Discriminations

The Next Right notes the “most underreported fact of the 2008 election,” from this CNN exit poll (HatTip to InstaPundit):

Those who said race was an important factor voted 55 percent to 44 percent in favor of Obama.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

Roger Clegg discusses what he aptly calls “an odd article” in the Los Angeles Times today “about the tragic shortage of racial boxes on the UCLA admissions form, and in particular the lack of any ‘Middle Eastern’ boxes.” This concern is odd, of course, since “UCLA is not supposed to be considering race or ethnicity at all.

Raja Abdulhahim’s article begins with the surprise and dismay of 19 year old freshman, Nicole Salame, whose mother was born in Lebanon.

[She] was filling out an application to UCLA last year when she got to the question about race and ethnicity. She thought a mistake had been made.

“I read it five times and was like, where is Middle Eastern?” the freshman recently recalled. “Is it on the other page, did it get cut off? I thought they forgot.”

Her Lebanese-born mother told her Arabs are considered white, but Salame didn’t believe her. Her high school counselor told her the same thing.

“It did not make sense to me, it’s so far-fetched,” said Salame, who ended up checking “Other.”

ow several UCLA student groups -- including Arabs, Iranians, Afghanis and Armenians -- have launched a campaign to add a Middle Eastern category, with various subgroups, to the University of California admissions application. They hope to emulate the Asian Pacific Coalition's "Count Me In" campaign, which a few years ago successfully lobbied for the inclusion of 23 ethnic categories on the UC application, including Hmong, Pakistani, Native Hawaiian and Samoan.

Here’s one:

The UCLA students said having their own ethnic designation goes beyond self-identity and has real implications for the larger Arab and Middle Eastern communities....

[Not collecting the data on admissions forms} can result in the gathering of little or no statistical data on important issues, such as health trends in the community. Voter-approved Proposition 209 bars California's public colleges from considering race in admissions....

Here’s the other:

For years the federal government has classified Arab Americans and Middle Easterners as white....

For years the federal government has classified Arab Americans and Middle Easterners as white....

That classification was cemented in the late 1970s when the Office of Management and Budget, a federal agency, listed all Middle Easterners as white.

But in the last few decades there has been a push to establish a separate category as the general population has grown more diverse and because of the possible benefits it could bring.

“Back then, to get rights you needed to be white,” said Yasi Chehroudi, president of the Iranian Student Group, which is helping spearhead the University of California campaign.
“Now it helps to be yourself.”

UCLA junior Shawn Gabrill certainly knows.

“I feel like when I put down ‘white’ on an application, they assume my parents finished high school, went to college and that English was my first language,” the 20-year-old English major said. “And none of these things describe me.”

UPDATE [1 April]

Roger Clegg has written More on ‘More Boxes’, which I link not because (O.K., not only because) he includes a link to my post but rather because he makes a good point that neither of made in first posts.

It is “irksome,” he writes, that defenders of racial preferences usually claim that eliminating them will reduce the number of admitted “minority” students “when in fact there are plenty of racial and ethnic minority groups that are on the wrong end of this discrimination.” Asians are the obvious example, but they are far from the only one. Even many Hispanics, Clegg notes, are victims and not beneficiaries of racial preference discrimination.

For example, the evidence in the Grutter case showed that the University of Michigan law school treated Mexican Americans like African Americans (that is, preferentially), but treated all other Hispanics — from Central and South America and the Caribbean — like whites (that is, they were discriminated against). Except Puerto Rico: If you were actually born in Puerto Rico, you were discriminated against, while if you were of Puerto Rican background but born on the mainland, you were given a preference.

“Hispanic,” for example can be sliced and diced into white Hispanic and black Hispanic, and that’s before you even get to the cultures/subcultures that distinguish the various national groups. Even within national “cultures” there can be sharp divisions. Thus the article quotes Maria Perez-Brown, identified as a “Puerto Rican television producer and entertainment lawyer in New York,” whose mother is “a dark-skinned Puerto Rican” and whose father is “a white Puerto Rican.” She marked “Hispanic” and “black” on her census form.

Ms. Perez-Brown, who grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn, said that when she attended Yale University there was a division between the Puerto Ricans from the island — “rich and blonde,” she said — and “mainlanders” like her, dark-skinned, urban and more in tune with African-Americans from the same background.

whether Hispanic applicants to the Michigan law school who are neither Mexican-American nor mainland Puerto Rican, and hence receive no preferences, have grounds to file a complaint based on national origin discrimination. If not granting preferences to African Americans or Mexican Americans or Native Americans is discriminatory, as the defenders of such preferences claim, then it certainly seems like discrimination not to offer preferences to other Hispanics because of their country of origin. But then, Italian Americans and Lebanese Americans don't get preferences, either. Perhaps the system of ethnic doles will collapse not because it is unfair, which it is, but because it is unmanageable, which it also is.

Another problem is that 42% of those identifying themselves as "Hispanic," "Spanish," or "Latino" on the 2000 census "also identified themselves as a member of 'some other race' besides black or white," and an additional 6 per cent said they were members of "two or more races." In other words, these square pegs refused to fit themselves into the round holes neatly provided for them by their interest groups, leading to the saddest line in the whole article:

This resistance to racial categorization worries some advocates for minority groups.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED ... twice]

Since Oldsmobile died an untimely death in 2004, perhaps the name can be revived and applied (in slightly modified form), O’smobile, to the new General Motors. Or perhaps it will be sufficient simply to refer to GM from now on as BM (Barack Motors).

UPDATE

In his statement this morning President Obama said:

... my administration will offer General Motors adequate working capital over the next 60 days. And during this time, my team will be working closely with GM to produce a better business plan. They must ask themselves: Have they consolidated enough unprofitable brands? Have they cleaned up their balance sheets, or are they still saddled with so much debt that they can’t make future investments? Above all, have they created a credible model for how not only to survive, but to succeed in this competitive global market?

Let me be clear: The United States government has no interest in running GM. We have no intention of running GM.

How long will it be before someone asks, “Would you buy a used car from this government?

UPDATE [31 March]

Not long. Would You Buy A Used Car From This Man?

UPDATE II [31 March 9:20PM]

And: Would You Buy A Used Car From This Man?

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Corina Knoll is a young Korean-American journalist at the Los Angeles Times who recently interviewed and wrote a revealing appreciation of Jane Elliott, an Iowa teacher who made, first, headlines and then, fame and at least some fortune, with a controversial method she developed of teaching whites how racist they are.

Elliott ... created a now-famous exercise for her classroom of white third-graders. It was the day after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and she was struggling to explain the concept of racism.

She hit upon an idea: For an entire day, she conducted her class as if the brown-eyed children were superior to those with blue eyes. Elliott eventually made headlines, appeared on “The Tonight Show” and became the subject of multiple documentaries.

Three decades later, my high school sociology teacher played us snippets of a news program about the “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise. For a 16-year-old Korean adoptee growing up in Iowa, the most fascinating aspect was this: Elliott had made history in Riceville, two hours from my hometown.

The daughter of white parents, I grew up in a predominantly white city, attended an overwhelmingly white school and interacted mostly with white friends. The subject of race in my community was hidden, buried under rhetoric that insisted we remain “colorblind.”

Elliott was the first white person I ever heard who admitted to the privileges of whites, acknowledging that visible differences affect how the world perceives us. Her words sparked a hunger in me for more.

Jane Elliott, however, is another story, a fascinating case, perhaps the founding mother of race-obsessed white guilt in America. According to an article in the Smithsonian Magazine, her work

is sometimes cited as a landmark of social science. The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill has listed her on a timeline of key educators, along with Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, Maria Montessori and 23 others.

Jane Elliott, internationally known teacher, lecturer, diversity trainer, and recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education, exposes prejudice and bigotry for what it is, an irrational class system based upon purely arbitrary factors. And if you think this does not apply to you. . . you are in for a rude awakening.

In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. over thirty years ago, Jane Elliott devised the controversial and startling, “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise. This, now famous, exercise labels participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority. Everyone who is exposed to Jane Elliott’s work, be it through a lecture, workshop, or video, is dramatically affected by it.

that Elliott was a “disgrace” and described her exercise as “sadistic,” adding, “You would think that any normal person would realize that she had done an evil thing. But not Elliott. She repeated the abuse with subsequent classes, and finally turned it into a fully commercial enterprise.”

The BBC opines that her training style is “uncompromising, brusque and authoritative. She tells her captive audience, she is their “resident BITCH for the day – Being In Total Control Honey.” Strong critics of Elliott, such as Carl F. Horowitz call her the “Dominatrix of Diversity” who wages “…psychological warfare against employees – more specifically, white employees….” [Citations omitted]

Blue Eyed arose from Elliott’s elementary school class in Riceville, Iowa, where, starting in 1968, she inflicted upon her dyslexic students an experience in which they were loathed or praised based upon their eye color. According to Elliott, she was ostracized for this experiment, her own children were beaten and abused, and her parents (who were racists, she informed a Dutch interviewer) were driven into isolation, bankruptcy, and despair because they had raised “a nigger lover” (one of her favorite terms).

In her modest explanation, once news of her exercise with the children made it onto national television, the people of Riceville feared that blacks across America would assume that everyone there was like Elliott and would move to their town. To punish her for that, they stopped buying from her father. Elliott also revealed to her Dutch interviewer that she abandoned teaching school in 1984 to devote herself full time to diversity education, for which she receives $6,000 per day from “companies and governmental institutions.”

Customers stopped patronizing the hotel her parents managed. Passersby called her names and shouted insults. The bowling team that she had long played for replaced her, and she was no longer invited to play bridge. Her children were spat on and knocked down, their belongings defaced.

When Darald got a job managing a supermarket in nearby Osage, the family was happy to move, although Elliott stayed on as a teacher in Riceville and continued to conduct the exercise. She still marvels that she wasn’t fired, believing it was because four generations of her family had lived in the community.

“And I’m white, so I have credibility,” she adds....

She says friends her age are hard to make, and over the years her relationships with her family deteriorated. Her mother and siblings asked her not to come around because she made them uncomfortable. Elliott's mother died seven months ago; she did not attend the funeral.

“Did it make a difference to you when you heard about it?”

I think about a Midwestern girl who wasted years yearning to be white, who believed life would be easier, happier, better, if her brown eyes were not almond-shaped, who wavered between feeling insecure and invisible, and whose heart leaped upon learning of the blue-eyed woman who spoke of white privilege and institutionalized racism.

Did Jane Elliott’s work make a difference to me? Yes, so much so that I felt the need to seek her out just to let her know. Elliott listens, then turns away and sighs. “Yeah,” she says softly. “It was worth it.”

Here’s a bit more on Elliott’s method and message, from Kors:

In Blue Eyed [a training film based on one of her workshops], masochistic adults accept Elliott’s two-and-a-half-hour exercise in sadism (reduced to 90 minutes of film), designed to make white people understand what it is to be “a person of color” in America. To achieve this, she divides her group into stupid, lazy, shiftless, incompetent, and psychologically brutalized “blue eyes,” on the one hand, and clever and empowered “brown eyes,” on the other. Some of the sadism is central to the “game,” but much is gratuitous, and it continues after the exercise has ended.

Elliott is unbearably tendentious and ignorant. To teach what an IQ test truly is, she gives the brown eyes half of the answers to an impossible test before the blue eyes enter the room, explaining that, for people of color, the IQ exam is “a test about which you know absolutely nothing.” IQ tests only measure “white culture.” They are a means of “reinforcing our position of power,” and “we do this all the time in public, private, and parochial schools,” using “culturally biased tests, textbooks, and pictures on the wall...for white people.”...

... [I]n her view, nothing has changed in America since the collapse of Reconstruction. Every day in the United States, she explains, white power keeps black males in their place by calling them “boy” (two syllables, hissed), “and we do it to accomplished black males over 70, and we get away with it.” We tell blacks to assimilate, which means merely to “act white,” but when they try that, we put them in their place and change the rules. For example (this in 1995), whites now are building up Colin Powell, but as soon as they build “this boy” up, they will kick him down. For Elliott, the Powell boom was a conscious conspiracy to humiliate and disorient blacks.

She teaches her “blueys” with relish that protest accomplishes nothing, because if blacks protest, “we kill them.” It is not smart to speak up or act clever, which is why blacks appear passive and stupid. The lesson: “You have no power, absolutely no power. ...Quit trying.” Blacks might try to “win” on the inside, but it is almost impossible to validate oneself when white society puts you down “all day, every day.”
....
In short, this is America, and there truly is no hope. Nothing ever changes. No one can succeed by effort. Culture, society, and politics all are static. “White privilege” controls all agencies of power, influence, and image, and uses all the means that arise from these to render “people of color” psychologically impotent, confused, passive, and helpless. So either vent your hatred or assume your guilt.

It is late October, five days before the United States elects its first black president, and Elliott is in a dither. Her Iowa absentee ballot in favor of Barack Obama was mailed in weeks ago, although she worries about what he’s up against.

“Whatever a black person does, he has to do twice as good as a white person to be thought of as half as good,” she says, her sharp voice rising.

Dressed in a pink cotton shirt, jeans and white tennis shoes, Elliott is the picture of a grandmotherly retiree, but her voice remains that of a stern teacher. Obama “mustn’t look angry because we have demonized black men,” she says. “He knows exactly how to get accepted. He’s a bargainer . . . and that’s OK if that’s what it takes to get white people to listen.”

But if there are no real differences between the “classes,” then how do the brown-eyed or blue-eyed provide “diversity” to the those assigned to the other class? If any of those large corporations or government agencies who have paid Ms. Elliott $6000 or $7000 a day (or universities that have used her exercise in their freshman indoctrinations orientations) really believe in her view of racial reality, then they all should move immediately to dismantle all their “diversity” programs.

That’s the first inconsistency, but there’s another, different one. “Yes,” the defenders of Elliott’s bunkum could retort, “there are no underlying, real differences between the two socially created classes [races], but prejudice and bigotry have made them different!”

Not only could they say that, but they actually do. Here’s Knoll in the Los Angeles Times:

Within 15 minutes, Elliott says, she observed her brown-eyed students morph into youthful supremacists and blue-eyed children become uncertain and intimidated.

Brown-eyed children “became domineering and arrogant and judgmental and cool,” she says. “And smart! Smart! All of a sudden, disabled readers were reading. I thought, ‘This is not possible, this is my imagination.’ And I watched bright, blue-eyed kids become stupid and frightened and frustrated and angry and resentful and distrustful. It was absolutely the strangest thing I’d ever experienced.”

proof that black underachievement was purely a product of white-dominated constructions of reality. Turn the tables on whites, and they, too, will perform poorly. “We had one (brown-eyed) girl with a mind like a steel trap who never misspelled a word until we told her that brown eyes were bad,” she proudly recalled to a campus audience many years later.

