Category Archives: affirmative action

A Thought on Fisher

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Justice Clarence Thomas has one.  Fisher v University of Texas at Austin was a case that wound up in front of the Supreme Court that involved a white woman who was denied admission as a result of UTA’s racial preference admissions system that explicitly deprecated some students and elevated others in the UTA admissions system solely on the basis of race, or so she claimed in her suit.

Monday, the Supremes took the easy way out and sent the case back to the Appellate Court on the legal technicality that that court had used the wrong criterion in reaching its decision upholding UTA’s race-based admissions system.

Justice Thomas, in his separate concurring opinion, had this to say concerning race-based discrimination, as cited in The Wall Street Journal:

While I find the theory advanced by the University to justify racial discrimination facially inadequate, I also believe that its use of race has little to do with the alleged educational benefits of diversity. I suspect that the University’s program is instead based on the benighted notion that it is possible to tell when discrimination helps, rather than hurts, racial minorities….  The worst forms of racial discrimination in this Nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities.

Slaveholders argued that slavery was a “positive good” that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life. See, e.g., Calhoun, Speech in the U.S. Senate, 1837, in P. Finkelman, Defending Slavery 54, 58–59 (2003) (“Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually….”)

…A century later, segregationists similarly asserted that segregation was not only benign, but good for black students. They argued, for example, that separate schools protected black children from racist white students and teachers. See, e.g., …Tr. of Oral Arg. in Bolling v. Sharpe, O.T. 1952, No. 413, p. 56 (“There was behind these [a]cts a kindly feeling [and] an intention to help these people who had been in bondage. And there was and there still is an intention by the Congress to see that these children shall be educated in a healthful atmosphere, in a wholesome atmosphere, in a place where they are wanted….”)

…Following in these inauspicious footsteps, the University would have us believe that its discrimination is likewise benign. I think the lesson of history is clear enough: Racial discrimination is never benign.

What he said.

Racism of the Federal Government

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Here’s another example of the WilsonianObaman government’s racism.

The EEOC is haling Dollar General and a US unit of BMW into court, charging them with racism for the heinous practice—seriously—of using background checks to screen those convicted of

Murder, Assault & Battery, Rape, Child Abuse, Spousal Abuse (Domestic Violence), Manufacturing of Drugs, Distribution of Drugs, [and] Weapons Violations

from job applications.

Just to add racism to the EEOC’s racism, in the BMW case, there’s this: 70 black and 18 non-black contractors had criminal convictions, and the company declined to hire any of them.  The EEOC is only suing over the blacks’ non-hiring.  The non-blacks can go hang.

Indeed, the President Barack Obama’s EEOC has proudly codified its racism.  It said just last April that

an employer’s evidence of a racially balanced workforce will not be enough to disprove disparate impact.

Don’t worry about the inherently racist nature of disparate impact.  Such a worry would be racist.

Progressive Policies and the Poor

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Thomas Sowell, writing in the National Review, had some thoughts on the impact of modern Liberalism on the welfare of blacks in the US.  I think they apply to all minorities, to whites, to our poor generally.

Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.

And

Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the minimum wage.  Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum-wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment….

And

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.  Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time, but most grow up with only one parent today.

And

Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities.  But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count.

Sowell summarizes the matter starkly:

In all these cases, and many others, liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good—and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.

The party of Jim Crow may be attempting to correct its past.  It is, in fact, failing miserably.  Modern Liberals give so little thought to the 50 years of empirical evidence defining the consequences of their actions that I have to conclude that they’re well aware of those consequences.  One of those consequences, flowing from the poverty enforced maintained by their actions, is the continued dependency of our poor on the largesse of the Modern Liberals in government.

That’s not just petty ego stroke, that’s political power.

Racism in Student Selection

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Bill Powers, President of the University of Texas at Austin, put an op-ed into The Wall Street Journal in which he attempts to defend a particular version of “affirmative” action for admission to that university.  The case on which he commented is Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which is before the Supreme Court this term.  In this case, a young woman was denied admission in favor of a less qualified black student because, she argues, she’s white.

The subtitle for Powers’ piece is this:

My university once kept blacks out.  Now at Texas we ensure that their grandchildren can enter.

