Discriminations

Regular readers will know that Peter Schmidt of the Chronicle of Higher Education is one of the few journalists who cover affirmative action whose work I respect, and that is true even though I often disagree with what he writes. He’s often wrong, in my view, but never devious, duplicitous, or dumb. (Indeed, I have commented on Schmidt’s work so often that the above points will not be news even to most irregular readers.)

Some of you will have noticed, however, that I have not commented at any length on Schmidt’s book, Color And Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning The War Over College Affirmative Action. For a taste of what he says, and what I would have said if I’d said anything, you may want to take a look at this post from almost a year ago, Telling It Like It (Mostly) Is.

For various reasons, including no small doses of sloth and procrastination, I have put off doing so, even though I believe the book nicely reflects both Schmidt’s considerable strengths and one or two of his wrongheaded notions and thus richly deserves comment.

Now University of Michigan philosophy professor Carl Cohen, long-time liberal who remains a liberal despite his now almost legendary opposition to racial preferences, has made my task considerably more difficult. Now I not only have to do what has eluded me so far — figuring out how to strike the right balance between praise and criticism of one of the few reporters in this area whose work deserves respect — but I now have the additional burden of doing so while not repeating what Cohen said in his excellent review.

So, for now, I’ll simply say: What he said....

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A blockade by thousands of protesters from India’s Gujjar tribe brought Delhi to a standstill today, paralysing trains by squatting on tracks and setting up a ring of burning tyres around the perimeter of the city.

The Gujjars, traditionally nomadic farmers, are demanding to be socially downgraded in order to gain government jobs and university places....

Community leaders have been demanding that the government give the community special status for several years. The Gujjars, already considered a disadvantaged group, want to be reclassified further down the Hindu hierarchy.

The Indian government runs the world’s largest affirmative action programme, reserving half of government jobs and university places to those socially disadvantaged by centuries of caste oppression. Gujjars, who the British Raj classified as part of the “criminial castes” are already considered “backward”. But they themselves say they are not backward enough.

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Drawing on a 27-year old interview with the recently deceased Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff, David Broder worries about some troubling parallels between Carter and the new would-be outsider come to clean up Washington, Obama.

Both have relied on splintering and ideological division inside the Democratic Party.

It was in the resulting “chaos,” as he called it, that Jordan conceived the possibility of making the one-term governor of Georgia the next president. The “fragmentation” they discovered was real, not metaphorical. Carter won the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary with less than 30 percent of the votes, as four more-liberal contenders -- Morris Udall, Birch Bayh, Fred Harris and Sargent Shriver -- split up the rest.

But once Carter was in the White House, the liberals who controlled Congress quickly took his measure. They put their obligations to their constituencies and interest groups ahead of any loyalty to him. He never had a “honeymoon” and by his third year, his presidency had unraveled, not because of Republican obduracy but because of Carter’s inability to lead his fellow Democrats.

The individuals and the times seem very different. A white Southern governor versus a mixed-race Hawaii-born senator. A Navy veteran-peanut farmer versus a lawyer-intellectual activist.

But the two have more in common than meets the eye. Both were largely unknown to the nation’s Democrats at the start of their election years. Both faced more-credentialed rivals. Both ran as outsiders, vowing to reform Washington. Both relied on generalized promises to raise politics to a higher standard than the outgoing Republican administration. Both benefited from early plurality victories over large and divided fields. Obama gained his first and most important win in Iowa with 37.6 percent of the votes, while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards split almost 60 percent evenly. Both Carter and Obama lost several of the late primaries, but held on to the delegate lead they had staked out earlier.

Obama has yet to win the White House, but it is almost as if Jordan were warning him that his toughest challenge lies ahead when he sets out to govern against the grain of his own party.

Carter came out of the conservative to moderate wing of his party; Obama is from its left-most extreme. Carter swam against the mainstream of his party, politically and culturally; Obama swims easily among the school of liberal Democrats as one of their own, at one with them, darting here and there with them according to the dictates of party orthodoxy.

There is another substantial difference between Carter and Obama: Carter came into the White House with much more experience than Obama, both in the public and private sectors. Carter had served on a nuclear submarine, grown peanuts, governed a state. Obama has, well, sat passively in Rev. Wright’s church for twenty years and in the Senate for less than two.

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Peter Schmidt has an important and typically thorough article today in the Chronicle of Higher Education on a new lawsuit against the University of Texas’s “top 10%” plan that could have far-reaching implications for the future of race preferences in higher education.

On behalf of Abigail Fisher, an 18 year old student at Stephen F. Austin High School in Sugar Land, Texas, who is in the the top 12% of her class, the Washington-based Project on Fair Representation is seeking to prevent the University of Texas from re-instituting race- and ethnicity-based preferences in admissions. (See its court filings here.)

In Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932 (1996) the Fifth Circuit barred the University of Texas and other institutions in its jurisdiction from giving preferential treatment to minority applicants. In response, and in an effort to maintain “diversity,” the university adopted a new admissions policy that did not take race into account, instead granting automatic admission to applicants in the top 10% of their graduating high school class.

Hopwood was effectively overruled in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), and as the plaintiff’s complaint in the current case, Fisher v. Texas, points out,

On June 23, 2003, the same day that the United States Supreme Court decided Grutter, UT Austin decided to resume employing race as a factor in undergraduate admissions decisions.

hangs its challenge to Austin’s race-conscious admissions policy on guidance given to colleges in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision. In that case, a five-member majority of the justices upheld the use of race-conscious admissions by the University of Michigan’s law school—superseding the Hopwood ruling—but the opinion also advised that colleges should engage in “serious, good-faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives” before resorting to affirmative-action preferences.

64. The Supreme Court reaffirmed in Grutter both that “[a] core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to do away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race,” 539 U.S. at 341, and that “whenever the government treats any person unequally because of his or her race, that person has suffered an injury that falls squarely within the language and spirit of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection,” 539 U.S. at 327.

65. Government discrimination based upon race is the exception rather than the rule under the Fourteenth Amendment.

66. The Supreme Court held that courts must apply strict scrutiny to racially discriminatory university admissions programs in order to ensure that admissions committees are “pursing a goal important enough to warrant use of a highly suspect tool.” Grutter, 539 U.S. at 326.

67. The Supreme Court explained that “racial classifications, however compelling their goals, are potentially so dangerous that they may be employed no more broadly than the interest demands.” Grutter,539 U.S. at 342.

68. The Supreme Court held in Grutter that universities have a compelling interest in “student body diversity” such that, under limited circumstances, they may consider race or ethnicity as a factor in their admissions processes. Grutter, 539 U.S. at 328.

69. The Supreme Court further explained in Grutter that government is constrained in how it may pursue those ends, even where the end is a compelling state interest. The means chosen by the government must be narrowly tailored to fit its purpose. Grutter, 539 U.S. at 333.

70. The Supreme Court therefore held in Grutter that universities must engage in “serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives that will achieve the diversity the university seeks” before turning to racial preferences. Grutter, 539 U.S. at 339.

As Schmidt explains,

[t]he new complaint ... argues that the 10-percent plan is exactly the sort of “workable race-neutral alternative” the Supreme Court advised colleges to seek and that its effectiveness in bringing diversity to the University of Texas legally precluded the institution from going back to considering applicants’ ethnicity or race.

The university’s lawyers say the plan has not brought their institution enough racial and ethnic diversity, especially given the rapid growth of the state’s Hispanic population....

How the court decides the question of whether the 10-percent plan has brought the university enough diversity may come down to its definition of “enough.”

In a strange twist, each side in the dispute is offering arguments that its opponents made just a few years ago. For example, the university had characterized the 10-percent plan as race-neutral, while Edward J. Blum, director of the Project on Fair Representation, denounced such plans in a 2003 Chronicle commentary as “another brick in the wall of massive resistance to the principle of nondiscrimination.” Now, however, Mr. Blum is calling the plan race-neutral, while the university’s lawyers are arguing in a legal brief that the policy “was plainly designed” with the intent of increasing minority enrollments for the sake of bringing about a specific racial balance.

Schmidt’s article, as usual, is excellent — fair and balanced almost to a fault. Or maybe all the way to a fault, since, also as usual, I believe he missed a point or two that I think should have been made.

