil Rights Commission definition, is

any measure ... which permits the consideration of race, national origin, sex and disability, along with other criteria, and which is adopted to provide opportunities to a class of qualified individuals who have either historically or actually been denied those opportunities, and to prevent the reoccurrence of discrimination in the future.

the needs of impoverished whites should be addressed. However, they are not covered by affirmative action and could be helped by antipoverty measures. The presidential debate provided further proof that most of the confusion over affirmative action is because it is too often mis-defined.

(1) The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.... [Emphasis added]

Curry did not refer to President Kennedy’s earlier Executive Order 10925, but if he had he would have found that it embodied the same, now abandoned principle.

WHEREAS discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin is contrary to the Constitutional principles and policies of the United States; and

WHEREAS it is the plain and positive obligation of the United States Government to promote and ensure equal opportunity for all qualified persons, without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin, employed or seeking employment with the Federal Government and on government contracts; and

WHEREAS it is the policy of the executive branch of the Government to encourage by positive measures equal opportunity for all qualified persons within the Government....

He is surely right that affirmative action has come, for most people, to be synonymous with preferential treatment based on race, but that is because the original meaning has been butchered by those, like Curry, who have “mis-defined” it.

Finally, Curry doesn’t know whether to justify affirmative action primarily as a remedy for past discrimination or a prophylactic against discrimination in the future. So he does both. He quoted, recall, a definition that justified affirmative action in part because it is necessary “to prevent the reoccurrence of discrimination in the future,” and he also asserted:

If people were discriminated against based on their race or sex, then it stands to reason that remedies should be race- and sex-sensitive.

Discrimination is and should be addressed by enforcing anti-discrimination laws, not by practicing preventive discrimination.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

... that newspapers in major cities can be fair if they put their mind to it.

The Lincoln Journal-Star published a Q&A about the proposed Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative that is fair, balanced, and neutral.

What a shame such coverage is so rare.

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Several posts below (here) I discussed Obama’s comments on affirmative action in the recent Philadelphia debate, finding them a continuation of the obfuscatory waffling I’d criticized in earlier posts cited there. Two close observers I highly respect, however, Mickey Kaus and Roger Clegg, were far more optimistic (I discussed their views in UPDATES to my recent post), as was Chet Zarko, a frequent commenter here whose views I also respect (in this comment to the above post).

So, I’ve continued to think about what he said, and continued to wonder what he meant, and I have the following additional thoughts.

First, let me quote exactly what Obama said in its entirety, since what he actually said may present a clue as to what his position is. (Or, in the alternative, he may have no position, or a position, or preference, completely at variance with what he said, but let’s worry about that later.)

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Obama, last May we talked about affirmative action, ad you said at the time that affluent African Americans like your daughters should probably be treated as pretty advantaged when they apply to college, and that poor white children -- kids -- should get special consideration, affirmative action.

So, as president, how specifically would you recommend changing affirmative action policies so that affluent African Americans are not given advantages, and poor, less affluent whites are?

SENATOR OBAMA: Well, I think that the basic principle that should guide discussions not just on affirmative action but how we are admitting young people to college generally is, how do we make sure that we’re providing ladders of opportunity for people? How do we make sure that every child in America has a decent shot in pursuing their dreams?

And race is still a factor in our society. And I think that for universities and other institutions to say, you know, we’re going to take into account the hardships that somebody has experienced because they’re black or Latino or because they’re women --

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Even if they’re wealthy?

SENATOR OBAMA: I think that’s something that they can take into account, but it can only be in the context of looking at the whole situation of the young person. So if they look at my child and they say, you know, Malia and Sasha, they’ve had a pretty good deal, then that shouldn’t be factored in. On the other hand, if there’s a young white person who has been working hard, struggling, and has overcome great odds, that’s something that should be taken into account.

So I still believe in affirmative action as a means of overcoming both historic and potentially current discrimination, but I think that it can’t be a quota system and it can’t be something that is simply applied without looking at the whole person, whether that person is black or white or Hispanic, male or female.

What we want to do is make sure that people who have been locked out of opportunity are going to be able to walk through those doors of opportunity in the future.

I’m still not persuaded. He notes that “race is still a factor in our society” and concludes from that that universities and other institutions should “take into account the hardships that somebody has experienced because they’re black or Latino or because they’re women....” Thus the crucial question here is whether or not admissions officers, employers, contract officers, etc., are entitled to view race as a proxy for having endured hardship.

Obama tries to say no by saying “it” (presumably the preferential treatment afforded by affirmative action) “can’t be something that is simply applied without looking at the whole person, whether that person is black or white or Hispanic, male or female.” But is this position really credible, or even possible?

Let’s give Obama and this position the benefit of the doubt by agreeing that it would deprive most rich, privileged, “pretty advantaged” blacks like his daughters from the race preferences they would otherwise surely receive. (Or would it? Don’t many rich blacks also claim that they too suffer slights, indignities, and even some hardships simply by virtue of being black? Would Obama deny those claims?)

But is it reasonable to expect admissions officers etc. to determine which blacks, Latinos, women, etc., have suffered “hardship” because they are black, Latino, women? How would they do so? Wouldn’t a revised, holistic affirmative action of the sort Obama seems to propose inevitably invite the gatekeepers to, de facto, regard race and ethnicity as proxies for hardship? That’s certainly what the “holistic” system at UCLA seems to be doing (see cites in previous post). Isn’t that in effect what the University of Michigan undergraduate admissions did, albeit in the name of promoting “diversity,” when it automatically awarded 20 points to every black applicant? Does Obama think that was wrong? (Hillary certainly didn’t. She signed a brief with other Democratic senators supporting those automatic points.) Would he have thought it wrong if it had awarded only 10 points?

I believe, in short, that Obama’s plan (insofar as what he said in Philadelphia represents a plan) would encourage preferentialists to continue awarding preference points for race, and that the only “change” this would represent would be that race would now be regarded as a proxy for “enduring hardship” instead of “providing ‘diversity.’”

In fact, Obama’s move away from “diversity”-justified preferences would run into a serious legal obstacle, at least until he manages to appoint some justices and judges who, like him, do not believe in colorblind equal treatment. As Roger Clegg has noted recently on an email list I read, and in fact as all lawyers involved in affirmative action know (except, perhaps, former Harvard Law Review editor Obama), the courts have pretty much restricted the use of race preferences to the purpose of promoting “diversity.” Thus, when Obama says affirmative action is still needed “as a means of overcoming both historic and potentially current discrimination,” he is advocating something that is not now currently permitted. And isn’t advocating special treatment as a presumed remedy for “potentially current discrimination” that has not actually occurred, that only “potentially” may be occuring, isn’t that going a bit far for liberals who usually demand the occurrence of crime before imposing punishment?

Finally, one other large obstacle I see is not so much with Obama’s “plan” as with Obama himself. Insofar as what he proposes would move any distance at all away from more or less automatic race preferences, it would to that degree reduce the number of minorities preferentially admitted to selective universities. Faced with that possibility, the civil rights establishment can be confidently predicted to object forcefully. What is the basis for believing that Obama will have the fortitude to stand up to the pressure he will receive from his most loyal supporters? On what other major issue has he gone against a major power center in his party, or even proposed doing so in the future?

In other words, I’m afraid I see Obama’s version of affirmative action as just another rhetorical smokescreen of proposing that we mend it, not end it, with no real mending being offered. The Clintons should recognize this as a substance-less political feint worthy of themselves.

UPDATE

I don’t usually find myself agreeing with the Washington Post’s (and MSNBC’s) Eugene Robinson, but in a rare outburst of good judgment he agrees with me about Obama’s Philly debate affirmative action comments:

... Obama threatened to make news, but didn't quite, when the subject turned to affirmative action. He walked to the brink of a clear declaration that all affirmative action programs taking race into account should also have to consider income — but didn't take the leap.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:25 PM | Permalink | Say What? (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Read Kevin Ferris’s superb OpEd in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Sadness,” Ferris writes, “is the right response to Barack Obama's now famous riff on small-town America.”

Not because he’s no longer walking on water. The Messiah of Change image started sinking when Obama lied about hearing incendiary comments from his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. The latest “misspeak” just helps confirm that he’s imperfect, like the rest of us. That’s a welcome reminder. After all, we’re awaiting a new administration, not the second coming - of Jesus, JFK or anyone else.

No, what’s really sad is the end of the promise Obama offered from his first appearance on the national stage at the Democratic convention in 2004. There, and in subsequent speeches, was the hint that this was a man who believed in reaching out, who would be fair to all sides, who could respect those with whom he disagreed. Red state or blue. Republican, Democrat or independent.

Even then, however, I noted a fundamental tension between his vision of “One America” (“There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America”) and his continuing support for racial preferences.

As I wrote then, “I approve of Obama’s vision, but I’m not sure he does.”

Now, with Rev. Wright ranting in the background and bitter whites clinging to their racism and xenophobia in the foreground, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t.

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Reader Alex Bensky sends word of this article urging the state of Michigan to do more to ensure that more “Disadvantaged Business Enterprises” (aka DBEs, aka firms owned or apparently owned by minorities) get state contracts for highway construction.

We should all applaud this effort, as does Alex, who writes:

I can tell you, John, I’m with them on this one. My car runs better, my tires roll faster, and the road seems wider when I know I’m driving over pavement constructed by a representative cross-section of Michigan’s population.

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In what seems to be my current role as extinguisher of all optimism falsely generated by seemingly deviationist comments on race by Democrats, I have UPDATEd this post on Obama’s preference waffle in Philly once again.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m always looking for new arguments supporting racial, ethnic, gender preferences, arguments, that is, that oppose requiring the state to treat all individuals “without regard” to their race.

New arguments like that are hard to find, but here’s an amusing one by Dana Goldstein in Tapped, the group blog of The American Prospect.

Passing the state civil rights initiatives that may be on the ballots of several states next fall, she writes,

would outlaw state programs that help women and minority business owners apply for government contracts, as well as after-school programs that introduce girls of color to science and technology careers.

Finally, it’s simply not true that the civil rights initiatives, if passed, would “would outlaw state programs that help women and minority business owners apply for government contracts.” All they would outlaw are any programs that exclude men or whites or Asians, etc., from such help.

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Regular readers will know that I have criticized Obama’s various pronouncements on affirmative action as waffling obfuscation, muddled, lacking any commitment to his own announced vision, to name a few of my reservations.

Thus I was quite interested in his attempt at clarifying his views last night in the Philadelphia debate with Sen. Clinton.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Obama, last May we talked about affirmative action, ad you said at the time that affluent African Americans like your daughters should probably be treated as pretty advantaged when they apply to college, and that poor white children -- kids -- should get special consideration, affirmative action.

So, as president, how specifically would you recommend changing affirmative action policies so that affluent African Americans are not given advantages, and poor, less affluent whites are?

SENATOR OBAMA: Well, I think that the basic principle that should guide discussions not just on affirmative action but how we are admitting young people to college generally is, how do we make sure that we’re providing ladders of opportunity for people? How do we make sure that every child in America has a decent shot in pursuing their dreams?

And race is still a factor in our society. And I think that for universities and other institutions to say, you know, we’re going to take into account the hardships that somebody has experienced because they’re black or Latino or because they’re women --

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Even if they’re wealthy?

SENATOR OBAMA: I think that’s something that they can take into account, but it can only be in the context of looking at the whole situation of the young person. So if they look at my child and they say, you know, Malia and Sasha, they’ve had a pretty good deal, then that shouldn’t be factored in. On the other hand, if there’s a young white person who has been working hard, struggling, and has overcome great odds, that’s something that should be taken into account.

So I still believe in affirmative action as a means of overcoming both historic and potentially current discrimination, but I think that it can’t be a quota system and it can’t be something that is simply applied without looking at the whole person, whether that person is black or white or Hispanic, male or female.

