Discriminations

Move over Frederick Jackson Turner. He’s the historian whose “frontier thesis” explained the national nerve tapped by the official closing of the frontier. In “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” an address delivered to a gathering of historians in 1893, he asserted:

This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development. Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. Now the peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people -- to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life.

Forget them all. Our major media have discovered the real central theme of American history. Writing in the New York Times today, columnist Brent Staples declares that “[t]he effort to dehumanize black people by characterizing them as apes is central to our national history.”

I would say that the Los Angeles Times is aping this trend, but I dare not. One of the authors of its contribution today to this growing genre is none other than Prof. Philip Atiba Goff, whom we encountered only a few days ago here and one of whose recent studies, mentioned in his LAT piece today,

looked into the role of the media in death penalty cases. Using data compiled by the criminologist David Baldus, we examined 153 cases in the Philadelphia area in which a defendant was found guilty and statutes allowed for the application of the death penalty, among other sentencing options.

We read every article published about these cases in the Philadelphia Inquirer, from the time the crime was first reported to the sentencing of those arrested, and we tallied the number of ape-related metaphors that appeared in print -- things such as “an urban jungle” and “aping a victim’s screams.” Not only were black men and their crimes much more likely to be described in apelike terms, but the number of ape-related metaphors predicted the likelihood that a defendant would be sentenced to death.

I suppose if our racial notions are that deeply rooted it would be futile to monkey around with them.

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It is almost amusing to watch practitioners of the old black protest politics try hold on to their old positions as the threats to them come from new and unexpected directions.

Take this lament by noted black protest author/journalist Earl Ofari Hutchinson that “the number of black elected officials has been stagnant at best and, at worst, on a downhill slide,” an article that inadvertently reveals some of the confusions and contradictions of contemporary black protest politics.

Note, for starters, his assumption that blacks are owed guaranteed political success and that removing that guarantee is a “peril” for black politicians:

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in 1993 on minority redistricting is another potential peril for black politicians. The court tossed out districts that had been gerrymandered to preserve black population majorities. These so-called race-based districts were mostly in the South and were deliberately drawn to insure that black candidates would perpetually be elected to Congress.

Next Hutchinson trips over some factual hurdles (facts are often hard to get across or around):

An added dilemma for black voters is that any future increase in the number of black elected officials must come from what are currently majority white districts. Yet, with the exception of former Oklahoma Rep. J.C. Watts and former Connecticut Rep. Gary Franks — both Republicans and both conservatives who were elected from majority white districts — it is still a hard sell for blacks to triumph in non-black majority districts.

Even the New York Times has noticed what Hutchinson hasn’t. In an article from last October that featured Melanie Levesque of New Hampshire, a black woman who “represents one of the whitest districts in one of the whitest states in the nation.” Levesque, however, was simply the cover girl for the article’s main subject: “a new generation of black elected officials who are wooing white voters and winning local elections in predominantly white districts across the country.”

... [O]ver the last 10 years, about 200 black politicians have won positions once held by whites in legislatures and city halls in states like New Hampshire, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee.

In 2007, about 30 percent of the nation’s 622 black state legislators represented predominantly white districts, up from about 16 percent in 2001, according to data collected by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research group based in Washington that has kept statistics on black elected officials for nearly 40 years.

The turgidity in black political gains can also be dumped squarely on several phenomena: black voter apathy, alienation, inner-city population drops, suburban integration and displacement by Latinos and Asians who have shown a far greater willingness than blacks to split their votes more evenly among both Republican and Democratic candidates....

Black politicians must also expand their agenda to address the needs of Latino and Asian voters. Their support will be absolutely crucial if black politicians expect to hold or win office in the future in districts that were once majority black but are fast changing to majority Latino and Asian districts.

swollen and distended or congested : a turgid and fast-moving river.
[But also, and this may be more appropriate]
• (of language or style) tediously pompous or bombastic : some turgid verses on the death of Prince Albert.

First, it still doesn’t occur to Hutchinson that if blacks want to get elected they should “expand their agenda” to appeal to whites as well. The pale, apparently, remain beyond the pale.

More fundamentally, however, Hutchinson doesn’t explain why blacks should be elected to represent districts that “are fast changing to majority Latino and Asian districts.” Well, of course he doesn’t. He can’t. The whole point of “diversity” these days is that people should be represented (even in institutions that are not designed to be representative) by people who “look like them.”

It has never struck me as a smart move for minorities to elevate pigment to principle and to pin their claim for equal treatment on what they look like, and I suspect some black politicians who are in the process of being displaced by Hispanics and Asians may come to hold colorblind merit in higher regard than they have in the past.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Most of the criticism of Attorney General Holder’s recent speech lamenting that “Black History Month” was separate and unequal has concentrated on his accusation that we (or at least those of us who are pigment-impaired) are a “nation of cowards.”

Now a second wave of criticism has begun to appear, and it is even more devastating than the first. A good example of this second wave is Abigail Thernstrom, who writes in National Review Online: “‘A nation of cowards’” — those attention-grabbing words have been much remarked upon. In fact, the rest of the speech is even more disturbing than that mud-slinging phrase.”

Thernstrom begins with Holder’s charge that “outside the workplace” there is so little racial interaction that “[o]n Saturdays and Sundays” America today “does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago.” Really?

A little fact-checking is in order. Saturdays and Sundays looked quite different even less than 50 years ago. In 1964 only 18 percent of whites said they had black friends; the figure today is 87 percent. Raise the bar to “a fairly close personal friend” and the proportion jumps from a mere 9 percent in 1975 to 75 percent in 2005. The share of blacks with close white friends has soared from 21 percent to 82 percent over that same period.

We don’t have much in the way of historical data on interracial dating because, not so long ago, the figure would have been too low for pollsters to bother tabulating. But we do know that in 1963 only 10 percent of whites approved of it. In 2006, however, a Washington Post/Kaiser poll found that 59 percent of black men and 41 percent of black women had dated someone who is white. And 41 percent of white women and 36 percent of white men had crossed the racial-dating divide. Today, the number of black-white marriages is up to almost half a million — still low, but a steep rise over the last 40 years. Presumably, these couples generally spend Saturdays and Sundays together.

Holder says that on the weekends blacks and whites lead separate lives. That’s not so easy to do, given the racial composition of many American neighborhoods. Half a century ago, only 20 percent of whites reported having black neighbors; today the figure is above 60 percent. Blacks, on average, live in communities that are only half black. Do blacks and whites living in close proximity never chat about common concerns — the schools, the traffic, and the life of their kids in and out of school? Do the whites who voted for  Barack Obama refuse to talk to the blacks who live on their street?

The one point that you developed in a bit of detail in the February 18 speech was especially silly: “Black history is given a separate, and clearly not equal, treatment.... Until black history is included in the standard curriculum in our schools and becomes a regular part of all our lives, it will be viewed as a novelty, relatively unimportant and not as weighty as so-called ‘real’ American history.”

Bosh. The reality is that our high schools and universities are quite clearly focusing disproportionate attention on black history.

The proof includes a poll published last year in which 2,000 high school juniors and seniors in all 50 states were asked to name the 10 most famous Americans, other than presidents and first ladies. The top three finishers were black: Martin Luther King Jr. (67 percent), Rosa Parks (60 percent), and Harriet Tubman (44 percent). So is the only living finisher, Oprah Winfrey (22 percent).

As for the universities, “the almost obsessive emphasis on race, class, and gender in the humanities and social sciences means that, if anything, black history is overrepresented in college history curricula,” in the words of professor KC Johnson, a distinguished scholar of American history based at Brooklyn College....

It’s true that college black-studies courses are often “separate.” But the reason is hardly to slight black history. It is to satisfy demands for hiring more black professors, who tend to specialize in black studies. Some of them also use their platforms to spread the lie that America is still pervaded by white racism.

Your unelaborated assertion that “this nation has still not come to grips with its racial past” is also way off base, Mr. Attorney General.

To the contrary, this nation has adopted numerous civil-rights laws. It has replaced the once-pervasive regime of discrimination against blacks with a benignly motivated but nonetheless wide-reaching regime of discrimination against whites, euphemistically known as “affirmative action.” It sometimes seems more interested in teaching children about slavery and segregation than about math and science. It has elected a black president.

If you really want an honest conversation and if you don't share the opposition of the vast majority of Americans (including me) to large racial preferences, please clarify specifically why you disagree. Also, please come to grips with the fact that these preferences do very little for truly poor people; that a substantial percentage of them go to middle- and upper-class blacks at the expense of less affluent Asians and whites; and that preferences harm some of their intended beneficiaries.

On this last point, please address the social-science research showing that virtually every selective college and university in the country discriminates so heavily in admissions that most black students cluster toward the bottom of the class and the best black students see their accomplishments stigmatized -- and that alarming percentages drop out. And that more than half of entering black law students never pass the bar and never become lawyers. And that many blacks might do much better and get better educations at the less selective schools they would attend if the racial preferences were not so large. And please state whether you support the racial-preference lobby's efforts to deny researchers access to the empirical databases that would cast more light on the magnitude of these problems

Maybe in future comments Thernstrom and Taylor will say what they really think of Holder’s speech.

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Is calling someone “spooky” the same as calling him a spook? If so, Christopher Edley, Dean of Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, should prepare for an onslaught by the politically correct language police since spook, for those of you too young or protected to be familiar with it, is “Offensive Slang Used as a disparaging term for a Black person.” (HatTip to Roger Clegg)

This Edley, by the way, who taught Obama at the Harvard Law School, was last seen here, predicting that “race-baiting” would be a major factor in the 2008 presidential campaign.

... [HIs] paper argues that appeals to racial bigotry are likely, especially if Barack Obama emerges as the Democratic nominee.

“It’s not only Barack Obama who will have to combat race-based tactics,” Mr. Edley, an Obama supporter, said in a statement accompanying the report. “Any politician who backs positions that appeal to minority voters is vulnerable.”

Before that, we encountered Edley here, heading a new institute to explore ways around California’s ban on race preferences.

And before that, as I noted here, Edley is a former Harvard law school professor,

former White House aide, co-author of President Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” review of affirmative action policies, advisor to Clinton’s race commission, fervent advocate of racial preferences (he described Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White as “a crime against humanity”), and advisor to the Gore campaign.

Asked how Obama has changed since his Harvard days, Edley compares him to “a fabulous red wine.”

“When it’s young, its potential is exciting, and then with age the real power and beauty of it comes out. That process accelerated to lightning speed during the campaign, and I think the best is yet to come.”