First, note UT’s argument that the Top 10% plan has not produced “enough” diversity, “especially given the rapid growth of the state's Hispanic population [emphasis added].” That “especially” is an unwitting admission that UT is not really interested in “diversity” at all, unless “diversity” be defined (as it is treated in practice) as nothing more than proportional representation.

Second, Schmidt writes that if this lawsuit succeeds in barring Texas from re-instituting racial and ethnic preferences,

it could set a precedent whereby the development of effective alternatives to race-conscious admissions policies undercuts the defense of such policies in the courts. Colleges that have had to make do without race-conscious admissions policies as a result of ballot measures, court decisions, or some act of government may find it harder to go back to using them.

And left unsaid here is the equally obvious precedent that would be set by the failure of this lawsuit — that Grutter’s requirement to find and use alternatives to race preferences wherever possible can be safely disregarded. It would become the modern equivalent of Justice Powell’s begrudging acceptance, in Bakke, of the limited use of race as a tie-breaker that was transformed by the education establishment into a practically unlimited license to place whatever weight on race they wanted.

For the race-mongers in higher education and elsewhere, “enough” is never enough.

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Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell is quite pleased with the ideological diversity of the paper’s op-ed page. She thinks the offerings are nicely balanced between liberals and conservatives — she lists the usual suspects among the regulars — but the quality of her judgment here is reflected by the fact that she accepts regular Colby King’s self-description as an independent curmudgeon “with little tolerance for ideologues of any stripe.” On the other hand, she is bothered by the fact that the WP’s op-ed page is “too male and too white.”

There are, of course, good reasons for its maleness and whiteness, which she dutifully provides: men submit more op-eds than women “by as much as 9 to 1”; “the nation's power structure, often represented in Post op-eds, is white, male and at least middle-aged”; and this big one:

The Post’s longtime stable of regular columnists consists overwhelmingly of older white men. The op-ed page usually runs five pieces a day; four are from regular columnists. So only one of the 80 to 100 daily outside submissions gets in.

Staleness knows no color.

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Prof. John L. Jackson Jr., an anthropologist and newest member of the Chronicle of Higher Education panel of regulars on its “Brainstorm” blog (first and last encountered here and here), reports today on his participation on a race and religion panel at Harvard.

A good time was had by all. In fact, the intellectual exchange was so electrifying that Jackson writes that he

left the campus abuzz from all the challenging feedback provided by audience members and encouraged by the fact that Harvard’s Divinity School had even mounted such a provocative session at all.

The panel topic, “Theorizing Race and Ethnicity in Theology and the Study of Religion,” wasn’t really so bad. The practice of making a verb out of a noun and then letting it have an object is now so established and common as not to deserve comment. Similarly, one panelist’s “‘womanist’ position on race and contemporary cultural politics” was only to be expected. But, moving on, when we encounter another panelist’s “meticulous articulation of past and present scientific commitments to ideologically driven biologizations of race,” my own head starts to buzz.

Don’t you just love “biologizations”? Do linguists have a name for making a verb (biologize, or is it biologizize?) out of a noun and then turning that ersatz verb back into an even more ersatz noun? If they don’t, they should. Doing this sort of thing seems to be a common practice among the tribes of social scientists who live in isolated academic jungles and who, thanks to their isolation in those overgrown intellectual thickets, are free to create, amend, and preserve quaint word forms and expressions without any need to make themselves understood by outsiders.

Our Professor Jackson himself was also not immune to some amusing formulations. For example, in discussing his own project, “conducting ethnographic work on global Black Hebrewism,” he explains that

[t]here are many examples of African Americans’ investments in Hebrewism, dating back to the early 1600s. One of the most compelling contemporary instantiations of such a reckoning of Black Hebraic identity would be “The African Hebrews of Jerusalem,” a group that left the United States in 1967 and is currently thriving in Israel’s Negev region. My take on the emigrationist group spurred a productive discussion and debate.

As late as 1640, there were probably only 150 blacks in Virginia (the colony with the highest black population), and in 1650, 300.

But for today’s purposes I’m less interested in historical accuracy than in Professor Jackson’s “compelling contemporary instantiations of such a reckoning.” For those of you who are curious, instantiation is a noun derived, however unnecessarily, from the verb instantiate.

Or is it the other way around?

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It appears that the Democratic Party officials in charge of selecting the 55 bloggers who will make up the “State Blogger Corps” at the party convention in Denver violated one of the party’s core principles: they (can you believe it!) evaluated the candidates according to a set of criteria that did not include race!

Party leaders said the factors in determining state bloggers were readership, Internet ratings and focus on local and state politics, not race

Not to worry. The Dems obviously recognized that in addition to violating party principles they had made a terrible political blunder in evaluating minority bloggers by the same standards used for all the other bloggers, and the moved quickly to get back in line with party preferentialist policies.

A second round of blog credentials will be announced before the end of the month, party leaders said, and minority bloggers will be purposely included in that selection.

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A Google search on “affirmative action” these days turns up as many (sometimes more) articles from around the world as from the United States. For some reason this interesting report from The Pretoria News on whites adapting to affirmative action turned up today, even though it is several years old.

“South Africa's white population's growth rate is declining,” the article reports, at least in part because

there appears to be a massive surge of people reclassifying themselves coloured in order to improve their upward mobility....

Coloureds experienced 1.17 percent per annum growth, Africans 0.96 percent and Asians 0.89 percent. But whites suffered a -0.05 percent decline.

But there are other social forces at work as well: the continuation of official race classification in the guise of affirmative action in the post-apartheid era has seen the self-defined coloured population soar from 3,6 million people in 1996 to an unlikely 4 million people in 2005.

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Roger Simon is an astute political writer, but, perhaps because of his long friendship with David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign manager, I think he was a bit tone deaf this morning to the sound of one bit of evidence he provides of Axelrod’s style.

When he was running Paul Simon’s successful U.S. Senate race in 1984, one of Simon’s campaign offices in Chicago was defaced with swastikas out of the mistaken belief that Simon [no relation to Roger] was Jewish. Axelrod saw an easy solution, and Simon began mentioning in his speeches that he was the son of Lutheran missionaries.

So today, in a nation in which 15 percent of voters think (mistakenly) that Obama is a Muslim, I was not surprised when the Obama campaign recently began circulating leaflets with a picture of Obama standing in a pulpit with a large cross in the background and saying that Obama “felt a beckoning of the spirit and accepted Jesus Christ into his life.”

Axelrod’s characteristic response to his candidate being tarred with an unpopular association — swaddling the candidate in reassuring stage props — also does little to allay the suspicion that the American flags and crosses that surround Obama these days represent anything more substantial than, well, stage props.

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We know that Obama lived as a boy in Hawaii and Indonesia, attained his education in New York City and Cambridge, and selected Chicago to launch his political career, but the evidence mounts that his familiarity with the layout of the United States leaves something to be desired.

The blogs, but for some reason not the mainstream press, had a field day lately with his curious announcement in Oregon that

Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go....

Now the Senator from Hawaii–Indonesia–New York–Cambridge–Chicago has committed another grand geographical gaffe (HatTip to Mickey Kaus). After blaming Fox News and emailed rumors for his impending loss in Kentucky, Obama went on to explain that

What it says is that I’m not very well known in that part of the country.... Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.

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In the past I have dogeared a number of Pages (columns by Clarence Page, that is) as good examples of the thinking (or lack thereof) of mainstream liberal columnists/talking heads. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Today’s column, however, goes so far beyond his earlier attempts that I’m tempted to characterize it not as political analysis but humor, intended or otherwise.

Here are some Page pontifications from today:

Obama’s weak appeal to blue-collar voters is tied to his other liability, his newness on America’s political stage. Lower-income voters tend to be the least knowledgeable of “the skinny kid with the funny name,” as Obama cheerfully introduced himself during his Senate campaign. In his presidential campaign, they have been the most likely to believe the false rumors that he is a Muslim, refuses to salute the flag, hangs out with radicals and doesn’t appreciate the values of people who work hard for a living.

Summary of the eRumor:
A picture of Senator Barack Obama [omitted here], Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, Senator Hillary Clinton, and one other person all on a platform and backed by an American flag.  The eRumor says that the National Anthem was being played at the time and that all but Senator Obama saluted.