What we want to do is make sure that people who have been locked out of opportunity are going to be able to walk through those doors of opportunity in the future.

For those of you who are still not sure you’ve got a firm grip on Obama’s opposition to/support for racial preferences, you might re-take the quiz I suggested you take after reading his equally clarifying interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here’s the quiz, as relevant now as then:

1. Does Obama believe it is wrong to burden some and benefit others because of their race? Always? Usually? Sometimes? Never?

2. Are “qualities such as leadership, motivation, teamwork, and ability to effectively communicate” found primarily among disadvantaged blacks? If race were not a factor, would placing more weight on those qualities increase the proportion of blacks who are admitted to selective colleges?

3. How can affirmative action programs that treat race in a preferential manner be “properly structured” so that they give additional opportunities to blacks without “without diminishing opportunities for white [or Asian] students”?

4. What is the nature of the “diversity” provided by blacks and Latinos in math and science, and why is it important?

5. How would “a scholarship program for minorities interested in getting advanced degrees in these fields ... broaden the pool of talent that we need to prosper in the new economy” more than a scholarship program that was not racially restrictive? If such a program were racially restrictive, why would it not “keep white [and Asian] students out of such programs” who could not attend without a scholarship?

6. Does Obama believe [as I’ve already asked, here and here] that all minority applicants who, like his daughters, “are pretty advantaged” should receive no preferential treatment?

7. Would Obama award preferences to those “who are still struggling, ... who are in the middle class [but] may be first-generation as opposed to fifth- or sixth-generation college attendees” only if they are “African-American kids,” or would he “take into account” those facts equally for all applicants, regardless of their race?

8. In short, does Obama support or oppose preferences based on race? If he opposes them, why did he make ads opposing their abolition in Michigan?
   

Done? Good. Now you’ll have to grade your own quizzes, since I don’t know the correct answers.

Mickey Kaus, uncharacteristically, gets this one wrong, reading far more “pivot”-possibility into what Obama said than is there and ignoring Obama’s similarly obfuscating earlier comments. He would like to promote “triangulation” by engineering criticism of Obama’s allegedly flexible new position from both Jesse Jackson and Ward Connerly.

I’m no Ward Connerly, but ... see the above and links contained therein.

UPDATE II

Mickey Kaus continues to think that Obama moved farther away from race-based preferences last night than he has in the past:

Last night, however, he certainly seemed to say race would not be a factor at all for “advantaged” blacks like his daughters. (“Shouldn’t be factored in.”) That seems like a further step--a big one. Wiping out the race preference for upper class blacks would in practice wipe out most race preference admissions at elite schools, no? It strikes at the core of the actual, practical race-preference constituency. If Hillary said it, there would be a firestorm from the civil rights lobby, I think.

Stephanopolous then interrupted to ask, “Even if they’re wealthy?” Then:

SENATOR OBAMA: I think that’s something that they can take into account, but it can only be in the context of looking at the whole situation of the young person. So if they look at my child and they say, you know, Malia and Sasha, they’ve had a pretty good deal, then that shouldn’t be factored in. On the other hand, if there’s a young white person who has been working hard, struggling, and has overcome great odds, that’s something that should be taken into account. [Emphasis added]

It seems to me that what Obama is doing is expanding affirmative action, not restricting it in a meaningful way. He acknowledges that taking race into account continues to be useful as a way to combat “potentially current discrimination.” Moreover, as long as race is considered a proxy for hardship, as it would be in practice by the current generation of admissions officers, the best that could be squeezed out of the emanations and penumbra of Obama’s tentative suggestion is something like the new “holistic” admissions program at UCLA, which appears to be little if anything more than racial preferences with a pretty new name. (On UCLA’s “holistic” review, see here, here, here, here, and here.)

Thus the position that Obama seemed to announce (can you tell for sure what he meant?), it seems to me, is no different from what he’s said before, including having the same ambiguity. Kaus also, I believe, misreads Hillary’s comments, writing that “If Hillary said [what Obama said], there would be a firestorm from the civil rights lobby, I think.” She didn’t say what Obama said, but what she did say was much more at variance with her earlier statements than his statements were. As Peter Schmidt notes on a Chronicle of Higher Education blog:

Asked by Mr. Stephanopolous whether she supported the sort of approach advocated by Mr. Obama, Ms. Clinton said, “Here’s the way I’d prefer to think about it,” and then gave an answer that did not touch on the issue of race-conscious admissions policies. “We’ve got to have affirmative action generally to try to give more opportunities to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds — whoever they are,” she said. She then described such affirmative action as support for early childhood education and universal pre-kindergarten, scrapping the No Child Left Behind law as it is currently operating in favor of other approaches to improving elementary and secondary education, and various steps to make college more affordable, including the expansion of aid programs.

Ms. Clinton has not been as reticent to take up the issue in the past. In a question and answer session with The Chronicle last fall, she said she “will support strong and sensible affirmative action” — but not quotas — and said she was “distressed” by recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions striking down the race-conscious student-assignment policies many public school systems use to promote integration.

UPDATE III [18 April]

“Ever the optimist,” as he says, Roger Clegg takes encouragement from Dems wherever he can find it:

... I’m heartened that neither candidate was jumping up and down to defend racial preferences.

Obama asserted, “I still believe in affirmative action,” but it sounds pretty watered down: Race might get you a preference, but only if it’s part of an overall picture of disadvantage, so that poor whites also get it and rich blacks do not. Clinton’s follow-up endorsed only need-based affirmative action, saying nothing at all in favor of the race-based variety.

A good antidote to any doubt about my, well, pessimism was provided, as some of you may recall, by the director of admissions at the University of Chicago, whose response to Obama’s earlier comments about his daughters’ “probably” not deserving preferences I discussed here last October:

Not long ago I noted, twice (here and here), that Barack Obama had opened the door to an interesting discussion about racial preference by saying that when his two daughters applied to college they “probably” should not be given any preferential treatment because they are “pretty advantaged.”

Of course no one took advantage of that opening by asking whether Obama really opposed preferential treatment for all minorities who could be regarded as “advantaged,” and what might have been a fruitful discussion never happened. Now comes Theodore O’Neill, the director of admissions at the University of Chicago, who not only did not walk through the door Obama at least partially opened; he actually slammed it shut. [HatTip to anonymous University of Chicago graduate]

A few months ago, black presidential hopeful Barack Obama, a former U of C lecturer, told George Stephanopoulos that he didn’t think his daughters should be treated differently in the college admissions process from any other “advantaged” kids. But Mr. O’Neill disagrees. He would give the Obama girls “a break” anyway: “Those children, for all their privileges, will have interesting things to say about American society based on what I’m assuming their experiences are.”

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You will noticed the ad in the right column, seeking signature gatherers for the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative. To see why you should volunteer, read the post immediately below. To find out more, click on the ad and send an inquiry.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At their best, liberals have defended free speech for those with whom they disagree; defended the rights of workers to organize even when they didn’t like the unions the workers were likely to choose; and defended voter registration drives even if they suspected the newly registered voters would support candidates the liberals opposed. Liberalism, that is, has in the past been as concerned with fair and democratic procedures as with politically appealing, i.e., Democratic, results. Now that sort of liberalism has, alas, been largely displaced by a results-oriented partisanship, famously derided by one of the founders of the ACLU, Roger Baldwin, as “civil liberties for our side only.”

Take Missouri (Please!). I have already discussed at length how Robin Carnahan, the Democratic Secretary of State, and Jay Nixon, the Democratic Attorney General, have engaged in massively outrageous and illegal conduct in an attempt, unsuccessful so far, to block the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative from getting on the ballot. But enough about that.

Sometimes, as now, what Democratic office holders and their acolytes in the big newspapers (in this case, the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the Kansas City Star) don’t do and don’t say is far worse than what they do and say. As I write, right now, they are doing nothing and saying nothing while the organized defenders of racial preferences are importing and paying to thugs to intimidate, disrupt, and prevent supporters of the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative from gathering the signatures necessary to place that discrimination-banning measure on the ballot.

An acquaintance who prefers not to be names emails from the Missouri battlefield:

If you have never seen a blocking operation, it involves individuals who are opposed to the initiative setting up shop adjacent to petition circulators and doing everything possible to keep citizens from signing the petitions being circulated.

The strategy of our opponents is to keep us off the ballot. By Any Means Necessary made it very clear when we started this campaign that such would be their approach. They are now even more aggressive, often sending out three and four physically intimidating individuals to threaten our circulators. In addition, they are sabotaging our efforts by falsely signing petitions.

Democratic secretary of state Robin Carnahan, charged with what is normally the routine certification of ballot measures, instead went to work on this one, eliminating its straightforward language, derived from that of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and substituting wording that pleads the other side’s case. The question, as she wanted to pose it to voters, was whether to amend the state’s constitution to “ban affirmative action programs designed to eliminate discrimination against, and improve opportunities for, women and minorities in public contracting, employment and education.” So egregious was this subterfuge that a liberal county circuit judge took the unprecedented step of throwing out Carnahan’s rewrite and reinstating the original language almost intact.

Still, as [Ward] Connerly observes, “all the forces of the Left are converging in Missouri—Acorn and the rest of the race industry, the feminists, the unions, the contractors who feed off this stuff—and George Soros is providing a lot of the funding. They’re enlisting the whole vast left-wing conspiracy—and, believe me, it’s a lot vaster than the supposed right-wing one.” The ugliness is most evident on the streets, where supporters of the ballot initiative are busy gathering signatures. Opponents’ chief tactic is to use “blockers”—often burly union men—to shadow signature gatherers and scare off potential signers by charging not only that the initiative is racist and has the support of the Ku Klux Klan, but also that the signers risk identity theft. In addition, the pro-preferences sources have dispatched their people to sign petitions with false names and addresses, so that they will be invalidated later.

Meanwhile, we can do two things. First, take comfort in what produces this thuggish behavior from opponents of colorblind equality: they know that they would lose if citizens are given the opportunity to vote for or against race preferences. They can’t win an election, so they choose to try to prevent it, By Any Means Necessary.

Second, you, or anyone you know or can enlist, can volunteer to go to Missouri right now (the deadline for submission is May 4) and gather signatures. And you can do well by doing good: earn up to $1000 a week for the next several weeks!

Click on the ad in the column on the right if you’re interested.

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How odd. Barack Obama, whose whole appeal rests on his eloquent speeches, who said not long ago

It's true I give a good speech. What can I do? Nothing wrong with that?

It’s not becoming for a candidate who’s done so little but said so much about what he will do to complain when people actually pay attention to what he says, especially what he says when he thinks no one outside his circle is listenting. If they weren’t transfixed by his words, they might pay more attention to the disconnect between a politician on the far left of his party promising (once he’s elected) to make common cause with those across the aisle, between a self-identified black candidate who refuses to disown the most radical (“U.S. of KKK A,” etc.) elements of his black support who promises to transcend race even as he describes small-town whites as too bitter, angry, frustrated, fearful, cynical (take you pick) to know where their true interests lie.

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No, this post isn’t really about backbone on Madison Avenue. If it were, I would have already written too much, since that would be shortest post ever written. Instead, what follows is about lack of backbone on Madison Avenue.

By way of preface, I’ve written before (here and here), about two years ago, about a witch hunt “diversity probe” of New York ad agencies by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights, which was shocked that right there in diversity city there weren’t more minorities working in the big advertising firms.

