Discriminations

I have written before, such as here, that

just as Republicans waved the “bloody shirt” for a generation after the Civil War in an attempt to keep the Democrats branded as the party of slaveholders and rebellion, it is a staple of liberal and Democratic argument today to refer almost continuously to the Nixon/Reagan “Southern Strategy” in an attempt to reinforce black, liberal, and independent rejection of current Republicans.

For a generation after the Civil War northern Republicans “waved the bloody shirt” to remind voters that the Democrats were all disloyal sympathizers with the South. The modern equivalent is for northern liberals, now Democrats, to accuse all Republicans of being sympathizers with the South, and thus racist. A perfect example is this column, “Bigotry Beneath the Fog,” by Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post.

It begins:

Once in a while the fog machine that’s kept on “high” around here to obscure everyone’s real intentions breaks down. There’s always a mad rush to crank it up again, but for the briefest moment we can see our elected representatives for what they really are, not what they pretend to be. Wednesday we had one of those rare high-definition moments, when the House Republican caucus defied its leaders and refused to back renewal of the Voting Rights Act.

That tells you about all you need to know, doesn't it?

If you’re Eugene Robinson, or one of the many who see a racist every time they look at a conservative, the recent detour on the road to re-authorizing parts of the Voting Rights Act didn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know.

If, on the other hand, you’re one of those, like me, who believes that the nature and role of race in our politics is fundamentally different in 2006 from what it was in 1965, when the VRA was passed, you are willing to look beneath the racial fog that Robinson et. al. generate and consider whether the “temporary” provisions of the VRA are still needed.

why, in 2006, are Texas and Arizona covered, while New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Arkansas are not? Why some counties in Florida and North Carolina, and not others? Why some boroughs in New York City, and not others? Why Alaska?

If the covered jurisdictions looked in 1965 like they look now, no one then would have given any consideration to a bill like Section 5. And yet many in Congress appear to think they can renew Section 5 in perpetuity.

A perfect example of this (so perfect you may think I’m making it up, but I’m not) example of this new “bloody shirt” waving can be found in these comments yesterday, on an election law mailing list, by University of Michigan law professor Ellen Katz, a prominent Section 5 supporter:

The Justices today repeatedly asked for comparative data showing that covered jurisdictions are worse than non-covered ones. They seemed troubled by their sense that minority voters fare no better in Ohio than in Texas.

The comparison they seek, however, is problematic. It’s like comparing a patient being treated with lipitor for high cholesterol with a healthy person. The two might look the same, but that doesn’t mean they are. The relevant question is what happens when you take the patient off the drug.

And what of the conservative Justices’ concern that nowadays the “covered” jurisdictions are no worse than the uncovered ones, “that minority voters fare no better in Ohio than in Texas”? Katz has a breathtakingly audacious response: the fact that they are now all about the same actually proves the continuing need for Section 5 pre-clearance! Really.

For Katz et. al., to repeat, “[t]he relevant question is what happens when you take the patient off the drug.”

Here, the Chief Justice seemed to be convinced that the answer is nothing. Hence his elephant whistle example. I don’t see any elephants now, and I don’t really think I’m going to see any when I stop blowing this whistle. Maybe that’s right. But then again, we had a lot of elephants around when the statute was enacted, and there’s certainly evidence they are in the vicinity. The question is whether they are coming back.

If Section 5 is truly superfluous, minority voters should confront fewer obstacles to political participation in places where additional federal safeguards protect minority interests than in places where these safeguards do not operate. That is, if all else is equal, things should be easier for minority voters in covered jurisdictions than non-covered ones.

If you listen to the liberals, it’ll be carrots now and carrots forever.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED, twice]
Loyala Law School Professor Rick Hasen, who writes the Election Law Blog and is a highly regarded authority on, you guessed it, election law, has an article on SLATE today expressing his concern, even fear, that the Supreme Court may invalidate a key section of the Voting Rights Law.

Tomorrow, he writes,

the last day of the court's term, the justices will hear a case from an obscure utility district in Texas, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder. (The shorthand is NAMUDNO....) At stake is not only the constitutionality of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act but, potentially, the constitutionality of a host of other civil rights laws. These include the requirement for the creation of majority-minority districts in cities and states with large minority populations and the guarantee of language assistance to non-English-speaking voters in jurisdictions with a fair number of them. The NAMUDNO ruling will come just before the next round of redistricting and could have a major effect on who wins in all kinds of races, from obscure utility districts to state houses to Congress.

What’s especially worrying about NAMUDNO is that the case does not provide the court with an easy incremental way out: If a majority of the justices want to side with the challengers to the Voting Rights Act, there’s not much they can do short of holding the act as broadly unconstitutional.

In Construing Liberal Construing, Or: Construe You, for example, I discussed his explanation of why the apparently clear language in New Jersey election law specifying that a party can replace one candidate with another “not later than the 51st day before the general election” didn’t really mean “not later than the 51st day before the general election.”

In Liberals vs. Conservatives: It's A Matter Of Interpretation, we saw Prof. Hasen creatively construe Article Two, Section One, Clause Two of the U.S. Constitution, which says in part that “[e]ach State shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors....” As I wrote in that 2004 post,

I find it very curious, ... and perhaps revealing, that Prof. Hasen’s rendition of this Article II requirement is that it “allows each state legislature to set the rules under which electors are chosen and allocated” (emphasis added). Allows? This is rather like saying that Article I allows Congress to exercise legislative powers, and allows it to consist of a Senate and House.

Under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has not been friendly to voting rights or reasonable campaign finance laws.

First, the “new federalism” rulings of the Rehnquist Court, beginning in 1997 when it struck down the Violence Against Women Act, has held, Hasen writes, “that when Congress passes laws regulating unconstitutional conduct by the states, it has to come up with specific evidence that the states are violating the Constitution.” One can readily see why that unbearably high standard — imagine: requiring that Congress have evidence that states are violating the Constitution before it is allowed to to regulate their unconstitutional conduct! — might prove objectionable to liberals who assume as an article of faith that states are doing today what they did in 1965. As Hasen writes,

The problem with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is that it has been so successful that there's little ongoing evidence that states are engaging in unconstitutional discrimination. New forms of race-based barriers to voting are more subtle....

And then there’s the problem of Chief Justice Roberts himself, who remarked in a 2006 Texas redistricting case that it is “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race” and, as Hasen laments, “Justices Alito, Thomas, and Scalia have all lined up on the same side.”

But wait. It gets worse! Not only is there an apparently solid conservative block on the Court that finds fault with “divvying us up by race” (what a sad comment on liberalism that this is now a conservative hallmark!), but even the liberals may be beginning to suspect that times have changed. “More surprisingly, perhaps,” Hasen mourns,

even Justices Stevens and Souter may not vote to uphold Section 5. In a Section 5 case the court decided last year, the two issued an opinion stating that “it may well be true that today [Section 5] is maintaining strict federal controls that are not as neces­sary or appropriate as they once were.”

.... As the law's challengers point out, the formula describing which jurisdictions are covered by the law is now based on 40-year-old data. And, of course, the election of the first African-American president is being touted by Section 5 opponents as evidence that race is no longer a problem in American elections. (To the contrary, a group of political scientists has shown that whites in jurisdictions covered by the Voting Rights Act were less likely to support Obama last November than whites elsewhere.)....

Those political scientists may believe that they have “shown” continuing racism in need of federal intrusion by pointing to evidence “that whites in jurisdictions covered by the Voting Rights Act were less likely to support Obama last November than whites elsewhere,” but it may be that those whites voted against Obama precisely because they object to the federal intrusion that they predicted, accurately, would follow in the wake of his election. The Voting Rights Act, in short, may have become the problem it was meant to solve.

UPDATE [29 April]

I love irony, almost as much as I detest hypocrisy, and enjoy pointing them both out. On a couple of occasions (Partisan Hypocrisy and Partisan GKerrymandering And Racial Hypocrisy) I have already discussed the hypocrisy, of both parties, regarding the Voting Rights Act, especially regarding the “majority minority” districts that are thought to be required by Section 5. So this post will address a large dose of irony at the core of the debate that raged in the Supreme Court this morning over the fate of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was intended to eradicate racial discrimination in voting. “States rights” had long provided a protective political thicket in which discriminatory acts by state and local officials could flourish, uninterrupted by federal intervention. To protect voting rights some the worst and most oppressive growths of that political thicket had to be chopped down, and they were — by the “pre-clearance” provisions of Section 5. In order to make any changes in voting procedures or arrangements the 16 “covered” jurisdictions — primarily in the South, but a few counties outside as well — had to secure permission from the Justice Department.

By all accounts the Voting Rights Act worked. Blacks in the South vote in large numbers, and they are well-represented in state legislatures, county commissions, and mayors’ offices across the South today. But the original 16 “covered” jurisdictions are still covered, still must seek permission for any electoral changes, even though jurisdictions with now much worse records of enforcing voting rights are free to make changes without going to Washington for permission.

As David Savage writes in his report of the oral argument in the Los Angeles Times today,

[t]he fate of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act looked to be in doubt Wednesday as Supreme Court justices questioned whether the Southern states still need special supervision to prevent them from discriminating against black voters.

“Are Southerners more likely to discriminate than Northerners?” asked a skeptical Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

Is the “sovereignty of Georgia” entitled to less respect than “the sovereign dignity of Ohio? . . . Does the United States take that position today?” asked Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, pressing a lawyer for the Justice Department who was defending the Voting Rights Act.

The comments and questions during an hourlong argument suggested a majority of the justices are prepared to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This provision requires many Southern states, counties and school districts to get approval from the Justice Department before making changes in their election rules. These rules range from the location of polling places to the makeup of districts in state legislatures....

The provision also applies to a few counties in Northern California, New York and elsewhere that have a high percentage of residents who do not speak English.

The question before the Supreme Court was whether this special Southern-only “pre-clearance” provision was still needed. “Why didn’t [Congress] extend Section 5 to the entire country?” asked Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Like Roberts and Kennedy, he voiced doubt over whether Congress had sufficient reason in 2006 for singling out the South for special supervision for another 25 years. In the past, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas also have voiced skepticism about the reach of this provision....

Roberts noted that Massachusetts had a lower rate of registering Latino voters than Texas. “Why didn’t Congress extend the act to Massachusetts?” he asked.

does something unique in American history. It singles out some states and prohibits them from making any change in their voting systems without federal approval. So if North Carolina (which is covered) wants to move up its presidential primary, it can’t without federal approval. If Arkansas (which is not covered) wants to do the same, it can. Or if Alabama (covered) wants to shift from elected judges to appointed judges, it must get federal approval. If Ohio (not covered) wants to the same, it can.

UPDATE II [29 April]

The transcript of the oral argument can be found here.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

The New York Times/CBS Poll released today found that

Barack Obama’s presidency seems to be altering the public perception of race relations in the United States. Two-thirds of Americans now say race relations are generally good and the percentage of blacks who say so has doubled since last July....

