From Gail Heriot, professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Affirmative Action Backfires”:
Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action — and indeed, among those who were not.
Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions — about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been “matched” to the wrong school.
No one claims the findings in Mr. Sander’s study, “A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools,” are the last word on the subject. Although so far his work has held up to scrutiny at least as well as that of his critics, all fair-minded scholars agree that more research is necessary before the “mismatch thesis” can be definitively accepted or rejected.
Unfortunately, fair-minded scholars are hard to come by when the issue is affirmative action. Some of the same people who argue Mr. Sander’s data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they apparently don’t want you — or anyone else — to know.
Take William Kidder, a University of California staff advisor and co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander’s study. When Mr. Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure “risks stigmatizing African American attorneys.” At the same time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling over sideways, gleefully warned that the state bar would be sued if it cooperated with Mr. Sander.
Got that? Facts used as for demographic studies, the argument goes, must be kept hidden from those doing such studies, the very point of which is to examine whether the social programs driving the results are, in fact, working. And the Society of American Law Teachers will sue to make sure these facts are kept hidden — their concern being that a study of those facts could show poorly on the kind of public policy “help” for (preferred) minority groups they have long supported. To justify this anti-intellectual roadblock? They have the audacity to claim that they are doing so for the Blacks’ own good.
Like the benevolent masters of old.
The sheer arrogance here is astounding; the cynicism, revolting. Tendentious ideologues like Dr Ric Caric of Morehead State can argue that professors like Herriot are only interested in such “facts” because they are closet Klansfolk; or that studies like Sander’s are racially-motivated “science”, a form of cultural eugenics that uses “white logic” and status quo thinking about “outcomes” and “fairness” (as opposed to far more acceptable metric of feeling and good intentions) to promote the “racist” policy of color blindness and the ascendancy of individual difference over group difference as the real measure of a diverse society.
But that kind of faux-intellectual tripe only passes muster in an academic culture (which, troublingly, extends often to elite policy making) increasingly given to inbreeding and wagon circling: the public at large remains largely unpersuaded by the tortured logic and historical cherrypicking that informs arguments by Caric and other progressive ideologues who would rather a broken system be sustained indefinitely than admit they’ve fought tirelessly for a failed set of policies — which, ironically, they are almost compelled to do, because should they suddenly switch allegiances and admit they’d erred, these affirmative action stalwarts would be conceding (thanks to years of strained efforts to control the characterization of those on both “sides” in the race-based affirmative action debate) that they are themselves “racists” (or, worse, racist enablers, intellectual Kleagles who transmit extremism by way of “code words” like “fairness” and “color-blindness”).
Sadly, the State Bar’s Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the pressure. The committee members didn’t formally explain their decision to deny Mr. Sander’s request for this data (in which no names would be disclosed), but the root cause is clear: Over the last 40 years, many distinguished citizens — university presidents, judges, philanthropists and other leaders — have built their reputations on their support for race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs as part of the resulting diversity bureaucracy.
If the policy is not working, they, too, don’t want anyone to know.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hopes that it can persuade the State Bar to reconsider. Its soon-to-be released report on affirmative action in law schools specifically calls for state bar authorities to cooperate with qualified scholars studying the mismatch issue. The recommendation is modest. The commission doesn’t claim that Mr. Sander is right or his critics wrong. It simply seeks to encourage and facilitate important research.
The Commission’s deeper purpose is to remind those who support and administer affirmative action polices that good intentions are not enough. Consequences also matter. And conscious, deliberately chosen ignorance is not a good-faith option
Mr. Sander’s original article noted that when elite law schools lower their academic standards in order to admit a more racially diverse class, schools one or two tiers down feel they must do the same. As a result, there is now a serious gap in academic credentials between minority and non-minority law students across the pecking order, with the average black student’s academic index more than two standard deviations below that of his average white classmate.
Not surprisingly, such a gap leads to problems. Students who attend schools where their academic credentials are substantially below those of their fellow students tend to perform poorly.