The Truth:
The picture is authentic.  It was published in Time magazine and was taken 9/16/07 at an event in Indianola, Iowa where six Democratic presidential candidates appeared.  It was Iowa Senator Tom Harkin’s annual “meat and greet.”   The fourth person in the picture is Senator Harkin’s wife, Ruth.  Not seen in the picture are three other candidates who were standing out of view on the right side of the platform, Senator Chris Dodd, Senator John Edwards, Senator Joe Biden. 

At question is what was going on with Senator Obama? His critics are circulating the picture and saying that he is not respecting the flag or the National Anthem, especially since the protocol, according to the United States Flag code, is that civilians should have their right hands over their hearts and that they should be facing the flag.  His supporters are saying that this little lapse should not be held against him since there have been plenty of other events at which he has saluted the flag---so it did not mean that he would, in principle, avoid doing it.

Some supporters have suggested that perhaps the picture does not tell the whole story and that he may have raised his hand shortly after it was taken. 

An ABC News video, however, shows that Senator Obama did not salute at any time during the Anthem and that everybody else on the platform did.
A spokesperson for the Senator told Fox News that it was ridiculous to suggest that Obama was making any kind of a statement and that sometimes “he does and sometimes he doesn’t place his hand over his heart during the National Anthem.”

As for the “false rumor” that Obama “doesn't appreciate the values of people who work hard for a living,” perhaps Page regards Obama’s “bitter/cling” put-down as a form of appreciation.

Here’s another Page:

Obama’s awareness of that cultural gap probably explains why he’s taken to wearing his American flag lapel pin again. It may be a small thing to him intellectually, as he has said, but it does a lot to shatter some of the false Internet-fed impressions about him that have been allowed to grow and harden in some neighborhoods.

Page’s argument would be stronger if the “false rumors” and “false Internet-led impressions” that he offers really were false.

ADDENDUM

Above I laid out what I described as Page’s “observations” on Obama being “painted” as a liberal, but I really shouldn’t have used a noun based on the verb observe.

I’m in the process of reading Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Lanugage As A Window Into Human Nature, and Pinker’s discussion of “factive verbs” should have prevented me from saying that Page actually observes virtually anything about Obama. A factive verb, Pinker writes (p. 7),

entails that the belief attributed to the subject is true. In that way it is like the verb know and unlike the verb think. Say I have a friend Mitch who mistakenly believes that Thomas Dewey defeated Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election. I could truthfully say Mitch thinks that Dewey defeated Truman but I couldn’t say Mitch knows that Dewey defeated Truman, because Dewey did not, in fact, defeat Truman. Mitch may think he did, but you and I know he didn’t. For the same reason I couldn’t honestly say Mitch has admitted, discovered, observed, remembered, showed ... that Dewey defeated Truman.

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Obama, in Oregon, on energy:

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” he added.

Gives a whole new meaning to going on an energy diet.

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Morehouse College in Atlanta, alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr. and widely regarded as one of the top colleges in the country, and the best for black men, has just made the news by graduating the first white valedictorian in its 141 year history. (HatTip to reader Fred Ray)

I’m not sure how many non-black students were enrolled at Morehouse this year, but I’m sure there weren’t many. Back in 1998 an article mentioned that a freshman from Indianapolis “was one of two white full-time students at Morehouse this year,” and added:

Enrollment of white students at Morehouse, founded in 1867, varies from none some years to two or three in a year, said a spokesman.

By 1998, it’s clear, Morehouse was clearly feeling a bit defensive about its absence of “diversity.”

“Morehouse has always had a diverse, international faculty and staff,” college president Walter E. Massey. “For years ... the school maintained an interracial vision and hosted interracial conferences in defiance of Georgia’s Jim Crow laws.”

This sounds like “diversity for thee, but not for me.” Not at all, says Sterling Hudson, currently dean of admissions at Morehouse.

I think some of our alumni are a little nervous about a white student graduating from Morehouse with all of its rich history for producing African-American male leaders. But I don't think it's contradictory at all....

“We’re not aggressively pursuing white students,” says Hudson. “But like every other college, we’re interested in diversity. So, if a white student becomes interested in Morehouse — of course we are going to treat him like any other student.”

Of course in this regard Morehouse is not at all like — it’s more like the polar opposite of — every other selective college in the country, all of whom, in the name of “diversity,” are aggressively competing for and courting the unfortunately small pool of highly qualified minority students. “Of course” those other colleges do anything but “threat [minority applicants] like any other student[s].”

But that’s not all Hudson said. He continued:

“The interesting thing about [valedictorian] Josh [Packwood]’s experience is that he had a full Morehouse experience,” says Hudson. “When he marches across the stage on May 18 and receives his diploma, he’s going to be a Morehouse Man in every way — except ethnicity.”

“I don’t think ethnicity makes the difference; it’s what’s in his heart.”

“What Morehouse stands for at the end of the day, and what Dr. King epitomized, it’s not about black or white, it’s about the content of [a person’s] character,” says Packwood. “It’s about me, representing Morehouse in that light -- not as a white man or a black man.”

It’s not ironic; it’s worse.

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What would we do without anthropologists? (No, don’t tell me. That question was rhetorical.) I had a professor in college who defined an anthropologist as “a sociologist in a tent,” but then he was a sociologist and may simply have been presenting his latest survey findings.

In any event we last encountered an anthropologist here, in the form of John L. Jackson Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania. In his article discussed in that post he shared with the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog readers the following pearl of anthropological insight — that racism has evolved “from blatant to subtle, from explicit to inferential, from biological to cultural....” And the point of this observation?

The point isn't that race is less important now than before. It is just more paradoxical. Race is real, but it isn't. It has value, but it doesn't. It explains social difference, but it couldn't possibly....

Each camp sets the other one up as being more powerful — and dangerous. They make accusations about one another’s intentions and morality. And they both imagine the other to be a serious problem to the future of scholarship.

Race’s complicated relationship to reality (real vs. unreal, there vs. not there) is exactly what has everyone so preoccupied. Of course, just as those junior high school kids in Florida [to whom Prof. Jackson gave a talk] could imagine that race is and isn’t biological at the same time, a little of both and a little of neither, racial experts are caught in the same quicksand — of accusation and innuendo, of charges and countercharges. Race is a social construction, but it is also more than that, and this complicated, contradictory notion of race is exactly what makes racism so tenacious, perched right atop the electrified fence between those racial camps

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There they go again. Once again a liberal court has injected a contentious social issue into the middle of a political campaign, and in so doing has, no doubt unintentionally, handed the Republicans a hot-button issue.

That injection (perhaps a transfusion for the Republicans) came from the

California Supreme Court, striking down two state laws that had limited marriages to unions between a man and a woman, [which] ruled on Thursday that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.

was denounced by religious and conservative groups that promised to support an initiative proposed for the November ballot that would amend the California Constitution to ban same-sex marriages and overturn the decision.

Already the press is attempting to put McCain in the hot seat. Note the following treatment from the Associated Press:

John McCain, the GOP nominee-in-waiting whose position on the issue rankles the Republican Party’s conservative base, sought to strike a delicate balance to the Thursday ruling.

He “supports the right of the people of California to recognize marriage as a unique institution sanctioning the union between a man and a woman, just as he did in his home state of Arizona,” his campaign said in response. “John McCain doesn’t believe judges should be making these decisions.”

McCain rejected the will of the state’s high court even as he tried to maintain his long-held stance that the issue should be left to the states. He suggested that he backs an effort by California’s religious conservatives to put a constitutional amendment defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman on the November ballot.

The Arizona senator opposes same-sex marriage but, in a break with the GOP’s right flank, he also opposes a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex unions on grounds that states traditionally have decided the issue. McCain did work to ban same-sex marriage in Arizona, campaigning for a ballot measure there in 2006. The measure failed.

But wait. We’ve heard this argument before, an argument that forces consideration of the surprisingly vexing question: just what is a state? And, just as important, who gets to make the final decision? Some of you may recall that this very question was involved in — some would say at the core of — the late unpleasantness over the Florida election returns in the 2000 elections.

I discussed this very argument here nearly four years ago, and I encourage you to read that entire post and its links. For those of you who refuse to follow that suggestion, I’ll quote some of it now. Before doing so, however, I need to call your attention to Article Two, Section One, Clause Two of the U.S. Constitution, which provides that “[e]ach State shall appoint [electors], in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.”

