Why Defend Reagan on Race?

253 thoughts on “Why Defend Reagan on Race?”

1. “Again, I’m not saying the modern Federalist Society and its comrades are racist.”
   Well, even in liberal Cambridge, plenty of them are. Plenty of other prominent conservatives too. Plenty aren’t, of course. I’m not really prepared to make a statement one way or the other about the majority.
   Based on the rest of the post you seem to be using a def’n of “racism” that’s different from mine–something more like “white supremacism” or “support for segregation.”

2. “But more abstractly, much of modern conservative doctrine has foundations in racial issues. The clearest example is state rights and federalism.”
   Your thesis has a little bit of a problem with the 1787-1856 period, as state rights and federalism in modern conservatism trace quite a bit to the Constitution itself.
   “Same deal for welfare and “law and order” slogans.”
   Or alternatively the fact that liberal crime policy combined with not-so-brilliant liberal housing policy had turned entire cities into desolate wastelands might have had something to do with it.
   The irritating thing is you have an interesting enough point without having to turn it into EVERYTHING. Don’t overplay your hand or you sound like the silly people who think that liberals get all of their ideas from Communism.
   “Krugman has – Katrina-style – forced the issue again into the public eye.”
   I suspect you overestimate the readership of the New York Times.

3. “Well, even in liberal Cambridge, plenty of them are. Plenty of other prominent conservatives too. Plenty aren’t, of course. I’m not really prepared to make a statement one way or the other about the majority.”
   Come to California. I’ll introduce you to all sorts of racists. And they all be Democrats. Or by *them* did you mean a broader group than the Federalist Society?

4. Very good post indeed.

5. “Very good post indeed.”
   I agree. Very good job, publius.

6. Or alternatively the fact that liberal crime policy combined with not-so-brilliant liberal housing policy had turned entire cities into desolate wastelands might have had something to do with it.
   I can’t actually think of a single American city that became a “desolate wasteland” post-1945, unless by “desolate wasteland” you mean “area full of black people”.
   Oh, except New Orleans, of course!

7. It continues to baffle me that Americans can think we’ve simply put the problem of racism behind us and can happily move on. (Or sexism, for that matter.) A couple of weeks ago, Cleveland Scene, one of the city’s two free weeklies, published an article about a local mayor — a black woman — who appeared from the facts presented to have problems with allowing white people on the police force. In response, someone sent the following letter, which appeared in the print edition. Read this and tell me racism in this country is dead, or even dying:

   This is not the only time this has happened. The laws in our country favor blacks, but they just can’t obey them. If a white hurts or kills a black, it’s a national event. However, blacks kill whites (or try to) every day, and nothing is said. Most gangs in Ohio are black. The Jena Six are guilty, period.
   The person “reverse racism” hurts these days is the white male. The laws say: “Hire blacks, and we will give you tax breaks.” That hurts honest, hardworking whites.
   I live in Akron, and 28 percent of this city is black. They commit 82 percent of the crime. I’m moving ASAP to a place in the country where I can raise my children without these animals around me. Not all blacks are bad, but most are. Look at the kid in Akron who won’t testify against another gang member. Sickens me.
   That mayor should be fired and sued for her comments and actions, just like she would do if it was reversed. Where are Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson on this one? Oh yeah, I forgot. They don’t want justice. They want a race war with blacks winning.
   Mark Lattimer
   Akron

   A letter like this appears nearly every week in that publication. The comments sections on news articles at Clevleland.com are riddled with statements much like this, dozens of them every day. And they sure as heck aren’t restricted to Republicans. We have a loooooong way to go on race issues in this country.

8. Come to California. I’ll introduce you to all sorts of racists. And they all be Democrats. Or by *them* did you mean a broader group than the Federalist Society?
   Lots of Republicans and Democrats are racist. Lots of people are racist. This is a pretty sucky thing and should be worked against. But, generally speaking, Democratic politicians are less likely to institute racist policies or appeal directly to racism than Republicans.
   I should be clear I’m not exactly using publius’ definition of racism. I see what he’s getting at, and I certainly agree that lots of people flip out when called on racist words and actions. It couldn’t hurt to have a good way to get people to examine their racist attitudes, but I do not like the idea of diminishing the real impact that these attitudes have on people of color.

9. “I can’t actually think of a single American city that became a “desolate wasteland” post-1945,”
   Never been to Detroit, have you? “Desolate wasteland” describes quite a bit of THAT city.
   I suppose I must admit that racism has had it’s influences on the Republican party. OTOH, you want me to relate the origins of, say, the gun control movement? Planned Parenthood? Mote, beam.

10. You’re reaching, Brett.

11. Um, close, but not exactly.
    I would put it as “tribalist,” not so much racist. There has been a lot of racism by the primarily white, primarily protestant, primarily heterosexual establishment involved in discrimination, but the establishment has discriminated based not only on race, but also on religion (no Irish need apply, here in Boston, same with Italian immigrants) and they have certainly discriminated based on sex and sexual orientation.
    It isn’t just an issue of race.

12. OTOH
    when it comes to criticism of the Republican party, there’s always an Other Hand. and if it has to reach back 80 years to the beliefs of a woman who founded an organization which hasn’t supported those beliefs in nearly that long, just to grab a tu quoque, well, it does what it must.

13. The thing I dislike most about arguments like this is that they are often used today to discredit legitimate political opinion. (I’m not saying you are doing that here publius.)
    You can’t really believe in state’s rights – that’s just code for racism.
    You can’t really be against affirmative action because you believe we should be truly color blind instead – secretly you’re just racist.
    You can’t really believe that it’s important to secure our borders – you’re just scared of all those brown people infiltrating your neighborhood.
    You’re careful to repeat “I don’t think … are racist” throughout the post. You’re point seems to be that you just want a simple acknowledgement that amounts to “your political movement was built on racism”.
    OK. Many of the founding fathers were slave owners. I admit it. Now what?
    Acknowledging that racism occurred throughout our country’s history is one thing. Insuring that racism is eliminated in all forms today is another. It’s legitimate to argue that it is important to acknowledge the past in that regard.
    But what I often see today is charges of implicit racism used as a cudgel against opposing political views. (No that doesn’t mean that I think racism has been entirely eliminated in this country.)

14. I don’t understand how publius is using the word “racist”.
    To me it seems obvious that the US is *profoundly* racist: historically, structurally, in practice and in thought. All Americans should assume that we will use illegitimate racial categories when we aren’t looking, and that we’ll take advantage of them as a matter of course.
    One huge change in my lifetime is that it’s no longer generally acceptable to make overt, conscious racist statements, so in that sense most USans “aren’t racist”. But I would never assume that any USan isn’t unconsciously racist, including myself. Making a dichotomy between “racists” and “good people” is IMHO false and distracting, when most of the problems are caused by unspoken assumptions and structural racism.

15. I tend to agree with Seb that although, on the whole, the post has a lot of excellent points to make, there is a tendency to do a bit of overreaching. This is something I have mentioned before on some of publius’ posts.
    And, yes, there are people with racist views at every level of the political, racial, religious etc. spectrums. In fact, I would have to say I don’t know anybody that doesn’t, at some level, to some degree, have some racist thinkings. I am sure there might be some people that don’t, I just don’t know any.
    Re Brett’s comment, I agree with cleek (as usual.)

16. Posted, then read OCSteve’s comment. Extremely well put.

17. Since racism is woven into the fabric of American society, it is part of the status quo. Therefor, one way to be conservative is to want to conserve racism. Not all conservatives are overt racists, but anyone who wants to keep racist structures in place is, by definition, conservative.
    I talk about structures because in a society as pervasively racist as ours you don’t have to *do* or think anything in particular to take advantage of racism. You can be quite certain you’ve never had a racist thought — while living a racist life.
    The only way out, IMHO, is through. You have to be conscious about things you’d rather not think about, see continuities you’d rather not overlook.
    So, OCSteve, you can (in theory) support states’ rights without intending anything racist by it. But you’d better be prepared to talk and think about what the racial implications might be, and how you can distance your views from the coded meaning the phrase already has.
    Unless you’re part of the racial solution, as Americans we’re *all* part of the problem.

18. I can’t actually think of a single American city that became a “desolate wasteland” post-1945, unless by “desolate wasteland” you mean “area full of black people”.
    There were several, Detroit, as noted by Brett, being just one. If you scale it back from entire city to very large neighborhood of a city, there were lots.
    Seb’s point here is right on.
    Racism is, it would seem, bred in the American bone. To be honest, person for person I don’t see that folks on the right are any more or less likely to harbor racist thoughts than folks on the left. Any statistical correlation is, I think, accidental.
    It is true, however, that from the post war period on, conservatives did their best to turn animus toward blacks into votes, and did quite well with it. And, yes, there was much that was patronizing and counter-productive in the liberal civil rights agenda as well.
    Black people were property in this country for a couple of hundred years. It will be another 100 years before we scrub that out of our culture, if in fact we ever do.
    I don’t see Reagan, personally, as being any more or less racist than the typical Joe of his period. That’s still quite a lot, but not enough to be remarkable in any way. He was mainly just another one of those guys preaching the gospel of pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and if that doesn’t work it’s your own damned fault.
    He was, however, not at all above indulging in dog-whistle politics if the audience was right, and I’m damned sure he knew exactly what he was doing when he did it.
    Thanks –

19. The thing I dislike most about arguments like this is that they are often used today to discredit legitimate political opinion.
    You can’t really believe in state’s rights – that’s just code for racism.
    (…)
    
    Yeah, true, but the question is: who’s to blame for this situation? Certainly some overzealous lefties, that’s obvious, but it was Republican strategists who willfully blurred the distinction between legitimate political argument and racist doublespeak to gain a political advantage:
    It was called “the southern strategy,” started under Richard M. Nixon in 1968, and described Republican efforts to use race as a wedge issue — on matters such as desegregation and busing — to appeal to white southern voters.
    Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman, this morning will tell the NAACP national convention in Milwaukee that it was “wrong.”
    “By the ’70s and into the ’80s and ’90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out,” Mehlman says in his prepared text. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
    link
    If lefties should be honest in admitting certain overreaches, then those on the right should at least find it in their hearts to be as honest as the former RNC chairman. (This is a general statement, not attacking OC Steve in any way, whose point is valid, but incomplete IMHO)

20. I agree with that there were and are severe problems with US cities, but is it correct to claim that this is solely the fault of liberal crime and housing policies? My take is that the problems of the inner city originated with white flight that was exacerbated with the onset of the Civil Rights movement, and with white flight, the cities were starved of the resources. I don’t think any housing policy might have changed that. A crime policy that operated on sub rosa racist principles might have been able to stop things from declining, but that would be by simply stopping change from occurring.

21. Good post, publius, and good points made in response (and thanks for dropping the prior thread down the queue!!).
    It is hard to believe how entrenched the Washington elites are in trying to protect Reagan on this point. It came up in a recent chat with David Broder:
    “Silver Spring, Md.: I am very interested in your views on David Brooks’s defense of Ronald Reagan’s trip to Philadelphia, Miss., at the start of his 1980 campaign. In today’s New York Times, Brooks take issue with the description of the trip as an appeal to racists Southern voters. But because Reagan did use the loaded term “states rights” and promise to give localities more control over their schools, I don’t think his visit can be seen as anything but racist. This seems like ancient history, but history seems to repeat itself in these campaigns. See the Willie Horton ads, and then Gov. Bush’s speech at Bob Jones University. So I would like to know your views on this issue.
    David S. Broder: Your question sent me to the New York Times, which I had not had a chance to read. I have great admiration for David Brooks, and even greater trust on his main source, Lou Cannon. I think both described the sequence of events at the beginning of Reagan’s campaign accurately. I have never written or believed that Reagan deliberately appealed to racial prejudice, but I know such prejudice existed — and exists — and still affects our politics today.”
    (snip)
    “Lafayette Hill, Pa.: You said earlier in this chat that “I have never written, or believed, that Reagan deliberately appealed to racial prejudice.” Do you believe his use of the term “welfare queens” to not have been a deliberate appeal to racial prejudice?
    David S. Broder: Welfare as an issue was always racially tinged, and so the term “welfare queen” had racial overtones. But the welfare system was also a legitimate subject for debate, and as you know, it was President Clinton who finally signed a major overhaul of that system into law.”
    Reagan never did anything wrong, and look over there!

22. You can’t really be against affirmative action because you believe we should be truly color blind instead – secretly you’re just racist.
    Well, speaking for myself, I have no problem with people who sincerely desire a color-blind society and sincerely believe, for whatever reason, that affirmative action is an impediment to achieving it. I disagree with them, but it’s honest disagreement.
    I have a big problem with people who — and I’m NOT saying you’re one of these, Steve, and if you are, it’s up to you to tell me so or not — refuse to acknowledge two things:
    1. The extent to which affirmative action was designed to remedy the lagging effects of a culture which was manifestly NOT colorblind and which was not going to achieve anything even remotely resembling colorblindness until nonwhites were given access to the benefits of education and jobs; but more importantly,
    2. If we got rid of affirmative action tomorrow morning, the LAST thing we’d achieve would be colorblindness. Hilzoy has already documented the extent to which, not only is there an entrenched whites>latinos>blacks hiring heirarchy out there now, but that employers will hire white felons over black college graduates. We’ve also seen studies that suggest that names on résumés perceived by employers as black (or, to be generous, “ethnic”) are less likely to get called back than names perceived as white. Getting rid of affirmative action policies would not only not solve those problems, they’d make them an order of magnitude worse, IMNSHO.
    So, you can sincerely believe affirmative action is bad, and have that be an honestly-come-by position. But you’re going to have to come up with solutions that actually solve the problems, not just wave a hoped-for “colorblindness” as a panacea.
    America has deeply entrenched problems with race, and shouting “colorblindness” doesn’t solve any of them. When you’re more likely to get called for a job interview just because your name is Bob or Jim rather than Latrell or Tyrone, that’s a real problem that eliminating affirmative action ain’t gonna fix.

23. Dr. S: But you’d better be prepared to talk and think about what the racial implications might be, and how you can distance your views from the coded meaning the phrase already has.
    No. I’m sorry but I don’t agree with that. That grants the premise that the viewpoint is implicitly racist today, in 2007. Also, I’m not a University of Delaware student.
    If I say I believe that states should be able to establish their own speed limits or legalize marijuana it is up to you to make the argument that I am somehow being racist.
    novakant: If lefties should be honest in admitting certain overreaches, then those on the right should at least find it in their hearts to be as honest as the former RNC chairman.
    I agree. I’m not saying race hasn’t been used as a wedge issue by the GOP. I object to people assuming that my political views today, in 2007, are based on racism.

24. How racism is defined is key, here, as Dr Science and others have suggested. The contemporary, teevee, soundbite definition of racism – ‘Using The N-or-some-other-Word’ – is really kind of an insult to the concept. Even defining racism strictly as discrimination – noticing differences – sidesteps the problem. US racism is, above all, structural, institutional. Slavery, and then Jim Crow, were institutions; unfair housing and lending are structural. Personal bigotry is a symptom. While it’s wonderful, and potentially very important, when a powerful person can ‘manage’ their own symptom (compare Woodrow Wilson to GW Bush), there is nothing preventing them from neglecting or even worsening, the underlying disease.
    I think ‘nice’ conservatives like Brooks have a hard time facing the racist foundations of the modern GOP because they want to escape the fact that there was something really immoral going on. The modern GOP explicitly and conciously decided to exploit the grubby, ugly overt racism still stinking up the South. They want to argue that they didn’t invent racism, that southern Democrats personified southern racism, that plenty of Democrats are racist too, etc. All true, but not exculpatory. What damns them is not that they merely exploited a situation which was already there: they extended it. Racism is not a dormant or latent disease; it can only get better or worse. They made it worse. The Southern Strategy was like discreetly slipping the blankets off of someone in a sickbed, a form of cultural torture – not the sort of thing genteel guys like Brooks want to admit to. His very denial of something this obvious is an admission.

25. OCSteve: I object to people assuming that my political views today, in 2007, are based on racism.
    But if you identify as a supporter of a racist party, and identify as part of a racist political movement – both of which apply to the Republican party and the conservative political movement, you will then – and you should – have to constantly be on the defense against members of your own party, and fellow-travellers in your own movement, who will want to include you in their racist political actions and views. What do you do, personally, to resist that? What other people who aren’t part of your party or your movement think of you personally is – relatively speaking – small beans, compared to whether you are by your support of your party actually supporting racist policies.

26. A nice riposte, OCSteve, but what I see is a parallel to the way Republicans have used libertarianism as sheep’s clothing to institute ‘reforms’ that reward market players, frex. A libertarian can say that they honestly think that we should not have any regulation, but when those people are appealed to, and it turns out that ‘not any regulation’ means regulation dealing with Enron and not with marijuana, I’m not sure if the libertarian gets a complete pass and should be able to say ‘how the heck could I have known those guys were going to do that?’

27. I wonder if the answer to your title question doesn’t have more to do with the 2008 election than it does the 1980 one. With the GOP in tatters, and the (previous) appeal of Thompson being more that he’s the most Gipperish of the candidates than that he’s the most inspiring of the lot, I suspect this whitewashing of Reagan’s image is an attempt to be able to both channel Ronnie and still appeal to minorities next November. This need to connect to a GOP success story is a transparent admission that Bush sucks, but they can’t even hope of winning if the nation’s voting minorities assume the “new Reagan” feels the same about them that the old Reagan did.

28. Phil: America has deeply entrenched problems with race, and shouting “colorblindness” doesn’t solve any of them.
    Agreed, and all your points are valid. What I object to is the fact that I can’t discuss it without many people assuming my opinion is based on racism.

29. put me on-record as not considering the GOP either a “racist political movement” or a “racist political party”.
    rather, i believe, as many above have described, that there are racists everywhere and that the GOP has a recent high-profile record of exploiting racist feelings. i’m sure you can find Dems who’ve done the same, but you won’t find a recent Dem presidential contender* who has done it as part of their campaign.
    * “contender” was carefully-chosen so as to exclude once-candidate Sharpton.

30. The issue is not whether this or that politician or voter is “racist” or not – I am quite willing to believe that Reagan and/or Bush (either one) is/was not personally hostile to non-whites. The issue is whether or not Republican politicians deliberately exploit the issue, and the answer is emphatically yes.
    The Republican party is now the racist party, and if you vote for Republicans you must accept some responsibility for their racist policies.

31. It seems to me that one form of institutionalized, perhaps even codified racism is a quota system that caps the number of students of Asian ethnicity in various colleges and universities. But those institutions are generally liberal. And the people who institute and enforce this type of discrimination are liberals.

32. OCSteve,

    I have a bone to pick with one of your statements in what was otherwise a post I agreed with.

    You can’t really believe that it’s important to secure our borders – you’re just scared of all those brown people infiltrating your neighborhood.”

    Most of what I’ve seen in the recent fracas about immigration *is* pretty much poorly disguised hating on Mexicans. Tancredo is the most egregious offender, but there are many, many others.

33. On Krugman and St. Ronny – I have to go with Mark Hemingway:
    Perhaps more approvingly, Krugman used the occasion to gleefully trash the economic legacy of “St. Ronald Reagan” who got elected through “red-baiting” and “race-baiting.” Krugman doesn’t explain to his audience that he had no problems going to work enacting the economic policy of a such a racist when he worked for the Reagan White House’s Council of Economic Advisors.
    No mention of that in his blog post either. It doesn’t make Krugman wrong here, but I would expect the disclosure and some explanation of how he parted ways with Reagan, especially from an influential pundit.

34. Detroit is a perfect storm of many problems. One of the largest problems is the loss of jobs from the auto manufacturers, due to a mix of automation, corporate culture changing, and US automakers not competing with the Japanese manufacturers. It’s been losing population for years for many reasons, and no mix of government programs and market “reforms” of either party has had too much benefit.

35. Pretending that we don’t harbor biases/ prejudices can be disruptive to our decisionmaking ability.
    More productive, the explicit recognition of predetermined mindsets on race and ethnicity coupled with a resolve to set them aside, would help all of us reach more rational decisions on matters of importance.
    All of us pretend at some level, denying that these preformed conclusions about others exist in ourselves. To do otherwise would be to place myself in the category of Sheriff Bull Connor and the rest of the 60’s miscreants.
    We do this because we view racial biases and prejudices as limited to animosity – hatred – malevolence. But…there is a second category of discrimination, the unemotional belief in a moral/intellectual/psychological distinction that is not borne out by science or experience. Jews are all smart. Blacks are all (great basketball players) stupid.
    We would all, not just David Brooks, benefit by acknowledging the undeniable; and by recognizing that all or nearly all of us continue to harbor unreasoning distinctions about race or ethnicity that can only be fixed by facing them and setting them aside.