The reason is simple: While some students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.
Uncontroversial, sure. But for many progressives, the (philosophical) answer is to uniformly lower all standards until everyone can claim the same degree of minimal competency.
Get rid of letter grades. Stop keeping score at little league games. Demonize competition as “masculine.” Stop handing out “prizes” unless everyone gets one. And on and on and on, until any kind of firm metric that delineates based on “merit” (well, other than a dogged belief that those who stand against such delineations merit greater moral standing than the racist, sexist, homophobes who continue to rely on such “fact-based” white patriarchal measures) is seen as promoting an unfair and culturally-weighted idea of “fairness” that need to be deconstructed, then reconstructed under the Utopian guidance of progressive policy makers.
Continues Heriot:
Supporters of race-based admissions argue that, despite the likelihood of poor grades, minority students are still better off accepting the benefit of a preference and graduating from a more prestigious school. But Mr. Sander’s research suggests that just the opposite may be true — that law students, no matter what their race, may learn less, not more, when they enroll in schools for which they are not academically prepared. Students who could have performed well at less competitive schools may end up lost and demoralized. As a result, they may fail the bar.
Specifically, Mr. Sander found that when black and white students with similar academic credentials compete against each other at the same school, they earn about the same grades. Similarly, when black and white students with similar grades from the same tier law school take the bar examination, they pass at about the same rate.
Yet, paradoxically, black students as a whole have dramatically lower bar passage rates than white students with similar credentials. Something is wrong.
[…]
Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to use color-blind [read: RACIST!] admissions policies, fewer black law students would be admitted to law schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those who were admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In the end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567) and more would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the current system of race preferences. Obviously, these figures are just approximations, but they are troubling nonetheless.
Mr. Sander has his critics — some thoughtful, some just strident — but so far none has offered a plausible alternative explanation for the data. Of course, Mr. Sander doesn’t need to be proven 100% correct for his research to be devastating news for affirmative-action supporters.
Suppose the consequences of race-based admissions turn out to be a wash — neither increasing nor decreasing the number of minority attorneys. In that case, few people would think it worth the costs, not least among them the human costs that result from the failure of the supposed beneficiaries to graduate and pass the bar.
This last is a crucial point. The vast majority of those who continue to support race-based affirmative action do so, I believe, out of a genuine belief that they are helping those whom history, or demography, or poverty, have held down as a group. They differ from the ideologues and social engineers whose goal it is to see proportional representation and the strenghtening of identity politics, both of which carry with them a way of approximating the political affiliation of those granted power, and so are a way to control (ideological) power distribution.
Should it turn out, then, that race-based affirmative action is providing no net gain in the condition of those it is ostensibly employed to aid, the program’s negative aspects — its bald racialism, its contribution to keeping alive racial animus, its affront to founding principles of individualism and Constitutional principles of equality — will take on more weight, and those who provisionally support such programs out of a (misinformed) sense of social justice will almost certainly reconsider their support.
And doing so would devastate the identity politics movement and those so heavily invested in it.
Under current practices, only 45% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar on their first attempt as opposed to over 78% of whites. Even after multiple tries, only 57% of blacks succeed. The rest are often saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt. How great an increase in the number of black attorneys is needed to justify these costs?
The most important other recommendation of the Civil Rights Commission is a call for transparency. As a matter of consumer fairness, law school applicants — regardless of race — need to know the statistical likelihood that someone with their academic credentials will successfully graduate and pass the bar. Once informed, they can better decide whether to undertake the risk of attending that particular school, or any law school at all. If law schools are unwilling to undertake this simple reform, it should be mandated by law.
[…]
Decades of law students have relied upon the good faith of law school officials to tell them what they needed to know. For the 43% of black law students who never became lawyers, maybe that reliance was misplaced.
But what the hell — so long as the cover of the brochures continue to look like Benetton ads, who’s going to complain, right?