Now, as I mentioned in the first “here” above, there was what would have seemed to some observers to be a problem with the Human Rights Commission’s hounding of the ad agencies. This is the only regulation that would seem to give it any jurisdiction:

§8-107 Unlawful discriminatory practices. 1. Employment. It shall be an unlawful discriminatory practice:
(a) For an employer or an employee or agent thereof, because of the actual or perceived age, race, creed, color, national origin, gender, disability, marital status, sexual orientation or alienage or citizenship status of any person, to refuse to hire or employ or to bar or to discharge from employment such person or to discriminate against such person in compensation or in terms, conditions or privileges of employment.

Hmm, that’s funny. I’ve re-read this provision several times, but I can’t find in it any requirement for an employer to have a “diverse” workforce, whatever that might mean. On the contrary, if words have meaning (an increasingly doubtful proposition, I suppose), I think “any person” who was not hired because of his or her race would have a strong cause of action.

Shhh! Do you hear that loud whooshing noise? That’s the collective sigh of relief uttered by DISCRIMINATIONS readers worldwide who’ve just learned that those brave souls on Madison Avenue resisted having dread quotas imposed on them.

One such relieved reader was the estemed Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, who sent me the following email (quoted with permission):

No Quotas Here!

Headline in today’s New York Times: “Madison Ave. Charts Some Progress in Meeting Diversity Hiring Goals.” I was a little concerned by the headline. These “goals” have been set by 15 ad agencies, and we are always told by the diversity industry that no employer uses racial quotas these days, because everyone knows they are illegal. But is there any way that these goals might turn out to be quotas?

The goals were expressed in terms of percentages of new hires who were black, Hispanic or Asian-American. …[T]he15 agencies had hoped that 18 percent of the total managerial and professional employees they hired last year would be minorities, and the actual percentage was higher, at 25 percent.

But no quotas, I guess — that would be illegal.

Only one agency, Merkley & Partners, part of the Omnicom Group, missed both its goals, while four others — three of them also owned by Omnicom — missed one goal each. Omnicom executives said that in some cases, the goals were missed because there were no hires, period, in the categories in question.

But no mention of illegal quotas, thank goodness!

The 15 agencies accepted the reporting process as part of a binding agreement [with the New York City Human Rights Commission] reached in September 2006 with 16 of them. They also agreed they could be punished with fines for failing to achieve more diversity in the hiring of senior employees.

But that doesn’t make a goal a quota, of course, because that would be illegal.

Under the terms of the deal with the commission, the agencies said they would hire outside consultants if they did not meet their goals.

That doesn’t make the goal a quota either. I finished the article. Nope, no quotas here.

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I was beginning to wonder what they’d done with Michelle, but yesterday she turned up in Indiana, rejecting the elitist label that had been pinned on her husband and herself.

EVANSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - Michelle Obama said Wednesday she is a product of a working-class background and rejected characterizations of her and her husband as elitist....

“I am a product of a working-class background, I am one of those folks who grew up in that struggle. That is the lens through which I see the world,” Michelle Obama told a cheering crowd at Harrison High School, the first stop of a three-city campaign swing ahead of the state’s May 6 primary.

“So when people talk about this elitist stuff, I say, ‘You couldn’t possibly know anything about me.’ So let me give you a better sense of who me and Barack are and why we’re doing this,” she said. [Emphasis added]

Oh. So they don’t cling to religion, guns, and disliking people not like them because they’re bitter. They do it because they’re cynical and fearful.

Glad we got that straightened out.

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Perhaps New York Times editors and reporters, bitter over impending layoffs caused by declining numbers of newspaper readers and ad revenues and hence clinging to comfortable ideological bromides, cannot resist disparaging those who are different from themselves. Or perhaps being fair and balanced (forget about objective) is so counter to the corporate culture there that they cannot help themselves.

But whatever the contextualizing explanation, there is simply no excuse for the following question that NYT reporter Jeff Zeleny asks in his article today that purports to plumb the depths of the hole dug by Obama’s bitter&cling remarks.

In Pennsylvania, as well as coming primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, did Mr. Obama provide another excuse for white voters to voice qualms about his candidacy without acknowledging that it is his race that troubles them?....

You almost have to feel sorry for these poor white voters. They are victimized by so many forces working against them, not least of which is their stubborn failure to read the New York Times and accept its point of view. Leave aside the editorials; if they would only read news stories like this one by Zeleny they would know what Zeleny knows — that their real reluctance to vote for Obama is his race, not his infatuation with his Farrakhanian pastor, his belief that their religious values and social views derive from the degree of their satisfaction with their jobs, or even his tax policy (white rubes don't have views on tax policy; they only vote their prejudices).

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Opponents of state civil rights initiatives always complain about fraud by initiative supporters, by which they mean petition gatherers describing as a civil rights measure a proposal that would prohibit the state from treating some people better and others worse because of their race . Yesterday I reported (here) that there really does seem to have been fraud in Colorado ... committed by the initiative’s opponents.

Today another example of fraud on the part of the civil rights initiative’s opponents in Colorado has come to light.

For the second time in as many days, opponents of a citizen-led civil rights initiative are facing allegations that they manufactured voter fraud allegations. The latest dust up: A Democrat state legislative aide who had claimed to be a victim of voter fraud saw her complaint dismissed after state officials learned that she was not a registered voter.

On February 26, Chloe Johnson filed a complaint with Secretary of State Mike Coffman’s office alleging that she was tricked into supporting Amendment 46, also known as the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, a ballot effort designed to end race and gender preferences in government hiring, education, and contracting. The complaint was formally dismissed by the state’s Office of Administrative Courts because Johnson never registered to vote.
....
Under Colorado law you must be a registered voter in order to sign a petition. According to Rich Coolidge, Coffman’s spokesman, “If you know you aren’t registered, then you have perjured yourself by signing a petition.”

The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any group or individual on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public contracting, or public education.

Turns out she really didn’t want to prevent discrimination everywhere. In any event, “[m]ore than six weeks after lodging her complaint, Johnson is still not a registered voter....”

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The new University of California admissions statistics are now out, and UCLA is pleased as punch to announce that the “holistic” system it devised to admit more blacks and Hispanics (and, correspondingly, fewer Asians and whites) actually admitted more blacks and Hispanics and fewer Asians and whites.

The University of California system as a whole released a truck load of data, including the number of admits by ethnicity. Unless I missed it, however, no data was released revealing the ratio of admits to applications by race and ethnicity. That is, from this massive data dump it is still impossible to compare (unless I missed it, in which case someone will quickly set me straight) the percentage of white or Asian applicants who were offered admission to the percentage of black or Hispanic applicants who were offered admission. I wonder why?

Nevertheless, the information contained in this data is sufficient to dispel a number of myths. For example, take a look at this chart showing the freshman admits at each campus of the university system from Fall 1997 (the last class admitted under the racially preferential system barred, in theory, by Prop. 209) through the class just admitted for Fall 2008. It reveals, contrary to what supporters of race preferences argue in each state where they are threatened with extinction by civil rights initiatives, that the number and proportion of “underrepresented minorities” is greater now than it was in 1997 at seven of the nine campuses of the university system (not counting Merced, which did not exist in 1997). At UCLA, along with Berkeley one of the two most selective, the Fall 2008 proportion of “underrepresented minorities” is 19.4%, compared with 21.2% in 1997. At un-holistic Berkeley, the Fall 2008 proportion is 17.7%, compared to 25.2% in 1997.

Now take a look at this chart showing the freshman admits by race and ethnicity for the system as a whole. It may have the most surprising data of all. Again comparing 1997, the last classes admitted under preferential admissions, with Fall 2008, we find the following:

• the proportion of white admits fell from 40.8% to 34.4%

• the proportion of Asian admits rose from 33% to 34%

• the proportion of URM admits rose from 18.6% to 25.1%.

These statistics do raise at least one question they don’t answer: since whites are now 43% of the California population but only 34.4% of the entering freshmen in the University of California system next fall, why are they not categorized as an “underrepresented minority”?

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James Taranto makes a very good point:

Underlying [Obama’s] criticism is a curious normative premise: that the nonaffluent ought to prioritize their material interests over moral and cultural concerns. “Workers of the world, unite!” meets “The Virtue of Selfishness.”

Unlike Ayn Rand, Feingold and Obama see selfishness as a virtue only for bitter-off cultural conservatives. The well-heeled San Francisco Democrats Obama addressed on Friday stand to pay much higher taxes if he is elected. Many of them no doubt back Obama because they like his liberal positions on subjects like guns, abortion and same-sex marriage. If you think Obama criticized their priorities, we’ve got some change you can believe in. In Barack Obama’s America, rich people who vote on cultural issues rather than economic self-interest are principled and self-sacrificing. People of more modest means who do so are credulous and bitter. [Emphasis added]

When Feingold and Obama refer dismissively to cultural and moral issues, it is not because they do not take those issues seriously. It is because they would rather not take seriously the arguments on the other side. It is much less intellectually demanding, as well as flattering to oneself and those San Francisco Democrats, to caricature opposing positions as the products of poverty, ignorance and bitterness.

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Not long ago I discussed (here) the predictable charges of “fraud” emerging in Colorado by people stepping forward to claim that they were duped into signing a petition for the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative. The assumed, they claimed, that the initiative was in favor of civil rights and opposed discrimination only to discover to their horror that it in fact ... supported civil rights and opposed discrimination. (They hadn’t realized, they claimed, that it would bar all affirmative action based on race or gender preferences.)

In my earlier post I discussed in particular the claims of one Dara Burwell, whose claims were also treated with more respect than they deserved in a New York Times article that was nevertheless more fair than most.

Now comes an enterprising blogger/reporter in Colorado who has done the research that the New York Times should have done. Face The State (“Colorado’s Front Page”) has found that there might well have been some fraud in Colorado ... by Ms. Burwell, who, it turns out, “is a longtime liberal activist with ties to multiple organizations promoting” race preferences, etc. It is also far from clear, FTS points out, that Ms. Burwell even signed the petition.

On April Fool’s Day she spoke at a widely covered press conference alleging that she was “misled” into signing the petition under false pretenses.

But as FTS has learned, Burwell is not one of the three individuals who filed formal complaints with [Secretary of State Mike] Coffman's office....

Burwell is alleging fraud based on the fact that the young black man who approached her for support of the initiative said it would help minorities. She maintains that he was being deceitful because he didn’t indicate that the initiative would explicitly ban race and gender preferences in state government.

“Given what he said, the language of the petition and also our shared experience as black people in this country, I believed myself to be signing a pro-affirmative action measure,” she told the Rocky Mountain News. “I signed the petition, handed it back to him and in turn he gave me a flier to a hip-hop event — which I felt was further confirmation of that recognition of shared experience.”

As FTS has learned, however, Burwell is very knowledgeable about diversity issues in Colorado, having been a leader in the state’s pro-Affirmative Action movement. A 2004 “Focus on Diversity” newsletter, published by the University of Colorado’s Office of Diversity and Equity, recognized Burwell as “an advocate of underrepresented communities, and for her work with the WRC [Women’s Resource Center] and the University of Colorado Student Union.” In 2003, she was named a CU “Equity & Excellence Award” recipient.

In 2006, Burwell served as a spokeswoman for 9to5, the “National Association of Working Women,” advocating a raise to Colorado’s minimum wage. She is now employed by Sixth Sun Consulting, a Denver firm that specializes in diversity training, according to its web site. The firm has a motto of “Internal Revolution. Organization Evolution.” Specific services advertised include “anti-oppression consulting and training,” “Reiki Energy Work,” “Transformative Coaching,” and “Enneagram Instruction.”

When asked by FTS how someone so knowledgeable about race and gender-related issues could be tricked into signing the initiative, Burwell said she “didn’t associate that [ballot] language with terminating any equal opportunity programs.” [Links omitted]

Thus her own behavior may well be the fraud that she’s complaining about.

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Dick Polman, the celebrated Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, offers a plague on both their houses analysis of cling-gate on his blog.

