How We Got Affirmative Action

Originally published in 1998, we just found an essay by one Hugh Murray about how “affirmative action” (a euphemism for discrimination against white males, as well as against other successful groups like Asians and Jews) came about. Murray first explains that, when it was passed, the 1964 Civil Rights Act not only did not require affirmative action, it actually outlawed it.

Conservatives Roberts and Stratton and remind us that the debate about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the debate over quotas; it would never have been enacted without a series of amendments to ensure that quotas would not result. Democrat Emmanuel Celler amended the proposal so that the EEOC could make no substantial interpretations of regulations. Sen. Everett Dirksen amended it so that discrimination must be “intentional” and seniority systems protected. Sen. John Tower amended it to protect continued use of aptitude tests in which whites invariably scored higher than blacks. All the supporters of the bill assured the nation that there would be no quotas—and Roberts and Stratton quote Senators Hubert Humphrey, Clifford Case, Thomas Kuchel, Harrison Williams, and even the Leadership Committee on Civil Rights to that effect.

Murray goes through the transformation of a law requiring equal treatment into a law used to promote discrimination, and discusses what might seem to be a paradox: conservative and Republican-voting business executives have supported affirmative action. Murray explains:

Why? “While AA may be one of the costs of doing business for the big fellows— ... it is no threat to their existence and can even be viewed as raising the entry barrier to potential competitors, the little guys.” To put it bluntly, IBM and Proctor and Gamble can afford to hire dummies, druggies, and violent criminals. Smaller companies cannot. Meanwhile, the large corporations gain an image of compassion and fairness. Better qualified whites who are not promoted or hired are poor or working class whites. But with AA, those poor whites are labeled “privileged,” and therefore deserving of being denied employment or promotion. Meanwhile, the wealthy, privileged, CEO’s receive humanitarian awards. Clearly what is most needed is a class analysis of the monstrosity called affirmative action

The rhetoric about “dummies, druggies, and violent criminals” might seem overwrought, but in fact any qualification that produces “disparate outcomes” for blacks versus whites is considered suspect. Failing to hire because of criminal convictions, poor aptitude test scores, and drug use are quite explicitly named among those things.

Liberal Protection Racket

What business is subjected to is, quite simply, a protection racket. Just as, early in the 20th century in many American cities, it was rational for any business to pay “protection” to the mafia, today it is rational to have and advertise initiatives for “diversity” and “inclusion” and “sustainability.”

If you talk loudly enough about such things, and fund some liberal interest groups, and hire some bureaucrats promoting those things, you will be allowed to go ahead and do what you need to do — produce a good or service that people value and sell it for a profit.

To acquiesce in this system is a rational choice for any executive. The the collective effect is to screw over a lot of innocent victims.  But they are the poor and working class whites that the affluent liberals view as the “other” and demean and deride.

Who Really Benefits from Racial Affirmative Action?

From Walter Williams in Frontpage Mag: Williams is commenting on the fact that black students, admitted via affirmative action to colleges where they must struggle to meet demands designed for well-prepared white students, disproportionately drop out, fail and end up at the bottom of their classes. This system, of course, has its beneficiaries.

There are beneficiaries from admitting black students with little chance of performing at the level of other students. They are college presidents, administrators and campus liberals. Whether blacks graduate or have been steered into useless “Mickey Mouse” courses is irrelevant. Government race overseers are only counting colors. College administrators win kudos for achieving and celebrating “diversity,” not to mention the fact that they can keep government higher-education handouts.

Another group of beneficiaries is composed of black staff and faculty who are hired and create campus fiefdoms with big budgets based on the presence of black students. The number of black students enrolled is the key, not the number who graduate or wind up in useless “Mickey Mouse” courses or in the bottom of their classes. In fact, there is an element of perversity. The greater the number of blacks who are on academic probation or do not graduate the more justified are calls for greater budgets for academic support and student retention programs.

Of course, struggling black students can easily pick up a sense of victimhood, blaming their situation on “racist” administrations, professors or fellow students. And it doesn’t help if white students let on, perhaps in subtle ways, that they know the black students are less well academically qualified. Thus we have “microaggressions.” In spite of good intentions, it’s not easy to consistently pretend that something you know to be true isn’t.

Of course, there are plenty of professors and administrators who will egg on and pander to racial grievances. Students articulating such grievances may get rewards — a position on a diversity committee, for example, or the favorable attention of the media. And, for course, when white students react negatively to the whining (or being bullied about “white privilege”) this simply adds to the stock of grievances.

Things like this may explain the findings of a recent Gallup study: black graduates of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) fare better than black graduates of other institutions.

This applies, first, to various indices of “thriving.”

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It also applies to college experiences.

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Interpretation

This Gallup study involved a large number of respondents, but it is short of a well-controlled social science study. Most importantly, there is probably a lot of self-selection involved, and black students who choose to go to such institutions may be different from students who choose to go to predominately white institutions.

