Posted on 01/21/2003 11:55:21 AM PST by mrustow
Toogood Reports [Tuesday, January 21, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]
URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/
Well, George W. Bush has clarified matters: He is against racial quotas. And he is for racial quotas. Whew! I feel so much better now.
In the big affirmative action cases on the Supreme Court docket, Graz and Hamacher v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, white students are suing the University of Michigan/Ann Arbor's undergraduate and law schools, respectively. Like most major public universities, "U of M," as it is known in Ann Arbor, has bounced from one stealth quota admissions system to another, as lawsuits by white applicants whom the system has discriminated against, have bounced after them. The current rigged game for undergraduate admissions has the school giving black, Hispanic, and American Indian applicants 20 points out of a 150-point maximum, based solely on their race or ethnicity. To understand what an outrage this is, consider that an applicant can receive only 12 points for a perfect SAT score (1600). A perfect application essay only counts for three points, but such essays are of dubious value, anyway.
(I'm going to ignore American Indians, because their numbers are negligible.)
The purpose of the 20 points is to rig the admissions process, while claiming that race is only being considered as "a factor," rather than being "the factor." After all, U of M didn't automatically award affirmative action group members the whole 150 points!
As Solicitor General Ted Olson observes in his brief on behalf of the Bush Administration, U of M "believes that diversity 'increase[s] the intellectual vitality of [its] education, scholarship, service and communal life.'"
I'd like someone to explain how admitting intellectually incompetent people, while shutting out competent people, will increase the "intellectual vitality" of a campus. Indeed, since affirmative action is inseparable from the regime of multiculturalism, which at U of M and elsewhere represses intellectual and political dissent, affirmative action is poison to intellectual vitality. As for communal life, affirmative action has brought about a form of self-segregation, whereby black students shun whites, choosing to eat only with other blacks, and even demanding racially segregated dormitories.
In their defense, U of M officials have protested that 'everyone's doing it!' And they are right. Every major public university in America has been violating the civil rights of white and Asian students for over thirty years. But such pervasiveness doesn't make the practices any less criminal or immoral. The practices are forbidden by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act, and even by the unfortunate 1978 majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Bakke case.
The Bakke decision, written by Justice Lewis Powell, forbade racial quotas, but permitted race to be "a factor" – just not THE factor – in admissions decisions. Powell's opinion was unfortunate, because it diverged from the other majority justices, in permitting race to figure in admissions decisions, and because it was an invitation to university officials, most of whom supported the anti-white racism of affirmative action, to thoroughly corrupt the admissions process through re-defined, stealth quotas. And so they did.
The Bad Guys and the Really Bad Guys
Then there is the matter of the President. I never thought there could be a worse corruption problem regarding higher education, than socialists' support of affirmative action. But there is: Conservatives' support of affirmative action. The President has said, "At their core, the Michigan policies amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes perspective students, based solely on their race." And yet, what he proposes is ... a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes perspective students, based solely on their race.
Solicitor General Ted Olson has argued on President George W. Bush's behalf that there are "race-neutral" methods to achieve "diversity." Olson argues that in Texas and California, campus racial diversity rose after these "race-neutral" methods were employed.
There are two things wrong with Olson's claim:
The methods for increasing the percentage of black and Hispanic college students embraced by the Bush brothers have been to guarantee admission to the flagship state universities of their respective states – Texas and Florida – to graduating high school seniors in the top 10% (in Texas) or 20% (in Florida) of their graduating high school class. These plans' critics – including Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY) – have rightfully pointed out, that since many minority schools are de facto segregated, these schemes are merely quotas. (What the critics don't point out, is that the majority of black folks like their schools segregated. Segregation today is something black folks choose for themselves, and impose on other groups, not something those evil white folks impose on blacks.)
Those segregated black schools and Hispanics schools are so bad, that their "top" graduates are no better than mediocre graduates from integrated schools. And so, just as in the Democrats' quota schemes, state schools admit black and Hispanic students with test scores hundreds of points lower than white and Asian admits, while rejecting superior white and Asian applicants.