36. Jes: What do you do, personally, to resist that?
    What little you can. When the GOP sends David Duke an official letter condemning his activities when he decides to run as a Republican, you applaud that. When Trent Lott praises Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential bid you join the rest of the blog world in booing him off stage.
    I know we’ve discussed in a similar context before – but we have only two parties to choose from here. It would be nice to pick from the “57 varieties” you have available but we don’t have that option. I’m trying not to go down the “but they did it too” road here. I could, but its history and I don’t think it is relevant in 2007 either.
    cleek: “contender” was carefully-chosen so as to exclude once-candidate Sharpton.
    No fair short-circuiting a good rejoiner. 😉

37. I’m not sure if Brooks column is really about race as much as the general white-washing of Reagan. I’m sure he’d have been just as defensive if someone had brought up Reagan certifying El Salvador’s government supported human rights (back when it was murdering priests and nuns), backing Saddam Hussein and his use of poison gas against Iran, his views on apartheid.
    Reagan’s a symbol because he took policies dear to the right-wing and was still wildly popular (and probably had most right-wingers convinced that they were finally going to rollback all the evil social changes that happened in the sixties and seventies). The fact that he supported dictators, ran up a massive budget surplus, saddled us with stupid ideas like SDI and supply-side economics, those are to be flushed down the memory hole. The Onion parody about “Reagan memorial pyramid almost completed” pretty much sums it up.
    As to his racial record, I’ve read that his supporting a bill that wiped out California’s right-to-carry gun laws was largely in response to the Black Panthers. Any information on that, anyone?

38. What I object to is the fact that I can’t discuss it without many people assuming my opinion is based on racism.
    I could only do that if I was willing to assume that American society is not racist. Why shouldn’t people assume that you’re a normal American? When a normal American uses racially-loaded words, I assume they mean it. If you’re going to use those words in a different way, stripping them of their usual historical baggage, then you’re going to have to *work* at it.
    You can’t deal with racism by saying “Bored now.” This is particularly true for those of us on the upside of the American race game, because a huge part of “privilege” is the freedom to not notice things.

39. While I agree that it is possible to be a Republican or anti-immigrant or want to fill the prisons without being a racist, the problem is that you will end up with many allies who are racist and you will be furthering their agenda. The Republican Southern Strategy was effective for the Republican Party, even for those who were not remotely racist, but they traded their heritage for it, just as the Democrats were finally cleaning up their act.
    If the Republicans hadn’t made a place for the Confederate Battle Flag Wavers, they would have been marginalized in a George Wallace third party, vile and vicious, but essentially harmless because Democrats were breaking away from their racism and the Republicans had never been.
    That pact with the devil is still in place. Republicans who have never been racist, who have Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in their foursomes at the country club and don’t even mention it, are still relying on the deal and are still making decisions that keep the racists who still exist voting for the Republican candidates. As others have mentioned, life in the US has been fraught with racism in the past and ‘color-blindness’ does nothing but reinforce the sins of the past.
    Public universities that practice affirmative action have a problem when they keep highly qualified white or Asian students from their states from attending their flagship schools. The answer, of course, is simple, if expensive. Affirmative action students are in addition to the capacity quota of the school. Over the next few years, Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan and other highly selective public universities need to add more seats for freshmen to meet all of the goals they are pursuing. More importantly, the states need to be sure that the affirmative action admittees are really capable of success in these schools. That requires a major overhaul of K-12 education.
    Eventually, the problem will be solved by intermarriage, but that is many generations away. Today, the best we can do is mitigate the damage of the past and work to improve the future. Those who advocate doing nothing, for whatever reason, have chosen to side with the racists.

40. The fact that he supported dictators, ran up a massive budget surplus, saddled us with stupid ideas like SDI and supply-side economics, those are to be flushed down the memory hole.
    Fraser, Clearly you meant massive budget deficits. Unfortunately, George W Bush is still pursuing all of these policies. The only one he hasn’t figured out how to do is arm two different countries (Iran and Iraq) as they fight each other. Instead, he seems willing to fight both of them, for no good reason.

41. I agree with Fraser. Brooks was just white-washing, and today’s topic happened to be race.
    Unfortunately for Brooks, that topic is the one that’s probably hardest to wash off.
    Great post Pub, and a very good comment thread everybody else.

42. one that reduced black people to 3/5 of a person
    The truth is that blacks remained non-people, while, in effect, whites in slave states got an additional three-fifths of a vote per black. The formulation you’ve used (which is a common one) implies that the number should be 1. In fact, that was for obvious reasons the slaveholders’ position, while the preferred anti-slavery number was 0.

43. You can’t really believe in state’s rights – that’s just code for racism.
    I’ll make a weaker statement that I believe to be entirely true. “States’ rights” is code for “I can’t win at the federal level”. If there’s a political party (or faction) that will stand on principal and refuse to push their agenda at the federal level even though they have some chance of success there, I have yet to encounter it.
    Racists beset by civil rights legislation and the Warren Court are merely the most familiar example. “Conservatives” who want the federal government to outlaw same-sex marriage are the obverse.

44. Have to disagree with the idea that SDI was a waste. SDI contibuted very much to the eventual freedom of
    Albania
    Bulgaria
    Czechoslovakia
    East Germany
    Estonia
    Hungary
    Latvia
    Lithuania
    Poland
    Romania
    Ukraine
    which is a shared accomplishment with Bush 41. And why wouldn’t any American want anti-ballistic missiles as part of our national security? To be against an ABM defense strategy seems to be short sighted, and frankly, weak on security issues, especially given the way the nuclear club is expanding.

45. Agreed, and all your points are valid. What I object to is the fact that I can’t discuss it without many people assuming my opinion is based on racism.

    Granted. On the other hand, it’s the case of the burned child, where folks are understandably wary of people who, SAYING the same things, just might DO the same things.

46. And why wouldn’t any American want anti-ballistic missiles as part of our national security? To be against an ABM defense strategy seems to be short sighted, and frankly, weak on security issues, especially given the way the nuclear club is expanding.
    Why not just advocate for having the Death Star as part of our national security, it’ll cost about the same and is just as feasible.

47. And why wouldn’t any American want anti-ballistic missiles as part of our national security?
    And ninja ponies!

48. SDI, Star Wars, like so many other euphemisms, was and is a bad idea because it is not a defensive tool, but surprise, an offensive one.

49. “* ‘contender’ was carefully-chosen so as to exclude once-candidate Sharpton.”
    I’m suddenly picturing the Reverend Al in a dinner theater production of On The Waterfront.

50. Ugh, there’s no point in replying to a troll who is only interested in jerking people around, and whose goal in commenting is to say anything to provoke a reaction. You’re just being played.

51. If there’s a political party (or faction) that will stand on principal and refuse to push their agenda at the federal level even though they have some chance of success there, I have yet to encounter it.
    Well, given the tax revolt and Prop 13, one could suggest that some people push agendas on a state level because a path has been established. A parallel example, I have been involved in a national teaching organization here in Japan, and got pushed into running for national office. However, my experience at the national level soured me on any kind of action within this organization on the national level precisely because of the kind of frustrations that exist. So I might get upset if someone suggested (and there were a lot of sharp elbows, so the basic equivalent was suggested on a number of occasions) if you really thought X was such a good idea, you would have attempted to institute it nationally, so I have to assume that you aren’t serious when you try to institute these changes locally.
    Now, this discusses people rather than parties, but I can think of several groups that would prefer to work on a state level rather than try and subject their changes to the federal level where they would be beaten up.

52. Unless you’re part of the racial solution, as Americans we’re *all* part of the problem.
    Those who advocate doing nothing, for whatever reason, have chosen to side with the racists.
    Sorry, but I simply don’t buy these original sin/collective guilt tactics and find them counterproductive. You might have a point if the US was Nazi Germany but it’s not.
    Also, until we reach egalitarian utopia there is simply no limit to your approach – why stop at race:
    There are still pretty few women at the top management level, what are you doing about it, are you a sexist? Children of academics have a much higher chance of becoming academics themselves, than those growing up without such a background – what are we doing about that, is it not unjust? Children of wealthy parents are much more likely to stay or become even more wealthy, while all others have only a minuscule chance of ever reaching these levels – unless you are willing to dispossess them all, you’re a classist, right?
    I’m all for a more egalitarian society with greater equal opportunity, but there are different ways to get there and not everybody who doesn’t share your particular ideas on this matter is a racist.

53. As an actual question, DaveC, how many of the countries with or pursuing nukes that might use them against the US would send them via missile, rather than say, cargo container?
    Because SDI does nothing to cargo containers.

54. yeah novakant? What about those who argue that we should stop at striking down the 1964 civil rights act & all affirmative action programs as unconstitutional, overturn the decision extending the equal protection clause to the federal government, and stop providing court-appointed lawyers to poor defendants in criminal cases? The boundary between “personal hatred of black people” and “utter indifference to policies which harm them & strong opposition to all possible remedies” becomes fairly unimportant to me.

55. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are anti-Semites, period. And yet they became two-term Presidents of the United States of America.
    Ronald Reagan was a racist, period. And yet he became a two-term President of the United States.
    Coincidence?
    OCSteve: “If I say that states should be able to establish their own speed limits or legalize marijuana it is up to YOU to make the argument that I am somehow being racist.”
    True, but so what? Ronald Reagan, the subject at hand, didn’t show up in Philadelphia, Mississippi to galvanize the pothead vote or to lure owners of hepped-up 1957 Chevys to the Republican side.
    He either knew precisely what he was doing or the only other explanation is the usual liberal criticism that he thought he was in a movie and was an out-of-touch, distant charlaton. Pick one.
    I vote for both, but YMMV.
    Unless, of course, those interest groups were also a little pissed off at “outside agitators” coming in to integrate schools and such.
    Neither political party will ever wash away the stain of what William Faulkner called America’s “original sin”.
    DaveC:
    Leave it to you to throw a spastic in the works. 😉 And a very clever one, too, judging from your link that gives out names.
    Fine. I’ll call you on this. If I’m elected President (after opening my campaign in San Francisco’s Chinatown with pointed references to academic quotas at elite schools), you will be named Secretary of Education, head of the Office of Equal Opportunity, and Director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and, if your schedule permits, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
    As my underling (God, I love the sound of that!), you will undertake the following: no more quotas; all academic admissions will be based on strict academic merit, AND, in the interests of capitalistic free trade in intellectual capital, you will direct your border agents to admit all comers of Chinese and other Asian descents, including the 100 million or so 17-year old Asian Indians who are looking to emigrate.
    My goal, easily achievable under the absolutist terms of a pure meritocracy by the end of our first term, will be to transform the student bodies at those snotty, elite institutions on both Left Coasts, not to mention Chicago, to 100% Asian.
    I got this idea from my 17-year old son who attends one of those smarty-pants, elite high school programs for over-achievers. It’s a public school, otherwise communist and, heaven forbid, politically correct and inclusive. Nearly all of his best friends and fellow students are Chinese, Indian, and Jewish. Their families go for it. And it shows, compared to we more “laid back” families.
    Then we’ll sit back and see what happens when diversity is vanguished from the American academic landscape, and it will be, because butts will be kicked..
    Fine by me. How bout everyone else?
    You can hold out in the White House bunker with me and the rest of the diversity debunkers (Clarence Thomas can come, too, because I will still be one of those closet liberals, despite his fairly pedestrian academic credentials) when the trouble starts. Al Sharpton, George Wallace (the ghost in the wheelchair), Tom Tancredo, southern Democrats turned Republicans turned Independents, soccer moms, and, well, it will be a stressful time as all of these folks link arms and storm the barricades.
    We’ll send Sebastian out to calm the rabble with cool rationality and perfect reasonableness (which is a good thing, if not always useful). Then, after they’re done tarring and feathering him, I will name one of the 622,895,413 million Asians with superior academic credentials to his post.
    You will, of course, tender your resignation, having realized the country deserves only the best and diversity has ruined, I say, ruined this country.
    That last is a jokey-joke. I think you’re the best, but then you can’t trust a guy like me who tries to be nice and politically correct in polite company.
    PS. Eventually, the racists in the Republican Party and the religiously fundamental demagogues in the Republican Party will realize they were temporarily useful and that their relatively few number put the Party over the top vote-wise to achieve the one and only true aim of the Republican Party: To eliminate taxation and destroy as much government as possible.

56. More On Reagan And Race

    Publius has some good thoughts on the whole Reagan editorial thing that Kevin addressed earlier. Publius is a little to eager to think that racism is strictly a thing of the past, rather than still being quite prevalent today (well that, or hes…

57. “the problem is that you will end up with many allies who are racist and you will be furthering their agenda.”
    Yeah, that is a problem; The Democratic party is all the time furthering the agenda of racist blacks, isn’t it?
    Well, guess what: I don’t give a fig about furthering the agenda of racists, as long as I’m only doing it to the extent that agenda is legitimate. Like the proverbial stopped clock, even scum of the earth can be right, sometimes, and I’m not going to abandon worthy causes just because some of the supporters of those causes are unworthy.
    Democrats don’t abandon a cause just because Al Sharpton signs on, why should you expect Republicans to abandon any cause David Duke approves of?

58. OCSteve, you make some good points, I agree that believing in states rights doesn’t make one a racist, but going to Philadelphia, MS in 1980 and making a statement supporting states rights is an appeal to racism. I honestly don’t feel a good faith argument can be made that that isn’t the case.
    Further, I’d like to see some consistency in application of states rights (it’s clear you feel the same way). Modern Republicans who make states rights arguments for any issue had better be ready to defend state sanction of medical pot.

59. And we see reason #1 why Obama will not be elected POTUS. Reason #2 is that he’s a Muslim.*
    *Ok, he’s not a muslim, but if he gets the Dem nod, there will be a “Obama is a secret muslim” whisper (if not outright shouting) campaign the likes of which even God hasn’t seen.

60. Brett:
    “Like the proverbial stopped clock, even scum of the Earth can be right, sometimes, and I’m not going to abandon worthy causes because SOME of the supporters of those causes are unworthy.”
    I just said that.
    To bring the thread back to Ronald Reagan, I think you scored a hat trick.

61. publius, looks like you hit the big time-a link from sully! but he credits your fantastic post to hilzoy. better get someone on that champ.

62. Incidentally, I misspelled “vanquish” with a “g”.
    See, I was turned down by Stanford on my own merits. But I’m the exception that proves the rule, even though I think I should go to the head of the line because of my exceptional unruliness.

63. The Bad Old Days

    Publius at ObWi:The problem today is less racism, than an unwillingness to deal honestly with the consequences of prior racism…No racism problem today. How does one reach this conclusion, exactly? Let’s see:But more abstractly, much of modern conserv…

64. Democrats don’t abandon a cause just because Al Sharpton signs on, why should you expect Republicans to abandon any cause David Duke approves of?
    I wouldn’t have thought this needed saying, but apparently it does.
    Because Al Sharpton, for all his faults, was never the Grand Wizard of a domestic terrorist organization with a 100 year history of brutality against anyone they don’t like. And, of course, by “brutality” I mean lynching, maiming, mutilation, and burning alive, along with the more pedestrian shooting, beating to death, and blowing up.
    Hey, maybe Hitler had some good ideas too.
    David Duke and Al Sharpton are not comparable individuals. If that’s not clear, I’m not sure how to proceed.
    Thanks –

65. John, this is probably due to my utter disinterest in sports, but what exactly did you mean by “hat trick”? Does this involve rabbits, or silk scarfs?

66. Democrats don’t … why should you expect Republicans to …
    is the Neenerneenerist Party going to field a candidate for Pres in 2008 ?

67. Many of the comments here speak in terms of how racist Americans are, i.e. it is embedded in our heritage and nationality.
    Maybe so, but have any of you ever travelled outside of this country? Do you think racism is a peculiarly American phenomenon? (Just like some people think slavery was America’s “peculiar institution,” when in fact it was prevalent around the world?)
    Go to Japan, and see how other Asian nationalities are treated. Go to Malaysia, and see how the Chinese or Indonesians are treated. Go to African countries, and pay attention to the animosity between light-skinned and dark-skinned tribes. Go to South American countries, and observe the racial heirarchies that remain.
    The U.S. isn’t exactly the world’s biggest practitioner of racism. There are plenty of countries where the equivalent of a “civil rights movement” has not happened yet. Please stop disparaging Americans as if we are uniquely racist, and oh how good it would be if we were like the rest of the world. That indicates a bizarre, provincial self-hatred.

68. “And, of course, by “brutality” I mean lynching, maiming, mutilation, and burning alive, along with the more pedestrian shooting, beating to death, and blowing up.”
    You actually wrote that without irony? I’m pretty sure that Sharpton, for all that he’s the new guy on the block, has actually been involved in more arson/murders than Duke…

69. “Please stop disparaging Americans as if we are uniquely racist, and oh how good it would be if we were like the rest of the world.”
    The fact that racism is endemic throughout the world, and that America isn’t particularly more egregious than most, is perfectly true, and a point I make myself from time to time.
    However, in this case, I invite you to please quote some specific statements in this thread that engage in “disparaging Americans as if we are uniquely racist,” so we can consider the accuracy and applicablility, or not, of your criticism in this case, please. Scatter-shot vague accusations are difficult to address when you’ve not pointed to what statements, exactly, you’re referring to.
    “I’m pretty sure that Sharpton, for all that he’s the new guy on the block, has actually been involved in more arson/murders than Duke…”
    Have you notified the police? If not, why not?

70. coming to terms with racism is an American problem, not just a Republican one.
    http://blanksslate.blogspot.com/2007/11/st-reagan-race-and-right.html

71. Your thesis has a little bit of a problem with the 1787-1856 period, as state rights and federalism in modern conservatism trace quite a bit to the Constitution itself.
    It seems odd, Sebastian, that you acknowledge the roots of modern conservatism’s view of states rights and federalism as pre-Cviil War–and yet, the whole point of the post-Civil War settlement notably, the 14th Amendment, was to alter the state/federal relationship. And of course, there is a reason we had a Civil War and a 14th Amendment, and that reason is not unrelated to racism . . .
    You can’t really believe in state’s rights – that’s just code for racism.
    Your point might be more persuasive if it were not for the fact that mainstream Republicans demonstrably do not beleive in state’s rights when it comes to issues like drug laws or marriage laws. somehow, they seem to care about state’s rights only when we talk about state’s rights to be racist.

72. Reminder on how to post a non-broken, working link: How To Embed A Link.
    Here is a handy guide to HTML tags.
    You can use “find” to go to “link something.”
    Here’s how you link (you can copy this and paste it as necessary, if you can’t remember):
    Put words as necessary between > < Put the actual URL to link to where it says "URL." You're done. It doesn't matter if you capitalize or not.

73. I’m pretty sure that Sharpton, for all that he’s the new guy on the block, has actually been involved in more arson/murders than Duke
    woah… cite ?

74. I’m pretty sure that Sharpton, for all that he’s the new guy on the block, has actually been involved in more arson/murders than Duke…
    OK, whatever. This is where I say “Uncle”.
    Do you think racism is a peculiarly American phenomenon?
    No.
    Thanks –

75. Freddie’s Fashion Mart.
    IMO, this is a bit like a participant in a mud wrestling contest accusing his foe of being dirty. The Democratic party, the party of slavery and Jim Crow, did not enjoy a virgin rebirth in the civil rights movement, much as you’d like to think it, and it gets very tiresome indeed when Democrats launch into this “racist Republican party” riff without the slightest sign of self-consciousness.

76. “… but have any of you ever traveled to this country?”
    Yup.
    Even though Gary already asked after this, I’ll offer this statement: “Humans are uniquely racist in the aggregate, with individual exceptions.
    Americans are no more exceptional (despite some who are argue that we are uniquely exceptional) than anyone else, except that we have elected governments to coerce us into improving the ravages of racism.

77. “outside of this” not “to”
    I would cry Uncle too, but I can’t spell it and I would probably misquote my uncle as well.

78. Leave it to you to throw a spastic in the works. 😉
    Good Catch John (Center Fielder?)
    First thing I’d do as Secy of Dept of Education would be to force U.S. News and World Report to rank colleges according to their BCS standings, which would lower the attractiveness of the Ivys and Berkeley (Although Cal did thump the Vols pretty good this year.)
    This still would not solve the problem at Michigan, but App State may have made a little dent.
    Anyway, another link I looked at posed the question this way, “Why should Asian American students have to go to Valparaiso or Kalamazoo?”, and my first reaction was “Hey, don’t be disrespecting Valpo! Come on, guys, remember The Shot.” (although “The Play” did happen between smarty-pants schools Cal and Stanford.
    Second thing I would do is eliminate some college sports like volleyball, in favor of a college NASCAR league. Now, before you go saying, “DaveC, you couldn’t hold Sebastian’s jock, so who are you to eliminate vollwyball?”, I’ll come right out and say that volleyball was my only varsity H.S. sport. So I make cuts where they even hurt me. Also so sorry to those who hate to see me mess up the consensus formation going on around here. My inane comments are in the spirit of the booby post.