But it may be that the climate at predominately black institutions is simply better than the racially obsessed hyper politically correct climate at many predominately white colleges.

Students at historically black colleges are unlikely to be struggling academically because affirmative action has put them in an excessively demanding environment. And it’s harder to articulate racial grievances against administrators who are black, or faculty who are black (or are whites who have chosen to teach at a predominately black college). Where the overwhelming majority of students are black, the color of your skin cannot make you the affirmative action pet of administrators, or the token black on this or that committee. If somebody disses you, it’s likely to be viewed as personal, and not a racial slight.

Conclusion

Does this mean that black students should prefer historically black colleges? No — although that might be a good choice for some students. But it does suggest that they should be wary of accepting admission to any institution where they will be far below the average white student in terms of SAT or ACT scores. Williams suggests “[d]o not enroll your children in a college where their SAT score [presumably, verbal plus quantitative] is 200 or more points below the average of that college.”

It also means your are better off in a school that is not hyper politically correct. A school that is not overrun with diversity bureaucrats, and where white students are not berated about “white privilege.” A religious institution (one that is really religious, not merely nominally religious, like Marquette) is a likely choice.

But the first thing to remember is this: the people who talk loudest about having your best interests at heart, probably don’t.

Minority Students as Victims of Affirmative Action

From Jeff Jacoby:

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION is once again before the Supreme Court. The case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, arose from the usual scenario: A white student applied to the university but was denied admission, while black applicants with weaker academic credentials were admitted because of racial preferences designed to favor minorities.

It’s no mystery why Abigail Fisher, the rejected student in this case, would object to that racial double standard and take her protest all the way to the Supreme Court. What’s less clear is why the University of Texas embraces such a double standard.

Then, further on in the article:

What particularly concerns Heriot and Kirsanow [members of the Civil Rights Commission] is the substantial body of empirical evidence demonstrating that affirmative action hurts the very students it is intended to help. Their brief discusses the problem of “mismatch.” That is the term for what happens when an elite institution relaxes its usual standards to admit more racial minorities, thereby encouraging black students to enter schools where they are apt to be academically weaker than their peers. The result is that students admitted through affirmative action tend to cluster near the bottom of their entering cohort, to have lower grades and higher drop-out rates, and to more frequently abandon rigorous courses or switch to less demanding majors.

For anyone who cares about minority advancement, the toll taken by mismatch is heartbreaking. Only one-third of black students who enter law school, for example, end up graduating and passing the bar exam on the first attempt. Another example: At Duke University, to take another example, 54 percent of black and Hispanic men who started out as science and engineering majors switched to a different field, compared with a mere 8 percent of white male students who did so. A study of underrepresented minority students at 23 universities found that the number who would have successfully earned degrees in science, math, and engineering would have been between 35 and 45 percent higher — if only the students had attended schools where their academic credentials were closer to average.

The Civil Rights Commission has reported on the troubling “mismatch” phenomenon in several recent studies. An important 2012 book by legal scholars Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. delved into the issue in sober detail. There is little doubt that racial preferences have backfired, leaving the nation with fewer black doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, and professors than would otherwise be the case. There was some politically-correct hyperventilating when Justice Antonin Scalia asked about this research during the Fisher oral argument this month.

But there is nothing outrageous in taking a hard look at mismatch, or in seriously confronting the harm it has caused. Racial preferences have held back far too many minority students. The sooner those preferences are scrapped, the more success black students will achieve.

For a more detailed review of the evidence, which clearly supports Jacoby, check this article in the Wall Street Journal.

Affirmative action is not, in fact, about “diversity,” it’s about political correctness. A genuine diversity agenda would require recruiting conservatives and libertarians for faculty positions in most departments in most universities. It might require giving preference to students from poor and working class backgrounds. It would involve giving preference to foreign students coming from cultures quite different from that of the average American kid (and this includes the average black American kid).

Affirmative action, in other words, is not a genuine diversity policy. It’s just a racial spoils system.

Affirmative Action Debate in Madison Tomorrow Night

These two fellows are heavyweights, and this debate should be excellent. We expect to be there.

Yet Another Way Affirmative Action Hurts

From Yahoo News:

Black and Latino students may be getting less critical, but helpful, feedback from teachers than their white counterparts, a new educational study indicates.

“The social implications of these results are important; many minority students might not be getting input from instructors that stimulates intellectual growth and fosters achievement,” study researcher Kent Harber, a Rutgers-Newark psychology professor, said in a press release.

This positive bias in feedback to minority students may be contributing to the achievement gap between white and minority students, a stubborn national problem, Harber said.

The study “tested” 113 white middle-school and high-school teachers in two public school districts, one middle class and white, and the other working class and racially mixed. Both are located in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area.