California has a similar, 4% scheme. And in California, applicants are encouraged to emphasize, in their application essays, "hurdles" they had to overcome, which is a coded way to inform admissions committees that they are black or Hispanic.
Hillary Clinton has also criticized such schemes as being less than ideal for admitting unqualified blacks and Hispanics to graduate and professional schools. What such a criticism reveals, is that for Clinton and her allies, affirmative action is not a remedy for deficits due to past discrimination, or poor schools, which are to be made up during one's undergraduate education, but a permanent racial privilege. Undergraduate affirmative action, graduate and professional school affirmative action, and affirmative action in hiring and contracting, make up an Unholy Trinity that is no longer limited to socialists.
Yet More Free Riders
Socialist attacks on conservative "critics" of affirmative action point out, regarding the Michigan cases, that the conservatives have not complained about "legacies" ("alumni brats" in common usage) and athletes, both of whom are admitted to schools despite failing to meet the schools' academic requirements. Conservatives have long dodged such issues or insisted they are irrelevant, as if merit were a matter of principle, except when it has consequences they dislike. If critics of affirmative action are serious about the merit principle, they will call on their private alma mater to cease admitting alumni brats.
However, in the case of U of M and other public institutions, the alumni brats (and faculty brats) issue really is irrelevant. The admitting of unqualified alumni and faculty brats is a type of corruption endemic to campuses of allegedly highly selective OPUs (overpriced, private universities). Who ever heard of a public university alumnus seeking to get his idiot son admitted to his alma mater? However, in the OPU world, alumni brats are pervasive. (I'm not sure about faculty brats.) When I worked as a fundraiser at Columbia University fifteen years ago, my girlfriend, who was a student there (we met while I was working there), once noted to a girlfriend, "I can always tell when someone's an alumni brat, because they're so dumb." She then gave me a dirty look, because she hated admitting that in front of me, who had attended only public institutions.
OPUs refuse to divulge the numbers of alumni and faculty brats they admit, but my hunch is that they total anywhere from 10-20 % of a given OPU campus' student body, with alumni brats predominating over faculty brats.
Note too that alumni and faculty brats who are intellectually unqualified to attend their respective institutions suffer no more from "stigma" than do their incompetent classmates admitted under affirmative action.
(When older conservatives such as Thomas Sowell talk of such "stigma," they are dating themselves: Early in the history of affirmative action, some black and Hispanic affirmative action admits might have felt stigmatized. In the intervening 38 or so years, however, the merit principle has so eroded in academia, while so many institutional supports for black and Hispanic incompetence have been erected, that today's racial and ethnic quota admits wear their admissions status like a badge of courage.)
The use of athletic scholarships to juice black enrollments is such a pervasive problem among public athletic powerhouses, that even the NCAA admitted to it a few years ago. In Ann Arbor during the late 1980s, the joke among supporters of the perennial national championship contender U of M Wolverines football team, was that former star wide receiver Anthony Carter (who had since moved on to an all-pro career with the NFL's Minnesota Vikings) was so illiterate, that he couldn't sign his own name.
You can follow the merit principle, or you can have nice numbers of black and Hispanic university admits. Anyone who says you can end affirmative action, without the numbers of black and Hispanic admits falling precipitously, is a liar. The reason for this is simple: The black and Hispanic talent pool is too small to legitimately raise black and Hispanic admissions at selective schools. Hence, you can have merit, or you can have corruption.
The shallow talent pool is due either to genetic inferiority or moral inferiority.
Let's deal with blacks, since affirmative action was instituted for blacks, and rationalizations of the scheme have always revolved around blacks.
Explaining Black Academic Failure
1. The explanation that is the most popular in private, but least frequently offered in public, is that of black genetic inferiority. From what I can see, most people of all races and political persuasions, including blacks, believe that blacks are genetically inferior to whites and Asians, in matters of intellect. The pedagogical ideas of black supremacists – that black kids should get test points for "rap skills," and be taught only pidgin English – suggest to me that they have less faith in black intellectual abilities than the average white supremacist does.