In that earlier post I quoted law professor Rick Hasen’s summary of part of Bush v. Gore:

When the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the 2000 Florida controversy, supporters of Bush argued that the Florida Supreme Court, in extending the deadline for Al Gore to contest the election and later by ordering a recount, had violated Article II. The argument was that the court had usurped the legislature’s power.

In its first decision in the Florida controversy, the U.S. Supreme Court suggested that such an argument might be plausible, though it failed to decide the issue conclusively. In the second decision, Bush vs. Gore, three justices — Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice William Rehnquist — embraced the view that the Florida Supreme Court’s actions violated Article II. Dissenting justices argued that the Florida court decision was simply an interpretation of the legislature’s existing rules.

Note well, as Prof. Hasen did, that the issue in 2000 turned on what the Florida Supreme Court’s defenders said was “simply an interpretation of the legislature’s existing rules.” As I wrote in my earlier post:

Ah, there’s the rub that frequently rubs conservatives the wrong way: “simply an interpretation.” The Florida Supreme Court “interpreted” the statutory requirement that election returns be reported within seven days to mean ... not necessarily within seven days. Ditto with the amount of time required for contesting the results, several other matters.

More relevant, however, is the second question, which should be kept in mind during the charges that are sure to be leveled once again against conservatives for claiming to believe in states rights but who will seek to overturn the ruling of the California Supreme Court.

That question, not to put too fine or too exaggerated a point on it, is nothing less than, “What is a state?” As I’m sure you all recall, in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore conservatives on and off the Court were and are still accused of being hypocrites for claiming to be for federalism and states rights while supporting, for purely partisan reasons, the Supreme Court’s running roughshod (so the argument went) over a state’s highest court. That argument was and is fundamentally mistaken, however, because at bottom it rests on the assumption that in a fundamental sense a state is embodied in (and only in) its highest court.

In Bush v. Gore, the relevant fact was that Article Two, Section One, of the U.S. Constitution clearly placed the power to make election rules in the state legislature, whose “seven day” rule was hardly in need of “interpretation.” In what is sure to become the current controversy, some conservatives will encourage the people of California to amend their constitution in a manner that would reverse the California Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling. There is no “tightrope” to be walked by John McCain or anyone else who claims to believe in federalism and states rights supporting the right of the people of a state to say what their fundamental rights are.

That is not to say that no tightropes, no tension, no "delicate balance" to be breached is possible on this issue among conservatives. There certainly is such a tension between conservatives who favor states rights on some policy issues but favor a national Constitutional amendment that would preclude states from approving of gay marriages.

But John McCain is not one of those conservatives. He has consistently opposed, on federalist principles, such a national Constitutional amendment.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Howard Fineman of Newsweek Magazine has done what I would have thought impossible, even for someone who divides his time pontificating on talk television and writing for a slick mainstream publication: he was written an article pontificating about race in the current campaign, and assigning blame here and there for the role it has come to play, without once mentioning Rev. Wright.

Wright’s absence makes Fineman’s complaint against the Clintons seem not only petty but downright pettifogging. “Bill Clinton,” he writes, “should never have dismissed Obama's victory in South Carolina as a race-based one, just like Jesse Jackson's” — even though Fineman recognizes that Clinton was accurate! — and, furthermore, they should not point out that Obama has a real problem attracting blue-collar white votes. As he put it:

(Even though it was in good measure just that the Clintons should have had the wisdom not to say so. Neither should their main argument to superdelegates be that Obama can't get enough white voters to win in the fall. First, that may not be true—especially if Hillary gets out there to help him. And, while it might seem unfair, the Clintons need to have a better reason. They sound too much like they are fanning the prejudice they claim to deplore and that, indeed, they worked throughout their lives to oppose.[The absence of the close parenthesis and some other punctuation is in the original.]

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Over 90% of black Democrats support Obama. So, asks Cinque Henderson in a must-read New Republic article,

What the hell is up with that other 10 percent? Are they stupid? Do they hate their own race? Do they not understand the historical import of the moment?

I can shed some insight on this demographic anomaly. In gatherings of black people, I'm invariably the only one for the Dragon Lady. I'll do my best to explain how those of us in the ever-shrinking minority of a minority came to our position.

I disliked Obama almost instantly. I never believed the central premises of his autobiography or his campaign. He is fueled by precisely the same brand of personal ambition as Bill Clinton. But, where Clinton is damned as “Slick Willie,” Obama is hailed as a post-racial Messiah. Do I believe that Obama had this whole yes-we-can deal planned from age 16? No, I would respond. He began plotting it at age 22. This predisposition, of course, doesn’t help me in making the case against Obama, especially not with black people. But, believe me, there’s a strong case to be made that he isn’t such a virtuous mediator of race. And it’s this skepticism about Obama’s racial posturing that has led us, the 10 percent, into dissent.

Barack is the black person [white liberals] want the rest of us to be — half-white and loving, or “racially transcendent,” as the press loves to call him. And, since picking a candidate makes you allies with his other supporters, why would I want to be allies with educated whites whose glorification of Barack depends in large part on their implicit denigration of the rest of us?

Channeling Malcolm X

It is Obama's biography, we are told, that will govern his behavior. He was raised by a mother who supposedly didn't see color, so he doesn't see color. He was born into tolerance and multi-racial understanding, so he will practice tolerance and multi-racial understanding. Except, that is, when it's not useful to him....

It’s worth remembering that the majority of blacks still think O.J. Simpson is innocent. And, in times like these, when a black man is out front in the public eye, black people feel both proud and vulnerable and, as a result, scour the earth for evidence of racists plotting to bring him down, like an advance team ready to sound an alarm. Barack needed only a gesture, a quick sneer or nod in the direction of the Clintons’ hidden racism to avail himself of the twisted love that rescued O.J. and others like him and to smooth his path to victory, and, therefore, to salvage his candidacy. After Donna Brazile and James Clyburn started to cry racism, Barack was repeatedly asked his thoughts. He declined to answer, allowing the charge to grow for days (in sharp contrast to how he leapt to Joe Biden’s defense a month earlier). But, while he remained silent about the allegations of racism, he gave speeches across South Carolina that warned against being “hoodwinked” and “bamboozled” by the Clintons. His use of the phrase is resonant. It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of “the White Man” masquerading as a smiling politician: “Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us,” he says. “You’ve been hoodwinked. Bamboozled.”

As the son of a Baptist minister, I can attest that Wright is and was an extreme aberration from how the overwhelming majority of black Christians worship. In church, black people hear about Peter, Paul, Mary, and how to get into heaven. How to forgive. How to love. Not how to vote.

But here was Barack suggesting that Wright’s behavior was commonplace in black churches: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.” He generalized Wright’s ridiculousness to distract from his individual choice to worship under a buffoon for two decades. I have a cousin who attended Wright’s church for three weeks and then left, never to return. She had no interest in hearing his nonsense from the pulpit.

Barack obscured the true nature of black religious life because, to do otherwise, he would have had to answer the question, “Why are you a member of a church that is this racially divisive and such a sharp aberration to how the rest of black people worship?” When Barack beautifully suggested that the beliefs pronounced from the pulpit of Trinity in Chicago are not uncommon, he was feeding us garbage. But Barack needed to protect his reputation as a race-healer and unifier, so he told a lie about black religious life to help keep the glow of his own reputation alive. And now the evidence suggests that Barack didn’t, in the end, break with Wright over his outrageous racial claims, but over his suggestion that Barack is just a politician.

Indeed, the only think in this article I disagree with is its support for Hillary.

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I’ve written before about the frantic lengths diversity czars at Susquehanna University went to in order to “balance” the appearance there of Joseph C. Phillips, a prominent black critic of racial preferences.

Now Phillips himself tells the story of his visit, and much better than I did. Read the whole thing.

To whet your appetite for what precedes, here’s his conclusion:

There was ... a particularly fascinating moment during the question and answer portion of the evening. A woman in the rear of the auditorium (that had been sucking her teeth for most of my talk) asked how in the world I expected Black students to get into college without racial preferences. I waited hoping that perhaps one of the Black students so indignant at my appearance would politely check this woman. I waited in vain. The new Black revolutionaries, God help us.