79. hat-trick: to score three times (usually in hockey and if I’m not mistaken, cricket)
    I have a feeling we’re both going to find out much more about the precise meaning soon on this thread. 😉 to you know who.
    Brett:
    You scored at least three points with Ronald Reagan, if you were around to vote for him.
    He was a stopped clock; he appealed to the scum of the earth in Mississippi (and he knew it); you didn’t abandon his overall philosophy because of it.
    The crowd roars.

80. While an improvement over The current president, Reagan was hardly the “saint” the right is making him out to be.

81. Gary:
    some specific statements in this thread that engage in “disparaging Americans as if we are uniquely racist,”
    Not to do global view’s homework for him, but there are several comments that can be construed this way (at least they seem to imply that Americans are *especially* racist — “uniquely” is a leap):
    Doctor Science:

    To me it seems obvious that the US is *profoundly* racist

    racism is woven into the fabric of American society

    in a society as pervasively racist as ours

    Russell:

    Racism is, it would seem, bred in the American bone.

    Phil:

    America has deeply entrenched problems with race

82. Brett, so what about the fact that most of the Dixiecrats became Republicans, or were replaced by Republicans when they retired? Just calling the Democrats “The party of slavery and Jim Crow” is ignoring an entire swathe of American political history, and the drastic realignment of the parties that happened in the Civil Rights era.

83. Sharpton — arson?
    WTF?
    Aaaaas Brett takes a gleeful leap off the deep end…
    I don’t like Sharpton, but I don’t know of a single felony he has enabled, really. Whereas the Klan is a terrorist organization by any reasonable definition. An ineffective, mostly-talk terrorist organization in my lifetime, but still –and proudly — the same organization that used to burn blacks (and the occasional Jew, Catholic, and Mexican) alive, hang them, burn their property, attack courthouses and jails, etc. Sharpton at his worst was an apologist for one racist mob action, not an accessory.

84. Racism is, it would seem, bred in the American bone.
    I’ll stand behind that statement. If you’d like to argue against it, have fun. You’ve got your work cut out for you.
    The question was whether we’re unique in that regard.
    Thanks –

85. You’re asking Republicans (or anyone for that matter)to look at themselves in a self-critical way without having shown any propensity for doing so in the past.
    Good luck with that.

86. Unfortunately, you can play this game just about anyway you want- there are plenty of “Progressive” policies that have some relationship to racism, both white and black.
    Not that the gold standard is a particularly important issue in my mind, but it gives a good example: Dave Neiwert has been claiming that Ron Paul’s support of the gold standard has deep roots in anti-Semitism because it’s a favorite issue of “New World Order” types. Trouble is, he ignores the fact that the gold standard was a favorite of classical liberals and, notably, the first President of the NAACP. Meanwhile, opposition to the gold standard was primarily brought to the forefront in this country by William Jennings Bryan as the centerpiece of his brand of populism (which we would now likely characterize as primarily racist in nature). So, in that case, which side is really based more in racism- the “conservative” gold standard side, or the “Progressive” anti-gold standard side.
    Also, I wanted to respond to Japonicus’ 9:47AM Post, where he said:
    “A libertarian can say that they honestly think that we should not have any regulation, but when those people are appealed to, and it turns out that ‘not any regulation’ means regulation dealing with Enron and not with marijuana, I’m not sure if the libertarian gets a complete pass and should be able to say ‘how the heck could I have known those guys were going to do that?'”
    I think you will find that this is the very reason libertarians have been fleeing the GOP and/or mounting an anti-establishment insurgency. After 25 or so years of being co-opted by the GOP, the Bushies finally pushed us over the line. Unfortunately, elements of the GOP have now taken to calling themselves “libertarians at heart” while advancing very un-libertarian arguments. I think this is because it allows them to feel good about themselves, and seem much less manipulative. Consider it the GOP’s version of “I have black friends.” Of course, it involves a dramatic level of doublethink to make such an argument, but in the process of doing so, they’ve completely misrepresented the real libertarians. I’m starting to think we need a new name.

87. If you’d like to argue against it, have fun.
    Thanks, but I was just trying to point out where “global view” might have gotten his/her impression. Anyway, regardless of my own opinions, I wouldn’t dare argue against a statement like that until you fleshed out exactly what you meant by it.

88. OCSteve reasonably asks why he should care about the history of the states-rights movement (btw, Sebastian, I vehemently disagree with your thumbnail assessment of the 1796-1860 period, as even then “states rights” were most loudly and comprehensively invoked in defense of the Peculiar Institution). I would answer that abstract arguments about rights seldom mean anything divorced from context. Ringing phrases about how people need space to realize their greatness, for example, sound a bit different in the original German. If a doctrine, like states’ rights, is developed largely to further some evil, such as Jim Crow, that fact throws an additional burden of proof on those who offer the doctrine as generally good or in good faith — just as the lofty ideals of communism must be judged in light of the horrors of Soviet Russia and Maoist China.
    Also, it’s generally a bad idea to ignore history, and always a good idea to know when you’re walking on someone else’s grave. I certainly don’t think that you, or any other modern supporter of new federalist theory, needs to prove that they’re not racist. But the kind of willful blindness to history shown by most Americans assures that we will 1) repeat our mistakes and 2) offend people who do remember history (e.g., “we’re Crusaders!”). Then we sit around and wonder, gee, how did that go so wrong.
    I don’t think anyone is saying that the conservatives need to apologize for Reagan’s race-baiting, but do we really need to lie about him? I wish more Republicans would ask themselves, why is it ALWAYS my politicians who wind up saying things like “welfare queen in a Cadillac” and “welcome to America, macaca!” That kind of scrutiny might finally clean out that ugly taint that never quite seems to go away. But they’re not going to ask that if they live in denial that it’s not just a one-off.

89. Since I’m one of the people KenB is citing, let me make myself clear(er):
    I’m a US citizen. Therefore, I do not stand outside American problems. It seems to me clear that racism is one of the big, ongoing problems the US has, and it has been a problem since the Revolution and before. This is hardly my own observation (see: Jefferson; Lincoln; Douglass; Faulkner; any survey course in American history).
    Are we unique in the degree of our racial problems? Insofar as these things can be measured or compared, no — but they’re pretty damn bad.
    Do we have a unique configuration of racial problems? Yes, because we have a unique history.
    Racial issues are profound and pervasive in US society because they’ve been here for a long time, have involved a lot of people, and have created & exposed the stresses & contradictions of our way of life. To me, this seems a completely unradical observation, pretty much at the 9th-grade history level.

90. kenB says:

    Not to do global view’s homework for him, but there are several comments that can be construed this way (at least they seem to imply that Americans are *especially* racist — “uniquely” is a leap): . . .Phil: America has deeply entrenched problems with race

    
    You forgot to quote the second part, where I said, “Unlike every other country in the world.” Oh, wait, that’s because I didn’t.
    The Democratic party, the party of slavery and Jim Crow, did not enjoy a virgin rebirth in the civil rights movement, much as you’d like to think it, and it gets very tiresome indeed when Democrats launch into this “racist Republican party” riff without the slightest sign of self-consciousness.
    
    How you don’t drown in your own irony on a daily basis is beyond me. Buy a flippin’ history book, kid.

91. Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, reported of a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Prof. Alexander P. Lamis, in which Lee Atwater discusses politics in the South:
    You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
    And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”.[8]

92. Dave Neiwert has been claiming that Ron Paul’s support of the gold standard has deep roots in anti-Semitism because it’s a favorite issue of “New World Order” types.
    well, it is a favorite of NWO types. and those types apparently love Ron Paul.
    nonetheless, Neiwert is often a little quick to leap to connections and conclusions, IMO.
    So, in that case, which side is really based more in racism- the “conservative” gold standard side, or the “Progressive” anti-gold standard side.
    again, IMO, neither Party today is responsible for what the Parties were doing over 100 years ago. i’m not going to, despondently, pull the lever for the Dems because i liked where they stood on the issues back in 1892.
    are you?

93. “The Democratic party, the party of slavery and Jim Crow, did not enjoy a virgin rebirth in the civil rights movement, much as you’d like to think it, and it gets very tiresome indeed when Democrats launch into this ‘racist Republican party’ riff without the slightest sign of self-consciousness.”
    Brett, the Democratic Party has, as you say, a long history of racism, going back to its pre-Civil War days, and with continued great fervor and virulence in the post-Civil War era, and the construction of Jim Crow as Reconstruction was destroyed.
    But the Democratic Party started to take the lead in, first very tentatively, fighting back against Jim Crow, and racism, with the first baby steps under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with the first civil rights plank in the 1940 Democratic platform, the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee in 1941, and other small but important and historic measures.
    This trend towards civil rights accelerated greatly under Harry Truman, who integrated the armed forces, and made the first strong push for full civil rights, and against bigotry, of any American President.
    Then, of course, after Eisenhower’s tepid course, JFK first stuck with lip service to civil rights, but little more, until finally forced, by the terrible violence on display against civil rights protestors on nightly tv news broadcasts, as America saw young men and women brutally beaten and attack by the authorities and “white” people of much of the south, to take up the cause of civil rights which was already a wide-spread Democratic cause, as it had been growing to be for many decades, led by… the liberals of America.
    By the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, the fight for civil rights in America, and against racism, was led by Democrats, and fought against by Republicans.
    If you think that’s sufficiently unimportant that it can be glossed by pointing out that, say, Woodrow Wilson was a dreadful and despicable racist — which he was — or that the Democratic Party was still losing its racist wing in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, to the Republican Party — hello, Strom Thurmond! — be my guest.
    If the facts make you uncomfortable, alas. I’m not in the least uncomfortable condemning the racist Democrats of the past, whether George Wallace, or Lester Maddox, and any in the near-endlessly long list of past racist Democratic politicans, while noting that when it came time to finally start to deliver on the promises of voting rights, and legislation to ban discrimination in housing, education, public accomodation, and all the other civil rights protections so hard fought for for so many decades, and won at the cost of people’s lives, and the life’s work of so many others, it was the Democrats who fought so hard to accomplish these goals, against the Republicans, who largely fought to prevent those laws.
    I’m comfortable with those facts. Tiresome though they may be.
    You cite a link here, presumably to support your claim that you’re “pretty sure that Sharpton, for all that he’s the new guy on the block, has actually been involved in more arson/murders than [David Duke].”
    As you know, “involved in… arson/murder” commonly means “was a criminal participant in arson/murder.”
    That’s quite a serious charge. And you’re “pretty sure” of it. I ask you again: what evidence do you have, or point to, of Al Sharpton’s criminal responsibility in that arson?
    It’s a perfectly simple question. You’ve made the charge (which is, I think, incidentally, not that I’d worry about it, libelous if untrue). Please support it.
    Why wouldn’t you, after all? Let’s put that arsonist behind bars!
    All we need is some actual evidence. You wouldn’t just casually libel someone, right?
    Thanks.
    KenB, thanks for the pointers. However, not one of them actually supports the claim that the statements were “disparaging Americans as if we are uniquely racist.”
    “Uniquely” means something: it means unique, singular. Not one of those statements said or implied any such thing.
    The statement “these statements are disparaging Americans as if we are uniquely racist” and the statement “these statements are disparaging Americans as if we are racist” have completely different meanings, no less than another change of a one word modifier completely changes the meaning “these statements are disparaging Americans as if we are not uniquely racist.”
    global view’s entire stated point was that everyone in the thread was disparaging Americans as uniquely racist: other claims about American racism are not at issue.
    “global view” attacked the entire body of commenters here: “Many of the comments here….”
    Every single person was included: “Maybe so, but have any of you ever travelled outside of this country? Do you think racism is a peculiarly American phenomenon?”
    We were all issued instructions: “Please stop disparaging Americans as if we are uniquely racist, and oh how good it would be if we were like the rest of the world. That indicates a bizarre, provincial self-hatred.”
    I’d like to see at least a few of these statements that were “disparaging Americans as if we are uniquely racist.”
    Certainly such statements are made by people, and such people are wrong. The question is: who was doing this in this thread?
    Secondly, was, in fact, every single commenter engaging in such disparagement of Americans?
    I’m kinda skeptical, but I’d like to give global view an opportunity to support these claims, which strike me as questionable.
    And, as always, goal-post moving isn’t a valid means of supporting a claim. (In this case, that would include claiming “uniquely” doesn’t mean “uniquely.”)

94. i’m not going to, despondently, pull the lever for the Dems because i liked where they stood on the issues back in 1892.
    Hmmph.
    cleek is clearly a Roo – se – velt man. (A 75 year Democrat legacy). And probably he is voting against Republicans because Warren Harding is in cahoots with Big Oil.

95. Cleek:
    That’s exactly my point- if you want to, you can find a plausibly racist connection to plenty of policies, and in many cases to policies on both sides of the same issue. This makes publius’ suggestion that the GOP acknowledge the source of “cognitive dissonance” on its side unworkable and frankly inappropriate without a similar demand of the Dems.
    If this suggestion were followed, each side of every argument would be required to find out which racists support or supported said policy, and then disclaim association with said racists. This would make the rightness or wrongness of something of less importance than who supports or supported it.

96. “Do we have a unique configuration of racial problems? Yes, because we have a unique history.”
    Not to disagree with anything else you said in that comment, Doctor Science, but this is a uselessly meaningless statement. It’s true of not just every single country, but of every single set of human beings who has ever existed.
    What set of people can you chose of whom the statement isn’t true?
    A distinction that isn’t a distinction isn’t a distinction.
    cleek: “well, it is a favorite of NWO types.”
    Um, I think you mean anti-“NWO” types.

97. Yeah, Gary, I meant to imply that I’d only call the US “uniquely” racist in an incredibly banal, I-must-write-a-300-word-essay kind of way.
    We’re not *outstandingly* racist, but racism is an *outstanding* problem of ours.

98. Um, I think you mean anti-“NWO” types.
    yeah, they are the anti- types. but i meant something like “people who use the phrase ‘New World Order'”. since these days, i only hear it from conspiracy-minded black helicopter (anti-black helicopter?) types. your Dale Gribbles and such.

99. Yeah, Gary, I meant to imply that I’d only call the US “uniquely” racist in an incredibly banal, I-must-write-a-300-word-essay kind of way.
    We’re not *outstandingly* racist, but racism is an *outstanding* problem of ours.

    Um, what? I’m sorry, but I don’t follow what you’re saying here at all: I have no idea what any of this means.
    (As a point of trivia, I wouldn’t call anything of only three hundred word an “essay”; I’d tend to consider an essay as having to be at least about 2,000 words before it was an actual “essay” — but that’s more personal usage preference than anything else. However, what are you talking about?; I’m afraid I’m baffled.)

100. “your Dale Gribbles and such.”
     I had to look that reference up; the Fox tv channel broadcast disappeared from here about four years ago (I assume they moved the antenna; the station that used to be UPN also vanished from broadcast a while back, and I know they’ve been putting up new antennas for HD; I only get one channel at all clearly, and that’s PBS 12; I get a very staticy NBC, CBS, ABC, and CW, and one other staticy PBS station, and that’s it).

101. Second run at this. If I eliminate my initial interpretation that the first paragraph was sarcastic about something, and then remove my confusion about the purpose of the asterisks in the second sentence, I guess the comment makes sense as a straight-forward comment, kinda.
     It’s my presumption that the comment was sarcastic about something, along with my confusion about the asterisked second sentence — which I now take as a substitute, for some reason, for italics for emphasis — that left me baffled. Sorry, Doctor Science.
     (Can I call you just “Dr. Science” for short, or would that be presumptuous?)

102. Ross Douthat links to this and expands on the crime angle among other things. I think it’s a pretty good response though I have to give it another read.

103. Most people just call me “Doc” or “Dr S”.
     Basically, I’m trying to say that I consider my statemens saying “the US is racist”, far from being controversial, are obvious at the 9th-grade level — the level at which a 300-word essay might need padding.

104. douthat’s piece is worth reading (as is everything else he writes). i’m hoping to respond tonight, and i disagree at points, but it’s worth the read

105. “I think it’s a pretty good response though I have to give it another read.”
     I think it’s somewhat gossamery.
     Is “‘the complete picture’ of the Republican realignment as a story of racist backlash, full stop, end of story”?
     No, of course it isn’t. Of course race wasn’t the only significant factor in the rise of Republicanism in the second half of the 20th century.
     I haven’t the faintest problem agreeing with assertion.
     But that’s because it’s a silly strawman. Whether Krugman meant to be that simplistic, or not, or was merely writing a bit loosely, I have no idea, but, yep, sure, race wasn’t the only factor, absolutely.
     Having agreed with that, there’s not much left to the argument, though.
     Goldwater’s themes, which Douthat noted weren’t picked up by the majority of the country in 1964, but some of which, such as those having to do with “state’s rights,” which happened to mean at the time that the federal goverment had no right or power to interfere with states’ voting laws, or laws regarding civil rights of any kind, were resonating nationally in ’68 and ’72 not just “because crime rates exploded over the quarter-century that followed Goldwater, and the (liberal-run) government seemed helpless to do anything about it,” but also because it gave people a not-necessarily-racist justification for their racist feelings, as well as for far more benign reasons.
     Where Douthat’s argument really falls down, though, is here:

     […] Southern whites were, and are, natural conservatives who happened to find themselves in the more liberal of the two parties; once Democrats associated themselves with the civil-rights movement, there wasn’t anywhere else for white Mississippians and Alabamans to go except the GOP.

     All very nice, but it totally ignores the completely conscious strategy of Richard Nixon and the leaders of both the national Republican Party, and most state Republican Parties, to deliberately go after the “white fear” vote, and pander to it.
     Somehow the fact of the endlessly detailed history of this goes unmentioned by Douthat.
     He quotes stuff, including this, which is close to an outright fib:

     […] Second, this was borne out in how little the GOP had to “offer,” so to speak, segregationists for their support after 1968, even according to the myth’s own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP, they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action.

     Well, that would be nice, but it’s just not true: the GOP offered, in the Nixon era through the Reagan era, a clear-cut message of opposing any and all programs intended to fulfill judicial orders, or in any way forward any further advancement in civil rights law, or programatically, and that wherever possible, such programs would be rolled back.
     Is that the same as standing in a school door, bellowing “Segregation forever!”? No.
     But it’s not just benign race neutrality, either, however emphatically or repeatedly that cover story is put forward.
     That what the GOP had to “offer” wasn’t an outright to Jim Crow doesn’t obviate that it was still a program of go as slow as possible, do as little as possible, resist as much as possible, roll back wherever possible over time, and that that’s the best they could do on that front.
     Does that mean that the parties were ever utterly, you’ll pardon the expression, black and white in their stances on race? One party perfectly pure and good, and the other party perfectly racist and evil?
     No, of course not.
     But that doesn’t mean we can’t make important distinctions, and the fact that the Republican Party has a more shameful record, overall, than the Democratic Party, on race over the past fifty-odd years, is an unfortunate, though not the only relevant, fact.
     Whereas glossing the matter as “the Republican Party was just race-neutral, and where else could people go?!” is, ah, not entirely accurate or honest.
     Going back to the premise of publius’s post: why deny this, if you’re a contemporary Republican, or sometime sympathizer?
     Why not just take Ken Mehlman’s attitude, and say “we did some bad stuff; we’re sorry; we won’t do it again; here’s what we now offer as policy and rhetoric: please try to judge us on it”?
     I mean, one has to actually back that up with real effort, and results, for it to stand a chance of working, but it would be a more admirable approach than rewriting history for the echo chamber.
     Minorities are particularly unapt to adopt such rewritten history, I’m inclined to think.

106. By the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, the fight for civil rights in America, and against racism, was led by Democrats, and fought against by Republicans.
     Um Hmm.
     What about the Japanese-American internment?
     Also seems like the Repubs were more on board the Civil Rights thing back in the 60’s.

     July 2, 1964: Democratic President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after former Klansman Robert Byrd’s 14-hour filibuster and the votes of 22 other Senate Democrats (including Tennessee’s Al Gore, Sr.) failed to scuttle the measure. Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen rallied 26 GOP senators and 44 Democrats to invoke cloture and allow the bill’s passage. According to John Fonte in the January 9, 2003, National Review, 82 percent of Republicans so voted, versus only 66 percent of Democrats.