He scores some points against Obama ... and Clinton ... and McCain, but there’s a lesson here other judgmental reporters should heed: if you’re going to cleverly zing Hillary (or anyone) by humorously (but also snidely) noting that

I half expect to see her marching in the Lehigh Valley, clad in a bowling shirt, with a .12-gauge in one hand and the New Testament in the other, with John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” blasting on a loudspeaker[,]

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATed Twice]

According to an entry in Wikipedia,

A bitters is a preparation of herbs and citrus dissolved in alcohol or glycerine with a bitter or bittersweet flavor. The various brands of bitters, once numerous, were formerly manufactured as patent medicines....

Angostura Bitters was first compounded in Venezuela in 1824 by a German physician, who intended it as a remedy for stomach maladies. It was exported to England and to Trinidad, where it came to be used in a number of cocktails following its medicinal use by the British Navy in Pink Gin. Angostura and similar gentian bitters preparations are still of some value to settle a mild case of nausea, and is used to stimulate the appetite, either for food or cocktails. It is used in both apéritifs and digestifs, and will settle one’s stomach before a meal, or before undertaking a night of drinking....

By focusing on the “bitter,” however, the mainstream press and the Clinton campaign have missed the point.

Clinton’s campaign has launched a widespread effort on this issue. At a rally former president Clinton held in rural North Carolina yesterday, aides handed out “We’re not bitter” stickers to voters.

no one took offense because he said the small towners are “frustrated” by “economic distress.” He offended them — and many others — because he said that they “cling” to religion and guns and nativism and opposition to affirmative action and gay marriage, etc., etc., because of their frustration. People without those frustrations, presumably people who had been well taken care of by a benevolent Washington, wouldn’t “cling” to such benighted views. In ObamaLand, which is just a province of LiberalLand, people do not oppose race preferences, illegal immigration, etc., if they are not angry and frustrated because of economic distress.

Specifically, he regards the views of these Pennsylvanians as epiphenomena--byproducts of economic stagnation--in a way he doesn’t regard, say, his own views as epiphenomena.** Once the Pennsylvanians get some jobs back, they’ll change and become as enlightened as Obama [&] the San Franciscans to whom he was talking. That’s the clear logic of his argument. Superiority of this sort — not crediting the authenticity and standing of your subject’s views — is a violation of social equality, which is a more important value for Americans than money equality....

**--You might argue that this was the same ‘it-will-go-away’ attitude Obama had toward the anger of parishioners of Rev. Wrights’s church — which would reinforce the “he condescends to everyone” theory of Obama. But the parallel isn’t there. Obama describes ongoing black anger about racism as an artifact of racism — it’s an epiphenomenon only in the sense that it will eventually disappear when its legitimate cause disappears. Obama describes white anger — indeed white anger, white racism, white religiosity, white NRA membership and white opposition to comprehensive immigration reform — as an artifact of something unrelated, namely the loss of good industrial jobs. It’s fundamentally inauthentic, Obama suggests, because (unlike black anger) it isn’t caused by what those who express it say it is caused by.

And Obama never describes his own views as the products of anything except an accurate perception of reality. Come to think of it, has he ever expressed any doubt about — let alone apologized for — his views? He certainly didn’t apologize in his “race” speech. He presents himself as near ominscient, the Archimedian point from which everyone else’s beliefs and behavior can be assessed and explained, and to which almost everyone’s beliefs will revert after the revolution. ... sorry, I mean after President Obama has restored hope!

So, this is where I think we are now on the Obama Express:

• The biracial, post-racial candidate who promises to bridge the bitter racial gap and bring us all together refuses to abandon his association with a Farrakhanian mentor who spews hate-filled, anti-white, anti-American rhetoric. And as if this weren’t enough, he implies that demands that he abandon those who hold these views is implicitly racist because these views are so pervasive in the black community that he would be abandoning blacks altogether if he did so. Why, I wonder, was it regarded as racist for Bill Clinton to compare Obama to Jesse Jackson? Jackson, at least, has never argued that blacks and whites have such fundamentally opposed views of the value of their country.

• The calm, cool, collected candidate who says we should ignore his lack of experience because of his more important qualities of judgment and leadership exerted no leadership in his own congregation, where he no doubt could have had a great deal of influence. His passivity allowed defamatory slander against his own country, such as that it invented AIDS to commit genocide against blacks, to go unanswered. He promises “change,” but he’s changed nothing where he could have. Where he had a literal opportunity to “reach across the aisle,” he did not.

• The candidate of “change” appears most interested in changing the values of people who disagree with him. Once he is installed in Washington, misguided small-town souls will shed their bitterness, and along with it their opposition to race preferences, gay marriage, zenophobia, racism, guns, and clinging to religion that were produced by that now abandoned bitterness.

A number of pundits and talking heads have begun comparing “Bitter” Obama with Dukakis’s tank appearance or John Kerry’s voting for the $87 billion before voting against it, but I don’t think these comparisons do Obama justice. What he has accomplished, so far, is a remarkable and impressive synthesis of Adlai Stevenson’s common man folksiness, George McGovern’s political moderation, and Jimmy Carter’s humility and total lack of whiny moralism. They said he couldn’t do that, but Yes He Can!

I doubt that the Obama Express can be derailed. But it’s surely going to have a rough ride after it leaves Denver.

UPDATE

At least one far outpost of the mainstream media understands the difference between what Obama said and what he’s subsequently been saying he said. As Jake Tapper notes on his ABCNews blog, “Obama allies are trying to focus on the “bitter” part alone.”

UPDATE II

After Obama’s race speech, Kaus suggested that we may need to recognize “a second kind of Kinsley Gaffe.” A Kinsley Gaffe, you all recall, is

when a politican says what he or she actually thinks (whether or not it’s the truth)

In Obama’s case, we've already seen (in my post below) that he was merely recycling the argument of Thomas Frank’s book, What’s The Matter With Kansas?, a book that was very popular in Democratic circles.

And even now, in the midst of a bitter ongoing debate over “bitter” and “cling,” one doesn’t have to look far to find agreement with the offensive core of Obama’s condescending assertions. Time magazine, for example, has collected a couple for us.

“Obama used the word ‘bitter’ when he should have said ‘frustrated,’” said Donna Brazile, an undecided Super Delegate who ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000. “Clearly Obama’s comments were ‘unartful,’ but not inaccurate....”

I thought his response in Indiana, in which he reemphasized the point he was making rather than apologize or “clarify” it, was sensible and refreshing.

“I didn’t say it as well as I could have,” Obama told a crowd in Muncie, Indiana, Saturday. Later that same day he told a North Carolina newspaper: “Obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that.” At the same time, Obama refused to repudiate his words, seeking instead to clarify them. “People end up — they don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them,” Obama said. “So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.”

What warmed over Marxist rubbish.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

(You think “Delusional” is too strong? Perhaps you’re right. Substitute “Irrational” or even “Misguided” if you prefer.)

One of the virtues of being late to the feast of devouring Obama’s latest misstep — his condescending dismissal of the rubes in small-town America — is that you all already know what I’m talking about. But just in case you don’t (in case you've been on Mars all weekend or, like me, attending a reunion or something), here’s what the Anointed One said to a group of supporters at a small fundraising gathering in San Francisco, speaking of the frustrated, angry, misguided voters in Pennsylvania (and presumably other) small towns, as reported in a friendly source, The Huffington Post:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama made a problematic judgment call in trying to explain working class culture to a much wealthier audience. He described blue collar Pennsylvanians with a series of what in the eyes of Californians might be considered pure negatives: guns, clinging to religion, antipathy, xenophobia

Why, some of you may be asking, do I describe Obama’s snootily superior view of small-town Americans — he knows how they should be voting, even though they don’t; he knows that their values, though real, are illegitimate, nothing more than irrational responses to hard times — as “frank”? Two reasons.

First, because they are what Mickey Kaus has aptly described as a (Michael) Kinsley Gaffe: “the candidate accidentally says what he really thinks.” Proof that he really believes this, if any proof is needed, is that Obama said the same thing before and after these controversial remarks. Before, in The Speech, when in a widely mis-interpreted passage he recognized that “white anger” over affirmative action, welfare, etc., was real. Those whites are angry, he said, because

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.

In other words, because these misguided, misled souls in small-town Amercan don’t know what’s bad for them, they don’t know what’s good for them. So, Obama’s recent comments were frank because they were an honest statement of what he truly believes, as he told us only a few weeks ago.

If further proof is needed, Obama has just repeated those views in attempting to explain — or as he might say, “contextualize” — them. As he explained to the Winston-Salem Journal:

Sen. Barack Obama said yesterday that he regrets his choice of words when he recently described economically distressed Americans as people who are “bitter” and who “cling to guns or religion.”

But he defended the underlying content of his remarks, which were the subject of blistering attacks yesterday from Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

“Obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” Obama said in a phone interview with the Winston-Salem Journal. “But the underlying truth of what I said remains, which is simply that people who have seen their way of life upended because of economic distress are frustrated and rightfully so.”

And here's my second reason for describing Obama’s analysis as frank; it was undiluted, pure Frank with a capital "F." That is, it was almost a perfect rendition of the pervasive liberal attitude put forth several years ago in a highly popular (in certain circles) book by Thomas Frank, What’s The Matter With Kansas.

Here’s Frank himself describing the essence of the Great Backlash of false consciousness conservatism:

“The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off,” Frank wrote. “Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.”

Like the most vitriolic of right-wing pundits ... , Thomas Frank has a distinctly Manichean worldview. The political universe, for him, is divided between the good guys and the conservatives. The conservatives are further divided between the fools and the knaves. The fools are “the true believers, the average folks who have been driven into right-wing politics by what they see as the tyranny of the lawyers, the America-haters at Harvard, the professional politicians in Washington or the eviction of God from public space.” The knaves are “the opportunists: professional politicians and lawyers and Harvard men who have discovered in the great right-wing groundswell an easy shortcut to realizing their ambitions.”

Frank ... devotes his newest work, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” to explaining this red-state cycle of iniquity, using his native Kansas as the exemplar. Conservative leaders, according to Frank, care only about promoting the concerns of big business, which are inimical to those of the average Midwesterner. But those leaders have cynically seized upon and promoted a sense of cultural grievance and victimhood in order to win over the bumpkins and fool them into voting against their true interests.

Frank’s economics are, of course, debatable — his view that capitalism is “borderline criminality” puts him just a touch outside the mainstream (as does his view that the Democratic Leadership Council is a “hothouse of the right”). But what is most odd is Frank’s refusal to consider the idea that there might be such a thing as legitimate cultural grievances. The only legitimate interests, he believes, are material ones. “By all rights,” he tells us, “the people in Wichita and Shawnee and Garden City should today be flocking to the party of Roosevelt, not deserting it.” But instead, the poor fools have been led astray.

Frank’s book is remarkable as an anthropological artifact. Although not terribly successful at explaining the cultural divide, it manages to exemplify it perfectly in its condescension toward people who don’t vote as Frank thinks they should....

Because it is self-evident to [Obama] that people’s true interests are material ones, it is also self-evident to him that conservatives can only be either deluders or deluded, knaves or fools. Good-faith, intelligent disagreement is ruled out from the beginning....

ADDENDUM

I wonder if Obama actually knows any small-town Americans.

It’s clear that he’s on friendly, personal terms with a number of leftists, not only his Farrakhanian pastor. He breaks bread and has served on a foundation board with ex-weatherman Bill Ayers. Ayers once tried to set a bomb at the Pentagon. Later he told the New York Times that

I don’t regret setting bombs.... I feel we didn’t do enough.

Obama has no shortage of friends on the left, in universities (but I repeat myself), in cities, no doubt in suburbs. But leave aside friends; does he even have a passing acquaintance with any “angry” “frustrated” small-town residents who, he tells us, have been duped into opposing race preferences, people who don’t look like them, abortion, gay marriage ... who, in short, irrationally “cling” to religion and guns?