(h/t a fine scotch)
I saw this first-hand at Cornell: you could always tell the affirmative-action students because they were sitting there, arms crossed across their chests or staring off into space. They were in over their heads, they knew it, and if they thought they were stupid before, they really did then.
You could also tell the legacies, because they didn’t seem all that interested in actually attending class or doing work. They were there because they were expected to be, not because they had worked for it.
If we want to help the underprivileged (and let’s be honest, it doesn’t come from having dark skin but from being dirt poor), the extra boost needs to come much earlier in the process. If we’re waiting until college to give them a leg up, we’re really too late.
And doing those poor kids no favors at all. AA came into play under the assumption that colleges wouldn’t admit minorities unless they were forced to at the point of legislation, but now, can anyone seriously think that admissions would look less favorably at black students; applications only because they were black?
If you want to help the underprivileged get a college education, make sure they learn their lessons starting in kindergarten. Quit doing the social promotion thing. And start helping poor people get married and stay married while raising kids. That’s their best bet.
Nearly every question of policy is an empirical question. If we can’t sort out what works and what doesn’t by reference to the data, we’re left with shouting slogans and throwing rocks.
If someone wants to deny you access to data for the purposes of conducting transparent and peer-reviewed research, they’re hiding something.
The Thernstroms made this argument, and for that, people like Caric label them racist.
I despise, intellectually, at least, left-wing academics who promote policy to massage their own egos.
That they then turn around and have the temerity to sublimate their guilt by turning those they know to be more intellectually rigorious than they could ever be into “racists” — and then agree, en masse, to insist this is so, even if to do so means turning “color-blindness” into “primary racism” — is a testament to how ugly an orthodoxy can become when it insists on being left unchallenged.
Reactionary leftist show their racism.
Why am I not surprised?
Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure “risks stigmatizing African American attorneys…
Wouldn’t it be the other way around? If Sanders’ numbers hold up, wouldn’t that show everyone that African-Americans who graduate law school & pass the bar do so because of their own innate intelligence, skills & hard work, and not because they were given a pass based on their skin color?
Dr.Steve:
Does this remind you of the refusal by James Hanson at NASA to share his temperature data with the guy who ended up re-engineering the data, resulting in a conclusion that the temperature swings were not as dramatic nor as recent as Hanson’s study indicated? It would seem that such a common practice by anyone seeking to deny data for legitimate studies exposes them to suspicion that they have something to hide.
Although I suspect they may take Hanson’s route and simply proclaim that the data has been twisted and corrupted.
I read this the other day and I knew that you’d get to it.
Some beneficiaries of AA policy receive the credentials of lawyers, physicians, scientists etc., but are manifestly unable to perform many of the objectively-specified duties of such professions. Why? Because AA policy grad/professional school policy sets a lower standard of admittance and graduation for them than that required of non-AA beneficiaries (obviously).
The result? The capabilities of all black/Hispanic/female professionals become suspect.
Even many black people know this; some are especially hesitant to avail themselves of the services of a black physician for this very reason. (This does not mean that many black professionals have not taken the individual responsibility of far exceeding the standards expected of them in their professions. What it does mean is that some people are not willing to roll the AA di when it comes to their lives, racial solidarity be damned.)
AA has succeeded in enhancing the idea that blacks, etc., are inferior. Sometimes I wonder whether that is the actual goal of those who advocate the continuation of AA long past its usefulness.
Thanks a lot, Ceric, et al.
Would you be so kind as to close that tag for me?
Interestingly, I have been arguing this same theory for years, based entirely on common sense, personal experience and anecdotal evidence.
The theory, to me, seems like common sense – not just for law school, obviously, but for all endeavors. The idea that you can just plop anyone into any situation (i.e., an inner city kid with a 1100 SAT score being accepted at Harvard) and they will do just as well as anyone else (i.e., kids from better high school and who got 1500 or better on their SATs) defies common sense. Sure, there will be the exception to the rule, but in general, it is a recipe for failure.