     So, could it be that the conservative POV is much like Eisenhower’s:

     Now I realize as I talk about these matters that there is still, nevertheless, in your minds a special problem–that one of civil rights. Because of the problems that have been raised about the issue of racial discrimination and indeed any other types of discrimination, we have to be interested. We must be interested. We must do something about the Constitutional rights of the individual. To my mind, every American whatever his religion, his color, his race or anything else, should have exactly the same concern for these matters as does any individual who may have felt embarrassment or resentment because those rights have not been properly observed.
     So it means that every American, if we are to be true to our Constitutional heritage, must have respect for the law. He must know that he is equal before the law. He must have respect for the courts. He must have respect for others. He must make perfectly certain that he can, in every single kind of circumstance, respect himself.
     In such problems as this, there are no revolutionary cures. They are evolutionary. I started in the Army in 1911. I have lived to see the time come when in none of the Armed Services is practiced any kind of discrimination because of race, religion or color.
     In the Federal Government this same truth holds steady.
     In laws we have seen enacted those affecting the rights of voting. They are, let us pray, to be observed exactly as any other law passed and published by the Congress.
     Such things as these mean progress. But I do believe that as long as they are human problems–because they are buried in the human heart rather than ones merely to be solved by a sense of logic and of right-we must have patience and forbearance, We must depend more on better and more profound education than simply on the letter of the law. We must make sure that enforcement will not in itself create injustice.
     I do not decry laws, for they are necessary. But I say that laws themselves will never solve problems that have their roots in the human heart and in the human emotions. It is because of this very reason that I am more hopeful that we will, as the years go past, speak to each other only as Americans without any adjectives to describe us as special types of Americans. I am hopeful that we will see ourselves as equals before the law, equal in economic and every other kind of opportunity that is open to any other citizen. It is because education and understanding and betterment of human people can bring these things about, that I am hopeful.

     What is your evidence that in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, civil rights were fought against by Ronald Reagan, and like-minded people? (This is the subject of the post, by the way.)

107. According to Wikipedia:
     A hat-trick occurs in cricket when a bowler dismisses three batsmen with consecutive deliveries.
     Which doesn’t sound like nearly as much fun as bowling a maiden over.

108. Good luck with the rewriting history (Not.)

109. Gary: I think it’s somewhat gossamery.
     I think you may be cherry-picking just a bit, but as I said I have to re-read, and I will do so in light of your criticisms. Still, I think it is a substantive response.

110. Mike: Which doesn’t sound like nearly as much fun as bowling a maiden over.
     Neither one is fun for the batter: a “maiden over” is six bowls in which neither of the batters manage to score any runs.

111. And Now, The Right

     After venting my cranky spleen on the left and multiculturalism, I’ll let publius at Obsidian Wings explain what bugs me about the right with his insightful post on race and the Republicans.

112. You can’t really be against affirmative action because you believe we should be truly color blind instead – secretly you’re just racist.
     OCSteve, I agree that these kinds of statements can be toxic to real debate. However, I think if you reframe the statement as:
     You can’t really hope to overturn laws mandating affirmative action without the support of racist voters
     … you can’t deny there is something to that statement. Both liberals and conservatives appeal to the more baser instincts of their core supporters (liberals particularly appeal to anti-globalization types), but I think conservatives “win” because there are more prejudiced people than there are people who believe capitalism is destroying the world.
     I grew up in Georgia in the 70s and 80s (i.e. when Reagan was ascendant) and more than once heard people say “the Democrats want to give all my money to the n*ggers.” During tha period Georgia went from mostly Democratic congressman to overwhelmingly Republican. (Newt Gingrich symbolizes this. He ran twice and lost, then won when the incumbent retired and Carter was sinking in the opinion polls.)
     Of course, the Democrats were the party of racists from the Civil War into the civil rights era, but they eventually morphed into the party of MLK and protesting Vietnam (another reason Republicans gained support in the South).

113. Also seems like the Repubs were more on board the Civil Rights thing back in the 60s
     I think they were more principled in a Ron Paul sort of way, though I don’t support some of the votes. Barry Goldwater supported the ’57 Civil Rights Act but opposed the ’64 version.
     He later famously trashed the Jerry Falwell wing of the Republican party. Reagan’s genius was in combining Goldwater libertarianism with fundamentalist Christian prejudice.

114. I grew up in Georgia in the 70s and 80s (i.e. when Reagan was ascendant) and more than once heard people say “the Democrats want to give all my money to the n*ggers.”
     now, it’s phrased “the Democrats want to use my taxes to give free healthcare for all those illegals”

115. Great post! One can quibble over details, but the main point is well taken. Modern conservatives are too often in blissful denial about the racist roots of many of their policies.
     Even Republicans who are not racists often speak about liberal policies such as affirmative action as if these policies arose in some racially pristine environment where merely removing government support for racism would have changed American culture, remedying the ills of what was a brutally racist, segregated society that was only a few generations out of slavery.
     Many older Americans who have come around to a more enlightened view would simply like to forget about how they used to think about race and many younger Americans really have no idea how deep and culturally acceptable racism was in everyday American life back in the fifties and early sixties.
     As America made headway on race, the Republicans developed the southern strategy leading to a massive political realignment with white southern males defecting to the Republican Party in huge numbers. Anyone who lived during that time knows that the South was a cauldron of racism and the Republicans became the hosting party for the seething resentment of disaffected racists.

116. “but they eventually morphed into the party of MLK “
     That’s all very well and good, but you didn’t REMAIN the party of MLK.
     That recent switch from remedial justifications for those quotas you’re fond of, to ‘diversity’, has not gone unnoticed. People understand it’s implications, and why you did it: If quotas are to be justified as remediation for harm done in the past, you eventually have to give them up. But if they’re justified to create ‘diversity’, well, that’s a rationale that will NEVER expire.
     Quotas today, quotas tomorrow, quotas forever. That’s the upshot of adopting the cause of ‘diversity’, and that’s why you no longer have the right to claim to be MLK’s party. Because you’ve deliberately embraced a cause which will see to it that we will NEVER reach that inspiring goal he set out.

117. Maybe this is a good time to remind people here that affirmative action, insofar as it involves positive discrimination, is illegal in the UK because it violates several anti-discrimination laws. This is a rather widely held consensus in the UK. It does not preclude the government from taking positive action towards leveling the playing field by giving disadvantaged groups the tools to compete fairly with others, but preferred selection based on race, gender, religion and other factors is expressively against the law.
     For both philosophical and pragmatic reasons, I happen to agree with these laws rather strongly. Neither myself nor the people who pushed for these anti-discrimination laws are racists.

118. Even Republicans who are not racists often speak about liberal policies such as affirmative action as if these policies arose in some racially pristine environment where merely removing government support for racism would have changed American culture
     Conservatives in general have a problem with facing the fact that most of the laws they view as government overreaching exist because some horrible problem made them necessary. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have heard a conservative even acknowledge the purpose of a law he wants gone, much less offer an alternative solution that a) interferes less with liberty, and b) has any chance of working in the real world. I think the number of times I have seen that last happen is zero.
     When it comes to crime and war, of course, those same people are happy to support any amount of governmental overreach, without asking for any proof that it will solve the problem. I do not understand this mindset.

119. That’s great, Novakant, but here in the US, the model of ‘affirmative action’ the Democratic party is wedded to, and dissenting from which gets you branded a ‘racist’, is just exactly “preferred selection based on race, gender, religion, and other factors’.
     THAT is the context in which Republicans are accused of being racists. One where a ballot initiative prohibiting racial discrimination in hiring and admissions is attacked as a racist plot.
     Democrats have so debased the term ‘racism’ that it’s losing it’s sting here.

120. Brett is a perfect example of exactly the kind of person I was discussing in my first comment, particularly as regards my point #2. In fact, if I were writing a textbook, his last two comments would be the illustration for it.

121. Phil, if we got rid of the racial quotas that today go by the name “affirmative action”, (Do you know, it used to mean something else?) it would indeed not leave a color blind society. But it would leave a society where the government wasn’t mandating racial discrimination.
     In the final analysis, you don’t end an evil by practicing it, you end an evil by stopping practicing it. Racial quotas are NEVER going to result in racism going away, they only perpetuate it.

122. Ah, so we shouldn’t provoke racists into being more racist by letting black people have better jobs and educations. Well, at least we know where your sympathies lie.
     And, again, I note that the number of actual solutions you propose is exactly zero.

123. Well, this started OK anyway…

124. We’re mandating racial discrimination against light skinned recent immigrants, in favor of dark skinned recent immigrants, and justifying it on the basis of something that happened between people they vaguely resemble, before either of them were born.
     Do you have any idea how freaking dangerous the concept of racial guilt that is being used to justify those practices would be, if the public ever bought into it? If some second generation Asian-American has to be kept out of college to make room for an immigrant from Jamaica, and it’s justified because of the color of their respective skins, then what’s going to happen if the public thinks that’s right and just, and happens to notice the racial demographics of our violent crime, and draw the logical conclusion?
     You want solutions? How about not dancing around with a lit match in a pool of gasoline? And then we can talk solutions.

125. […] That’s great, Novakant, but here in the US, the model of ‘affirmative action’ the Democratic party is wedded to, and dissenting from which gets you branded a ‘racist’, is just exactly “preferred selection based on race, gender, religion, and other factors’.

     I’m not clear what metric you’re offering that we can evaluate, and I imagine one might be found that could be used to support the claim, but my actual experience, anecdotal as it is, is that opinion about affirmative action, and what steps should and shouldn’t be taken to deal with “diversity,” is somewhat heterogenous in the Democratic Party.
     If there’s some sort of gospel we’re all supposed to have sworn to affirm on affirmative action, I fear I don’t know what it is. Could you give us a precis of what you understand it to be?
     “Racial quotas are NEVER going to result in racism going away, they only perpetuate it.”
     Who, exactly, is arguing for racial quotas, and where are they arguing for them, and in regard to what, Brett?
     You then refer to “if we got rid of the racial quotas that today go by the name ‘affirmative action'”: could you perhaps please point us to a specific program currently in existence that you find objectionable, so we can discuss it, rather than some vague accusation where we have no idea what you’re referring to?
     Let me, however, note: good job of turning the conversation over to the topic of trying to make people defend affirmative action, rather then discuss Ronald Reagan.
     But let me also bravely come out against “racial quotas.” I hope the Democratic Party enforcers let me get away with this radical opinion!

126. And, again, I note that the number of actual solutions you propose is exactly zero.
     I was hoping this sort of argument would’ve been retired after the Iraq war. Just because person A has a proposed solution to a problem and person B doesn’t, doesn’t mean that person B isn’t entitled to argue against person A’s solution. Some problems don’t have an easy solution.

127. “could you perhaps please point us to a specific program currently in existence that you find objectionable”
     Gary, I live in Michigan, about an hour’s drive from U of M, so the quota system they have there for admissions comes to mind. And if nobody in the Democratic party is defending racial quotas, that blitz the Democrats put on last year attacking a ballot initiative that did nothing but ban racial quotas was sure inexplicable.
     Sure, there are people in the Democratic party who don’t favor racial quotas. I thought this was the broad brush thread…

128. No, but taking a stab at finding a solution would at least suggest that B believes there’s really a problem.
     Besides, most people who argue with Bush’s “solution” to Iraq do have an alternative, namely, pull out. It’s not a good solution, it’s just probably better than anything we’ve been doing or can do at this point. So I don’t see what Iraq has to do with it.
     I don’t see the problem with saying that we shouldn’t make changes unless we have an improvement in mind. Indeed, I think that is the truly conservative approach. In the best sense of the word.

129. Brett, that’s not an honest description of the U. Mich programs. They let race be a big plus-factor. After the Supreme Court decisions in ’03, they can’t even do that, race can merely be one of many factors considered. Either way, not a “quota.”
     Words mean things.
     Here’s the decision:
     http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/02pdf/02-516.pdf

130. trilobite, I was thinking of the run-up to the war, when suggesting that invading Iraq and taking out Saddam might not be such a hot idea often got a response along the lines of “OK, so what’s your answer then? Or do you think having Saddam in power is no problem at all?”

131. “And if nobody in the “Democratic party is defending racial quotas”
     Could you please quote who it is here who has made such a claim, Brett? Thanks.
     Also, did I miss your response to this?:

     […] You cite a link here, presumably to support your claim that you’re “pretty sure that Sharpton, for all that he’s the new guy on the block, has actually been involved in more arson/murders than [David Duke].”
     As you know, “involved in… arson/murder” commonly means “was a criminal participant in arson/murder.”
     That’s quite a serious charge. And you’re “pretty sure” of it. I ask you again: what evidence do you have, or point to, of Al Sharpton’s criminal responsibility in that arson?
     It’s a perfectly simple question. You’ve made the charge (which is, I think, incidentally, not that I’d worry about it, libelous if untrue). Please support it.
     Why wouldn’t you, after all? Let’s put that arsonist behind bars!
     All we need is some actual evidence. You wouldn’t just casually libel someone, right?
     Thanks.

     Again, thanks for any substantive response.
     “And if nobody in the Democratic party is defending racial quotas”
     Could you please quote who it is here who has made such a claim, Brett? Thanks.
     Also, did I miss your response to this?:

     […] You cite a link here, presumably to support your claim that you’re “pretty sure that Sharpton, for all that he’s the new guy on the block, has actually been involved in more arson/murders than [David Duke].”
     As you know, “involved in… arson/murder” commonly means “was a criminal participant in arson/murder.”
     That’s quite a serious charge. And you’re “pretty sure” of it. I ask you again: what evidence do you have, or point to, of Al Sharpton’s criminal responsibility in that arson?
     It’s a perfectly simple question. You’ve made the charge (which is, I think, incidentally, not that I’d worry about it, libelous if untrue). Please support it.
     Why wouldn’t you, after all? Let’s put that arsonist behind bars!
     All we need is some actual evidence. You wouldn’t just casually libel someone, right?
     Thanks.

     Again, thanks for any substantive response.
     “Gary, I live in Michigan, about an hour’s drive from U of M, so the quota system they have there for admissions comes to mind.”
     Could you give us a couple of sentences or so as to precisely which parts of their “quota system” you find objectionable?
     It’s easier for us to join you in denouncing these rotten quotas if we’re given some pointers to the specifics of the evil, you know. Educate us!

132. “Brett, that’s not an honest description of the U. Mich programs. They let race be a big plus-factor”
     When you have a “plus factor” that you adjust in real time to make sure you hit your target, you’ve got a quota.
     Gary, “involved in” can also mean “fomented”. Sharpton is very good at whipping up hatred, and then disclaiming any responsibility for what it leads to.

133. Brett:

     […] Gary, “involved in” can also mean “fomented”. Sharpton is very good at whipping up hatred, and then disclaiming any responsibility for what it leads to.

     Ah. So when you wrote that you were “pretty sure that Sharpton, for all that he’s the new guy on the block, has actually been involved in more arson/murders than [David Duke],” you mean that he’s fomented more arson/murders than David Duke.
     Is your claim that Sharpton “fomented” the murder of seven people by Roland J. Smith, Jr. at Freddie’s Fashion Mart based entirely on Sharpton having said “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business,” or do you have additional evidence of Sharpton’s responsibility you’d like to point to?
     Do you expect to be getting back to us about as regards giving us a couple of sentences or so as to precisely which parts of the U. of Michigan’s “quota system” you find objectionable? A cite to something checkable about the policy would be the most useful.
     Of course, you’re not obliged to support your assertions.
     It’s just that it’s usually the easiest way to convince others of the truth, and I’m sure that’s what you’d like to do, after all.

134. kenB, I think decisions to change something are relevantly different from decisions to not change something. I don’t need to state a “better alternative” to going to war because the status quo, peace, is the default alternative.
     What’s more, I have some reason to think the default is better: we are by definition surviving as a society in the status quo. So the burden is on the person who wants to change the status quo to show that the alternative is better. He could, for instance, prove that we will die if we don’t go to war. Then the status quo would not clearly be better, and war opponents would have to come up with some third alternative. That rule of thumb, the presumption in favor of the status quo is, as I said, the basic conservative position, see Edmund Burke.
     When deciding whether to reverse a recent policy decision, e.g., let’s have our soldiers torture innocent civilians, the default alternative is usually the status quo ante — you’re basically just saying, let’s have a do-over, go back 3 spaces, leave everything else the same. By definition, we were probably getting along reasonably well before we changed our policy, so we can change it back without fearing ill effects. This is especially true when the policy in question was put in place secretly, on an ad hoc basis, by people without the authority to do it, and nobody thinks it will solve the problem it was meant to solve.
     But when the policy decision has been in place for a generation, e.g., let’s do something to reverse the effects of generations of white racial preferences, you need more than that, because the entrenched policy has become the new status quo. Especially when the entrenched policy was put in place deliberately, with forethought, by people with authority to do so, and actually does do a lot to solve the problem it was meant to solve.
     Brett says that at this point the policy, affirmative action, is in fact perversely perpetuating the problem. OK — but he wants to change the status quo, so the burden of proof is on him. We have some reason to think that the problem doesn’t solve itself without government intervention, because it didn’t last time. Maybe enough of the problem has been solved that the rest would solve itself, but maybe not. We easily notice that blacks as a group are still not doing so well without the boost added by affirmative action — if they were, affirmative action programs would result in blacks being overrepresented in education, jobs, etc., which is clearly not the case — so, Brett needs to either show that’s not a problem, any solution will cause much worse problems, or some other solution would work better. Unless he’s just a utopian radical who wants to change things in the name of perfecting society towards an ideal, regardless of its actual effect. Which would be odd, because that’s just the sort of thing he says he hates about liberals.

135. Good point, Brett. I don’t know that this is what U Mich did, though. Was the 20-point figure chosen because it seemed likely to increase the number of successful black applicants to the “right” size, or because it was about the equivalent (according to the case) of one grade-point and somebody at U Mich read a study that said that poverty and other factors tended to depress average black high school performance about one grade point from the national average, or what? Knowing how committees work, I suspect they don’t know themselves how they came up with that number.

136. In any case, they’re not about to say how they came up with it, but we do know that they don’t say up front, “this year it’s going to be 20 points”, and let the chips fall where they may. That much they’ve admitted: They change the boost over the course of the admissions cycle.
     At any rate, good summation.
     I suppose my response would be that affirmative action, in the form of racial preferences, is not some neutral solution to the evil of racial discrimination. It IS the evil of racial discrimination, only with a new set of people as the designated victims.
     And without efforts to address the root causes of disparate outcomes, (Which given the different showings made by African-Americans and black immigrants, is NOT current racism.) that evil of discrimination will be forever.
     Indeed, the switch from remediation to diversity as a rationale for racial discrimination appears to be aimed at just that: Avoiding eventually having to give the quotas up.

137. FWIW, I much prefer the “tie-breaker” or “one factor among many” approaches myself. I think they’re much more true to the supposed purpose of advancing diversity, than the big-plus-factor or quota approaches.
     As to whether racism and the effects of past racism are still a big problem, the difference in outcomes for native-born and immigrant blacks shows something else is going on, but I think that may be just a matter of the imperfect fit between abstract categories and the real world.
     Racism is defined as prejudice on the basis of color. An archetypal racist believes that people of different color than himself are, or at least tend to be, inferior in ability, worth, and perhaps morality. But few bigots if any carefully target just the people in a category and all of those people. A bigot may react differently to a black person who is markedly different than the ones he is used to despising or fearing. He may not hate or fear black skin per se, but the combination of black skin and a lower-class accent, body language, attitude, etc. A black person different enough from that gestalt may well not trigger racist reactions, or not as much. It’s a cliche that Colin Powell and Barack Obama, for example, don’t come across to most whites as “black”. Similarly, institutionalized racism, like financial redlining or government underservice of a largely-black neighborhood, or overpunishment of “black” crimes, may not hit immigrants, who may well live in different areas and follow different cultural norms.
     This all suggests that we need to target affirmative action and other anti-‘racism’ strategies a lot more narrowly than we do, and I think that black people can assimilate much better than many of them believe possible. It does not suggest that affirmative action is always a bad idea, however. Even broad-brush, over-inclusive affirmative action programs may at least help the next generation by creating a greater pool of black-skinned role models and mentors.
     Can we agree that there is something shameful, unseemly, and socially very destructive about the existence of a persistent, multigenerational underclass that can be recognized by skin color? And that it would be good to do something about it, if we can find the right thing to do?

138. Sure. I just don’t think even more racial discrimination is the right thing to do. To the extent that it’s government mandated, I don’t think it’s even the constitutional thing to do.
     The problem, fundamentally, and it derives from a number of sources of which a history of racism is only one, is that black culture in this country is seriously messed up and dysfunctional. Unfortunately, this is one of those “they’ve got to fix it themselves” problems; We can’t just up and change their culture for them, after all. The best we can do is provide a good example, and some backing to people like Cosby who are trying to do that.
     I’m afraid that this is a problem Democrats aren’t very well equipped to deal with, because of this “multi-culturalism” business, not wanting to acknowledge that one culture can actually be objectively worse than another.

139. Brett: is that black culture in this country is seriously messed up and dysfunctional
     …as is white culture.
     Can you believe parents seriously arguing that they don’t want their pre-teen daughter protected for all her life against cervical cancer, because she’ll take getting a shot as permission to have sex?