It is truly a sign of how mixed up the world is when a Black man telling Black students that there is no monopoly on brain power is decried as a sellout while White folk that believe Black students are only in attendance on campus because of lowered standards and that without lowered standards they would not be in school at all are seen as comrades in arms. Let’s just call that madness.

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USA Today has an informative article today on the raft of litigation that has emerged around Title IX. Although the article is concerned almost entirely with claims of retribution filed by women’s coaches who complained about their institutions’ failure to comply with Title IX, and all but neglects the numerous complaints that Title IX has led many men’s sports programs to be eliminated in order to produce more (or the appearance of more) “gender equity,” the article is a useful summary of some current controversies.

Read it if you interested in those controversies, because I’m not going to discuss them here. I want to call attention only to one passing — and, as it happens, revealingly off base — comment offered by the author, Jill Lieber Steeg, who has a number of Title IX articles today:

Title IX has come to stand for equality in college sports, though it applies to all schools receiving federal funds, not just colleges, and not just to athletics. There’s no longer a debate over whether women should have equal access to medical and law schools, but Title IX’s role in athletics remains controversial....

Ms. Steeg is right in claiming that there is “no longer a debate over whether women should have equal access to medical and law schools” (or anything else), but she is flatly wrong to imply that, unlike Title IX, Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act are free from controversy these days. And the controversy is always centered on the issue of preferential treatment.

There is a broad, deep consensus today in favor non-discriminatory equal access. Indeed, about the only opposition to it comes from “civil rights” and women’s advocacy groups and their supportive politicians who demand not equal access but preferential treatment. But insofar as “equal access” is less controversial in medical and law school admissions than it is in school and college sports, it is because the non-discrimination standard is given at least more verbal fealty there. Title IX controversies, by contrast, often emphasize “equity” — by which is meant numerical equality in participation, resources, etc. — not non-discriminatory equal treatment, not “equal access” but equal participation.

There would be much less controversy over civil rights today if everyone agreed on the underlying principle that individuals have a right to be treated without regard to their race, sex, or ethnicity, and hence that equality requires non-discriminatory equal treatment, not equality of results — whether the “results” in question are the proportional representation of blacks or women in the freshman class, on the faculty, or on the football and soccer fields.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last June I wrote:

If there were a prize for the most ridiculous rationale for racial discrimination, it would surely go to the University of Oregon.

According to economics professor Bill Harbaugh, I noted,

the startup package for a new, nonminority faculty member in the economics department typically would total about $7,000 over the first three years. A faculty member in the minority recruitment program could get up to $97,000, he said.

Provost Linda Brady and general counsel Melinda Grier said the program, which helps new minority faculty set up an office or lab, is legal and needed to help attract minority faculty in a competitive market....

The funds come into play after a selection committee has chosen a candidate and made an initial job offer. The funds then can be used to negotiate a final contract, [Grier] said....

The funds come into play after a selection committee has chosen a candidate and made an initial job offer. The funds then can be used to negotiate a final contract, she said.

The money goes to the professor's department, not to the professor, she said.

“Dollars aren't allocated based on race,” she said. “Departments get reimbursed for costs.”

“The Department of Justice has information that the University of Oregon may be engaged in a pattern or practice of unlawful discrimination against newly hired non-minority faculty members with respect to the disbursement of salary and other employment benefits via its ‘Underrepresented Minority Recruitment Program,’” according to a letter sent to University General Counsel Melinda Grier that is signed by David Palmer, chief of the employment litigation section of the U.S. Department of Justice.

According to university president David Frohnmayer, the program has “been carefully examined by our legal council [sic] over a number of years. We’ve made reasonable judgment that it is defensible.” (Almost anything is defensible; whether it’s legal or not is another matter.) The university counsel also trotted out the same old argument:

University General Counsel Grier also defended UMRP’s legality in a four-page letter she sent to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The program “is designed to help the University of Oregon diversify its workforce and to help UO meet its obligations under state and federal law,” Grier wrote. “The UMRP does not provide benefits to individuals based on their race or ethnicity. Rather, under the UMRP, departments are reimbursed for the expenses they incur in recruiting and hiring individuals or for general department activities where the hiring of the individual would help to eliminate an underutilization.”

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Here’s a real dog bites man story:

The Colorado Black Chamber of Commerce announced its opposition Monday to a ballot initiative that would eliminate affirmative action in state hiring, contracting and education.

If this becomes a trend, pretty soon labor unions will come out for higher wages; teachers’ unions will oppose school vouchers; illegal immigrants will oppose efforts to curtail illegal immigration; and Minister Farrakhan and Rev. Wright will denounce Jews and whites....

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Richard Kahlenberg, who’s been campaigning for class-based affirmative action for years, has an article on InsideHigherEd yesterday arguing, quite persuasively, that

nothing could carry more potent symbolic value with Reagan Democrats than for Obama to end the Democratic Party’s 40 years of support for racial preferences and to argue, instead, for preferences — in college admissions and elsewhere — based on economic status....

... to catch the attention of working-class whites, he needs to do something striking, which further distances himself from the Rev. Wrights of the world, who view life through the lens of race, and also signals to working-class whites that he understands that they deserve a helping hand too. Switching the basis of affirmative action policies from race to class would do just that.

It’s not as though Obama has said nothing about affirmative action — in fact, he’s been as close to it as he has been to Rev. Wright — and to reject race preferences now he’d have to reject just about everything he’s said in the past. Of course, since he’s now rejected Wright he could reject preferences as well. In fact, following his shock! shock! at learning, after all these years, what Wright really stands for, he could claim, with similar persuasiveness, that in all the years he supported affirmative action he never realized that in practice it amounted to actual racial preferences.

If anyone wants to follow a fairly detailed trail of what Obama has said about affirmative action, and what others have said about what he’s said, you can begin by looking here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Since I agree with the excellent points made in all those posts (I should, since I made them!), I’m sorely tempted to reprise them all here. But — you may issue a sigh of relief now — I’m not going to. The reason I’m not — other than my confidence that I don’t need to because you remember them all— is that the purpose of this post is to point you to Kahlenberg’s article, and Kahlenberg doesn’t argue that Obama will substitute economic preference for race preference, only that he should. (In that wish, although he might shudder at the thought, he agrees with Ward Connerly.)

Now, if you doubt my fear that Kahlenberg reads too much into Obama’s opaque utterances (utterances that I’ve called a “model of waffling obfuscation” on more than one occasion), that at best all Obama wants to do is substitute preferences for some poor whites for some rich blacks while leaving the massive structure of race preference intact, then you’ll need to repair to the above posts and study Obama’s quoted comments carefully.

If you do that, let me ask you to take the following quiz that I asked readers to take last November, some four months before The Speech but as relevant now as then, if not more so, after I quoted from Obama’s verbose but obfuscatory comments on affirmative action in an interview:

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 or decrease 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 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.

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Lately I’ve been trying to get a handle on what is widely said to be our enduring, endemic, pervasive racism, but a racism so “underground, hidden, subtle” that it is visible only to highly trained social scientists (such as the one discussed here) who, to skeptics, resemble nothing so much as dowsers claiming to have near-magical powers to find underground water with forked sticks.

Summarizing the findings regarding “racial resentments” in recent literature of political psychology, John Judis of The New Republic writes that

racism remains deeply embedded within the psyche of the American electorate--so deep that many voters may not even be aware of their own feelings on the subject....

Political psychologists devised new tests to uncover these sentiments....

The answers [to questions inserted into the American National Election Studies] revealed a degree of racial resentment that wasn't apparent from more explicit questions about racial bias. In 1986, for instance, 59 percent of respondents agreed that blacks were not trying hard enough (only 27 percent disagreed), while 67 percent thought blacks should work "their way up ... without any special favors." Psychologists David Sears and Donald Kinder, as well as others, found that this racial resentment was the single most important factor--more important than even conservative ideology or political partisanship--in explaining strong opposition to a host of government programs that either directly or indirectly benefited minorities. Of course, that doesn't mean there couldn't be principled conservative opposition to government-guaranteed equal employment or urban aid. But, according to the political psychologists, racial resentment played the largest role in fueling public skepticism.