Obama, Edley predicts, “is gonna keep getting better and better.”

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

Admissions to very selective public universities like the University of Virginia (or at least nominally public; UVa receives only 8% or so of its operating budget from the state) are trickier and more fraught with conflict than admission to selective private institutions. There are debates, for example, over how many students to accept from out of state as well as which parts of the state are favored over others.

Virginia is now enjoying another of these hardy perennial controversies, as state legislators have introduced several bills recently to limit out of state admissions. As the Washington Post reported two days ago,

RICHMOND -- Valedictorian Phillip Wears boasted a 4.01 grade point average, served as captain of his lacrosse team and won awards for photography and television production when he graduated from South County Secondary School last year. But he still couldn’t get into the University of Virginia. “He was kind of shocked more than anything,” said his mother, Millie Wears of Fairfax Station. “It’s a Virginia school. You have a student who has a 4.0. How can you say no?”

State legislators say they think they know the answer: An increasing number of Virginia students with top grades and impressive test scores, many from populous Northern Virginia, are losing slots at the state’s premiere schools to out-of-state students....

“We’re in a situation where we have the ‘University of New Jersey-Charlottesville’ campus and the ‘University of Pennsylvania-Williamsburg’ campus,” Del. Timothy D. Hugo (R-Fairfax) said. “I think that needs to come to an end.”

For their part, university and state education officials make two main arguments: money and, you guessed it, diversity. Regarding the money, they note that reducing the number of out of state students would be very expensive, since those students pay a much higher tuition.

At U.Va., each 1 percent drop in the number of out-of-state undergraduates would cost the university about $3 million, [executive director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Daniel] LaVista said.

The 31 percent of out-of-state undergraduates there account for 63 percent of the school's tuition revenue, said Carol Wood, a U.Va spokeswoman.

But there is another diversity argument — actually, a “diversity” argument — that current critics of out of state admissions curiously are not making but should make: that admissions officials and university minority offices actively recruit out of state in order to increase the numbers of black and Hispanic students.

I”ve discussed the problem (at least I think it’s a problem) of recruiting out of state minorities a number of times. For example, UVa chief diversity officer William Harvey has been quite explicit about this, as I noted here in discussing one of his speeches:

This was the problem Harvey addressed in his recent speech:

Harvey noted that Latinos and Hispanics currently comprise approximately three percent of the University undergraduate population, while Latinos and Hispanics make up approximately seven percent of the Commonwealth's population.
....
The number of Latino/Hispanic faculty members at the University is also considered inadequate, Harvey noted.

And the solution, or part of it:

Harvey said as one-third of University students are not from the Commonwealth, the University should actively recruit students from states with large Latino/Hispanic communities. [Emphasis added]

So, because Virginia Hispanics are “underrepresented,” Hispanics should be rounded up and brought in from other states....

But does the number of Hispanics at UVa really represent a problem that needs to be solved? Consider:

Approximately 37 percent of Latinos and Hispanics who apply to the University are accepted, Harvey said. According to the Office of Admission Web site, 38 percent of students who applied for admission in the fall of 2004 were accepted.

Since The University turns away large numbers of qualified students, including many who could provide “diversity” on any number of grounds, is it really a good idea to spend scarce resources to persuade students who are not now applying to apply?

• 7% of the applicants were black;

• 12.3% of the admittees were black;

• 29.4% of the non-black applicants were admitted;

• 57.1% of the black applicants were admitted.
  

“You have to attribute that high-yield rate to the excellent job that the Office of Admission has done this past year,” African-American Affairs Dean M. Rick Turner said. “They were on a special mission to really cull the country, enticing the very, very best African-American students to come to the University of Virginia....” [Emphasis added]

A front page story in today’s Washington Post discusses discrimination in admissions at the University of Virginia ... against applicants from Northern Virgina.

Of the current sophomore, junior and senior classes, 47.7 percent of Northern Virginia applicants to the university's College of Arts and Sciences were admitted, compared with 54.5 percent from other urban and suburban regions, such as the Richmond and Norfolk areas, and 54 percent from rural communities.

This despite the fact that Northern Virginia’s schools are generally considered the strongest in the state, and one school, the highly selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, typically has a UVa admission rate of 80% or more.

In a very interesting and unexplored comparison, the article points out — but does not analyze in any way — that black applicants are accepted at a significantly higher rate.

Black applicants appear to have had an edge in the process. Though as a group they had lower SAT scores, about 69 percent were offered admission, higher than any other racial [or geographical!] subset.

Does this very high acceptance rate reflect only applications from blacks who are Virginia residents? The article doesn’t say. Are out of state blacks with low scores accepted at a higher rate than white or Asian or Hispanic Virginia residents with high scores? The article doesn’t say.

If the legislators who are examining out of state admissions are serious about their effort, they will confront the degree to which the decision to “cull the country” in search of racial and ethnic “diversity” discriminates against residents of Virginia.

ADDENDUM

Here’s another question the legislators should pursue. As we’ve seen, one of the main justifications university officials give for admitting out of state students is financial — those students are charged a much higher tuition than Virginia residents. But inasmuch as the University of Virginia works closely with several organizations that provide racially exclusive scholarships, what percentage of out of state minorities do not pay that tuition because they receive such scholarships?

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Conventional wisdom has it that Obama’s election has shown that affirmative action is no longer necessary, but according to Rasmussen’s surveys more people think it necessary now than thought so before his election.

In a survey taken last August, “46% [said] such programs are no longer necessary. But nearly a third (32%) [believed] that affirmative action should continue.” In a survey published today, however, Rasmussen reports that “[t]hirty-eight percent (38%) of adults say affirmative action is still relevant, but 41% disagree....”

Rasmussen’s surveys, like many others, also show that “affirmative action” garners more support than “preferential treatment,” even though virtually all actual affirmative action programs (in admissions, hiring, etc.) involve preferential treatment. Last August’s survey, for example, found that “58% ... oppose government programs that give special treatment to women and minorities, as opposed to 26% who favor them.”

Still, the interesting findings here are that, according to Rasmussen, the number of people who believe “affirmative action” is still relevant has increased since Obama’s election, and the number who disagree has declined.

I wonder, does this mean that people really like Obama and think that he wouldn’t be president without affirmative action, that we need to keep affirmative action so that we an elect more Obamas in the future?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

In its Sunday Magazine section yesterday the Washington Post ran a perfectly innocuous (and not very funny) humor column, “Below The Beltway,” by Gene Weingarten on the sexual appetites of men and women. It began:

In a study described recently in the New York Times, men and women were shown various types of sexually explicit videos, and sensors were attached to their private parts to measure their physical arousal. The subjects were also asked to rate their degree of arousal themselves.

The study found that men were completely predictable: Straight men reported they were turned on only by images of women, and the machine confirmed that. Same with gay men and images of men. But while women of both orientations reported similarly gender-specific responses, the machine called them liars. The sensors reported that all women were turned on by absolutely everything ... including videos of bonobos having sex. Bonobos are apes.

The Times treated this as social anthropology. The story droned on for what seemed like 200 pages and wrestled with grave epistemological issues involving the Cartesian nexus of mind and body. I opted instead for a few minutes on the phone with my friend Gina Barreca, the feminist scholar.

Gene: So, from a highly scientific perspective, can we agree this study establishes that, deep in their hearts, all women are slutbunnies?

Gina: How many pairs of shoes do you own, and when was the last time you altered your hairstyle?

The headline, illustration and text of “Below the Beltway,” a column in The Washington Post Magazine today, may cause offense to readers. The magazine was printed before a widely publicized incident last week in which a chimpanzee attacked and badly mauled a woman in Stamford, Conn. In addition, the image and text inadvertently may conjure racial stereotypes that The Post does not countenance. We regret the lapse.

Read Weingarten’s column, take a look at this graphic that accompanied it, and decide for yourself whether they could possibly “conjure up racial stereotypes” for any remotely sane person. As my friend Roger Clegg commented to me in an email (I quote with permission):

Suppose every time you made a reference to a monkey or ape, you turned to your African American friend and, said, “No offense” [or my counter-example: “present company excepted”]. Would that be a good idea? Such hypersensitivity is silly at best, and really quite insulting. But yesterday, The Washington Post apologized in advance for any racial offense (or offense to those recently mauled by chimps) given by Gene Weingarten’s column....

UPDATE [24 Feb.]

On several occasions I have commented on syndicated columns by DeWayne Wickham, such as here and here. If you’ve read those posts, and others, you will know that when I say that his piece in USA Today is one of his more interesting ones I’m not offering much of a compliment (HatTip to Roger Clegg, whose comments on it will appear on National Review Online’s The Corner later today).

Given all the recent monkey business (“no offense,” “DISCRIMINATIONS readers excepted,” etc.), Wickham took it upon himself to consult with Prof. Philip Atiba Goff, an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA who specializes in, among other things, “Mental representations of minority groups,” who, Wickham claims, probably with good reason, “knows more than just about anyone about the metaphorical linking of blacks to apes ... [and] has spent years probing the psyche of whites for an understanding of why so many of them tend to, consciously or unconsciously, associate blacks with apes, monkeys, baboons or gorillas.”

So, what do Goff/Wickham suggest we do? I’m sure you can guess, if you haven’t already:

It’s time the nation has an adult conversation about the long legacy of portraying blacks as monkeys, Goff said. But as the Post’s response shows, this won’t be easy.

Attorney General Eric Holder was right when he said during a Black History Month speech at the Justice Department that “in things racial, we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” Talk of racial issues is too unpleasant for those who believe Obama’s election has ushered in a post-racial era.

I suppose the transition from fighting actual discrimination to ferreting out hidden, unconscious bias represents progress of a sort, but all too often it seems to result in wallowing in pits of rhetorical muck at the bottom of a long, steep, slippery slope.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Law school admissions, as readers of DISCRIMINATIONS know all too well, is not colorblind, but according to a new lawsuit it is completely blind to the needs of one group, the blind.

Inside Higher Ed reports this morning:

The National Federation of the Blind and a blind law school applicant sued the Law School Admission Council last week, charging that its Web site, essential to those preparing for the Law School Admission Test, is inaccessible to blind people, effectively blocking them from law school. Web sites can be “tagged” so that blind people can use software to navigate and obtain information, but the suit charges that the law school site lacks this necessary tagging.