It seems to me that these people are as alien to him as Rev.Wright and his ilk are to them. How can Obama “bring us together” if he is so clueless about so many of the people who must be brought?

Could someone, please, arrange some introductions?

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If I weren’t a product of both undergraduate and graduate programs at Stanford, I would be critical of this report (“Latinos underrepresented in medical profession”) of quota-mongering at the Stanford Medical School (HatTip to reader Ed Chin). But since I am, I am both ashamed and embarrassed as well as critical.

The Stanford Daily article begins by noting that

Latino Americans only make up five percent of California’s doctors, according to a recent study at UC-San Francisco, though they constitute one-third of the state’s population[,]

Fernando Mendoza, Associate Dean for Minority Advising and Programs at the Stanford School of Medicine, said the lack of diversity within the medical profession can actually reduce the effectiveness of physicians.

“A lot of work has been done that’s shown how physicians communicate with patients and the barriers to that communication,” he said. “Studies have reported that there are biases in health care and that they are quite often unconscious; in order to deal with those unconscious biases, we need to diversify the work force and develop more culturally competent positions.”

But I digress. Let us listen to Dr. Mendoza’s prescription:

In order to increase diversity in the medical school student population, Mendoza ... encourages the admission office to evaluate potential candidates on a broader spectrum of criteria.

“One thing I think is evident,” he said. “We’re well behind the curve and have a long way to go to get the number of Latino physicians up to where they represent the proportion of the general population.

And while we’re speaking of proportional representation (not quotas!), if the goal (not quota!) is for the proportion of doctors who are Latino to reflect the proportion of Latinos in the general population, then Stanford and the remainder of the medical establishment must take some rather dramatic steps to reduce the proportion of admitted medical students and physicians who are Asian or Jewish, since those groups are now substantially “overrepresented” at Stanford and everywhere else.

Weeding out the Jews and Asians, however, can be a tricky business. Asians are usually easy to spot, even where their names are not giveaways, but Jews are not always so obvious. We don’t all have Jewish-sounding names, and many Jewish-sounding names aren’t even Jewish. Nor is photographic evidence, even in profile, completely reliable.

And even if those problems were solved (if Stanford can combat “unconscious bias,” surely it can come up with ways to spot Asians and Jews), what of the “Latino” category itself? Should all of the “Latino” physicians in California be Mexican or Mexican-American, or do Dr. Mendoza and his Stanford colleagues think that, say, Cuban-Americans are “culturally competent” enough to treat Mexicans?

Sorry, but that’s all I have time for right now. I’m off to meet with our accountant re taxes, though now I’m worried that he’s not culturally competent enough to figure out how the tax code applies to us.

UPDATE

Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity has posted this comment on the Stanford Daily’s web site:

Aggressive outreach — casting a wide net--to make sure that you get the best qualified applicants possible, of all colors and socioeconomic backgrounds, is fine. Getting rid of conscious or unconscious bias in selection is fine, too. So is making sure that your selection criteria really produce the best, most qualified students.

But weighing ethnicity to decide which applicants are admitted is not. If you give weight to ethnicity, then you are no longer admitting the best qualified people. That shortchanges future patients--of all national origins.

It is wrong to discriminate in order to ensure that the med school looks like the general population, and it makes no sense to do so. Cultural competence can be taught to doctors of any color. Gentiles and non-Asians have not suffered from the historical “overrepresentation” of Jewish and Asian doctors. A quota is a quota is a quota.

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Michael Lind has an excellent piece in the Guardian opposing race-based affirmative action. (Yes, you read that right, the Guardian.) Read it.

Lind has always been a young man in a hurry — at times, apparently in a hurry to try on the outfits of as many different political persuasions as possible. Reviewing one of his books several years ago, Michael Barone pithily described him as “a young man full of learning, information, humor — and himself.”

Lind is less young now, but that description still seems to fit. To his credit, however, he’s been a consistent critic of government imposed racial classifications and patronage for a number of years, no matter what political hat he was wearing. This latest article continues the tradition, and is especially welcome given the place it appears.

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According to Andrew Kohut, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that people who supported Obama did so in part because he made them feel good about themselves. [HatTip to Jim Geraghty]

His article was titled “That’s What I Like About Me,” and the findings he reports remind me of those bumper stickers proclaiming that “My Child Is An Honor Student At [Whatever] Middle School.” Those bumper stickers are implicitly, or perhaps explicitly, parents patting themselves on the back for a job well done.

At the start of his run for the presidency, Barack Obama would explain the positive reaction he was getting from admirers by saying “this is more about you than about me.” Now that Mr. Obama is the front-running Democratic candidate, an in-depth look at how voters are reacting to him — and the reasons for those reactions — lends considerable credence to his characterization of public opinion....

While Mr. Obama’s positive personal image plays an important role in his high favorable ratings, the polling found that his ratings are more influenced by how he makes voters feel than by specific characteristics they attributed to him. In particular, views that Mr. Obama inspires hope and pride are the strongest determinants of a person’s opinion of him. In other words, he is a charismatic candidate who has made large numbers of Democratic voters feel good, and this is even more important to them than specific perceptions of him.

I can't help but suspect that some people believe that their support of Obama is proof that they're a good person. (How many people believe their Obama bumper sticker irrefutably disproves any accusation of racism?)

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Too Many Asians Hmong Us... has been UPDATED.

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A freshman at the University of North Texas, responding to an earlier article in the school paper, makes a good point regarding

the idea that a diverse faculty is good for exposing students to different ways of thinking. While I agree, a later statement in favor of diversity goes completely against it.

Olivia Sanders states that she needs a professor who understands her background and knows what she needs to do well. From what I can gather, that is saying someone from your background (not a diverse or different one) is the only one who can properly prepare someone for life after college. This is, in my opinion, slightly racist, and, at any rate, it goes against the very ideas of diversity.

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I hesitate to get you even more upset than you already are about the blatant “underrepresentation” of so many groups in so many areas of American life, but you can’t fret about this blight on our democracy as effectively as you should unless you know what I’m about to report to you (based on this report of this report) — that “fewer than 0.5% of the total physician population [of California] is of Cambodian, Loatian, Hmong and Samoan descent.”

And this despite the fact that Asian physicians in general are dramatically “overrepresented” — “About 26% are Asian or Pacific Islander, while 11% of the population is Asian/Pacific Islander.”

Clearly, we need a quota on Asians admitted to medical school so that we can get more ... , well, other Asians into medical school.

ADDENDUM [10 April]

The commonplace rationale for admitting medical students by race is that, as the Report argues,

minority physicians are more likely than other doctors to practice in urban or underserved communities, which helps address health disparities between whites and minorities.

I think the real rationale is closer to this “diversity”-based justification:

the new report says minority doctors are more willing to return to their communities, despite low payment from insurers like Medi-Cal. Moreover, these doctors provide better care because they are comfortable talking to patients with backgrounds similar to their own.

Claire Pomeroy, dean of the University of California-Davis School of Medicine, said that health disparities will persist unless the health work force becomes more representative of the population. She added, “Medicine is not just technical skills, but connections between doctors and patients. Those connections are made by having a diverse work force.”

Medical officials said language barriers can result in miscommunication that leads to medical errors, and cultural differences can interfere with doctor-patient relationships – particularly for recent immigrants and their families.

“The fact is that people many times feel more comfortable and prefer to go to a physician who looks like them because of cultural reasons,” said Rodney Hood, an African-American physician who works in southeast San Diego.

For example, this need for “diversity” would clearly not seem to be equally strong in all specialties. Does a Hispanic with a brain tumor or a broken arm really receive a lower quality of medical care if she is not treated by a Hispanic brain surgeon or orthopedist?

And what about those “overrepresented” Asians (26% of the physicians in California but only 11% of the population)? Don’t we need to know what they do? What if most of them are in research or specialties where their “Asian-ness,” whatever that might be, is not really relevant to the medical care they provide? Maybe Asians physicians are actually “underrepresented” among general practitioners where some believe their Asian identity might help.

If that is the case, the solution to that problem seems obvious. It is the same solution that everyone studiously avoids to the lack of “diversity” in higher education in general: just as black students should be drafted our of historically black colleges and sent to schools in need of the “diversity” they would provide (individual choice long since having been discarded as a liberal principle), so there should be limits (let’s call them “goals” and not “quotas”) set on the number of Asians allowed in certain specialties until the just demands of the “Asian community” are satisfied.

But wait. Even that won’t do, for there is no Asian community. There is instead a Hmong community, a Samoan community, a Japanese community, etc. We will need several new groups of statistics-gatherers and committees to oversee and manage the required racial and ethnich recruitment and assignment procedures.

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Linda Ramirez Sliwinski is a Trustee of the Village of Carpentersville, Illinois. She has received a $75 citation for “disorderly conduct,” and probably won’t stand for reelection.

According to an article in the Chicago Tribune,

Ramirez Sliwinski said she saw two boys climbing a tree next door to her home about 1 p.m. Saturday and asked them to stop. The mother of one of the boys called police after Ramirez Sliwinski referred to the children, ages 8 and 9, as monkeys.

Ramirez Sliwinski, who is Hispanic, was issued a citation alleging that she violated a village ordinance prohibiting disorderly conduct. The ordinance bans conduct that disturbs or alarms people, and one of the boys told police he was scared by Ramirez Sliwinski's comment, Police Cmdr. Michael Kilbourne said....

The mother told police her son and a friend were playing in a tree in front of their house in the 0-99 block of Sparrow Road when Ramirez Sliwinski came outside and told them to quit playing in the tree like monkeys, Kilbourne said.

Ramirez Sliwinski, who has been an opponent of efforts by some on the Village Board to crack down on illegal immigrants, said she meant no racial undertones by her comment.

Moving to nip in the bud some potential bad press, White House hopeful Barack Obama’s campaign persuaded a delegate to step down after she was ticketed for calling her neighbor’s African-American children “monkeys.”

Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski, a Carpentersville village trustee, was elected as an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention. She sports an Obama sign in her front yard.

I can no more disown [Rev. Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

Ramirez-Sliwinski admitted she used the word “monkeys,” but said she did not intend racism. She said she was only trying to protect them from falling out of the tree.

“Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski said she saw the kids playing in the tree and didn’t want them falling out of the tree and getting hurt. She said she calls her own grandchildren ‘monkeys,’” Kilbourne said.

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In Hopwood v. Texas 78 F.3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996) the University of Texas and other schools in the Fifth Circuit were barred from using race in admissions. In response, Texas adopted the “Top 10%” plan guaranteeing admission to high school graduates in the top 10% of their class. Since many high schools had high concentrations of blacks and Hispanics (the only minorities Texas actually cared about), this was, and was seen as, a way to produce “diversity” without using preferential admissions. When Hopwood was in effect overruled by Grutter, Texas re-instituted race preferences in admissions, although the Top 10% plan was retained (and now accounts for about 80% of the admissions to UT Austin).

This plan, and similar ones in Florida and Texas, have proved controversial, both regarding their effect and their intent. Even critics of race preferences are divided on their merit and/or legality.

Now comes an interesting new challenge to race preferences in Texas. Grutter, of course, held that race preferences are permissible, but only after race-neutral means of producing “diversity” have been found inadequate. According to the plaintiff’s press release, linked above,

[t]he present lawsuit claims that Top-10 Percent Plan is a successful race-neutral program that forecloses UT-Austin from considering a student’s race or ethnicity in admissions and that the University failed to consider and take advantage of alternative race-neutral means of achieving “diversity” prior to implementing their racially-discriminatory policies.