Harber and colleagues developed a poorly written essay that they gave to the teachers to grade, under the pretense that it was the work of a student. In some cases, the teachers believed the student was white, in others black and in others Latino.

The teachers believed their feedback would go directly to the student.

The researchers found that, indeed, the teachers were prone to give more praise and less criticism if they believed a minority student had written the paper, as opposed to a white student.

The researchers also considered the support the teacher received from colleagues and administration. This turned out to be an important factor if the teachers believed the student was black, with only teachers who lacked support showing the bias. However, when teachers thought the student was Latino, they showed the bias toward positive feedback regardless.

“These results indicate that the positive feedback bias may contribute to the insufficient challenge that undermines minority students’ academic achievement,” the researchers conclude.

The study appeared online April 30 in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

Of course, the teachers may believe that minority students have had a tougher time in life, and that a poor essay represents a reasonable effort for them. But this pervasive belief that minority students are not “up to” the intellectual demands that white students can handle has more bad consequences than we can count.

Ward Connerly, Affirmative Action Opponent, to Speak at Law School

From Marquette News Briefs:

Ward Connerly, founder and president of the American Civil Rights Institute, will speak at the Law School on Thursday, Oct. 27, at 12:10 p.m. Connerly, who is speaking at the Law School at the invitation of the Federalist Society, will present “Affirmative Action: Is It Equality or Discrimination?” RSVP online by Thursday, Oct. 20. Space is limited.

Connerly is in fact an heroic figure, fighting to end racial discrimination in an era when the politically correct kinds of discrimination (anti-white, anti-male) are embraced (although heavily out of fear) by most powerful institutions in society.

The Racial Bean Counters

From Jeff Jacoby:

THE CENSUS BUREAU has begun rolling out state-by-state demographic data distilled from the 2010 Census. They include statistics on race and Hispanic origin that can be broken down with meticulous geographic precision. If you want to know how many African Americans live in Arkansas’s Benton School District (1,302), or whether Maryland’s white population has gone up or down since 2000 (down 0.9 percent), or which Vermont county has the most Hispanics (Chittenden, with 2,586), the Census Bureau can tell you. Spend a while with the census search engine, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the nation’s racial composition has never been defined with such pinpoint accuracy.

In fact, the nation’s racial composition has never been defined with less accuracy, and the margin of error is widening. Why? Because of the growing number of Americans like Michelle López-Mullins, who render the government’s racial categories meaningless or obsolete. The University of Maryland student was introduced last week in a New York Times story that illustrates the difficulties faced by the bean-counters in an increasingly post-racial society:

“The federal Department of Education would categorize Michelle López-Mullins -- a university student who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee, and Cherokee descent -- as ‘Hispanic,’” Susan Saulny’s story began. “But the National Center for Health Statistics, the government agency that tracks data on births and deaths, would pronounce her ‘Asian’ and ‘Hispanic.’ And what does Ms. López-Mullins’s birth certificate from the State of Maryland say? It doesn’t mention her race.

“Ms. López-Mullins, 20, usually marks ‘other’ on surveys these days. But when she filled out a census form last year, she chose Asian, Hispanic, Native American, and white.”

Though most Americans may still think of themselves as belonging to a single race, the multiracial population is surging. Racial boundaries are more permeable and easier to ignore than they have ever been before.

Today, one in seven new marriages -- 14.6 percent -- unites spouses of different races, according to the Pew Research Center. The interracial marriage rate has doubled since 1980, and is six times what it was in 1960. For some combinations, the rate of increase has been even more rapid. When Barack Obama was born in 1961, less than one new marriage in 1,000 was, like his parents’, that of a black person and a white person. “By 1980, that share had risen to about one in 150 new marriages,” Pew notes. “By 2008, it had risen to one in 60.”

Yet instead of shutting down the racial bean-counters, the government is giving them new powers. The Times reports that new Department of Education rules require any student who acknowledges any Hispanic ethnicity at all to be reported solely as “Hispanic” in federal filings. That doesn’t sit well with López-Mullins, whose Peruvian-Chinese-Irish-Shawnee-Cherokee family tree is considerably more diverse and interesting than the word “Hispanic” alone can possibly convey.

To be sure, some lobbies and grievance groups profit handsomely from aggravating racial distinctions. But most Americans have moved beyond the color-consciousness of generations past, and it’s time federal agencies did too.

The problem, and it’s a huge one, is that as American society is becoming more tolerant, more multi-racial and more diverse, a very large infrastructure exists to divide people and put them into categories. And people put into some politically correct victim category are supposed to nurse grievances against American society.

Thus, the bureaucrats and activists who talk most about “diversity” and “inclusion” have a vested interest in promoting social division.

And there are plenty of them at Marquette.

Asian Students: Victims of “Diversity”

From Minding the Campus, an account of how an inconvenient minority is being victimized in the name of “diversity.”

