Madera, California, a city of about 55,000, is more than two-thirds Latino. The Madera Unified School District is 82% Latino. “Yet just one Latino sits on its seven-member school board.”
The predictable result? A lawsuit claiming that the at-large election system for school board members violates the California Voting Rights Act.
This strategy — demanding the replacement of city-wide elections with smaller, neighborhood-based voting districts — was widely used in the South to promote the election of minorities to city councils, county commissions, etc. But what about where the minorities are a majority?
Why can’t a Latino majority elect more Latinos?
The easy answer is that many of the newly arrived immigrants are not U.S. citizens and can’t vote. But Latinos hold a slight majority even among U.S. citizens of voting age.
If the easy answer is wrong, what is the hard answer?
In interviews, several incumbent board members and a member of Madera’s City Council argued that Latinos had effectively marginalized themselves, with too few involved in civic affairs.
“To be honest with you, over the 17 years that I have been on the board . . . there haven’t been that many Hispanics or Latinos who have taken out papers to run,” said Robert Garibay, the lone Latino trustee. It frustrates him, especially when he hears people in the Latino community complain about a lack of representation.
“Where were they?” he asked.
Garibay argued that Latinos were, perhaps, discouraged from running because “they don’t feel that they have a chance.” As a result, he said, “they don’t get involved, for the most part, in community events.” That is the argument made in interviews by the three plaintiffs.
It has often been pointed out — by Abigail Thernstrom, among others — that the federal voting rights act has been interpreted not only to prohibit discrimination against minorities but to guarantee them the right to elect candidates of their choice. In California, however, apparently that is not enough. There, according to state law, minority voters presumably have a right not only to election districts, etc., where they can elect candidates of their choice (such as districts in which they are a majority) but districts where they feel they can win.
Latino voters in Madera, California, are, of course, not the only minorities whose own action, or inaction, deprives them of something valuable. Black students who choose to attend virtually all-black colleges deprive themselves of the “diversity” that their leaders, college administrators, and liberals everywhere insist is absolutely essential to education in and for the modern world. (I’ve argued a number of times — such as here, here, here, and here — that if “diversity” really is as important as its advocates claim, minorities should be drafted to attend “diversity”-deprived institutions, study in “diversity”-underrepresented fields, etc., and, as I argued here, inner city minorities should be shipped to, say, schools in South and North Dakota that are terribly “diversity”-deprived and the Dakotans shipped to Detroit et. al.)
Wait. There’s more. Now come Carol Hoxby, an economist at Stanford, and Christopher Avery, a professor of public policy at Harvard, who argue in a paper recently presented at the American Economic Association convention in San Francisco that
[e]ach year thousands of high-achieving students from low-income families do not apply to selective colleges that would almost certainly accept them….
Most such students do attend college somewhere — often at nonselective institutions where the median SAT score is hundreds of points below their own. But they miss out on the challenging course work and valuable career networks that a selective college might provide. And ironically, they might actually pay more for their education, because some elite colleges now offer extensive financial aid to students from low-income families….
The two scholars used a variety of methods, including block-level census data, to estimate each student’s household income. In their paper they define a family as “low income” if its income is below the 30th percentile, which is around $28,000. They define a student as high-achieving if the student had combined SAT scores above 1200, a high-school grade point average of B-plus or better, and at least one Advanced Placement score of 4 or 5 (or an equivalently high score on an SAT subject-area test).
In one typical recent year, Ms. Hoxby said, there were roughly 21,000 high-achieving students from low-income families. But more than 60 percent of those students did not make any “ambitious applications,” the study found.
Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Avery regarded an application as ambitious if the college’s median combined SAT score was no more than five percentiles below the student’s own score. “Notice that that’s a very broad definition,” Ms. Hoxby said. “I’m not saying that you’re applying to a school where you would be below the median.”
But even under that generous definition, Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Avery found that a large majority of those students did not make any ambitious applications. Instead, they typically applied to nonselective (or only slightly selective) public institutions close to their homes.
I know, I know. You don’t have to say it. Pointing out that there would be more Latinos on school boards if more of them decided to run for election and that there would be more poor minorities in selective colleges if more them applied is just one more conservative, racist (but I repeat myself) example of blaming the victims.
Today’s LA Times (Sat., Jan. 10) has an editorial that opposes the judge’s ruling and to some extent the logic behind the state statute. One of the editorial board’s problems with the statue is the irony that whites could soon sue based on their own minority status, and could be disenfranchised if they “continue[d] to vote along racial lines.” Of course, their voting along racial lines may have a lot to due with the absence of Latino candidates. In essence: Latino voters voting for Latino candidates in at-large or districted elections is acceptable, whites doing the same points to problems in the law.