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Posted on 01/22/2003 12:05:08 AM PST by JohnHuang2
In what is surely an unusual move, given that the Bush administration has no legal involvement in the case, the president has announced his intention to file a brief challenging racial preferences in student admissions at the University of Michigan.
Following Mr. Bush's deft deployment of the Trent Lott affair to curry electoral favor with minorities, it appears that by taking a stand ostensibly against affirmative action the president has done an about face.
Or has he?
Anyone who suggests the Michigan undergraduate and law school programs are not racist cannot be serious, and if he is serious, should not be taken seriously. At the undergraduate level, African-American, non-white Hispanic and Native-American students receive 20 points out of 150 solely because of their race. A perfect SAT score nets a student only 12 points. It takes 100 points to gain admission, making the hue of one's skin good for a fifth of the admission points. The law school completes the project with a relatively straightforward quota.
Michigan is not unusual. Many undergraduate institutions and most law schools and medical schools in the U.S. practice affirmative action. Like the Constitution, "the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the government no license to set quotas for hiring personnel by private enterprise or admitting students to institutions of higher learning, yet the federal bureaucracy acts as if it had," writes Harvard scholar, Richard Pipes.
Any public institution practicing affirmative action thus opens itself up to 14th Amendment due process and equal protection claims.
Politicking aside, a closer look at the Bush brief should quell denunciations from Democrats and minorities. Bush agrees that the American "Constitution makes it clear that people of all races must be treated equally under the law."
"Yet we know that our society has not fully achieved that ideal," he equivocates. "Racial prejudice is a reality in America."
The president infers the prevalence of deep-seated racism from the fact that African-Americans lag behind whites in academic and socio-economic achievements. This, of course, is a post hoc error, one that most Americans reject, root and branch.
Upheld by Mr. Bush, this error is the central tenet of affirmative action. According to the president's diversity doxology, justice is achieved when racial and ethnic groups are reflected in academia and in the professions in proportion to their presence in the larger population, an impossibility considering individual and age-long inter-group differences. Absent such representation, Mr. Bush concludes that racism reigns.
This non sequitur is even harder to sustain when considering the Asian minority. In professions and academic pursuits where mathematical precocity is a factor, Asians are over-represented and consistently outperform whites. If under-representation signals injustice, then over-representation must too reflect an unfair advantage. Surely justice demands that over-representation be similarly corrected by the state?
Malaysian governments certainly thought so. They adopted this logic toward their Chinese population, whose starting status as indentured laborers didn't stop them from rising to dominate business, professions and universities. To achieve "racial balance," pro-Malaysian affirmative action laws were mandated in all government-controlled institutions.
Did not Hitler awaken to the same logic? In proportion to their numbers, Jews also were over-represented in the economic and cultural life of Germany. In Malaysia, pogroms against the Chinese were not regarded unfavorably. It's far from hyperbolic to mention that Hitler used the state apparatus to find a Final Solution to the Jewish advantage.
The U.S. federal government has gone the Malaysian route for its black minority. As syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts reports, "in all 22 independent federal agencies and in 16 of 17 executive departments, blacks are massively over-represented." Understandably, the plaintiffs in the Michigan case want the state to relinquish its compelling interest in promoting whatever it construes as diversity.
Bush refuses to second this; his brief shies away from addressing "the outer bounds of the Constitution," but only the case in its narrowest sense. Since he accepts racial discrimination as a cause for African-Americans' lag in achievement, the president intends to reject only the methods associated with this faulty formulation. Diversity directives are to go full throttle ahead so long as they are "racially-neutral."
Mr. Bush's "road map" includes encouraging schools to come up with racial cue cards such as "a statement people can make about whether they've overcome hardship." This quest is unlikely to encompass the Midwestern experience.
The Condi, (Andy) Card and Karl (Rove) Crack Team has achieved a triumph of triangulation. The Bush base, of which 92 percent is white, will swallow the bait, believing, as it did after the landmark 1978 case of Bakke, that quotas had been outlawed. Despite Bakke, universities continued to take race into account. Same in this case: With presidential imprimatur, the Michigan point system will be palliated somewhat, but business as usual will see public funds diverted to other, less conspicuous, race-friendly recruiting methods, much to the glee of the "civil rights" industry.
You don't state one fact to support your comments but we're supposed to believe what you write in your posts.
YOU NEED TO BACK UP WHAT YOU SAY OR you look like an idiot?
Sad, but true.
Because of Lan Lee the country has been over run by illegal aliens, his wanton quota system didn’t stop with just the universities, his socialist agenda was for multiculturalism in spite of the United States Constitution. Bill Lan Lee was Bill and Hillary’s pet and they gave him free reign – he was never to my knowledge, confirmed by congress.
This is a true statement. In fact, this will always be a true statement. People like to be around people like themselves. As long as the minorities insist on preserving their own culture rather than melting into the great pot of American culture, the rest of us won't want to put up with them.
A wealthy black family that acts like hip-hop thugs only fits in in the ghetto. A middle class black family that acts like any other middle class family fits in everywhere.
Oddly enough this was the success of the Cosby show. they may have been black but they were just like us.
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