Or, in the alternative, perhaps the National Federation of the Blind should expand its litigation strategy to demand that all law schools require all their students to wear some sort of voice-induced “tag” that would identify them by race and ethnicity, thus allowing blind students to benefit from the “diversity” that would otherwise be denied to them.

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Rachel Steindel is the “Language Columnist” for the Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina. In a recent column she argues that some students admitted under affirmative action are “at a disadvantage” because “they speak a different language.”
That language? “African-American English, or AAE, has many names, but you’ve probably heard it referred to in hushed whispers as Ebonics.”

Not only does Ms. Steindel defend Ebonics, or AAE — “Contrary to popular belief, AAE is not just a bunch of jumbled-up bad English that hip-hoppers and wannabes use to sound cool” — she actually argues that it provides a justification for continuing affirmative action.

What does this have to do with affirmative action? Imagine coming to school and learning how to read. Except instead of being given Dick and Jane, you are given a primer written in Middle English.

It kind of looks like the English you speak. But things are just different, in ways you can’t quite figure out. And when you ask your teacher for help, she just corrects what you say (“Now Susy, you forgot to use the genitive case again!”) and tells you to get back to work. The next day, you find yourself in a class for people with language deficits.

The thing you really need, then, is explicit instruction in Middle English, like I got on my first day of Chaucer here at UNC. Professor Wittig didn’t teach me either to erase my own English or expect me to speak Middle English all the time, but rather to learn a skill set that I needed to know to succeed. And the same should be true for children who speak AAE.

But they are not getting this explicit instruction. And until educators and the general population wake up and hear the Ebonics, children who speak AAE are going to be drastically behind and stay behind no matter how many other educational reforms are passed and new schools built. And I think that’s a good a reason as any to keep affirmative action around.

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Hauling out the most overworked and overheated rhetorical weapon in the Democrats’ arsenal, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and others accused the Republican governors who are threatening to refuse some of the “stimulus” funds for their states as, you guessed it, insenstive.

Other Democratic critics weren’t so, well, sensitive.

Critics such as Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina say the Republican resistance is a political, even racist, ploy to withhold critical help from the nation’s poorest and most hard-hit communities.

The governor of Louisiana expressed opposition. Has the highest African-American population in the country. Governor of Mississippi expressed opposition. The governor of Texas, and the governor of South Carolina. These four governor’s represent states that are in the black belt. I was insulted by that.... All of this was a slap in the face of African-Americans.

Republican Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said he is rejecting $100 million in unemployment assistance in the stimulus plan because it would force the state to raise business taxes to pay for the extra aid once the federal dollars run out.

“It requires us to make a permanent change in our law,” he said. “It’s like spending a dollar to get a dime.”

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Yes, I’m biased. I have a conscious bias against the very idea, or at least the uses of the idea, of “unconscious bias,” a faddish notion lovingly surveyed and endorsed in this New York Times piece in which Charles M. Blow writes that he “take[s] exception to Holder’s language, but not his line of reasoning” in his “A Nation of Cowards” speech (discussed here ).

Blow begins by attempting to give us what he regards as “a better understanding of the breadth and nature of racial bias.”

According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released last month, twice as many blacks as whites thought racism was a big problem in this country, while twice as many whites as blacks thought that blacks had achieved racial equality.

Furthermore, according to a 2003 Gallup poll, two in five of blacks said that they felt discriminated against at least once a month, and one in five felt discriminated against every day. But, a CNN poll from last January found that 72 percent of whites thought that blacks overestimated the amount of discrimination against them, while 82 percent of blacks thought that whites underestimated the amount of discrimination against blacks.

One factor could be that most whites harbor a hidden racial bias that many are unaware of and don’t consciously agree with.

Next, consider the convoluted, twisted double-bind (“A dilemma in which someone receives contradictory instructions and cannot act on either”) that inescapably results from taking the idea of hidden racial bias seriously. Even Blow notes an example, without seeming to appreciate its irony:

First, white people don’t want to be labeled as prejudiced, so they work hard around blacks not to appear so. A study conducted by researchers at Tufts University and Harvard Business School and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that many whites — including those as young as 10 years old — are so worried about appearing prejudiced that they act colorblind around blacks, avoiding “talking about race, or even acknowledging racial difference,” even when race is germane. Interestingly, blacks thought that whites who did this were more prejudiced than those who didn’t.

Second, that work is exhausting. A 2007 study by researchers at Northwestern and Princeton that was published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science found that interracial interactions leave whites both “cognitively and emotionally” drained because they are trying not to be perceived as prejudiced.

But Blow, generously, is willing to let “‘cognitively and emotionally’ drained” whites off the hook, acknowledging that “[t]he fear of offending isn’t necessarily cowardice, nor is a failure to acknowledge a bias that you don’t know that you have” — at least up to a point, since he can’t help adding “but they are impediments.”

So, is there any hope for us “cognitively and emotionally” impaired whites? Are there no re-education centers to which we could be sent? Blow does note one possible way to “eradicate this implicit bias”:

According to a Brown University and University of Victoria study that was published last month in the online journal PLoS One, researchers were able to ameliorate white’s racial biases by teaching them to distinguish black peoples’ faces from one another. Basically, seeing black people as individuals diminished white peoples’ discrimination. Imagine that.

Whenever anyone, black or white, is presumptious or foolish enough to suggest that blacks should not only be seen but treated “as individuals,” not as fungible representatives of their race, they are immediately and vociferously branded as racists.

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Regarding President Obama’s upcoming budget, Politico reports today:

Obama’s aides now talk about “bending the curve” – that is, changing the rate of increase of the deficit – rather than balancing the budget. The plan released this week will “seek to restore the nation to a sustainable fiscal trajectory over of [sic] five-to-ten year window,” Orszag said.

Obama’s pledge is to reduce the budget by 2013 to a mere $533 billion, a figure that previously would have been thought of as staggering.

I’m neither an economist nor a mathematician (or, for that matter, even an arithmetician), but it seems to me this means that if Obama’s “stimulus” etc. had totaled “only,” say, one or two trillion then, based on his own budget proposals and projections, we’d have a surplus in 2013 of between $500 billion and a trillion and a half.

Obama is nice and appealing all that, but he’s certainly beginning to look like a pretty expensive luxury item that we can’t afford.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Newsweek is the magazine that recently informed us in its cover story that “We Are All Socialists Now.” Now one of its quintessential Alter-nate reality writers, Jonathan Alter, tells us “How Obama Can Talk Us Out Of The Recession.”

That, actually, was Real Clear Politics’ headline for Alter’s story. Newsweek itself called the article “America’s New Shrink,” and, with its customary fawning idolotry of all things Obama, cheerily instructs us, “Chin up, everyone. This president is well poised to bring us back from the brink.”

Alter, it turns out, is much more interested in Obama’s demeanor than in deficits, in his personality more than in his performance, in his “leadership” than in where he is trying to lead us. In Newsweek’s Alternate-reality, personality has been elevated from cult to quasi-offcial state religion.

“Why,” Alter asks, does he think “Barack Obama has a good chance of restoring confidence and pulling us back from the brink?” He’s only too happy, giddy even, to tell us.

Because my take on Obama, based on conversations with him and his team stretching back more than four years and extending into the White House, is that he has a firm grasp of the psychological and substantive challenges of the presidency....

The critical element, of course, is confidence. Leadership in war is mostly about concrete tactical and strategic decisions. Leadership in a peacetime crisis also involves making the right calls on policy—but at bottom, it’s dependent on a subtle understanding of how to make people feel better so that they invest in the future....

It’s early yet and much can change, but the new president is showing signs of carrying himself in a more naturally confident way, with the right blend of traits. He’s bold enough to add a couple of zeroes to the conversation about spending, but humble enough to utter those three most unpresidential words: “I screwed up.”

Obama’s confidence is the product of an unusual combination of good early parenting by his mother and grandmother and his own search for racial identity....

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Angela Cela, a student from Guam (making her, in census terminology, a “Pacific Islander”), has sued historically black Tennessee State University in Nashville for racial discrimination, claiming that she was denied a graduate student financial grant because she’s not black. (HatTip to reader Paul)

In February 2008, Harold Mitchell, head of the department of speech and audiology, told Cela she didn’t qualify for the grant because she wasn’t black, the complaint says. Cela told Mitchell that Pacific Islanders were represented even less than African-Americans in the field of speech pathology.

“Ms. Cela stated that she was advised by several of her professors that this entire situation could have been avoided had she announced that she was not white,” the suit says.

“Then and there Dr. Mitchell stated: ‘Well, what do you expect? You are at an historically black university. You have to know the backdrop and understand our professors’ point of view when they converse with white students.’”

Let’s hope he’s right.

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I admit it. I’ve had a hard time figuring out how zealously borrowing and spending and subsidizing the unsuccessful is supposed to get us out of an economic crisis caused in large part by overly zealous borrowing and spending and encouraging the unsuccessful to take on obligations they couldn’t meet.

But now I’ve figured it out. Obama and his party like poor people so much they’re determined to make lots more of them.

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NOTE: This post has been UPDATED twice three times: first with a pointer to a Paul Mirengoff post on Power Line; then with a long, perceptive comment by Roger Clegg; finally with pointers to excellent articles by Heather Mac Donald and John McWhorter.

In longwinded remarks at the Department of Justice commemorating Black History Month, Attorney General Eric Holder called us “essentially a nation of cowards” because “we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race.”

We commemorated five years ago, the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. And though the world in which we now live is fundamentally different than that which existed then, this nation has still not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have. To our detriment, this is typical of the way in which this nation deals with issues of race

we talk about race a great, great, great deal in this country....

Second, to the extent we don’t talk about race in this country the primary reason is that liberals and racial activists have an annoying habit of attacking anyone who doesn’t read from a liberal script [as] “racists” or, if they’re lucky, “insensitive.”

Thus “cowardice” is defined as refusal to do as [you’re] told when that would in fact be the cowardly thing to do.

Or maybe not, for he also says:

There can ... be very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action. This debate can, and should, be nuanced, principled and spirited. But the conversation that we now engage in as a nation on this and other racial subjects is too often simplistic and left to those on the extremes who are not hesitant to use these issues to advance nothing more than their own, narrow self interest

Most of the Attorney General’s speech was taken up with a lament over our lack of meaningful conversations about race and our continued social segregation, but I did find one interesting comment:

As a nation we should use Black History month as a means to deal with this continuing problem [voluntary social segregation]. By creating what will admittedly be, at first, artificial opportunities to engage one another we can hasten the day when the dream of individual, character based, acceptance can actually be realized.