One of the least-kept secrets in higher education is the fact that many colleges and universities, especially the more select ones, consciously seek to suppress their “Asian” student enrollment.

During the first year of my term as a regent of the University of California (UC), a prominent member of the staff at one of the UC campuses remarked to me that at least two of the UC campuses could become “all-Asian” if conscious efforts were not pursued to “maintain diversity.” It was at that point that I learned that “diversity” was the fig leaf to hide this pervasive system of discrimination against Asians.

This insidious practice of Asian discrimination has largely gone unchallenged for a variety of reasons. First, there is a prevailing view that “opportunities” granted to one group do not come at the expense of another. This view was recently expressed by one of the presidential candidates. It is a sentiment that enables institutions of higher education as well as others to get away with their Asian discrimination. Few are aware that the percentage of Asians at the University of California at Los Angeles campus went from roughly 22% when preferences were being accorded to “underrepresented minorities” to over 40% once they were eliminated.

Second, Asian discrimination occurs because Asians---unlike black and Latino activist groups---remain silent in the face of discrimination against them. Stepping forward as he has done, Li might very well trigger an “I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore” attitude among other Asians. And that would be a good thing.

Politically correct people deride Asians as the “model minority.”

Why the derision? Because Asians have not understood the proper function of minorities in American society.

Minorities are supposed to fail. That failure stands as a condemnation of American society, a very convenient excuse for more social programs, and a justification for more bureaucrats to minister to the needs of poor needy failed minorities.

Success undermines the whole game.

Since the liberals have a vested interest in minority failure, they set out to explicitly reward failure and punish success.

Further, the success of one group raises the question of why other groups fail, and that question can be exceedingly embarrassing. It might, for example, lead one to ask whether the family values that liberals deride have something to do with the success of Asians. It might raise the question of whether buying into the victim culture isn’t itself a major impediment to minority success.

We can’t help but wonder: how would blacks be doing in America today if the black community had not been hobbled both by “leaders” in the community and by white liberals whose interests would be badly harmed by black success?

Two Minorities and the Recipe for Failure

From the Americn Thinker an account of one Ed Kaitz, who had quite diverse experiences in Bayou country and in politically correct academia.

In Bayou country I lived on boats and in doublewide trailers, and like the rest of the Vietnamese refugees, I shopped at Wal-Mart and ate a lot of rice. When they arrived in Louisiana the refugees had no money (the money that they had was used to bribe their way out of Vietnam and into refugee camps in Thailand), few friends, and a mostly unfriendly and suspicious local population.

They did however have strong families, a strong work ethic, and the “Audacity of Hope.” Within a generation, with little or no knowledge of English, the Vietnamese had achieved dominance in the fishing industry there and their children were already achieving the top SAT scores in the state.

While I had been fishing my new black friend had been working as a prison psychologist in Missouri, and he was pursuing a higher degree in psychology. He was interested in my story, and after about an hour getting to know each other I asked him point blank why these Vietnamese refugees, with no money, friends, or knowledge of the language could be, within a generation, so successful. I also asked him why it was so difficult to convince young black men to abandon the streets and take advantage of the same kinds of opportunities that the Vietnamese had recently embraced.

His answer, only a few words, not only floored me but became sort of a razor that has allowed me ever since to slice through all of the rhetoric regarding race relations that Democrats shovel our way during election season:

“We’re owed and they aren’t.”

In short, he concluded, “they’re hungry and we think we’re owed. It’s crushing us, and as long as we think we’re owed we’re going nowhere.”

And then to another job:

After leaving the fishing boats, I attended graduate school at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I managed to get a job on campus teaching expository writing to minority students who had been accepted provisionally into the university on an affirmative action program. And although I never met him, Ward Churchill, in addition to teaching in the ethnic studies department, helped to develop and organize the minority writing program.

The job paid most of my bills, but what I witnessed there was absolutely horrifying. The students were encouraged to write essays attacking the white establishment from every conceivable angle and in addition to defend affirmative action and other government programs. Of the hundreds of papers that I read, there was not one original contribution to the problem of black mobility that strayed from the party line.

The irony of it all however is that the “white establishment” managed to get them into the college and pay their entire tuition. Instead of being encouraged to study international affairs, classical or modern languages, philosophy or art, most of these students became ethnic studies or sociology majors because it allowed them to remain in disciplines whose orientation justified their existence at the university. In short, it became a vicious cycle.

There was a student there I’ll never forget. He was plucked out of the projects in Denver and given a free ride to the university. One day in my office he told me that his mother had said the following to him: “M.J., they owe you this. White people at that university owe you this.” M.J.’s experience at the university was a glorious fulfillment of his mother’s angst.