White socialists are no better: In 1988, at the height of the Tawana Brawley hoax, a white socialist political operative in New York told me why she and her compatriots did not point out to blacks that Tawana Brawley had never been kidnapped or raped: "You can't expect blacks to participate as equals in public discourse."
The most influential scientific theories of black intellectual inferiority have come from scholars such as J. Phillippe Rushton (Race, Evolution, and Behavior) and the late Richard Herrnstein (The Bell Curve). Such theories' extensive use of statistics notwithstanding, they depend on the twin metaphysical beliefs that intelligence is genetically determined, and that genetic characteristics are group-specific. I say "metaphysical," because I have never seen any scholar provide genetic evidence for such claims. The most sophisticated regression analysis in the world cannot substitute for genetic evidence.
2. The public explanation proferred by socialists: 'Black academic failure is due to racism, especially "racist schools."'
In fact, predominantly black schools have long been in black hands. Most urban black schools are run by incompetent, racist, black principals, and staffed with incompetent, racist, black teachers. Black "educators," leaders, and civilians have for years complained that black schools are largely staffed with uncertified teachers, as if some racist, white conspiracy kept certified teachers out of black schools. And in fact, a racist conspiracy is at fault: A racist, black conspiracy.
Most state certification exams could be passed by a bright sixth-grader. They are dumbed down on an annual basis, so as to make them easier for black and Hispanic testees who have no business teaching children. And yet, black and Hispanic teacher candidates are getting dumber faster than education officials can dumb down the tests.
What no one talks about, is that there is an abundance of competent, certified teachers available for black schools. But the teachers are predominantly white.
Most white teachers know better than to try teaching in black schools, where they are unwelcome. Those who try and make a difference, are made an example of. If a white teacher doesn't respond to the racial epithets and harassment from black students, colleagues and bosses, by quitting or transferring, black educators will arrange for parents or students to brutally assault them. And if violence doesn't do the trick, the white teachers will simply be fired.
Since the 1970s, black public school kids who speak proper English have increasingly been accused by classmates of "acting white," and beaten up. And many black "educators" support the beatings.
The racism holding back black kids today is black racism.
3. The real deal: After coming home from school, black kids spend a fraction as much time as any other racial group doing homework, devoting their time instead to watching TV and playing video games. That is to say, their parents let them fritter away their time. And that applies to middle and upper-middle-class, as well as to working-class and poor blacks. Such sloth is why, I believe, that upper-middle-class black students score no better on standardized tests than do lower-class white students.
And yet, it is understandable that black students do not apply themselves. Middle and upper-middle-class black students know that they will get accepted to top universities, without the required grades and test scores. Working-class and poor black students "know" that there is "no point" to studying, because racism will keep them from having any chance at success. They "know" this, because their middle-class black teachers and administrators constantly tell them so. But somehow, white racism did not keep those black educators from gaining employment and influence.
The Hispanic Factor
Since Hispanics and blacks have little in common, there's no point in talking about them in the same fashion. Hispanics are not a racial, ethnic, or religious group, and while the term initially referred to non-Spaniards from Spanish-speaking countries and their children, it has since been stretched to include both Spaniards, and non-Spanish speakers whose families have been in America for generations, even centuries. Linda Chavez, for instance, is an "Hispanic," even though, as she points out, her family has been here since 1609. "Hispanics" have long functioned, politically, to serve as blacks' political maidservants.
The one thing "Hispanic" students have in common with black students, is that the racist elites of their own group have conspired to cause them to fail academically, through the pedagogical scam known as "bilingual education." So-called bilingual – really, nonlingual – education is the greatest method ever devised to retard language acquisition. Thus have millions of children with Spanish surnames been consigned to academic failure and virtual speechlessness.
But such realities have not stopped Republicans from pandering to Hispanics, as well. George W. Bush supports bilingual education, amnesty for illegal Mexican immigrants (which would end up as amnesty for all illegal immigrants), and is rumored to even support paying billions of dollars in social security benefits to illegal Mexican workers who never paid a dime in social security taxes.