140. jes – I’m not sure that’s limited to white culture.

141. Brett, you may well be right. Still, George Wallace was demonstrably wrong, you can legislate morality, and I’m not ready to give up on the ability of government to change these particular screwed-up cultural norms. Some small, localized progress has been observed with, e.g., midnight basketball programs — which, of course, are high on the boondoggle list for conservative politicians and other noisemakers, because everyone knows that you can’t change cultural norms, and that the only way to prevent crime is by throwing bad people in jail for a long time. I think anyone who thinks a job is impossible can make it so, but that we can do a lot more than we think.
     Whether affirmative action is a good way to do it, or to alleviate symptoms in the meantime, is a much harder question.

142. And without efforts to address the root causes of disparate outcomes
     Without minimizing the reality of its own indigenous problems, my guess is that one of the root causes of poor outcomes in the black community is that lots of folks treat blacks differently than they treat everyone else.
     Just saying.
     Unfortunately, this is one of those “they’ve got to fix it themselves” problems
     Sadly, I agree with this.
     If there is one group of people in this country that deserves some kind of amends from the rest of us, it is American blacks. Unfortunately, the best we’ve been able to come up with along that line is a debilitating welfare regime and affirmative action, which appears to have turned into, or at least is commonly regarded as, some kind of charity set-aside deal.
     Here’s what I’d like to see:
     If it’s proven that you discriminated against a black person, or even any minority, in hiring, you have to give that person your job, then you go to jail.
     If it’s proven that you denied a black person, or any minority, a mortgage for a house, you then get to buy them that house. Then, you go to jail.
     If it’s proven that you denied a black person, or any minority, any good or service you provide to other folks as a commercial venture, then you will provide that person that good or service for the rest of their natural life. And, maybe you go to jail.
     That would settle folks’ hash in a hurry.
     Within my living memory, black people had to sit in different places to eat and ride the bus, had to wash their hands at different sinks, had to swim in different pools or at different times, had their access to other public places, places their own tax dollars helped pay for, limited to only certain days and times.
     Within my living memory, there were parts of this country where a black man, woman, or child could be seized, mutilated, and killed, publicly, with little or no consequence.
     We’re damned lucky black folks didn’t come and kill us in our beds while we slept. Seriously. I don’t know how they endured it, or why they put up with it.
     We owe them our thanks for their patience.
     Yes, black people should not expect much in the way of help from the rest of us. They will improve their lot much more quickly if they just do it for themselves.
     At least that way it will get done.
     Thanks –

143. A little extreme, Russell, but I respect that.
     Some friends of mine (liberal ones at that) once said that they didn’t think reparations for slavery were right. They weren’t talking about now–they were talking about the actual freed slaves themselves. I couldn’t then and can’t now understand what they were thinking. To my mind, slaveowners in 1865 should have been thankful they weren’t murdered in their beds.

144. Bellmore would, if he were a doctor, say that it’s bad to prescribe antibiotics because they kill things in the body and that means they’re just diseases. If he were a firefighter, he’d oppose spraying water because it would ruin the furniture and that makes it just as bad as the fire in the first place.

145. Sheesh, Jaden, can’t you come up with better analogies than that? How about, “Bellmore would, if he were a fire fighter, oppose setting back fires, because that’s just more arson!”
     See, that’s the way you do it. Maybe you’ve got to be wrong, but you can at least try to sound like you’re making sense.

146. I didn’t invoke arson because I don’t think it’s relevant. I think the problem with your outlook is that it gets to the first diagnostic question, “Will it hurt?” and stops right there. A useful diagnostic goes on to ask what the outcome of the present hurt might be, if it’s an appropriate remedy for the problem and the desired outcome, etc. For most of us, the fact that an effort to correct for long and entrenched injustice does impede some people’s freedom to pursue their own discriminatory ends isn’t very interesting because it’s not very surprising. The same is true when it comes to the correction having some bad consequences of its own (just like antibiotics killing off helpful bacteria). These are the beginnings of a sober look at the overall process and its administration, not magic trump cards.
     At least, that’s the way it is for people interested in Constitutional government and its just foundations.

147. I didn’t mean to set up a guessing game, though, and sorry for that. Rather than be vague, I’ll be explicit — I think libertarian philosophy is directly contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution when it comes to the general welfare of the country. The Constitution isn’t individualistic; that requires a heavily selective reading of the text, the founding debate, and the history of legislation and jurisprudence ever since. Libertarianism and actual US governance are like the first seven letters of the alphabet and the whole set of twenty-six letters.

148. The problem is that it’s an effort to remedy a long entrenched injustice by entrenching the exact same injustice with a new set of victims. This isn’t a cure for racism that just happens to have unfortunate side effects. It’s racism itself.
     It’s the sort of thing that only makes sense to you if you’re already thinking like a racist.

149. trilobite, re the status quo distinction: I think there’s some merit to it, but I’m not convinced that the person who issued the “where’s your solution” challenge in this thread had such a distinction in mind.
     But FWIW, I agree heartily with your eloquent comment at 03:20 PM.

150. The problem is that it’s an effort to remedy a long entrenched injustice by entrenching the exact same injustice with a new set of victims. This isn’t a cure for racism that just happens to have unfortunate side effects. It’s racism itself.

     One. This is not news to a lot of supporters of affirmative action.
     Two. Affirmative action has ALWAYS been about choosing among a variety of alternatives. The legal and philosophical underpinnings has always recognized the heinous nature of the choices presented.
     It is not enough of an argument to say “it is racist” or “it’s the exact same injustice.” Allowing the current situation to persist is ALSO RACIST. If all the choices that are available are all racist to some degree, what is the best way to proceed?

151. “This isn’t a cure for racism that just happens to have unfortunate side effects. It’s racism itself.”
     Brett, I’ve now asked you repeatedly to identify what it is you are referring to.
     It’s impossible to discuss whether or not something “is racism itself” or not, when you’ve never identified what “it” is.
     You seem to have endless time to rant against “it,” but no time at all to discuss what “it” is. The closest you’ve managed to come is that there’s something about the U. of Michigan’s current program that you disapprove of. What it is? You won’t say.
     But whatever it is, it’s very very bad. Very bad. Extremely bad. Racist. Racism itself. Liberal badness. Racist liberal badness. What is it? Sorry, no time to answer. It’s bad. Racist bad. Liberal badness.
     Etc. Rinse, repeat.
     So let’s go again: Ah. So when you wrote that you were “pretty sure that Sharpton, for all that he’s the new guy on the block, has actually been involved in more arson/murders than [David Duke],” you mean that he’s fomented more arson/murders than David Duke.
     Is your claim that Sharpton “fomented” the murder of seven people by Roland J. Smith, Jr. at Freddie’s Fashion Mart based entirely on Sharpton having said “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business,” or do you have additional evidence of Sharpton’s responsibility you’d like to point to?
     Do you expect to be getting back to us about as regards giving us a couple of sentences or so as to precisely which parts of the U. of Michigan’s “quota system” you find objectionable? A cite to something checkable about the policy would be the most useful.
     Of course, you’re not obliged to support your assertions.
     It’s just that it’s usually the easiest way to convince others of the truth, and I’m sure that’s what you’d like to do, after all.
     And it would be awfully nice not to be back here tomorrow night, repeating the same questions yet again, Brett.

152. Brett: A Concise History of Black-White Relations in the USA.

153. Gary, just last year we passed a ballot initiative here in Michigan, banning racial discrimination in hiring and admissions. Basically just restating the language of the 1964 Civil Rights act. And all the usual suspects attacked it as a racist plot designed to destroy affirmative action.
     Now you want me to provide examples of affirmative action programs that are racist. I could just say, “Ask the opponents of Proposal 2, I’m sure they can point you to some.”
     But I’ve already mentioned U of M, now, haven’t I? Since this hasn’t proven adequate, here’s links:
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger
     Our ballot initiative had the purpose of overturning Grutter v Bollinger. (Yes, you can do that; Just because the Supreme court says it’s constitutional for a state to do something doesn’t mean the citizens of that state can’t decide it won’t be done.)
     Oh, and if you followed the case, the Supreme court majority was definitely wrong about U of M not using a quota. They used an added weight on ‘minority’ applications which they each year tuned to achieve their target: Just another way of implementing a quota.

154. You want solutions? How about not dancing around with a lit match in a pool of gasoline? And then we can talk solutions.
     This, of course — and I would expect nothing less from you, and got nothing more — ignores the extent to which doing nothing at all (which is exactly what you’ve proposed, remember) is also “dancing around with a lit match in a pool of gasoline.” (For elaboration, see russell’s earlier comment.) Or is it OK to anger black people in this way but not white people? Is that what you’re getting at?
     The problem, fundamentally, and it derives from a number of sources of which a history of racism is only one, is that black culture in this country is seriously messed up and dysfunctional.
     There is, of course, no monolithic “black culture” any more than there’s a monolithic “white culture.” (Watch the ouvre of Spike Lee, particularly Do The Right Thing and School Daze for further instruction on this matter.) But, to the extent that you have any point here at all, “black culture” does not differ significantly from “white culture” in that respect, which I invite you to investigate further by spending some time among dirt-poor whites in Mississippi, or among suburban wannabes in Cleveland.
     I’m afraid that this is a problem Democrats aren’t very well equipped to deal with, because of this “multi-culturalism” business, not wanting to acknowledge that one culture can actually be objectively worse than another.
     Any line of thinking that puts, say, Michael Vick, Denzel Washington, my neighbor across the street, Flavor Flav, the late W.E.B. Dubois and Condoleeza Rice all in one box and calls it “black culture,” and further goes on to suppose that that box is inferior to a box called “white culture” which somehow contains, say, you, me, Timothy McVeigh, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Gates and Carrot Top, is probably not a line of thinking I’m much interested in. Or were you thinking of some other cultures, and if so, can you describe them to me?
     (We’ll leave aside the idiotic notion that Democrats [or, I’m sure you’d throw in, liberals] see no heirarchy of cultures or cultural mores and values, unless you’d like to ask Hilzoy what she thinks of female genital mutilation, or Edward__ what he thinks of gay rights in Iran.)
     And without efforts to address the root causes of disparate outcomes, (Which given the different showings made by African-Americans and black immigrants, is NOT current racism.) that evil of discrimination will be forever.
     And we’ll address those root causes by_____________? Come on, Brett, just once, fill in the blank for me.

155. “But I’ve already mentioned U of M, now, haven’t I?”
     Yes, Brett: let’s try for the fourth time: what, precisely, about the U. of M’s policy do you object to?
     Why is this such an impossible question for you to answer?
     How do you expect us to discuss what you object to, when you continue to dodge around the simple task of identifying it.
     What you seem to want to do is rage and rant non-stop about the evils of “affirmative action,” a concept you seem to wish to insist must be left undefined, so you can object to it vociferously without leaving any possibility of refutation, since you refuse to say wtf you’re talking about.
     “Since this hasn’t proven adequate, here’s links:
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger”
     Lovely. Now: could you please identify precisely what it is about the University of Michigan’s admission’s plan that you find objectionable?
     And can you point to any other examples of whatever it is that you’re objecting to, that you object to?
     Thanks muchly!
     (I gather the odds are high that tonight I’ll be repeating all these questions at you again, but meanwhile you’ll have plenty of time to again explain how racist and bad “affirmative action” is, even if you can’t quite identify what it is you’re referring to.)
     “Oh, and if you followed the case, the Supreme court majority was definitely wrong about U of M not using a quota. They used an added weight on ‘minority’ applications which they each year tuned to achieve their target: Just another way of implementing a quota.”
     Here’s an idea! Quote the language you object to.
     The Supreme Court is wrong about what a quota is? Do you want us to agree? Or are you just talking for the sake of talking? If you want us to possibly agree, quote what the eff you’re talking about?
     Why is this so effing hard for you?
     Why do you think “this is really really bad! Liberal bad!” is a substitute for “this is the language that I object to, and here’s why”?
     Meanwhile, let’s get an early start here: Ah. So when you wrote that you were “pretty sure that Sharpton, for all that he’s the new guy on the block, has actually been involved in more arson/murders than [David Duke],” you mean that he’s fomented more arson/murders than David Duke.
     Is your claim that Sharpton “fomented” the murder of seven people by Roland J. Smith, Jr. at Freddie’s Fashion Mart based entirely on Sharpton having said “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business,” or do you have additional evidence of Sharpton’s responsibility you’d like to point to?

156. Gary, I’m probably as exasperated at how obtuse you’re chosing to be, as you are at how I’m refraining from writing a complete amicus brief for a Supreme court challenge to the constitutionality of racial preferences.
     What do I object to about U of M’s admissions plan? It’s racially discriminatory! It takes person A, and person B, similarly situated, and treats them differently because of their race.
     And this racial discrimination is not occuring at the hands of private individuals, who at least have some claim to freedom of contract and of association, and who are beyond the reach of the 14th amendment, reasonably interpreted. (Though not of state law, let it be noted.) No, it’s taking place at the hands of agents of the government, unquestionably bound by the terms of the 14th amendment to extend equal treatment to people of different races.
     It is everything that the civil rights movement set out to end. And I don’t give a bucket of warm spit that it’s being done out of benevolence towards blacks, rather than malice towards asians. (The effects being something of a wash for whites, it seems.) Why the heck should anyone being screwed over by officially sanctioned racial discrimination care what motivates it?
     Now, you may ask your question yet again, but it will be in vain, for I will not respond any further.

157. Brett: What do I object to about U of M’s admissions plan? It’s racially discriminatory! It takes person A, and person B, similarly situated, and treats them differently because of their race.
     Curious how angry some people get over admissions plans that are expressly designed to ensure that a college campus has a good, diverse mix of students, race, gender, and class… and how little anger they seem to feel over admissions plans that are designed to ensure that a college campus is mostly white and mostly wealthy. (The attempts to ensure that it would be mostly male were lost too long ago for conservatives to care about them now.)
     It is everything that the civil rights movement set out to end.
     The civil rights movement set out to end predominently-white, predominently-wealthy campuses? Curiously, that’s not the version of the civil rights movement I heard of. Perhaps you’re thinking of a different civil rights movement, one in which this speech would never have been made?

     It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

158. Good god, that was a muddle of a sentence. Intent is clear (I hope) but grammar is not.
     Could have been phrased either “The civil rights movement set out to ensure predominently-white, predominently-wealthy campuses?” or “The civil rights movement set out to end college campuses with a good, diverse mix of students”. I wish more blogs let you edit comments… Of course, PIMF.

159. Brett Bellmore: “What do I object to about U of M’s admissions plan? It’s racially discriminatory! It takes person A, and person B, similarly situated, and treats them differently because of their race.”
     Brett, I’m asking you a simple question: which part of the plan, exactly, is racially discriminatory?
     Look, I’m trying to understand your point. All I’m asking you to do is cite the piece of the plan you object to.
     I don’t understand why you won’t do such a simple thing, when you’re ostensibly trying to persuade people of that simple point: that there’s a key part of the plan that is racially discriminatory.
     I’m saying fine, show me.
     That’s all. Just cite the gawrshdarn discriminatory language that you object to.
     You can choose whether or not to do so all you like, of course, but how or why you’d expect anyone to agree with you if you refuse to do that simple basic elementary thing, I have no idea.
     Why would you expect anyone to agree with you, if you can’t cite what it is you object to?
     If you have a point, make it.
     Merely claiming over and over and over and over and over and over and over again that there’s something discriminatory about the plan, and that we should take your word for it, but you’ll never actually say what it is, couldn’t possibly fly with anyone other than maybe your family, could it?

160. “Brett, I’m asking you a simple question: which part of the plan, exactly, is racially discriminatory?”
     THE PART WHERE THEY LOOK AT WHAT RACE APPLICANTS ARE, AND DO DIFFERENT THINGS DEPENDING ON IT! What part did you think?
     This is well beyond obtuse, I’m beginning to think your repeatedly asking this question is a symptom of OCD.

161. Brett: THE PART WHERE THEY LOOK AT WHAT RACE APPLICANTS ARE, AND DO DIFFERENT THINGS DEPENDING ON IT!
     So can you quote or link to that part? So far you’ve just said it exists. Repeatedly. Without actually being able to quote from it, link to it, or even give a summary of exactly what it says, apparently.

162. I provided links (Actually, just the naked urls, I was in a hurry.) to the wiki entries concerning the cases upthread. Here are actual links:
     Gratz v Bollinger
     Grutter v Bollinger
     That the University of Michigan were, and to the extent they’re presently violating Proposal 2, still are, taking applications by aspiring students of different races, and handling them differently, (IOW, “racially discriminating”) is not a matter of contention. Even a “20 point boost” is racial discrimination, if you’re assigning it on the basis of race.
     If you think otherwise, contemplate how the NAACP would react if it were the whites who were getting the “boost”.

163. Brett: That the University of Michigan were, and to the extent they’re presently violating Proposal 2, still are, taking applications by aspiring students of different races, and handling them differently, (IOW, “racially discriminating”) is not a matter of contention.
     To be precise, U of M are attempting to create a diverse student body. The only possible reason to object to this would be if you were against the idea of diversity on college campuses. One of the methods which is used to U of M is that if a member of an underrepresented racial group applies to U of M, they get a points bonus. You link to two cases where white students did not get in and claimed that this was because they were white – that if they had been members of underrepresented groups, as opposed to members of a majority group, this would have added sufficiently to their scores that they would have got in.
     In one case (that of the law school) the affirmative action admissions policy was deemed acceptable until diversity in law school is achieved: in another, that of undergraduate admissions, it was deemed “too mechanistic” – no different from a quota system.
     If you think otherwise, contemplate how the NAACP would react if it were the whites who were getting the “boost”.
     Not just the NAACP, I would hope, if a group that were significantly in the majority were getting a boost to remain in the majority.

164. ” The only possible reason to object to this would be if you were against the idea of diversity on college campuses.”
     Yup, nobody could possibly object to this on any other basis. Say, that the way they’re going about is involves racial discrimination, which violates the 14th amendment when committed by agents of the state.
     I think “diversity” is just peachy. I also think there are serious constraints on the ways agents of the government are allowed to go about promoting it.

165. Brett: Say, that the way they’re going about is involves racial discrimination
     Guh.
     Brett, I’m just not sure it’s even worth pointing this out to you, because I am not in the least certain that you are arguing this position in good faith.
     Given that (for example) a law school tends to have a uniformly-white student population, as (according to the Supreme Court) law schools in the US tend to do.
     Given that a uniformly-white population of law students is a bad thing, it follows that it would be a good thing to get more students into that law school who are part of other racial groups. So far, you seem to be in agreement, which makes your next objection – that this involves racial discrimination – just kind of floating in mid-air, groundlessly.
     If you count as “racial discrimination” any programme which tracks how many students of which races are admitted, and which then encourages the application of students of a racial group not much represented on that campus. And you say this is a bad thing and ought not to be allowed, because racial discrimination is wrong.
     In short, you are arguing that it is wrong to attempt to make a campus more diverse: it only right to preserve the status quo, and keep the campus lily-white.
     I also think there are serious constraints on the ways agents of the government are allowed to go about promoting it.
     Indeed there are, evidently, since three white students who objected to not getting into a law school and who were convinced that their failure to get in was because the racial group to which they belonged was already over-represented on campus, got to argue their case to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court decided that in one instance the affirmative action program was “too mechanistic”. That’s a serious constraint on a university’s ability to govern itself, and decide what students they want to admit and what kind of campus they want to have.
     They want to have a more-diverse campus. You think they ought not to be allowed to do so, because their doing so requires them to evaluate the racial makeup of the students applying.
     So you object to diverse campuses, and think they’re a bad thing: the status quo of lily-white law schools ought, in your view, to be preserved by the authority of the state preventing universities from deciding they want diversity on their campuses and acting accordingly.

166. I heard this story from the admissions director at a high school my son is applying to:
     I was walking through the halls, and overheard an ethics class discussing affirmative action. One of the boys was criticizing it, saying that it was unfair to discriminate that way. I popped my head in and asked him what percentage of the school was male and what percent female. “It’s 50-50”, he responded, which is correct. “It would be about 70-30 female if we treated all applicants alike,” I informed him. “It’s a good thing for the male students that we practice affirmative action.”

167. Not that I agree with Brett — I’ve made it pretty clear that I don’t — but Jesurgislac seems not to understand that the University of Michigan, and in fact pretty much any such institution in this country called “University of [State X],” is actually owned by the state and is itself an agent of the state.
     Thus, her statement “the status quo of lily-white law schools ought, in your view, to be preserved by the authority of the state preventing universities from deciding they want diversity on their campuses and acting accordingly,” is semantically equivalent to “jdkfgljasioejtngmslandflnoirjytasngnamn.” This is so for precisely the same reason that U.S. public schools have constraints placed on them by the First Amendment regarding school prayer and the like; they are themselves agents of the state.