There were black student organizations and other clubs that “facilitated” the minority student’s experience on the majority white and “racist” campus, in addition to a plethora of faculty members, both white and black, who encouraged the same animus toward the white establishment. While adding to their own bona fides as part of the trendy Left, these “facilitators” supplied M.J. with everything he needed to quench his and his mother’s anger, but nothing in the way of advice about how to succeed in college. No one, in short, had told M.J. that he needed to study. But since he was “owed” everything, why put out any effort on his own?

In a fit of despair after failing most of his classes, M.J. wandered into my office one Friday afternoon in the middle of the semester and asked if I could help him out. I asked M.J. about his plans that evening, and he told me that he usually attended parties on Friday and Saturday nights. I told him that if he agreed to meet me in front of the university library at 6:00pm I would buy him dinner. At 6pm M.J. showed up, and for the next twenty minutes we wandered silently through the stacks, lounges, and study areas of the library. When we arrived back at the entrance I asked M.J. if he noticed anything interesting. As we headed up the hill to a popular burger joint, M.J. turned to me and said:

“They were all Asian. Everyone in there was Asian, and it was Friday night.”

Nothing I could do, say, or show him, however, could match the fire power of his support system favoring anger. I was sad to hear of M.J. dropping out of school the following semester.

One might think that the moral of all of this is that the Asian model should be emulated.

But the politically correct professors don’t see it this way. They deride Asians as the “model minority.”

Sex Discrimination in State Government: No Males Need Apply

From the State of Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, a letter advertising an internship.

The catch, it’s for women only. No men need apply.

If some male should apply, and be turned down for being male, he could almost certainly sue.

As much as the left might dislike it, the Civil Rights laws protect whites as well as blacks, and men as well as women.

The City of Milwaukee found this out when white police officers, discriminated against because of their race, won a large jury award.

More Diversity Follies in Chicago

Thomas Evoy has become, virtually, our regular correspondent on the absurdity that is Chicago city government, and he sends this along:

Here’s a fun story-one of the Cook County commissioners wants to ensure that the public prosocuter’s office is racially balanced:

Beavers slams hiring in prosecutor’s office

Never mind the competition from PC law firms, get out there and hire! And hire for a job that’s probably pretty unpopular with minority “victims,” being the man and putting it to the downtrodden!

I have to wonder what’s next. We’d like to hire the most qualified doctor, but were already over budget on whites, hispanics and asians so everyone who needs brain surgery will have to wait until we find a black brain surgeon who wants to work for low wages at County Hospital. Will we need racially balanced garbage crews, tree trimmers, sewer workers and road crews?

The Cook County commissioner who’s making that absurd demand is the same one who tried to get his daughter elected as a Chicago alderman to follow him-she lost to Mrs. Jesse Jackson Jr.

Apart from that, in the “bad timing” department one of the Illinois courts handed down a soverign immunity decsion yesterday in a case about a porch collapse two or three years ago. Not too unusual except for the timing with the bridge collapse: and also the disclosures (after the porch came down) that Chicago had hired the 19 year-old son of a politically connected carpenter as a building inspector (with the excuse that he knew about buildings as the son & grandson of carpenters) and that some porch inspections were taking something like 10 minutes for a three-story structure serving six apartments.

Here’s a little bit from the Sun-Times GOSSIP columnist that I didn’t see before: the term “Superblack” as well as the idea that his own kid is already pulling down $70k/year.

“The hitch: Beavers may have a point! Turns out his own son, David, landed a plum job in that office as a $70,000-a-year investigator and is among the highest-paid employees in the state’s attorney’s capital litigation program!”

Letter to the Editor: Racial Gymnastics in the Chicago Fire, Police Hiring

The following from reader Thomas Evoy.

Read your recent reverse discrimination article. Don’t forget, it’s not just the people taking the tests-it is also the people who CANNOT take a test for years because of the holdups involved.

The Fire Department here in Chicago gave an exam a while back and graded the results, offering jobs to the top 30% or so of scorers in rank order. And that was uneven racially, and you know what happened next-- demonstrations, hearings, etc. No exams were given for about ten years-and people simply couldn’t join up without the exam. About half a generation of people couldn’t take the exam simply because the whole thing was in the courts -- as far as I know there are age limits for joining the fire department Our most recent exam had a different flavor: the cutoff was the top 70% or so of scores (presented to the public as the results of a “pass-fail” exam) and the hiring was done on a random basis from that pool. The usual whiners were a lot more satisfied: based solely on the numbers, of course. No comment on qualifications.

One of the most hilarious things in Chicago was the recent “testing” to decide who would be promoted from sergeant to lieutenant on the police force. Apparently in their zeal to bend over backwards in order to prove fairness, the testing group taped all the answers. And of course, some sort of foulup ensued, followed by the predicable lawsuit. So the solution to this problem was to re-administer the test. Using the very same questions. Yes, that sounds like a great way to figure out who can handle a volatile situation with a great probability of violence.