And, what’s worse, AA actually destroys any incentive for those schools/kids to do better. Why would anyone work the extra 20 hours a week on studying/homework if you know you can get into Harvard based on AA without doing the work? If public school X can say it places y% of kids in top level schools, then it sounds like that school is pretty good, doesn’t it – even if it is all based on AA and not merit.
The whole point of affirmative action (and how it was sold, and continues to be sold) was supposed to be that if all other factors were equal, the employer, school, etc. would then lean towards the underrepresented minority candidate.
If that were how AA actually worked, we would likely all support it. It never did work that way, and it does not. Standards are lowered dramatically so that certain candidates are allowed access to jobs, school, etc. regardless of their unfitness by the standards. (Again, this brings up a recurring theme I have in my comments – why does the left always have to lie to get its policies enacted? The left always vehemently denies that standards are lowered for AA.)
Moreover, AA in turn leads to those who see such things happening devaluing minorities success or achievments. After all, as I have asked many times in the past, who would volunteer to have the AA heart surgeon (i.e., got into the school b/c of AA, was hired by the hospital b/c of AA) instead of a non-AA heart surgeon operate on them? It is simply rational (because of AA) for people to have a generalization that minorities are less likely to have truly earned their positions.
It also creates anger and bitterness. If I work my tail off to get into Harvard and I come from lower or even middle class, and get straight As, score 1500 on my SAT, and am denied to allow someone with much lower grades and SAT based on race – how am I not going to be angry? Or, if I do get in, but see others around me who don’t deserve to be there, how do I not develop resentment?
Great Banana,
Great minds think alike. :-)
For someone with the name “Great Banana”, you make lots of sense.
Are you perhaps the fifth Banana Split?
One banana, two banana, three banana, four.
Four bananas make a bunch and so do many more.
BJTexs,
I don’t know if there was any skulduggery in Hanson’s data, but it’s pretty damning that someone on his team didn’t run a simple visual check on the time series to see that discontinuity. Not sharing just makes it more likely that something like that won’t be caught.
I couldn’t find anything wrong with the second round of Lancet stuff on Iraq excess mortality as the authors described it, but Burnham et al. refused (politely) to share their data, and even the routines they ran to analyze it. Not sharing the names of respondents from the neighborhood clusters is one thing — these guys wouldn’t share their programs. What’s confidential about a SAS editor file, anyway?
When the government pays me for program evaluations I have to give them everything — the data, all the routines that operate on it, and all my results. That’s as it should be. The “science” part of social science means replicability is one of the standards we have to live up to. No replicability, no falsifiability from a practical standpoint, which means no science.
Jeff, that’s a tremendous post.
So my question is: How are we to objectify you? By passing some kind of third level of intellectualization of racial sterotypes, you are now providing cover for those like Sanders who, by their studies (if incomplete in their access to followup data) provide intellectual cover for the Kleagles, Klansmen and Aryan brothers.
Double Super Secret Racism Enabler©? Mega Bigotine Coverer©?
Does this new designation of your racial perfidy come with a black hooded cloak, a case of Jeam Beam and a year’s supply of genuine imitation medieval torches?
Inquiring
closet bigots,minds want to know!Baldilocks,
Yeah, but you said it better and faster.
– GB
DrSteve;
This is obviously your field (and so far from mine as to be on Neptune.) I have a daughter who is just starting to get her Executive MBA with the plan to eventually get a full Masters in International Finance and Econometrics (she’s doing Drexel’s program for working adults.) She loves this stuff and I feel like the village idiot arounbd her on this topic.
Please explain to me the mind set of someone like Burnham and Hanson when it comes to transparency of methods and data. Why shouldn’t I be suspicious, as a lowly layman, of anyone who publishes a widely quoted study who refuses to share data and methods for peer review? Kidder was looking to protect data he didn’t own from a political perspective, so I get that. The others must have a component to their obstinance that is unscientific, whether it be ego or political or policy orientation or being beholden to someone or some group.