Racial attitudes have changed dramatically in the United States over the past several decades, of course, and overtly racist beliefs are much less prevalent among white Americans of all classes today. But a more subtle form of prejudice, which social scientists sometimes call symbolic racism, is still out there — especially among working-class whites.

Symbolic racism means believing that African American poverty and other problems are largely the result of lack of ambition and effort, rather than white racism and discrimination. Who holds symbolically racist beliefs? A relatively large portion of white voters in general and white working-class voters in particular, according to the 2004 American National Election Study, the best data available on this topic. A few answers underscore how widespread these attitudes are:

• Almost 60 percent of white voters agreed with the statement that “blacks should try harder to succeed.” A startling 43 percent of white college graduates nodded at this one, along with 71 percent of whites with no college education.

• Fully 49 percent of white voters disagreed with the statement that “history makes it more difficult for blacks to succeed.” Forty percent of white college graduates disagreed with it, along with 58 percent of whites with no college education.

All of this talk of subconscious, non-rational, gut-level racism calls to mind the work of another Emory social scientist, Drew Westen, whose book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, was discussed here. (What is it with Emory’s infatuation with emotions over thought?) As I wrote there, quoting an article in the Los Angeles Times,

Westen writes that it doesn’t make sense to argue an issue using facts and figures and to count on voters — particularly the swing voters who decide national elections — to make choices based on sophisticated understandings of policy differences or procedures. He says Democratic candidates must learn to do what Republicans have understood for many years — they must appeal to emotions....

As everyone knows by now, Hillary commented that

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

There is indeed a pattern emerging — and it is a pattern that must dismay everyone who admires the Clintons and has defended them against the charge that they are exploiting racial divisions.

There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years

I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.

Not for the first time (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc.), one of the more predictably splenetic outbursts came from the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson. “As a statement of fact, that's debatable at best. As a rationale for why Democratic Party superdelegates should pick her over Obama,” he writes,

it’s a slap in the face to the party’s most loyal constituency — African Americans — and a repudiation of principles the party claims to stand for. Here’s what she’s really saying to party leaders: There’s no way that white people are going to vote for the black guy. Come November, you’ll be sorry.

How silly of me. I thought the Democratic Party believed in a colorblind America.

As I have commented more than once, virtually all of the discussion of the Democratic primaries has been couched in a very unsubtle version of demographic determinism. Democratic voters have been routinely described as being more or less of one mind (if that) on most major public policy issues; they have differed only in their demographic identities, splitting along lines of race, gender, age, etc.

But when Hillary notes, quoting an AP article, that her coalition is broader than Obama’s, she’s denounced as the second coming of George Wallace who “violated the rhetorical rules” (Conason, linked above). If she’s guilty of appealing to the baser instincts of Democratic voters, isn’t this exactly the behavior that one would expect to flow from all the advice to “frame” the debate (see here, here, here, and here) by appealing to the emotions of the electorate?

And speaking of rhetorical rules, Joan Walsh of Salon nervously asks, “[c]an Democrats learn to talk about race.” Like a prissy school-marm telling her charges to sit still, shape up, and fly right, she petulantly informs Democrats to watch their mouth:

Everybody’s going to have to be more careful in the next few months, in the way they talk about race, while also talking about it. A lot. I don’t know how we figure that one out, but we have to.

I think the underlying problem here is that Democrats, apt and eager acolytes of their social science gurus, believe that everything important is, well, underlying — that emotion, attitude, prejudice, unconscious racism trump and even run roughshod over conscious thought, rationality, evidence, principles, moral beliefs, etc. And to their credit, they are perfectly bi-partisan in their disdain for the rationality of American voters: Republicans and small-towners bitterly cling to God and Guns because of economic disappointment; white, blue-collar Democrats similarly vote against their own interests out of “racial resentments.”

In many respects there’s nothing new in the Democrats’ subordination of rationality and thought to feeling and emotion. Remember all the talk, not so long ago, about the Democrats as the “Mommy Party” (warm, compassionate, healing, inclusive, generous) and the Republicans as the “Daddy Party” (strict, demanding, competitive, stingy, just-the-facts rule enforcement)? And let us not forget all the hoo-hah over Thomas Frank’s dismissal of the crazy Kansans that was such a popular rage among Democrats and that was just discussed here.

We’ve just heard a modern riff on the thought vs. emotion melody when Rev. Wright informed the Detroit NAACP about the “two different ways of learning” of blacks and whites.

European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style and the entire educational learning system in the United States of America....

Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object. From the solitude of the cradle with objects being hung over his or her head to help them determine colors and shape to the solitude in a carol in a PhD program stuffed off somewhere in a corner in absolute quietness to absorb from the object. From a block to a book, an object. That is one way of learning, but it is only one way of learning.

African and African-American children have a different way of learning.

They are right brained, subject oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive. Subject oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object. They learn from a person. Some of you are old enough, I see your hair color, to remember when the NAACP won that tremendous desegregation case back in 1954 and when the schools were desegregated. They were never integrated. When they were desegregated in Philadelphia, several of the white teachers in my school freaked out. Why? Because black kids wouldn't stay in their place. Over there behind the desk, black kids climbed up all on them.

Because they learn from a subject, not from an object. Tell me a story. They have a different way of learning....

Let me give just one example — as it happens, from Rev. Wright’s most famous and now recently former acolyte, Barack Obama. Obama, as we’ve seen with his bitter/clinging put-down of small town voters, is no stranger to the idea that people’s behavior is often governed more by their emotions and subconscious concerns than by a clear, thought-out position on the “issues,” but as far as he himself is concerned, he has the image of being almost too thoughtful, rational, articulate, etc., to connect with ordinary people. Thus I think it is quite revealing that even he, former editor of the Harvard Law Review and part-time professor of constitutional law, is on the record saying that he would subordinate head to “heart” in nominating judges and Supreme Court Justices.

As Edward Whelan explained in The Weekly Standard,

In explaining his vote against Roberts, Obama opined that deciding the “truly difficult” cases requires resort to “one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” In short, “the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.” No clearer prescription for lawless judicial activism is possible. [emphasis added]

Indeed, in setting forth the sort of judges he would appoint, Obama has explicitly declared: “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old — and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.” So much for the judicial virtue of dispassion. So much for a craft of judging that is distinct from politics.

So, I’m curious: when Obama was lecturing in Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago, were I to take a class of his and write on the final exam “Justice X’s opinion in Case Y was correct because Justice X’s heart was in the right place”, would Obama have given me an ‘A’?

Again, there’s nothing altogether new here. Pragmatism has long been an important, and often dominant, strain in American liberalism, and its offspring, legal realism and an even more extreme post-modernism (search here for my many discussions of Stanley Fish), also reject fealty to rules and principles in favor of whatever road will lead to one’s preferred result.

Nevertheless, even though this phenomenon is not new, it’s important to recognize that when Obama lets slip his belief that voters often act irrationally, when he emphasizes what’s in a judge’s “heart,” and when Hillary “frames” the argument for her candidacy in a way that strikes many liberals and mainstream pundits (but I repeat myself) as pandering to voters' emotions and subconscious prejudices, they are not going off half-cocked as idiosyncratic individuals but are rather both reflecting and acting out of what has become the dominant heart and gut over head epistemology of modern liberalism.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today I indicated (here) some skepticism about underground, hidden, subtle “institutional and structural” racism. Whether because of luck or co-incidence or simply a terribly confused contact list, I just received an email notice from an assistant editor at Ms. Magazine informing me of an article in the new issue, “‘Too Poor to Parent?,’ on institutional racism in the U.S. foster care system.”

Curious to learn more about “institutional racism,” and hoping to find a good example of this undercover, subtle, hard to pin down but nevertheless pervasive evil, I went to the above link, which provides only an excerpt from the article, not the whole thing. Still, it was revealing (or not, if you’re a skeptic ... or an overt or covert racist).

It begins quite dramatically:

When a recurrent plumbing problem in an upstairs unit caused raw sewage to seep into her New York City apartment, 22-year-old Lisa called social services for help. She had repeatedly asked her landlord to fix the problem, but he had been unresponsive. Now the smell was unbearable, and Lisa feared for the health and safety of her two young children.