70% of the black respondents thought things are generally going in the right direction, compared to only 34% of the whites. [This sentence has been rewritten to correct my original misstatement — jsr]

That response suggests what a number of the others questions seem to confirm, that blacks are much happier than whites about everything now that Obama is president. For example, blacks approve of the way Congress is doing its job by 44% to 41% while whites disapprove, 55% to 28%. Regarding “the condition of the national economy these days” (Question 12), 27% of blacks thought it very good or fairly good, compared to 10% of whites. As for whether “the economy is getting better, getting worse, or staying about the same” (Question 13), 41% of blacks thought it getting better, 19% getting worse. Only 24% of whites, by contrast, thought the economy is getting better, while 25% thought it getting worse.

Maybe “the public perception of race relations” has altered, in the rosy view of the Times/CBS pollsters, but the racial divide on major issues doesn’t seem to have been reduced at all.

Finally, I found it remarkable that in well over a hundred questions on issues of the day, the Times/CBS pollsters neglected to ask a single question about attitudes toward racial preferences. Maybe their editors thought that, on that score, no news was good news.

UPDATE [29 April]

Byron York notices the same black-white divide in the New York Times/CBS poll. Since blacks make up about 13% of American society and whites about 80%, York notes, this divide makes some of Obama’s policies appear more popular with most Americans than they in fact are.

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Michèle Lamont is a professor of just about everything at Harvard (Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies, and Senior Adviser on Faculty Development and Diversity, Faculty of Arts and Sciences). According to her Dept. of Sociology website,

Lamont’s scholarly interests center on shared concepts of worth and their impact on hierarchies in a number of social domains. She has written on how culture contributes to ethno-racial and class inequality and on the evaluation of excellence in higher education. Recent areas of interest include racism and anti-racism (how discriminated people -including immigrants- respond to exclusion and understand the relationship between themselves and others), the sociology of the social sciences, and the impact of self-identity on health.

She has done extensive research on racial and class boundaries in France and the United States. She has published widely in the fields of inequality, culture, race, immigration, knowledge, theory, qualitative methods, and comparative sociology. Her publications include The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration...; The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries; and Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality....

“Diversity and excellence are often pitted against one another in American higher education,” Prof. Lamont writes.

Those who oppose taking diversity into consideration in university admission or other forms of academic selection argue that some “get in” because of their skin color or gender while others “get in” because of their achievement and analytical skills. A detailed analysis of academic evaluation shows that these considerations are most often not alternatives, but additives.

Prof. Lamont’s primary claim — that “diversity” and “excellence” are “additives,” not “alternatives” — is similarly unpersuasive. To support it she turns to that well-known authority on just about everything, Prof. Lamont. “Indeed,” she writes,

in How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Evaluation (Harvard University Press 2009), I show that many contenders for prestigious fellowships are selected because of a combination of excellence and diversity considerations.

How Professors Think opens the black box of peer review to learn how academics go about selecting candidates for prestigious fellowships. I conducted more than eighty interviews with individuals charged with distributing various fellowships to graduate students and other academics. I found that very good but not perfect proposals are pushed above the proverbial line because of diversity consideration and that diversity is often a tie-breaker between two somewhat faulty proposals. Taking diversity into consideration facilitates the decision-making process and helps “move things along.” Of course, this is not to say that awardees who benefit from diversity considerations are less meritorious--in a varying proportion, some of them are among the “top awardees,” i.e., the first recipients to be chosen; similarly, the “maybe” pile invariably includes many applicants who do and do not benefit from diversity considerations. Combining excellence and various kinds of diversity criteria is valued as an intrinsic good that contributes to the overall quality of the research environment. A white history professor says, “I do believe in having a mix, as much of a mix as possible, as much diversity of whatever kind. And that includes diversity of background or training or interest or maybe even age or personality.”

Of course, if you define “[c]ombining excellence and varying kinds of diversity” as “an intrinsic good,” then you’ve solved the problem of any possible conflict by definition, no further analysis needed, especially since she minimizes race and ethnicity by implying that everybody is “diverse” in one way or another. And it of course adds nothing to any debate worth having to quote “a white history professor” (what difference does it make that he or she is white?) favoring “as much of a mix as possible, as much diversity of whatever kind.” So what? Can Prof. Lamont cite any critic of race preference “diversity” who objects to “diversity of background or training or interest or maybe even age or personality?” It is racial discrimination we oppose, not discrimination “of whatever kind.”

The fact that “some” applicants who are “diverse” (a “varying proportion,” Prof. Lamont says) will also be among the top, i.e., who would “get in” even without their “diversity,” does not refute the obvious fact that their “diversity” makes winners out of some applicants who otherwise would not have won, and its inevitable corollary: that some losers would have been winners if they had been “diverse.” As Prof. Lamont acknowledges, her own research confirmed “that very good but not perfect proposals are pushed above the proverbial line because of diversity consideration....”

To say that diversity and excellence are “additives,” in short, is to say almost nothing. It is true that they are not at war with each other in every single applicant, but neither are they always, even usually, allies. Most of the time, if you have more of one you have less of the other.

Maybe that makes them “subtractives.”

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

Jerry Brown (remember him?) — once California governor, now California Attorney General, and possible future California governor — says in a letter to the California Supreme Court that the prohibition against preferential treatment based on race or gender that was added to the California Constitution by Prop. 209 is unconstitutional.

To the extent that the prohibitions against race- and gender-based discrimination in article I, section 31 of the California Constitution (hereafter referred to as section 31) are aligned with the prohibitions enforced under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, section 31 is constitutional. However, to the extent that section 31 is interpreted more broadly to bar race- or gender-conscious programs that would be permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment, it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the federal Constitution....

Closer to home, it also seems to be identical to one even the Ninth Circuit all but laughed out of court in rejecting a challenge to Prop. 209 right after it passed. As the opinion by Judge O'Scannlain put it:

.... Proposition 209 amends the California Constitution simply to prohibit state discrimination against or preferential treatment to any person on account of race or gender. Plaintiffs charge that this ban on unequal treatment denies members of certain races and one gender equal protection of the laws. If merely stating this alleged equal protection violation does not suffice to refute it, the central tenet of the Equal Protection Clause teeters on the brink of incoherence.

UPDATE

The Chronicle of Higher Education takes note of Attorney General’s Brown’s letter today, here. If you have access to the Chronicle, the comments to this note are worth reading.

UPDATE II [24 April]

The Los Angeles Times has a good article on this issue today. It quotes, to good effect, Sharon Browne, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation who is challenging a San Francisco law giving preferences to women and minorities. (It is that case that prompted the Calif. Supreme Court’s request for an opinion on Prop. 209 from Attorney General Brown.)

“It would be incredibly strange for the California Supreme Court, 13 years after Prop. 209 was adopted, to say at this time it is unconstitutional,” said Browne, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative public interest law firm.

The state high court unanimously ruled in 2000 that Proposition 209 prohibited a San Jose outreach program. That ruling cited a 1997 decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that found Proposition 209 constitutional.

UPDATE III [9 May]

I have discussed Sharon Browne’s reply (in a letter brief from the Pacific Legal Foundation) to Jerry Brown’s argument in a separate post, The Moonbeamish Argument Of Calif. AG Jerry Brown.

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This morning Inside Higher Ed notes the publication of yet another report calling for more “diversity” in higher education, this one from the Council of Graduate Schools.

“Our nation is becoming increasingly diverse, yet Hispanic and African American students are highly underrepresented in graduate schools, particularly in fields such as science and engineering, where each group makes up less than 10 percent of graduate enrollment and approximately 5 percent of new Ph.D.’s,” the report says. “While women are the fastest-growing group in graduate education, they too remain underrepresented in some key fields. These demographic trends present long-term challenges that can be overcome only by a national commitment to developing all our country’s talent.”

Thus it seems to me that this plea for more “diversity,” based as always on the assertion that we are more diverse than we used to be, is not only not about actual diversity (again, as always); it’s not even fundamentally about pigmentary “diversity.” All it is is a plea (once again, as usual) for proportional representation.

“The face of higher education does not mirror the face of our nation,” the first sentence of the Executive Summary of the Council of Graduate schools report ponderously intones. Even though the proportion of students from “underrepresented groups” has been increasing, the Executive Summary continues, “not enough students from underrepresented groups get their degrees, and not enough go on to graduate school.”

“Enough” for what? Why should “the face of higher education ... mirror our society”? If it should, shouldn’t the faces of accountants, middle managers, automobile workers, tobacco farmers, etc., etc. also “mirror” our society? Again, just asking.

“Focusing on the increasingly diverse domestic talent pool must be a national priority,” the Executive Summary commands.

Diversity and inclusiveness are about more than gender and race; these concepts include socio-economic status, age, people with disabilities, international students, immigrants, and those who are the first generation in their family to pursue higher education.

Finally, no matter whether or not “the increasingly diverse domestic talent pool” really is becoming “increasingly diverse,” there are still only a finite (not infinite) number of “diverse” people in that talent pool. If more of them are lured into graduate schools, wouldn’t there be fewer of them available to become engineers and insurance salesman and, even, lawyers? Wouldn’t we then have to endure more reports like this one lamenting that the “faces” of those professions do not “mirror” our society? Just asking.

Rather than continue to have all our career fields and professions engaged in constant strife, each trying both inefficiently and expensively to outbid the others for “diverse” talent, why shouldn’t the Obama administration simply step in, as it’s so fond of doing when the market doesn’t work to its satisfaction, to regulate our unruly racial and ethnic market? Michelle, or someone equally diverse and talented, could then be appointed “Diversity Czar” and given the authority to assign “diverse” students to fields where they are needed, much as local school boards like to assign students by race to achieve the most appealing racial mix (or did until that mean right-wing Supreme Court told them they had to stop). Just asking.

By the way, if you think you’ve heard this Draft ‘Em! argument before, you’re right.

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I thought I was through writing about Ricci (see here, here, and here). After all, the Supremes just heard the argument, and nothing more will happen until the case is decided. But then I just saw Editorial: Racism in the firehouse in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and it deserves comment.

First, Ricci has nothing to do with “racism in the firehouse.” If there is racism anywhere in the record of this case, it is in the city administration of New Haven, which, depending on your point of view, either a) selected a test to be used to determine promotions in the fire department that, because it was “cognitive” or required too much “memorization” or something, no blacks could pass; or b) decided to throw out the results of its test because it disapproved of the skin colors of those who passed.

The editorial begins with the following egregiously offensive and wrongheaded statement:

A reverse-discrimination case involving Connecticut firefighters being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court today may show just how out of sync this court is with the nation's first African American president.

And since when is it the function of the Supreme Court to make sure that it remains in sync with the president, even a black one? Funny, but I don’t recall the Inquirer complaining that the recent Supreme Court that approved limited race preferences in Grutter was “out of sync” with the nation’s white president.

Next, the editorial takes a swing at Chief Justice Roberts:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts calls affirmative action the “sordid business” of “divvying us up by race.” He prefers to declare the playing field level for everyone, while blithely turning a blind eye to vestiges of discrimination that perpetuate inequality.