Pardon my naivete but this interests me and I don’t want to just have a kneejerk reaction that it’s all about promoting a particular agenda.
Lack of affirmative action causes global warming. Google it.
BJTexas,
I am working on my PH.D in biometrics and I think I can answer this one.
There are conflicting interests within a researcher. You only get to move up if you publish. You only get to move up if you publish new and exciting stuff. As a scientist you need and want others to be able to replicate your studies and get the same results if they use the same data.
The need to be unique and replicatable is a bind when working on large publicly funded data sets.
If you share data others might scoop you. If you don’t you call into question your results. Plus, being famous for your conclusions, not your methods, can cause a desire to retreat into a shell that deflects criticism of your conclusions.
Given that these guys are publicly funded researchers and they won’t catch any breaks if they are wrong (imagine the hearings next time they asked for money) I think it was trying to self-protect. Being wrong so bad will make these guys a laughingstock.
Bad move, but I can understand the urge to do so. Hope I am never in there shoes. If I am I hope that I will be giving a press conference saying ‘I made a mistake, a lot of the stuff we did was wrong, and now we need to revise it.’
Andrew
Bennetton? Boy, you’ve dated yourself? Why don’t you just say Merry-Go-Round?
Heh.
Andrew:
Thanks for that and good luck in your studies.
Dan:
Global Warming causes lack of affirmative action. Everyone knows the causal link between warmer weather and color blindness. Google that! Also why did so many of the worse race based incidents take place in warmer climates? Huh? HUH??
It’s right there in front of you if you only you would see!
Man. I’m like the typing moron today. Pardon all of the typos. Hope they amused you.
Jeam Beam heh
Benneton? You are so NOT a man.
While some students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials predict.
I.AM.SO.FUCKED!!
I somehow doubt that the Georgia/Japan matchup in the Little League World series yesterday would have been nearly as interesting if they hadn’t been keeping score. And I somehow think that all of those kids’ self esteem was intact at the end.
Had to feel sorry for the pitcher, though; he served up that winning homer on a silver tray. And knew it.
Please explain to me the mind set of someone like Burnham and Hanson when it comes to transparency of methods and data.
They’re hoping either that people won’t notice or that anyone who notices can’t do anything about it. Sorry to disappoint, but that’s probably what it is. They may be hoping that critics will discredit themselves by arguing from assumptions about methods — assumptions they’re forced into by the original authors’ lack of disclosure. If critics make a misstep in trying to figure out what the authors did, then the Tim Lambert types will swarm all over the critics and call them bad scientists, and third parties observing the swarm might agree with them.
Burnham told me they were too busy to send me the analysis routines. This is hardly credible as the routines are text files generally small in size, and most analysts will maintain obsessive version control over them, with the current version kept handy. I should note that Burnham’s group are releasing data in dribs and drabs, but only to worthies not too critical in their appraisal of the work, and who will agree not to share the data with anyone else:
http://chronicle.com/news/article/2108/authors-of-controversial-
iraq-study-release-raw-data-selectively
http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/research/iraq/ [scroll down to the box of numbered bullets]
This is a non-partisan criticism, by the way. Lott looked like he was trying to hide his coding “errors.” The Preamble Foundation just knew no one would sort through all those city contracts and find them conflating cases. Every day of the week, folks.
the state bar would be sued if it cooperated
Lawyers suing lawyers battle royale… Any chance id this being available on pay-per-view?
Dr. Steve: Thanks! About this, the civilian casualty study from Johns Hopkins published in The Lancet:
Is #1 par for the course? This seems awful arrogant to me but maybe its standard operating procedure.