UPDATE [19 Feb.]

Paul Mirengoff makes a similar point on Power Line. Referring to Holder’s comments that I quoted above on affirmative action (which Mirengoff calls “a coward’s name for race-based preferences”), he writes:

So in one breath, Holder calls for a frank discussion of race, rather than the normal polite talk that evades tough issues; in the next breath, he attempts to rule out of the debate positions that he finds “extreme” while demonizing those who hold them. In the one instance where Holder is willing to be specific, we learn that his real complaint is not the absence of candid discussion, but rather the articulation of positions he doesn’t like.

We have plenty of problems as a nation. I doubt that insufficient discussion of race is one of them. But if it is, Holder’s mind-set is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

UPDATE II [19 Feb.]

Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, sent the following characteristically perceptive comments on Holder’s astonishing speech:

Here’s my theory on Holder’s speech: It was ghost written by a racist.

For starters, any sane person knows that it is just wrong to give a speech that calls America “a nation of cowards” when you are the Attorney General of the United States. Not just wrong, but offensive and insulting. So, you have the first African American AG begin the speech this way.

The next step is to establish the speaker’s liberal credentials, to make it easier to smuggle in the racist’s real message later on. To do this, the speech manages to be predictable and cliched, but still disappointing and depressing to anyone who isn’t liberal. For instance, the main theme of the speech, to the extent one can be deciphered, is that Americans don’t talk about and focus enough on race. Huh--don’t we talk of little else?

To drive nonliberals even crazier, sprinkle in plenty of Fieldisms (that’s Sally, not W.C.): “Truly meaningful,” “truly valued,” “really comprehend,” “truly understand,” etc.

So, having now established beyond any doubt the AG’s liberal bona fides, you then smuggle in your racist agenda.

First, having people of different races treat one another straightforwardly as fellow human beings has become the norm, and we can’t have that. So let’s encourage racial conflict and misunderstanding. “I urge all of you to use the opportunity of this month to talk with your friends and co-workers on the other side of the divide about racial matters.” Good idea: Hey, Lamont, what’s it like being a black guy? That’ll get things going.

There’s a passage on affirmative action (which all us racists hate--just ask any liberal). And sure enough, the passage uses the words “self interest” and “divisive,” but obliquely--just enough to remind people that that’s what affirmative action is all about:

We still speak too much of “them” and not “us”. There can, for instance, be very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action. This debate can, and should, be nuanced, principled and spirited. But the conversation that we now engage in as a nation on this and other racial subjects is too often simplistic and left to those on the extremes who are not hesitant to use these issues to advance nothing more than their own, narrow self interest. Our history has demonstrated that the vast majority of Americans are uncomfortable with, and would like to not have to deal with, racial matters and that is why those, black or white, elected or self-appointed, who promise relief in easy, quick solutions, no matter how divisive, are embraced.

And today the link between the black experience and this country is still evident. While the problems that continue to afflict the black community may be more severe, they are an indication of where the rest of the nation may be if corrective measures are not taken. Our inner cities are still too conversant with crime but the level of fear generated by that crime, now found in once quiet, and now electronically padlocked suburbs is alarming and further demonstrates that our past, present and future are linked. It is not safe for this nation to assume that the unaddressed social problems in the poorest parts of our country can be isolated and will not ultimately affect the larger society.

UPDATE III [20 Feb.]

John McWhorter writes in The New Republic that “[w]hat Holder wants is not a conversation but a conversion.” Read the whole thing.

But one small nit (I can’t pass up the opportunity to presume to correct a noted linguist): McWhorter writes:

To what extent will this “conversation” entail blacks teaching whites about institutional racism, ensuring them that black people still experience racism, and that our having a black president doesn’t mean that white people are “off the hook?”

Finally, also be sure to read Heather Mac Donald’s excellent piece in City Journal. Speaking of Holder, she asks exasperation, “Is he nuts?” and then proceeds to demonstrate in some detail that he is.

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The always perceptive Peter Schmidt has an interview today in the Chronicle of Higher Education with James Sidanius, a professor of psychology and of African and African-American studies at Harvard University, whose research interests are “the political psychology of gender, group conflict, institutional discrimination and the evolutionary psychology of intergroup prejudice.” Prof. Sidanius led a team of researchers who conducted a long-term study of about 2000 students who entered UCLA in 1996. The results have been published in a new book, The Diversity Challenge: Social Identity and Intergroup Relations on the College Campus (Russell Sage). The students, Schmidt reports

were surveyed in the summer before they entered UCLA, at the end of their freshman year, and again each year until their graduation or the end of their fifth year in college.

Q. Your book says you had expected to find that “cultural diversity and the multicultural practices that universities have put in place as a response to it have some profound effects on students.” What was your basis for having such expectations? Instead of finding profound effects—good or bad—your book reaches the bottom-line conclusions that cultural diversity and multicultural practices failed to either significantly change students’ ethnic identities and views on race or to have the feared effects of heightening ethnic conflict and separation on campus. At the end of the day, does your study buttress—or does it undermine—the argument that race-conscious college-admissions policies serve a compelling government interest by producing educational benefits? In which direction (and how far) does your study move the ball in the affirmative-action debate?

A. We found that neither the multicultural policies of the university nor the general multiethnic environment had profound effects on the intergroup attitudes of the students. Thus, in broad terms, the students left the university with largely the same social and political views that they entered college with.

However, three facts show that this does not mean that there were no theoretically expected changes. First, in general, students did become less politically conservative, ethnocentric, and racist over four years of college. Secondly, for the most part, increased levels of intergroup contact (e.g., in the form of having roommates from other ethnic groups) did attenuate levels of racism, and increased positive affect for members of other ethnic outgroups. Thirdly, in terms of the effects of affirmative action, we were interested in addressing the issue of whether or not being an affirmative-action admittee affected the academic self-confidence and academic performance of minority students. The negative effects of affirmative action on student performance were complex and conditional. For example, for black students who thought that they were affirmative-action admittees, grade-point average was negatively affected, but only among those with high personal-identity stereotype threat (concerns about confirming negative stereotypes of their ethnic groups). However, among those with no such stereotype-threat concerns, being an affirmative-action admittee had no deleterious effects on academic achievement.

It is hard to judge the effect of affirmative action from this comment. Were the “deleterious effects” measured? How was the putative existence of “personal-identity stereotype threat” confirmed (other than by, I suppose, the presence of “deleterious effects”)?

Q. Your book talks about the limits of using "pan-ethnic" classifications—such as “Hispanic” or “Asian”—to lump together people from very different backgrounds. Tell me about the differences you found between people in each of these groups.

A. While white and black students identify with pan-ethnic labels, the use of these pan-ethnic labels was much less prevalent among Asian and Latino students. This was particularly the case among Asian students, who strongly preferred to identify with labels referencing their nations of origin rather than their pan-ethnic identities. This tendency was less strong among Latino students, about half of whom thought of themselves in pan-ethnic terms (e.g., Latino, Hispanic) and half of whom thought of themselves in terms of their national origins. However, unlike [for] the Asian students, university exposure appeared to increase the use of pan-ethnic labels among Latino students. There was no evidence indicating that the use of pan-ethnic labels either increased or decreased ethnic tension or intergroup hostility on campus.

Q. You talk about finding important differences between native-born and immigrant students within various racial and ethnic groups. Please talk about these, and whether they point to potential new avenues of research.

A. We found some important differences in the level of political socialization and attitude stability of those ethnic-minority students whom we classified as “old” and “new” immigrants. “Old Asians” and “old Latinos” were defined as those born and raised in the U.S.A. and who spoke English at home. In contrast, “new Asians” and “new Latinos” were defined as those who were immigrants or did not speak English at home. The data showed that old Asians looked very much like whites in their general levels of political conservatism, their levels of racism, and correlates of these attitudes. While old Latinos resembled whites and old Asians in the crystallization, consistency, and stability of attitudes, they were also found to [have] significantly lower levels of racism and general political conservatism. As opposed to “old” immigrants, the “new” immigrants showed relatively low levels of political socialization into American political culture, and lower levels of attitude stability, crystallization, and stability. However, this is the group which showed a systematic increase in political crystallization and stability with increasing exposure to the university environment.

Here’s a really interesting one, concerning the detrimental effect of rooming with Asians, who are described as almost toxic:

Q. ... Non-Asian students assigned to live with Asian students generally tended to have more bias afterward. You suggest that the explanation may be that Asian students are relatively conservative, and their views rubbed off on their roommates. But do you have any empirical evidence that this was the cause of the shift? Might some other force or forces be at work here?

A. There has been a slight misunderstanding of our results here. Exposure to Asian roommates does not increase prejudice against Asians. Rather, the data show that exposure to Asian roommates increases prejudice against blacks and Latinos, and decreases friendship heterogeneity and intergroup comfort among students of all ethnicities. While we cannot be certain of the cause for this effect, the fact that Asian students have the most ethnocentric and xenophobic attitudes of all major student categories would suggest that socialization effects (or attitudinal contagion) are the most likely causes of these results.

There’s more. Read the whole thing if you have access to the Chronicle. For now I will mention only one other interesting finding: the researchers found that,

prior to college entry, 57 percent of black students and 72 percent of Latino students believed they may have been or definitely were admitted under affirmative action. In comparison, only 10 percent of white students believed that they may have been or definitely were admitted through affirmative action.

Now, these findings would be more useful if only UCLA would reveal the actual numbers of blacks and Latinos who would not have been admitted without affirmative action.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning that Some States Get Stimulus Whether They Need or Want It.

A pot of money in Congress's economic-stimulus bill is primarily intended to help buffer colleges and schools from state budget cuts. But some of the states slated to get the most money from that measure are not necessarily facing the greatest budget gaps or even proposing the sharpest reductions for higher education.

So, the people of Arkansas and Oklahoma and the other 48 states will be transferring money to the Chinese in the form of interest payments so that the borrowed funds can be distributed to some states who managed their budgets well enough not to need it.

Meanwhile, we should all weep for Harry Reid’s Nevada since it will receive only $387.3 million from the fiscal stabilization fund even though it has run up “a budget gap of more than $1-billion for the next fiscal year, an amount equal to nearly 38 percent of the state’s general fund....”

But now that Happy Days Are Here Again (“the song is probably best remembered as the campaign song for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) successful 1932 Presidential campaign”) I’m sure that taxpayers all over the country (especially those in careful, well-run states) will be happy to go deeply into debt to rescue profligate states and their feckless politicians.