168. “and which then encourages”
     That was the original meaning of “affirmative action”: Going out of our way to encourage under-represented majorities to apply to institutions, by efforts such as community outreach in minority-majority areas. Nothing terribly wrong with that.
     But the University of Michigan wasn’t “encouraging” blacks to apply, any more than they were “discouraging” asians. They were putting a heavy thumb on admissions standards in order to admit blacks who’d have been rejected otherwise, and in a zero sum context like parceling out limited numbers of freshman slots, that meant rejecting people who were not black, who’d have been admitted under a color blind system.
     They weren’t doing outreach, they were doing racial discrimination.

169. Brett: They were putting a heavy thumb on admissions standards in order to admit blacks who’d have been rejected otherwise
     And you know this how? You’ve checked each black person admitted to the U of M law school and confirmed that they were inferior students who would have been rejected except for the color of their skin?
     , and in a zero sum context like parceling out limited numbers of freshman slots, that meant rejecting people who were not black, who’d have been admitted under a color blind system.
     And you know this how? You’ve checked each white student rejected and confirmed that they would have been accepted if not for the color of their skin?
     Or are you just making assumptions… based on the color of the student’s skin?

170. More to the point, actually: Has the U of M’s academic standards gone up or gone down since they began this affirmative admissions program? If you can show, Brett, that the quality of the students graduating is significantly lower (by some measure other than the color of their skin) since U of M began this affirmative action program, then you have evidence that the university is admitting students who should not have been admitted, and rejecting those who should have been.
     If not, you’ve got nothing but a conviction that it’s just wrong for black students to get in while white students are rejected.

171. Phil: Thus, her statement “the status quo of lily-white law schools ought, in your view, to be preserved by the authority of the state preventing universities from deciding they want diversity on their campuses and acting accordingly,” is semantically equivalent to “jdkfgljasioejtngmslandflnoirjytasngnamn.”
     Thanks for clearing that up, Phil. I was honestly under the impression that the Supreme Court of the United States represented the third branch of US government, and that state universities in the US were academically independent bodies, so thanks for explaining that I got it exactly reversed: universities are a branch of government, and SCOTUS is an academically independent body. The US is so confusing to a foreigner.

172. Um, there really is a simple solution to at least the undergrad “race” issue at UnivMich. UMI could do what Ohio State Univ did when I went there in 1967: admit every student who graduated from an accredited high school in the state who applied to go there. At the beginning of the freshman year, the freshman class was huge. By the end of the 2d quarter (we were on the quarter system) half of the admittees were gone.
     No racial issue. The admittees had been given the opportunity to attempt college-level work, and more than a few of them couldn’t. At least not at that point; maybe some of them returned.
     I’ll reserve opinion on the UMI’s law school case. When I went to law school, more than a bit of the chit-chat among law school students centered around politics, not law. There, race might make a difference.
     One major problem with the American educational system is that there is really no analog to, for example, Germany’s apprenticeship system. There is something in the US that is jokingly referred to as “vocational education,” but it is hardly similar. The US high school system is primarily geared to college prep, and that is one of its greatest failings.

173. Apparently it is confusing, Jes. I await eagerly your argument that, since US public grade schools and high schools are not agents of the state — being independent bodies untied from the government — that there is no First Amendment implication in the school principal leading students in prayer every morning. Can you have that on my desk my lunchtime? Show your work!

174. Oh, for bonus points, show why there is no Fourth Amendment implication for public school officials randomly searching students’ lockers for drugs, schools being academically independent bodies. And why there are no further First Amendment implications for school officials censoring the content of student body publications, since those officials are not agents of the state. I can’t wait to read what is sure to be a fascinating piece of work!

175. Phil | November 23, 2007 at 09:09 AM
     Oh, for bonus points, show why there is no Fourth Amendment implication for public school officials randomly searching students’ lockers for drugs, schools being academically independent bodies
     That one ie easy. The lockers are owned by the schools.

176. “And you know this how?”
     I know this because I live 90 minutes from the University of Michigan, and followed the case in newspapers and legal briefs.
     What the university was doing was not contested. The fight was over whether or not it was constitutional for them to be doing it.

177. Phil
     And why there are no further First Amendment implications for school officials censoring the content of student body publications, since those officials are not agents of the state.
     This one is also easy. The publisher of the student body publications is the school. The publisher always has the right to “censor” (to use your term, I prefer “control”) the content of the publication of which he or she is the publisher. That is also true of the NYTimes and other publications that are laughingly referred to as “media.”
     If a group that happens to be students at a public school wishes to publish something that is not controlled by the school, they are free to do so. They would have to get outside support in order to do so, however.
     That has not been unheard of. Consider the ultra right-wing Dartmouth Review edited by D’Sousa.

178. Phil, apparently you’re deliberately misunderstanding in order to pick a fight, so I think I’ll just drop it.
     Brett: I know this because I live 90 minutes from the University of Michigan, and followed the case in newspapers and legal briefs.
     So you don’t know, in fact, as you claimed, that all the black students accepted by U of M were inferior to the white students rejected by the U of M. You’re just guessing, and your guess does not appear, in fact, to have any foundation aside from the race of the students rejected and accepted.

179. “So you don’t know, in fact, as you claimed, that all the black students accepted by U of M were inferior to the white students rejected by the U of M.”
     Not only don’t I know this, I never claimed it. You really need to work on your reading comprehension. Let me know when you’re capable of responding to what I actually write, instead of what you expect me to write; At that point it might be worth arguing with you.

180. Brett you said that they were admitting blacks who would have been rejected otherwise. Ththink the statememtn clearly implies that you think the U is admitting black students who aren’t up to their standards.
     BTW many years ago a friend of mine, female, went to the U of Mich law school. She was a top student but got admitted under affirmative action becuase, in those days , women weren’t admitted unless there was some kind of special program for it.
     A year or tow inot her schooling the law school was sued or threatened with a suit (don’t remember). The claim was tat the professors weren’t grading fairly, that women were systematically given lower grades than men. The law school webnt to a blind grading suystem wherein the profs couldno longer see the names of students on student work, only student numbers. suddenly the grades of women went up significantly.
     I’m really tiried of the poor-meism of somewhite males.
     The fact is, at competetive schools, almost of all of the applicatns are qualified, if not ovewr qualified. The admissions office chooses a pool of applicants who MEET THEIR STANDARDS. Then the admissions office starts choosing from amongst the pool. There has been and must always be a certain arbitrariness to this minnowing out. Which qualified applicant willbe accepted annd whhichh won’t? Bushtwit got in because Daddy donated a million to the alumni fund. Most of the competitive schools choose some public school applicants and some private school ones. Most choose students from all over Anerica. Most look for a variety of backgrounds: working class, middle class, eitc.
     It’s not the Olympics! They donn’t choose the best. They choose FROM the best. So many top studnts appliy that no matter what basis they use for accepting or rejecting, many of the best wonn’t get in.
     Given that reality why the hell shouldn’t they decide to pick some white and some blackandsome Hispanic and so onn?
     Would you rather they put put the top applicant files in a big barrel, rolled it down an hill, and drew out names?

181. Brett: Not only don’t I know this, I never claimed it.
     What wonkie said.
     wonkie: Would you rather they put put the top applicant files in a big barrel, rolled it down an hill, and drew out names?
     According to a FOAF story (well, friend of my brother) the dean of a well-known medical school used to pick the candidates for admission when it was his turn by taking all the admissions forms of qualified candidates to the top of his staircase, and throwing them, hard.
     Then he’d walk down to the foot of the staircase, and head upstairs, picking up the scattered forms. As soon as he’d picked up the total number that could be admitted that year, he’d stop.
     According to FOMB, the dean (who only admitted this after he retired) claimed that this system produced better results than his colleagues’ systems of looking over the forms and trying to pick out the best ones. (It had the advantage, too, of being genuinely color-blind and gender-blind.) Certainly, assuming the story is true, the random system produced results that were no worse than anyone else’s…

182. I want to tweak my statement a bit: admissions committee at competitive schools will throw out the unqualifieds, and thhem choose a pool of the best of thhe qualifieds. Then they choose from that pool. “The best of ” is determined various ways but straight CPA and stndardized test scores usually aren’t the sole determiners. Some schools, for example, look for evcidence of guts and determination: outstanding employment record, for example. Anyhoo the pool of qualified gets narrowed to a smaller pool of highly qualified and then the students are chosen, based on whatever standard the school has chosen for the final cut.
     The idea that students havve ever been chosen on the basis of academic achievement or aptitude alone is naive. The ones tht get admitted are not the best. They are from a pool of the best and got chosenfor matching the school’s goals in some way.
     I don’t have a problem with a publically funded institution using its applicatin process to reach the goal of having the student body look like America.
     (Of course I don’t know what the U of Mich’s current goals are).

183. “I don’t have a problem with a publically funded institution using its applicatin process to reach the goal of having the student body look like America.”
     Neither do I, but I’ll try to make Brett feel slightly better (unless he more enjoys feeling righteously isolated, in which case he can let me know) by noting that he does have some valid concerns on his side that aren’t being acknowledged: while I agree that diversity is one of many valid goals for a university or institution (and Brett may or may agree with that, or may just have issues with methodologies of recruitment, rather than of goals: I dunno), not wanting any system pursuing that goal to descend into a rigid caste system of quotas is a valid concern.
     I figure Brett should see that acknowledged.
     However, having acknowledged that that would be undesirable, I think it’s up to him to demonstrate that any and all acknowledgement of ethnic diversity, or efforts towards encouraging or increasing or maintaining that, necessarily start a roll down a slippery slope towards such an inevitable end state, since that seems not particularly inevitable if we choose not to make it so.
     Whereas Brett seems to feel either that such an end state is inevitable, or that any such nod towards a goal of diversity, including ethnic diversity, is inherently racist. Nonetheless, it’s non-obvious to me, at least.
     But I have no problem agreeing with Brett that there are red lines that shouldn’t be crossed. We simply seem to disagree about the neighborhood of those red lines.

184. “So you don’t know, in fact, as you claimed, that all the black students accepted by U of M were inferior to the white students rejected by the U of M.”
     “Brett you said that they were admitting blacks who would have been rejected otherwise.”
     Just how bad do your reasoning and reading skills have to be, to not understand the difference between, on the one hand, admitting blacks who would have been rejected otherwise, and asserting that ALL THE BLACKS WOULD HAVE BEEN REJECTED OTHERWISE????
     I’ve debated with chat-bots that had better comprehension than that. Seriously. I am getting f***ing tired of idiots who assign you a category, like “bigot”, and then run everything you say through their “bigot” filter, so that it comes out bigotry no matter what you might actually happen to say.
     You’re not arguing with me, you’re arguing with some stereotype that lives inside your head, and warping everything I say to match that stereotype. And I’m getting damned tired of it.

185. Brett: on the one hand, admitting blacks who would have been rejected otherwise
     Please respond to wonkie’s point, Brett, rather than getting hung up on your conviction that some black students were accepted who were inferior in some measurable way to some white students.
     There is no doubt that some white students were rejected because the university preferred to have a diverse student body to an all-white one. You’ve declared that you have no objection to a diverse campus.
     Unless you can show that a superior student was rejected in favor of an inferior one – “superior” and “inferior” in some measurable sense (and you haven’t claimed to be able to do that) then all you seem to have is an objection to some white students being rejected because the university preferred to have a diverse campus and therefore opted for equally good black students in order to have a diverse campus.
     If your insistence that the white students should have been accepted, and the black students rejected, does not derive from insider knowledge that inferior students were accepted over superior students, then what basis can it have other than you object to the idea that white students didn’t get in, and equally able black students did?

186. You are not worth arguing with, Jes. You don’t need me to further explain myself, you only need to go back and read what I actually wrote, rather than what you expected me to say.
     I sincerely doubt you’re capable of that, though.

187. That’s one way out of responding to me, Brett: pretend that I just don’t understand what you’re saying.
     Are you going to duck out of responding to wonkie’s point the same way?

188. I call shenanigans.
     What Brett said:
     They were putting a heavy thumb on admissions standards in order to admit blacks who’d have been rejected otherwise.
     What Jesurgislac says he meant:
     each black person admitted to the U of M law school…were inferior students who would have been rejected except for the color of their skin
     Not the same statement. First of all, he said nothing about “each black person,” only about some. More importantly, if Wonkie is right, the students are all academically qualified, and are then winnowed further on non-academic grounds. Brett didn’t say a word about their academic qualifications, which appears to be what Jesurgislac means by “inferior.” (I’m sure it’s what wonkie meant by it, because he contrasted nonacademic factors to inferiority, and Jesurgislac seems to think she agrees with Wonkie). The most consistent reading of Brett’s remarks throughout this thread is that he knew everything wonkie said going in, and objected to race being one of the non-academic factors considered, no matter what the reason for considering it, because, in his opinion, to do so is both pernicious and unlawful.
     Wonkie and Jesurgislac have made some good points about why it’s reasonable to consider race as a factor, but they had no call to repeatedly attack Brett for something he didn’t say. This is especially unfortunate since Jesurgislac had already strained courtesy by refusing to acknowledge that Brett correctly described the U Mich program, as described in the Bollinger cases, which I personally linked to in the thread well before, so she could easily have looked it up instead of challenging Brett to look it up for her. The program as described made race a sizeable plus factor in the admissions process for the purpose of increasing racial diversity — which is another way of saying that the program intended and effected the admission of blacks who would otherwise have been rejected.
     I.e., Jesurgislac refused to acknowledge that what Brett had said was self-evidently correct, and then took him to task for what he had not said. Along the way, she berated him for not reading the cases for her. Good grief.
     I have rarely seen a leftwing troll, but this comes close.

189. I don’t know if all of the U of Mich students who were accepted were drawn from a pool of qualified students. I think it’s a safe assumption, but different schools do things indifferent ways.
     I am curious, though, about the prhase “would otherwise been rejected” I took that to mean that the students were presumed by Brett to be inferior academically to whatever students would have gotten the spots. If that isn’t what he meant then I am really confused, because how would annyone know for sure that they would otherwise have been rejected if they weren’t lacking in academic competence?
     Student admissions shouldn’t be conceptualized as hierarchial. the students really can’t be rated from one to two hundfred or whatever. They can be put into broad catagories based on various criteria (academics too weak for college work, marginal, mediocre, pretty good… references weak andgeneric, references specific and good, references excellentand from a very reliable source…) At some point an admissions committee will decide that certain students could make in their progarm and that others could’t but it is really an act of fortunetelling to try to determine which student, amongst the qualified, is a better choice than some other student.
     I apologize to Brett for the crackabout white male poor meism. I do not not believe that I accused him of bigotry, however. I accuse him of being too ideoplogical. Using race as a criteria isn’t anny worse than using region, income, or public shool backgrouund (as oppposed to private) and is, in my opinion better than using the ability to play sports or kinship with an alumus as criteria. In the end the decsion to pick this qualified student rather than that one is always unfair to the one who didn’t get picked. It has to be because the fair thing would be for all qualified students to get picked since there is no way to know really who the “best” ones are.
     Here’s an example: My sister was admitted to a state university under an affirmative action plan. She was a 4 point graduate with a degree in zoology. Another female student (African American, a twofer) also had a vry high GPA but from an inferior stae school in the south. Since they got accepted that means that two other applicants did not get accepted. It is possible that the two who didn’t get accepted got their undergrad degrees from better schools orhad more clubs and activites on their resumes…but so what? Anne annd Regina werre qualified to be in the program and went on to become dentists. It is likely that the majority of students who didn’t get accepted were also qualified. It is unlikely that anny difference in GPA, references, course work, job experiennce or whatever was significant enough to amke the admissions committee’s job easy.

190. I wrote all that blather annd then I finally figured out what I wannted to say:
     After rejecting the unqualified students there is really no way to determine which students are the best ones to admit. A school mighht assign each student a number from one to whhatever. They might decide to bump number ten who is white and accept number sixty who isn’t. Or thhe school might scrutinize applications annd sweat blood annd analyze for hours and finally chose the studennts thhe admissioons committee members like. Or the school might work out some sort of formula based on an array of criteria….but, in the end, it’s all a crap shoot.
     Take for example my sister annd Regina. They were accepted and thhat means two applicannts, probably white males, weren’t. It’s hard to argue thhat mmy brainniac sister wasn’t a top student: she was always academically gifted. However, in the end, it turnned out that the dental school wasted its resources on her. She only practiced for two years. Turns out shhe didn’t like being a dentist. It could be argued that Regina was less qualified thann other students. It is quite possible that thhe student shhe displaced had better grades from a better school. However Regina went back to her hometown annd became a successful dentist and a respected pillar of thhe community. Who knows how the student she displaced would have donne? He mighht have won a Nobel Prize or he mighht have ended up the target for lawsuits.
     The point is you can’t tell. The black students who got admitted mighht turn out great, mediocre, or a waste of money. The same for the hypotheitical students thhey displaced. (annd displaced is a bad word because it presumes that the
     spots righhtly belonged to someonne else).
     Given that the admissions systems of schools,once the unqualified are elliminated, are basically in the fortunetelling business, I don’t see why race can’t be part of the crystal ball. It is no more arbitrary thhan any other criteria and has the positive effect of making the student bodies of government funded institutions match thhe general population.

191. I seem to be contributing best to this thread, trilobite, by just saying “What wonkie said.”
     If Brett wasn’t arguing that the black students who were accepted were inferior in some way to the white students who were rejected, why was he claiming that he knew the black students would have been rejected otherwise? And given that he’s admitted that all he knew about the black students who were accepted was that they were black, well…?

192. To which I must respond, “What Trilobite said.” (And why do you understand it when Tril says it, but not when I say it?)
     Supposedly there’s something wrong with racial discrimination. You know, “content of their character, not color of their skin”, and all that crap? If this has changed, in all fairness you ought to distribute the memo more widely, so that David Duke can be properly rehabilitated.
     Oh, what’s that? Racial discrimination is bad or good depending on who’s being discriminated against? Racial discrimination against blacks, naughty, racial discrimination against asians, nice?
     Screw that. That position isn’t just morally wrong, it’s stupid. You might, just might, be able to convince the vast majority of the population that it’s wrong to racially discriminate. Expecting to convince the majority that racial discrimination is only ok if it’s against them is a fool’s game, most people don’t have that degree of racial self hate.
     Convince the public that racial discrimination is ok, (Judging by Ward Conorly’s success to date, you’re not making much headway, thank God.) and it’s discrimination in their own favor people are going to sign on to.
     In short, racial discrimination by public entities like the University of Michigan is pernicious, illegal, and horribly dangerous. Because some day you might convince people to agree with you that racial discrimination is acceptable, and you won’t like the results.

193. Brett: And why do you understand it when Tril says it, but not when I say it?
     Because you’re the one complaining about black students getting into a university when white students aren’t, and getting mad at me when I point out what that complaint says about you.

194. Nope, getting mad at you when you ‘point out’ what your incompetent misreading of what I actually complained about ‘means about me’: That you can’t read above a 4th grade level.

195. Brett: You might, just might, be able to convince the vast majority of the population that it’s wrong to racially discriminate. Expecting to convince the majority that racial discrimination is only ok if it’s against them is a fool’s game, most people don’t have that degree of racial self hate.
     Let’s try again.
     Let’s suppose, first of all, that there’s a group of 1000 qualified applicants who have applied to go to U of M, and all of them are – as far as anyone can tell by a formal assessment – perfectly capable of doing a college degree. 900 of them are white, 100 black. The state of M is 25% black. (I am making all these figures up.)
     The reason why the applicants are disproportionately white is that (a) black kids tend to be in poor neighborhoods with worse schools (b) black kids tend to think of going to college as a “white” thing to do (c) black kids parents tend to think of going to college as a “white” thing to do. (I am not making any of this up.)
     All of the 1000 kids who applied and are qualified deserve a college education, but there are only places for 800.
     200 students have to be rejected. The U of M has to decide on criteria for who to admit.
     One of the U of M’s goals is to have a diverse campus that reflects the actual diversity of the state and gives students the opportunity to mix with people of different races, educational background, income level, nationality, etc. They may end up rejecting 200 students because those 200 will not contribute to that goal. A quota system is usually a bad way to do that, but some kind of “points system” can work flexibly and well. And eventually, we hope, race-related points won’t be needed, because the 1000 applicants from whom 800 will be chosen will be 25% black, give or take.
     The 200 students rejected will include both white and black students – but only the white students, seeing black students get in when they couldn’t get a place, will have the sense of entitlement that leads to their suing the university, certain that they shouldn’t have been rejected.
     The notion that a white person would have to have “racial self-hatred” to see a diverse campus as a worthy goal, is, um… just wrong.

