So if Obama is elected president....

[jsxtreme]

So if Obama is elected president, a black man, does that mean we can do away with spending to help minorites get ahead? How much further ahead can they get than leader of the U.S.A. ?


Can we also dump affirmative action?

[Frenchy]

ahhh, the race issue. I thought we were electing a president, not a color.

[XDConvert9mm]

Originally Posted by Frenchy

ahhh, the race issue. I thought we were electing a president, not a color.

I have to agree. Why is this even being discussed?

[jsxtreme]

Originally Posted by XDConvert9mm

I have to agree. Why is this even being discussed?

Because, I was unable to get into the college I wanted to, because I'm white! Thats rascism, right? A minority was given my spot, even though I had better test scores.

[Green Man]

Originally Posted by jsxtreme

Because, I was unable to get into the college I wanted to, because I'm white! Thats rascism, right? A minority was given my spot, even though I had better test scores.

Get real. If you want to go to college you can. Quit blaming minorities for your problems.

[XDConvert9mm]

Originally Posted by jsxtreme

Because, I was unable to get into the college I wanted to, because I'm white! Thats rascism, right? A minority was given my spot, even though I had better test scores.

If that is the case and you can prove it then I think you would have a great basis for a lawsuit. If not, then I think you have to realize that there are other colleges out there and act accordingly. Not everyone gets to go to the college they want to, for a variety of reasons.

[jsxtreme]

Originally Posted by Green Man

Get real. If you want to go to college you can. Quit blaming minorities for your problems.

I do! Just wasn't able to go to the one I wanted to!

Originally Posted by XDConvert9mm

If that is the case and you can prove it then I think you would have a great basis for a lawsuit. If not, then I think you have to realize that there are other colleges out there and act accordingly. Not everyone gets to go to the college they want to, for a variety of reasons.

But it's ok that the reason is racism?

University of Michigan

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—In a major victory for U-M announced June 23, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the right of universities to consider race in admissions procedures in order to achieve a diverse student body.
In two lawsuits challenging University of Michigan admissions policies, the court ruled 5-4 in favor of the Law School and, by a vote of 6-3, reversed, in part, the University’s undergraduate policy, while still allowing for the consideration of race in admissions.
U-M President Mary Sue Coleman responded to news of the court’s decision:
“This is a tremendous victory for the University of Michigan, for all of higher education, and for the hundreds of groups and individuals who supported us,” Coleman said. “A majority of the court has firmly endorsed the principle of diversity articulated by Justice Powell in the Bakke decision. This is a resounding affirmation that will be heard across the land—from our college classrooms to our corporate boardrooms.
“The court has provided two important signals. The first is a green light to pursue diversity in the college classroom. The second is a road map to get us there. We will modify our undergraduate system to comply with today’s ruling, but make no mistake: We will find the route that continues our commitment to a richly diverse student body.
“I believe these rulings in support of affirmative action will go down in history as among the great landmark decisions of the Supreme Court. And I am proud of the voice the University of Michigan provided in this important debate. We fought for the very principle that defines our country’s greatness. Year after year, our student body proves it and now the court has affirmed it: Our diversity is our strength.”
In the Law School decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion. The Equal Protection Clause does not prohibit the Law School¹s narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body, O'Connor wrote.
Outgoing Dean Jeffrey Lehman said the decision in the Law School affirmed the importance of diversity in higher education.
“By upholding the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions policy, the court has approved a model for how to enroll a student body that is both academically excellent and racially integrated,” Lehman said. “The question is no longer whether affirmative action is legal; it is how to hasten the day when affirmative action is no longer needed.”
Incoming Law School Dean Evan Caminker said the decision “affirmed the authority of colleges and universities to recognize that all students benefit from attending a school that has a meaningful degree of racial integration.”
“This ruling will enable the Law School and other institutions of higher education to continue serving as a pathway to a more fully integrated society.”
Chief Justice William Rehnquist issued the majority opinion in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) case, declaring that while existing affirmative action law established in the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke allows for race to be a factor in the admissions process, it must not be a “deciding factor.” At issue, said justices, is the point value given to minority applicants.
"The university's policy, which automatically distributes 20 points, or one-fifth of the points needed to guarantee admission, to every single 'underrepresented minority' applicant solely because of race, is not narrowly tailored to achieve the interest in educational diversity that respondents claim justifies their program," Rehnquist wrote.
LSA Dean Terrence McDonald said the court’s decision to uphold Bakke is an endorsement of the importance of a diverse student body.
“Historically, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts has been committed to the ideal of a diverse student body, pioneering in the admission of women and students of color,” McDonald said. “And our commitment to that goal remains today.
“It is now up to us to rededicate ourselves to this diversity by refining our undergraduate admissions system to comply with the court’s ruling. We will do this. We will put to work some of the brightest minds and most motivated people in the country, and the result, I am sure, will continue to be a model for all of higher education.”
Vice President and General Counsel Marvin Krislov said the court’s decision has impact beyond colleges and universities. Among the many amicus supporters of the University during the course of the lawsuits was the military, whose ranks of officers have become more diverse because of affirmative action. Corporations and other organizations also have come forward to attest to the value of diversity.
“Our nation’s prosperity and national security will be strengthened by today’s decision. Diversity and excellence go hand in hand,” Krislov said.
The lawsuits decided today by the Supreme Court were both filed in 1997 in the Eastern District, U.S. District Court by white applicants, who challenged the use of race in the admissions processes of the University’s largest undergraduate school, the College of Literature Science, and the Arts (Gratz v. Bollinger) and its Law School (Grutter v. Bollinger).
Information about the cases can be found online at http://www.umich.edu/~urel/admissions/ including a complete chronology of the key rulings in the cases and other higher education affirmative action lawsuits, which can be found at http://www.umich.edu/~urel/admissions/faqs/chronology.html
A number of conferences are being planned during the summer and fall by higher education and legal organizations to analyze and explain the effects of the court’s decision on university policies nationwide.