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On November 25, 2008, Reuters reported that “Obama vows to slash wasteful spending.” (HatTip to the Center For Individual Freedom)

In his news conference on Tuesday Obama vowed to run a cost-effective and efficient government. “If we’re going to make the investments we need, we must also be willing to shed the spending we don’t.”

“We cannot sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness or exist solely because of the power of a politician, lobbyist or interest group,” he said.

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One of Candidate Obama’s most characteristic and common criticisms of President Bush was that he had politicized science, or elevated politics over science in his administration. This played well with an audience that ridiculed Bush as a rube and adored Obama as an Ivy League intellectual.

President-elect Obama played this tune again in his radio address introducing his “science team” on December 20, 2008, a summary and transcript of which is on his change.gov website.

In the latest weekly address, President-elect Barack Obama took a bold stand for making decisions based on science and facts rather than ideology as he introduced leading members of his science and technology team.

“The truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources—it’s about protecting free and open inquiry,” President-elect Obama said. “It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States—and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.”

George Will skewers Holdren today:

Speaking of experts, in 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a "basket" of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. Ehrlich picked five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined.

An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama's science adviser....

While nowhere near as famous as Ehrlich, Holdren collaborated with him on two books and several articles, and fully shared Ehrlich’s pessimistic theories on the future of the human race. In fact, as John Tierney notes, Ehrlich went to Holdren for advice on which commodities to choose for his losing bet with Simon.

Consistent with these preoccupations, Holdren postures himself today as an expert on “sustainability.” In 1995, he co-authored this article, titled “The Meaning of Sustainability: Biogeophysical Aspects,” with Ehrlich. Since Holdren is listed as the principal author, it sheds significant light on his alleged commitment to the “de-politicization of science.”

Holdren begins by identifying the “ills that development must address.” It’s a pretty plain-vanilla list: poverty, war, oppression of human rights. Next, Holdren purports to identify the “driving forces” behind these ills. This is where we start to get political. First on the list is Ehrlich and Holdren’s old hobbyhorse, “excessive population growth,” which is “a condition now prevailing almost everywhere.” Next comes “maldistribution,” as “between rich and investment poor” and “between military and civilian forms of consumption and investment.” (No one here but us scientists, right?)

This is where Holdren can no longer keep his left-wing politics under wraps. He identifies another “driving force” behind humanity’s ills: “Underlying human frailties: Greed, selfishness, intolerance, and shortsightedness. Which collectively have been elevated by conservative political doctrine and practice (above all in the United States in 1980-92) to the status of a credo.”

There you have it! This is the man upon whom Barack Obama is counting to “ensur[e] that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”

Hope? Change?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hope? has been UPDATED.

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From the London Sunday Times:

How would the Treasury secretary invest the hundreds of billions earmarked to “rescue” the housing market? “We will announce details in the next few weeks.” How, exactly would he construct the announced $1 trillion public-private partnership to absorb the banks’ “toxic debts”? “We are not going to put out details until we have the right structure.” With apologies to Obama the author, this might be described as the opacity of hope....

You simply can’t tell the public on the one hand that there is an imminent danger of economic meltdown if your plans are not implemented – and on the other, give the impression that those plans are little more than scribbles on the back of an envelope. Obama is much more able to get away with such a mismatch between promise and practice – he has a fresh mandate and the high level of opinion poll support which tends to attach to that. Yet, for the same reason, he will never have had a better opportunity to harness popular goodwill to political action.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My brother just pointed me to Tiger Woods’ remarkable speech during Obama’s inauguration, which I had missed.

Woods has generally stayed aloof from politics and before the election he refused to say whether he would vote for Obama or McCain, but after Obama’s victory he told CNBC that “"I think it's absolutely incredible. ... My father was hoping it would happen in his lifetime, but he didn't get to see it....”

Woods accepted an invitation to speak at the “We Are One” concert at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18.

The special will be executive produced by George Stevens, Jr. (The Kennedy Center Honors), and produced by Don Mischer (Olympic Ceremonies) who will also direct the special, and Michael Stevens (The American Film Institute Salutes) who is also writing the special, and will be a production of The Stevens Company in association with Don Mischer Productions.

Musical performers scheduled for the event include Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, Bono, Garth Brooks, Sheryl Crow, Renee Fleming, Josh Groban, Herbie Hancock, Heather Headley, John Legend, Jennifer Nettles, John Mellencamp, Usher Raymond IV, Shakira, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, will.i.am, and Stevie Wonder. Among those reading historical passages will be Jamie Foxx, Martin Luther King III, Queen Latifah and Denzel Washington. The Rt. Reverend V. Gene Robinson will give the invocation. Rob Mathes will be the music director and arranger for the backing band, which will support all of the artists. Additional performers will be announced as they are confirmed.

I grew up in a military family -- and my role models in life were my Mom and Dad, Lt. Col. Earl Woods.
My dad was a Special Forces operator and many nights friends would visit our home. They represented every branch of service, and every rank. In my Dad, and in those guests, I saw firsthand the dedication and commitment of those who serve. They come from every walk of life. From every part of our country. Time and again, across generations, they have defeneded our safety in the dark of night and far from home.

Each day -- and particularly on this historic day -- we honor the men and women in uniform who serve our country and protect our freedom. They travel to the dangerous corners of the world, and we must remember that for every person who is in uniform, there are families who wait for them to come home safely.

I am honored that the military is such an important part, not just of my personal life, but of my professional life as well. The golf tournament we do each year here in Washington is a testament to those unsung heroes. I am the son of a man who dedicated his life to his country, family and the military, and I am a better person for it.

In the summer of 1864, Abraham Lincoln, the man on whose memorial we stand, spoke to the 164th Ohio Regiment and said: “I am greatly obliged to you, and to all who have come forward at the call of their country.”

Just as they have stood tall for our country -- we must always stand by and support the men and women in uniform and their families.

Thank you, and it is now my pleasure to introduce the U.S. Naval Glee Club.

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If you can, i.e., if you are a subscriber to the Claremont Review of Books, be sure to read Abigail Thernstrom’s perceptive review essay of three interesting books: The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, by Richard Thompson Ford; Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal, by Randall Kennedy; and A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, by Shelby Steele. She both begins and ends her essay by noting that “[w]e live in racially interesting times.”

“Old assumptions about white racism and black victimization are still very much alive,,” Thernstrom writes,

but they are finally being challenged by important black writers who see an altered racial landscape and grapple in fresh and interesting ways with the problems it poses. With President Obama and a crop of maverick black authors, we are witnessing what might be called the incredible shrinking of Jesse Jackson and his allies—the civil rights community, the mainstream media, and the politically timid who fear that someone, someday, might play the race card and destroy their careers.

Thus after many decades, the hold of the thought police who stifle dissent from conventional civil rights orthodoxy has clearly been broken. Richard Thompson Ford, professor of law at Stanford University, writes about the concept of discrimination, which by now is in a “state of crisis.” “When does a grievance deserve the special and unequivocal condemnation reserved for racism?” he asks. In today’s racially complex setting, the answer is “getting more convoluted and confusing.” Randall Kennedy, also on the Left but known for his intellectual independence at Harvard Law School, focuses on the notion of the black sellout—blacks as traitors to their race, a charge often leveled at him. And Shelby Steele ... explores the “complex” biracial identity that he and Barack Obama share. These are important books, and also good reads—written in lively, engaging prose.

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There must be a site, or sites, somewhere monitoring the fate of Obama’s campaign promises. I’d appreciate pointers to the best of them.

Off the top of my head, and not trying at the moment to source and cite each one, here are a few that come to mind:

1. To accept public financing of his campaign if McCain would.

2. To change the tone of politics by such means as not implying that his opponents are unpatriotic, doing away with doom-predicting scare tactics, etc.

3. To initiate a new era of bi-partisanship.

4. To bring “transparency” to all important government functions by such means as requiring that all important legislation be posted online at least 48 hours before he signs it.

5. A whole host of policy specifics, such as this promise on his campaign website that “Barack Obama will restore fiscal discipline to Washington.”

Here’s a pretty good brief summary on the Foreign Policy blog of Obama’s promise progress to date, by Phil Levy an economist with a blue-ribbon resume who is not opposed (in principle or necessarily even in policy) to the idea of a large government “stimulus” program:

President Obama seems to have dashed many of his major thematic campaign promises in his very first foray into large-scale policy-making. The crafting and selling of the stimulus package have been neither transparent, innovative, calm, nor bipartisan. Much of the package was crafted behind closed doors. The rush to push money out quickly left no time to develop creative new approaches. The president’s dire warnings of doom did little to soothe fears, particularly in those who had doubts about the stimulus package’s efficacy. And hopes for bipartisanship may have been the biggest victim of the endeavor. While President Obama was willing to exchange pleasantries with Republicans, those Republicans were largely excluded from the crafting of the bill and voted overwhelmingly against it.

... in February of 2008, [Obama] released the statement, “Small businesses are the backbone of our nation’s economy and we must protect this great resource. It is time to end the diversion of federal small business contracts to corporate giants.”

Since making that statement almost a year ago, President Obama has consistently refused to make good on his campaign promise, and support legislation to stop Fortune 500 firms from hijacking federal contracts designated for America’s nearly 27 million small businesses.

Not only has President Obama refused to propose even a single policy to address the problem, but he actually changed his Web site to remove the appearance that he had ever made the statement, “It is time to end the diversion of federal small business contracts to corporate giants.”

Here’s another good example, also embarrassingly (because I hadn’t seen it before writing my post above) titled, Promises, Promises.

Really, I hope somebody is putting all these in one place.

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Fortune editor Nina Easton reports today that Austan Goolsbee, staff director and chief economist of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, has, well, interesting hopes for the the success of the stimulus bill.

“Within six months, for sure, you want to see that the recovery package is doing things.” The University of Chicago economist says he’ll consider the effort successful if the worst scenarios don’t come to pass, “if by the end of 2009 we aren’t looking at GDP numbers that are huge negatives, if unemployment rises to the 8% range rather than the 11% that some are predicting.”

Now that is indeed giving a whole new meaning to Hope!

UPDATE [15 Feb.]

Echoing the Obama administration’s less than rosy predictions about the likely effects of the stimulus bill, White House senior advisor David Axelrod said on “Fox News Sunday” today that “he expects the rise of unemployment to be slowed by the bill's passage and implementation.”