George Bush's pandering to Hispanics will get him about as far as his pandering to blacks will.
George Bush is like a man who goes to the dance with a beautiful, virtuous girl, but instead of dancing with the one that brung him, ignores his girl, and spends the entire night begging for a dance with the town slut, who despises him. The more the slut insults him, the more desperately he pleads with her for a spin around the floor. And as he begs, unbeknownst to him, Lady Virtue leaves the hall.
The embrace of racial and ethnic quotas by the Bush family gives the lie to Republicans' claims that they stand for the merit principle. Unfortunately, the Bush family – sons George W. and Jeb, and father George H.W. – is no more opposed to racial quotas than their socialist "opponents" are. The Bush family is a pillar of America's elite, which includes the "Left" and the "Right," and which lacks a concept of merit. Merit is for the "little people." Like so much in America, the workings of affirmative action are a case of what socialist columnist Sidney Zion calls "the two parties against the people."
To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .
We really think that the question of admission to a State University should be a matter for a State to decide. We opposed Federal intervention when the attack was on segregation and we oppose Federal intervention when the attack is on forced integration, for the sake of integration. The reason is that we do not believe that the 14th Amendment was ever validly ratified, and all of these cases on either side of the battle over racial patterns are brought under the assumption that it was. (See the comments on the same in Conservative Pot-Pourri.)
On the question of race and intellectual aptitude, the answers are not quite so simplistic as the discussion, here, would suggest. While there are unqestionably differences in the overall averages of the different tested performances of many racial and ethnic groups, there is considerable variation in areas of excellence, also. Because one has an overall high I.Q., does not mean that one is a master of all mental traits; nor does the fact that one has a considerably lower overall I.Q., mean that one is necessarily deficient in all important mental traits.
There is a great deal that may be done to help the individual child, regardless of his overall makeup, utilize his own particular aptitudes in the most advantageous way. What needs to be done, first, is to get the political and social dogmatists out of education; and to staff each school, regardless of its racial character, with teachers who will really care to address the needs of the individual children in that particular school. That is what needs to be done; but we are not so foolish as to hold our breath until it is done. Meanwhile, public education becomes more and more a waste of time for children of all races.
William Flax
Here is where he and many others make the fatal mistake. Bubba-2 is NOT a conservative. He doesn't even really claim to be one. He claims to be a "compassionate conservative" so that he can lay claim to being a leftist and a conservative at the same time. What he really is is a elitist/royalist. He is more comfortable with Teddy Kennedy that he would be with Ron Paul.
Of course. He is talking out both sides of his mouth,lying in a effort to convince people on both sides that he agrees with them. Why else do you think I call him Bubba-2?
Most conservatives are not fooled!
Sorry,I can't agree,here. Seems like there are a awful lot of Bush-Bots who worship the ground he walks on,and they consider themselves to be "conservatives". Of course,he is one blowjob away from losing their love. He can give America away to Mexico and China,and they don't give a damn,but let him get one blowjob and he would be history.
Here is where he and many others make the fatal mistake. Bubba-2 is NOT a conservative. He doesn't even really claim to be one. He claims to be a "compassionate conservative" so that he can lay claim to being a leftist and a conservative at the same time. What he really is is a elitist/royalist. He is more comfortable with Teddy Kennedy that he would be with Ron Paul.
I respectfully disagree with your charge that George W. Bush (aka Bubba-2) is "NOT a conservative." He certainly is a conservative. There is a little place in his brain that is clearly marked, "conservative." Right between the places marked "socialist" and "pragmatist," respectively.
Which is why the President got into Yale based upon its "legacy admissions policy."
As for the small part of his brain that is labeled as "conservative",I'd be willing to bet the part of Homer Simpson's brain that is labeled "Butterfinger" is bigger.
From the January 19, 2003 Dallas Morning News:
The president refuses to take a stand on affirmative action.
by Terry Eastland
01/20/2003 12:00:00 AM
ON WEDNESDAY, President Bush announced that his administration would file briefs in opposition to the University of Michigan affirmative action policies now before the Supreme Court. Bush apparently would be taking, as one news account put it, a "hard-line" position.
