In fact, racial discrimination is the only way to prevent racial discrimination — the upshot of which is that, thanks to racial discrimination, racial discrimination is no longer a problem, provided you learn to view certain racial discrimination as non-discriminatory, and provided you learn to couch any questions about such racial discrimination as racist and discriminatory. I know this because the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals told me so, and because Sandra Day O’Connor, whose wisdom simply cannot be constrained by something so hoary and out of date as the Constitution, wrote the deciding opinion on the matter, using the term “holistic” where “textualism” might have been a better fit (while still maintaining she was a Supreme Court Justice, where philosopher queen was clearly the better fit. Miers!).
Michael Barone:
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 overturned the explicit quotas used by the University of Michigan’s undergraduate college but, in a controlling opinion by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, approved the “holistic” admissions process of Michigan’s law school.
The 6th Circuit ruling seems unlikely to stand. Its citation of Supreme Court precedents is unpersuasive. The proposition that a state’s voters cannot ban racial discrimination seems palpably absurd.
But it does stand as a monument to the contortions that liberal lawyers and judges will go through to perpetuate the racial quotas and preferences that have become embedded in important parts of American life.
The first step in these contortions is to ignore the fact that any racial quota or preference violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discriminating by race is racial discrimination, even if your intention is to help black people.
The next step is, as the 6th Circuit panel did explicitly and O’Connor did more surreptitiously, to close your eyes to the fact that racial quotas and preferences are being employed. The admissions directors and the corporate human relations departments are just being, um, “holistic.”
All of which is intellectually dishonest and corrosive to honest discourse.
In my view the strongest argument against racial quotas and preferences is that they tend to cast a pall of illegitimacy over the achievements of the intended beneficiaries. We see this every time a liberal critic questions the competence of Justice Clarence Thomas.
— Whereas in my view, the strongest argument against racial quotas and preferences is that they are racial quotas and preferences, and so should be unconstitutional on their face, Justice Powell’s rationalizations in Bakke notwithstanding.
But then, I’m a “purist.”
Within colleges and universities the existence of racial quotas and preferences, unacknowledged but understood by everyone, tends to make relations between blacks and whites more tense and distant. We see all-black dorms on campus, separate orientations for students of color, separate graduation ceremonies — everything but separate drinking fountains.
In addition, the obvious unfairness of racial quotas and preferences has led to the adoption of speech codes to suppress any criticism and prohibit any statement that makes someone feel uncomfortable. Campuses that were once havens of free speech are now patrolled and regulated by thought police. Intellectual dishonesty has become a job requirement for university administrators.
The argument for racial quotas and preferences is that every sort of talent and ability is equally distributed among every conceivable category of persons, but that quotas and preferences are needed to identify qualified members of groups that were objects of discrimination in the past.
But the idea of equal distribution of talents and abilities, as Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray showed definitively in their 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” is simply factually wrong.
The ordinary American knows this — and knows also that that is not a rational basis for discriminating against members of any group. It’s not very hard to understand that beneath any group average there is a wide range of individual abilities.
Why are university and legal elites so determined to preserve racial quotas and preferences? One reason, I suspect, is that they can’t bear to see lower percentages of blacks in the institutions they run than you find in the U.S. Army or many local police departments.
Such attitudes help explain the 6th Circuit decision and indicate that, even if it is overturned, racial quotas and preferences will remain intact, if unacknowledged and disguised, in higher education.
In 2003 O’Connor suggested that we might need such policies for only another 25 years. I’m betting they’ll be around a lot longer than that.
Unfortunately, yes. Unless and until the Supreme Court really does find its balls and kill it off — which is easy enough to do, frankly: simply declare that racial discrimination causes racial discrimination, a contingency that is hardly surprising given that it is racial discrimination, and point out that the Constitution doesn’t allow for such discrimination based on race.
Of course, such a radical pronouncement would require that jurists interpret the law and not make the law, then work backwards to rationalize the law they’ve just written, pretending to have found such justifications through the process of interpretation; and as we around these parts know, legal types are tenaciously reluctant to give up the power to find things in “the words themselves” — divorced from the legislative intent behind them — lest they lose control over remaking reality through appeals to consensus.