Hmm. $787 billion, plus an odd $300 billion or so of interest, to slow the rise of unemployment?

More Hope!

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From a Pacific Legal Foundation press release:

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Defense will not seek Supreme Court review of a November, 2008, federal appeals court ruling that struck down the Defense Department’s racial quota program in contracts....

On November 4, 2008, after 10 years of repeated appeals, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the program as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court found that Congress did not have sufficient evidence to establish that the government had a compelling interest for the quota program; specifically, there was not sufficient evidence of past discrimination against the targeted minority groups in Defense Department contracts to warrant any kind of “reverse discrimination” as a remedy.

“DOD did not cite a single instance of alleged discrimination by DOD ... of awarding a prime contract, nor to a single instance of alleged discriminating by a private contractor identified as the recipient of a prime defense contract,” the court noted.
....
In submitting its brief, PLF represented the Center for Equal Opportunity, a national think tank devoted exclusively to the promotion of colorblind equal opportunity and racial harmony.

The case is Rothe Development Corporation v. United States, 545 F.3d 1023 (Fed. Cir. 2008). PLF’s brief opposing the Pentagon racial quotas, can be found at www.pacificlegal.org.

A more likely explanation is that the new team did not want to launch a major fight over quotas this early in their day. Why appeal to a Supreme Court that still (but only temporarily, the Obamanauts hope) favors colorblind equality over racial quotas when they have every intention of changing that Court as soon as they can?

Whatever the reason, let us savor this strong victory ... while it lasts. But stay tuned for the upcoming arguments when the current quota legislation comes up for re-authorization later this year.

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Mickey Kaus has pointed out that the “stimulus” bill working its way through Congress would reverse one of the most significant domestic accomplishments of the Clinton administration, welfare reform. It would do so by paying states to expand their welfare roles and allowing them to avoid welfare reform’s work requirements.

And it’s not just welfare. As Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has been pointing out, in order to receive “stimulus” funds states might also be required to change their laws regarding unemployment compensation.

Barbour said the House-passed bill would extend unemployment benefits to people who work part-time.

“The law in our state is clear. Before you can get unemployment, you have to be ready, willing and able to work full-time,” he said.

Mississippi employers, he said, would be left with a tax increase to pay for that change once the stimulus money expires, Barbour said.

Barbour said he could envision a situation in which he would not want some of the funds because of the strings attached. He said the version of the stimulus bill that passed the U.S. House last week has provisions that could put a financial burden on Mississippi.

Under those provisions, health coverage would be greatly expanded and unemployment compensation would be awarded to some part-time workers. He said the stimulus package provides funds for the state for a couple of years, but then the state might be left to continue those expensive programs.

He called the House version "welfare state 3.0. But I don't see the Senate trying to make a statement about public policy instead of a stimulus package."

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Two days I ago I discussed (here) the Student Bar Association at the University of Virginia encouraging students to sign a pledge of allegiance to “diversity.” And today, because of this recent article in the student-run Cavalier Daily, I find it necessary to discuss “diversity” at UVa one more time. You might get the idea that the University of Virginia is obsessed with/fixated on “diversity.” (If you did, you’d be right.)

It’s not as though “diversity” is the only thing UVa has to worry about. Indeed, some misguided souls might think the fact that the University’s endowment (listed at $4.3 billion in July 2007) lost $1.3 billion since last July was a more pressing concern.

Still, the University’s Board of Visitors is never too busy, never too worried about mundane things like money, to fret and wring its hands trying to figure out new ways to promote “diversity.” True to form, the Cavalier Daily article linked above reports on some of the “diversity” discussion at the last Board of Visitors meeting.

There are a couple of notable things about this article, written by Cavalier Daily associate editor Kate Colwell, one having to do with form and the other with substance. Let me discuss the form first.

Not to mince words, some of the quotes border on incoherence. Now that could be for many reasons: haste in taking notes, haste in writing, haste in editing (if, indeed, this piece was edited), typos, or ... perfectly accurate quotes of borderline incoherent comments. Anyway, here are a few examples of why this piece is difficult to read:

• “It’s pretty clear that the Common Application is a factor in having an increased number of applicants than last year,” said Bill Harvey, vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity.... “We’re all encouraged by the applicant pool situation being larger from last year,” Harvey said.

• “In minority applicant numbers, we’ve stayed relatively the same the past 10 years,” Student Board member Adom Getachew. To change this trend, “it’s important to think about more effective means of outreach, growing your own, and considering what kinds of resources and commitments that will take for the University,” [First sentence needs something like an “according to student board member...” or “ ... Adom Getachew said.” Second sentence: a) a trend is something that changes, not stays the same; b) growing your own? How does a university grow its own minority students? c) sentence should end with a period, not a comma.]

• “We’ve done a great job of letting people know we are discrete of diversity,” [Board member Warren] Thompson said, adding, though, that the University needs to improve its efforts to prepare students from diverse backgrounds so that those students can compete at the University’s high academic standards. [a) discrete of diversity? b) Does the University really have an obligation to select some unprepared “diverse” students and prepare them for UVa? If it picked only “diverse” students, wouldn’t any un-“diverse” students who were not selected for this special preparation have a valid discrimination claim?]
  

Despite its disappointing form, this article did have some substance, primarily its reporting of some very interesting numbers:

According to data from the Office of Undergraduate Admission, to date the University has received applications from 11,632 females and 10,315 males. Among these applicants were 1814 Asian females compared to 1747 males, 806 black females compared to 554 black males and 475 Latino females compared to 391 Latino males.

Some Board of Visitor members expressed concern, however, about the discrepancies between minority females and males. Board member Syd Dorsey questioned whether the number of black women who come to the University to play Division I basketball further skews these figures. She suggested that if scholarship athletes were removed from the pool, the discrepancy between females and males may be even greater.

• Asians are 16% of 2009 applicants and 11% of current freshmen;

• Blacks are 6% of 2009 applicants and 8.7% of current freshmen.

Note that Asians are 4.8% of Virginia’s population (as of 2006), and blacks are 19.9%, but also note that UVa receives many applications from outside Virginia. Currently about a third of UVa undergraduates are not Virginia residents.

This comparison of applicants to enrollees says nothing, obviously, about the relative qualifications of members of different groups. That information is difficult to come by, but five years ago the Center for Equal Opportunity and the Virginia Association of Scholars did manage to get this data, and CEO’s report is quite revealing of how UVa goes about engineering “diversity.” (There is little reason to suspect that the findings would be dramatically different if conducted again today.) The report summarizes some of the more dramatic findings as follows:

The largest differences in the likelihood of admission at UVA occur for the SAT ranges 950 to 1350, where more than 70% of black students are admitted compared to only about 25% of white students. About half of all white applicants score in this range, compared to more than three- fourths of black applicants. The median SAT score for all UVA admissions is 1350, while the average for admitted black students is 1026.

• Of students scoring 850 – 950 on the SAT, 25% of black applicants were admitted, 24% of whites, and 0% (none, nada) of Asians;

• Of students scoring 950 – 1050, 52% of black were admitted, 15% of whites, and 8% of Asians;

• Of students scoring 1050 – 1150, 72% of blacks were admitted, 21% of whites, and 11% of Asians;

In fact, it is worth emphasizing that in every SAT test range a smaller percentage of Asians than whites were admitted.

A few days ago I discussed (here) a recent change in admissions policy at the University of California that will significantly reduce the number of Asians admitted, and I cited, among other sources, an excellent article by Stephan Thernstrom on the same subject titled “Staving Off The Yellow Peril.”

Perhaps California can take some lessons from Virginia, which seems to have decided years ago that more “diversity” requires fewer Asians.

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To the stated surprise of many diversiphiles, the sky hasn’t fallen on Nebraska, despite the fact that a substantial majority of its citizens passed a constitutional amendment barring the state and its agencies from continuing to practice racial favoritism.

The Women’s Center hasn’t closed its doors.

A scholarship recognizing contributions to Native heritage remains available.

And an on-campus summit focused on empowering black men will go on as planned next month.

Two and a half weeks after a judge upheld a new state law banning race- and gender-based affirmative action at public institutions, University of Nebraska-Lincoln leaders are finding the worst-case outcomes they once feared haven’t come to fruition.

“The biggest challenge now is to find those proxies for diversity that are independent of race,” said Craig Munier, UNL director of scholarships and financial aid. “That will be more difficult, more challenging, more time-consuming. But it’s still certainly doable …

And now, of course, the attempted end runs begin.

Changes include two new essay questions — both optional — on UNL’s admissions application. One allows students to explain how they’ve contributed to diversity, and the other invites students to write about obstacles they’ve overcome.

The open-ended nature of the questions allows applicants to interpret “diversity” as they wish, Munier said.

UPDATE

The Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative claims another victim: minority set-asides.

Omaha city leaders hope — but can’t guarantee — that minority-owned companies will get contracts to help build the new downtown ballpark this year.

That’s a marked change from a decade ago, when the Omaha City Council mandated that at least $5.7 million in contracts go to women and minorities during the construction of the Qwest Center Omaha. The difference: Nebraska’s new ban on affirmative action.

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A little over a week ago, discussing a report from a liberal organization at a liberal law school lamenting the lack of “diversity” among state court judges, I asked, “Is Justice ‘Diverse’?.” Today this long article in the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Argus prompts me to return to that question, if for no other reason than this revealing introductory non-sequitur:

In a state where more than 8 percent of the citizens and 25 percent of the male prison population are Native American, many are watching as Gov. Mike Rounds prepares to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court.

Judge Tony Portra of Aberdeen is one-eighth Turtle Mountain Chippewa.

There is no official data on the race or ethnicity of the 38 circuit judges in South Dakota, or the five members of the state’s Supreme Court, but it appears Portra is the only one with a minority background.

Since Judge Portra is all we have, let’s give him pride of place and listen to what he says.

Portra said few defendants standing before him know he is part Chippewa. To the extent that he treats everyone equally, that’s probably good, he said. But a judiciary that more closely mirrors the population it serves would be good, too, he said.

“People want a president who looks like them. They want Congress to represent the nation at large, too,” he said. “I don’t see why you wouldn’t want the judiciary to be the same. I don’t think the public wants a judiciary to be all white, or all black, or all Native American. But they want it to mirror them. It certainly would help the perception of fairness here in South Dakota.”

If it were really true that “people who want a president who looks like them,” Barack Obama wouldn’t be president. But this “look like” argument is part of one of the two reasons Judge Portra offers for why the bench should be “diverse.” First, he says the bench should “mirror” the population it serves. But if that’s the case, then no judges in South Dakota (including him) should be elected; they should be appointed to fill designated population slots.