But wait. Doesn’t it prove too much to say that prejudice and bigotry can make the privileged class smart and assertive and the victimized class dumb and passive? If the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise amounts to more than just children (and adults put in the role of children) playing games, it suggests that discrimination-induced differences are real and lasting, and that suggestion in turn calls to mind a phenomenon I’ve discussed before, such as in “Victims ... Of Victimization Theory”:

... the degree to which those who vigorously criticize oppression often portray the subjects whose interests they mean to support as helpless victims.

Perhaps the most influential example of this phenomenom was the publication in 1959 of Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, by the influential American historian Stanley Elkins. Influenced by the research of psychoanalyst Bruno Bettleheim, who had argued that Nazi concentration camps had “infantalized” their inmates, Elkins argued that the institution of slavery, like the concentration camps, was so oppressive and so all-encompassing that it broke the wills and psyches of slaves, making the “Sambo personality” real, not a figment of the imagination of deluded slaveowners. Elkins himself, by the way, was a liberal, and his analysis influenced many policy initiatives in the 1960s, not least of which was his friend Daniel Moynihan’s call for efforts to shore up the black family.

Elkins’s influence can also possibly be seen in the reference to the “comfortable concentration camp” by his Northampton neighbor, Betty Friedan, in her Feminine Mystique (1963). For a later generation of much more radical feminists, the “concentration camp” was not so comfortable. Andrea Dworkin, for example, was widely known for arguing that “all sex is rape,” i.e., that women have been so oppressed, so victimized, by male hierarchy that they are incapable of giving consent. [As I noted here in discussing EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Co., Prof. Alice Kessler Harris, the EEOC’s expert witness, argued much the same thing. “In fact,” I pointed out, “she was so hostile to the idea that the system leaves women any room at all to choose that she insisted on placing the terms “choice” and “women’s interests” in quotes, and even went so far as to deny that women themselves choose their own major subjects in college or that women business owners choose the types of businesses they own. ]

Her exercise, in short, is fit for neither man nor beast. In fact, if it had been conducted on animals she would have been reported to the SPCA.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED[]

Last month I discussed (here) the Student Bar Association at the University of Virginia encouraging students to sign a pledge of allegiance to “diversity.”

Now comes news, from the Chronicle of Higher Education today, of a new set of guidelines at Virginia Tech that, critics say, “appear to require faculty members to show a commitment to diversity as part of their bids for tenure and promotion.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the National Association of Scholars are on the case. Yesterday FIRE called on Virginia Tech president Charles Steger to abandon its new “political litmus test for faculty.”

The proposal would force faculty members in Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences to adhere to an ideological loyalty oath to an entirely abstract concept — “diversity” — that can represent vastly different things to different people. Faculty are to be evaluated with “special attention” to the candidate’s “involvement in diversity initiatives.” This includes “demonstrating accomplishments and significant contributions pertinent to the candidate’s field” in areas such as “Publications,” “Courses taught,” “Competitive grants,” and other areas of professional contribution. Such evaluative criteria unacceptably interfere with faculty members’ moral and intellectual agency. Although expecting candidates to demonstrate this involvement in every area of their work may seem admirable and innocuous, in practice this is indeed an ideological loyalty oath to adhere to Virginia Tech’s current ideological perspectives on bias, race, gender, and culture.

is making active support and advancement of “diversity”a requirement for faculty to keep their positions and for promotion.

This is a highly unusual step — one that flouts academic freedom. “Diversity” is not a category of academic accomplishment equivalent to high-quality teaching or success in scholarly research and publishing. “Diversity” is an ideology. The term summarizes a set of objectives popular on one part of the political spectrum. Virginia Tech, which is a public university, has no business turning a partisan political credo into a test that must be passed for faculty members to win tenure or to advance in rank.

To start with, “Contributions to diversity” begin with “self-education.” The first duty of the faculty member is to achieve ideological conformity, and the Dossier Guidelines gently explain how. This consists of submitting to training by the good folks at the Equal Opportunity Office, and at CEUT (Center for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching), and attending lots of events such as “the Diversity Summit, identity group celebrations, Campus Climate Checkup, MLK events, special speakers, annual AdvanceVT, Scholarship of Diversity conferences, events hosted by Cranwell Center or Disability Services,” and etc.

All this stuff testifies to the conviction of the senior Virginia Tech administrators that the University’s faculty members give little credence to the concept of “diversity.” Many of those faculty members apparently have to be coerced into agreeing with the doctrine. No such assumption comes with the other kinds of service. It is assumed in those cases that the value of going to workshops, serving on committees, and assisting students in extra-curricular activities is self-evident. Only “diversity” requires reprogramming the ideas, ideals, and social attitudes of faculty members.

Second, it turns out that embracing “diversity” requires changing everything else a faculty member does: student advising, scholarship, research methods, syllabi, teaching styles, student recruitment, and much more. What kind of “service” is Virginia Tech talking about that suddenly balloons into an
across-the-board rehabilitation of the faculty member’s whole life?

Both “re-education” and the ballooning-into-everything are strong evidence of the ideological character of this “diversity” requirement. It is not about improving service to the students or even service to the University. It is about humble acceptance of political doctrine that administrators hope to impose without the inconvenience of rational argument or intellectually valid reasons. They can’t, because the program is intellectually indefensible.

is too shop-worn a word to require much exposition these days, but that doesn’t mean it has lost its ideological character. It remains a way of dividing people into categories on the basis of what the diversiphiles consider group characteristics. That this involves radical stereotyping that denies individuals the right to determine for themselves who they are doesn’t slow down the diversity’s hard-core supporters. They believe that anyone who doesn’t conform to their storyline isn’t being “authentic” and may suffer from what the Marxists used to call “false consciousness.” Get in your group, says diversity, and stay there. We — the race experts, the disability advocates, the heads of women’s centers, and LGBTQ “safe space” allies, the folks who are making careers out of convincing you that you are a victim and need our advocacy — we will look out for you. And part of looking out for you is that we will browbeat the faculty into going along with our spiel. If they don’t go along, it will cost them their jobs or their promotions. Yes, some of them may huff about academic freedom, but we’ve got that covered too. Academic freedom now consists of agreeing with us. Free to agree!

the university’s provost, Mark G. McNamee, says not only is the language on diversity not really new, it is also merely intended to encourage faculty members to pursue activities related to diversity, not to require it.

In an e-mail message to The Chronicle on Wednesday, Mr. McNamee said he would review the new promotion and tenure guidelines in light of the letter from FIRE.

UPDATE [March 27]

When The Chronicle asked Provost McNamee what would happen to faculty members who failed to report any involvement in “diversity” activities, he replied, “Nothing.”

FIRE is not convinced. As it noted yesterday, citing a National Association of Scholars discussion of a May 29, 2008, memorandum sent to Virginia Tech department heads mandating “diversity accomplishments”:

Diversity accomplishments are a meaningful part of the faculty review process. Candidates must do a better job of participating in and documenting their involvement in diversity initiatives. Diversity accomplishments are especially important for candidates seeking promotion to full professor. Please use the categories developed by the Commission on Equal Opportunity and Diversity to prompt and organize diversity-related contributions. The categories may be found at section VII. C. 1. - 8. of the promotion and tenure guidelines. They are also available at www.provost.vt.edu/documents/reporting_diversity.php. Committees are asked to develop working expectations for department members, perhaps sharing good examples, and to review diversity contributions included in the dossier with those expectations in mind. (Emphasis added.)

Participation in diversity awareness workshops on campus or off, attending harassment prevention training from EO Office, participation in CEUT reading group on multicultural/diversity topics, attending diversity-related programs to learn more about groups other than your own (Diversity Summit, identity group celebrations, Campus Climate Checkup, MLK events, special speakers, annual AdvanceVT and Scholarship of Diversity conferences, events hosted by Cranwell Center or Disability Services, special programs in your discipline or association, etc.); participating in an Undoing Racism workshop; learning another language (including American sign language) so that you might speak to current or prospective students, parents, or community members.

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One of the most prominent planks in Obama’s campaign platform was his promise to move beyond (or above) partisanship.Many observers have thus been confused or disappointed by the currently unfolding reality of President Obama’s economic agenda for the nation, consisting as it does of the conversion of one liberal wish list after another into government policy with little, often no, input from Republicans.

A real mystery, no?, even after the campaign promises have been discounted by the amount usually applied to campaign promises.

Well, no. It’s a mystery no more. I have finally figured it out.

In our recent political history — in fact, even going back into the not so recent past — Democrats have been the tax and spend party, and Republicans have been the borrow and spend party. Obama’s signal accomplishment in his first two months in office has indeed been his transcendence of that old partisan divide.

The Democrats under Obama’s leadership have now become the party committed to both tax and spend and borrow and spend, taking both taxing and borrowing to heretofore undreamed of heights (or depths).

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:26 PM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The first part of my discussion of Princeton Prof. Douglas Massey’s most recent defense of affirmative action appears immediately below, or, if you somehow stumbled on this continuation first, here. Part I dealt with the first of what are claimed to be only “three basic charges” we critics level against affirmative action, that it “constitutes reverse discrimination, lowering the chance of admission for better-qualified white students” and, further, that “affirmative action generally has had only small and insignificant effects on the admission prospects of white students.” As I argued at length — and, I hope and believe, in depth — in that first, long post, baloney!

Here is what they say is our second charge:

They also contend that it creates a mismatch between the skills of minority students and the abilities required for success at selective institutions, setting those students up for academic problems.

I assume Massey et al. respond to Sander in their book. They should have done so in this “adaptation” as well, or not mentioned “mismatch” at all.

Moving on, most of the Massey et al. article deals with what they regard as the third “charge” against affirmative action: “that it stigmatizes minority students as less than fully qualified, which results in demoralization and substandard performance, when in fact those students may be well qualified.”

This third “charge” is the only one they seem to take seriously, and the bulk of their article is devoted to an (ultimately unpersuasive) attempt to rebut it. Here’s the launch:

If white students believe that many of their black peers would not be at a college were it not for affirmative action and, more important, if black students perceive whites to believe that, then affirmative action may indeed undermine minority-group members’ academic performance by heightening the social stigma they already experience because of race or ethnicity. In addition, we have uncovered a fourth possibility: the idea that affirmative action exacerbates the psychological burdens that minority students must carry on campuses. Those who feel threatened because they have internalized negative beliefs about their group will find that they feel even more so if they themselves fall below the institutional norm for SAT performance. Likewise, those who feel they are representing their race every time they are called on to perform academically will have a heightened sense of responsibility, or what we call a “subjective performance burden,” when their group’s average SAT score is known to be well below that of other students at the institution.

Predictably, all this feeling and perceiving and believing and internalizing, etc., leads to an extended riff on “stereotype threat,” which Massey et al. posit as the real villain, not affirmative action. “Indeed,” they write,

our research suggests that the extensive use of race-sensitive criteria under institutional affirmative action, when it produces a large test-score gap between minority and other students on campuses, appears to lower minority achievement in two ways: Directly, it creates a stigmatizing social context within which black and Latino students find it more difficult to perform. Indirectly, it heightens the subjective performance burden experienced by individual minority students.

the results of our research do not mean that affirmative action is necessarily detrimental to the academic interests of minority students and should be abandoned. Rather, the results imply that as currently administered by selective institutions, the application of race-sensitive admissions criteria appears to create a stigmatizing setting and should be reconsidered. Indeed, if the way affirmative action is administered and framed can be changed so as to mitigate the stigma now being created, its negative academic effects might disappear....

In the end, our finding that affirmative-action programs can undermine grade performance by stigmatizing students and increasing the pressure they feel to perform tells us less about the inherent weakness of affirmative action than about the poor fashion in which programs are carried out.

What might these stigma filters look like? How, that is, do Massey et al. suggest that racial preferences be “administered and framed” so that their stigmatizing effects are eliminated? As one example, they mention that Stanford psychology professor Claude Steele, the father of the “stereotype threat” theory, and several colleagues

initiated a special program for African-American students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, in which students weren't stigmatized by labeling the program as remedial or compensatory. Rather, they were told that, as Michigan students, they had survived a competitive selection process, and that their assignment to the program was intended to maximize their strong potential....

To Massey et al., however,

[t]hose findings suggest that if minority students were welcomed and supported at selective institutions in the same way that star athletes and legacy students routinely are, the grade performance of black and Latino students might improve markedly. But, if anything, elite colleges and universities now seem to be doing the opposite of wisely intervening in support of minority students. When they arrive on campus, black and Latino students are often singled out for special treatment in ways that typically imply a need for remediation. They have been far more likely than white or Asian students to report the use of a tutor or the receipt of special instruction in reading, writing, mathematics, test taking, and study skills. Over all, black students have been more than twice as likely as white students to receive institutional help.

The worst possible situation is for minority students to be typically selected for remedial programs on the basis of race and ethnicity rather than ability or level of preparation, thus communicating the tacit assumption that all black and Latino students are of suspect intellectual quality, no matter what their class or educational background....

• Even if it is legitimate to single out one racial group of students to receive lavish large doses of praise, care, and attention, why would such race-based attention not simply reinforce “stereotype threat”? As Roger Clegg noted in the post linked above,

I have no particular problem with putting a happy face on these intervention programs, but I am skeptical that doing so will solve the problem of less academically competitive students not performing as well as more academically competitive students.... I would also note that limiting these intervention programs on the basis of race is not only illegal (the Supreme Court made clear in its 2003 University of Michigan decisions that “individualized consideration” of students rather than the mechanical application of racial categories is required by schools), but is more likely to aggravate “stereotype threat” ... than allowing students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds to participate in them.

• Since university officials know very well that a substantial proportion of the minority students they admit are less prepared for college work than their peers and more in need of remedial (by whatever name) “instruction in reading, writing, mathematics, test taking, and study skills,” wouldn’t it be cruel of them not to provide tutors, special instruction, etc.?

The larger problem here is the authors’ overarching (or is it undergirding?) assumption that what they acknowledge as the “demoralization and substandard performance” of minority students is caused by the “stigmatizing social context” created by the way affirmative action is framed rather than by the fact, which they not only freely acknowledge but actually document, that minority students are admitted in large numbers with substandard qualifications. They are admitted because of the “difference” that the religion of “diversity” proclaims they provide to those admitted without preferences; they are admitted under different standards from the other students; and they are thus not surprisingly regarded as different by their non-diverse peers and faculty.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not confess that there always seems to be something about the arguments of Prof. Massey and his colleagues that I simply fail to understand. Other examples of my difficulty with what strike me as inconsistencies in their work can be found here and here. In the current article, I haven’t yet figured out how the following two paragraphs fit together. After noting the substantial SAT score gap that exists between minorities and other students, Massey et al. write:

Based on those findings, our research has revealed that black and Latino students with relatively low SAT scores do no better or worse than their counterparts who scored at or above the average for their institutions. Affirmative action does not appear to set individual students up for failure by creating a mismatch between cognitive skills and academic demands at competitive colleges and universities. Other things being equal, individual affirmative-action beneficiaries earn the same grades as other students.