This follows the much earlier(perhaps the 1980’s) police test that was announced with great fanfare-huge cost, guaranteed to be fair, outside consultants, etc. The results came in that one race was overwhelmingly overrepresented (vis a vis the police department stats as well as the city demographics) among the most qualified. Huge demonstrations, city council hearings, etc. If I recall correctly, the thing was tied up for years in court and in politics.

We can say only one thing good about all these gymnastics: it is good that they used them instead of out-and-out racial preferences and quotas.

Still, how much healthier would it be if a clear standard of non-discrimination prevailed. Would blacks forever and always be unable to meet the standard?

Only a racist would believe that. But a lot of race card players and politically correct whites are, somewhere down deep inside, racist.

Shock: Civil Rights Law Protects Whites

When Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it was explicit that it protected whites as well as blacks, and men as well as women (although in that pre-feminist era, nobody was paying much attention to the gender aspect).

The Act, remember, had opponents. Some were simply racists (or pandering to racists, which is worse). But some, like Barry Goldwater, had a principled fear about handing such powers over to the Federal government.

The opponents said that the Act might lead to racial quotas, or to “reverse discrimination.” The proponents of the Act made it clear that those things would be impossible. They insisted that any discrimination against whites would be outlawed just as any discrimination against blacks would be.

Of course, the proponents of “civil rights” quickly moved to discriminate against whites, and institute de facto quotas. But the Act (and other civil rights laws) remains what it is.

From the Journal-Sentinel:

The city would pay $2.65 million to 17 current and former Milwaukee police lieutenants who successfully argued they were passed over for promotion because they were white men, under a settlement backed Monday by a Common Council committee.

If the full council agrees July 31, each of the men would be paid $103,922 to end their federal discrimination lawsuit against former Police Chief Arthur Jones and the Fire and Police Commission. Their attorney, William Rettko, would be paid $833,333, nearly one-third of the total.

The lieutenants filed suit in 2003, accusing the city’s first permanent black police chief of discriminating against them by repeatedly promoting minority and female officers ahead of them. During Jones’ tenure, about 80% of Milwaukee police lieutenants were white men, but about half the 41 people he promoted to captain were minorities or women.

In their suit, the lieutenants sought $300,000 each, or $5.1 million, in addition to unspecified punitive damages.

A federal jury ruled in their favor in 2005, finding that between them, the officers were discriminated against a total of 144 times. The jury and U.S. District Judge Thomas J. Curran awarded $3.7 million in damages. Curran later awarded attorney’s fees that brought the total to about $4.6 million, Deputy City Attorney Rudolph Konrad said in a memo to the council’s Judiciary and Legislation Committee.

In January of this year, a federal appeals court upheld the verdict but sent the damages back to the district court in Milwaukee to be recalculated. Both sides agreed to mediation, which produced Monday’s deal, said Assistant City Attorney Miriam Horwitz.

We would strongly urge white males who think they have been victims of discrimination to go to court and sue. Make life dangerous for those who discriminate.

Racial Discrimination in the Marquette Law School?

We just came across something that we should have noticed over a year ago. But we’re going to post it now, since it raises a recurring issue -- the claim that the Marquette Law School is “too white.”

In the wake of a directive from the American Bar Association -- which has become increasingly activist and politically correct -- that American law school enroll more blacks and other minorities and break state law if necessary to do it -- Marquette Law Professor Christine Hurt posted the following on the blog Concurring Opinions.

This week’s events (the promulgation of new rules by the ABA on diversity admissions, publication of David Bernstein’s op-ed, Affirmative Blackmail, and the ensuing blogospheric discussions) have prompted me to post on a topic that I have been ruminating about for some time: admissions. At the Glom last year, I blogged a series of advice posts (here, here, here and here) from information gleaned after my first year on admissions committee. This is my second year on that committee, and I have to admit that the shiny has worn off a bit for me. I wanted to be on the admissions committee because I wanted to find out why we had classes with low percentages of minority students. Surely there must be some subconscious, yet insidious discrimination creating this result. I was going to ferret out this bias and squash it like a bug.

Presumably, Professor Hurt is saying this for rhetorical effect. She could not possibly have believed her Law School colleagues are a bunch of racists, could she?

What I found was a problem that I couldn’t fix. The problem is math. Prof. Bernstein and Thom Lambert point out that the ABA’s new rules show that the ABA has a conscious disregard for the rule of law. I would add that the rules also show a conscious disregard for math. For schools like Marquette, in the middle of the rankings, with a small faculty, administration and budget, cold, hard numbers are our problem when it comes to increasing diversity. Putting aside debates as to whether affirmative action is good, bad, constitutional, unconstitutional or whatever, the most affirmative action-minded admissions committee has to make very difficult choices in an environment of scarcity. Scarcity of applicants; scarcity of dollars.