In 2000, UT Austin President Larry R. Faulkner stated that “the Top 10 percent law has enabled us to diversify enrollment at UT Austin with talented students who succeed. Our 1999 enrollment levels for African American and Hispanic freshmen have returned to those of 1996, the year before the Hopwood decision prohibited the consideration of race in admissions policies.”
....
In a January 16, 2003 press release, UT Austin stated that the Top 10 Percent Law “has effectively compensated for the loss of affirmative action.”
....
In a January 29, 2003 press release, UT Austin announced that “[d]iversity efforts at The University of Texas at Austin have brought a higher number of freshman minority students—African Americans [and] Hispanics . . . —to the campus than were enrolled in 1996, the year a court ruling ended the use of affirmative action in the university’s enrollment process.

One irony, notes InsideHigherEd,

is that the University of Texas has been pushing hard since 2003 to have the state repeal the 10 percent law. At the time the law was adopted, a federal appeals court decision banning affirmative action was in place in Texas. But when the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action’s legality, the university resumed consideration of race. University officials have said that they now have enough tools available to assure a diverse class that they don’t need the top 10 percent law and fear it deprives them of flexibility. Last year, it looked like the Texas Legislature was poised to repeal the law, but at the last minute, the repeal effort failed — with many advocates for minority students saying that the 10 percent plan was still needed.

[Edward] Blum [of the Project on Fair Representation] said that if Texas does repeal the law, it would not change the suit. Texas can decide whether or not it wants to keep the law, he said. But it can’t consider race in admissions when the success of the law has demonstrated the ability to obtain diversity in a student body without using race-specific policies.

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Howell Raines, the former New York Times editor who resigned in disgrace after the Jason Jayson Blair affair, has no doubt continued to think about the role of race in American society.

Based on this evidence, however, he doesn’t seem to have made much progress.

Howell Raines said tonight that Bill Clinton has engaged in a subtle race-baiting campaign against Barack Obama.

“He has sought to, in a low key way, remind people, ‘Hey, this guy is black,’” Raines said of Clinton during a panel discussion at a journalism awards banquet sponsored by The Week magazine.

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Organizers for a Michelle Obama appearance at Carnegie Mellon University were careful to engineer their preferred version of “diversity” in the visible audience, a “diversity” that apparently had no room for an Asian student. (HatTip to Drudge)

While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama’s event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama. The Tartan’s correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, “Get me more white people, we need more white people.” To an Asian girl sitting in the back row, one coordinator said, “We’re moving you, sorry. It’s going to look so pretty, though.”

“I didn’t know they would say, ‘We need a white person here,’ ” said attendee and senior psychology major Shayna Watson, who sat in the crowd behind Mrs. Obama. “I understood they would want a show of diversity, but to pick up people and to reseat them, I didn’t know it would be so outright.”

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As part of temporary access to Education Week that I’ve been enjoying recently, I receive a weekly email notice of articles, etc., of interest. The most recent notice invited me to

Check out the brand new issue of Technology Counts 2008: STEM: The Push to Improve Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Read how states are pushing to prepare their students for the high-tech global economy.

The article reports that the College Board, which oversees the Advanced Placement program, plans to drop AP classes and exams in four subjects, including Computer Science. Computer Science AB, it seems, like some men’s athletic teams that have fallen victim to Title IX, has been done in by affirmative action.

According to Trevor Packer, the College Board vice president who oversees the AP program,

the decision was made principally because of demographic considerations.

Only a tiny fraction of the members of underrepresented minority groups who take AP exams take the tests in one of those four affected subject areas, he said.

The College Board has made it a priority to reach such students, including those who are African- American and Hispanic.

“For us, [the question is], are we able to achieve our mission of reaching a broader range of students?” Mr. Packer said.

If I had posted this about a week ago, you would have suspected it was an April Fool’s joke. Alas, it’s not.

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The bad news is that the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative has filed a request with the state supreme court to withdraw the initiative because it believes that it did not gather enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. Maybe next time.

The good news — no, make that great news — is this article by Terry Pell of the Center For Individual Rights that just appeared on the web site of the National Association of Scholars.

Not long ago, here, I reported some earlier good news — that U.S. District Judge David Lawson had shocked observers by dismissing BAMN’s lawsuit (a lawsuit supported, either covertly or overtly, by the University of Michigan, the NAACP, and the ACLU) attempting to block the implementation of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. Pell himself, the CIR and its staff, and litigator Charles Cooper are responsible for that victory, and Pell’s article tells (Pell Tells? the dramatic story of how, and why, that victory was achieved. (Hint: it wasn’t because of CIR’s airtight and unassailable legal arguments. Those had always been evident, even to the ideologically blinded Judge Lawson after one of his earlier rulings was quickly and summarily reversed by the Sixth Circuit. So, what was it? Read on....)

Needless to say, I started to blog Pell’s article for you, quoting only the most important content — proof, for example, that Justice O’Connor was wrong in Grutter, that the Michigan law school’s “holistic review” placed greater weight on race than the undergraduate college’s mechanical formula; or, to pick another, that preferentially admitted black graduates of the Michigan law school failed the bar at a rate eight times higher than other graduates, confirming Richard Sander’s “mismatch” theory and contradicting the sworn testimony of a University of Michigan expert witness in Grutter.

But I couldn’t do it. There is too much important content. I found myself wanting to quote the whole thing. So that is what I’m doing, with the generous permission of both the National Association of Scholars and Mr. Pell. Read, I insist, the whole thing, on the new NAS site or below:

By No Means: Michigan Judge Turns Tables on Advocacy Groups Determined to Derail Civil Rights Initiative

04/07/2008

Terry Pell gives the first public analysis of the recent court decision ending (for now) the legal challenges to the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative.

by Terry Pell

Some means are by no means necessary.

That’s what Federal District Court Judge David Lawson decided last month about the efforts of a Michigan advocacy group that calls itself the “Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary” or, more simply, “BAMN.”

In a sweeping opinion, Lawson rejected every one of the legal arguments that BAMN and other opponents were hoping to use to strike down Michigan’s new amendment barring the use of racial preferences. Lawson’s decision takes the steam out of the multiple legal challenges that have dogged the new amendment almost from the day it passed in November, 2006.

The legal outcome was not as surprising as Lawson’s timing. From the beginning, Lawson seemed eager to see BAMN’s case proceed. He even issued an extraordinary preliminary injunction forbidding enforcement of the new amendment against three Michigan universities while the case got underway. Even after a panel of Sixth Circuit judges issued a stinging rebuke of this misuse of federal judicial authority, Lawson continued to find new judicial limbs on which to keep the suit perched.

Though there was little likelihood the suit would succeed on the merits, Lawson allowed the parties to gear up for a major trial that would have focused on the effects of the new amendment on minority enrollment. Lawson possibly thought that a long period of pre-trial discovery followed by a sensational trial might slow down the new amendment or turn up a new legal basis for striking it down. And a public airing of problems with the new amendment might help opponents of similar initiatives planned for five other states.

But then suddenly Lawson pulled the plug on all this with an opinion in March that, whatever else it did, certainly ended the prospect of further discovery and a trial.

Lawson’s about-face was no accident. Pre-trial discovery was turning up evidence that the extensive use of racial preferences at Michigan universities was directly causing racial disparities in grades, majors, graduation and professional examination results. Far from helping the case for racial preferences, pre-trial discovery was undermining it.

The new evidence was the result of efforts of UCLA Law Professor Richard Sander. Sander had donated his services as an expert to Eric Russell, one of the parties in the case represented by my firm, the Center for Individual Rights. Last fall, Sander had submitted his preliminary findings to the court, including the revelation that minority students at the UM Law School failed the bar at more than eight times the rate of white students during the years 2004, 2005 and 2006.

According to Sander, this data contradicted sworn testimony by UM experts during the trial in Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court case challenging the use of race-based admissions at the UM law school. When called as an expert witness in that case, then UM Professor Richard Lempert testified that,

“not to put too fine a point on it, Michigan graduates pass the bar. It doesn’t matter really whether you’re a minority or whether you’re white... I think there might of have been a statistically significant difference favoring whites, but it was substantively sort of completely trivial. It was like 95 percent of minorities and 98 or something or 99 percent of whites.”

Lempert based this conclusion on an exhaustive study he authored with David Chambers and Terry Adams of the careers of minority law school graduates during the 26-year period between 1970 and 1996. But in Sander’s view, it was implausible that minority bar failure rates could have been stable for 26 years up until 2001 when Lempert testified, and then suddenly balloon to eight times the white failure rate in 2004, 2005 and 2006.

The evidence Sander was beginning to develop seemed to undermine the well-financed effort by the UM to reassure the Supreme Court that the racial preferences employed by the UM law school were a comparatively modest effort that produced benefits for the law school and for minority law students.Sander’s analysis suggested just the opposite: the preferences were extreme and directly harmed the academic prospects of minority students. If Sander’s analysis held for other years, it would have undermined both the UM’s expert testimony and the Supreme Court rulings based on that testimony.

Rather suddenly, the UM refused to provide the additional data Sander needed. Then, after Sander submitted an affidavit explaining his initial findings and why he needed additional data, the ACLU and NAACP -- interveners in the case -- moved to dismiss CIR client Eric Russell on the grounds that his document requests for “irrelevant” documents posed a hindrance to the efficient litigation of the case.

Now Lawson was left holding the bag -- he couldn’t very well allow discovery to go on without granting Russell’s request for the data. Yet if he did so, he knew that Russell’s lawyers could use the subsequent trial to make a strong case against the use of racial preferences – one based on their documented effect in undermining the ability of minority students to compete academically.

Lawson’s apparent about-face is probably the final blow to the efforts of the Michigan state establishment to block Prop. 2. Key to its strategy was a loose confederation of political leaders, college presidents and BAMN. Michigan leaders had always been wary of BAMN, which as often as not directed its aggressive street theatre against state officials. But after Michigan voters passed Prop. 2 by a margin of 58 to 42 percent, BAMN’s tactics looked like a good way to keep the new referendum tied up in legal knots.

BAMN’s legal challenge was a way to put the referendum itself on trial by suggesting that Michigan voters were either duped or misguided when they ended racial preferences. Everyone from Governor Granholm to UM President Mary Sue Coleman probably figured that BAMN could stir up a lot of trouble at low cost: the established institutions could cherry pick the BAMN tactics they liked while carefully distancing themselves from BAMN in every other way.

At first, the strategy looked brilliant. BAMN got the ball rolling by suing the state in federal court, demanding that it be prohibited from implementing Prop. 2. Instead of fighting, state officials including (Democrat) Governor Jennifer Granholm, (Republican) Attorney General Michael Cox, and the trustees of the three major Michigan state universities joined forces in asking Judge Lawson to suspend the new amendment for at least the first admissions cycle.

Judge Lawson went along with this collusive arrangement between “opposing” parties without so much as hearing from the only true opposing party in the case, a lone applicant to the UM, one Eric Russell, who asked for representation from the Center for Individual Rights. Lawson issued an injunction that purported to prohibit enforcement of Prop. 2 against the admissions and financial aid policies of the three universities for a period of slightly more than six months. BAMN was on a roll.

The gambit lasted only a week before the Sixth Circuit stayed Lawson’s order and bluntly stated that his authority to overturn the provisions of a state constitution was not likely supported in this case. Lacking the cover of Lawson’s order, UM President Mary Sue Coleman was forced to implement the new amendment and to begin admitting students without regard to race.

Thanks to their decision to join forces with BAMN, state officials were then saddled with BAMN’s plans for the lawsuit. Right away, BAMN made clear this case was not going to be decided on the basis of narrow legal principles. Rather, BAMN envisioned a long process of court-enforced legal discovery into such questions as what had happened to minority enrollment a decade ago in California after that state passed Prop. 209. Also on BAMN’s shopping list were depositions of initiative organizers Ward Connerly and Jennifer Gratz to probe their attitudes toward racial minorities.