It is not necessary for Chief Justice Roberts, or anyone, to believe that racial discrimination against blacks no longer exists in order to believe that racial discrimination against whites, Asians, Hispanics, etc., is not justified. All that it is necessary to believe is something the editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer obviously do not, which is that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong. But to be fair, the Inquirer doesn’t actually accuse Chief Justice Roberts of “turning a blind eye” to discrimination but only to the “vestiges” of discrimination, though neither it nor the City of New Haven pointed out any of those “vestiges” in the test at issue or explained how any such “vestiges” are responsible for the fact that the black test takers did not do as well as the whites and Hispanics.

Finally, the editorial takes issue with an argument in an amicus brief in support of the firefighters filed by the Philadelphia chapter of the Concerned American Firefighters Association.

The CAFFA brief agrees that there might be a compelling reason for diversity in schools, and even in a police department, which needs “a workforce that appears unbiased” to be “respected by the community it serves.” But CAFFA says the “race of the firefighter is an utter irrelevance.”

Such an attitude suggests firefighters are merely autobots, who mechanically put out fires without regard to the humanity saved, or lost, in the process. It’s an attitude that disregards the fact that little boys and girls who see firefighters that look like them want to grow up to be one. It’s an attitude that disregards that for decades, that dream was denied to blacks, and still remains difficult.

Yes, but then so is the “role model” argument. If the fact (or rather, allegation) that “little girls and boys” need to see firefighters “who look like them” provides a sufficient justification to discriminate against some firemen who don’t “look like them,” why does it not also provide a compelling justification to prohibit that discrimination? That is, why does the look-like principle not also prevent other “little boys and girls” from being taught what the editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer would like to teach them — that when they grow up they can legally be denied promotions they’ve earned because people in authority prefer those who don’t look like them?

Wouldn’t we have a much better country if we taught all the “little boys and girls” that their fate depends on their own efforts, character, and behavior, not the color of their skin? If the Supreme Court wants to teach that lesson, as it should, Mr. Ricci and his fellow plaintiffs will win.

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Today the Supremes heard oral argument in Ricci v. DeStefano, a case brought by 17 white and 1 Hispanic New Haven firefighters whose successful promotion exams were tossed out for racial reasons that I discussed earlier here and here. In their excellent summary and preview of the case in the Wall Street Journal this morning, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom present the core question clearly:

The issue in Ricci was simply stated by Judge José Cabranes, dissenting from a cursory, unenlightening opinion by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. “At its core,” he wrote, “this case presents a straight-forward question: May a municipal employer disregard the results of a qualifying examination, which was carefully constructed to ensure race-neutrality, on the ground that the results of that examination yielded too many qualified applicants of one race and not enough of another?”

The Times, straining (unsuccessfully) for even-handedness, does give a mild slap of the wrist to the City of New Haven:

With all of the research that has been done on employment testing, it should have had a carefully constructed system for evaluating potential supervisors that could withstand a legal challenge.

So shouldn’t there be some standard that there has to be a significant, a strong showing after the test has been taken that it’s deficient? Before it can be set aside?

Chief Justice John Roberts wondered whether the city could continue throwing out tests when it doesn't like the results. “They get do-overs until it comes out right?” Roberts said.

the city found itself in a “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation.” If the city had used the test results, black fighters could sue and say they were excluded because of a discriminatory test. When the city scrapped the results, they were sued by the white firefighters. “Why not give the city an opportunity, in a good faith, to start again?”

In any event, it’s clear that the city, “for political reasons” noted by the trial judge (discussed here), cared more about avoiding a suit by blacks than by whites, something that bothered Chief Justice Roberts, as noted in the Los Angeles Times article linked above:

Roberts objected to the city’s claim that it had to give greater weight to the test’s impact on blacks.

“Isn’t that kind of a blank check to discriminate” against the white firefighters, he asked. “You don’t care about whether Jones or Smith gets a promotion. All you care about is race.”

Justice Stephen Breyer sought to liken New Haven’s action to Justice Kennedy’s “controlling” concurrence in the [Louisville and Seattle] schools case, where he left open the option for local districts to put campuses in areas likely to draw a mixed student body. Although race conscious, such decisions did not disadvantage any specific individuals, so they were permissible, Justice Kennedy wrote at the time.

Frank Ricci, the lead plaintiff, had trusted a test of merit. He had been a firefighter for 11 years and was determined to become a lieutenant. All applicants were given three months to prepare for the exam and provided with a detailed reading list. Mr. Ricci is dyslexic, so he paid an acquaintance more than $1,000 to read textbooks onto audiotapes, made flashcards, took practice tests, worked with a study group and participated in mock interviews. He gave up a second job in order to study long hours. His work paid off: He came in sixth among the 77 candidates who took the exam.

Finally, let me mention two other comments from the oral argument, one that strikes me as almost pathetic and one that is almost humorous. For almost pathos, here is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said that

historically, fire departments have been the preserve of white men, something they maintained through discrimination. She likened the city's decision to junk the test for another exam to changes made by public-safety departments in physical-strength requirements to accommodate women applicants.

And now, to end on an (almost) humorous note, let’s turn to Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler, supporting New Haven, who, as quoted in the same Wall Street Journal article, apparently said that “the Obama administration would have the same position even if the city had rejected the test results after only minority applicants had qualified for promotion.”

Sure. Right. You bet. With that comment Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler deserves at least a guest appearance, and perhaps a permanent spot, on Saturday Night Live, or a new assignment as full-time columnist for The Onion.

UPDATE

A transcript of the oral argument can be found here, and it’s worth reading. (HatTip to Stephan Thernstrom)

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Jay Cost gave an impressive talk on (you guessed it) “Race, Realignment, and the Election of 1948,” and posted it on Real Clear Politics. Like everything Cost does on RCP, this piece is quite good, and I encourage you to read it. I think he nails the significance of 1948 for the modern Democratic Party quite well.

I do, however, have one quibble. After quoting the following Truman statement in his 1948 State of the Union Address —

The United States has always had a deep concern for human rights. Religious freedom, free speech, and freedom of thought are cherished realities in our land. Any denial of human rights is a denial of the basic beliefs of democracy and of our regard for the worth of each individual.

Today, however, some of our citizens are still denied equal opportunity for education, for jobs and economic advancement, and for the expression of their views at the polls. Most serious of all, some are denied equal protection under the laws. Whether discrimination is based on race, or creed, or color, or land of origin, it is utterly contrary to American ideals of democracy.

Taken today, this is pretty conventional. But in 1948, it was an extraordinary statement to make — particularly by a Democratic President looking to be reelected in just ten months.

If we define discrimination as treating some individuals better and others worse because of their race (and how else can it be defined?), then racial discrimination is still pervasive, the now “conventional” nature of Truman's statement notwithstanding. I am referring, of course, to the policies and practices now described as “affirmative action” but that in practice depend upon preferential treatment based on race.

And the irony, or something, is that this new form of racial discrimination is supported most enthusiastically by the very political party that was in part created by, and now loudly applauds, Truman’s move away from the old forms of racial discrimination.

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“Responding to recent incidents of alleged discrimination targeting University students,” the University of Virginia’s Cavalier Daily reports this morning,

the Sikh Student Association, in conjunction with 11 other student organizations, organized a “Unite Against Discrimination” rally, scheduled to kick off this afternoon.

The rally’s aim is to “show a unified force against these actions,” of discrimination, outgoing Black Student Alliance President Lauren McGlory said.

Seth Kaye, president of Queer and Allied Activism, added that the rally’s purpose also is “to show we will not tolerate discrimination.”
....
McGlory and Kaye both said they believe discrimination is an ongoing problem at the University that needs to be addressed.

“There’s systematic discrimination,” Kaye said....

Kaye said he believed that recent events show “exacerbated” discriminatory feelings.

Students planned the rally in light of recent incidents of alleged discrimination against University students. The first occurred March 27, when a Sikh student was denied entry to the X-Lounge — at which the Indian Student Association was holding a party — because he was wearing a turban as required by his faith. The Sikh Student Association condemned the incident as a “woeful display of ignorance and discrimination,” in a recent e-mail statement.

X-Lounge management, which said the lounge has a “no head covering” policy, later issued an e-mail of apology to the ISA. Sikh Student Association representatives have since met with X-Lounge staff.

“They assured us that it won’t happen again,” [Sikh Student Association President Justin] Chhabra said. He also noted that the SSA is planning to meet with them again “to educate them about the religion and the various different head coverings that Sikhs wear.”

More recently, a discriminatory act was committed against a gay University student April 4, during which he and his guest were assaulted by five males who uttered several homophobic slurs and broke the student’s phone when he attempted to dial 911
.
Also this past weekend, BSA members reported alleged verbal and physical incidents. McGlory said someone drove past Cohn’s on the Corner at about 11 p.m. and shouted a racial slur at a black student.

I don’t know where the gay University student was accosted, but it is worth noting that “the Corner” is a public street near the University, and of course the X-Lounge has no relationship (even proximity) to the University. There is no evidence that either the “five males” who accosted the gay student or the drive-by epithet shouters were University students.

If the University, in short, were a person, it might give serious consideration to suing these rally organizers for slander. Sadly, but predictably, the University’s response took a different tack, and in its own way is more disappointing than the overheated over-sensitivity of the students.

In response to the organized rally, Dean of Students Allen Groves stated in an e-mail that he sees the goals of the rally as positive and beneficial for the University community.

“As I understand it, the students want to draw attention to discrimination in light of the X-Lounge incident and show solidarity in standing against it, which I see as worthy goals,” Groves stated

Groves added that on the whole, however, he believes discrimination is not widespread at the University.
[Does that mean that, in part, it is widespread?]

“Discrimination refers to people being treated differently or denied equal opportunities based on their race, gender, religion and the like,” he stated. “I do not think that discrimination, properly understood, is a pervasive issue at U.Va., as I believe all students have equal access to relevant opportunities provided by the University. What we have seen recently are sporadic and isolated instances of intolerance, which must be addressed as a community. However, I am not aware of an instance in which a student has been denied equal opportunity or access at the University by a person in a position of authority, which is how discrimination is defined.”

One of the effects of the unequal treatment given to students coming in to UVa is the unequal rate at which they graduate. UVa, as I’ve pointed out many times, UVa boasts at every opportunity that it graduates 87% of its black students, a higher percentage than any other public (and a great many private) universities. True, but as I wrote here,

13% of the blacks who entered in 1998 failed to graduate in six years, compared to 6% of the whites and 6% of the Asians. Put another, less optimistic way, blacks failed to graduate at a rate over twice as high as whites and Asians.

Of those students who entered UVa in the fall of 1997, 92% of the black females but only 78% of the black males had graduated after six years. (Among whites, six year graduation rate was 95% for females and 91% for males, or a total of 93%, and the numbers for Asians were virtually the same.)

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Here I wrote that “[i]n the past I have dogeared a number of Pages (columns by Clarence Page, that is) as good examples of the thinking (or lack thereof) of mainstream liberal columnists/talking heads,” and I then provided links to seven examples.

A few days ago he committed another one. It began, cutely, with “a quick history quiz.”

Which nationally prominent leader said this:

“Edicts of non-discrimination are not enough. Justice demands that every citizen consciously adopt a personal commitment to affirmative action, which will make equal opportunity a reality.”