O.K., diversicrats will say at this point, the Supreme Court justices are appointed! Why not ensure “diversity” there? Well, one reason is that it would be difficult.

Since 1993, only 26 graduates from the USD School of Law listed themselves as Native Americans, said Associate Dean Tom Sorensen, and it’s difficult to say how many of them remain in the state.

But even if population mirroring were possible, it still would be objectionable. As I noted in my previous post on this subject,

“Diversity,” keep in mind, is justified by its proponents because “diverse” individuals are different in important, relevant ways from individuals who are not “diverse” — that’s why the latter need to be exposed to the former. But do we really want to institute what amounts to a quota system for judges based on the assumption that the quality and nature of the justice they dispense will vary based on their race, ethnicity, or sex? Without that assumption, however, what is the justification for “diversity” on the bench?

Still, to people such as commission co-chairman John Konenkamp, himself a Supreme Court justice, there had to be a better way to respond to the overrepresentation of Native Americans in the system when they account for only 8 percent of the state’s population.

“The only thing the studies have said loud and clear is, ‘there’s a disproportionate number of native people in the penitentiary,’” Konenkamp said. “They are not able to ascribe racism as the reason for it....

“I think ... it is an acknowledgement of what is pretty decent, common-sense advice,” Rounds said of the commission recommendation. “But I choose the person who I think would be the best judge, not the person who will get me an accolade for having done something different or unique.”

But wait a minute. If “perception is reality,” then if a significant proportion of South Dakota’s population (I could say strong majority, but don’t really need to for this point) believes that imposing “diversity” is little more than quota-mongering, leading to the advancement of less qualified candidates over more qualified candidates, isn’t that perception, by diversiphile definition, “reality”?

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As I have pointed out too many times to cite, when “affirmative action” was first imposed on the federal government by presidential executive orders (Kennedy’s 10925 in 1961; Johnson’s 11246 in 1965) government agencies and contractors were barred from discriminating against “any employee or applicant ... because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” and they were required to take “affirmative action” to ensure that all applicants and employees were treated “without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin.”

Over time, as we’ve seen, the meaning of “affirmative action” was reversed, so that it now requires precisely what it was originally designed to prevent — treating some applicants and employees better and others worse because of their race or ethnicity.

This, as I’ve said, is an old story, at least here. But even old stories can seem fresh when they are discovered in new and unfamiliar settings. Thus, to borrow from that great philosopher, Yogi Berra, I had a very strong “déjà vu all over again” feeling when I came across the following excerpted passage in Peter Wallison’s excellent discussion of the origins of the current financial crisis.

As originally enacted in 1977, the CRA [Community Reinvestment Act] vaguely mandated regulators to consider whether an insured bank was serving the needs of the “whole” community. For 16 years, the act was invoked rather infrequently, but 1993 marked a decisive turn in its enforcement. What changed? Substantial media and political attention was showered upon a 1992 Boston Federal Reserve Bank study of discrimination in home mortgage lending. This study concluded that, while there was no overt discrimination in banks’ allocation of mortgage funds, loan officers gave whites preferential treatment. The methodology of the study has since been questioned, but at the time it was highly influential with regulators and members of the incoming Clinton administration; in 1993, bank regulators initiated a major effort to reform the CRA regulations.

In 1995, the regulators created new rules that sought to establish objective criteria for determining whether a bank was meeting CRA standards. Examiners no longer had the discretion they once had. For banks, simply proving that they were looking for qualified buyers wasn’t enough. Banks now had to show that they had actually made a requisite number of loans to low- and moderate-income (LMI) borrowers. The new regulations also required the use of “innovative or flexible” lending practices to address credit needs of LMI borrowers and neighborhoods. Thus, a law that was originally intended to encourage banks to use safe and sound practices in lending now required them to be “innovative” and “flexible.” In other words, it called for the relaxation of lending standards, and it was the bank regulators who were expected to enforce these relaxed standards....

The point here is not that low-income borrowers received mortgage loans that they could not afford. That is probably true to some extent but cannot account for the large number of sub-prime and Alt-A loans [“those made to speculative buyers or without the usual underwriting standards”] that currently pollute the banking system. It was the spreading of these looser standards to the prime loan market that vastly increased the availability of credit for mortgages, the speculation in housing, and ultimately the bubble in housing prices.

The result: a multitude of affirmative action borrowers mismatched with mortgages they could not afford. The determination to extend home ownership to far more people than market forces could support initially led to record numbers of homeowners ... and then, when the government inflated bubble burst, led to record numbers of foreclosures.

Moral: it is dangerous and counter-productive to lower or eliminate fair and reasonable standards.

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Does Obama Think Republicans Are Un-American? has been UPDATED.

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Karin Agness reports (on NRO’s Phi Beta Cons) that the Student Bar Association at the University of Virginia law school is encouraging all students to sign the “2009 Diversity Pledge.”

She quotes the entire Pledge, which I encourage you to read, but I will limit my comments here to its first paragraph:

Every person has worth as an individual. Every person is entitled to dignity and respect, regardless of class, color, disability, gender, nationality, race, or sexual orientation. Thoughts and acts of prejudice have no place in the UVA Law community.

Let us, generously I think, make some assumptions here (assumptions are necessary because the text isn’t clear): first, that although what the UVa lawyers-in-waiting actually say is that

Every person has worth as an individual. Every person is entitled to dignity and respect, regardless of class, color, disability, gender, nationality, race, or sexual orientation...

If my assumptions are correct, then this is an impressive pledge (although the attempt to banish even bad thoughts in Mr. Jefferson's University is overreaching a bit). But, alas, my assumptions can’t possibly be correct, because if these future lawyers really meant that everyone should be treated without regard to race, etc., they would have to oppose UVa’s heavy use of race preferences in admissions, and of course they do not.

A 2002 study by the Center for Equal Opportunity found that the UVa law school gives a

massive preference to black applicants over their Hispanic, white, and Asian counterparts. The relative odds of admission of a black over a white applicant for UVA, controlling for other factors, were almost 650 to 1 in 1998 and 730 to 1 in 1999 (the highest in any CEO study).

ADDENDUM [7 Feb.]

The more I think about UVa’s Diversity Pledge, the more I think of ... Miss Faulk. As I wrote here:

My eighth grade teacher, the formidable Miss Faulk, refused to require (or, as I recall, even allow) students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in her classroom. She had no problem with “under God,” but Miss Faulk was a fiercely unreconstructed Confederate, and she had a great deal of trouble with “one nation, indivisible.”

Well, maybe not no one. What about the feelings of any students who might be skeptical about this Pledge, who refused to sign because, although they had no problem with the abstract “diverse” thoughts it expressed, they held principled objections to the “diverse” actions that flowed inexorably from these thoughts? Would not such students feel “different,” unwanted, excluded if the Pledge were posted or published and their names were conspicuously absent?

Given their devotion to “diversity,” it’s almost surprising that the UVa Student Bar Association settled for encouraging everyone merely to sign its Pledge. If “diversity” is so important to the law student “community,” why settle for a mere paper Pledge? Why not ask (require?) that the day begin with the Pledge broadcast every morning throughout the law school? Students who did not want to be exposed to this daily devotional could be allowed to opt out, perhaps by being supplied with a set of ear plugs (paid for, of course, out of student activity fees).

UPDATE [9 Feb.]

Eugene Volokh discusses the UVa Pledge here. He finds it “vapid” and “also quite empty of any political or community norm-setting value, ... partly because it would so clearly be understood as political posturing.” Otherwise, it doesn’t bother him.

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The president, who campaigned on the promise of bringing an end to bitter partisanship, made a highly partisan speech to House Democrats who were on a “retreat” in Williamsburg last night. Politico called that retreat “a partisan love fest.”

In a “fired-up” speech to the House Dems on Thursday night, writes Politico’s Jonathan Martin,

Obama accused his Republican critics of wanting to return to “the same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin.”

“I don’t care whether you’re driving a hybrid or an SUV,” he said. "If you’re headed for a cliff, you have to change direction. That’s what the American people called for in November, and that’s what we intend to deliver.”

He assured his former colleagues that he would reach out to Republicans — but “not at the expense of the American people,” an attendee recalled.

UPDATE [7 Feb.]

Tom Maguire makes a similar point:

Now Consent Is The Highest Form Of Patriotism?

Here is one more for the “If Bush did this sort of thing Libs leapt from tall buildings” file:

WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats reached an agreement with Republican moderates on Friday to pare a huge economic recovery measure, clearing the way for approval of a package that President Obama said was urgently needed in light of mounting job losses.

The deal, announced on the Senate floor, was a result of two days of tense negotiations and political theater. Mr. Obama dispatched his chief of staff to Capitol Hill to help conclude the talks and reassure senators in his own party, and he called three key Republicans to applaud them for their patriotism.

...Mr. Obama called Ms. Collins and Mr. Specter, as well as Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, another Republican expected to support the deal, to acknowledge they were acting against pressure from their party and, one official said, to thank them for their patriotism in helping advance the bill at a critical time.

Hmm, bill opponents are not patriotic? Or are less patriotic? I know libs will line up to fret about whether Obama ought to be implicitly questioning anyone’s patriotism merely for opposing a particular Administration policy.

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Everyone knows that entertainment is perhaps California’s most important export, but most are under the mistaken impression that it comes primarily from Hollywood. It doesn’t. It comes from UCLA, Berkeley, and other precincts where liberals manufacture more and more zany attempts to evade Prop. 209, the amendment to the California constitution that forbids state agencies from distributing benefits and burdens based on race or ethnicity.

The latest howler is the University of California’s move to drop the SAT II and otherwise lower standards so that a larger number of applicants will qualify for “holistic review,” an entirely subjective process (decried in the debates over the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “white male discretion”) that allows admissions officers to reward overcoming hardship more than mastering academic subjects. Never mind that it hasn’t been that long since UC administrators were touting the SAT II test because it allowed for the admission of more Hispanics, who did well on subject test in Spanish.

As reported in Inside Higher Education,

For several years now, the University of California has been debating plans to drop the SAT Subject Tests (formerly called the SAT II or achievement tests) and to find ways to consider more minority applicants. The debate has focused on the relative merits (or lack thereof) of the SAT and how to promote diversity while not violating the state’s ban on affirmative action.