The issue that never seems to be discussed by AA proponents is “how many bites at the apple†does the individual representative of the minority class to be favored get? It would stand to reason that at each stage, the air gets a little more rarified, so that at the end of the day it is possible that, for example, any particular black heart surgeon has been shepherded through college, medical school, residency, and into practice on successive waves of affirmative action. This would not even count (as I have seen) informal “mentoring†programs (in law school) in which certain minority students were given private meetings with deans and professors outside of the typical “office hours†structure, or “diversity training†in which lateness was described as a harmless cultural trait of blacks for which (I suppose) they were expected to be forgiven as professionals.
In the aggregate, this would seem to be both a tremendous “competitive†advantage, and one that I would find less than justifiable. I suppose, in the minds of the proponents, AA “resets†at every successive level of achievement such that one ignores that “black applicant X†has already been the recipient of significant anticompetitive leveling influences, buffering the appearance of his application well above its merits before the special AA rules are even applied to it.
Also, the hidden social costs of AA are one of its least spoken of evils. Of course, we assume that white applicants bear the burden, but I think that it bears investigation to determine which whites get the short end of the stick. Elite institutions have a long history of discriminating not only against racial minorities, but the “wrong kinds†of whites – i.e. Catholics and Jews at the Ivy League schools. And by discriminate, I mean deliberately not admitting superior Catholic and Jewish candidates in favor of WASPs, not merely that Catholics and Jews were underrepresented.
Establishment leftists – take Al Gore – for example, are vociferously pro-AA, knowing that the “life chances†(for lack of a better term) that he is bargaining away for political gain are those of politically unconnected white ethnic Catholic kids, while all four of the Gore children have the road to Harvard University open to them – even assuming for the sake of the argument that all four children from one family are perennially in the top few thousand of high school graduates. So, in effect, the chances of a really smart white Catholic kid from Southy for a spot in a class at Harvard require him to thread that narrow needle between legacies and political admits on the one side and expanding affirmative action admits on the other. Add to this the “code speak†that one can add to the “personal statement†in which the candidate can telegraph political and ideological activism and reveal his or her experiences in a transsexual GreenPeace anti-whaling unit, and the needle becomes narrower still.
Turning back to the legal field, I remember having a conversation with a very liberal friend and former law school classmate of mine who was part of a hiring class at one of the City’s big firms, one which was embarking on a newly committed diversity policy. He just couldn’t get it into his head that the firm was simply going to demand more production from him – in the form of billables – to compensate for the several AA hires who were obviously not going to make 2200 hours, but who were going to get the same salary that he was getting. Unless there is some great chest of “diversity money†that the partners are looking to dole out every year, the economics dictate that the difference would be made up at the bottom of the firm food chain, meaning junior associates like him would be expected to work later during the week, and longer on the weekends in order to keep the firm profitable – not all that savory for a young man with a wife and newborn baby, but such is the real cost of AA. I suppose it is impolite to mention this, but it is true nonetheless that when real money is involved, the AA beneficiaries are eating other people’s lunches, or in this case, the time that they would otherwise have available for family.
Yikes! I cut and pasted that, and the paragraphing went bye bye.
My apologies.
BJTexs,
No, that’s an eye-roller right there. Delicious irony moment: If someone politically motivated got a hold of those data, but adhered to the standards of transparency that Burnham apparently refuses to, no one would need to worry about their motivations, would they?
Delicious irony moment II: The folks on the left who said that the political views of Burnham’s co-author Les Roberts were irrelevant, but who will no doubt rush to defend the team’s refusal to release data to those unfavorably disposed to its published findings.
So as I understand it Burnham/Roberts, Kidder and Hanson are all reading from the same song sheet: Control the message by controlling access to the data.
This just strikes me as especially ludicrous and horribly arrogant. Kidder has made no bones about his political agenda yet tosses out the “black attorneys sigmatized” meme. My gosh, he still playing the victimization card for African Americans who have already achieved a level of success within a highly educated profession!
One wonders if someone like Kidder is looking out for Clarence Thomas to insure that he gets the protection he needs. Oh, I’m sorry! I forgot that he’s no longer authentically black. My bad!