When the caseworker arrived, she observed that the apartment had no lights and that food was spoiling in the refrigerator. Lisa explained that she did not have the money to pay her electric bill that month, but would have the money in a few weeks. She asked whether the caseworker could help get them into a family shelter. The caseworker promised she would help—but left Lisa in the apartment and took the children, who were then placed in foster care.

Months later, the apartment is cleaned up. Lisa still does not have her children....

What I think is the attempt at answering this question quickly follows:

Black children are the most overrepresented demographic in foster care nationwide. According to the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO), blacks make up 34 percent of the foster-care population, but only 15 percent of the general child population. In 2004, black children were twice as likely to enter foster care as white children. Even among other minority groups, black mothers are more likely to lose their children to the state than Hispanics or Asians—groups that are slightly underrepresented in foster care.

The reason for this disparity? Study after study reviewed by Stanford University law professor Dorothy Roberts in her book Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books/Perseus, 2002) concludes that poverty is the leading cause of children landing in foster care. One study, for example, showed that poor families are up to 22 times more likely to be involved in the child-welfare system than wealthier families. And nationwide, blacks are four times more likely than other groups to live in poverty.

Similarly, if “poverty is the leading cause of children landing in foster care” and blacks are “four times more likely than other groups to live in poverty,” why is the fact that blacks are “twice as likely to enter foster care as white children” regarded as evidence of “institutional racism”? Why, that is, are blacks the “most overrepresented demographic” if poverty is the cause of “representation” in foster care, blacks are four times more likely to live in poverty, but only twice as likely to be in foster care?

Alas, I’m afraid “institutional racism” remains too subtle for me to grasp.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Say What? (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Opponents of racial preference (I of course include myself) oppose it because we believe discrimination on the basis of race is wrong in principle and practice. Supporters of racial preference support it because they believe that however appealing colorblind racial neutrality may be in principle, in practice it is wrong.

Because those supporters believe that treating the races with strict neutrality amounts to discrimination against blacks, many, perhaps most, of them also believe that opponents are actually motivated by racial animus.

Now comes Tim Wise, an activist national supporter of preferences (I’m sure you can contact his agent to find his speaker fees), who refreshingly admits his own animus.

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) - Anti-racism activist Tim Wise says white men would benefit from a ban on affirmative action.

A petition drive is under way in Nebraska to get a proposed constitutional amendment banning affirmative action on the November ballot.

Wise says that if the measure were to pass, more white men would be hired over qualified minorities, including women. He says that's because those in positions of power in Nebraska are mostly white men, and they — like all people - seek out their own kind, giving little thought to minority applicants

Oh, I forgot. Reducing discrimination is not the goal. Redirecting against “white men” is.

What a relief that, under the leadership of Rev. Wright’s protégé, we’re about to transcend all this race-based business.

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John Jackson Jr., an associate professor of communications and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, has a confused and confusing article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on “Racial Paranoia and Jeremiah Wright.”

“In the 1950s and 1960s,” he begins,

“consensus historians” such as Richard Hofstadter argued that large swaths of the American public displayed a “paranoid style” of political analysis that made them incapable of fully participating in rational debate. That “sick” style was concerned with “the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content.” Half a century later, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s claim that the AIDS epidemic is a scourge inflicted on the African-American community by the U.S. government exemplifies the extent to which paranoia — racial paranoia, in particular — continues to play a powerful role in our politics.

So, let’s move on to (where else?) racism — overt? covert? (pervert?).

The civil-rights movement succeeded in outlawing legal discrimination and driving explicit racism to the margins of society. But in many respects, racism has simply gone underground. Today it is usually subtle, making it more difficult to identify. Of course, recent studies demonstrate that black people still have a harder time than white people (even with identical credentials) when it comes to buying new homes or cars or landing lucrative jobs. According to some social scientists, those differences aren’t just about white prejudice. They are also related to institutional and structural realities like housing patterns and the reliance on market forces in hiring that perpetuate racial differences as a byproduct of seemingly colorblind social policies.

O.K., what is it? Apparently such things as “housing patterns” and even “market forces.” No wonder “racism” is so hard to identify! On this view, it’s everything and everywhere.

And, since Jackson implies racism is both everything and everywhere, one can understand why so many people see it wherever they look, even where, by some unexplained magic, it isn’t.

When racism was explicit and legal, there was less need for African-Americans to be paranoid about it. For the most part, what they saw was what they got. Racists could be unabashed about their feelings, and politicians could blatantly vow, like George Wallace, to fight for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

With the social advances of the 1960s, African-Americans have become increasingly secure in their legal citizenship, but they are less confident about determining when they are being victimized by silent and undeclared racism. Racial paranoia characterizes the post-civil-rights generation of “affirmative-action babies.” They are young black people for whom legal segregation is a glimpse at black-and-white images in a PBS documentary. But they also have a sneaking suspicion that somehow the smallest slights and the most trivial of gestures may be a telltale sign of what has been called “two-faced racism” — hidden racial animus dressed up to look politically correct. Such uncertainty gives rise to paranoia, especially if we stubbornly fail to discuss racism’s newfangled subtleties.

The professor’s attempted explanation falls a good deal short of satisfactory.

What do I mean by racial paranoia? It describes the suspicions black people have whenever, say, an idle white salesperson at their local drugstore sees them beckoning with a question but ignores them anyway. Or when that salesperson takes a few seconds longer than needed to sigh himself into an unenthusiastic response. Insignificant, I know — petty, even. More hollow bourgeois angst. But when talking about race and racism, we shouldn’t underestimate the potential significance of seemingly inconsequential acts.

In some ways, racism was easier to recognize when it was the obvious motivation behind public water hosings and police-dog attacks, when it was symbolized in socially meaningful lines separating the fronts from the backs of buses. Fortunately that version of racial reality is dead. But many Americans still view race relations today through the warped lens of the pre-civil-rights era.

Understanding race means disregarding almost everything we accepted about it prior to the 1960s. We have achieved a modicum of racial equality in the law, but we are far less skilled at figuring out what this recent change in racism — from blatant to subtle, from explicit to inferential, from biological to cultural — means for how we relate to one another after the courts have adjourned and the unabashed bigots have been publicly lambasted.

The point isn’t that race is less important now than before. It is just more paradoxical. Race is real, but it isn’t. It has value, but it doesn’t. It explains social difference, but it couldn’t possibly. That sort of racial double-think drives Americans crazy, makes us suspicious of those staring back at us from across America’s racial tracks, and fans the flames of racial paranoia.

The heightened racial sensitivity that we see now is paranoid only if it sees a threat that’s not there. Prof. Jackson doesn’t seem to have made up his mind on this point, or if he has his explanation is so subtle and so far beyond the reach of his prose that I don’t know what it is.

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I have written several times (such as here and, most recently, here) that Rev. Wright was wrong to say, in effect, “The Black Church, c’est moi!”

Now Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom have made that point much better than I did.

In his recent incendiary remarks, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. claimed that criticism of his views is nothing less “an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition.” Can it really be that millions of black Americans regularly choose to listen to viciously anti-white and anti-American rants on Sunday mornings?

Happily, Chicago’s Trinity Church is an outlier in that regard....

Clearly, Rev. Wright does not speak for mainstream black churches-and he has done them a gross disservice by claiming to do so. He shares neither their vision nor their values. Why their relative silence in the face of Rev. Wright’s rants? Perhaps they believe they are protecting Sen. Obama, but if Wright convinces white Americans that his hateful speeches reflect the ways African-American churchgoers think and worship, the quest for racial equality will be set back decades.

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Opponents of colorblind racial equality in Missouri, led by elected Democratic state officials and supported by roving gangs of intimidators who disrupted petition gathering, have succeeded in keeping the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative off the ballot. For this year.

It is clear that opponents in other states have learned well the lesson taught by states where similar initiative passed and where they have been kept off the ballot by similar tactics. As the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star reported today,

The news from Missouri cheered affirmative-action supporters here, who believe the best way to defeat the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative could be keeping it off the ballot. Similar initiatives passed comfortably when put before voters in California, Michigan and Washington.

Democrats should be ashamed, or at least change the name of their party.

UPDATE

Ward Connerly, a gentleman, rarely raises his voice, but he raised it yesterday.

“So those who are gleeful right now about being able to bully us, you better enjoy your last laugh because it won’t last very long,” said Ward Connerly, a California businessman who helped spearhead the initiative in Missouri and four other states this year.