But at the same time, we have found a significant effect of institutional affirmative action on the grade performance of black and Latino students. A sizable minority-majority test-score gap within any given institution appears to create a social context that makes it more difficult for minority students to perform academically. The greater the discrepancy in SAT scores between minority students and others on a particular campus, the lower the grades earned by black and Latino students as a group on that campus.

As I’ve said, I must be missing something here, because this makes no sense to me. Nor do I understand how the authors can be sure that the lower grades earned by minority students at schools with a large test score gap are the result of a bad “social context” rather than their lower qualifications.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:23 AM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

[NOTE! This post has been UPDATED UPDATED TWICE]

Virginia under the Byrd Machine engaged in “massive resistance” to attacks on state-supported racial discrimination. For a while now Prof. Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton, has been engaged in scholarly resistance to attacks on the racial discrimination at the core of affirmative action in higher education. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long article today, “Affirmative-Action Programs for Minority Students: Right in Theory, Wrong in Practice,” by Massey and several colleagues. It is adapted from their new book, Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities, which will be published by Princeton this year. Their argument, so far as it can be determined by this adaptation, is wrong in both theory and practice.

The first clause of the first sentence turn out to be a reliable tip-off to what’s coming: “The use of race-sensitive criteria in admissions continues to be controversial....” Aside from the not so hidden implication that those of us who oppose the use of “race-sensitive” admissions criteria are insensitive to race, this euphemism reveals a discomfort with the literally accurate “race preference” label these criteria deserve. In less politically correct times I would be tempted to describe this euphemistic squeamishness as a reluctance to call a spade a spade.

The second clause of that first sentence — “and critics have leveled three basic charges against it” — is followed immediately by another and far more serious problem in their handling of the first of the “charges” against those “race-sensitive criteria”:

For one, opponents say the practice constitutes reverse discrimination, lowering the chance of admission for better-qualified white students.

Regular readers will know that I don’t believe there is any such thing as “reverse discrimination.” A policy or practice is either discriminatory, or it isn’t.

This assertion is simply, flatly not true. Many (indeed, I believe most) of us oppose racial discrimination because we believe it is immoral, illegal, unconstitutional, and just plain wrong, regardless of the identity or number of victims. Because of this fundamental error, Massey et. al. think they can refute Charge No. 1 by claiming that it

has not stood up to empirical scrutiny. In fact, studies show that affirmative action generally has had only small and insignificant effects on the admission prospects of white students.

On a number of occasions we have confronted Massey’s argument that racial preference for blacks and Hispanics “has had only small and insignificant effects on the admission prospects of white students.” For example, I looked (rather closely, I think) at the University of Michgan’s use of this argument here1, here2, and here3, from which the following comes:

The following is from a Q&A re University of Michigan Admissions Policies on a Michigan web site with its legal materials. [At least it was there, when I discussed it here and here. Now it has apparently been “revised” and “archived.”]

Q: Does the University’s consideration of race hurt a white student’s chances of getting into the University?

A: No. The numbers of minority applicants are extremely small compared to the numbers of white students who apply to the University.... It is not mathematically possible that the small numbers of minority students who apply and are admitted are “displacing” a significant number of white students under any scenario.

For a peek at how many were discriminatorily denied admission let’s turn, as I did in the posts linked above (and staying still with the third one here), to another Michigan source, Dr. Stephen Raudenbush, an expert witness for Michigan in Grutter v. Bollinger, the law school case. I quoted from Judge Bernard Friedman’s summary of some of Dr. Raudenbush’s data in his U.S. District Court opinion in Grutter, namely, that under the race preference policy in effect in 2000 170 “underrepresented minorities” were admitted to the University of Michigan law school that year and that, if Michigan had used race-blind admissions, 46 would have been offered admission. Thus 124 white, Asian, or unpreferred minority applicants were denied admission solely because of their race.

Michigan, of course, was and is not unique, although the degree of discrimination is even greater at some other schools. For example, here, I quoted Prof. Robert Heidt, a law professor and former member of the admissions committee at the University of Indiana law school, who wrote in a courageous article that

to meet our de facto quotas, we must leapfrog less qualified minority applicants over approximately 330 more qualified non-minority applicants each year, many of whom, of course, will be Indiana residents.

William Bowen and Derek Bok, in their book The Shape of the River, look at the nationwide statistics concerning admissions to selective universities. They determined that even if all selective universities used a race-blind admissions system, the probability of being admitted for a white student would go only from 25 percent to 26.2 percent.

What Michigan, and Bowen and Bok, are actually saying here is that there is no discrimination because there's not much of it, and what there is affects only some individuals, not their groups. Their argument is that discrimination against individuals doesn't count. The only discrimination that matters, that is in effect even worthy of being called discrimination, is against “groups” — and even then, only if its impact is severe enough to make a group “underrepresented.”
....
Go back and look at the Bowen and Bok numbers quoted above. [But before you accept these numbers as accurate, you should read the long critique by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in the UCLA Law Review, June 1999....] According to Bowen & Bok, “a white student” has a 25% probability of being admitted to a selective college under the current regime of race preferences, but under a “race-blind” system that probability would increase “only” to 26.2%. But what if one also considers Asians and other non-preferred minorities? B&B don't say. In any event, based on their numbers, for every thousand applicants to a selective college, 12 whites (Asians, etc., still invisible) are rejected only because of their race or ethnicity. Applying those numbers to Michigan’s 25,000 applicants every year to its freshman class, Michigan rejects 300 white applicants a year based exclusively on their race. [Emphasis added]

In the four years analyzed [1999, 2003, 2004, 2005], UM rejected over 8000 Hispanics, Asians, and whites who had higher SAT or ACT scores and GPAs than the median black admittee — including nearly 2700 students in 2005 alone.

Do Massey et al. really regard those numbers — and the 124 applicants to the University of Michigan law school in one year and the 330 applicants to the University of Indiana law school in one year and the roughly 300 applicants for undergraduate admissions to Michigan in one year and the 1.2% of all white (and Asian etc.?) applicants to all selective colleges and graduate schools and professional schools ever year (if Bowen and Bok’s estimates are correct) who are denied admission solely because of their race — as “small and insignificant”? Perhaps they will tell us in their forthcoming book.

Attentive readers will have noticed that I have dealt with only the first of the “three charges” Massey et al. say we critics make against affirmative action. That’s why this post is Part I. If you’ve got the stomach for it, come back later when I’ll be back with Part II.

UPDATE [2:45PM]

NOTE! This UPDATE is not Part II. In fact, it is not so much an UPDATE as a transition to the still coming, later today, Part II. But I need to point you here and now, not there and later, to Roger Clegg’s post today on National Review Online’s Phi Beta Cons. I would like to say that great minds work alike, but it would be much more accurate to say that a great mind says there one or two things I said above, several things I didn’t say but should have, and more things that I like to think I would have thought to say in Part II even if I hadn’t read them here. Here’s one of the things he said that I should have said but didn’t: “... there are a lot more than just three criticisms of racial admission preferences”:

The list of costs [of using racial preferences], on the other hand, is long and largely irrefutable: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership.

UPDATE II [5:55PM]

No, this still isn’t Part II. There’s one more aspect to the Massey argument that affirmative action produces only a “small and insignificant” amount of discrimination against whites, Asians, and others that I would like to keep with this post. Above, I discuss what I think is overwhelming, irrefutable evidence (much of it from defenders of racial preferences) that the number of white, Asian, and other victims of affirmative action admissions is in fact dramatically large and significant.

But there is another measure of discrimination, in addition to and beyond the number of victims, and that is the amount, extent, depth of the preference given to the preferred groups. And here, too, Massey et al. minimize the amount of discrimination at the core of affirmative action. Consider the following:

To measure affirmative action at the institutional level of each campus, [Massey et al.] took the difference between the average SAT score earned by blacks or Hispanics and that earned by all students at a particular institution. We hypothesized that the larger the gap, the more an institution used criteria other than test scores to determine minority admissions. Among the 28 institutions that we studied, none displayed mean black and Latino SAT scores that were above the institutional average, suggesting that all institutions practiced some form of affirmative action. The differences between the SAT scores of black students and all students at those institutions ranged from 43 to 194 points and averaged 122 points. For Hispanics the average difference was 61 points, with a range that went from 56 to 139.

Perhaps part of the reason the Massey numbers minimize the degree of preference awarded to minority students is that they are based on a comparison of minority SAT scores to the SAT scores for “all students,” a group that includes the minorities. Comparing minority scores to the scores of those not receiving admissions preferences is much more revealing, as was done in this 2006 study of the University of Michigan, also cited above, which found that “[i]n the most recent year (2005), the median black admittee’s SAT score was 1160, versus 1260 for Hispanics, 1350 for whites, and 1400 for Asians.” This Michigan study also found that “[t]he black-to-white odds ratio for 2005 was 70 to 1 among students taking the SAT.... (To put this in perspective, the odds ratio for nonsmokers versus smokers dying from lung cancer is only 14 to 1.)”

I wonder if Massey et al. think the distance the bar is lowered for minorities is as "small and insignificant" as the number of white, Asian, and other victims of discrimination it produces.

Part II? Still coming.... Check back later.

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

... in part because there are too many multicolored beans. Thus, the Washington Post reports today,

Public schools in the Washington region and elsewhere are abandoning their check-one-box approach to gathering information about race and ethnicity in an effort to develop a more accurate portrait of classrooms transformed by immigration and interracial marriage. Next year, they will begin a separate count of students who are of more than one race.

“The racial categories have lost their meaning,” [Faifax County, Virginia, school superintendent Jack] Dale said. He pointed out that the black or African American group could include a student born in Virginia or Nigeria, while the white group includes students of Middle Eastern descent.

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Politico: “Obama struggles as communicator”

Of all the pitfalls Barack Obama might face in the presidency, here is one not many people predicted: He is struggling as a public communicator....

From giving contradictory statements on the economy to making gaffes about the Special Olympics, team Obama has lost the communications magic that propelled it to the White House....

In terms of pure miscommunication, however, no event compares to the president’s appearance with Prime Minister Brian Cowan of Ireland, during which a Teleprompter malfunction caused Cowan to repeat parts of the Obama speech and the president to thank himself for inviting everyone to the event...

Trivial stuff? Perhaps. But there are plenty of similar failures to synchronize on issues that nobody thinks are unimportant....

Sigh. One almost gets tired of saying it, but one must say it, still: Can you IMAGINE what the press and the Dems would do with that, had Bush said it. Can you IMAGINE what the press and the Dems would have done with the Irish PM Teleprompter gaffe (the press has helpfully embargoed the video, so Obama doesn’t have to see it playing 24/7, as Bush would have - had Bush so gaffed). Can you IMAGINE what the press and the Dems would have done if Bush had given the Prime Minister of Great Britain a lousy pack of 50 “Classic” DVD’s that didn’t work in the UK?

Senior White House aides concede that the AIG scandal made it difficult for them to communicate their message last week....

Pundits are questioning Obama's ability to communicate

The guy just doesn’t know what to say. He can’t connect. Emotions are here, he’s over there. He can’t get the words to match the situation.

This began, I’d argue, from the first moment. He punted on the inaugural. Everybody ran around like crazy trying to praise it because if Barack Obama couldn’t give a speech then what?

But now, at week 11, we’re face-to-face with the reality, the man can’t talk worth a damn....

You can see the fundamental mistake he’s making. Having been so successfully elected, he’s acting like people actually want to hear what he thinks. He’s the great earnest bore at the dinner party. Instead of singing for his supper, he’s just talking—and going on at length. The real job of making people part of the story you’re telling, of having them hang on your every word, of getting the tone and detail right, the hard job of holding a conversation, he ain’t doing.

He’s cold; he’s prickly; he’s uncomfortable; he’s not funny; and he’s getting awfully tedious.

He thinks it’s all about him.... This guy is leaden and this show is in trouble.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Say What? (13) | TrackBacks (0)

... Or maybe he’s always been dotty. In either case, it is well known by now that the Administration, Democratic leaders, and their followers on both sides of the aisle rushed through the “stimulus” bill so fast they didn’t have time to read it, and so were and are blissfully unaware of many of its provisions.

Just the other day, for example, CNN reported that during the rush to ram through the “stimulus”

[t]he Senate passed a bipartisan amendment proposed by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R- Maine, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, that would have taxed bonuses on any company getting federal bailout dollars, if the company didn’t pay back the bonus money to the government.

But the idea was stripped from the stimulus bill during hurried, closed-door negotiations with the White House and House of Representatives.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, who is now pursing a similar bonus tax idea in the wake of outrage over AIG, said it was a mistake to drop it from the stimulus bill. He made a stunning admission.

“Frankly it was such a rush -- we’re talking about the stimulus bill now -- to get it passed, I didn’t have time and other conferees didn’t have time to address many of the provisions that were modified significantly,” said Baucus.

“We shouldn’t be here. That should have passed, but it didn’t,” he said.

now called “the Dodd Amendment” by the Obama Administration provides an “exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009.

“When the language went to the conference and came back, there was different language,” he said.... “I can tell you this much, when my language left the Senate, it did not include it. When it came back, it did.”

Dodd told CNN ... that he was responsible for language added to the stimulus bill to make sure that existing contracts for bonuses at companies receiving federal bailout money were honored.

At the Enfield event Friday, Dodd said that he was misled on the issue of bonuses for AIG executives. He said he would not have drafted key legislative changes allowing the bonuses to move forward if he knew the purpose of those changes.

Dodd said officials at the Treasury Department led him to believe that the changes, added to the $787 billion economic stimulus bill shortly before its passage last month, were merely “technical and innocuous” in nature.

“If anyone had mentioned AIG or any bonuses, I would have rejected it immediately, out of hand. But the argument was this was technical,” Dodd said.

I suspect it’s not so unusual for Senators and Representatives to vote on measures, even important ones, without having read or understood them, but I retain enough residual confidence in the Congress to think, or at least hope, that in being so uninformed about what he himself has inserted in a bill Dodd remains a special case.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education has two interesting pieces today on free speech and openness to alien ideas (or not).

In the longer and more analytical of the two staff writer Peter Schmidt begins on a metaphorical (or is it allegorical?) note:

Imagine a world where people can say whatever they want but are forced to wear earplugs at all times. What value would free speech have? The First Amendment does not just protect our right to express ideas; it protects our right to take them in. Its whole point is to ensure access to the thoughts of others, based on a belief that a successful democracy requires an informed citizenry and open debate.

was disappointed to find that President Turner and the SMU trustees had agreed to permit former President George W. Bush to establish, alongside the Bush presidential library and museum, what appears to be a fully independent research institute to be operated by the George W. Bush foundation, not SMU. This has ... provoked a serious division among the faculty as to whether the University should permit an institute on its campus, “to further the domestic and international goals of the Bush administration.” It is to be, if we are to take this language literally, an advocacy organization. It was apparently loosely modeled on the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, but it appears to be a more thoroughly focused political effort than the Hoover, even at its most partisan.