196. “Worthy goal”? Jes, we’re not talking about whether the end is a noble one, we’re discussing whether a particular means to that end is acceptable. There are other means, you know, like maybe mounting a PR effort to convince blacks that education is cool.
     And don’t think it hasn’t been noticed the way racial quota mongers have switched from remedying the effects of discrimination, to “diversity” as a justification for their racial discrimination. They’ve done it because remedying the effects of discrimination is an excuse which is eventually going to pass it’s ‘sell by’ date. Even O’Conner admitted as much.
     Whereas “diversity” is an eternal excuse to judge people by the color of their skins. Which is why the public finally lost patience with it.
     Also, I suggest you bother to actually follow the links upthread, and become informed about what U of M was doing. Because you’ve provided a rather inaccurate description of it. At U of M, race was not a “tie-breaker”, it was one of the most powerful criteria going into a decision whether to admit.

197. Jes, we’re not talking about whether the end is a noble one, we’re discussing whether a particular means to that end is acceptable.
     And as I pointed out to you way, way upthread: it is not possible to achieve a diverse campus if you are unwilling to “racially discriminate” – that is, to be aware that the campus is not racially diverse, and to be discriminate in your selection of students – including race as a criteria.
     At U of M, race was not a “tie-breaker”, it was one of the most powerful criteria going into a decision whether to admit.
     I thought you were claiming that you didn’t know anything about the academic quality of the students accepted? Yet now you’re saying you know their race was the most powerful criteria, not their academic qualifications? Again – how do you know this? Where is your evidence that the U of M admitted students who were inferior over the students who were rejected?

198. Brett: Because some day you might convince people to agree with you that racial discrimination is acceptable, and you won’t like the results.
     You know, I just registered this. Brett, are you really that ignorant of the history of racial discrimination in the US and in the state of Michigan? If so, perhaps you should begin with the very, very basic level – website gives you a timeline to start from – before you presume to lecture others or accuse people of reading from a “fourth grade” level.
     It’ll take a few years. You’ve got a lot of reading to get through. Come back when you’re better informed.

199. “it is not possible to achieve a diverse campus if you are unwilling to “racially discriminate””
     Fine, then we learn to live without racially diverse campuses.

200. Here’s what I don’t get about this conversation. If underrepresented minority applicants were receiveing 20 points on top of what their admissions scores would otherwise have been, they moved up the list of applicants. They went ahead of someone else. It’s highly, highly unlikely that someone, some number of applicants, who would have been rejected would not have gotten in because of the 20 point bonus. Otherwise, there’s no point in assigning the bonus. The argument here should not be that there is no (racial) discrimination in this. The argument is that the (racial) discrimination is justified. If there is no discrimination, there is no program.
     Given what Wonkie wrote, I don’t believe that it is necessary to demonstrate that a successful applicant who would have been unsuccessful without the 20-point bonus is somehow “inferior.” The applicant well may not have been inferior, but that doesn’t mean that the applicant would not have been unsuccessful without the bonus.
     Without someone getting in who wouldn’t have otherwise, the program has no effect and no meaning. You can’t have it both ways. You either discriminate on some given basis or you don’t. If you do, you can’t say that you aren’t. You have to say that it’s okay that you are. I would assume that Wonkie would agree with this, given the other criteria she (right? not “he?”) listed as being worse bases for admission.
     Any one type of discrimation may not have been decisive in some given cases, but it’s almost certain that every type of discrimination was the deciding factor in some number of cases. Again, otherwise there would be no point in considering the factor as a basis for discrimination among applicants for admission.

201. hairshirthedonist, the key point in wonkie’s comment was: everyone in the pool of possible successful applicants is qualified.
     Given a pool of people who are all qualified to attend college or attend a course, and the necessity of rejecting some, what criteria may a college use?
     If a diverse campus is important, the college may use criteria that will create a diverse campus from the available pool of qualified applicants. You can call this “racial discrimination” if you’re intent on trying to make selection to create a diverse campus sound like a bad thing.
     If the argument is that the college is picking applicants who are not qualified, that’s a different objection.

202. “Fine, then we learn to live without racially diverse campuses.”
     Ah, but it won’t be fine.
     What about the cafeteria workers and the janitors on these retro campuses. Any opportunity there?
     I hope so.
     I’ll know we’re a shining meritocracy on the hill when America accepts 200 million of the highest I.Q. Chinese and Indian students onto its campuses, public and private. Until then, both of us get to feel smart.
     “racial quota mongers”
     Brett, you should wrap your stinky fish in more imaginative, and less reconstructive, boilerplate. It would make the mongering sell better.
     Given the sheer amount of educational dollars and resources expended on the clever geniuses of all races who directed their ample talents toward gaming the mortgage market, hiding the paper inside exquisitely complicated financial instruments, and then creating towering computer models of mathematical babble to mis-cipher the risk, I’m thinking about starting a movement to offer higher education to ONLY stupid people.
     They tend to kid themselves less and thus do less harm.
     Plenty of white people would qualify.

203. everyone in the pool of possible successful applicants is qualified.
     That was italicised for emphasis, not because it was a direct quote…

204. Jes, you’re having the wrong argument with me. I can call it racial discrimination because it is (and I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing). If you’re discriminating among applicants on the basis of race, even if it’s only one of many considerations, it’s by definition racial discrimination. Don’t deny it. Justify it. Then it doesn’t matter so much what someone calls it.
     I completely understand what Wonkie’s point was. I hope Wonkie would think so after reading what I wrote. Why do you think I was trying to dimiss the inferiority argument?

205. Incidentally, why are qualified students of any background rejected at any university?
     What’s stopping Harvard or old Miss or whatever from enlarging their infrastructure and accepting all of those who meet their qualifications?
     Just because the scarecrow’s head was full of hay doesn’t mean he wasn’t smarter than the Wicked Witch, who got all of the scholarships and the endowed chair.

206. Brett, I don’t think you can tell the content of character from an application. You might be able to spot the obvious sociopaths, of course, but beyond that…
     Also sure it is arbitrary to decide to have some of this ethnic group and some of that. Bout it is also arbitrary to have some from here and some from there, some from public and some from private. How come those sorts of criteria don’t register with you as discriminatory? They also have nothing to do with content of character. As Hairshirt notes, it’s all a process of discriminating. The only way to choose row without discrimination is to weed out the truely unqualifieds and throw the rest of the files down the stairs a la that prof of Jes’s.
     So it is discriminatory to give a black student 20 points. it is also discrimiatory to favor the one with the 3.8 gpa over the one with the 3.3 gpa. It is also discriminatory to choose the one the quirky, humorous personal essay (because you like the style) over the one with thhe serioous thoughtful essay.
     I’m not kneejerk in favor of affirmative action. Some plans are well written and some are clumsy and crude. Also situations differ. The Ivy League schools, which are the trainning grounds for the ruling class, must have, in my opinion, a diverse student body. A small state community college in central Iowa, not so much. For one thing the state is overwhelmingly white (or it was when I lived there).
     I don’t think people should ever be admitted if they cann’t do the work. But I do think we should get over the idea that it is possible to determine who the very best students are. It can’tbe done. It can only be determined that a pool of studens has, in general, a combination of attributes that are a little more appealing to the committee of a certain school than thhe attributes of the students in the next pool down. So discrimination in favor of race in a well designed affrimative action program willnot result in a great student being displaced to accommodate a poor one.
     Brett’s point now is, I think, that discrimination on race is bad regardless and my response is that discrimination in favor of race under some circumstances, when the studnets in question are qualified for the program inquestion, is no worse than the other types of discrimination to which Brett is ont objecting, and has a positive benefit.

207. “the key point in wonkie’s comment was: everyone in the pool of possible successful applicants is qualified.”
     For suitably flexible values of “qualified”, yes. It’s not like being qualified for college is a binary function, after all.
     A study of U of M admissions back in 2005 showed that black applicants with an SAT score of 1240, and 3.2 GPA, had a 90% chance of be admitted. Non-black applicants of the same acadmemic qualifications had a 10% chance of being admitted.
     If your surname was Hsu, you had to be a freaking genius to have the same chance of admission as a moderately qualified black applicant, all else being equal.

208. “We”can learn to live without racially diverse campuses? Well, that’s mighty white of you, Brett!!
     Is this the part where I have to explain to you why excluding blacks from public universities is just as “dangerous” as you seem to think letting them in is?

209. hairshirthedonist:
     Exactly. Here was the point scale:
     100–150 (admit); 95–99 (admit or postpone); 90–94 (postpone or admit); 75–89 (delay or postpone); 74 and below (delay or reject).
     So a minority with a score of 80 would be an automatic admit with the 20 point bonus where otherwise would have been considered minimally qualified and not likely to get in. There was no individual consideration given.
     Where is your evidence that the U of M admitted students who were inferior over the students who were rejected?
     Hairshirthedonist already made the point. It’s common sense. According to the opinion, virtually all minority applicants were admitted. Some of these statistically speaking would be at the lower end of the scale but were elevated to automatic admit whereas the plaintiffs were in the “hold” category but would have been automatic admits with the 20 point bonus.
     A quota system is usually a bad way to do that, but some kind of “points system” can work flexibly and well. And eventually, we hope, race-related points won’t be needed, because the 1000 applicants from whom 800 will be chosen will be 25% black, give or take.
     I have trouble with any goal that includes an “exact” representation based on race itself. Why? Why sell the minorities short? That does not, IMHO, represent true colorblindness. No content of character, but only the color of skin.
     My biggest problem with affirmative action is who decides when to shut it off? When will it not be necessary? Is discrimination a valid answer to past racism? Will it get us to a level playing field that much sooner? What about the resentment it creates? Will that eventually undue whatever good it might create?
     I appreciate and respect the views of those who have been subjected to discrimination and believe the only way out is through affirmative action. I don’t exactly agree, but they have some license in my view. But the UofM’s policy IMHO was simply wrongheaded. Had the committee made individual consideration of minority applicants at least minimally qualified (in the “pool” that Jesurgislac speaks of) I might feel differently.

210. I am not going to defend or attack the U of M speciffically, mostly because I don’t know enough about it.
     I don’t like systtems that rank students numerically because that kind of system perpetuates the myth that the student with the gpa of 3.2 is actually qualitatively different than the student with thhe gpa of 3.8.
     No, admissions is not binary. It is usually a matter of rating students along a whole series of axis (axi? axeses?). So the best way to rank the students is in groups. Of course there are the quirky ones, too: the kid with the great gpa but no clubs, no friends, generic references, or the kid with the mediocre gpa who worked thrity hours a week to support the family.
     It is easier to determine who will fail then to determine who will be outstanding. My point is that there really isnn’t a good way to tell that one student is mediocre and another a future genius. Geniuses can be lousy students. Kids who ace every class are sometimes just workhorses who do every assignment, not creative or insightful thinkers.
     Affirmative action has been frequently critisized unfairly as a system for replacing good students with poor ones. It is much more likely that an affirmative action program will replace one studnet who is highinn onne attributewith a studnent who is high in another attribute. The attributes don’t necessarily have that much to do with academic success. One kid gets into the top pool from the next tier down for being black. Another gets into the top pool from thenext tierr down for doing volunteer work in a food bank. A student doesn’t make the top tier because the personal essay strikes a committee member as snobbish. It isn’t a binary process but it is also not a process whereinn you can state definatively that this students is good but that one is mediocre.
     Again, I’m not writing about the U of M specifically.
     Also Brett, could you respond to the issue of discrimination by region, type of school, sports participation, relations to alumni,etc?
     Also Brett, could you

211. If they’re not getting in because they’ve just flat out got lousy academic qualifications, then they’re not being excluded, they’re just not making the cut. If this troubles you, maybe you should be concerned about why they haven’t got the academic qualifications, rather than insisting on rigging the system to hide that lack.
     We’ve finally reached the sticking point here: I think racial discrimination is wrong, and for government agents, constitutionally prohibited. You folks think whether or not it’s wrong depends on who benefits.
     I don’t think that’s a disagreement we’re ever going to bridge. But at least we’ve gotten past all the pretense about racial preferences not really being discriminatory, to the real heart of the matter.

212. bc: My biggest problem with affirmative action is who decides when to shut it off? When will it not be necessary?
     It will not be necessary when people no longer discriminate. When a state that has a population that is about 25% black will also tend to have college students about 25% black.
     I see Brett has now raised a new strawman and is busy arguing with it.

213. I see we’re right back to that unsupported assumption that, in the absence of racism, blacks would of course, apply for and objectively qualify for college in strict statistical partity with all other groups.
     Tell me, are whites discriminated against, that they are disproportionately less likely than asians to apply for, and qualify for, college?
     What we see here is the Procrustean approach to racial statistics: The population MUST do everything in the exact same proportions as their numbers, and if they fail to do so for ANY reason, they must be forced to.

214. Brett I don’t think it has been established thhat thhey ( the U of Mich students) just flat out lacked the qualifications. SAT’s are usually only one factor in determining a student’s qualifications. Also a student who is low in the math area could have a lowered average but still be competent to study literature. Indeed their scores in the language area mighht be outstanding. The SAT’s would have very limited relevance if the student wanted to study art.
     Undergraduate schools, especially the competitive ones, rarely accept or reject exclusively on test scores because the people involved in admissions understand the limitations of such scores. If black students who would “otherwise been rejected” were deficient across the board in all areas required on the application process then there would truly be a case of poor students substituting for qualified ones. perhaps that is what happened at Michhigan; I don’t knnow. So far the admissions discussion has only mentioned test scores and I’d be surprised if Mich based their admissions exclusively on them. I admit it: I didn’t follow the link ( I tried but had one of those computer meltdowns)
     Also you haven’t answered my question about discrimination.
     I do think that it is a legitimate concern that affirmative acgtion could get entrenched annd extend beyond its usefulness. My own prefence is that schools move to discrimination in favor of students of limited inncome.
     I do think thatwe have to get over the myth thhatschools, especially competitive ones, try to admit “the best” and that affirmative action has the effect of replacing the best with the not best. Schools try to admit students who will succeed. They try to admit students who be the kinnd of students the school wants to have. A dental college, for example, looks for students who are empathetic and able to work well with other people. Also they need good hand eye coordination and a strong sense of ccraftsmanship.
     it’s not the Olympics. You don’t get in by having the best fastest speed in downhill racing. It just isn’t that easy to quantify who is top, next tier down, and so on.

215. My biggest problem with affirmative action is who decides when to shut it off? When will it not be necessary?
     There are two issues at work here, but one of them, I think, can be addressed by using socio-economic bases for affirmative action as opposed to racial bases. If a given group, racial or otherwise, is disadvantaged, socio-economically based affirmative action will assist that group in proportion to that group’s degree of disadvantage at any given point in time.
     Diversity is, to some extent, another issue. Some degree of diversity will be achieved through socio-economic affirmative action, but not necessarily the kind that a given institution might deem to be in the best interest of the students. It might not create the desired campus environment. That issue has less to do with compensating for discrimination than to do with making the students’ experiences more rich, rewarding and worthwhile.

216. I see we’re right back to that unsupported assumption that, in the absence of racism, blacks would of course, apply for and objectively qualify for college in strict statistical partity with all other groups.

     Um, you HAVE to start somewhere. And statistically speaking, that’s generally the null hypothesis—you have to have that unspoken assumption before you get into the test scores and whatnot.
     Throw that out and you’re basically throwing out the test scores that so many people are basing their arguments on.

     We’ve finally reached the sticking point here: I think racial discrimination is wrong, and for government agents, constitutionally prohibited.

     This is simply not true. To remedy past discrimination and if there’s no other viable solution that is less problematic, racial yardsticks ARE allowable. That’s part of the case law.
     Whether or not that’s wise or ethical is a separate, though related matter.

217. “To remedy past discrimination”
     And there’s the point: If present discrimination is acceptable only as a remedy for past discrimination, not just for incidental statistical disparities, then you have to establish that the disparity IS a result of past discrimination before resorting to that remedy. You can’t just use discrimination as your null hypothesis, and place the burden on people who object to racial discrimination to prove the case.
     And doing it for reasons of “diversity” is right out.

218. There are two issues at work here, but one of them, I think, can be addressed by using socio-economic bases for affirmative action as opposed to racial bases. If a given group, racial or otherwise, is disadvantaged, socio-economically based affirmative action will assist that group in proportion to that group’s degree of disadvantage at any given point in time.

     By the way, I have absolutely no problem with relying on socio-economic factors as the major basis for affirmative action and equal opportunity programs. I’m not sure how many people would.

     Diversity is, to some extent, another issue. Some degree of diversity will be achieved through socio-economic affirmative action, but not necessarily the kind that a given institution might deem to be in the best interest of the students. It might not create the desired campus environment. That issue has less to do with compensating for discrimination than to do with making the students’ experiences more rich, rewarding and worthwhile.

     In my experience with elite universities (as a student and on selection committees), admissions committees has always taken diversity (on a number levels–geographic, socioeconomic, rural/urban, etc.) seriously.

219. It will not be necessary when people no longer discriminate. When a state that has a population that is about 25% black will also tend to have college students about 25% black.
     This “equality of results” argument is getting a little grating. I cannot fathom how you can say that any one ethnic group “must” be represented in exact mathematical proportion to the general population in college and that then-and only then-will discrimination been wiped out. Why? What if one minority group is doing better than another? Should we then discriminate against them in pursuit of the mathematically perfect mix?
     We are already discriminating heavily against Asian Americans. Unfairly. After Prop 209 in California, Asian American admissions rose 6% at Berkely. The same article notes that Asian Americans, representing only 4% of the population, comprise 20% of med. school students.
     Having lived in Korea Town in LA (miss the Bulgogi!)and having attended physics classes at UW, I can tell you Asian Americans have a highly respectable work ethic and drive to succeed scholastically. I guarantee you they drive up competition in school! Should we limit their admission to med school? On what basis? As has been repeatedly pointed out here, Asians are hardly free from past discrimination with the Chinese Exclusion Act to Japanese internment.
     I believe we should instead work on instilling the Asian American drive to succeed in other traditionally disadvantaged populations.
     There is not an easy answer here. It is not as easy as saying “once 25% of African Americans are attending college (and only 4% of you Asians!) then discrimination will be conquered once and for all in America.”

220. If present discrimination is acceptable only as a remedy for past discrimination, not just for incidental statistical disparities, then you have to establish that the disparity IS a result of past discrimination before resorting to that remedy.

     That’s not as hard as you may think, you know. Alumni affinity admissions reaching back to the days of de jure racial discrimination is evidence of continuing racial discrimination (though, of course, not nearly as major a factor as other factors.)

     And doing it for reasons of “diversity” is right out.

     I believe that is incorrect, both on a legal and an ethical ground.

221. “I cannot fathom how you can say that any one ethnic group “must” be represented in exact mathematical proportion to the general population in college and that then-and only then-will discrimination been wiped out.”
     I can’t speak for Jes, but I think she was just saying that it would be an indicator. In any case, you’re overstating her point by saying “exact proportions”.
     I think discrimination is a confusing thing to talk about because it’s partly an indicator and partly a cause of the real problem, which is socio-economic disadvantage.
     “I believe we should instead work on instilling the Asian American drive to succeed in other traditionally disadvantaged populations.”
     I think this is wrong on a couple of levels. First, it assumes that having the drive will result in success. It doesn’t. Second, it makes it sound like this drive is separable from other social, cultural and economic factors. It’s not.
     On the other hand, I think it’s the right perspective not to just look at discrimination. That’s why the old survey question, “Do you feel that your personal success is inside or outside your control?” is also a good indicator.

222. Brett, if past and present discrimination is not the primary reason for the disparity in educational achievement, what is? Poverty is not an answer, as that merely bumps the question one step back, why are so many blacks so poor? I see only two other possibilities:
     1) cultural norms not primarily caused by present and past discrimination; and
     2) genetic variation.
     The second is, I trust, not what you are suggesting, as the history of that belief is uniquely ugly, and there is no good evidence for it (the Bell Curve, even if we ignore critiques of its methodology, did not IIRC even purport to factor out non-genetic causes associated with race). I mention this logical possibility only to eliminate it.
     That leaves cultural norms not themselves a result of discrimination. As described upthread, there are mainstream black cultural norms that work against educational achievement, but it seems offhand very straightforward to trace those back to learned hopelessness, poor role models, poverty, and other effects of discrimination. I would put the burden of proof on those who say that the majority of the cultural problem has little to do with the effects of past and present discrimination.
     This doesn’t mean that affirmative action is the best way to deal with the problem. But it probably is primarily caused by discrimination, one way or another.