Was it Rev. Jesse Jackson? Rev. Al Sharpton? Sister Souljah?

No, it was Gov. Ronald Reagan of California in a 1971 executive order. He sounded more liberal, at least on this issue, than the racial-quota fighter who later became president.

Times have changed, but on race not all that much, as far as NAACP Chairman Julian Bond is concerned. Bond whipped out Reagan’s old quote during a debate at the Library of Congress last week to argue that what was good for Reagan two generations ago is good enough for America now.

But my main concern with this Page is not class vs. race; it is with Page’s “quick history quiz.” It is not the “Gotcha!” that Page and Bond think it is. To see why, here’s another “quick history quiz.” In what nationally famous documents, signed by which nationally prominent leaders, do the following two statements (excerpts) occur? [Emphasis added]
1.

WHEREAS it is the plain and positive obligation of the United States Government to promote and ensure equal opportunity for all qualified persons, without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin, employed or seeking employment with the Federal Government and on government contracts....

NOW, THEREFORE, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States by the Constitution and statutes of the United States, it is ordered as follows:....

SECTION 301....(1) The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin....

2) The contractor will, in all solicitations or advertisements for employees placed by or on behalf of the contractor, state that all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.

Section 101. It is the policy of the Government of the United States to provide equal opportunity in Federal employment for all qualified persons, to prohibit discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin....

Sec. 202. ... all Government contracting agencies shall include in every Government contract hereafter entered into the following provisions: “(1) The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin....”

There is, in short, nothing inconsistent between being in favor of “affirmative action” as it was understood by the two Democratic administrations that implemented it and opposing all preferential treatment based on race. In fact, there is something inconsistent between supporting those Executive Orders and supporting any policy or practice that gives preferential treatment to any person “because of race, creed, color, or national origin.”

These two Executive Orders should be required reading for everyone who supports “affirmative action.”

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Last week I discussed A Rickety Argument In Ricci, referring to Ricci v. DeStefano, a case the Supreme Court will hear tomorrow involving, as I noted in my post, “a complaint by 17 white and one Hispanic firemen that the New Haven Fire Department set aside the results of a promotional exam because it didn’t like the racial distribution of those who would have been promoted if the results had been honored (too many whites, not enough blacks).”

Now comes Joan Biskupic today in USA Today with a preview of the case, and others the Supremes will hear dealing with race. The Obama administration, she notes, has taken a seemingly more measured approach than some of us might have feared.

Justice Department lawyers say the city acted properly to avoid violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which restricts tests that don't appear to discriminate but have a disproportionate racial impact. Yet, the Justice Department also says the case should be sent back for more fact-finding. It says the white firefighters' claims that they were intentionally discriminated against when the results were thrown out were not fully aired in lower courts.

And what of the New Haven test itself? According to a recent article on Fox News,

The promotion exams were closely focused on firefighting methods, knowledge and skills. The first part had 200 multiple-choice questions and counted for 60 percent of the final score. Candidates returned another day to take an oral exam in which they described responses to various scenarios, which counted for 40 percent....

The exams were designed by a professional testing firm that followed federal guidelines for mitigating disparate racial outcomes, the plaintiffs say.

But after the results came back, the city says it found evidence that the tests were potentially flawed. Sources of bias included that the written section measured memorization rather than actual skills needed for the jobs; giving too much weight to the written section; and lack of testing for leadership in emergency conditions, according to a brief filed by officers of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Does the city maintain that blacks are memory-impaired? That they are disproportionately endowed with leadership skills? If not, even with its alleged flaws how was the test discriminatory? And if it wasn’t discriminatory, what is the basis for reneging on the city’s implicit promise to promote those who did well on it?

According to the USA Today article linked above,

Frank Ricci, the white lead challenger in the firefighters’ lawsuit, says in court filings that he overcame dyslexia and paid to convert study materials to audio recordings to prepare for the test. His lawyers say canceling the promotions because of how blacks fared amounts to “overt racial balancing, de facto quotas and blunt race politics in government hiring.”

New Haven Mayor John DeStefano and other city officials say they wanted to avoid claims of indirect discrimination against minorities.

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Obama received much deserved criticism during and after the campaign for his narcissistic self-regard bordering on (or crossing the border of) messianic. Obamessiah, etc. Alas, evidence of that tendency continues to manifest itself.

At the recent “Summit of the Americas,” for example, another episode may be even more revealing than his warm embrace of dictator Chavez, which has received more attention. First, here is a drippingly sympathetic appreciation of Obama’s performance from the Christian Science Monitor (“Chummy Obama, Chávez mark ’spirit of cooperation’ at summit”):

His determination not to be provoked by aggressive, anti-US leaders such as Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela typified the esprit de corps of the meeting....

That determination to bury old antagonisms was also present when Obama responded disarmingly to an hour-long opening speech by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, in which the former leftist revolutionary reviewed US action against Cuba including the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. “I’m grateful President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old,” he told chuckling leaders

At last week’s Summit of the Americas, President Obama acquiesced to a 50-minute attack on America as terroristic, expansionist, and interventionist from Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. His response to Ortega’s denunciation of our effort to free Cuba from Castro’s dictatorship was that he shouldn’t be blamed “for things that happened when I was three months old.” Blamed? Hundreds of men, including Americans, bravely fought and died for Cuba’s freedom, heeding the call from newly elected president John F. Kennedy. But last week, even as American soldiers sacrificed blood in Afghanistan and Iraq to defend liberty, President Obama shrank from defending liberty here in the Americas.

This aspect of Obama’s failure was captured perfectly this morning by Mark Steyn:

What struck me (aside from its unfortunate echoes of his self-absolvement with regard to what William Ayers did when young Barack was eight years old) was the reductive narcissism of the answer. Barack Obama is not a banana-republic coup-leader re-setting the calendar to Year Zero. When he travels abroad, he represents two-and-a-third centuries of constitutional continuity. The impression he gives that that’s all just some dreary backstory of no real relevance to the Barack Obama biopic he’s starring in 24/7 is very unusual in the chief of state of one of the oldest democratic polities on the planet. And not entirely reassuring.

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We last encountered California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell back in 2007, in The Supe Is Nuts: Just When You Thought California Schools Couldn’t Get Any Worse.... There we saw that he was alarmed at the dramatic racial and ethnic achievement gaps, but his response — attributing the gaps to “cultural ignorance” in the schools — was, at least to me, as alarming as the gaps.

An example:

Like most professional school people, Supt. O’Connell is no doubt a good liberal. Therefore, according to this account of his “Summit” in the San Francisco Chronicle,

[l]ike many educators, O’Connell assumed the culprit was poverty. Then he noticed an even wider ethnic disparity among students who were not poor....

The realization was a jolt: Being black or Latino — not poor — was what the low-scorers had in common. And it changed everything.

Based on this summary, I’d be more tempted to say it deranged everything.

O’Connell now believes that widespread cultural ignorance within the California school system is responsible for the poor academic performance of many black and Latino students in school.

He offered the example of black children who learn at church that it’s good to clap, speak loudly and be a bit raucous. But doing the same thing at school, where 72 percent of teachers are white and may be unfamiliar with such customs, will get them in trouble, he said.

Do they learn at church that it’s a good idea to behave that way in school? Do young Hispanics learn the same thing ... at Communion? Are teachers on the public payroll supposed to tell black kids that what they learn in church is wrong? Are low math scores (and the math scores of non-poor blacks are worse than those of poor whites and Asians) really the result of clapping in church? Could we please have a control group of, say, black Episcopalians, who presumably don’t clap and shout so much?

With an analysis as wacky as this, you can almost predict Supt. O’Connell’s response:

O’Connell and top educators in the California Department of Education have taken hours of racial sensitivity training, which O'Connell wants to extend to teachers statewide....

to fully engage both students and teachers in the learning process in a way that sees both parties benefit and helps to better prepare students for success in the economy of the 21st century.

Translation from education jargon: He wants to water down California's existing high standards in the name of the wolly concept of “21st-century skills,” that is, communicating with each other, working in groups, media literacy, and so forth. He wants to subtract from classroom time spent on solid subject-matter content to teach these supposed stand-alone skills.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED.]

For the past several months you’ve been spared exposure to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s commentator on all things “diverse,” Penn anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr., at least via my criticisms of his columns (the last one was here, citing five earlier ones). Alas, your luck just ran out.

Today Prof. Jackson laments Virginia Tech’s backsliding on its commitment to “diversity.” (You will recall from past posts that Virginia Tech first appeared “to require faculty members to show a commitment to diversity [by demonstrating their ‘involvement in diversity initiatives’] as part of their bids for tenure and promotion” but then, under pressure from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars, abandoned “the mandated reporting of contributions to “diversity” for tenure candidates.”

Professor Jackson regards this abandonment of mandated reporting of contributions to “diversity” as rushing headlong in the wrong direction.

At a moment when some American universities are re-emphasizing their broad-based commitments to diversity (re-doubling their efforts at diversifying faculties and student bodies), Virginia Tech has taken an institutionalized step in the other direction.

Jackson begins by suggesting that this whole controversy was much ado about nothing. He notes, with typical clarity, that

a Virginia Tech spokesperson has been very clear about the fact that a conspicuous commitment to diversity was never a formal requirement for promotion, conceding that the document’s language wasn’t clear enough on that matter.

No matter. It is clear enough to anthropologist Jackson that no one was required to do anything, “diversity”-wise, to earn promotion. Nevertheless, that unclear language clearly expressing no (formal) requirement to do anything is now being revised.

It looks like that diversity language will not be removed completely from Viriginia Tech’s promotion guidelines, only clarified such that it reads less like an official mandate and more like a wish list for what faculty might be encouraged (though not required) to do. (And they certainly will not be formally judged on those grounds.)

There are some other inconsistencies in Prof. Jackson’s column, but they are not worth more than noting. For example, he objects to those who treat “diversity” as though it is merely a code word for race and ethnicity, but then he writes that “faculty of color ... literally embody diversification.” He writes that FIRE and friends are attempting “to politiicize academic culture” by pushing back against that culture’s “commitments to ethnic and racial inclusion,” as though those commitments themselves, and the racial preference policies necessary to implement them, are not political. He calls FIRE a “conservative organization” because it “reject[s] any and all nods to affirmative action or other diversity initiatives within the academy, characterizing them as lillte more than ‘political litmus tests,’” without recognizing that they are “political litmus tests” if demonstrating fealty to them is mandatory and that it is such mandatory requirements, not “nods,” to which FIRE et. al. object.

Sometimes Prof. Jackson is merely indecipherable, as in his confusing criticism that

For groups like FIRE, there are no legitimate social/political constituencies other than national ones. We are individuals, and just about anything else is an ideological straitjacket.

I said above that what is most interesting in Prof. Jackson’s column is not his argument, which is fundamentally incoherent (how can no real change be institutionalized backsliding?). What animates him is not the defense of a particular “diversity” policy from abandonment or even revision; he is angry because his deity is being dissed by groups like FIRE and NAS.

The dead giveaway is the way he states his objection to Virginia Tech “remove[ing]/revis[ing] the current invocation of diversity from its official ‘guidelines on tenure and promotion.’”

