Diversity’s New Proxy (Or, Proxy By Proxy)

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.

Veteran DISCRIMINATIONS readers will not be surprised by a California court’s ruling that assigning students to schools based on the racial composition of their four to eight block neighborhoods does not violate a state constitutional provision that prohibits the state from, among other things, assigning students based on their race, having seen it coming here and here. Still, jokes can be funny even when you can anticipate the punch line.

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.

But sober analysis, persuasive as it is, probably gives this opinion too much respect. Clegg’s more devastating point is his repetition of something he once heard from Sharon Browne, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation (which brought the suit):

… 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.

In California, at least temporarily, neighborhoods are now a proxy for a proxy for “diversity.”

Say What? (1)

  1. Svigor March 18, 2009 at 7:04 pm | | Reply

    So I can refuse to hire the same people, based on the same criteria, and it won’t be racism, right?

Say What?