223. I say we all go (re-)read Guns, Germs and Steel to get to the root of all of this.

224. This thread has been far too heated for my taste, but I do wonder if those who are holding up the example of Asian American admissions as proof of the problematic nature of the admission process are Asian Americans themselves. To my knowledge, there is no broad based movement among Asian Americans protesting the discrimination involved in the admissions process. In fact, I’d like to think most Asian Americans realize that having a student body that is diverse outweighs the loss of preferred status, though it is probably more a case of Asians-Americans feeling that a majority Asian-American student body would stand as proof that Asian-Americans are unable to assimilate. And while it is impossible to prove the case that certain elite schools would be less attractive if the student body contained the proportion of Asians that SAT scores might dictate, there is a notion of not joining any country club that would accept me as a member…

225. dkilmer: I can’t speak for Jes, but I think she was just saying that it would be an indicator.
     Correct.

226. I think this is wrong on a couple of levels. First, it assumes that having the drive will result in success. It doesn’t. Second, it makes it sound like this drive is separable from other social, cultural and economic factors. It’s not.

     Well, that sort of achievement disappears after a generation or two in the country, so it’s strictly a temporary phenomena. Too, it smacks to this wizened child of the 60s and 70s of the old divide and and conquer tactics (not that it’s being used for that now…just that it was used in that fashion back then). I’d be careful in using a tactic that could easily pit group against group, diverting focus from more pertinent problems (this, of course, applies to affirmative action).

     This thread has been far too heated for my taste, but I do wonder if those who are holding up the example of Asian American admissions as proof of the problematic nature of the admission process are Asian Americans themselves. To my knowledge, there is no broad based movement among Asian Americans protesting the discrimination involved in the admissions process. In fact, I’d like to think most Asian Americans realize that having a student body that is diverse outweighs the loss of preferred status, though it is probably more a case of Asians-Americans feeling that a majority Asian-American student body would stand as proof that Asian-Americans are unable to assimilate.

     There are some in the community (at least, in how I see it) who rankle at the process; there are just as many who reason they would like to see the diversity.
     Personally, I thought I benefitted greatly from having a campus full of sharp minds that also had cultural community centers (Asian American, Chicano, black, Native American). I learned far more from that environment than I did from my classes. But….YMMV.

227. This may be generational, locational or personal, but to me, the rankle-ing was not so much at the system, but that it was being assumed that our intelligence was the product of some freaky work ethic, and the assumption of connected personality points. Of course, I’m 3rd generation, and there are 5th and even 6th generation Japanese-Americans out there, so I’m sure that there are some that feel that the system is unfair, but I haven’t seen the Asian-American equivalent of Bakke yet.

228. it was being assumed that our intelligence was the product of some freaky work ethic
     Well, lj, this is anecdotal, but many years ago, when I worked in the Science Library, this East Asian girl kept coming to the desk and asking for the books that were on reserve for her class. Eventually there were no books left, and when other students came by looking for the books, I had to lead them over to her table where there was this huge frigging pile of texts. Like she was going to read them in one sitting.
     Not even Evelyn Wood could do that.

229. it was being assumed that our intelligence was the product of some freaky work ethic
     If that was aimed at me, I said nothing of some innate intelligence or freaky work ethic, just a culture that values hard work and scholastic success. (I said “highly respectable work ethic and drive to succeed scholastically”)
     I do wonder if those who are holding up the example of Asian American admissions as proof of the problematic nature of the admission process are Asian Americans themselves.
     No, I’m not Asian American. I wasn’t trying to say that there is this hue and cry among Asian Americans. But I bet there would be if that 5x-the-general-population percentage representation in med school were cut back to what Jesugislac sees as proof of non-discrimination (4%).
     I think she was just saying that it would be an indicator.
     The question was “when would we stop affirmative action.” Her answer was when the numbers were equal “more or less.” She clearly sees equal numbers as the goal.
     I think this is wrong on a couple of levels. First, it assumes that having the drive will result in success. It doesn’t. Second, it makes it sound like this drive is separable from other social, cultural and economic factors. It’s not.
     First, it will in the long run. I will grant that it will be harder given the discrimination that still exists. And I will also grant that accommodations can be made, just not the ones UM used. Second, I agree. I’m saying the “drive” is largely social and cultural. I don’t completely buy the economic, but it certainly makes things harder.

230. “The question was ‘when would we stop affirmative action.’ Her answer was when the numbers were equal ‘more or less.’ She clearly sees equal numbers as the goal.”
     If I said, “I’ll know the cake is finished baking when it’s brown on top”, would my goal be to make the top of the cake brown? You’re stretching what was said.

231. “I don’t completely buy the economic, but it certainly makes things harder.”
     When you’re poor, it’s extremely hard to imagine success. You don’t know what it looks like or how it works. When you’re surrounded by poverty, you don’t have any exposure to the mechanisms of success. You don’t have access to the information that will tell you how it’s done. You are detached from the network.
     Not to sound like Al Gore, but it’s just like attachment theory.

232. If that was aimed at me, I said nothing of some innate intelligence or freaky work ethic, just a culture that values hard work and scholastic success. (I said “highly respectable work ethic and drive to succeed scholastically”)
     No, my apologies, just my first comment was, the second was to gwangung, who is a fellow Asian-American. DaveC’s example fits alongside your observation of the “5x-the-general-population percentage” point: if it is a white person acting in some way, it is not perceived as being indicative of the caucasian gene pool, but if it is an asian, ta-dah! proof of genetic factors. I hasten to add that DaveC did say it was anecdotal, but it provides a textbook indication of the asymmetry in treatment. I’m not complaining, just observing that it exists and suggesting that it need to be taken into account.

233. She’s willing to end racial preferences when the world on it’s own decides to spontaneously generate a demographically uniform distribution of people across all activities and roles.
     “Affirmative action now. Affirmative action tomorrow. Affirmative action forever.” As Nietzche said, “He who hunts dragons must beware, lest he become a dragon himself.”

234. “She’s willing to end racial preferences when the world on it’s own decides to spontaneously generate a demographically uniform distribution of people across all activities and roles.”
     So you disagree with the premise that if real social equality is achieved, you’ll tend to see a uniform distribution?
     Like bc’s use of “exact”, your use of “all” overstates what was said.
     “Affirmative action now. Affirmative action tomorrow. Affirmative action forever.”
     I think the problem is the opposite. You can’t truly test whether it’s worked until you phase it out.

235. Yes, I do disagree. That’s you guys’ wonderful vision of “diversity”? A kaleidescope of people who look different on the surface, but all think and act the same? Can’t quite wrap your heads around the difference between “equal” and “identical”, maybe?
     How long are we talking for this vision to arrive? Hundreds of years?
     Look, the goal is, or at least at one time was, equality of rights. Not that everybody have equal interests, equal natural endowments, equal attainments.
     Not, in short, a world of clones with different paint jobs.
     That’s why I call this vision of the world “Procrustean”; You just can’t accept the world not matching your vision of it, and somehow feel entitled to chop and stretch it into agreement. Too bad that world is made up of people with minds of their own, eh?

236. I’d get up at 6:00am for breakfast in the female dorm one year where I attended college just to be served eggs and french toast by a girl on whom I had a gigantic crush.
     I’d go back for seconds and thirds, no doubt depriving other students looking for eggs and french toast.
     Maybe the East Asian girl had a crush on you, Dave.
     Tell me something, folks. I’m so liberal I think even stupid people of all races, creeds, colors, and incomes should be permitted admission to college. Maybe they’ll read a little Milton Friedman and Emily Dickenson, preferably the latter. What’s the harm?
     What, is everyone afraid there won’t be anyone to pick up their garbage once the Republican Party manages to close the borders with their demagoguery?
     Then, of course, we have the problem of legacy admissions ….. something I happen to share with Al Gore and George W. Bush. And yes, legacy is alive and well, as I found out when my son started receiving cushy offers from my alma mater. That they would give him a scholarship on my meager account is a source of great amusement to my friends and family, the comedians.
     Three folks of some color or other didn’t get the education they deserve because of we white noble three. That Bush kept right on going to the Presidency is evidence that mediocrity and some sort of “negative” action practiced with gusto by the Republican Party.
     Who says life is fair? Probably Tom Delay, the scholar.

237. I hasten to add that DaveC did say it was anecdotal, but it provides a textbook indication of the asymmetry in treatment. I’m not complaining, just observing that it exists and suggesting that it need to be taken into account.
     I think it’s more an indication of confirmation bias, if anything. So too, if Democrats think that Reagan was a race-baiter, then they are going to see or “remember” some sort of evidence for that more than evidence against. It’s like premonitions. We never remember premonitions that we had that didn’t come true.
     By the way, it’s not like I had to daily fend off hordes of earnest Asian students by wielding a giant volume of Chem Abstracts, and threaten to pound them with the book. It’s just an anecdote.

238. Brett:
     “How long are we talking for this vision to arrive? Hundreds of years?”
     Tell me how long it took James Meredith to gain admission to the U. of Miss and I’ll give you a timeline.
     See, impatient white people like me would have burnt the place to the ground long before the vision was permitted, oh so slowly, to arrive.

239. Brett – Sometimes a bed is just a bed.
     When race isn’t a factor, you tend to see distributions in economic classes, college attendance, etc. that match the race distribution in the whole population. Nothing more to it than that. It’s an indicator that race isn’t preventing achievement.
     “How long are we talking for this vision to arrive? Hundreds of years?”
     I’d say, as long as it takes.
     “You just can’t accept the world not matching your vision of it, and somehow feel entitled to chop and stretch it into agreement.”
     You’ve just defined humanity.

240. Dave, I had a premonition that you wouldn’t bring up the Reagan race-baiting, so that shoots that theory.
     I remember it. I just had it 10 minutes ago.

241. Someone seriously needs to put up a new post.

242. Now look here, John. I started off being against quotas. But then, I gave the anecdote, and got the “Aha!” reaction.
     I also have pointed out elsewhere that there are many more women than men on campus. One thing I’m not about to do is stand in the door of “Old Main” and declare that, for diversity’s sake, if any more young Asian women want to get into college, they’ll have to go through me.
     Well it depends on how hot they are.

243. That’s you guys’ wonderful vision of “diversity”? A kaleidescope of people who look different on the surface, but all think and act the same?

     No, and I don’t think you have much of a future as a mindreader.
     I do note that you’re not having that much success with people who are thinking differently from you, either.

244. I also have pointed out elsewhere that there are many more women than men on campus. One thing I’m not about to do is stand in the door of “Old Main” and declare that, for diversity’s sake, if any more young Asian women want to get into college, they’ll have to go through me.

     Now, now…that’s racial thinking for you. I am completely color blind when it comes to tackling multiple young women for the good of the campus…..

245. Here’s the weird thing on this thread: everyone has a pretty good point.
     Here’s a handful of things that seem obvious to me about all of this:
     Racial discrimination is always unfair, period.
     Sometimes a completely fair option is not available.
     Fifty, forty, or even thirty years ago, the idea of blacks attending elite law schools in numbers exceeding the single digits wouldn’t even have come up. Period.
     Lots of eminently qualified blacks, hispanics, and women have achieved well-deserved positions of responsibility and influence because of AA. Without it, they would never have gotten their shot. Period.
     I think Brett’s right. Without something like affirmative action, we’d all just have to accept things like law schools having significantly more homogenous populations.
     Is that worse than deliberately favoring some applicants based on the color of their skin?
     How long do we do things like that before we say “We’ve done enough?”
     I don’t know the answer to either question, because there is no clear answer.
     The real answer is that it shouldn’t matter what color your skin is. Unfortunately, that isn’t available to us right now. So, we either have to ignore or accept it and let one set of folks take their lumps, or we have to try to ameliorate it and let another set of folks take theirs.
     You pay your money and you take your choice.
     Thanks –

246. DaveC,
     let me apologize for the ‘a-ha’ moment, my point wasn’t a-ha-ing you, it was just attempting to point out that there is an inevitable asymmetry involved.
     And I should add, teaching at a university in a country that has got a birth rate dropping like a lead balloon, I got nothing against quotas. If we could just fill them…

247. “I think Brett’s right. Without something like affirmative action, we’d all just have to accept things like law schools having significantly more homogenous populations.”
     Look, my comment on that score was a direct response to Jes’s hypothetical, what if we couldn’t achieve diversity without racial preferences. Doesn’t mean I don’t think we can.
     The availability of racial preferences makes people who want ‘diversity’ lazy. No need to address underlying causes of poor academic performance, just rig the game until the numbers come out right, and if they don’t graduate either, rig the game some more.
     But you’ll never be able to stop rigging the game, if you don’t do anything about the underlying causes of the poor academic performance. And that’s where things get ugly, and hard for liberals to address.
     Hundreds of years of racism. Ok, supposing that’s the cause, what’s the mechanism? Because nobody has lived through three hundred years of racism, something has to deliver the effects of those hundreds of years to a teen.
     Chew on this: The mechanism is black culture. (And, yeah, I’m not an idiot, I know there isn’t just one black culture. I also know that not all blacks do badly in school… Think maybe there’s a connection?) So, what are you going to do about that?

248. But you’ll never be able to stop rigging the game, if you don’t do anything about the underlying causes of the poor academic performance.
     You won’t get any argument from me on that.
     Chew on this: The mechanism is black culture.
     There’s something to what you say. There are a lot of toxic, self-destructive elements of black culture.
     I’ll even go further, and agree with the generally conservative position that if black folks want to really change their position in this society, they’re going to have to do it for themselves. Not because they ought to be required to do so, but because nobody else is really going to do it for them.
     All of that said, American black culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not just the centuries-long history of being treated first as nothing more than property, then as the literal whipping boy of white arrogance and spite, then as the servant class of white privilege.
     It’s also the pervasive, ubiquitous level of suspicion and basic lack of respect and simple decency that black people have to live with, every day, here and now. If you think that isn’t a reality, and isn’t a frustrating, corrosive, poisonous burden, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong.
     To be dead honest with you, I believe the white majority in this country owes black Americans nothing but thanks for their patience and long-suffering under our ill treatment of them. We owe them a debt that won’t be paid by 40 acres and a mule, financial reparations, Great Society handouts, or affirmative action programs.
     The only possible thing we can do to repay them for their patience is to treat them with the respect and consideration that is their due, as equals.
     When that happens, affirmative action or any other program will be unnecessary. I have no idea if they will then all run out and become lawyers, or not. It really doesn’t matter.
     That kind of transformation of the relationship between blacks and whites in the US ain’t gonna happen anytime soon, sorry to say, so if, in the meantime, a law school decides to give blacks a leg up, I really don’t have a problem with it.
     You’re right, it doesn’t solve the problem. It is, at best, a band aid, and a clumsy one. It might even be harmful, in that it is, in some ways, a continuation of the god-damned, self-righteous, patronizing behavior of American whites towards American blacks.
     But, you know, it’s something, rather than nothing, and a few black folks get to go to law school. So, there’s that.
     Thanks –

249. Because nobody has lived through three hundred years of racism
     Not for nothing, but I’d like to put a point on this.
     I’m 51. No spring chicken, but also not quite ancient yet.
     Emmett Till was mutilated and murdered the year before I was born, all for calling a white woman “baby”. He was beaten, shot, his eye was gouged out, and he was thrown into the river with a cotton gin tied to his neck with barbed wire. Everyone knew who killed him, but the men who did it never did a day of time for it. The jury acquitted them after deliberating for a bit more than an hour. He was 14.
     When I was a kid, I saw pictures in the paper and on TV of black people being sprayed with fire hoses, beaten with clubs, and attacked by dogs, all for the crime of asking to be treated like fellow human beings.
     My old man was raised in the pre-Civil Rights era south. When I was a kid we used to go visit my family in Georgia, where my aunts, uncles, and cousins would treat their hired black domestic help like crap. We’d drive past shacks made of scrap lumber and tar paper where poor black folks lived.
     I once got to meet an older black man who had worked as a share cropper for my grandfather. The deal with share cropping was that you’d get an advance from your employer, which you’d pay off when the harvest was in. The guys my grandfather would hire were illiterate, so he’d cheat them. My father told me this.
     My grandfather, that sorry, evil son of a bitch, rode with klansmen, and apparently kept a black man’s knucklebones in his dresser as a trophy. I never saw them, my uncle told me.
     I’m a well educated, upper middle class, white, northeastern blue state coastal liberal with a German car and a fondness for French cheese, and that’s my personal history. Is it that f*cking hard to imagine what kind of crap the average black person has lived through, personally, or what kind of immediate family history they have been steeped in?
     What would it be like to be the guy who’s grandfather’s knucklebones were in my grandfather’s drawer?
     There are lots of toxic elements in current-day black culture, but that’s far, far, far from the only “mechanism” in play.
     Thanks –

250. Russell puts it strongly, but I’ll put it more strongly. If an occupying nation treated a subject people the way American institutions public and private treat black Americans, we’d say they have grounds for revolt. When the Soviet Union treated Warsaw Pact nations that way we [i]did[/i] say they had grounds for revolt. Black cultures – plural, there’s not just one – might well improve in some ways if their inhabitants didn’t have to deal with the constant reality of unjust treatment at law, discrimination in lending and housing, and all the rest. Blaming black people for noticing that they’r e subject to discrimination every day of their lives and not feeling glad about it is stupid at best, collaborating with the evil at worst. As it now stands, black people know that no matter how educated they are, no matter how they toady to racist authorities, they’ll continue to suffer routine discrimination every damn day of their lives.
     It’s a tribute to the collective good will and decency of black Americans that they haven’t yet risen en masse to give us whites a taste of our own medicine.

251. Although this whole thread may be past its sell-by date, and I have no particular expertise on the question(s) as posed, allow me to offer a slight variant hypothetical.
     Let us talk med school, rather than law, because there’s probably a stronger consensus here that doctors are, in general, good for the community as a whole than lawyers. (Apologies to the Good Lawyers lurking out there, but I’m trying to simplify this example.)
     We know that among the health problems faced by this country, some of the most important stem from a shortage of doctors willing to live in, and serve, minority areas, particularly (though not exclusively) the inner city.
     Most doctors, quite understandably, prefer the better working conditions and higher salaries of more affluent zones, and we are not suggesting they be denied that choice. (Although in some countries, where all medical education is state-sponsored, the state may demand that one serve, at least for a while, where it determines one is “needed.”)
     Nevertheless, as director of admissions of a medical school in some hypothetical state, I am conscious of this situation. I have reason to believe that although any medical graduate should continue to have the right to live and practice wherever s/he wants, the odds of a doctor choosing to serve the inner city are significantly greater if s/he comes from that community, or from the ethnic group(s) most heavily represented there: African-American, Latino, etc.
     If my assumptions are correct, it would be in the interest of the common weal – not just institutional diversity, or racial fairness, or reparation of past injustice – to maximize the number of qualified doctors who are likeliest to serve there.
     If (and only if, I hasten to point out) the pool of applicants is such that – as described in previous hypotheticals – there are 1000 qualified applicants for some 800 positions, may I not use the discretion of the application process to ensure the acceptance of the maximum number of these qualified applicants from ethnic backgrounds most likely to serve where most needed? Is this not a legitimate goal of a state institution – the general betterment of the health of the people of that state?
     (I stress “qualified” because there was a whole lot of nonsense around the time that Bakke was originally argued that by accepting those whose test scores were not at the very top, Berkeley was accepting “unqualified” candidates. What most of the objectors failed to note – whether through ignorance or through malice – was that ALL of the candidates in question had scores well above those required of an earlier generation, which suggested that if these “affirmative action” doctors were not qualified, many of their own physicians were probably, on the same scale, even worse. It’s a bad faith argument unless one is willing to posit that a few points on the MEDCAT [or LSAT or SAT or whatever] can clearly distinguish capability from incapacity for particular educational or professional purposes – which even the promoters of such tests would not argue.)

252. Chew on this: The mechanism is black culture.
     Actually, there is an excellent analogue, the phenomenon of buraku culture in Japan. Yglesias recently posted about it, but I would highlight the Kristof article MY cites noting the progress that has been made. While you might attribute lack of black progress to the fact that black culture has held black people down, there is a buraku culture and it doesn’t seem to be as effective in holding the buraku down. Why is that? Rather than some mystical differences in culture, Kristof suggests it is the upward mobility that prevents people from telling them from the mainstream, so perhaps it is less black culture than actual black skin. I myself would highlight the strong hand that the government has followed strictly enforcing anti discrimination laws, but that would probably have Brett curl into a fetal position. Still, I’d be interested to know what Brett thinks is different and if it can be distilled down to something for us to chew on.

253. To add to russell’s comments above, I am only 38, and in my lifetime (hell, when I was in college), the largest suburb of Cleveland — and the seventh-largest city in Ohio overall — had black residents driven out by having crosses burned on their lawns, and the entire city had to operate under a consent decree for more than two decades because of pervasively racist policies of keeping blacks out of home sales and rentals.
     In my lifetime, a black man was tied to a truck in Texas and dragged to his death for no other reason than some white person’s amusement.
     russell and I could probably both go on and on, but I’m not sure how much education a man who persists in believing that, since nobody alive today is 300 years old, it’s black people’s own damn fault for not having more CEOs and presidents and senators, is capable of achieving.

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