All of us are guilty at some time or another of framing the language and direction of discourse to achieve support for a particular viewpoint. It just seems so much more aggregious to manipulate or withhold data on the basis of a political test or a public policy concern.
LET THE DATA GO!!!!
This is the Law School equivalent of something that’s been pointed out in other fields in the past. Let’s take two kids with identical abilities, but one’s black and the other’s white. The white kid is told he’s not good enough to get into MIT, so he settles for Kansas State, graduates with an engineering degree, and earns a nice income. The black kid flunks out of MIT and has to declare bankruptcy because he can’t repay his student loans out of his salary as a McDonald’s manager.
This practice is advocated by the alleged defenders of the black kid, because thinking honestly about it will require confronting facts that are all too easily labeled ‘racist’, which trips the mental circuit breakers of leftists.
LET THE DATA GO!!!!
Hey, that’s a cause I could get behind. Perhaps someone wants to make a banner that we can put on our blogs, like the “Free Jamil Hussein” banner.
The vast majority of those who continue to support race-based affirmative action do so, I believe, out of a genuine belief that they are helping those whom history, or demography, or poverty, have held down as a group.
Evidence, please.
At best, they’re objectively pro-racist, or class-bound to a racist false consciousness.
At best.
Having lived among them in several of their habitats, I say they’re straight-up white supremacist fucks. The evidence — their whole lives.
(Amusing irony here: You’re finally, for once, living up to a leftist stereotype re: conservatives by being so accommodating toward Elite White Opinion — not that any lefty would notice.)
I have no evidence, psychologizer, other than anecdotal, and those I know who support it (and aren’t of the academic ilk, or aren’t terribly politically active) do so almost reflexively. They’ve either grown up with it (post Bakke), or else they can remember a time when racial animus was not a strictly “coded” problem, visible only to those SUPERSPECIAL CARING PEOPLE who can detect racism in the color of a tube sock. I’m not talking activists, here. I’m talking pedestrian liberalism.
To put it another way, many a.a. supporters merely accept it as necessary, and so long as they believe it’s helping someone, they have absorbed enough cultural guilt to make the tradeoff between supporting affirmative action and maybe losing out on a job to a minority palatable.
Americans tend to be charitable. False consciousness? Absolutely. But lots of folks have been rigorously trained into that consciousness — and what’s more, they’ve been trained that embracing such liberal programs is what makes them good, and what separates them from the knuckledragging racists who, they’re taught, are the only kinds of people who actively protest affirmative action.
Lots of people are sharp enough to get that A.A. doesn’t track with the ideals of equality and color-blindness; but, like Justice O’Connor, they seem to believe it might still be necessary.
I don’t think they do so because they are objectively pro-racist. I think they do so because they have been taught to — and that it’s good –, and beyond that they haven’t given it much thought.
I don’t think it’s be
Jeff, could you stop keeping a sista down and fix one of my bold tags in comment #7 (right after the word ‘all’)?
Jeff, Jeff, Jeff… you of all people should know that the subjective beliefs of a person have no bearing on their objective classification.
I’m a 2L student at a not so great law school. Even here the AAs are painfully obvious… and not in class this second year.
Lefty intellectuals have invented a game. It is really noncompetitive and requires no specials skills or practice to play. It is especially popular with academics. The rules are simple. If you have a disagreement of any sort, the first one to accuse his/her opponent of racism ( or in some cases sexism or homophobia ) wins. Race ( or sex or orientation ) do not need to be under consideration. The actual effect on any given race ( etc ) do not need to be considered. The accusation is the objective.
Anyone not skilled in this game will have a very hard time winning academic tenure or any status in the social sciences.
The University that I work for did away with race based quotas and now the student body is 60% Asian. Treating Friday night as a school night for 12 years seems to make a difference.
Jeff G – You are providing rhetorical cover for the KKK and overt racists. In effect, you are a primary racist, quite worse than those whose bigotry you give cover to.