Of course, little if any of the information sought by BAMN was likely to be relevant to the legal issue in the case, namely the authority of a federal judge to set aside a state law prohibiting racial preferences in Michigan. But BAMN’s goal always seemed broader than a legal decision. It wanted a high profile lawsuit to set the public agenda and shape public opinion. In BAMN’s mind, the lawsuit was a useful platform on which to conduct a noisy seminar on race in America, regardless of any narrow legal objective.

CIR opposed all of this as a waste of time. None of the evidence BAMN sought was relevant to the legal theory of its suit, which the Sixth Circuit had just ruled was unlikely to succeed in any event. CIR urged Judge Lawson to dismiss the case outright. But having engineered the Sixth Circuit reversal of Judge Lawson’s stay, CIR was not high on the list of Lawson’s favorite parties.
CIR asked well-known Washington litigator Charles Cooper to take the lead in defending the new initiative in the ongoing litigation. Cooper decided that if BAMN and its allies could have a full year to dig into the legally irrelevant question of whether ending racial preferences reduces minority enrollment, then Russell ought to have the same opportunity to collect information about the ways in which racial preferences harm minority interests.

UCLA Law Professor Richard Sander was just then getting national notice for a 2005 Stanford Law Review article demonstrating the ways in which the widespread use of large racial preferences tended to produce a “mismatch effect.” Because the top tier law schools use racial preferences to pull in minority students who otherwise would attend second tier schools, the second tier schools must use slightly greater preferences to pull in minority students who might otherwise attend third tier schools and so on, down the line. According to Sander, the overall effect is that minority law students as a group attend law schools where their credentials are one or two standard deviations lower than those of their classmates.

Sander’s article had included an analysis of data the University of Michigan had produced in the Gratz and Grutter litigation. Sander’s findings demonstrated that the University of Michigan Law School actually gave greater weight to race than did Michigan’s undergraduate college. Sander’s finding directly undermined Justice O’Connor’s view that the undergraduate system was the more egregious of the two.

Whereas Justice O’Connor believed that the law school considered race in a less mechanical way, she missed the more important point that regardless how “individualized” and “holistic” the law school system might appear to be, it nonetheless made the element of race more decisive than did the supposedly “mechanical” undergraduate system. Sander’s conclusions about the relative weight given to race by the two admissions systems were corroborated in later analyses by Yale academics Ian Ayres and Sydney Foster.

Before the UM clamped down on CIR’s request for data, Sander was able to confirm his earlier finding that the undergraduate system may have produced fewer harms than the law school system. For one thing, the newly-produced data showed that a substantial number of minorities with strong credentials attend the UM undergraduate college. These students could have been admitted without any consideration of race and presumably resisted offers from more competitive schools to attend the UM. It was thus possible for Sander to compare, for the first time, the academic records of UM undergraduate minorities who did not receive a racial preference with those who undoubtedly did.

According to Sander, there were dramatic differences between the two groups. Undergraduate blacks at the UM who were admitted without a preference had a graduation rate of 93% -- higher than the rate for comparable white students, and far higher than the graduation rate of the school as a whole. In stark contrast, UM undergraduate blacks who received a preference had a graduation rate of 47%. If Sander is right, it raises a real question whether this latter group benefited from the UM’s heavy use of race or whether they would not have had better academic outcomes at less prestigious schools.

While Judge Lawson now has dismissed the case, the reason probably has less to do with the law and more to do with the what the evidence was starting to show about the real harms of the preferential admissions policies followed for years by the UM and other schools. For the time being, Judge Lawson has sidelined the effort to get a full decade’s worth of data as part of this litigation. But given what even three years worth of data seems to show, schools like Michigan will find it increasingly difficult to keep this data secret. If even the “holistic” use of race makes it difficult for minority students to compete academically, the moral and legal imperative to publicize and analyze this information becomes great.

All of this is a far cry from last January when Mary Sue Coleman, Governor Granholm and the rest of the political establishment said they would keep Prop. 2 tied up in legal knots for years. While BAMN’s decision to sue seemed like a good idea last year, it’s a good idea that turned into their worst nightmare. Too bad for them.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:06 PM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The Washington Post’s coverage of civil rights issues has been marred by the pronounced bias of its reporter covering that beat, Darryl Fears, more times that I have been able to write about, and I have written about his coverage more times than I have time to cite here. (But for starters, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

He has written, for example (here), that one cannot believe in civil rights and oppose affirmative action; that what minorities in the United States have in common is that they are victims (here); and that Gerald Reynolds, current chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “is an outspoken opponent of race-based college admission policies for minorities, even though before the civil rights movement, colleges commonly discriminated against African Americans and other minorities by not allowing them in.” [here, Emphasis added]. In other words, Reynolds opposes racial preferences in the present even though racial preferences existed in the past. Imagine that.

In an article over this past weekend, however, Fears and his editors committed a travesty on any decent understanding of civil rights that arguably goes far beyond anything he’s written before. (HatTip to Hans Bader)

In “Civil Rights Groups Seeing Gradual End of Their Era,” Fears chronicled the declining members, resources, and influence of the old (and getting older) civil rights organizations — the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Urban League, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE has sunk so low that its “most charismatic liberal leader, James Farmer, resigned and was replaced by a conservative”), the NAACP, and the Nation of Islam.

Yes, you read that correctly — the Nation of Islam, which Fears discusses as though it were just another “civil rights group” in its twilight years!

In Chicago, the Nation of Islam struggles as its ailing leader, Louis Farrakhan, recovers from an illness. The group declined to discuss its membership numbers, but it has been speculated that they are far lower than they were in the 1960s.

Civil rights executives, who tend to be older, are stuck in time....

Perhaps because he covers the race beat, Fears seems to see race everywhere. In 2004, after the Administration was finally able to dislodge Mary Frances Berry from her tenacious hold on the chairmanship of the Civil Rights Commission, Fears wrote:

But after Berry, the liberal chairman, who is black, and Reynoso, the liberal vice chairman, who is Latino, stepped down Tuesday, the composition of the commission changed. President Bush appointed a black Republican, Gerald A. Reynolds, to replace Berry as chairman, and another black Republican, Ashley L. Taylor, to replace Reynoso as a member. Abigail Thernstrom, an independent who is conservative and white, became the new vice chairman.

What is the relevance of race and ethnicity to “the composition” of the Commission if a black and a Hispanic are replaced by two blacks? It is surely relevant that liberals are being replaced by conservatives, but why do race and ethnicity always have to be brought to center stage?

Fears takes such pains to point out everyone’s race and ethnicity that you’d think he’d insist the Post identify him not as a “Washington Post Staff Writer” but as a “Washington Post Black Staff Writer.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Time Magazine used to be pretty good. Now it features articles by Joe Klein filled with partisan bombast (Bush “clearly unfit to lead”) or humorous, clueless contradictions.

In the latter category, last week Klein proclaimed that liberals are more patriotic than conservatives. A failure to appear patriotic, Klein wrote, has been

a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right. When Ronald Reagan touted “Morning in America” in the 1980s, Dick Gephardt famously countered that it was near midnight “and getting darker all the time.” This is ironic and weirdly self-defeating, since the liberal message of national improvement is profoundly more optimistic, and patriotic, than the innate conservative pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature.... [Emphasis added]

But I didn’t do that at all. I didn’t question the patriotism of conservatives: I simply argued that it is more patriotic to be optimistic about the chance that our collective will—that is, the best work of government—will succeed, rather than that it will fail or impinge on freedom.

In others words, it is more patriotic to be in favor of civil rights legislation than to oppose it...to be in favor of social security and medicare than to oppose them...and to hope that the better angels of our legislators--acting in concert, in compromise--will produce a universal health insurance system and an alternative energy plan that we can all be proud of.

Oh well, another liberal disregards the sandblower principle — When you’re standing in a hole, stop digging — at his peril. (For other recent examples, see here and here.)

Now, some will argue that Klein confuses patriotism — being “optimistic ... that ... the best work of government will succeed, rather than that it will fail or impinge on freedom” — with Democratic campaign speeches or naiveté (is there a difference?), but I don’t want to go there. What I propose instead is a test to determine whether or not Klein believes what he preaches.

As we have seen, he asserts that “it is more patriotic to be in favor of civil rights legislation than to oppose it.” Next November citizens in a number of states may have the opportunity to vote on civil rights initiatives that would prohibit their state governments from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group based on race, ethnicity, sex, or national origin.

So, Joe, do you believe it is more patriotic to support these civil rights initiatives than to oppose them? If so, will you write a column informing your Democratic colleagues, since they seem to be confused on this issue.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Say What? (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Editorials like this one in the Colorado Springs Gazette in favor of non-discriminatory civil rights are rare, and hence to be savored.

Discussing the claims of some signers of the Colorado Civil Rights Coalition that they were deceived, the editorial states, in part:

It’s difficult to understand how they could feel deceived. Signing a petition is like casting a vote, or signing a contract: don’t do it if you’re not prepared. And everyone has been told not to sign documents without reading them first. That’s difficult when it comes to a lengthy contract involving a minor purchase. But the petition for a civil rights initiative couldn't be simpler. Here’s what it says:

“The 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.”

It’s abundantly clear the initiative would forbid state “discrimination” and “preferential treatment” based on superficial criterion. By ending “preferential treatment,” it would end the most common form: “affirmative action.”

When the state gives special treatment to people because of their skin, the state engages in racial discrimination. One person has been deemed a winner, by virtue of race, and another person has lost by virtue of race. We can call it "affirmative action" all we want, but it's racism pure and simple. Anything that makes race a central consideration is racist. Anything that makes sex a central consideration is sexist. This is not a difficult concept.

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Rebecca Walsh, a columnist at the Salt Lake Tribune, is liberal-minded. She acknowledges that the inequality that permeates the University of Utah Medical School is not “all” the fault of one “Republican state senator,” other “Conservative lawmakers,” and their “fit of regressive policy-making.”

But most of it is.

Walsh liberal-mindedly notes statistics showing that “Utah minority students simply aren’t graduating from college or applying to graduate programs at the rate of their white counterparts,” but she is offended by “Conservative lawmakers” who “insist they simply want enrollment at the state's only medical school to reflect the applicant pool — without regard for social or economic factors that may skew those numbers.”

Of students enrolled in 1997, 4 percent were Latino. Last year, 3.9 percent were Latino. Meanwhile, Utah’s Latino population more than doubled — to 11 percent of the state’s population.

But it’s not just Latinos. Virtually every traditionally disadvantaged group lags in U. medical school enrollment. In 2007, a single American Indian was enrolled at the school. There are three Pacific Islander students. In the just-accepted class of 102, 40 percent are women. The only exception to the rule are Asian students, whose numbers at the school have doubled in the past 10 years.

According to Wayne Samuelson, Associate Dean of Admissions, this audit “had a chilling effect on administrators and students.” One usually associates “chilling effect” with intimidating individuals from exercising their First Amendment or other Constitutional rights, but at the Utah Medical School it seems that what was chilled was the practice of giving preferential treatment to members of certain racial and ethnic groups.

Or was it? Ms. Walsh reports, apparently oblivious to the implication of her numbers, that

the U. School of Medicine is competitive. More than 1,300 students applied this year; only 8 percent got in. The university is required to reserve 75 spots for Utahns and eight for students from Idaho. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, 14 Latino students applied to the U. in 2007 and six were enrolled.

If that’s the result after the “chilling effect” resulting from the “fit of regressive policy-making,” I’d hate to see how hot things were before.