Note well: invocation of diversity in official guidelines.

in⋅vo⋅ca⋅tion

1. the act of invoking or calling upon a deity, spirit, etc., for aid, protection, inspiration, or the like; supplication.

2. any petitioning or supplication for help or aid.

3. a form of prayer invoking God’s presence, esp. one said at the beginning of a religious service or public ceremony.

4. an entreaty for aid and guidance from a Muse, deity, etc., at the beginning of an epic or epiclike poem....

UPDATE

FIRE has posted a devastating reply to Prof. Jackson, and Jackson has a tentative, weak rejoinder conceding that his “‘conservative’ label” of FIRE “isn’t nearly nuanced enough.” Well, no, but it’s problem is a lack of basic accuracy, not “nuance.”

But “regardless of FIRE’s goals,” Jackson continues,

isn’t the VT move equally intelligible against the backdrop of larger debates within the academy about the place of Affirmative Action? I don’t think the latter point is far fetched, regardless of where one comes down on that issue (or what aspects of the case FIRE would emphasize and most adamantly challenge). Is that not a fair question?

Meanwhile, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, emails:

It disturbs me that Professor Jackson focuses all his fury on FIRE. After all, yours truly broke the story. Adam Kissel [of FIRE] then ran with it and deserves the lion’s share of the credit (or opprobrium), but surely Jackson could spare some words of condemnation for NAS as well. Alas.

The string of comments following Jackson’s story is stunning in the predominance of views opposing VT’s policy and the diversity doctrine in general.

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Earl Ofari Hutchinson, the black political columnist last encountered here who writes almost exclusively about race issues and thus glass-house dweller, throws a rock at Rush Limbaugh because of his alleged “obsession” with race.

He just can't seem to stay away from it. In between his ritual tirade against liberals, the drive by media, Democrats, feminists, environmentalists, and Nancy Pelosi, the Limbaugh road always leads back to race.

Or someone’s.

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Even though Charlottesville is solid blue, and even though the weather yesterday was cold and rainy, “[m]ore than 1,500 people flooded the pavilion in downtown Charlottesville Wednesday for the city’s first ever Tax Day Tea Party.”

Charlottesville’s may have been the only Tea Party in the country whose keynote address was delivered by a former Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger. Another speaker, state delegate Rob Bell, holds the legislative seat first occupied by Thomas Jefferson, whom he quoted to good effect.

I took a few pics, which you can view here.

UPDATE

Hans Bader responds, very effectively, to Tea Party critics.

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rick⋅et⋅y

1. likely to fall or collapse; shaky...
2. feeble in the joints; tottering; infirm....

I return to Ricci now because of a New York Times article last week (sorry, just now getting to it) noticing its importance, and especially because of its report of U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton’s reasoning in her decision rejecting the firemen’s complaint.

In 2006, Judge Janet Bond Arterton of the Federal District Court [in New Haven, nominated by President Clinton in 1995] ruled that the city had not discriminated against the white firefighters. Since no one was promoted, Judge Arterton said, no one was harmed.

True, she wrote, “a jury could infer that the defendants were motivated by a concern that too many whites and not enough minorities would be promoted.”

But the city’s motives were lawful, Judge Arterton said. They included fear of public criticism, the possibility of “lawsuits from minority applicants that, for political reasons, the city did not want to defend” and a desire to promote “diversity in the Fire Department” and “managerial role models for aspiring firefighters.”

Judge Arterton ruled that city officials were not required to abide by the test results even though “they cannot pinpoint its deficiency explaining its disparate impact....”

a) they fear not doing so will lead to “public criticism”;

b) “for political reasons” they do not “want to defend” lawsuits by minorities who want preferential treatment; but

c) they have no “political reasons” that inhibit them from defending lawsuits by citizens who want to be treated without regard to their race.

Even I, jaded as I am about these matters and accustomed as I am to all manner of liberal claptrap, found it hard to believe that a federal judge would actually write these things in an opinion.

Silly me. Take a look at Judge Arterton’s opinion (if you have a strong stomach), and you’ll find that she really did say all those things, and more. For example, she also freely acknowledged that

Plaintiffs’ evidence – and defendants’ own arguments – show that the City’s reasons for advocating non-certification [of the test results] were related to the racial distribution of the results....

Thus, while the evidence shows that race was taken into account in the decision not to certify the test results, the result was race-neutral: all the test results were discarded, no one was promoted, and firefighters of every race will have to participate in another selection process to be considered for promotion.

A crucial issue raised by the case is the question of the range of situations whether a “race-neutral” denial of opportunities by government counts as an Equal Protection Clause violation if the government’s action was motivated by racial considerations....

This situation is somewhat similar to the 1971 case of Palmer v. Thompson, where a closely divided Supreme Court refused to invalidate a Mississippi city’s decision to shut down several public swimming pools rather than allow them to be racially integrated (as a previous court order required). The Court reasoned that the city was not required to provide public swimming pools in the first place, and that the decision to shut down the pools did not affect blacks “differently from whites.” In Ricci, New Haven likewise is not required to provide exam-based promotions to firefighters in the first place, and it could be argued that its action affects all racial groups equally in the sense that firefighters of all races are now ineligible to gain promotion on the basis of the exam in question.

However, the public employment context differs from the public service context in a number of ways. In the famous 1976 case of Washington v. Davis (involving police promotions in the District of Columbia), the Court held that a race-neutral promotion system could be unconstitutional if plaintiffs could prove that it had been enacted for the purpose of disadvantaging particular racial groups. But it’s hard to say to what extent this principle applies to a situation where a promotion system has been scrapped for racial reasons, as opposed to instituted for them.

the city acted as it did precisely because it knew that white (and a few Hispanic) firefighters would otherwise gain promotion, while no black ones would. By contrast, in Palmer it was reasonable for the Supreme Court to assume that both black and white residents of the city would have used the swimming pools had they not been shut down.

But wait; there’s more! In addition to the reasons I’ve quoted above, Judge Arterton also argued that New Haven’s refusal to promote the white and Hispanic firefighters who passed the promotional exam was legal because promoting them “would undermine [the city’s] goal of diversity in the Fire Department.”

Now, as we know all too well, the Supremes decided in Grutter that on occasion “diversity” can justify race-based policies in higher education. But what, we are entitled to wonder, can it contribute to the workings of a fire department?

Well, wonder no more, for the City of New Haven produced an expert witness at trial, Dr. Janet Helms, a professor of counseling psychology and the Director of the Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture at Boston College, who explained it for us, and obviously to Judge Arterton’s satisfaction.

Since you might not believe any summary I could write, I quote some passages from Judge Arterton’s opinion based on Dr. Helms’ expert opinion [Emphasis added; citations omitted]:

.... Her area of expertise “is not with firefighters per se but is more in the general area of how race and culture influence test performance more generally.” She did not examine the specific tests at issue. However, she offered several potential explanations for racially disparate impact on the tests. First, “[w]e know for a fact that regardless of what kind of written test we give in this country that we can just about predict how many people will pass who are members of underrepresented groups. And your data are not that inconsistent with what predictions would say were the case.”

Second, Dr. Helms suggested that because 67% of the respondents in the JAQ [Job Analysis Questionnaire]survey were white, the questions may have been skewed toward their job knowledge, as “most of the literature on firefighters show that the different [racial and gender] groups perform the job differently.”

Relying on information she had read in newspaper accounts of the situation in New Haven, she stated that the difference in performance may have been due to differences in opportunities for training and “informal mentoring” available to minorities. As general concerns, Dr. Helms mentioned that test takers may score lower if they are expected not to perform well, or if tests focus on “traditional ways of doing the job and the test-taker, in fact, uses innovative approaches.”

Finally, one question I would like to ask Dr. Helms: since she “mentioned that test takers may score lower if they are expected not to perform well,” and since she obviously did not expect them to perform well, testifying, as we saw above, that blacks don’t do well on tests, that “[w]e know for a fact that regardless of what kind of written test we give in this country that we can just about predict how many people will pass who are members of underrepresented groups,” does she accept any personal responsibility, or responsibility for her profession, for these low scores?

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InsideHigherEd reports this morning that the University of Tennessee–Martin, a Division 1 school in the Ohio Valley Conference, is dropping its men’s tennis team.

Phil Dane, athletics director, cited the “high cost of out-of-state scholarships” and the team’s “relatively small roster” as the reasoning for its suspension. He noted that a men’s team, and not a women’s team, was selected for removal out of consideration for Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Money saved from the lost men’s program, he said, will go to support the university’s women’s programs.

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Under pressure, in the form of ridicule and exposure, from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars, Virginia Tech President Charles Steger has announced that the mandated reporting of contributions to “diversity” for tenure candidates, discussed here, is no longer being considered.

Diversiphiles need not be overly disappointed, however. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning, although tenure candidates will no longer be required to contribute to “diversity,” they will still be rewarded for doing so.

The university has a long list of activities that professors can include in annual reports of their work as evidence of a commitment to diversity, including taking part in diversity-awareness workshops, helping to recruit and serving as mentors to female students and students from racial-minority groups, and incorporating diversity-related scholarship into their teaching. Professors can still report such activities but will not be required to do so.

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A couple of months ago denizens of the Democratic Underground had a serious discussion (or what passes for a serious discussion on Democratic Underground) of whether it would always be racist to describe someone as a Step ’n Fetchit, or whether there might be people who deserve that label.

Let’s suppose that a candidate’s spokesman/supporter used that phrase during a discussion about the need to limit corporate influence on Congress/Government/Elections. Would we be up-in-arms at the racial implications of someone referring to unnamed politicians acting as a “Step ‘n Fetchit” for their Corporate masters?

Would we be disgusted to hear someone characterize Condi Rice as W’s “Step ‘n Fetchit” SoS during her obvious photo op trips through the Middle East? Did anyone use that phrase (SnF) to point how Colin Powell was used in the run up to the war?

That’s probably good advice to those concerned with keeping their politically correct credentials in good order ... and for anyone concerned with keeping his or her job in the many precincts where political correctness holds sway, one of which is Falmouth, Mass.

Last week Peter Waasdorp was removed from the Falmouth Conservation Commission as a result of charges by commission chairwoman Karen Wilson that he had been verbally harassing her via e-mail. It was revealed at a selectmen’s hearing that in one of the e-mails, Waasdorp referred to another commission member, a white woman, as a “Stepin Fetchit.” Waasdorp and Wilson are also white....

Waasdorp’s remark wasn’t meant to be complimentary. But is a name seen as racist when applied to an African-American also racist when directed toward someone who isn’t black, or is it simply insulting? Waasdorp said there were no racist intentions on his part.

Falmouth affirmative action officer, George Spivey, who was involved in Waasdorp’s harassment investigation, said the comment was racist because of its history and intent.

“It was a character created to put down a person of color,” Spivey said. “The person to whom the language was directed wasn’t a person of color, but the characteristic applied to that person was of a person of color. It’s a derogatory, negative statement and so the intent was to apply the characteristics of that negative statement to that individual.”

Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, vice chairwoman of Barnstable County Human Rights Commission, was equally adamant regarding the racism contained in the comment.