Over the past eight years, several of the world’s most prominent thinkers have not been heard on U.S. soil. Federal authorities, given broad discretion to deny foreigners entry in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have been denying them visas or, more awkwardly, stopping them at airports and placing them on return flights home, their visas revoked.

The USA Patriot Act, signed into law that fearful and angry autumn, said federal officials can deny a visa to anyone who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity” or “persuades others” to do so. That provision enabled the Bush administration to revive a cold-war practice known as ideological exclusion—the refusal of visas based not on actions, but on viewpoints or associations.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps the best movie one-liner of all time can be found here.

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Asia Times, “Dollar Crisis in the Making, Part 3”

There is mounting evidence that China's central bank is undertaking the process of divesting itself of longer-dated US Treasuries in favor of shorter-dated ones.

To provide greater support to mortgage lending and housing markets, the Committee decided today to increase the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet further by purchasing up to an additional $750 billion of agency mortgage-backed securities, bringing its total purchases of these securities to up to $1.25 trillion this year, and to increase its purchases of agency debt this year by up to $100 billion to a total of up to $200 billion. Moreover, to help improve conditions in private credit markets, the Committee decided to purchase up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months.

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Politico has a long article today on Obama’s continuing reluctance to talk about race, noting that today is the anniversary of the important speech in Philadelphia in which candidate Obama, trying to deflect criticism of his long association with Rev. Wright said

We have a choice in this country.... We can tackle race only as spectacle — as we did in the O.J. trial — or in the wake of tragedy — as we did in the aftermath of Katrina — or as fodder for the nightly news. ... That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”

Obama’s approach has been that race will take care of itself once his legislative package has passed, i.e., once American has been transformed by his epochal reforms. “I think what solves racial tensions is fixing the economy, putting people to work, making sure that people have health care, ensuring that every kid is learning out here,” he has said. “I think if we do that, then we’ll probably have more fruitful conversations.”

Not all of his supporters agree. Here’s an interesting dissent, quoted early in the article:

“If there’s an attitude of ‘it’s not that important, let’s just get people back working.’ that idea hinges on the fact that you can get that far without talking about race, which I don’t buy,” said Marc Lamont Hill, an assistant professor at Temple University who believes a discussion of race and discrimination has to be a part of Obama’s economic policy.

“Even if you stimulate the economy and create jobs, the reality is if your name is Shaheem and not Michael, you might not get a call-back,” Hill said. “You have to talk about the ways race continues to trump merit.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:47 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

... is that you don’t have to put up with messy, time-consuming, embarrassing dissent.

Bloomberg reports today (HatTip to Drudge):

President Barack Obama may try to push through Congress a health-care overhaul, energy proposals and tax increases by using a partisan tactic that would thwart Republican efforts to block the measures.

The administration and congressional Democrats are debating whether to use a parliamentary procedure called reconciliation to advance some of the biggest items on the president’s agenda. The move would allow Democrats to approve plans to raise taxes by $1 trillion, create a cap-and-trade system to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions, and overhaul health care without a single Republican vote.

“You’re talking about running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them into the Chicago River,” said Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican who stepped down last month as Obama’s pick for Commerce secretary. “It takes the minority completely out of the process.”

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According to the libs, as we all know, race is a valid proxy for all sorts of wonderful (but no bad) “differences.” That’s why schools and colleges are so determined to jiggle their admissions requirements, lowering them where necessary, to assign or admit students from the approved racial groups: so that all their same students can be exposed to a few different students.

Now, thanks to a state appeals court in (where else?) California, “diversity” has a new proxy, except that it’s really the same old proxy removed by only four to eight blocks.

A state appeals court breathed new life Tuesday into campus integration efforts, ruling that Berkeley does not violate California’s ban on racial preferences when it considers the makeup of students’ neighborhoods in deciding where they will go to school.

Berkeley’s policy “does not show partiality, prejudice or preference to any student on the basis of that student’s race,” said the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco. “All students in a given residential area are treated equally.”
....
Under a plan the district enacted in 2004, each area of four to eight blocks is given a diversity rating based on racial breakdown and parents’ income and educational levels. The district uses that rating in enrollment decisions at the city’s 11 elementary schools and in special academic programs at Berkeley High School.

For example, when considering enrollment at a school that has a high ratio of white, well-educated and wealthy families, the district gives preference to students from other types of neighborhoods. The district does not consider specific students’ race or their parents’ income or educational levels.

For a more sober analysis, here’s Roger Clegg today on National Review Online’s Bench Memos:

As a matter of federal (constitutional) law, the government is clearly using a racial “classification,” and that is enough to trigger strict scrutiny. It is also clear that what the school district is doing is racially motivated — it’s simply found a clever proxy for the race of the students themselves — which also triggers strict scrutiny. And, as a matter of state law, it is hard to believe that Proposition 209 ought to be interpreted as narrower than the Constitution, when the former was passed to supplement the latter. Prop 209 reads: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” Students and groups of students are being treated differently “on the basis of race” here.

... it seems hard to believe that, if it’s illegal to discriminate against someone because of his race, it can still be legal to discriminate against that person because of his neighbor’s race.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As I noted here last month, the first bill President Obama signed into law dramatically expanded the protection offered by (and the prospects of employer liability under) Title VII’s prohibition of job discrimination. I quoted the following (and more) from Stuart Taylor:

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.

Berkshire Associates, a leading provider of human resources services, software, and training has interpreted the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and is partnering with Baltimore-based law firm, A. Jai Bonner, P.C., to share its recommendations on how companies should handle the latest impact on fair pay policy.

On January 29, 2009, The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed into law by President Obama, effectively overturning a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision saying employees had only 180 days from the date of the first discriminatory paycheck to file a lawsuit. The new law now resets that time limit with every paycheck. Berkshire’s compensation expert, Michele Whitehead, PHR, states, “The amendment considers each discriminatory compensation decision or practice, even if unintentional, to be unlawful. This increases a company's exposure to pay-related lawsuits and claims. Now is the time for company’s to take action to protect themselves.”

UPDATE

See additional discussion here.

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I’m almost surprised that this Los Angeles Times column by Tim Rutten on “Rep. [Maxine] Waters' troubling ties” hasn’t received more attention. I suspect it would have had it not appeared in the middle of a flurry of fallout over the AIG bailout. In fact, I think what Rutten both reveals and reminds us of is worthy of more anger than the AIG bonuses, but maybe news that minority politicians are more interested in feathering racial nests (including their own) is no longer considered newsworthy in elite political circles.

Rutten’s conclusion is that throughout her career Waters “has shown a disturbing inability to adequately distinguish her family's interests from those of the public,” including, though Rutten is either too polite or too politically correct so say, what she probably regards as her racial family.

Anyway, take a look at his’s column and see if what he pins on Waters strikes you as outrageous or just business as usual (or both).

“This week,” he reports,

the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reported that Waters used her access as a senior member of the [House Financial Services] committee to arrange two meetings between officials of the Treasury Department and a group of banks owned by African Americans.

Ostensibly, the bankers wanted to talk because their institutions had been hard hit by the implosion of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. According to the New York Times, though, Kevin Cohee — chief executive of OneUnited Bank — took the opportunity to plead for a $50-million bailout of his institution.

“Here you had a tiny community bank that comes in and they are not proposing a broader policy — they were asking for help for themselves,” former Treasury aide Stephen Lineberry told the Times. “I don’t remember that ever happening before.”

Officials told both papers that they were even more taken aback when they discovered that Waters' husband, Sidney Williams — a U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas under President Clinton — was a former director of One- United Bank, that she herself had once owned as much as $500,000 worth of its stock and that her husband still holds two blocks of its securities, each valued somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000. Waters had arranged the meetings without disclosing any of these facts.

Why Whoops? Waters replies to such charges.

Waters sees nothing wrong in any of this. As she said in a statement: “I have been an outspoken advocate for minority communities and businesses in California and nationally for decades. ... [T]hese articles only revealed one thing: I am indeed an advocate for minority banks.”

And a good one. OneUnited was one of the first minority-owned institutions to receive bailout money — $12 million — from the feds’ Troubled Asset Relief Program. This despite the fact that less than six months ago, the FDIC sanctioned the bank for “unsafe or unsound banking practices,” including Cohee’s excessive compensation, which covered the cost of his 2008 Porsche SUV and the maintenance on his $6.4-million ocean-view compound in Pacific Palisades....

UDPATE

Fox News reports:

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., called on President Obama on Friday to explain what happened when a provision was added to his economic stimulus bill last month that allowed AIG employees to receive $165 million in bonuses....

“They’ve got some explaining to do,” Waters told Joe Scarborough on his WABC radio show Friday morning. “And I think the president is going to have to clarify to the American public what took place between Treasury and Mr. Dodd.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Since debates over voting discrimination today usually involves arcane notions of “vote dilution,” “majority-minority districts,” “pre-clearance” of even mundane changes in voting rules or procedures, etc., it is sometimes difficult to remember what real, unadulterated voting discrimination was like in the old days. Fortunately for those with faulty or short memories, however, Mississippi still exists, and it can provide useful if unpleasant reminders of how bad real discrimination was not so long ago.

A dramatic case in point, United States vs. Brown, recently decided by the Fifth Circuit, comes from Noxubee County, Mississippi. It has everything a Hollywood movie about the evil old South could possibly want (though even such a movie would be dismissed as so exaggerated as to be unbelievable): a corrupt County political machine determined to repress and even eliminate minority influence, bought and paid for voting registrars, massive fraud in registration and vote counting, blatant voter intimidation, and even collusive Washington bureaucrats turning a blind eye.

Here are some of the salient descriptions of how politics has been practiced in Noxubee County, taken from the recent Fifth Circuit opinion (either quoted or summarized). You may find the conditions and practices described here hard to believe in contemporary America.

• “The district court concluded that during that time ‘defendants engaged in improper, and in some instances fraudulent conduct, and committed blatant violations of state election laws[] for the purpose of diluting black voting strength. Brown, 494 F. Supp. 2d at 485. Black votes were diluted by defendants’ involvement in (1) obtaining large numbers of defective absentee ballots from white voters; (2) facilitating the improper counting of absentee ballots in order to ensure that the defective ballots were counted; and (3) permitting the improper assistance of white voters...”;

• voters being recruited by recruiters paid by the executive committee to recruit absentee voters who were not qualified to vote absentee, who did not apply to vote absentee, who did not intend to vote for the candidates marked on their ballots, and who testified that the signatures on their ballots were not theirs;

• evidence that clearly demonstrated “defendants’ attempts to obtain a disproportionate number of absentee ballots from white voters”;

• “evidence illustrated defendants’ permitting the improper counting of absentee ballots and defendants’ — specifically, Brown’s — direct influence over poll managers in counting the ballots.”

• “Brown inspected the absentee ballots the night before the runoff and placed yellow post-it notes on select ballots that he wished to be rejected. On the note, he indicated the reason why he considered the ballot deficient. The next day, Brown told the poll managers ‘I’ve already went through these absentee ballots and I put y’all’s stick-on stickers on the ballots that I want rejected and the rest of them is all right to count’”;

• “Brown’s directions were followed without deviation. All of the marked ballots were rejected, including black voters’ absentee ballots shown to possess the same deficiencies as white voters’ ballots that were counted.”

• “... the district court concluded that defendants engaged in a ‘pattern of episodic behavior intended to deny black voters equal participation in the political process.’ By soliciting large numbers of defective white absentee ballots, wielding their authority to ensure that these ballots were counted, and permitting the improper assistance of white voters—all with the intent to dilute the voting power of black Democrats—defendants were held to have violated § 2 of the Voting Rights Act.”

• “Witnesses recounted that both white poll workers ... repeatedly approached white voters, who made no request for assistance, in order to solicit the provision of assistance. This assistance involved marking the ballots for the voter without consultation, and no such assistance was proffered to black voters.”

• “The government presented a press release issued by Brown prior to the 2003 primary election. In it, Brown named 174 Democratic voters, all black, whom he intended to challenge were they to vote in the 2003 Democratic primary.... As only black voters were listed, the district court considered it ‘not credible in the least that Brown was only aware of blacks who had moved and were consequently no longer eligible to vote.’”

• “In 2005, [Brown] urged voters to ‘Keep Hope Alive [and] Vote White in ’05’ in an open letter to Noxubee County voters. As chair of the NDEC, Brown voiced the opinion that all of the county’s elected officials should be white; to that end, he baldly accused black elected officials of racism, without support, in an effort to arouse black voters to vote against a black official and to support a white challenger. He also recruited white individuals to run for office even though he knew the individuals failed to meet the position’s qualifications.”
  

Well, I said you would find all this hard to believe, but everything I’ve laid out above is true ... except for two small details. I’ve changed “black” to “white” and “white to black” in all the quotes and summaries, and Ike Brown’s famous mailed plea to Noxubee County voters to “Keep Hope Alive [and] Vote Black” (not “White,” as I had it above) was sent in 1995, not 2005.This would be a good place for me to point out that two thirds of the voters in Noxubee County are black and that 80% of the registered Democrats are black. Thus this case really was about oppressing minority voters.

The Fifth Circuit’s actual opinion, from which the above was bastardized, can be found here. Read it; the actual facts are as unbelievable as my counter-factual. Also read this account by Hans Bader and this excellent article by Hans von Spakovsky, a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission and counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice.

As von Spakovsky reports,

None of these voting abuses in Noxubee County surprised the career lawyers at the Bush administration’s Civil Rights Division when they filed suit against Brown and the Noxubee County Democratic Executive Committee in 2005. Brown’s exploits were legendary. In fact, he had issued an open letter to county voters years before, urging them to “Keep Hope Alive [and] Vote Black in ’95.” Yet the Clinton administration’s Civil Rights Division consistently refused to take action.

This is probably one of the worst cases of intentional voting discrimination that the Justice Department has prosecuted since the 1960s. But the lawsuit was filed only after a vicious internal fight in the Civil Rights Division. Left-wing career lawyers in the Voting Section made it abundantly clear that they didn’t want to use the Voting Rights Act to protect white voters, no matter how egregious the violations. The former Voting Section chief even deleted the recommendation to file suit from the memo sent up to the Bush political appointees running the division. Other partisan career lawyers refused to work on the case. One who went to Noxubee County as an observer admitted to another lawyer that if he had seen the same type of illegal behavior being committed against black voters, he would have been outraged. But he wanted nothing to do with a suit filed on behalf of white voters.

