Posted on 12/15/2015 9:51:26 AM PST by Kaslin
There are few more repugnant spectacles among the liberal elites of this country than the festival of smugness that follows any comment by a conservative public figure that can be twisted into a racial slight.
This week it is Justice Antonin Scalia's turn. In an oral argument over affirmative action, Scalia said:
"There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to -- to get them in the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less advanced school, a less -- a slower track school where they do well."
Sure, maybe Scalia should have said "some" African-American students, but frankly, he shouldn't have to. After a career in public life, he doesn't need to prove his bona fides to anyone. Everyone is, in effect, on notice that this brilliant jurist is the farthest thing from a racist.
But you know this game works. A conservative says something that can be misinterpreted, and the self-righteous, bad-faith denunciations pour out like sewage in a flood. On "Meet the Press," Ted Koppel compared Scalia to the hapless Al Campanis, and said:
"I was thinking both of them have the same problem. It's generational. He really doesn't think he is saying untoward. This is the kind of thing that someone of Antonin Scalia's generation has been saying all his life. Al Campanis did the same thing. But the key thing is being a Supreme Court justice means never having to say you're sorry."
The rest of the crew on MTP chimed in with similar head shaking and invocations of bad popular fiction. Now, leaving Campanis aside (I have my doubts that he was a racist either; he got caught up in one of America's fits of righteous indignation), who does Koppel think he is? First of all, he's almost exactly four years younger than Scalia, so spare us the generational snobbery. Second, he (like the other panelists) is clearly unfamiliar with the argument Scalia was referencing. Molly Ball of The Atlantic, Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal, Helene Cooper of The New York Times and, of course, Chuck Todd himself all expressed regret that Scalia can "get away with it" and noted that this explains why he opposes cameras in the Supreme Court.
Who pays these people for their commentary? This is risible. Supreme Court oral arguments are fully available to the public in print and audio form. Is Scalia trying to hide his racism by having it only unavailable on video? Quite a strategy.
The usual people issued denunciations and everyone had a good "two minutes hate," as George Orwell might have put it.
But Scalia has nothing for which to apologize (though his critics do). He was referring to a perfectly plausible theory about the effects of affirmative action. He was not saying that all African-American students are slower than others, merely that the widespread practice of accepting black students into colleges with much worse grades and scores than the majority of students has certain unfortunate effects. As Stuart Taylor Jr. and Richard H. Sander explain in their book "Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It," there is a good deal of evidence (and more has been produced since the book's publication) that black students who "benefit" from affirmative action in admission, and thus attend schools for which they are less prepared than their peers, are less likely to major in difficult but remunerative subjects such as engineering and science, more likely to wind up in the bottom 10th of the student body, and, most important, less likely to graduate than their peers.
What the "Mismatch" authors and others have described as the "cascade effect" means that at every level of college except for the very top, black students are more likely to attend colleges for which they are unprepared and thus many are set up to fail. That might be important, right, Ted Koppel?
One of the most telling statistics that is rarely mentioned in this debate comes from California, where Proposition 209 banned racial preferences by law in 1996. Advocates of affirmative action note that minority enrollments dropped thereafter. Yes, but graduation rates increased.
Perhaps the mismatch theory is wrong. Perhaps the benefits of attending more prestigious schools than you are prepared for outweigh the disadvantages (though this leaves unaddressed the constitutional problem of discriminating by race at all). But surely this is a worthy debate for people of goodwill to have. If we had people of goodwill.
As a group it is undeniably true that blacks are not as academically proficient as other races. So whether he was quoting or making a direct statement what is the issue?
The issue is, of course, that we are not allowed to talk about that. We are expected to pretend all races perform equally on IQ tests, in school and in a competitive job market.
The result? Many billions of dollars spent on a myriad of programs that have no possibility of succeeding.
Herrnstein and Murray nailed it. The world ignored it.
Well, in reality for the most part employers don’t give a shyt where you got your degree. So what difference does it really make?
This is not a raw new topic. Two fairly respected black gentlemen from the the world of academe, Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams have been saying that precise thing for a decade or more. That by affirmative action, a promising young black student will be pushed into an ivory tower school, where they are slightly out of their depth, and often flounder, fail and are washed out, and subsequently fail to ever recover.
Whereas, if that student had gone to a slightly less prestigious college, they would probably have been more at home, excelled in their studies, and gone on to a successful life.
The REAL shame, in the opinion of Sowell and Williams, is that the management of the ivory tower schools do not give a damn about that outcome. By admitting the borderline students they have fulfilled their bureaucratic obligation, and it is of no concern to them whether those students pass or fail.
The good Justice, and then Trump, were merely pointing out this glaring misguided, mistaken reality. But as is usually the case, THEY are being castigated for pointing it out, rather than the government and high level college management, who are hellbent on perpetuating it.
“The good Justice, and then Trump, were merely pointing out this glaring misguided, mistaken reality. But as is usually the case, THEY are being castigated for pointing it out, rather than the government and high level college management, who are hellbent on perpetuating it.”
I think you’re a little mixed up. Trump slammed Justice Scalia for his utterances. And in doing so drew ire from both Limbaugh and Levin.
AND NOTICE HOW NO ONE IS DISCUSSING IF SCALIA IS WRONG?
(Answer: No)
Uh, Trump criticized Scalia. And by logical inference, he disagrees with Sowell, Williams and Mona.
And that now includes Donald Trump.
And people wonder why American business can't complete.
The issue is, of course, that we must vigorously and repeatedly BREAK the rules of political correctness, or we are lost.
"Political Correctness" is a fancy phrase for "lying".
My bad.
Trump was wrong, IMHO.
Won’t throw him overboard, though.
He’s correct on so many other items that are far more crucial to our National survival.
Thanks for clearing that up.
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