What is animating Ms. Walsh’s agitation about “inequality” at the Utah Medical School is what animates all those who support race and ethnic preferences — a commitment to a version of equality that requires something approaching proportional representation of all groups (well, not all groups; only racial and some ethnic groups). Because the idea of pure racial and ethnic proportionality is so widely unappealing, subordinating individuals as it does to the groups of which they are members, lately this idea of proportional equality has been dressed up with the trappings of “culture.”

Here is Ms. Walsh’s view of the terrible effect of the medical school refusing (to the degree that it does) to engage in “social engineering”:

Needless to say, it’s hard for many Utahns to find a doctor who looks like them, speaks their language and understands their culture.

Finally, let us assume something that is not at all self-evident — that the Latino, black, etc., “cultures” are so different from the mainstream culture in Utah that they require their own native or tribal doctors, that doctors must look like, speak like, and ... (what? eat and dance like?) their patients in order to provide good medical care. Assuming, as I say, that that’s true, doing what it would take for Ms. Walsh to conclude that the medical school was not practicing “inequality” would require it to admit and produce doctors who could not provide quality medical care to a substantial majority of the people of Utah.

In fact, perhaps to protect the public from doctors who do not look, speak, eat, etc., like them, perhaps medical licensing authorities would have to begin issuing conditional medical licenses, limiting their owners to practice among culturally appropriate patients.

The good news is that, unless Utah is considerably more liberal than states such as California, Washington, and Michigan, I suspect Ms. Walsh’s view of what equality means, and hence what constitutes inequality, is limited to college campuses (and there, to administrative offices and departments in the humanities and social sciences) and a few editorial offices.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

According to the “mismatch” phenomenon analyzed by UCLA law professor Richard Sander (and discussed here too many times to cite), applicants to law schools who are preferentially admitted with much lower grades and test scores than others in their entering classes tend to cluster near the bottom of their classes, graduate at a much lower rate, and pass the bar at a much lower rate.

I have also discussed here too many times to cite (but I will anyway) the fact that the American Bar Association for all practical purposes requires law schools to achieve “diversity” by employing racial preferences in admissions. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here)

Now, with those two facts in mind, consider whether there are warning signals coming out of the predicament of St. Mary’s College, a small college near San Francisco, as reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, based on this article in the Contra Costa Times.

St. Mary’s College of California has received a letter from its accreditor threatening to sanction the institution if it does not make more progress toward resolving unspecified racial issues on its campus....

In the letter, Ralph A. Wolff, president of the commission that accredits senior colleges for the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, said the commission was concerned about a lack of “tangible results” on concerns it first raised with the college in 1990 and re-emphasized in 2004. The college needs to quickly develop a plan for reducing racism and sexism on the campus, he said.

is that the college is not doing enough to even out graduation rates.... While the graduation rate for white students is 73 percent, for African American students, the rate is 56 percent.

Will the American Bar Association, which requires “diversity” in the entering classes of law schools, also require a corresponding amount of “diversity” among graduates? Among those who pass state bar associations? If not, why not? If colorblind admission is unacceptable because it does not yield the requisite “tangible results,” why should the ABA allow blind grading of exams (where the professor does not know the identity of the student), since low grades of the preferentially admitted contribute mightily to low class rankings and low graduation rates.

There are other problems at St. Mary’s that may have implications for the accreditation process at other institutions. An article in the San Jose Mercury News quotes the new provost, who

acknowledged that minority professors are asked to serve on race- and diversity-focused committees more often than white colleagues, which contributes to feelings of discrimination.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Say What? (7) | TrackBacks (0)

In 1956, in their famous Southern Manifesto (discussed and brought up to date here), 19 Senators and 77 Representatives from the Southern states declared, among other things, in opposition to colorblind equality and defense of local control of their schools, that:

Without regard to the consent of the governed, outside agitators are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our public school systems.

I’m extremely skeptical of anybody from California coming to Nebraska to change our constitution.

Now, who’s really in favor of local control?

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Philosophy professor Laurence Thomas has caused a ruckus at Syracuse University.

If [he] catches a student sending text messages or reading a newspaper in class, he’ll end the class on the spot and walk out. It doesn’t matter if there is but one texter in a large lecture of hundreds of students. If you text, he will leave

Last week, when a student in a large lecture — in the front row no less — sent a text message, Thomas followed through on his threat (as he had done just a few days earlier). And he then sent the university’s chancellor, his dean, and all of the students an e-mail message explaining his actions and his frustration at the “brazen” disrespect he had received in class. In the e-mail, he noted that the student who sent the text message is Cuban, and that last year, two Latino students had started to play tic-tac-toe during his class.

While Thomas noted that white students are also rude, he expressed frustration that — especially as a minority scholar himself — he would be treated in this way. “One might have thought that for all the talk about racism and the good of social equality, non-white students would be particularly committed to respecting a black professor,” Thomas wrote.

Now, I do not know how this will unfold. But I will either not teach the course PHI 191 in the future or I will simply resign from Syracuse University. But what I will not do is tolerate such brazen disrespect for me. I am an old fashion [sic]individual in that I believe in principles of right and wrong that transcend every race/ethnicity and sexual identity. Ethnic diversity has become the gospel of Syracuse University. I maintain that ethnic diversity shorn of respect is utterly vapid. The respect that I demand of you stems not from arrogance or any sense of self-importance but from my unfailing commitment to your excellence. And when talk about all else blinds us to this reality, then the classroom becomes empty and meaningless.

Many have wondered how he happened to know the student’s ethnicity and why he remarked on it. Thomas said that before class starts, he chats informally with students and that on the fateful day last week, he was talking with a group of students about politics. He made a reference to the fact that he didn’t want the white students to feel that they couldn’t be honest with their views even though he is black. The student who later texted during class was with the group of students Thomas addressed, assuming them to be white, and she shot back “I’m Cuban.”

Collegiate racial and ethnic waters are swift and treacherous; the currents are constantly shifting; and the lifeguards are few and far between. Enter those waters at your peril.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Say What? (6) | TrackBacks (0)

My post below questioning charges of deception against proponents of the state initiatives that would prohibit states from practicing racial preferences has been UPDATED with an example of a real attempt to deceive — by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m speaking, of course, of college Republicans, on whom on most campuses there is an open season and no limit.

A case in point involves the College Republicans at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. They decided to invite a speaker to campus to talk about affirmative action, someone you will have seen and possibly even read — the well-known (The Cosby Show, and many others) actor and commentator, Joseph C. Phillips. In addition to his acting career, Mr. Phillips has been an active participant in the debate over affirmative action.

In a gesture of good will, the College Republicans asked Susquehanna’s Office of Multicultural Affairs if it wanted to co-sponsor the event and joint Mr. Phillips for dinner after the event. The OMA declined, saying it would participate only if it could supply a speaker of its choosing to share the stage with Mr Phillips.

And that’s not all. The students were told by the Communications Department that they could not list the upcoming speech on the university’s web page unless they agreed to a joint appearance with the OMA-preferred speaker. Finally, according to the comments of a member of the College Republicans, the Director of OMA told them that “students were offended” by their upcoming event, that there would be posters on campus attacking them personally and as a group, and finally “the Director stated that it would been better if we would have a white individual coming to speak.”

Mr. Phillips is scheduled to speak Friday evening, for any of you in the vicinity of Selinsgrove, Pa.

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Should the disputes over Rev. Wright’s rants, and Obama’s enabling them, be allowed “to die,” as Kevin Drum and other liberals would like?

Victor Davis Hanson thinks not.

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The New York Times has a surprisingly fair and balanced article this morning on “charges of deception” leveled at the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative.

Prominently displayed is picture of a black woman, Freddie Whitney with a caption stating that she “signed what she was told was an antidiscrimination petition in this Denver parking lot.” The article begins:

DENVER — Freddie Whitney was walking out of a King Soopers supermarket here this winter when she was approached by three young men.

They politely asked if she was against discrimination and, if so, if she would sign a petition that would legally end the practice in the state. After scanning it briefly, Ms. Whitney, a 78-year-old African-American, signed it.

A few weeks later, Ms. Whitney says, she was shocked to learn from a local newspaper that she had unwittingly lent her support to a ballot measure called the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative that seeks to eliminate state programs that give preferential treatment to minorities and women....

“My reaction was, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done?’” Ms. Whitney said. “I have children and grandchildren who have benefited from affirmative action.”

For Dara Burwell, 25, one of dozens of people who contacted Colorado Unity after signing the petition, the realization that she had inadvertently lent her support to the measure was “horrifying,” she said

Ms. Burwell, who is black and has actively supported affirmative action programs in the past, said she had been approached on the steps of a downtown library by a young black man who spoke of justice for minorities. Ms. Burwell said she had signed the petition thinking it was “a standard nondiscrimination clause.”

“I’m angry, because this is so deceptive,” she said. “I’ve contributed to get a measure on the ballot that stands for everything I don’t believe in.”

The Colorado Civil Rights Initiative that these citizens were asked to sign clearly states that it would prohibit the state “from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.” Ms. Burwell’s initial thought — that this is “a standard nondiscrimination clause” — is correct. That’s exactly what it is. The problem, obviously, is not that she was deceived, but that she does not believe in prohibiting discrimination. She wants the state to retain and continue to use the power to discriminate in favor of the group to which she belongs and against other groups. (That so many people, like Ms. Burwell, no longer believe in prohibiting racial discrimination is what I think is truly “horrifying.”)

Ms. Whitney also thought she was “against discrimination,” and so signed the petition. She, too, was not deceived in any way. Her “Oh, my God, what have I done?” second thought was based entirely on her belated recognition that she and her family “have benefited from affirmative action,” i.e., from receiving preferential treatment because of their race.

One can understand Ms. Whitney’s and Ms. Burwell’s discomfort at realizing that signing what is in fact “a standard nondiscrimination clause” lent their support to prohibiting all discrimination, even discrimination they would like to see continued, but that understanding lends no credence whatsoever to their frivolous charges that the petition they signed is deceptive.

Finally (or almost finally), Ms. Whitney wants to preserve racial preferences because she has “children and grandchildren who have benefited” from it. I wonder how old her grandchildren are. Does Ms. Whitney believe, do other supporters of race preferences believe, that her children and grandchildren should continue to benefit from preferential treatment throughout their lives? Should their own “children and grandchildren” inherit their parents’ and grandparents’ privilege of being treated better than others by the state because of their race and pass it on to their progeny forever? (No, dummy! Only until the “playing field is level.”)

I began by saying that the New York Times article is surprisingly fair and balanced — it even quotes Ward Connerly fairly! — but I don’t want to go overboard. It also presents a picture of Connerly with a caption stating that the anti-discrimination measure he supports “seeks to end affirmative action in Colorado.” As supporters of the measure in Colorado and in every other state where it has been introduced have stated, accurately, time and again (most of them quoted here), it doesn’t. It would bar only affirmative action programs that employ preferential treatment based on race.

UPDATE: More Deception [April 3]

Here’s another good example — this time from the ACLU of Eastern Missouri — of the gobbledygook that passes for analysis by the opponents of colorblind equality:

[The Missouri Civil Rights Initiative] comes cloaked in the language of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, but in reality, it is an attack on affirmative action policies that have benefited women and minorities who would otherwise be locked out of higher education, business contracts, and other public resources.

And locked out? Does the ACLU really believe that if the citizens of Missouri vote to prohibit their state government from bestowing benefits and burdens based on race, “women and minorities” will really be “locked out” of education, state contracts, and other public resources? Does it really believe, that is, that Missouri has no women or minorities capable of any educational or business success unless they receive preferences based on their race or sex?

The ACLU must believe that, for the only other reason women and minorities would be “locked out” in the absence of preferential treatment is that state agencies, once deprived of their ability to discriminate in favor of individuals based on their race, will immediately begin to discriminate against them. But that, of course, is already illegal, and will remain so if MCRI is passed.

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