When the Fifth Circuit issued its decision on February 27, there was complete silence from Justice. The department typically issues a press release after any significant litigation victory, and the Civil Rights Division trumpets every success. But not here. The silence from the nation’s leading news outlets was also deafening: Not a word was published about the case by the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any other major publication. Why? Because the offensive conduct at issue did not conveniently track with the Left’s view of race discrimination.
....
If the races had been reversed, does anyone doubt this would have been front-page news? Or that Eric Holder would have been prominently quoted in a Justice Department press release calling attention to this outrageous discrimination? The Department of Justice should be proud of this victory. If Attorney General Holder is serious about talking about race, perhaps he could start with this case.

UPDATE

Todd Zywicki has a short post noting this case on Volokh. The comments, especially those by Hans Bader, are especially interesting.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Inside Higher Ed reports this morning on a new study’s finding

that among high school graduates, “immigrant blacks” — defined as those who immigrated to the United States or their children — are significantly more likely than other black Americans to attend selective colleges. In fact, immigrant black Americans are more likely than white students to attend such colleges.

that previous research has documented that a smaller proportion of black high school graduates than white high school graduates enroll in college. But when students of similar socioeconomic status are compared, the black high school graduates are more likely than their white counterparts to enroll. Given the debate about the immigrant factor in analyzing black enrollments, the authors set out to determine “whether this net black advantage is very African American.”

Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, Bennett and Lutz found that among high school graduates, 75.1 percent of immigrant blacks enrolled in college, a slightly higher percentage than that of whites (72.5 percent) and substantially larger than for native blacks (60.2 percent).

In terms of the college destinations of those who enrolled in college, the rates for immigrant blacks compared to other black students were similar for two-year colleges and non-selective four-year colleges that are not historically black. The biggest gap was at selective colleges, which enroll only 2.4 percent of native black high school graduates but 9.2 percent of immigrant blacks (and 7.3 percent of whites).

To Be Continued...

Continued... O.K., I’m back. Playing tennis, this morning, was fun. Going to the dentist, this afternoon, wasn’t. But now that I’m back and have thought about this during the day, it turns out that I really don’t have anything to say about the “overrepresentation” of immigrant (or offspring of immigrant) blacks among the “underrepresented” blacks on American campuses. Or rather, I don’t have anything new to say, because I’ve already said a bunch in response to similar studies and earlier news here, here, and here.

From the first here, nearly five years ago:

According to a fascinating front page article in today’s New York Times, it has begun to dawn on Lani Guinier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and other preferentialists at Harvard and elsewhere that you’d better be very careful what you subsidize, for you’ll certainly get more of it ... and it may not be exactly what you had in mind.

One of the dirty little secrets of racial preferences, now beginning to leak out, is not only that most of the beneficiaries are middle class or actually rich -- that has been known if not advertised for a good while -- but that most are not even American, or if they are American they are of very recent origin. 8 percent of the undergraduates at Harvard are black (still “underrepresented,” says Guinier), but “the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.” Moreover,

Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania who have been studying the achievement of minority students at 28 selective colleges and universities (including theirs, as well as Yale, Columbia, Duke and the University of California at Berkeley), found that 41 percent of the black students identified themselves as immigrants, as children of immigrants or as mixed race. [Editorial Aside: Has the NYT lost its copy editors? The comma after “... Berkeley)” should not be there. If the Times were not as foolishly opposed to the serial comma as it is to President Bush, it should be after “Duke.”]

For many preferentialists, subsidizing dark foreigners is not at all what they had in mind....

Mary C. Waters, the chairman of the sociology department at Harvard, who has studied West Indian immigrants, says they are initially more successful than many African-Americans for a number of reasons. Since they come from majority-black countries, they are less psychologically handicapped by the stigma of race. In addition, many arrive with higher levels of education and professional experience. And at first, they encounter less discrimination.

So, there we have it. American blacks are so “psychologically handicapped” by the presumably internalized stigma of being black that they must be benevolently handed the crutch of racial preferences. I would like to think that if I had friends like this I would begin to rethink my friendship patterns.

“You need a philosophical discussion about what are the aims of affirmative action,’’ Professor Waters continued. I would be tempted to ask where she has been, but then she’s been at Harvard. Has Harvard really not had such a discussion, or has she simply been unaware of it? In any event, here’s her dramatic philosophical contribution:

If it’s about getting black faces at Harvard, then you’re doing fine. If it’s about making up for 200 to 500 years of slavery in this country and its aftermath, then you’re not doing well. And if it’s about having diversity that includes African-Americans from the South or from inner-city high schools, then you’re not doing well, either.

Well of course. If you give preferences to “black faces,” what you get is “black faces.” Why should anyone be surprised? I would say that’s Harvard for you, but that same surprising surprise seems to be prevalent across preferentialdom.

The nation’s most elite colleges and universities are bolstering their black student populations by enrolling large numbers of immigrants from Africa, the West Indies and Latin America, according to a study published recently in the American Journal of Education.
Immigrants, who make up 13 percent of the nation’s college-age black population, account for more than a quarter of black students at Ivy League and other selective universities, according to the study, produced by Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.

.... The more elite the school, the more black immigrants are enrolled.
....
Black American scholars such as Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier, two Harvard University professors, have said that white educators are skirting long-held missions to resolve historic wrongs against native black Americans by enrolling immigrants who look like them.

Now I’m confused. Have Gates and Guinier finally rejected the “look like” test for preferential treatment? Have they, finally realizing that those “historic wrongs” consisted precisely of distributing burdens and benefits based on color, renounced racial preference and embraced the old civil rights standard of colorblind equal treatment?

If they reject color — the “look like” test — as a basis for preferential treatment, what test do they propose? If color is no longer an acceptable proxy for having suffered “historic wrongs” that preferential admissions are somehow supposed to redress, what is? Should actual harm have to be proven, and if so, how much, how recent? Should Southern blacks receive preferences over Northern blacks on the theory that they’ve suffered more discrimination?

It seems to me that it’s very difficult to defend a regime of racial preference while rejecting color as the basis of determining whom to prefer.

It could be argued, I suppose, that the advantage immigrant blacks have over both native blacks and native whites reflects the fact that college admissions officers really do believe the “diversity” mantra they all now repeat. But that argument would be persuasive only if, say, Asian immigrants were also given such favorable treatment, and, as numerous studies have shown, they aren’t. In fact, they are disproportionately victimized by the preferences given to other minorities.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

President Obama wants to be fair to women and girls (men and boys are presumably on their own.). Toward that end last week he signed an Executive Order creating a new White House Council on Women and Girls. Its mission, an accompanying White House statement said, “will be to provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges confronted by women and girls and to ensure that all Cabinet and Cabinet-level agencies consider how their policies and programs impact women and families,” something that by implication has been heretofore ignored.

The Executive Order repeats the liberal mantra that

On average, American women continue to earn only about 78 cents for every dollar men make, and women are still significantly underrepresented in the science, engineering, and technology fields.

The [Bureau of Labor Statistics] definition of full time work is 35 hours per week, and not all 52 weeks a year. Since more men work 40+ hours and 52 weeks a year, voila, women make less than men do.

In fact, workers who average 44 or more hours per week earn an average of 100% more than workers who average only 40 hours per week. Men in full-time jobs tend to work 4 to 10 more hours more per week than women in full-time jobs.

Warren Farrell was elected to the board of the National Organization for Women three times. Like a lot of men, he protested the fact that men earned a dollar for each 59 cents that women earned for the same work. He wondered why, forty years after the Federal Equal pay Act, hard-working women still got paid less than the guys on the job. His latest book suggests that it is not the result of rampant discrimination, but rather because of career choices women (and men) make.

Based on the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, that women earn 80 cents for every dollar men earn, Farrell figured he could start an all female firm and produce products for 80 cents that would cost an all male firm a dollar to produce. After three years of researching the U.S. Census Bureau statistics he found out that isn't true, why it isn't true, and what women can do to erase the pay gap, if they want to. He published his results in a book titled, Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap-and What Women Can Do About It.

.... He points out that many women make career choices that give them a better balance between work and life. He provides concrete examples of choices men make that earn higher pay than other men (the pay gap between never married and married men is bigger than between men and women) and he tells women how they can actually make more money than their male counterparts if they are prepared to make the same choices.

.... Ample studies document workplace discrimination against men and women because of their weight and against men (and seldom women) based on height. Racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination still exists as well. Farrell's book, however, documents the much greater role that choice plays in maintaining the pay gap between men and women and it provides a roadmap for women who want to close the pay gap with men rather than simply complaining passively about that pay gap.

The order repeats the canard that, “On average, American women continue to earn only about 78 cents for every dollar men make,” suggesting that “women earn less than men for the same work,” when in fact only a penny or two, if even that, of such a disparity can be ascribed to discrimination, as opposed to voluntary, individual decisions about career paths. It promises to “assist[] women-owned businesses to compete internationally”; of course, if in doing so the government excludes similarly situated men-owned businesses, it will be violating the Constitution and, if what’s involved is an “education program or activity,” Title IX as well. Finally, the executive order bemoans that “women are still significantly underrepresented in the science, engineering, and technology fields,” and so the Council will be “working to increase the participation of women in the science, engineering, and technology workforce.” This also suggests the Council will be encouraging discrimination as a response to nondiscrimination; but the good news is that the Council subgroup on the latter issue will be chaired by Larry Summers....

ADDENDUM

I mentioned I could go on about this, but I really don’t want to. If I did, I would point to studies documenting the same conclusions Steve Chapman reaches in this excellent article debunking one of them. After analyzing some of the data he concludes with a couple of telling quotes:

I asked Harvard economist Claudia Goldin if there is sufficient evidence to conclude that women experience systematic pay discrimination. “No,” she replied. There are certainly instances of discrimination, she says, but most of the gap is the result of different choices. Other hard-to-measure factors, Goldin thinks, largely account for the remaining gap -- “probably not all, but most of it.”
....
June O’Neill, an economist at Baruch College and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, has uncovered something that debunks the discrimination thesis. Take out the effects of marriage and child-rearing, and the difference between the genders suddenly vanishes. “For men and women who never marry and never have children, there is no earnings gap,” she said in an interview.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

According to this article in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the “Rochester Police Department is seeking more minorities.” (HatTip to reader Mike Bertolone)

Recruitment Officer Jesse Green said anyone can apply to take the test since city residency is not required when applying. But the department will be taking a closer look at minorities who apply. “We want more diversity,” Green said.

More than half of the city of Rochester’s population consists of African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians, according to 2007 U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Yet, only 26 percent of the more than 600 sworn members of the department are African-American, Hispanic or Asian.

The Rochester Police Department says its goal is to have a police department that is reflective of the community it serves, but it does not have an exact percentage goal for how many minorities the department would like to have.

Police spokesman LaRon Singletary said it is important for the department to have individuals who can understand and address the diverse needs of the community.

If it is called upon to explain, as it should be, perhaps Police spokesman LaRon Singletary can make available the data revealing, say, how many Jewish and Muslim police officers serve in Rochester.

There are roughly 25,000 people living in Jewish households in the Rochester area, and many thousands of muslims, according to the Islamic Center of Rochester, maybe as many as 19,000. In a city whose population was 219,773 according to the 2000 census, or possibly 207,000, or even if only 189,312 in 2005, you’d think that a department truly interested in being “reflective of the community” would have a good number, perhaps even a “critical mass,” of Jewish and Muslim officers.

Does the Rochester Police Department have a properly reflective number of Jews and Muslims? Does it know how many it has? Does it believe that “Hispanics” are fungible, so that a Mexican-American can “reflect” a Cuban or a Puerto Rican? Does it care?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

It all depends on what the meaning of “state” is. You’d think by now, after over two hundred years of experience with those pesky sovereign (or not) units, we’d know what a state is, but as Bush v. Gore and several subsequent controversies have reminded us, we don’t.

Discussing the recent controversy in California over gay marriage in the second post linked above, I began by quoting from an Associated Press article:

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

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

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

is that McCain is, at best, walking a tightrope (attempting “to strike a delicate balance”) and, more likely, simply a hypocrite for claiming to support state rights while opposing “the will of the state’s high court.”

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

As I’m sure you all recall, in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore conservatives on and off the Court were and are still accused of being hypocrites for claiming to be for federalism and states rights while supporting, for purely partisan reasons, the Supreme Court’s running roughshod (so the argument went) over a state’s highest court. That argument was and is fundamentally mistaken, however, because at bottom it rests on the assumption that in a fundamental sense a state is embodied in (and only in) its highest court.

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

I return to the issues discussed above by way of background because we have just been confronted with a new need to parse the meaning of “state.” As Jonathan Adler writes on Volokh today,

This week, Governor Mark Sanford announced that South Carolina will reject a large chunk of the stimulus funds targeted for his state. The state legislature may disagree. If so, this could set up a confrontation over the constitutionality of the stimulus, specifically the provision that purports to enable state legislatures to bypass Governors and accept funds on behalf of their state.

If state law does not give the state legislature the right to bypass the governor, how can Congress just change that law? Where does Congress get the power to change a state constitution? . . .

.... Governor Sanford says he doesn’t want the money except to pay down debt; the state legislature has passed a concurrent resolution (which the Governor cannot veto) saying that it wants the money with all the federal strings attached. The federal stimulus bill says that a concurrent resolution is all that is necessary; this provision was inserted in the bill in order to do an end run around GOP governors like Sanford who might refuse federal funds either because of political grandstanding or because of their lack of a basic understanding of economics.

I think this provision may not be constitutional. Unless you can demonstrate that under South Carolina law, the South Carolina Legislature, acting alone, speaks for the State, it would seem to me that the governor’s consent is necessary.

Spending Clause jurisprudence requires that the state freely consent to conditional grants by the federal government. But not just any state official may give consent. The question of who is authorized to give consent to accept federal funding is a question of South Carolina state law, not federal law. Federal law can offer the states money to enforce federal mandates and even to pass legislation, but what it may not do is decide which state official is authorized to consent to federal grants that bind the state and its operations.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Tom Maguire skewers liberals Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias for “their unsteady commitment to civil liberties.”

“The topic,” Maguire writes,

is the right of Deborah Weinsig, a Citigroup equity analyst who covers retail stocks, to explain to her clients why she thinks that card check will be bad for WalMart.

Mr. Klein:

This is a big deal for two reasons. First, it calls into question the impartiality of Citibank's ratings division. Second, it happened amidst a government-funded bailout of Citibank. This is a moment when you'd expect Citibank to be on its best behavior, both in terms of its political action and its business practices. In fact, they appear to be dispatching their analysts and leveraging their ratings division to oppose a policy that the Obama administration supports.

So much for dissent as the highest form of patriotism. Here is Mr. Yglesias:

But there’s a fairly clear case to be made that firms on the public dole shouldn’t be engaged in lobbying or political activities.