Marquette’s problem is not that we don’t admit minority candidates. The percentage of minority candidates in our “admit” pool is larger than the percentage of minority candidates in our “applicant” pool. In fact, the percentage of minority applicants who become admits is larger than the percentage of nonminority applicants who become admits. However, the yield on minority candidates in our “admit” pool is quite low. These candidates have a lot of other opportunities. We do what we can: phone calls, scholarships, letters, emails, dinners, etc. I soon found out that to say that we discriminate against minority candidates is to say that we discriminate against candidates with 170 LSATs. We don’t end up with a lot because we don’t start out with a lot. And, no matter how many 170 LSATs we admit, our yield on 170 LSATs is very low, similar to our yield on minority candidates. These people have other opportunities, and our recruiting activities don’t change that much. If we were ranked higher, our yield would be greater. If our yield were greater, we would be ranked higher. See how that works, ABA?

However, the ABA now says that we are required to do more than just work with what we have. We need to commit resources to increase the number of minority applicants in our applicant pool. For instance, we could have a dedicated diversity admissions person, we could recruit in person at historically black colleges, we could hold minority applicant fairs, and we could have more minority scholarships. At present, our admissions office has one assistant dean and one office administrator. To comply, we would need to basically double our admissions budget. And our scholarship pool.

I teach corporate law, so I follow the recent white-collar prosecutions. Bernard Ebbers was criticized, and eventually punished, for blithely telling subordinates to “hit the numbers” without regard to the consequences. The ABA is also blithely telling law schools to do something without regard to the realities of numbers. I understand that in some situations, schools may have money, time and resources that they don’t want to commit to a laudable goal and will not until forced to do so. However, my impression is that many schools like Marquette will be caught in the middle because they actually do not have unlimited money, time and resources.

Being willing to “commit the resources” is a euphemism for giving black (and perhaps Hispanic) students more generous scholarship offers to induce them to come to your school.

Of course, in academia, prestige is also an important currency.

Marquette’s Law School, which is hanging by its fingernails at the bottom of the second tier of the nation’s law schools, can’t compete terribly well here either.

When Harvard Law School admits minority students who aren’t as academically capable as the white students they admit, they are still going to have pretty good minority students.

But when minority students who should be at Madison go to Harvard, and minority students who should be at Marquette go to Madison, Marquette has to accept minority students who belong at schools low in the third tier or in the fourth tier.

Or else fail to meet some quota.

Ultimately, shuffling minority student populations around does little good, although it serves the career interests of university bureaucrats and makes politically correct faculty feel all warm and fuzzy.

Until minority students graduate from high school with the same qualifications as white students, “diversity” is never going to be anything but a cynical con game. And of course, the problems begin long before high school.

Jesse Jackson: Demanding Affirmative Action in Major League Baseball

Jesse Jackson is doing his usual shtick, but this time the target is a Major League Baseball team.

Upset over the lack of African-Americans on the Braves roster, members of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow-PUSH Coalition asked for a meeting with team officials. They got one Monday.

Joe Beasley, Southern Regional Director for the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said he and Dexter Clinkscale, the director of sports for the organization, met Monday morning for nearly two hours with Braves general manager John Schuerholz, assistant general manager Frank Wren and three other Braves officials.

“The team slipped . . . down to [no African-Americans]; it wasn’t something that just happened,” Beasley said Monday afternoon. “I think it was a lack of diligence on the part of the Braves to recruit African-American players. There’s not diminished enthusiasm for African-Americans playing baseball. It’s simply the opportunity hasn’t presented itself.”

Schuerholz acknowledged the meeting Monday but declined further comment, saying in a statement: “We had a meeting with Mr. Beasley and another member of his organization this morning and discussed a variety of topics.”

Less than 10 percent of major league players are African-Americans. In a recent interview on the subject, Schuerholz said: “You go to where the talent leads you. Finding major league-caliber baseball players is far too difficult if you try to narrow your criteria down to demographics.”

Countered Beasley, “As I expected, [Schuerholz’s] idea is the bottom line: I’ll put the best 40 men I can get wherever I can get them from on the field, and that’s fair. But the fact of the matter is if they put resources into recruiting here in the United States, and more specifically here in Atlanta, there are talented players here.”

The issue was brought to the attention of the Rainbow-PUSH Coalition during the 60th anniversary celebration of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier. The Braves and Houston Astros did not have any African-American players on their 25-man rosters at the time. The Braves’ total grew with the promotion of left fielder Willie Harris, who is from Robinson’s hometown of Cairo.

This is a far cry from 1947, when Jackie Robinson and a whole cohort of black players broke the “color barrier” in Major League Baseball.

There was never any doubt that they fully deserved to play in the major leagues.