How did I do, Professor Caric?
Life at a top tier law school (in my case, and many years ago, Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley) is a scary experience no matter how well prepared and capable you are. I entered with a class of 300 in the fall of 1965–all this in the pre Affirmative Action days. Most of my class mates were used to being the smartest guy or girl in the room wherever they went. Admission was through a fairly narrow filter–good grades in high school got you into a competitive college; good grades in college and a strong LSAT got you into Boalt (or Stanford or Harvard/Yale/Columbia/Penn/Michigan or wherever)
Suddenly you were no longer the smartest guy in the room by a very long shot. You had to get out and compete. By the end of the year, 50 of the original 300 had dropped out, and 5 were flunked out.
The 50 who dropped out did so for a variety of reasons–but most of them were stress related or fear related–the academic competition was hard and the intellectual demands were rigorous. The casebook teaching method encourages students to argue vigorously and to “beat each other up” in classroom discussion. If you are not prepared to compete, your ego is going to take some large blows. AA admission to an arena for which one’s skills are not sufficient does one no favors.
Sorry, baldilocks —
Got caught up in a different thread and hadn’t returned here. Is fixed now.
The solution is obvious. We need an affirmative action program for the bar exam, so blacks can pass with lower scores. Then we need to force law firms to adopt affirmative action in their hiring and hire the underqualified blacks. Then, so that blacks win the proper number of cases, we need affirmative action for judges and juries so that they will bagree with bad arguments if made by black lawyers. Basically, we need a centrally planned economy, like the Soviets had. There was no inequality in Soviet Russia was there?
I get a good laugh out of Goldstein’s efforts to inflate me into a Macy’s parade balloon. But it’s all fluff in the end. Goldstein strung together a bunch of well-established conservative stereotypes about progressives for the entertainment of his followers. That takes a certain amount of writing skill, but Goldstein doesn’t seem to have any kind of talent for coming up with his own contributions to these debates, or even his own stereotypes about his opponents. To give an example of what I mean here, Goldstein obliquely refers to my argument about color-blind rhetoric as a form of “primary racism,” but he doesn’t even try to come up with a counter-argument concerning my reading of William Bennett. Maybe the skill set just isn’t there.
bigot.
I think if Dr Caric did a site search for William Bennett he’d find a few things.
His mistake — while he pretends to smirk at my lack of a skill set — is that his affected bemusement at all the “fuss” being made over his infantile arguments simply can’t cover up the kind of self importance that demands yet ANOTHER reply to every predictable progressive argument he makes.
If the Absinthe-minded perfessor is interested in exploring my skillset — or my take on Bennett and race — he might check out my posts on the subject. Doing so preemptively might have taken some of the egg off his face, to boot.
As for the argument about color-blindness being “primary racism,” such an attempt to turn one thing into its opposite by way of strained historical nodal stringing doesn’t much impress me — I guess because I’m not an undergrad awed by seeming paradoxes that are, when all is said and done, nothing more than the prestidigitations of academic charlatans trying to defend their “scholarly” turf.
Caric has become an object lesson. A kind of punchline around these parts, in fact. I don’t need to refute him, because he is self refuting. And I was debunking the arguments he makes today back when Stanley Fish was making them 13 years ago. If Caric wants to believe I don’t come up with my own contributions to these kinds of discussions — I approach racial construction from the realm of intentionalism, which I haven’t seen done much elsewhere — that’s his business. But as with much else he asserts, doing so merely makes him wrong.
Yet again.
It’s his most charming consistency, in fact.
For those of you interested, some background posts that inform the Bennett posts can be found here, here — and especially here, here, here, and here.
Then, of course, there are all those posts taking on a certain community college professor who found himself quite out of his depth. By let’s not relive those just now.
Fabulous irony there, isn’t it? Cancer.
butvkjg mxpdsno jxnmkhy kgeahc deif zyrp tlbi