That schism was caused by the ACLU’s intervention in a dispute between the Ford Motor Company and the National Labor Relations Board over limits on the right of Ford, and by extension other employers, to campaign against union organizers. (A nice summary can be found here, especially around pp. 47-50.) “From its inception in 1920,” writes William A. Donohue in The Politics of The American Civil Liberties Union, the work just linked, “the ACLU had defended Communists and Fascists, labor agitators and Klansmen, but never once — not for eighteen years — did it defend the free speech rights of capitalists to oppose unions.”

It was forced to confront that issue head on in 1938, when the National Labor Relations Board found Ford guilty of “unfair labor practices” under the Wagner Act, and one of those “unfair” practices was distributing anti-union literature to employees.

Do employers have the right to free speech? The NLRB did not find the question difficult. It ordered the company to cease and desist from “circulating, distributing or otherwise disseminating amongst its employees statements or propaganda disparaging or criticizing labor organizations, or advising it employees not to join such organizations.”

A bitter fight then ensued. The ACLU’s labor committee initially supported the NLRB.

[ACLU founder and long-time head Roger] Baldwin ... stated that when employers were asking if they too did not enjoy the right of free speech, the [American Civil Liberties] Union said, “No, you have not rights of free speech against unions now because the right to form a union is now a fundamental one under the National Labor Relations Act.” When employers asked, “Well, can’t we even talk?” most of the board members, according to Baldwin, replied, “No, you can’t even talk.”

Eventually the ACLU board compromised. It half-heartedly reaffirmed its commitment to free speech by stating its opposition to “any interference with the expressions of opinion on the part of employers” but placated its pro-labor faction by also announcing its opposition to “threats” such as “We’ll never recognize the United Automobile Workers or any other union,” claiming that such statements violate the civil liberties of workers.

This “civil liberties for our side only” approach to fundamental (or not) rights frequently roils the shallow waters of liberalism. How many of those today, for example, who want to muzzle Citibank employees will propose imposing similar restrictions on other beneficiaries of government largesse, such as ACORN?

Readers of DISCRIMINATIONS, I’m sure, will also be quick to see the similarity — indeed, almost identity — of the belief that only progressives should have unfettered free speech rights and the equally unprincipled position that the right to be treated without regard to race, ethnicity, or gender applies only to some races, ethnicities, and genders — and to them only some of the time (when it works to their alleged benefit; at other times, they have the right to preferential treatment).

ADDENDUM

I have had, or at least taken, the opportunity to mention the repeated appearances of the “civil liberties for our side only mentality” in recent liberal positions on a number of occasions, including the following: here, here, here, here, and here.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

President Obama’s performance in his first months in office has reinforced my belief that it would be a big mistake to elect a boy to do a man’s (or woman’s) job.

Note to the politically correct language police: I am very much aware that “Boy” was long a racist, insulting, demeaning term used, especially in the South, to refer to black men. I do not choose to use that term in reference to President Obama because of his race but because of his callow youthfulness. Not his youthfulness per se — John Kennedy was even younger when he was elected, but he was no boy — but his unseasoned, callow youthfulness.

callow
adj
Lacking adult maturity or experience; immature....

His appetite is matched only by his overweening faith in his own abilities, another conceit of untempered youth, a quality nicely captured today by George Will:

The president’s confidence in his capacities is undermining confidence in his judgment. His way of correcting what he called the Bush administration’s “misplaced priorities” has been to have no priorities. Mature political leaders know that to govern is to choose — to choose what to do and thereby to choose what cannot be done. The administration insists that it really does have a single priority: Everything depends on fixing the economy. But it also says that everything depends on everything: Economic revival requires enactment of the entire liberal wish list of recent decades.

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In an important decision handed down today the Supreme Court, according to the Associated Press, “refuses to expand voting rights.”

The 5-4 decision, with the court's conservatives in the majority, could make it harder for southern Democrats to draw friendly boundaries after the 2010 Census.

The court declined to expand protections of the landmark civil rights law to take in electoral districts where the minority population is less than 50 percent of the total, but strong enough to effectively determine the outcome of elections.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that minority voters don’t qualify for a key protection of the Voting Rights Act unless they comprise a majority of voters in a district....

In a 5-4 decision led by the conservative wing of the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the landmark civil rights legislation doesn’t require states to draw “crossover” districts, which would include enough voters who would vote for minority candidates to allow the minority bloc to elect a minority candidat

The U.S. Supreme Court Monday limited what legislatures can do to satisfy federal civil rights law, which bans dilution of black voter strength.

The high court ruled 5-4 that new legislative districts with fewer than 50 percent black voters could not be a remedy under federal law to correct the dilution of black voting strength.

Well, not no one. Writing on National Review’s The Corner, Roger Clegg, as usual, got it just right.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today that the Voting Rights Act does not require racial gerrymandering to the nth degree — specifically, that it does not, at least, require such gerrymandering whenever doing so might give a minority group “swing” power in a created district if that group makes up less than 50 percent of the district’s population.

This is a very important decision, since otherwise we would see lawsuits to compel gerrymandering not just when doing so could create a new district made up of a majority of minority voters (which is offensive and constitutionally problematic enough), but in practically any situation where there are any minority voters.

But the decision was only 5-4, so for the next four to eight years, its vitality depends on the vitality of those five. Worse, Justice Ginsburg in her dissent explicitly calls on Congress to overturn the majority opinion.

The Discriminations Hypocrisy Award goes to the Republicans. Under Bush I they realized that they could trumpet their fidelity to the Voting Rights Act, and by implication to black voters, by herding black voters into “majority-minority” districts that would be likely to elect black representatives for the first time. And by draining the surrounding districts of black, i.e., Democratic, votes, the policy would have the added benefit -- purely incidental, I’m sure -- of electing more Republicans. The Democrats, unable to oppose procedures that would lead to the election of more blacks, were effectively silenced and co-opted.
It was a brilliant tactical move, sacrificing only principle. Twenty-six such districts were created after the 1990 census, greatly contributing to subsequent Republican gains in the South.

The necessity for “majority-minority” districts was based on the assumption of “bloc voting,” that whites wouldn’t vote for blacks, but it did not take long for that assumption to be proven false. Once it became clear that super-majorities of blacks were not necessary to elect at least a significant number of blacks, the Democrats slowly emerged from the woodwork and began to argue (remember, they’ve never been addicted to consistency) that herding too many of blacks into “majority-minority” districts was racist, smacking of apartheid. At the same time, however, they argued that placing too few blacks in a district was also racist. To the Democrats, “too many” means more than enough to assure the election of a Democrat, and “too few” means not enough. By some cosmic co-incidence, the Democrats implicitly argue, that precise balance is what the law requires. This behavior thus has earned the Democrats the much-deserved Discriminations Award for Brazenness.

Both parties, in short, have proven themselves unprincipled. When the Republicans took over the state government in Virginia recently, for example, they moved quickly to round up as many blacks as possible and, freely admitting they were “taking race into account” as one factor among many (sound familiar?), herded them together in as few districts as possible. Not to be undone on the unprincipled front, the Democrats brought in heavy hitter Ronald Klain, Gore’s top advisor and head lawyer in the Florida recount, who, presumably with a straight face, argued to the Virginia Supreme Court: “We submit that what was going on here was race-conscious districting....” (Washington Post, Sept. 13, 2002, p. B5) The Virginia Supremes (including the new black chief justice) were not amused, and ruled for the Republicans.

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Dahlia Lithwick writes cute, sassy legal analysis for SLATE. As I noted here (and liked the description so well that I used it again here), she is “known more for the sizzle than the steak of her columns.” Although she is reluctantly willing to prick a liberal balloon or two on occasion, what heavy artillery she has is always reliably aimed at conservatives.

A Switch In Time?

Ms. Lithwick has just changed her tune on an important matter, the selection of federal judges, calling to mind another famous switch from that other New Deal — you know, that earlier one led by the pre-Obamian, Franklin Roosevelt. Frustrated by the Supreme Court’s obstreperous objections to much of his New Deal legislation, in February 1937 Roosevelt introduced legislation to add up to six new Supreme Court justices, arguing that too many of the sitting judges and justices were too old and feeble to understand what he was doing. (His plan would have allowed one new federal judge, or Supreme Court justice, for every sitting judge/justice who had served at least 10 years and hadn’t retired or resigned within six months of turning 70.)

“A lower mental or physical vigor leads men to avoid an examination of complicated and changed conditions,” FDR argued. “Little by little, new facts become blurred through old glasses fitted, as it were, for the needs of another generation.” To put it another way, the Court’s conservatives, who were committed to such outdated “horse and buggy” notions as limited constitutional government and the protection of both economic and political liberty, kept getting in the New Deal’s way.

Now for Ms. Lithwick’s timely switch: she has decided, no doubt totally uninfluenced by the presence of a new Democratic president and a Democratic majority in the Senate, that the nomination of federal judges has become far too rancorous. Now it’s time to make nice and be civil. Writing in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, she now expresses sad misgivings over the probability that “we're facing the same old partisan civil war over the makeup of the federal judiciary,” and as a result there will likely be “no end to the vacancy crisis on the federal bench, or to the looming crisis in confidence in the process.”

The stakes are high. The issues that divide us deeply and seem never to get solved -- abortion, guns, gay marriage, the mingling of church and state -- play out in federal courtrooms, turning judges into lightning rods and confirmations into cartoonish battles between “good” and “evil.”

Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that public figures spew the most extraordinary rot about judges, especially Supreme Court justices....

There is nothing to be gained by continuing down this road of mutually assured confirmation nastiness.... More profoundly, the public sense that judges must live above the sharp elbows and kidney punches of the political process cannot survive many more rounds of the judicial wars.

We should stop the escalating smear tactics and the grandstanding.....

And if you suspect that all judges inevitably make such moral judgments, you might seek to uncover from where such moral judgments come. When your inquiry proves fruitless (i.e., you are stonewalled), you may wish to turn to other sources to refute the notion that nothing in a person's history or ideology is reflected in his (or her) moral judgments.

Senate Democrats have had it up to here with ‘John Roberts the lawyer.’ And it’s hard to blame them. John Roberts the lawyer won’t answer any questions. Roberts may be an excellent lawyer, and he may ... prove to be an excellent chief justice, but it’s hard to know what to think of him -- that is, it’s hard to judge him as the nominee for highest judge in the land -- when he evades all the key questions tossed his way. So, is Roberts an ideologue? Roberts says no, and most of us are inclined to believe him. If he really is Scalia-without-the-anger, he’s the most accomplished liar in world history.

rejected the arguments that minority candidates serve as proxies for minority views (whatever those might be), or that they create the appearance of a court that “looks like America.” ... We need another woman on the Supreme Court. And while we’re at it we need a few more women on the Senate judiciary committee.

... in a speech at Wake Forest University, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined her colleague Sandra Day O’Connor and first lady Laura Bush in calling for a second woman on the high court. And while she qualified her words, her message was clear: “I would not like to be the only woman on the court,” said Ginsburg.

I’m not sure it’s worth bending the principle of non-discriminatory equal opportunity (or even the hoary old meritocratic principle of picking the person you think is best for the job regardless or race or sex) so that she can have some female companionship.

If the newly reformed and responsible Ms. Lithwick is now going to warn us of the dangers of “turning judges into lightning rods and confirmations into cartoonish battles between ‘good’ and ‘evil,’” a little embarrassed contrition would have been in order.

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It’s not enough that more of rich people’s income will, thanks to President Yes-We-Can!, be given to the IRS and that the deductions allowed for giving to charity will now be reduced, starving charities of funds they would formerly have received. Now, according to this disturbing article by Naomi Schaefer Riley in the Wall Street Journal (HatTip to InstaPundit), the “diversity” police are demanding that private “public interest” organizations, i.e., charities, philanthropic foundations, etc., toe the new mandatory “diversity” line.

Typical of this effort, Ms. Riley argues, is a new report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy whose “real aim is to push philanthropic organizations into ignoring donor intent and instead giving grants based on political considerations.”

The report, titled “Criteria for Philanthropy at its Best,” advises foundations to “provide at least 50 percent of grant dollars to benefit lower-income communities, communities of color, and other marginalized groups, broadly defined.” The committee looked at 809 of the largest foundations in the country, whose combined three-year grants totaled almost $15 billion, and concluded that the majority of foundations are “eschewing the needs of the most vulnerable in our society” by neglecting “marginalized groups.”

Two years ago, an advocacy group in San Francisco called Greenlining began releasing similar reports. Greenlining’s aim then was to pass legislation in California mandating that foundations report to the public the percentage of their dollars given to “minority-led” organizations and the percentage of their boards and staffs made up by racial and ethnic minorities. The legislation was dropped when several foundations promised to donate money to causes Greenlining favored.

Now Greenlining has put out reports in Florida, Pennsylvania and New York trying to shame foundations into distributing grants differently, as well as pressure them into recruiting more “diverse” board and staff members. The NCRP report picks up on this theme to suggest that foundation boards and staffs should include people with a “diversity of perspectives.”

but whose mission is it? Philanthropists give money to foundations with a particular cause in mind. And promoting “justice in our society” may not have anything to do with it. Indeed, foundations that redirect funding to match the NCRP criteria may have to violate donor intent in order to do so.

The best way for a donor to make sure that his money is given for the purposes he wants is to choose people for his board who agree with him. Whether these people are family members, co-religionists or old college buddies, what is important is that they share his philanthropic vision.

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Carol Swain, the impressive Vanderbilt law professor we first encountered here, points out that our new “Yes We Can!” president “has lofty goals. Under his tutelage,” she wrote recently in the Nashville Tennessean, “we will cure cancer, end our dependence on foreign oil, reform health care and guarantee higher education to everyone who wants it.” But there are some doable things that, according to President Hope ’N Change, we can’t, or at least won’t, do.

I would like to focus on something that the president has not addressed: illegal immigration and its impact on unemployment, job creation and our failing educational system. Until he is willing to acknowledge the obvious, our best efforts are doomed to fail.

Over the next two years, his job-creation plan promises to save or create 3.5 million jobs. Meanwhile, there are an estimated 6 to 7 million illegal immigrants working in low-wage, low-skill positions that could be filled with U.S- born workers with high school educations or less....

Instead of expanding and protecting American jobs, the president allowed Senate Democrats to strip two E-Verify provisions from the stimulus bill. E-Verify is a highly effective voluntary program run by the Department of Homeland Security, which allows employers to check Social Security numbers against a national database. In 2007, it had a 99.6 percent accuracy rate and could yield results in less than three minutes....

Unemployment is only one of many problems. Many of the president's new programs lack any mechanism for verifying that the recipients are in the country legally. Such a failure to tackle the obvious does not bode well for the future.

Our rising health-care costs and educational burdens are all impacted by the presence of large numbers of undocumented and unauthorized residents who make it more difficult for hard-working Americans to enjoy some of the benefits of living in a nation that used to be one of the greatest in the world.