“He’s using the word in the same way it was meant originally. He’s still evoking that whole history of a minstrel character ... made for white people’s amusement,” Goldberg said. “It’s insensitive and racist.”

But wait one more time. What if a white person characterizes someone as resembling not a Step ’n Fetchit but a powerful, successful black man? Don’t worry; this is not a hypothetical. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is, once again, ready with an answer.

In January, Brewster police officer Joseph Houston was arrested at a heavy metal concert in Boston for disturbing the peace. According to the arresting officer, who is Hispanic, Houston, who is white, called out, “Look at Obama,” directing his remark at the officer in what was described as “a loud disorderly manner.”
....
Houston was dismissed from the Brewster Police Force as a result of his behavior that night....

As for Houston’s remark, comparing someone to the president of the United States doesn’t sound like an insult, but does doing so “in a loud disorderly manner” suggest that may have been the intent? Was it racist? Goldberg thought it was.

“The reason I see it as racist, even though he had called him the name of the man who’d just become the most powerful man in the world, was because of the context. Particularly the context of trying to keep black people – and particularly black men – out of positions of power,” Goldberg said, interpreting Houston’s “Look at Obama” remark to mean “Look at this brown-skinned guy trying to have power over me.”

Verb 1. take in vain – use a name, such as God, without proper respect.

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As you will recall, there was a huge debate over the use of statistical sampling in the 2000 census as a possible way of correcting what is presumed to be a large undercount of minorities. That debate resurfaced with President Obama’s now abandoned intention of moving the Census Bureau out of the Commerce Department and putting it under the control of political operatives in the White House, and now it has resurfaced again with his recent nomination of University of Michigan sociologist Robert Groves to head the Census Bureau.

Groves is a former Census Bureau associate director of statistical design, who served from 1990-92....

When he was the bureau’s associate director, Groves recommended that the 1990 census be statistically adjusted to make up for an undercount of roughly 5 million people, many of them minorities in dense urban areas who tend to vote for Democrats.

But in a fierce political dispute that prompted White House staff to call advisers to the bureau and express opposition, the Census Bureau was overruled by Republican Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, who called the proposed statistical adjustment “political tampering.”

The Supreme Court later ruled in 1999 that the use of statistical sampling cannot be used to apportion House seats, but indicated that adjustments could be made to the population count when redrawing congressional boundaries.

Both supporters and opponents of illegal immigrant legalization think trying to pass it “while the U.S. economy is mired in economic turmoil” might be difficult. The fear/expectation is that Americans will see the new law as a plan to allow foreigners who aren’t supposed to be here to compete for the few jobs that are left, bidding down wages in the process. But here’s the thing: Just by re-opening the legalization issue, without passing any new law, Obama has already encouraged foreigners who aren’t supposed to be here to come and compete for the few jobs that are left, bidding down wages in the process. What better way to encourage more illegal immigration than by promising a possible amnesty in the next few years?

... a state harboring more illegal aliens can gain more House seats as long as the Census Bureau finds the illegal aliens and counts them. This also means that the illegal alien population resident in the United States during a census year has the potential to alter the regional and philosophical balance of power in Congress.

There are, of course, a couple of obstacles to this solution. One is that pesky Supreme Court opinion barring the use of sampling in Congressional apportionment. But courts change their minds, or change when they change, and if not now, there will always be future censuses.

A bigger problem may be that many Americans would be furious at the thought that a Democratic president has appointed a Census director skilled in a technique whose use would increase Democratic majorities in Congress by counting large numbers of illegal aliens who can’t even vote (legally).

Always eager to avoid conflict and promote comity and conciliation, I have a compromise to suggest that might mollify both sides of this controversy: use sampling in areas that have high concentrations of Hispanics, but then use some smaller percentage of that total (60% worked for a similar compromise in Philadelphia in 1787) for the purpose of apportioning representatives, with the percentage used to be determined by sampling that produces an estimate of the typical ratio of illegal aliens to citizens and legal immigrants in such communities.

Oh, wait. I guess that compromise didn’t work so well when it was tried before.

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On a number of occasions I have discussed (not favorably, as you can imagine) college recruitment and orientation programs that segregate students by race. (Examples: here, here, here, here, here, and most recently here) Now Mount Holyoke College has bravely taken this segregative approach to practicing and preaching “diversity” to its next logical step, as reported this morning at Inside Higher Ed:

Mount Holyoke College, which has for many years had a voluntary program for minority students in advance of the general orientation, plans this year to start a special section at the same time, also voluntary, for white students from the United States. (There is also a mandatory pre-orientation for international students.) Over three and a half days, the white and minority students will spend time separately and together, talking about race, before they join the four-day program for all new students.

.... Elizabeth Braun, dean of students at the college, said that the reality is that that two groups will probably spend more than half of the program time together, but will also have time to meet separately as white and minority students.

“This comes from our larger institutional commitment to diversity, and really figuring out students’ opportunities to engage with that diversity.” (About one third of students at the college are either from outside the United States or are members of minority groups.)

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Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger is scheduled to speak at the Charlottesville Tea Party on April 15. Check back afterwards; I should have pictures.

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17% of the 13,000 students offered admission to next year’s entering class at Berkeley are black, Latino, or American Indian, the same percentage as last year.

As a result, “[p]rotesters are claiming that the university is discriminating against Latina/o, black and Native American students by imposing a ceiling on the number of underrepresented minority students they admit.” (I wonder if these protesters would regard it as discriminatory and unfair if “a ceiling” were placed on the number of Asians, so that more of the favored minorities could be admitted.)

Not so, says the director of admissions.

“There is absolutely no ceiling for any type of student based on ethnicity—either in policy or in practice,” Assistant Vice Chancellor and Director of Undergraduate Admissions for UC Berkeley Walter Robinson said.

Admissions are based on a comprehensive review of applicants in the context of the opportunities that have been made available to them, Robinson said. Gender, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation is not considered during the application process.

The university had an affirmative action policy until 1996 when voters passed Proposition 209, which amended the state constitution to prohibit public institutions from considering race, gender or ethnicity.

Before Proposition 209, the university accepted twice as many minority students than it currently accepts, according to Robinson.

in 1995, the last year when racial preferences were both legal and in full force, 48% of black applicants to UCLA were offered admission. In 2006, with such “affirmative action” no longer legal, 11.5% of black applicants were accepted. This year, 2007, after UCLA moved with great fanfare to “holistic review,” 16% of blacks applicants were admitted....

Obvious, but still shocking.

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John Hinderaker is probably correct that, although “it is easy and tempting to ridicule the Obama administration's inability to take decisive action” against the Pirates who have kidnapped an American sea captain, “there is no good solution to a hostage situation, and patience is probably as good a virtue as any, at least for now.”

Still, anyone who finds it simply impossible to avoid the temptation should begin by reading this hilarious parody of Obama’s effort to “each out to the “Moderate Pirate Community.” (It is a parody, isn’t it?)

UPDATE

And then you could do worse than to turn to Our Reprimitivized Future by Mark Steyn. An excerpt:

.... Obviously, if the United States Navy hanged some eyepatched peglegged blackguard from the yardarm or made him walk the plank, pious senators would rise to denounce an America that no longer lived up to its highest ideals, and the network talking-heads would argue that Plankgate was recruiting more and more young men to the pirates’ cause, and judges would rule that pirates were entitled to the protections of the U.S. constitution and that their peglegs had to be replaced by high-tech prosthetic limbs at taxpayer expense.

Meanwhile, the Royal Navy, which over the centuries did more than anyone to rid the civilized world of the menace of piracy, now declines even to risk capturing their Somali successors, having been advised by Her Majesty’s Government that, under the European Human Rights Act, any pirate taken into custody would be entitled to claim refugee status in the United Kingdom and live on welfare for the rest of his life....

Actually, there was “a good solution,” and this was it:

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Sharpshooters firing from the fantail of a U.S. Navy destroyer killed three pirates holding an American cargo-ship captain in a lifeboat, ending a five-day ordeal that unfolded amid a surge in piracy off Somalia’s coast.

Richard Phillips, 53, captain of the Maersk Alabama, was untied, pulled from the lifeboat and brought unharmed aboard the USS Bainbridge, said Vice Admiral Bill Gortney, the commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command....

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I’ve recently posted, twice (here and here), discussions of the sad spectacle of President Obama and the Congressional Democrats mischaracterizing a Supreme Court opinion in order to pass a disturbing new “equal pay” law whose only saving grace is its wholly unintended consequence of doing away with time limit restrictions on employees (and former employees and retired employees) claiming that they have been victims of what is popularly known as “reverse discrimination.”

Now comes Hans Bader, with a chilling chapter-and-verse recitation of how the Obama administration has “repeatedly distorted the facts” surrounding Ledbetter’s case while using it to break campaign promises.

Read the whole thing.

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What I find most interesting about all the barking and biting about President Obama bowing to the Saudi monarch is that the White House denies what everyone can see on the video: “a full-blooded and deeply reverential half-body bow,” as described in the London Telegraph.

According to the White House,

“It wasn’t a bow. He grasped his hand with two hands, and he’s taller than King Abdullah,” said an Obama aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

But almost as unbelievable as the White House’s denial of what everyone can see is Politico’s Ben Smith assertion of something that everyone, or just about everyone, must know to be false:

The reason Obama's alleged, denied bow to King Abdullah — it was, however one describes it, a warm gesture — has been the source of controversy is the general American enmity to Saudi Arabia.

UPDATE

Even CNN is upset (though mildly) at the Obama bow and attempted White House denial of same.

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At a news conference in Turkey several days ago President Obama declared:

We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.

My problem with Obama’s statement is that he and his party oppose, and miss no opportunity to undermine, a core value that would be at the top of nearly every American’s “set of values” that bind us together as a nation: the belief that every American has a right to be treated by the state without regard to race, creed, or color.

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The University of Virginia is as good as any place on earth to observe that “diversity” has become the opiate of the liberal elites and their followers, deadening thought and dumbing down analysis. Accusations today of “soft on ‘diversity’!” echo the “soft on communism!” accusations and innuendos of McCarthyism, and serve the same silencing, orthodoxy-reinforcing function. Now, as then, there is an evil, insidious villain — now it’s the “vast right-wing conspiracy” — supported maliciously by hard-corps cadres, i.e., racists and Republicans (but I repeat myself), but often “unwittingly” by dupes and fellow-travelers.

Mindless orthodoxy is always unpleasant, but it seems especially abhorrent on university campuses, and even more especially at Mr. Jefferson’s University in Charlottesville (which has Grounds but no campus). The latest episode of it here concerns the dismay of some students, and the anger of others, that the president of the University would deign to invite a commencement speaker who, they claim, is not sufficiently enthusiastic about “diversity,” the distinguished University alumnus, former UVa law professor, former newspaper editor, and current judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, J. Harvie Wilkinson III. (Wilkinson, by the way, has not been immune from criticism here.)