But then, late Thursday night, Solicitor General Theodore Olson filed the briefs. To be sure, they ask the court to declare the Michigan policies unconstitutional. But they do so in a way that hardly can be called "hard-line." In fact, by avoiding key issues in the litigation, the briefs would permit the illegal and immoral business at the core of the Michigan policies--using race (and ethnicity) to favor and disfavor applicants.
The administration argues that the race-based admissions policies (one is at the undergraduate school, the other at the law school) are unconstitutional for two reasons. First, they employ quotas. And, second, school officials resorted to race-based policies without first using "race-neutral alternatives."
The administration's arguments go only so far. If the court should accept the administration's advice, no one should be surprised if admissions officers at Michigan soon are back to admitting by race.
Consider the quota argument. Twenty-five years ago in the Bakke case, the court reviewed a California medical school admissions policy that reserved 16 of the 100 seats in each class for members of certain minority groups. The court judged that a quota and struck it down. The administration wants the court to see Michigan in terms of Bakke, advising that the school's policies use quotas that, though "disguised," are illegal under that landmark ruling.
When Bakke was handed down, David Saxon, then the president of the University of California, greeted the decision as a "great victory." He explained, "Any ruling that introduces restriction on the use of race is going to make it more difficult but not very much more difficult." Saxon could say that because, in Bakke, the court also permitted race-based admissions, provided they weren't quotas.
Saxon quickly was proved a prophet, as higher education officials continued to use race in admissions, sometimes with "disguised" quotas such as those the administration rightly deplores in the Michigan cases. But who can doubt that if "disguised" quotas now are struck down, such a "restriction on the use of race" again will "make it more difficult but not very much more difficult" to admit by race?
The question the administration studiously avoids--the question insistently raised in affirmative action litigation in no fewer than four different courts of appeals--is whether indeed a public university may reward or penalize prospective students on the basis of race.
Amazingly, the administration has no opinion on whether Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote the influential opinion in Bakke, was right to say that, under the Constitution, it is OK for admissions officers to regard race as "a plus" that can "tip the balance" in an applicant's favor.
Nor does the administration have an opinion on the constitutionality of the so-called diversity rationale Michigan asserts to justify its racial policies. Here again the administration avoids Powell, for it also was in Bakke that Powell said that achieving a diverse student body qualified as a "compelling interest" of the kind necessary under the Constitution to permit a state to draw distinctions--and discriminate--on the basis of race.
The administration's avoidance of Powell on this point may be regarded as ingenious, since it argues, fairly enough in light of the court's precedents, that regardless of the merits of a state's asserted justification for race-based policies, it may not use them "without considering race-neutral alternatives and employing them if they would prove efficacious."
But the argument, however creative, cuts only so deep. It says only what Michigan must do first. What if, the court having ruled as the administration suggests, Michigan were to use "race-neutral alternatives" but found they weren't "efficacious"? It then could use race-based policies.
A footnote in one of the briefs ponders that eventuality: "Then [but not now!] the question whether race could ever be a consideration would arise." To answer that question, of course, you would need to know, as the footnote says, whether Michigan had a truly constitutional compelling interest. Which is to say: whether the diversity rationale is constitutional. The footnote ends, "The court need not reach that question in this case."
But the court probably will reach that question. The courts of appeals are divided over diversity, and the court is unlikely to have taken Michigan only to punt the big issues - as, to its discredit, the administration has. Staying out of the cases would have been better than entering them with so little to say.
Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.
The are going to give reparations before Bush is done I fear..
I'm wondering if he read The Bell Curve, or alternatively what he thinks 'genetic evidence' is.
That's one of those 'two wrongs make a right' arguments, isn't it?
I only know that they act that way.
I'm not 'enlightened' enough to argue pro/con for this subject. I come from the 'dinosaur age', where college admissions/grades achieved/effort involved, did NOT come in different colors.
If Michael Jackson can check the "black" box (or would he be checking the "white" box?) then anyone can.
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