[jsxtreme]

So tell me how this isn't a valid point?

[AZXD]

I used this resource for a paper I wrote a few years ago on this subject.
Enjoy!

Affirmative Action: Another Side to the Story by Steven Yates
by Steven Yates

[Author’s note: this was submitted to The State newspaper of Columbia, South Carolina, on Dec. 18, 2003. This should explain its unusual brevity. The manuscript was never acknowledged, much less published; and so I offer it here unchanged.]

If a white man expresses objections to affirmative action programs, must his motives be racist?

I’ll take up this question in light of a single sentence in Warren Bolton’s recent column (Dec. 13): "Just as whites need to hear blacks’ reasons for supporting affirmative action, whites who oppose it need to be able to express themselves."

I have written this for two reasons. One is to express this other side of the affirmative action story. Let’s try an analogy.

Consider a basketball season in which certain teams play by all the familiar rules and others are compelled to play with each player having one arm tied behind his back.

No one, of course, would consider such games fair.

Now suppose someone proposed that for the next several seasons those teams whose players had been untied, were now to play all their games with an arm tied behind their backs,
while those who had been tied up, now had both arms free.

Would turnabout be fair play?

Before answering, let’s improve the analogy. Let’s observe that there has been a complete turnover of players. All those who played in the first set of games have retired. The current players, therefore, are newcomers none of whom were involved with the original practice.

Now let’s ask again: would turnabout be fair?

To answer yes is to embrace affirmative action. To answer no is to reject it, on the grounds that the original perpetrators and beneficiaries of discrimination against blacks are gone (as are their victims), while those forced to sacrifice job opportunities, college admissions, etc., were unborn and so hardly responsible for the wrongs.

My analogy contains a crucial premise, and it is important to identify it. It focuses on the players as individuals, not as members of collectives. Is it fair or just to penalize the children of a given race for wrongs perpetrated by their remote ancestors?

To say no is to take up for an individualist model of society, as opposed to a collectivist one. The former takes the individual as the most basic unit for analysis; the latter, the group.

Most of human history has been dominated by various sorts of collectivism. It is the easy point of view, the one that divides the human race into tribes. Its logic: you are either part of the tribe or an outcast – probably an enemy. This is why so much of our history is a history of wars and bloodshed.

Individualism began its slow rise only in the West, through the gradual convergence of Protestant Christianity, natural-rights political philosophy, and constitutional-republicanism, which saw a written Constitution as encoding the rights of individuals (not groups) that pre-exist government. Individualism is the hard point of view. Escaping tribalism took centuries!

Americans have never been fully consistent individualists. Otherwise the Framers would have gotten rid of slavery at the country’s founding. Their not doing so was a blunder of major proportions.

Individualism is nevertheless the superior account of the human condition. There is no collective brain or nervous system. Individuals, not groups, take actions. To the extent that rights are acknowledged as belonging to individuals, societies have prospered. To the extent that human beings have been categorized as groups and moved about by force, societies have stagnated or declined. Marxism, the 20th century’s dominant form of collectivism, enslaved and impoverished a third of the human race. The final truth of collectivism is that it doesn’t work. Period.

It therefore behooves us to look at such things as institutional, systemic discrimination to see who is responsible. We see not a collective entity, the "white race," but specific acts of government. These include Supreme Court decisions such as Plessy v. Ferguson and also legislation such as 1931’s Davis-Bacon Act that made systemic discrimination convenient (it protected unionized workers, and most blacks were not unionized).

It also behooves us to look for proximate causes of black disadvantage. Here one sees teen pregnancies, single-parent homes, broken families, substance abuse, and the violent nihilism of the "gangsta rap" culture. Men and women of good conscience – of whatever ethnicity – who would see the plight of black citizens of this country improve must address these real issues, not appeal to that bogey of political correctness, the "legacy of slavery," an institution that hasn’t existed for almost 140 years. Once we have done this, I believe we will find that affirmative action uses unjust methods to address the wrong problems, and this is why it encounters resentment and passive resistance.