Karen Agness (first heard from here as a UVa undergraduate blasting feminist orthodoxy and last, here, as a UVa law student criticizing a proposed “diversity” loyalty oath) does a wonderful number on UVa’s “diversity” orthodoxy in today’s Cavalier Daily (which reprints, without attribution, her identical piece that appeared in the Washington Post last Sunday). From the WaPo version (which has links missing from the Cavalier Daily):

.... Some U-Va. students have launched an effort to challenge the selection of Wilkinson in the name of protecting “diversity,” complete with columns, an online petition drive and hints that they will disrupt graduation.

This growing effort shows that too often, diversity is absent from the one facet of campus life where it is essential: intellectual life.

Supporters purport to use “diversity” synonymously with open-mindedness; they argue for the U-Va. administration to hire a “dean for diversity,” for the faculty to offer a wider variety of classes and for students to sign a “diversity pledge.” They sing the virtues of learning about people from different places with different points of view. Yet, when it comes to listening to someone with a reputation for being politically conservative, that supposed open-mindedness quickly dissipates.

Because some students disagree with a few of Wilkinson’s opinions, they are quick to claim that his opinions are “discriminatory” and illustrate “blatant political bias.” A student columnist described one “problem” with his selection: “It is that his political biases will alienate a large number of students when a commencement speaker should bring students together.” Others justify their complaints with the need to “protect diversity,” claiming that inviting Wilkinson is against U-Va.’s “long-standing commitment to diversity.” But where is their support for diversity when it comes to a more politically conservative public figure?

These students argue that because some of Wilkinson’s rulings are disagreeable to them, he is offensive. Their message is: If you disagree with someone on a few issues, that person is automatically offensive, discriminatory and alienating -- and therefore, should have no place on campus. This is the opposite of true intellectual diversity.

.... Is it possible that there might be something really ugly at the core of contemporary liberalism? You call yourself a liberal, and you vote liberal, yet you are under constant attack by your liberal compatriots. Why? ....

Yes, something very ugly has surfaced in contemporary American liberalism, as evidenced by the irrational and sometimes infantile abuse directed toward anyone who strays from a strict party line. Liberalism, like second-wave feminism, seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power....

.... For the past 25 years, liberalism has gradually sunk into a soft, soggy, white upper-middle-class style that I often find preposterous and repellent. The nut cases on the right are on the uneducated fringe, but on the left they sport Ivy League degrees. I’m not kidding — there are some real fruitcakes out there, and some of them are writing for major magazines. It’s a comfortable, urban, messianic liberalism befogged by psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Conservatives these days are more geared to facts than emotions, and as individuals they seem to have a more ethical, perhaps sports-based sense of fair play.

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[NOTE! This post has been UPDATED]

Charlottesville, like the University of Virginia that it hosts, simply can’t get enough of “diversity.” (Well, that’s not exactly true. As discussed in Old Dominion Dems Decry Diversity! and Charlottesville, The Capital Of Blue Virginia..., one Republican on a five-member city council provided entirely too much diversity, and had to be replaced several years ago in an election in which the Dems “retook” the council.)

In any event the city is now about to partner with the University in several new “diversity” programs.

Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris unveiled a plan for building and maintaining a more diverse Charlottesville workforce Thursday. As part of the plan, the City could partner with the University to increase outreach efforts to potential minority employees.

Despite the University’s high black graduation rate, most black students leave the Charlottesville area after graduating, Norris said.

“What I want to see us do as a city and a community is try to reach out to third- and fourth-years at the University to whom it may never have occurred to stay in Charlottesville,” he said. “We could create internships and opportunities so that they will consider staying and adding to the local workforce.”

Here’s more:

“We are also looking at people who are mid-career — asking how we present Charlottesville as a more attractive place for professionals of color to put down roots,” Norris said.

In addition to recruiting diverse professionals from outside the area, Norris said he hopes to grow a more diverse workforce from within the community. He cited the City’s growing summer youth employment program — which he said has seen a high level of participation from black students — as an example of these efforts. Another initiative meant to expand the City’s workforce diversity is the African-American Teaching Fellows program, which Norris said aims to recruit local black citizens as teachers, as well as provide mentoring and support services.

Other fields in which the City wishes to generate minority job interest include nursing and law enforcement, Norris said.

UPDATE [7 April]

Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity emails:

As UVa knows, racially EXCLUSIVE programs are illegal under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which covers most federally funded programs; alas, racially PREFERENTIAL programs are sometimes still allowed under Title VI, in light of the Supreme Court’s 2003 University of Michigan decisions. But the programs here involve employment (if the positions are paid), in which case Title VII applies, and it’s unclear whether even racially preferential programs would be permissible to Charlottesville under this statute. So the partnership is not only bad policy, but likely illegal as well.

One thing I should have mentioned in my post is that UVa is an ideal partner with whom to develop programs that classify, reward, and punish employees and others on the basis of race, because it has the personnel with the experience and expertise of doing exactly that.

The Charlottesville initiative, through which the City could partner with the University, is still in its conceptual stages right now, though, said Bill Harvey, the University’s chief officer for diversity and equity. Harvey was invited by the City to work on the initiative.

“It’s a little bit too early to tell until we begin to go through the process and see what the program will look like,” Harvey said. “We will layout the framework of the University’s involvement and what the program will look like overall. I suspect once we have a couple of meetings in the summer, in the fall we will probably have a blueprint of action.”

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At UVa Asians Are Now “Diverse” (At Least For A Day)... has been UPDATED.

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Politics is often at its most entertaining when politicians rant indignantly about some allegedly outrageous offense that is not only not offensive but is in fact a statement of the obvious. A humorous case in point is the current hissy being thrown by Virginia state senator Creigh Deeds over a remark made by Mike Huckabee at a fundraiser in Tazewell County, in Southwestern Virginia, for Republican Bob McDonnell. Deeds, who lost to McDonnell for Attorney General in 2006, is now in a three-way Democratic primary race to run against him for governor in 2010.

Deeds’ campaign is steaming (or perhaps just blowing smoke). It has sent out a media advisory condemning “McDonnell’s refusal to condemn former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s divisive remarks about Virginia.” Deeds has put up a form on a web page asking viewers to “Stand Up Against Divisive Politics” and to “Join me in telling Bob McDonnell to condemn these remarks and this type of politics.” He has sent an email to so many Virginians that even I got one quoting Huckabee’s remark and inviting recipients to “Click here to join me in taking a stand against Republican campaign tactics and tell McDonnell to apologize for these divisive remarks.”

Even (especially?) the Washington Post has chimed in, asking “Did Mike Huckabee's visit to Virginia this week end up helping or hurting Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell?”

I suspect that by now you may be wondering what horrible, divisive comment Huckabee made. Could he have been so bold, so tactless, as to say we should put an end to illegal immigration? That we should stop the state from favoring some and burdening others because of their race? You might think that, because the Democrats have a long track record of condemning such comments as hateful and divisive. But that’s not what he said. Sit down. Brace yourselves. Cringe in anticipation if you must. Here is what Huckabee The Horrible said, as quoted on the web form Deeds wants everyone to sign condemning it (in fact, here’s the whole form, minus lines for name and address):

Stand Up Against Divisive Politics

One of Bob McDonnell's surrogates, Mike Huckabee, recently claimed that Northern Virginians “aren’t necessarily thinking the same way folks like you and me think.” He even had the nerve to say that Northern Virginians “may have never fully understood how hard it is for a lot of people to put a paycheck together and be able to feed a family.”

During these tough economic times, we can’t afford for our leaders to pit region versus region and Virginian versus Virginian for their own political gain.

Join me in telling Bob McDonnell to condemn these remarks and this type of politics.

In this warped view Nixon’s “Southern strategy” and what might be termed McDonnell’s “Southside strategy” are a piece of the same tainted cloth. Deeds has been striving mightily to find some high ground here from which to attack these low politics, but his strained effort comes across, at least to me, as ridiculous. Thus, from his mass email:

Unfortunately this type of rhetoric from the Republicans is all too familiar....

We can't let Republicans continue to pit one region of Virginia against another.  I'm running for Governor to stand up and fight for every Virginian....

Bob McDonnell doesn't understand that we are one commonwealth. His supporters are trying to pit region versus region and Virginian versus Virginian for political gain. We can't let Bob McDonnell continue to stand by these out-of-touch comments.

In the 2008 presidential election Virginia’s vote mirrored the national vote very closely: Obama beat McCain by 52.7% to 46.4%; his winning margin in the state was 232,317 votes. But the Red - Blue divide inside the state was quite dramatic, with Obama winning populous northern Virginia jurisdictions by lopsided amounts: Arlington 78% to 27%, Alexandria 72% to 27%, Falls Church 70% to 29%, Fairfax County 60% to 39%. In fact, Obama’s margin in the northern northern virginia jurisdictions (Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax, Fairfax City, Falls Church, Loudoun) plus Richmond was 260,372. In Tazewell County, where Huckabee spoke, McCain won 66% of the vote (which was actually a bit lower than in a number of other counties that voted for McCain).

One doesn’t have to look at just that one election to find irrefutable evidence that voters in Northern Virginia “aren’t necessarily thinking the same way folks” like Huckabee and the voters in the Piedmont, Southside, and Southwestern Virginia think. In 2006, for example, Virginia passed, with 57% of the vote, an amendment banning gay marriage. Northern Virginia, however, voted heavily against the amendment: 70% to 30% in Alexandria, 74% to 26% in Arlington, 54% to 46% in Fairfax, 69% to 31% in Falls Church. Tazewell County, in the Southwest, by contrast, voted for the amendment, 86% to 14%.

Let’s look at just one more example. In 2007 the Center for Social Science Research at George Mason University conducted a thorough survey of the attitudes of Virginians on a range of issues in immigration. One of the variables considered was geographic region of the state, and the survey found that “the depth of the attitudinal disparities” by region was striking.

Virginia’s 8 million residents live in regions that are highly diverse culturally, economically, and ecologically. The most affluent and urbanized region of the state is Northern Virginia, which has experienced the largest influx of newcomers. Other urban concentrations are in Richmond and Hampton Roads. More rural, less affluent parts of the state include the Southwest, South Piedmont, and Roanoke regions in the south, as well as the Shenandoah region adjoining West Virginia. Many of the latter regions have experienced economic hardship in recent years.

Our data indicate that different regions show highly divergent views of immigration policy and illegal immigration. The most tolerant and accommodating views are found in Northern Virginia; the least accepting attitudes are in the strip that reaches from the Southwest, the South Piedmont and Roanoke area....

While the most urbanized and culturally diverse region (Northern Virginia) holds relatively accomodating views on immigration policy, regions that are less urbanized and less affluent (such as the southern, Southwestern, and Piedmont regions) adopt significantly harsher views.

The only people “out of touch” here are the Democrats who deny that Northern Virginians “aren’t necessarily thinking the same way folks” are in the Piedmont, Southside, and Southwest and then try to brand those who note those differences as “divisive.”

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Narcissist In Chief has been UPDATED.

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In higher education “diverse” almost always means black, Hispanic, or Native American, but yesterday at the University of Virginia meeting of its Board of Visitors it meant Asian. “Officials discuss Asian faculty diversity concerns,” the headline of the front page article in the Cavalier Daily today announces. “[Interim vice provost for faculty advancement Sharon] Hostler says Asian-Americans are overrepresented in University undergraduate student population, underrepresented in faculty.”