But what he omitted to say there is that UTA once kept blacks out for purely racial reasons.  Now UTA “ensures that their grandchildren can enter” also on racial grounds.

Before I expand on that, though, a couple of smaller points.  Powers wrote,

UT finds itself back in court superficially for the same reason—considering race in admissions—but with just the opposite motivation.

No motive can justify racism.  Woodrow Wilson’s racism was for lofty motives—poor, inferior blacks needed the protections of segregation.  Nor do the basest of motives justify it, as the Jim Crow laws demonstrated.  Racism is…racist.

Powers also wrote

[T]he fiction that will be dispelled by Fisher is that minority students are being admitted at the expense of more-qualified white students.  There are no unqualified students admitted to UT[.]

This is nothing but a non sequitur.  Admitting less qualified students at the expense of more qualified students in no way implies that unqualified students are being admitted.  Nor is this the argument Ms Fisher is making: she’s averring that race played the role, not qualifications.

But from his flawed logic, as illustrated by these minor nits, flows the larger problem.  Powers made his case thusly:

[D]iversity isn’t only acceptable but desirable in all aspects of life, especially education.  In my 38 years in the classroom, I often have seen how a diverse classroom enriches discussion, provides valuable insights and offers a deeper learning experience.

And

[W]e employ an entirely holistic review in which race is one of many factors along with leadership, extracurricular activities, awards, work experience, family-income level and community service.

With this argument, he’s demonstrated the bankruptcy of his race-based (however diffuse) admission policy.  That breadth of diversity for which he seeks—leadership, extracurricular activities, awards, work experience, family-income level, and community service—already is wide.  Moreover, those last two, family income and community service (which carry within them the diversity of communities in which his applicants live, that income is earned, and that service is performed), are alone richly diverse, and they contain ethnicity and race within them.  With that broad diversity built into his selection paradigm, there’s no need to consider race separately.  Doing so is just separate but equal papered over.

What diversity actually would accomplish, were it not for Powers’ double counting of race in  it, would be to give all disadvantaged applicants equal opportunities for access, rather than giving superior access to those belonging to Powers’ favored race.  Giving preference to race—regardless of the strength of that preference—is to give preference to race.  There’s no amount of lipstick that can be smeared on this bigotry by those who should know better that can disguise that.

Progressives and Truth

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Professor Elizabeth Warren, who also professes to be part Cherokee Indian, was on CNN’s Starting Point the other day, as reported by The Daily Caller.  In that appearance, Prof Warren said

You know, I’m proud of my Native American heritage….

Exactly what native American heritage would that be, Madam?

The slender thread upon which Elizabeth Warren’s claim that she is 1/32 Cherokee rests—a purported 1894 marriage license application—has been exposed as non-existent.  Based on a review of the original marriage records found in the files of the Logan County, Oklahoma Court Clerk’s office in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and the statements of ReJeania Zmek, the Court Clerk of Logan County, Oklahoma, it is likely that the ephemeral 1894 marriage license application never existed.

Prof Warren continued in that interview:

Wall Street [et al.] wants to change the subject.

Actually, Madam, you’re the one who brought it up.  You’re the one who self-identified in the Association of American Law Schools as a minority person for your claimed purpose of “meeting other people like yourself”—never minding that the AALS lists its charges as minority, without breaking out the type of minority.  You’re the one who self-identified at UPenn and at Harvard, with the preferential hiring attached by those institutions’ affirmative action programs.  You’re the one who, just by coincidence, stopped self-identifying as a minority after you achieved tenure at Harvard.  What change of subject?

But this confusion of what is truth isn’t limited to Progressive Senate candidates.  It infects other Progressive candidates, also.  Here’s Candidate Barack Obama at the “Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency” in August 2008, when he wanted the support of a particular group of Americans in the coming election:

Pastor Rick Warren to Barack Obama: Define marriage.

Candidate Obama: I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.

(Then, with his typical hubris, Obama added, “I can afford those civil rights [of civil unions] to others.”)

Here’s President Obama, now appealing to another group [sorry about the opening ad] whose support he desires in the coming election:

I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

Hmm….