Connerly, in a telephone interview, said he believes he would have gathered enough signatures to make the November ballot if organizers had two more weeks. He mostly blamed a long court battle with the Missouri secretary of state’s office over the ballot language that delayed signature gathering until January.

Connerly said hordes of adversaries would descend on one petition circulator, call the person a racist, and yell and scream. In some cases, he said, “little old ladies” were harassed.

“We’ve never encountered anything like that” in any of the other states , he said in a phone interview. “This was a very well orchestrated campaign of harassment and intimidation.

Brandon Davis, a Working to Empower Community Action Now spokesman and political director for the Service Employees International Union, rejected Connerly’s depiction of their efforts.

“Our voter educators were simply that — voter educators,” he said. “Ward Connerly should accept what Missourians said and he should stop with the sore loser talk.”

ACORN activists are to “voter education” what scabs are to union organizing. See, for starters, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here....

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I have written, not favorably, about the columnist Leonard Pitts more than a few times, such as here, here, here, here, and here. But now he has written something I can completely endorse.

Writing critically of Rev. Wright, Pitts argues with great force:

If you condemn bigotry when it is turned against people like you, but tolerate it when people like you turn it against someone else, you forfeit all claim to the moral high ground. You are a hypocrite acting only from narrow self interest.

Go back and read all, or even some, of his views discussed in the links above and then ask yourself if you think he would agree with the following slightly amended version of his recent statement:

If you condemn preferential treatment based on skin color when it favors people not like you, but tolerate it when people like you benefit from it, you forfeit all claim to the moral high ground. You are a hypocrite acting only from narrow self interest.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I almost couldn’t believe it. It was so unbelievable, in fact, that I put off writing about it. “It” is something I thought I’d never see, a truly bad column by Peggy Noonan.

In fact, I put off writing about it (the column appeared May 2) so long that now I don’t have to. Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity says, in this email he’s given me permission to post, what I would have said, only better:

I usually like Peggy Noonan’s columns, but not this weekend’s.... The gist of it is that she is not riled up about Rev. Wright because—as silly as what he says is—he reflects “the pain of a people who were forced to come here when they did not want to and made to live in a way that no one would want to. Who could deny them their grief or anger?” Besides, nobody can take what he says seriously.

She analogizes the situation to this: She has a 20-year-old Irish-American friend who “delights in the Wolfe Tones, the Irish folk group named for the 18th-century leader condemned to death by the British occupying forces.” Noonan, in describing her friend’s enjoyment, writes, “It is good to feel that old ethnic religious solidarity … And it’s not so bad to take a little free-floating anger, apply it to politics, and express it in applause. … It’s just a way of saying, ‘I’m still loyal to our bitterness.’ … I can summon the old anger.” [Noonan’s italics.] Noonan thinks this is all fine and, turning back to those listening to Obama’s pastor, notes “there is no apparent record of people leaving a Wright sermon and punching anyone in the nose. Maybe they’re in search of solidarity too. Maybe they’re showing loyalty too.”

Three points, and I’ll make them as calmly as I can, although Noonan’s column is really disturbing. First, just on its own terms, I find this sort of tribalism to be stupid and adolescent at best, and there is nothing good to be said about it in an American, period. Second, the Wright situation is even worse than her friend’s because (a) it’s not 18th-century British occupying forces that the audience is targeting for its Orwellian hate-fest, but our own government right now, and (b) Noonan’s silly friend is not running for president. Third, while Noonan is correct that no thinking person would take Rev. Wright’s sermons seriously, she is wrong to reason that, therefore, they can pose no threat.

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

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

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

If Obama is right, and his and Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ is a “conventional,” typical, normal, black church, if most black ministers spew the hate that we’ve heard from Rev. Wright, the United States has a larger racial divide than most people realize.

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

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

Obama is.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 6:35 PM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

From the emerging Obamian Dictionary:

di•a•log
Noun

I speak; you listen. My Philadelphia Speech was the beginning, and end, of a much-needed national dialog on race.

ORIGIN Modern Elite American English, born in cites, rich suburbs, academic villages (Hyde Park, Cambridge, etc.) and bred in the Ivy League and similar institutions.

1. Hide him in the basement; hope he will be ignored;
   
2. “Contextualize” him; refuse to to “disown” him;
   
3. Disown him.
   

Wright, in short, provided the ideal opportunity for what Obama said he wants but has fled from as though it was the plague itself — a dialog.

Gregory Rodriguez captures this point perfectly today.

Right about now, his much-heralded tutorial on race relations is looking more like Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech than the Gettysburg Address. Because, after last Tuesday’s formal renunciation of his ties to Wright -- and presumably also his white grandmother and all blacks -- Obama looks not only tardy but thoroughly hypocritical. Didn’t Obama’s vaunted speech call for an open national dialogue on race, a subject he said was too important to ignore? Didn’t he urge us to address those “old wounds” that still fester today? Whether you agree with him or not, isn’t that exactly what Wright was doing last week when he reappeared in public to make more provocative statements on race and politics?

That’s no way to start a dialogue, Mr. Obama. You don’t call on people to talk and then renounce someone for speaking his mind. Because Wright didn’t really say anything new last week, it seems that his only new sin is that he called Obama’s bluff and, well, sparked another national dialogue on race. Which, of course, points to the absurdity of Obama’s call for more racial dialogue in the first place.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Please re-read this post, on your way to reading the new UPDATE to it.

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In the Chronicle of Higher Education this morning Peter Schmidt reports on two new studies that conclude colleges could increase their pigmentary “diversity” without resorting to race preferences by simply minimizing the weight they attach to SAT scores.

The second study was carried out by Marta Tienda, a professor of demographic studies, sociology, and public affairs at Princeton University, and Sigal Alon, an assistant professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University. They conducted simulations of how various shifts in admissions criteria would affect enrollments, using student data from the federal High School and Beyond study, the National Education Longitudinal Survey, the College and Beyond database, and the University of Texas at Austin. The researchers concluded that selective colleges created their own need to use race-conscious admissions policies to promote diversity by placing so much emphasis on standardized tests. “The apparent tension between merit and diversity exists only where merit is narrowly defined by test scores,” they argue.

On the basis of their analysis of data from the Texas flagship, which is required by state law to accept any state resident in the top 10th of his or her high-school class, Ms. Tienda and Ms. Alon argue that “using class rank as a measure of merit requires smaller or no race preferences to achieve diversity” and that shifting to admissions policies based on class rank would not hurt graduation rates.

One additional thought: Since it is abundantly clear that many selective colleges are perfectly willing to compromise what they regard as merit in order to achieve what they regard as “diversity,” why not adopt my grandmother’s approach to baking and go even farther? My grandmother thought that if a little bit of butter was good, more butter would be better. On that theory, if “diversity” is so good, why stop with lessening the weight assigned to SAT scores? Why not give a positive preference to some low scorers?

That number would not have to fixed, allowing it to be described as a “goal” and not a “quota.” And no one could dispute the defense that preferences for some low scorers would greatly increase the diversity of many highly selective institutions. Given the great discrepancy of SAT scores by race that currently exists at many of these institutions, they certainly could not have any principled objections to such a democratic policy.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:31 AM | Permalink | Say What? (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Thanks to F.I.R.E., reading in public is no longer as racial harassment at Indiana University -Purdue University.

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No, no. My title is neither an instruction nor a request to google “sex discrimination.” But if you did you should, but won’t, find what I am in fact referring to, which is this report in the Chronicle of Higher Education about Google’s own sex discrimination, which of course was not described as sex discrimination in either the Chronicle report or Google’s announcement of its sex-restricted scholarship program:

The U.S. program awards $10,000 academic scholarships to 23 outstanding female leaders in technology, and $1,000 scholarships to 32 finalists. In Canada, 4 women will receive $5,000 scholarship awards, and 13 finalists will receive $1,000 scholarships. These undergraduate and graduate women are completing degrees in computer science and related fields. Each of these award recipients has demonstrated a commitment to advancing women in technology. We congratulate these leaders on their accomplishments.

As a private company Google may well be allowed to engage in this sort of sex discrimination, but for us Bob Jones fans (see here, here, and here) it would be interesting to know whether any tax exempt funds are engaged in subsidizing it.

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