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The more I think about the current conventional liberal wisdom (pardon the oxymoron) regarding racial discrimination, especially as that wisdom defends racial preference policies, the more it strikes me as incoherent peremptory nonsense, as in:

per•emp•to•ry
adjective
(esp. of a person’s manner or actions) insisting on immediate attention or obedience, esp. in a brusquely imperious way : “Just do it!” came the peremptory reply. [From the built-in Macintosh dictionary]

attorneys can dismiss people from jury pools for dressing strangely, for being fat, even for just looking at them funny.

What lawyers can’t do is dismiss potential jurors based on their race, gender or ethnicity. Yet, attorneys and academics say, it happens all the time.

To root out discrimination in the jury room, critics have called for a radical solution: Get rid of peremptory strikes, which typically allow lawyers to dismiss a limited number of jurors, no questions asked.

The dishonesty apparent in these evasions, however, is no worse than the everyday dishonesty of using the idea of “diversity” to justify discrimination against Asians, whites, and others in favor of blacks and Hispanics. It’s simply another example of the hypocrisy required by the determination to make “race-conscious” decisions at every opportunity while pretending not to be engaging in discrimination.

But let’s return to juries, because the brouhaha over peremptory challenges reveals one of the glaring contradictions at the core of CCLW (Current Conventional Liberal Wisdom) on race. Consider the following points:

• Racial profiling is bad ... except when admissions officers do it.

• Presumably the reason racial profiling is bad is that it uses race as a proxy for something else (in this case, likelihood/probability of being a criminal). Same with Arabs in airports.

• But the entire edifice of “diversity” is based on the belief that race is in fact a valid proxy for all sorts of things — experience, values, ideas, “culture,” etc. If blacks weren’t thought to be “different” in important ways, they would not be able to provide the “diversity” to others that is the justification for giving them preferential treatment.

• But if race is a legitimate proxy for “diversity”-providing characteristics, how can liberals object to attorneys being allowed to use it as proxy for one or more of those characteristics and thus peremptorily disqualify black jurors if people with those characteristics are thought to be less likely to be sympathetic with their client?

• Admissions officers say they are not discriminating when they “take race into account” because race is only “one of many factors” they consider.”

• But the police and airport guards almost never racially profile on the basis of race alone. They too take other factors into account (young, Arab, male, one-way ticket, bought with cash; young, black, male, fancy car of a certain type, long dreadlocks, Jamaican accent, driving in unlikely place, etc.)

• Defenders of race preferences implicitly, and often explicitly, argue that if it’s legitimate to give preferences for other reasons -- athletic ability, legacy status, musical talent, etc. -- it should be legitimate to give preferences based on race. Race, in short, shouldn’t be singled out, made a “protected category,” walled off and made off limits to either favorable or unfavorable treatment by the state.

• But if race (like religion and to a degree like gender) isn’t special, isn’t deserving of being a protected category, why not just abolish the anti-discrimination laws, since doing so would undermine the arguments of those who oppose race preferences?

• I could go on, and generally do.
  

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Inside Higher Ed reports today on a UCLA survey that found some some significant changes in faculty views on their role and “the social responsibility of higher education.”

Compared to three years ago, faculty members were more likely to believe it is part of their job to “help students develop personal values” (66.1 percent, an increase of 15.3 percentage points over 2004–05), “enhance students’ self-understanding” (71.8 percent, a 13.4 percentage-point increase), “develop moral character” (70.2 percent, a 13.1 percentage-point increase) and “provide for students’ emotional development” (48.1 percent, a 12.9 percentage-point increase).

• 75.2 percent of professors now say that they work to “enhance students’ knowledge of and appreciation for other racial/ethnic groups.” That is a gain of 17.6 percentage points in the three years since the survey was last done.

• 55.5 percent of professors consider it “very important” or “essential” to “instill in students a commitment to community service,” an increase of 19.1 percentage points since the last survey.

• 71.0 percent believe that colleges should be “actively involved” in solving social problems, up 4.1 percentage points in three years.

While about one third of professors in the survey use multiple-choice exams, the latest survey found gains for those more likely to use short-answer questions (45.5 percent vs. 36.9 percent three years ago) and those more likely to use term/research papers (44.3 percent vs. 34.7 percent).

the proportion of professors who believe it is very important to teach undergraduates to become “agents of social change” is substantially larger than the proportion who believe it is important to teach students the classic works of Western civilization.

According to the survey, 57.8 percent of professors believe it is important to encourage undergraduates to become agents of social change, whereas only 34.7 percent said teaching them the classics is very important....

Sylvia Hurtado, a professor of education at UCLA who directs the research institute, said the gap between those who value teaching Western civilization and those who value teaching students to be social activists reflects a shift in emphasis from the abstract to the practical. “The notion of a liberal education as a set of essential intellectual skills is in transition,” she says. “It’s also about social and personal responsibility, thinking about one’s role in society, and creating change.”

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Jacob Sullum is alarmed by the “collectivism” implicit in President Obama’s recent speech to Congress, quoting the following passage [HatTip to InstaPundit]:

It is our responsibility as lawmakers and educators to make this system work. But it is the responsibility of every citizen to participate in it. And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country—and this country needs and values the talents of every American.

[t]he collectivism implicit in this rhetoric is pretty creepy. Evidently all of us have a duty to optimize our educations so we can maximize our earnings and give our country the full benefit of our talents. “Every American will need to get more than a high school diploma,” Obama decrees. But why stop there? If someone with strong mathematical and spatial reasoning abilities majors in sociology instead of engineering, it’s plain that he will not be giving his country as much value (and tax revenue) as he could. What about the potential doctor who decides to play the violin or the writer who could have been a software developer? Given Obama’s premise, it’s hard to see why such choices should be permitted, especially when the country is so generously subsidizing higher education.

1) If the yield [of admitted minority students who chose not to attend the University of California] has declined over the past 10 years, that is not the result of 209. That is, 209 didn’t keep those who were admitted but chose not to attend from attending. That was their own choice. [Not altogether frivolous aside: If “diversity” is as important as its advocates claim, draft them! Why should they be allowed to choose not to attend a college that needs them so much when K-12 students who want to attend a different school from the one to which they are assigned are often held hostage to “diversity,” i.e., not allowed to transfer because their leaving would deprive the remaining students of the advantage provided by being exposed to them.

2) If our national security really depends on having more women engineers, perhaps women should be drafted and sent to engineering schools.

3) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if “diversity” is important enough to the education of non-minority students at selective institutions to justify sacrificing the right of applicants to be free from racial discrimination, it’s important enough to draft some minority students and require their attendance at those schools. Why should their merely personal and individual interest in their own freedom of choice trump the needs of large numbers of otherwise diversity-deprived students to be exposed to them, especially since the trespassing on the drafted minorities’ freedom of choice would affect only a relatively small number of individuals.

If you agree with the preferentialist assertion that education is impossible without sufficient “diversity,” drafting a few minorities and women to provide such an essential service would seem to be a small price to pay for something on which our society depends.

It seems to me that the underlying principle urged upon us by the Louisville and Seattle school boards and their defenders is that “racial balance” is fundamental. Non-discrimination might be nice, but it’s not essential. What is essential, I believe they claim, is that the need for “racial balance” trumps everything. They often claim ... that they are speaking of “voluntary” programs, but these comments always strike me little more than political fluff, since they also argue that the promotion of “racial balance” is “compelling,” justifying what harm is done to those whose wrong-colored skin keeps them out of the school of their choice....

In order to elucidate the preferentialist principle a bit further, let us step outside bounds of actual, practical controversy and consider this hypothetical scenario:

First, if “racial balance” truly is a compelling national interest, then students in schools — indeed, almost all students in some entire states — are being woefully deprived of the education they need to succeed in our new global marketplace, etc.

With that in mind, what if the governments of, say, Michigan and North Dakota (black population: 0.7%) agreed (“voluntarily,” of course) to pay all the expenses associated with relocating several hundred black families from Michigan (many, but not all, from inner city Detroit) to North Dakota, to provide at least a modicum of “racial balance” there. If there were not enough Michigan volunteers, the National Guard would round up the balance, choosing those whose material conditions would be most improved by the transfer.

Some of those involuntary transferees, to be sure, would complain that they preferred for their children to attend schools in their current neighborhood (“Or at least in the same state!” a few of them might shout). Officials from the Michigan and North Dakota state governments, mayors, and involved school board officials from both states would no doubt think it unfortunate that some people were forced to relocate because of their race, but they took solace from the assurance of the City of Louisville in its recent brief to the Supreme Court that

[t]he small harm done to a few students who do not get their first choice of schools [or states] ... is outweighed by the value of [providing] an integrated school system ... [to an entire state].

Is the difference between what Seattle and Louisville are doing and my hypothetical scenario a difference in kind, or only in degree?

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[NOTE: An ADDENDUM was added to this post March 6 and an UPDATE on May 1]

The Virginia State Bar seems to have been overcome by a raging mania for “diversity.” A quick look through the past year or so of its primary publication, Virginia Lawyer, reveals article after article, report after report, initiative after initiative, dealing with the felt necessity of “diversity.” In addition to the question of whether all this frenetic activity is wise, there is also a question, as we shall see, of whether some of it is even legal.

Joseph Condo, president of the Virginia State Bar in 2000–2001, wrote of “The Diversity Imperative.”

The imperative of diversifying our profession, and the benefits to be derived from doing so, are manifest. To be truly responsive to the public we serve — to be able to empathize with their legal needs, their troubles, and their struggles — our profession, and by extension the justice system, must reflect their diversity.

In a similar vein, the current president of the Virginia State Bar, Manuel Capsalis, rarely misses an opportunity to sing the praises of “diversity,” although his song seems to consist of variations of only one tune with few supporting lyrics. Typical are his comments in the July 2008 Virginia Lawyer upon assuming the presidency:

I BELIEVE WE MUST RENEW our commitment and focus on diversity. For our legal profession and our judiciary to be properly responsive to the needs of society, we must be more reflective of the demographics of society. We are not. Our profession has made tangible improvement in better diversifying our ranks. To suggest that our work is done, however, is wrong.

Statistics from the American Bar Association indicate that the percentage of law students of color in recent years has leveled off, and in many cases, actually decreased. In Virginia, there remains a paucity of attorneys of color in state and local bar leadership. There continues to be a tangible shortage of attorneys capable of offering legal services to many of our fellow citizens who do not yet adequately speak, read, or write English.

Our profession is the guardian of the Rule of Law, the essence of our system of justice and what binds together our civil society. This is a glorious burden, and one which carries with it great responsibility. I believe the preservation of the Rule of Law is inextricably linked to diversity. Simply put, the Rule of Law without diversity is, at best, an incomplete principle, and at worst, a hollow promise to many who live among us.

We cannot deny the need for a vigilant commitment to diversity. The question, it seems to me, is whether we can live up to what Abraham Lincoln described as the “better angels of our nature.” Can we make our profession more responsive to all segments of society? Can we better reach out to our fellow Virginians, especially our youth who feel alienated within our society? How can we expect to be more inclusive when those we should be focusing on feel nothing but exclusion?

But this is not the time for that discussion. What is more pressing here is what Capsalis means by “diversity,” which is not at all clear. It appears at times that he means that Virginia lawyers should simply mirror their clients (or those who should be their clients), but he can’t really mean that since felons and “alienated youth” presumably can’t join the bar.

Returning to this tune in the October 2008 issue, Capsalis repeated his same refrain, asserting “two simple and undeniable facts”:

The first is that for our profession and our judiciary to be truly responsive to the needs of society, we must be more reflective of the demographics of society. The second is that, as a whole, we are not.

Again, I’m not sure that point is so unassailable, in part because I’m not sure what it means. I’ll come back to that question shortly, but whatever “diversity” means Capsalis wants it incorporated into the very structure of the Virginia State Bar. In the next issue of Virginia Lawyer (December 2008) he called diversity “a transcendent ideal” and proposed the following revision of the VSB’s mission statement:

It currently states: “The mission of the Virginia State Bar is to regulate the legal profession of Virginia; to advance the availability and quality of legal services provided to the people of Virginia; and to assist in improving the legal profession and the judicial system.” I submit that the time is upon us to add the following: “and to promote diversity in the administration of justice and the practice of law.”

That we proceed with deliberate speed with the creation of a Diversity Conference, which would become the fourth conference within the bar, along with the Young Lawyers Conference, the Senior Lawyers Conference, and the Conference of Local Bar Associations (CLBA).

.... Its core mission, simply put, would be to seek and to promote diversity of participation and equality of opportunity throughout our profession and judiciary, in the present and in the future.... [T]he pursuit of participation and opportunity, in turn, would be with the goal of promoting a more profound diversity of ideas and action. This would include enhancing access to justice and improving the quality of legal representation....

IT HAS BEEN SAID that we need to precisely define diversity to create such a structure. I disagree.While diversity by necessity must not neglect consideration of race, heritage, and gender, for example, I believe that the term must be allowed to evolve. What was considered in the scope of diversity some twenty–five years ago is not what we may think of it today, and we cannot know what the next generation may believe essential in its definition. That is for a Diversity Conference to have the freedom to pursue. Diversity must be allowed to grow and evolve organically, free from preconceived notions.

President Capsalis’s devotion to “diversity” reminds me of Justice Stewart’s approach to pornography: he can’t define it, but knows it when he sees it. And like the “living Constitution” that I’m sure he presumes allows the race preferences that implementing “diversity” requires, it is free “to evolve” over time as others come up with innovative new views of what it means.

The substantive incoherence at the core of President Capsalis’s “diversity” mania has not gone unnoticed or unchallenged. The February 2009 issue of Virginia Lawyer contains two unusually powerful critical letters. You should read both of them since they are too long for me to quote in their entirety. Actually, there are three letters, but the first one is, unintentionally, humorous. Its author, an enthusiastic supporter of the “diversity” initiatives, identifies himself as

associate commissioner of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, the country’s oldest historically black college conference, with member schools in Virginia (Virginia State University, Virginia Union University, and St. Paul’s College), North Carolina, Maryland and Pennsylvania....

The second letter, by Fairfax County attorney David E. Wilson, begins with a bit of autobiography.

Back in the mid-1990s, I was emerging from college to pursue the career I had before law: journalism. I was working as an intern for the Washington, D.C., bureau of a major paper and loving every minute of it.

The themes of the Virginia State Bar’s Diversity Initiative swirled around me then, as they do now. The college paper I worked for filled its pages with coverage of minority events, staffers fretted over sensitivity, and the field of professional journalism that lay before me was much concerned with “diversity.”

But what that meant for me, as a twenty-something white male, was not immediately clear until I sought my first job. I’d homed in on the Boston Globe [then, as now, owned by the New York Times?], which had a one- or two-year fellowship for young journalists with limited experience. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that whites were prohibited from applying.