But, of course, society changes. Most relevant here, fewer black youth live in rural areas, towns and small cities where baseball diamonds are common. (Hank Aaron, for example, grew up in Mobile, Alabama.)

More black youth live in large cities where playgrounds have basketball hoops.

The result: fewer blacks in baseball, but blacks dominate the NBA.

Objecting to that is about as sensible as objecting to the fact that Canadians dominate professional hockey.

If we are going to have affirmative action quotas, we’ve got to replace a lot of blacks in the NBA with whites.

Interestingly, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution offered an online poll, asking readers what they thought about the situation. The question:

Why do the Braves have so few African-American players?

The responses:

• There aren’t enough African-American prospects out there -- 13.04%
• The Braves aren’t trying hard enough to bring them along -- 3.05%
• Some of both of the above -- 4.61%
• I don’t care who they are as long as they’re good players -- 79.29%

Quote obviously, the vast majority of the people who voted have the sensible view of the issue.

Getting Beyond Race in College Admissions

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal ponders the legacy of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and takes issue with her view of affirmative action.

It’s true that O’Connor is not a fanatical quota advocate. She has said that racial preferences should be seen as “a temporary bandage, rather than a permanent cure.”

What’s disturbing is that liberals were saying the same thing in the early 1970s, when the first racial preference cases were coming to the Supreme Court. The “temporary” expedient isn’t looking so temporary today, especially when there is a whole cadre of activists, affirmative action bureaucrats and liberal politicians supporting it.

Fund continues:

She seemed strangely unaware, however, of the growing evidence that racial preferences might have actually decreased the likelihood that blacks and Hispanics will graduate from college. Put differently, if the body of evidence is correct, the whole affirmative action enterprise has been deeply and tragically flawed from the beginning, failing to achieve its most basic aim: increasing the number of minority college graduates, doctors, lawyers and other professionals.

Other panelists at the Powell symposium discussed the work of UCLA law professor Richard Sander, which shows that minority law students in California who attend law schools at which their academic credentials do not match the credentials of other students are less likely to pass the bar exam than they would have been if they had attended less prestigious law schools where their academic credentials would have been closer to the norm. As a result, according to Mr. Sander, there are fewer minority lawyers than there would have been under colorblind admissions. Justice O’Connor did not attend the rest of the symposium and made no reference to the Sander study in her remarks.

Moreover, Justice O’Connor’s comments about UCLA obscured an important and promising real story. While it’s true that black and Hispanic enrollment at UCLA and Berkeley went down after Prop 209, these students simply didn’t just vanish. The vast majority were admitted on the basis of their academic record to somewhat less highly ranked campuses of the prestigious 10-campus UC system, which caters only to the top one-eighth of California’s high school graduates. In the immediate wake of Proposition 209, the number of minority students at some of the nonflagship campuses went up, not down.

This “cascading” effect has had real benefits in matching students with the campus where they are most likely to do well. Despite what affirmative action supporters often imply, academic ability matters. Although some students will outperform their entering credentials and some students will underperform theirs, most students will succeed in the range that their high school grades and SAT scores predict. Leapfrogging minority candidates into elite colleges where they often become frustrated and fail hurts them even more than the institutions. It creates the illusion that we are closing racial disparities in education when in fact we are not. While blacks and Hispanics now attend college at nearly the same rate as whites, only about 1 in 6 graduates.

Affirmative action often creates the illusion that black or other minority students cannot excel. At the University of California at San Diego, in the year before race-based preferences were abolished in 1997, only one black student had a freshman-year GPA of 3.5 or better. In other words, there was a single black honor student in a freshman class of 3,268. In contrast, 20% of the white students on campus had a 3.5 or better GPA.

There were lots of black students capable of doing honors work at UCSD. But such students were probably admitted to Harvard, Yale or Berkeley, where often they were not receiving an honor GPA. The end to racial preferences changed that. In 1999, 20% of black freshmen at UCSD boasted a GPA of 3.5 or better after their first year, almost equaling the 22% rate for whites after their first year. Similarly, failure rates for black students declined dramatically at UCSD immediately after the implementation of Proposition 209. Isn’t that better for everyone in the long run?

Then there is the claim that affirmative action preferences benefit the “disadvantaged.” After all, aren’t all blacks disadvantaged?

Racial preferences were intended to help disadvantaged minorities, but in reality they have been turned into a spoils system for the privileged. “Most go to children of powerful politicians, civil-rights activists, and other relatively well-off blacks and Hispanics,” says Stuart Taylor of National Journal. “This does nothing for the people most in need of help, who lack the minimal qualifications to get into the game.”

This situation reminds us of the old quip that foreign aid is a subsidy from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

And indeed, Fund produces statistics to show that disadvantaged whites have been hurt by race-based preferences, while privileged black students have -- if not exactly been helped -- gotten into schools beyond what their qualifications justified.