According to data prepared by the university and just starting to receive attention, 36 percent of those admitted to the university system in 2007-8 were Asian Americans. Applying the new admissions standards, that percentage would drop to 29-32 percent. In contrast, white applicants made up 34 percent of those admitted in 2007-8. Under the proposed reforms, they would have made up 41 to 44 percent of the entering class. The bottom line is that Asian Americans would shift from being the largest group gaining admission to the University of California to the second.

Jon Reider, director of admissions at San Francisco University High School, an excellent private school,

noted that Asian American leaders have “a history of being suspicious of UC admissions,” because of a sense of many that Asian applicants are held to a higher standard. Reider doesn’t think anti-Asian feeling is at play in these changes. “The intention is to broaden black and Latino eligibility,” he said. As for the white increases and Asian decreases, he added, “that is what in the military they call collateral damage.”

“Yes,” he retorted, “but where is the omlet?”

Stephan Thernstrom makes similar points in an excellent piece on NRO this morning (and linked by RealClearPolitics), “Staving Off The Yellow Peril: The University of California regents attempt to curtail Asian admissions”, as did Roger Clegg, here (except they make them better). According to Thernstrom, the University of California’s

move is breathtaking. It will drop the requirement that applicants take two SAT “subject tests”; if the students the school wants tend to do poorly on such tests, then it is best not to know just how poorly. The plan also sharply lowers the academic standards that applicants must meet to be eligible for a “full admissions review.” This review is where their distinctive “personal qualities” can be discerned and made to count for more than the weaknesses in their academic performance.

These changes are manifestly driven by the desire to bring in more black and Hispanic students. Remarkably, though, the university’s own projections indicate that the plan will do almost nothing to expand black enrollment and will be of very modest benefit to Hispanics. Even more remarkably, the prime beneficiaries of the changes will be non-Hispanic whites, whose share of total enrollments is predicted to rise by 20–30 percent. And the big losers will be Asian Americans, whose numbers will be reduced by 10–20 percent. The net effect will thus be to make the University of California substantially “whiter” than it has been.

because when the battle for race-blind admissions began, opponents worried that Prop 209 would transform UC into a “lily white” institution. This dire prophecy proved ludicrously far from the mark. The big gainers were not white applicants; they were Asian Americans. Although only 12 percent of the state’s population, Asians accounted for 37 percent of UC admissions in 2008.

• blacks, currently 4% of admits, are projected to increase to 4-5%;

• Latinos, currently 19% of admits, are projected to increase to 19–22%;

• whites, currently 34% of admits; are projected to increase to 41–44%;

• Asians, currently, 36% of admits, are projected to decrease to 29–32%.

These numbers suggest one more irony: if correct, the new policy will substantially achieve one of the often-stated goals of the diversicrats, increasing the numbers of an “underrepresented minority group.” In 2006, California’s largest minority group, non-Hispanic whites, made up 43.1% of California’s population, making it the most “underrepresented” group of UC students under the old policy. (I say this is an irony because no one, including the diversicrats, really believes the diversicrats mean what they say about “diversity.”)

Whether or not this new policy is just, there is one aspect of it that is at least poetically just: one pro-affirmative action group getting bitten in the behind by its own arguments.

“All of us share the goal of trying to preserve excellence as well as to promote diversity. But the gains for Latinos and African Americans in these projections are very small, while the decreases for Asian Americans and the gains for whites are quite large,” said Vincent Pan, president of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a national group based in California. “There’s almost a swapping out of Asian students for white students. Let’s not rush this thing.”

If California and its multicultural antics didn’t exist, perhaps Hollywood could invent it. But then no one would believe it....

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Cathy Trower is research director and Anne Gallagher is assistant director of Harvard University's Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (Coache). In the Chronicle of Higher Education they report (Feb. 4) the findings of a Coache study “on what assistant professors want and need to be successful in academe.” The study found, among other things, that “an institutional commitment to diversity is integral to creating a welcoming and supportive culture for new faculty members.”

No surprise there; finding that “diversity” is important on campuses today is rather like discovering, well, that there are few Republicans in humanities and social science departments. But I did find this rather interesting:

At Coache, we measured a number of variables to assess the workplace satisfaction of early-career academics. One of the factors most highly correlated with success was the issue of institutional “fit.” The survey data suggest that your chances of earning tenure and your decision to stay at an institution are affected by the opportunities you have as an assistant professor to collaborate and interact with senior mentors....

Our findings show that minority faculty members expressed less satisfaction with nearly all of the climate variables we measured — including the issue of fit — as compared with their white peers....

Just asking.

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Education Week reports a little pot of gold stashed away in the pending “stimulus” bill that I hadn’t noticed, or seen discussed, before.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says he is eager to use a proposed $15 billion federal incentive-grant fund in part to reward states, districts, and even nonprofit organizations that have set high standards for the students they serve....

The education incentive-grant money would be available to Mr. Duncan under both versions of a huge economic-stimulus package working its way through Congress. The House approved a broad, $819 billion measure Jan. 28. The Senate is expected to consider such legislation this week....

The $15 billion fund is a relatively small slice of the more than $120 billion slated for education programs under the pending stimulus legislation....

Would this $15 billion really stimulate anything, and, if it would, do we really want more of whatever that is? On the other hand everyone keeps talking about spending stimulus money on “shovel-ready” projects, and it is certainly true that the education establishment produces much that needs to be shoveled.

UPDATE [6 Feb.]

Academics, also wanting to be stimulated, fear losing pork. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning:

As the Obama administration fights for its economic-stimulus plan in Congress, supporters of university research are trying to ensure they don’t lose out in a compromise.

The Senate is working today on a stimulus plan estimated to cost more than $900-billion, or about $100-billion more than the House version....

But the House version, while cheaper over all, contains about $1-billion more for scientific research and development than does the Senate bill....

And the fear, said Peter Harsha, director of government affairs at the Computing Research Association, an advocacy group with members in industry and on campuses, is that the Senate may bring its total stimulus package closer in price to the House version by cutting out even more money for scientific research.

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The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education has recently published its useful survey of the first year enrollment figures for blacks at 20 of the nation's top rated universities, public and private, for 2008.

Nothing too surprising in the data. Brown, for example, admitted a little over 13% of all applicants but 22% of black applicants. The University of Virginia admitted 36.3% of all applicants but 47.4% of black applicants.

There are, however, two issues about this survey that are worth pointing out. First, the data would be much more useful if the "overall student acceptance rate" were disaggregated, since that category includes the black applicants. That is, the most relevant comparison is between the black acceptance rate and the acceptance rate for whites and Asians, not between blacks and the entire pool that contains the blacks.

Second, although there is no reason for this to be a surprise, is the refusal of several of the listed colleges to reveal the number of blacks accepted or their black acceptance rates. The most egregious of these was, again not surprisingly, the University of Michigan, which refused to reveal even the number of its black applicants. The only number it was willing to reveal was the number of black enrollees, 374, the largest of any of the 20 schools.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Whether or not you recognize it by name, most of you by now have read about Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. That’s the case in which the horrible, right-wing, run-amok activist Roberts Supreme Court, via right-wing Justice Alito, held that when Congress wrote, in the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that anyone feeling he or she has been the victim of pay discrimination must file a complaint within 180 days (in Alabama and a few other states; 300 days in others), Congress actually meant what it said. As Justice Alito said in introducing his majority opinion:

This case calls upon us to apply established precedent in a slightly different context. We have previously held that the time for filing a charge of employment discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) begins when the discriminatory act occurs. We have explained that this rule applies to any “[d]iscrete ac[t]” of discrimination, including discrimination in “termination, failure to promote, denial of transfer, [and] refusal to hire.” [Citation omitted]. Because a pay-setting decision is a “discrete act,” it follows that the period for filing an EEOC charge begins when the act occurs. Petitioner, having abandoned her claim under the Equal Pay Act, asks us to deviate from our prior decisions in order to permit her to assert her claim under Title VII. Petitioner also contends that discrimination in pay is different from other types of employment discrimination and thus should be governed by a different rule. But because a pay-setting decision is a discrete act that occurs at a particular point in time, these arguments must be rejected.

Liberals, civil rights groups, and their media friends thus made overturning Ledbetter one of the most important items on their agenda, and their agent, President Obama, dutifully made the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act the first bill he signed into law.

As Stuart Taylor wrote in The National Journal (Jan. 31),

Congressional Democrats, liberal groups, and the media have thoroughly distorted the facts underlying the Ledbetter law to advance their agenda of opening the door wide to all manner of job-discrimination lawsuits.

The new law will virtually wipe out the 300-day time limit (180 days in Alabama and some other states) during which employees can file claims of discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Disgruntled employees will now be free to wait many years before hauling employers into court for supposedly discriminatory raises, promotions, or any other actions affecting pay.

The longer the wait, the more difficult it will be for the employer to contest an employee’s one-sided and perhaps false account of the case, because key witnesses may have retired or died and records such as performance evaluations may have been discarded.

Indeed, some of the Ledbetter law’s vague language could be construed as opening the doors for people to sue a company even years after retiring, on the theory that each new pension check is too small because of some claim of discrimination by some long-since-departed (or dead) supervisor.

This law represents an overreaction to a May 2007 Supreme Court decision, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., that provoked an explosion of ill-informed media outrage and propelled the losing party, retired Goodyear employee Lilly Ledbetter of Alabama, to a speaking role at last year's Democratic National Convention.…

What I do want to do here, and most emphatically, is to call attention to a BIG SURPRISE that may be in store for the Obamanauts who are now celebrating doing away, in effect, with the time limitations on filing pay discrimination complaints. I wish I had thought of this looming unintended consequence myself, but I didn’t. I’m indebted for it to Michael Rosman, General Counsel of the Center for Individual Rights, whose email to me I quote with permission:

Hi John. Now that President Obama has signed the Ledbetter bill into law, it might be an appropriate time to remind the readers of your blog that you do not need to be a minority or a woman to take advantage of its provisions. Specifically, anyone who was harmed in the 1970's or 1980's (or later) by a race-conscious affirmative action program can sue for damages if that person is still receiving a check (paycheck or pension) from the same employer that somehow reflects the injury.

ADDENDUM

Several astute, observant reader/editors have pointed out that Ledbetter dealt with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, not the Equal Pay Act, and I have corrected my text above. For an impressive, thorough, and thoughtful exposition of the issues involved see the excellent posts by Hans Bader here, here, here, and here.

UPDATE

See additional discussion here.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:53 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)