I was knocked for a loop by this. Though my familiarity with law was limited to the First Amendment and defamation cases I’d learned in journalism school, it just didn’t strike me as something that could fly in America.

It wasn’t. My complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was affirmed. The program was found to be illegally discriminating against whites. In the meantime, I’d found other employment, but I’ve never forgotten this experience. In fact, it was one of the things that motivated me to go to law school.

Mr. Capsalis blows a polished trumpet indeed, intoning that “what we seek is, distilled to its purest form, an affirmation of the Rule of Law, the very essence of our system of justice. We cannot deny that the preservation of the Rule of Law is inextricably linked to diversity.”

But “diversity,” to me, is a nice way of saying “whites need not apply.” There is simply no escaping the fact that whatever grandiosity its supporters adorn it with, “diversity” typically ends in a racial head count. Whatever one thinks of affirmative action, it is a policy that comes with undeniable costs and victims.

And I must ask, how does Mr. Capsalis’s insistence that Virginia’s legal profession “be more reflective” of its demographics square with the idea that race shouldn’t matter? These notions are at direct odds. In the supposed pursuit of making race irrelevant, institutions practicing affirmative action succeed in making race so relevant that it excludes everything else.

Mr. Stuart is also struck by the fact that President Capsalis, “[h]aving argued vociferously that “diversity” is “inextricably linked to the Rule of Law,” in his several pronouncements and proclamations that there can be no Law without diversity, “then declines to tell the reader what it means.”

.... He answers one letter writer by telling the author that “he fails to understand the fundamental need for diversity,” a term that Mr. Capsalis himself tells us cannot be defined. Thus, Mr. Capsalis casts himself as some sort of Gnostic keeper of the secret truths that mere mortal lawyers can neither understand nor question.

How can we understand the “fundamental need for diversity” when its very proponent cannot tell us what he means by the term? According to Mr. Capasalis, if we must ask the question, we have already missed the point. We must, instead, allow it to “grow and evolve organically, free from preconceived notions” (as opposed, apparently, to the “natural order of events,” which Mr. Capsalis soundly rejects). One day, perhaps, the augurs of his proposed Diversity Conference may let us know what it means; or perhaps not; or perhaps they will later change the meaning and the concurrent obligation.

In any event, the VSB Council must, according to Mr. Capsalis, change the very structure of the bar and the legal system to oblige the bar, its members, and even the judiciary to promote “diversity”—which is something, I know not what. And not only that, but it is urgent and necessary and unquestionable that the bar do so.

Mr. Capsalis simply presses an ideology on the bar. If ever there was a code word involving race or ethnicity, “diversity” is it. Mr. Capsalis offers us little glimpses at it—that it involves “taking into account gender, race, and heritage” in the administration of justice and the practice of law. But he is quick to close the curtain, noting that the “transcendent ideal of diversity” cannot be captured; it must be free to fly to the heavens or wherever it will. How on earth does Mr. Capsalis believe he can persuade thousands of lawyers with this kind of evasiveness and verbal sleight of hand?

Let’s be clear: “diversity,” in Mr. Capsalis’s usage, is nothing but the preferential treatment of persons or groups based on race, sex, or national origin in order to remedy generic past discrimination — a political notion that remains hotly disputed. Mr. Capsalis appears to wrap himself in the mantle of civil rights in demanding indefinable “diversity.” But many would take issue with this presumptive assertion.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously dreamt of a day when his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Mr. Capsalis proposes the opposite: that unless we take account of the color of a person’s skin, we can have no justice. This kind of thinking and action is hardly “transcendent”; in fact, it is both literally and figuratively superficial. It judges the worth of persons based on their outward appearance. It would have Lady Justice recast without her blindfold.

[a]nother problem with the bar’s diversity crusade, striking in light of its societal position as an upholder of the law, is that the legality of many forms of affirmative action are very much in doubt....

I suspect that some of the programs sponsored or endorsed by the VSB are subject to court challenge. Is the Oliver Hill/Samuel Tucker Prelaw Institute offered to poor white students in Appalachian Virginia? Is a legal diversity pipeline program open to young people of all races?

A summer journalism program operated by Virginia Commonwealth University and the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund was challenged after a white student, Emily Smith, was denied entry because of her race. In response to the suit, the operators of the program agreed in 2007 to stop denying admission to whites....

It seems that the leadership of the VSB won’t actually be engaging in much of a debate on this issue. Mr. Capsalis reports that the powers of the bar should now include “the power, obligation and responsibility to promote diversity in our legal profession and judiciary,” and “promote diversity” is now proposed to be emblazoned on the mission statement. How easily dissenters will be brushed aside now!

But this does not mean that the Emily Smiths of the world cease to exist.

If Mr. Capsalis wishes to promote his ideology, then he is free to do so on his own time and his own nickel and with those who voluntarily associate with him. But, the bar is not a voluntary organization. To practice law in Virginia, one must be a member of the Virginia State Bar. Forcing lawyers to associate themselves with this ineffable and “evolving” political ideology is wrong. Forcing lawyers to pay their tithes at the altar of the “transcendent ideal of diversity” is doubly wrong....

Mr. Capsalis’s initiative puts the bar, and by extension the Supreme Court of Virginia, on a collision course with the Constitution of Virginia. Article I, §11 of the constitution provides, in part, that “the right to be free from any governmental discrimination upon the basis of religious conviction, race, color, sex or national origin shall not be abridged....” That is to say, no Virginia government agency may legally discriminate against or in favor of any person on these bases. But, this is precisely what Mr. Capsalis proposes: that the bar and the courts specifically promote individuals and groups solely on the basis of race, color, sex or national origin, to the detriment or exclusion of others on the same basis.

This constitutional provision proves that Mr. Capsalis’s assertion, that “the preservation of the Rule of Law is inextricably linked to diversity” is false. The law specifically prohibits the preferential or detrimental treatment required by “diversity” and, in doing so, allows for a true flourishing of freedom and independence and the enjoyment of life, liberty, and happiness envisioned by the opening words of the Virginia Constitution, without regard to the superficial and irrelevant characteristics of color or race or sex.

It would be bad enough if, say, the County of Fairfax or the Virginia Department of Agriculture applied the discriminatory scheme proposed by Mr. Capsalis and his task force; but for the bar and the Supreme Court to adopt it would be the worst possible case. The Supreme Court is the ultimate guardian of Virginia’s Constitution and laws and the bar is charged with aiding in this duty. For the Court to encourage or even allow an obligatory program of preferential treatment based on race, color, sex, or national origin in the administration of justice or in the practice of law, in specific contravention of the constitution, would bring shame and scandal on it.

What would the public think about an organization of thousands of lawyers and judges who never even bothered to check their own fundamental laws in their haste to promote “diversity”? How would the public think that the courts could avoid applying the same discrimination in cases before them? This initiative invites disaster.

With an ever-growing diverse population, the need for diversity in the legal profession has become even more important. Although a disproportionate number of minorities are affected by the criminal justice system, the membership of the bar is not proportionately comprised of minority members. In 2000, the VSB leadership recognized a need to increase the number of minority attorneys in the bar, and developed the Millennium Diversity Initiative (“MDI”), a private, non-profit organization, to develop programs to that end. In 2001, at the request of the MDI, the YLC [Young Lawyer Conference] implemented the Oliver Hill/Samuel Tucker Institute....

The Institute targets a diverse group of students. We seek to attract minority high school students who would not normally have access to or positive interactions with members of the Virginia State Bar.

Then there’s the Minority Prelaw Conference “for minority college students interested in a legal career.” And finally, at least for now, “[t]his year, the YLC will implement an ABA pipeline program for high school students of color titled [ironically, I think] Choose Law: A Profession for All.”

One reason these programs are legally at risk is that, as Mr. Stuart’s letter indicated, the Virginia State Bar is at least a quasi- (and arguably much more that a quasi-) state agency.

The Virginia State Bar (VSB) was created in 1938 by the General Assembly as an administrative agency of the Supreme Court of Virginia. The creation of the agency unified Virginia's lawyers in a mandatory State Bar.... The mission of the Virginia State Bar, as an administrative agency of the Supreme Court of Virginia, is to regulate the legal profession of Virginia....

ADDENDUM [6 March]

Todd Zywicki links to this post on Volokh, which I appreciate. Some of the comments to his post are priceless, and I encourage you to look at them.

As others have pointed out in those comments, as well as in comment here, the Virginia State Bar is of course not unique in its sanctimonious devotion to “diversity.” Brandon M. Middleton, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation in Sacramento, pointed me to a similar “diversity” mania pervading the Young Lawyer Division of the American Bar Association, as exemplified in the February–March 2009 issue of its publication, The Young Lawyer.

Following is a letter Mr. Middleton sent to the editor, which I reproduce with his permission:

Dear Editor,

I find it odd that The Young Lawyer should spend so much time emphasizing diversity (see February-March 2009 edition), especially considering that our generation grew up being taught the harm and arbitrariness that accompanies discrimination based on skin color, sex, and sexual orientation.

Likewise, the Young Lawyers Division’s Diversity Plan states that “[a]t each orientation of the new bar year, a presenter shall provide diversity training to stress the importance of diversity and its long-term benefit to the ABA YLD. (To ensure attendance, reimbursement shall be tied to attendance of this meeting.)” This requirement is insulting, and it is beyond me how any young attorney would need more education on the topic of diversity. The fact that the Young Lawyers Division must withhold reimbursement in order to ensure attendance demonstrates the needlessness of this training.

One’s skin color, sex, and sexual orientation are not the defining qualities of a young attorney, notwithstanding the Diversity Plan and the February-March 2009 edition of The Young Lawyer. I encourage the Young Lawyers Division to spend less time on these issues (of which we’re already well aware), and more time, for instance, on how young attorneys can foster better relationships with their clients and colleagues.

Sincerely,

Brandon M. Middleton
Attorney
Pacific Legal Foundation
Sacramento, California

UPDATE [1 May 2009]

The April 2009 issue of the Virginia Lawyer published a new round of letters condemning and supporting the VSB’s “diversity” initiative. I’ve discussed them in a separate post, here.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning that Theodore O’Neill, the long-time director of admissions at the University of Chicago, has announced his retirement. “Dubbed the ‘philosopher king’ of admissions by one colleague, Mr. O'Neill is widely known as one of his profession's deepest thinkers.”

Perhaps that’s not saying so much.

His office is best known for the eccentric essay questions it asks students to answer in their applications. A few years ago, one question asked applicants to describe what they would do with a foot-and-a-half-tall jar of mustard. This year, one option is to respond to a quote by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “At present you need to live the question.”

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

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

I wonder, does the University of Chicago afford preferential treatment to all applicants whom its director of admissions assumes “have interesting things to say about American society,” to children of all U.S. Senators and presidential candidates because they no doubt have interesting things to say, only to the children of U.S. Senators and presidential candidates who have at least one black grandparent, or to any mixed race applicants with interesting things to say?

In the old days the University of Chicago was an interesting place, full of intellectual ferment. It may still be, but if it is I suspect it’s more in spite of than because of its director of admission’s concern with “diversity,” at least as expressed here.

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You can read it here:

Is Barack Hussein Obama Chance the Gardener in Being There, or is he the Manchurian Candidate?

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

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

b) Robert Redford, in The Candidate;

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

d) Laurence Harvey, in The Manchurian Candidate.

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The Indiana Statesman of Indiana State University had a remarkable article a few days about a public event featuring Sumita Furlong, currently the executive director of the president's office for diversity and global initiatives at the College of Charleston and a candidate for chief diversity officer at Indiana State.

There are many remarkable aspects of this article, but let me start with what I will select as the The Diversity Quote Of The Week (probably, indeed, of any week): “diversity does not revolve around skin color,” Ms. Furlong told the assembly, “it revolves globally.” Perhaps sensing that diversity revolving globally might not have been altogether clear, she continued:

“It is not about black, white and brown anymore,” she said. “It is about students competing nationally [at the collegiate level].”

She described overcoming diversity as a sun with many rays outstretched toward community. Each of the rays ranges from different socio-economically based standings, everything from race and religion to sexual preference.

The position was created after splitting the Office of Affirmative Action and Diversity into two separate offices, said Teresa Exline, [a?] university spokesperson, [who?] is currently co-chairing the application process.

The new position is designed to help build relationships across the campus.

Exline said it is important for diversity to be tolerated at universities.

Furlong said she applied for the new position to help ISU build the foundation to overcome certain levels of diversity.

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Bill Maxwell, a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, writes today that “On matters of race, blacks are cowards, too.” (HatTip to Drudge)

You should read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

.... On matters of race, blacks are cowards, too. We may be the worst cowards of all. First, we have perfected the crude art of controlling the terms of race talk. Second, we have developed various ways of avoiding and squashing the truth about our complicity in matters of race that are self-destructive....

Seeing themselves as victims of racism, most blacks reject raw race talk from whites. After all, whites are viewed as being the perpetrators of racism. The perpetrator, therefore, should confess, shut up and listen. Because of this dynamic, far too many whites have learned to avoid direct matters of race....

Although black attacks against whites are harsh, our attacks against other blacks who tell the truth are downright vicious. I know from personal experience. You are tar-brushed with the stain of Uncle Tomism, and it sticks to you forever.

You are ostracized and given the silent treatment. Your mistake is not that you told the truth but that you told the truth in public, thereby giving the enemy valuable ammunition. (Here, think of comedian Bill Cosby, who is castigated for saying that too many low-income blacks have not held up their end of the nation’s civil rights gains.) In short, you committed the unforgivable sin of “airing dirty laundry.”

Your achievements and good deeds are never recognized. You simply do not exist, unless you put yourself in people’s faces to have your say.

On matters of race, most blacks run away from introspection, and we do not like to hear others publicly remind us of our responsibilities to ourselves.... [Shades of Shelby Steele].

Maxwell’s forthright view, in January 2008, was that

[i]f Obama becomes the next president, he will do so primarily because of white support, especially the support of whites eager to prove that they are fair....

Many whites see Obama, like Colin Powell before him, as a black who has transcended race. He is the rare black politician who is not seen as a “black leader,” a designation of contempt reserved for the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan.

Obama is what many blacks, along with some whites, pejoratively refer to as “an honorary white man,” one who can soothe white people. In the parlance of race studies, he is a “good black” rather than a “bad black.”

Commenting, forthrightly I hope, on Maxwell’s forthright comments, I wrote (here) of my hope that

Perhaps some day Maxwell will grace us with “A Black Manifesto,” explicating the content and contours of ideological blackness. In the meantime it would be quite helpful if he, or someone of like mind, could provide a short summary or precis to university admissions officers, a checklist or something similar to prevent those architects of “diversity” from extending any preferences to the “good blacks” or “honorary whites” in their applicant pool since they would obviously provide no real “diversity” to the actual whites.

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