The way out is to re-learn how language works. But sadly, too many people lose too much, making a return to the Constitutional republic the founders and framers had in mind unlikely — while the steady move toward the tyranny that comes from decoupling meaning from intent and surrendering it to those who presume to usurp it, continues unabated.
Losing more slowly, I call it. Enjoy.
You can’t end racial discrimination by ending racial discrimination. You can’t balance the budget by spending less. You can’t make America energy independent by developing domestic energy sources. You can’t control our borders by building a fence.
Double-think. You can’t run a country into the ground without it.
This is the thing: back in the day, intelligent, qualified black applicants couldn’t get into college for the simple reason that they were black.
So the answer is to lower the entrance requirements? Skewz me?
Furthermore, a college admissions board is now the LAST place on the planet where an applicant will be turned down for not being white. LAST.
When I taught at Cornell, the black students in my classes were either at the tip-top or the very bottom. The top students had been raised middle-class or wealthy and the bottom ones came from the inner city.
The inner-city kids were way out of their depth. They just weren’t ready for the Ivies. Many of them were game enough to give it the old college try, but I also had one student who sat there all day with her arms crossed, as if to say, “I’ll attend class and all because I realize that I should, but this ain’t actually working for me.” Others were just plain dispirited. Many drop out, “realizing” that they are “failures.”
Besides, when you compare apples to apples–middle- to upper-class, intact, two-parent families–there is no difference in delinquency or achievement rates between black and white families.
If these alleged do-gooders really wanted to help inner-city kids get into college, they’d get them ready prior to application so that they could get in on merit alone.
But that’s too hard, isn’t it? Why put in the extra effort to actually help people when you can score high on the diversity scale by just stuffing them through the door, ready or not?
Orwellian.
Democrats, the Party of “can’t” and cant.
O’Connor is a daffy fascist twat what has a hard-on for citing foreign law and for censoring political speech – she herself was an affirmative action pick for the Supreme Court, and her insipid career is a caution against doing that sort of thing I think
Isn’t this the same court that said the Commerce clause means Congress can force you to purchase something you don’t want or need? Doesn’t sound to me like they know what the fuck they’re doing.
How about this, if racial preferences are OK again, I’m sitting at the front of the fucking bus. I don’t want any shit either, there’s hardly any white folk on the bus any more and I want the front. And if I hear any shit about using the middle exit, I’ll fucking sue. You hear me? I’ll sue your ass for discrimination.
Don’t give me any of that “the front is reserved for the old, crippled and lazy” bullshit, either. I want the front. For almost sixty years now my people have been discriminated against in the fields of music, sports, poetry and public transportation and fuck you, I want the front seat.
OT: This seems very close to “Spread the wealth around”.
Racial discrimination? Pish-posh, race is so 2010. This is is the future of grievance politics.
If these alleged do-gooders really wanted to help inner-city kids get into college, they’d get them ready prior to application so that they could get in on merit alone.
But that’s too hard, isn’t it?
Not when you’re a teacher in Atlanta. They have it figured out!
That’s the public school system that was shamed by a private school that was winning awards and placing their graduates in top colleges by spending only a fraction per student what APS was spending.
The AJC or one of its staff nitwits actually claimed the private school’s success demonstrated the need to give APS even more money. I guess that didn’t go over, so they started cheating instead.
Jeff: Don’t know that I’ve ever commented on your site, but wanted to tell you that this is the sort of writing that had me clicking and listening to “The Girl From Ipanema” every couple of days, awaiting your return to the intertubes . . .
Read the report to the governor for more fun details. It’s fairly bracing. Here’s a few tidbits:
See also Unintended Results, Journal of.
Magic! No cheating there!
There’s a ton more in the reports. One of the dryer comments was:
Emphasis mine. Basically these school officials who have pled the 5th have shortened their own careers, should the state take action. That’s the way I interpret it, anyway, and that’s the way I think it ought to result.
The teachers that cooperated have also merited some action, but I think their consequences should be less severe than that of the ringleaders. For the purposes of this particular scandal, I think that the state also bears some burden of guilt, given that some of the cheating has been going on for over 5 years. A new principal at school X, and test scores improve 25-30% in his first year? The guy must be an education genius. Maybe someone should check into this?