As usual, “representation” is a ridiculously opaque, irrelevant criterion to use for either faculty or students.

Overall, Asian-Americans are overrepresented within the University’s student population. Asian-Americans make up 11.4 percent of the undergraduate population, though they are only 4.4 percent of the United States’ population....

Admissions Dean Greg Roberts cited a dramatic increase in international applications from Asia as the reason for this overrepresentation, noting that applications from Chinese students increased from 400 to 800 this year.

Never mind. Let’s move on to the faculty.

The disproportionate number of Asian-Americans at the University, however, is limited to the student population, as Asian-American faculty actually are underrepresented, Hostler said.

.... She said 2007 data indicates that Asian-Americans comprise 6.5 percent of the tenure-track faculty at the University....

“Hostler also noted that Asian-Americans are highly underrepresented at the top levels of American higher education,” but Bill Harvey, UVa’s Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity, came forward with a ready explanation for this “underrepresentation” that may stand as one of the most remarkable utterances ever uttered by a chief diversity officer:

Bill Harvey, vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity, said this discrepancy between higher and lower levels of the University faculty may be because of culture. He said Asian-Americans typically do not actively seek out leadership positions and instead may prefer to take a more supportive role. For example, Harvey said, they may appear more comfortable in roles as senior faculty members.

Among the University’s Asian-American faculty, there also is a disparity between male and female Asian-American professors, Hostler noted.

“[There are] three times as many Asian-American men on the faculty as there are women,” she said, noting that women make up only 11 percent of the tenure-track professors of Asian descent.

But wait. Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey still had more to say, namely that he is optimistic about the future of “diversity” at UVa ... because Asians are so good at math and science.

The University’s recent emphasis on the sciences also may help attract more Asian-American faculty members, Harvey said, noting that he is optimistic about the University faculty’s future diversity

Readers with good memories will recall that this is not the first time we have encountered some of the strange ideas of Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey. Here, for example, he expressed his devotion to race-exclusive programs and his dismay at their elimination, a rather odd notion of “equity.” And here he explained what he means by “diversity”: “What we want this institution to do is to mirror society.” UVa, of course, doesn’t. Thus Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey’s lamented

that Latinos and Hispanics currently comprise approximately three percent of the University undergraduate population, while Latinos and Hispanics make up approximately seven percent of the Commonwealth's population.

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

Since the salary of the new coach, Tony Bennett, formerly of Washington State, who is not “diverse,” is over twice as high as that of the departing coach, who is “diverse,” I wonder if any discrimination complaints will reach the offices of the Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity or the Interim Vice Provost For Faculty Advancement.

UPDATE [6 April]

Prof. Anna Chong, director of the University’s Asian Pacific American Studies program, was not amused, finding the Cavalier Daily article “an inauspicious beginning to Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.”

In particular, she argued that

the comments attributed to Bill Harvey, vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity, regarding why APAs are not found in University administration perpetuates the model minority myth. There is no unitary Asian American culture dictating that APAs be passive and “prefer to take a more supportive role.” If anything, the culture that prevents more APAs from taking leadership roles is that of academia itself, which has generally not valued the recruitment and retention of APA faculty.

However, it is misleading to simply compare the percentage of APA undergradutes with the national APA population. A better indicator might be the APA population at other American Association of Universities institutions, where the University ranks 31 out of 58 and lags behind peer institutions including Harvard, Duke, Berkeley, and Michigan. This concern pits APAs against other minorities in a zero-sum game over diversity statistics, and harkens back to yellow peril anxieties of the early 1900s. If anything, we should celebrate that the APA undergraduate population at the University is so high, rising from only 0.76 percent in 1978.

No matter what benchmark is used to gauge the success of “diversity” efforts, “diversity” policies are always a “zero-sum game over diversity statistics.” The only way to win that game is not to play it, treating everyone as an individual, not a two-legged racial or ethnic statistic.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Professor Mark Peterson, associate professor and department chair of political science at Washburn University, recently delivered a lecture at Kansas State University defending affirmative action. His defense was typical, and thus, oddly, both depressing and encouraging.

Don’t misunderstand me. There are reasonable and intelligent arguments in support of affirmative action, and the fact that I don’t find them persuasive doesn’t make them (or at least not all of them) unreasonable or dumb. Still, typical arguments, like Professor Peterson’s, defy not only a widely and deeply held core American value — that everyone should be treated by the state without regard to race, creed, or color — but also clearly observable and amply documented facts. Thus I find it depressing that so many people in positions of some influence routinely make arguments that are patently ridiculous, but also encouraging — because they are unable to make better arguments, and the ones they do make are so easily refutable.

Professor Peterson, for example, “denied any legitimacy in the claim that admitting or hiring minority applicants lowers the quality of work or dilutes the selectivity of the school.”

Really? So, admitting minorities with SAT scores that are often 200 or more points below the entering average, with a similar gap in grade point averages, does not “dilute[] the selectivity of the school” that does that? One can argue that “diversity” justifies that reduction in selectivity, but I don’t see how any informed, reasonable person can deny the fact of the reduction.

More of the same:

Peterson said that affirmative action does not require hiring or admitting inferior students or employees. He went on to say that preference to a minority applicant is only granted when two applicants are comparable and, most importantly, the organization has identified a need to better represent a particular group.

Finally, if Professor Peterson really believes that “preference to a minority applicant is only granted when two applicants are comparable,” then he either has his head in the sand or sand in his head, which is to say, only somewhat more politely, that he has absolutely no conception of how affirmative actually works at large and even not so large universities.

UPDATE

A very thorough reader sent the following, writing that he “assume[s] this description is written by the subject.”

Mark Peterson, PhD
Associate Professor and Department Chair
E-Mail: mark.peterson@washburn.eduCourses Taught:
PO106 Intro to American Government
PO245 Intro to Public Administration
PO305 Public Policy
PO306 Urban-Metropolitan Government
PO308 Federalism and Public Policies
PO312 State and Local Economic Development
PO321 American Presidency
PO392 Urban and Regional Planning
PO393 Public Budgeting
PO401 Policy Evaluation Methods

Associate Professor Mark Peterson MPA, PhD (U. of New Mexico, 1996) is a practicing homosapiens who has engaged in acts of pedagogy at Washburn University for more than a pentad of years. Affable, extroverted, prolix and gargantuan, Dr. Peterson has an equable manner, is regarded by students as being just and empathetic, and regards his vocation as a sharing of a rich mixture of insights and enthusiasms for the second most important social activity the species engages in with or without clothing. Students who enroll in Dr. Peterson's classes are expected to demonstrate clear signs of higher cortical function through the skillful execution of writing assignments and class interactions.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

First, the Euphemism of the Day: as quoted in the Washington Post this morning:

Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) called cap-and-trade “the most significant revenue-generating proposal of our time,” and said it would be difficult to pass without reconciliation because Democrats would be forced to accommodate a handful of Republicans as they did in the debate over the president's stimulus package.

But to return to cap-and-trade, as Robert Zubrin explains so chillingly,

cap-and-trade is not just a tax, as its mechanism contains features not included in a conventional taxation system.... It is worse than a tax. It is a modern version of tax farming.

Tax farming was a practice followed by the Persian and various other ancient empires. Here’s how it would work. Let’s say the king needed some money to finance a war, a monument to himself, or similar worthy endeavor. Rather than fuss with the administration needed to collect taxes directly, he would sell the right to tax a given province to some wealthy crony. This public-spirited individual would then deploy his gangs of hired thugs to loot the people of the province in question. The king would get ready cash for his project, while through the exercise of unrestrained rapacity, the tax-farmer crony would generally obtain an excellent return on his investment. Thus, everyone who counted would be happy.

In essence, the cap-and-trade system works the same way. Initially carbon emission permits would be bought by utilities and industries, which need them in order to engage in their business. Such fees paid to the government for carbon permits are simply direct taxation. However, the carbon permits would be sold at auction, and many of them would be bought by financiers, not for their own use, but for the purpose of resale at profit. Provided that the government kept its issuance and sale of new carbon permits limited, which it must and therefore would in order for the system to function as desired, the resale mark up on privately held carbon permits could be very steep, allowing those with the ready cash to buy such permits in advance to tax the real economy at will. The utilities hit by these inflated costs would then pass them on to consumers, while those with the lowest incomes would be hit the hardest....

The Obama administration says that it hopes to raise some $650 billion in revenue for Uncle Sam through the sale of cap- and-trade carbon permits, and there is no reason to doubt this figure. However, that is only the government’s piece of the action. Because of the tax farming feature built into the system, the cost to the public is likely to be far greater.

Since an even larger fraction of Chinese electricity and industrial process heat comes from coal than does American, the net effect of the cap-and-trade system will therefore be to increase the total carbon emissions released into the Earth’s atmosphere, not decrease it. However not only will Chinese industrialists obtain a larger market share for their products, they will be able to charge more for them, since their competition will be priced even higher. Thus the big losers overall will not only be American manufacturers and workers, but the world’s poor.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Duke University, of all places, should know better. Given the devotion to “diversity” that pervades that institution (see Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case if you have any doubts), you’d think that by now Duke would have recognized that it comprises not one but many communities, that it borders on racial arrogance to insist on categorizing all its students as “Blue Devils,” as though they were all fundamentally alike.

Indeed, as three students who continue to support the idea of “One Duke, United” lament (HatTip to George Leef on National Review’s PhiBetaCons), in many areas of student life Duke insists on separating its students into various racial and ethnic subgroups. As they write,

Over the next few months, prospective freshmen will invade and inspect the Duke campus to decide where they want to spend the next four years. But a select group of them will be separated from the rest because of their race. While their peers intermingle and witness the diversity of Duke University in all its vibrancy, black and Latino prospective freshmen will be attending separate recruitment events.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So it’s true. The new über CEO of General Motors (which makes the soon to be revived O’smobile) really did give the Queen an iPod containing, along with a bunch of show tunes, some of his speeches, including the one he made to the Democratic convention in 2004 when he was still a state senator in Illinois.

He increasingly reminds me of the author who, after talking throughout lunch about his own work, turns to his companion over coffee and says, “I’ve been talking long enough about myself. Tell me, what do you think of my latest book?”

But one thing you have to grant to narcissists: when they give a memento of themselves, they are in fact giving the most valuable, most impressive gift they can think of.

UPDATE [5 April]

InstaPundit quotes Psychology Today’s A Field Guide to Narcissism:

Deep desire to be at the center of things is served by extreme self-confidence, a combination that makes narcissists attractive and even charming. Buoyed by a coterie of admiring friends and associates—protected by the armor of positive self-regard—someone with a mild-to-moderate case of narcissism can float through life feeling pretty good about himself. Since they feel entitled to special treatment, they are easily offended, and readily harbor grudges. Yet narcissists are often very popular—at least in the short term. . . . A narcissist can be hard to identify, in part because he is likely to be much more fascinating than you would expect for someone so self-absorbed, and in part because you wouldn’t think someone with such self-regard could be so defensive and needy.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Not Enough Race Boxes On UCLA Application... has been UPDATED.

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