Surprise! Race Mavens Insist “Race Still Matters”!

Remember that movie from a few years back, A Day Without A Mexican?

People fight in grocery stores as local vegetables become a hot commodity. Affluent families have to — gasp — actually mow their own lawns and take care of their own children. Hollywood has to resort to using latino-looking actors to play the role of “Hood No. 3” on NYPD Blue.

I thought of it as I read yet another defensive, almost plaintive insistence that, all the unnamed straw men to the contrary notwithstanding, “Race Still Matters.” What will the authors (“Michelle Asha Coooper [sic] is president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy. David A. Longanecker is president of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education”) and all the “diversity” and “affirmative action” and “multicultural” and “minority affairs” deans and officers and staffs do if they wake up one morning and find that, somehow, their best efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, the nation has come to its senses and decided to treat all its citizens and residents without regard to their race, creed, or color?

You really needn’t read the article to know what’s in it (but do read the comments, especially the ones by Carlos, Mavprof, and Roger Clegg, who says “Oh, Cheer Up”). There is the usual litany of “disparities” — college enrollment and graduation rates; fields of study; “perceptions of campus climate”; hiring, tenure, and compensation; etc.

Post graduation, racial/ethnic minorities earn less, with the same credentials, as [sic] their White counterparts. Even within the ranks of our liberal-minded institutions, Blacks and Hispanics are grossly underrepresented in our faculties. And where people of color do find positions within our institutions, it is too often in adjunct faculty positions, bereft of the pay and benefits appreciated by regular faculty, and in our service departments, perpetuating the inequalities that we so often condemn in society in general.

And there is also the required (apparently for all current “race still matters” articles) false (so false it’s dumb) equation of Justice Alito’s expression of ethnic pride with Justice Sotomayor’s obnoxious assertion that a “wise Latina” would make better judicial decisions than a white (or presumably Asian or black) man.

There is, of course, the also required ubiquitous liberal trope, persistent and pervasive structural inequality.

Certainly, there are those who firmly embrace the belief in the achievement ideology, which considers American society to be fair and meritocratic. For them, success and failure are based on individual differences in ability and motivation, and not societal or economic barriers. And while they strongly hold to their beliefs, there is a mountain of evidence to show that our society — including some of our campuses — is filled with longstanding, persistent barriers that fall along a color line.

I have already given my views on “structural inequality” and the seemingly unending number of “barriers” it produces at some length, here and here, and there is no need to repeat them. Instead, what I would like to do is ask you to join me in issuing a challenge:

Every time you hear anyone, from the president on down, talk about discriminatory “barriers,” insist that the “barriers” be specifically identified.

If you do that I think you’ll find, as you certainly will with this “race still matters” article, that the “barriers” turn out to be nothing other than the “disparities.” Since there are no actual barriers, the only way to remove the “barriers” always pointed to by the race mavens is to “level the playing field” by “voluntary” race preferences and, when not voluntary, impose them through regulations or disparate impact lawsuits.

Welcome to post-racial America, Obama-style.

Say What? (1)

  1. CaptDMO September 3, 2009 at 9:32 pm | | Reply

    Well I guess ONE way to address ONE of the “Race Matters” issues is to deny water (and work) to the green belt of California agricultural “communities”.

    It must be by those evil “haters”, judging by the way it’s been put in sly context of ecological”save the delta fish”.

    OF COURSE “Race Matters”. Just take a poll amongst the people that The President has surrounded himself with, especially the one’s associated with “green” and “jobs”.

    And of course, how ELSE are we supposed to keep score, EXCEPT attribution wto racism, in (ie.) NY, what with Justice being Blind and all that?

Say What?