I mentioned two reasons for writing this article. Everything up till now was the first. The second: I am curious to see whether an ordinary white guy who knows good and well he hasn’t reaped some mysterious benefit from being born white can write an article like this and not be demonized (by associates, other commentators, readers) as a covert racist. I have held out for individualism. But with the meteoric rise of political correctness, the complacent acceptance of unlimited immigration, and the dominance of academic ideologies of "diversity" and the "politics of identity," we are now moving backwards towards a society more and more divided into mutually distrustful collectives.

January 12, 2004

[AZXD]

Here's part of the expanded version.
Again, enjoy.

What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (And Why It Never Could Have Gone Right) An Essay by Steven Yates

For the past 40 years, furious debate has swirled around affirmative action. Stirring the pot anew is the U.S. Supreme Court’s announced plan to revisit the issue this year. At the University of Michigan, being black automatically counts "20 points" toward admission – considerably more than any academic or cognitive achievement (a perfect SAT score, for example, only counts "12 points"). The "point" system is not qualified in any way; as far as I can tell, Bill Cosby’s kids would be eligible for preferential admissions at the University of Michigan as members of a "disadvantaged" or "underrepresented" group. Two white students filed lawsuits. Given today’s spoils system, why wouldn’t they? Of course, it is a particular affirmative action program that is on trial. If I had to guess, based on history, I would predict that the Court will strike down the program at the University of Michigan as unconstitutional but stop short of repudiating preferential admissions overall. The troubled waters of affirmative action thus will remain as murky as ever. Let’s return to the beginning, and to fundamentals.

1.
What is affirmative action? That is the first problem. No one, at the outset, ever defined it. To its supporters, it meant racial and social justice, a compensation for past and present discrimination. To its critics, it has only perpetuated the problem of discrimination while creating a host of new problems.

The term affirmative action was introduced in the context of civil rights by President John F. Kennedy’s EO 10925, signed in 1961; one passage in the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and again in President Lyndon Johnson’s EO 11246, in 1965. Each called for organizations to take "affirmative action" to counter discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, and so on (gender came later). Kennedy originally spoke of "affirmative steps" to prevent discrimination, suggesting general efforts to reach out to minority groups. The term is not defined or explained further; nowhere are to be found specific instructions how to take "affirmative action." There is no indication that a specific policy was intended.

The term stuck. Its meaning would soon be hammered out by federal agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Justice Department. There seemed to be only one way organizations ranging from construction companies and their subcontractors to colleges and universities could "prove" they were not engaging in discrimination, and that was to start keeping extensive records of the race, ethnicity, and eventually gender of every job applicant, every applicant for a promotion, every applicant for admission to every college and every applicant for a faculty or administrative appointment. These would be used as a baseline measure to be compared with records of those hired, promoted, admitted to a university or appointed to a faculty.

The problem was, the new antidiscrimination laws required the proof of a negative. At the time no one noticed or commented that this made antidiscrimination law a fatally flawed concept. Sometimes this problem was solved by introducing racial quotas, as with Richard Nixon’s version of the 1969 Philadelphia Plan. Original civil rights law, however, had repudiated all interpretations of the law that called for preferential treatment, much less quotas. The following sentence in the 1964 Civil Rights Act is as clear and explicit as any government document is capable of being:

Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer, any employment agency, labor organization or joint labor-management committee subject to this title to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex or national origin … in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons of such race, color, religion, sex or national origin in any community, State, section, or other area, or in the available work force in any community, State, section or other area. (Title VII, Section 703, (j).)

Nevertheless, and quite contrary to this passage in the Civil Rights Act, by 1970 we had begun to see a shift in emphasis away from establishing personal acts of discrimination as a legal requirement for taking "affirmative action" toward a preoccupation with statistical ratios. It was simply assumed that absent discrimination, the percentage of hires, applicants, etc., from a particular racial or ethnic group would reflect its percentage in the local population. Conversely, imbalances (or lack of parity) meant that systemic discrimination was still occurring even if no systematic discrimination could be proven. This notion was settling into place at the time of the Supreme Court’s decision in Griggs v. Duke Power in 1971, which introduced disparate impact as a measure of discrimination and gave full sanction to the conceptual shift. We also began to hear phrases like underrepresented group thrown around. The very concept underrepresentation presupposes another one: correct representation. What could this be? To the growing army of affirmative action bureaucrats, it meant proportional representation – ideally, each group should be represented on campuses, in workforces, and on corporate boards, relative to its percentage in the local population.

By the time the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case came up in 1978, it was clear that at least some affirmative action programs were involving overt preferences where less qualified minorities were given seats in medical and law schools over more qualified whites, in the name of achieving greater "balance" in student populations. This was what plaintiff Allan Bakke alleged was occurring at the University of California at Davis Medical School. He had applied for admission in both 1973 and 1974 and been rejected both times, while blacks who were less qualified by the medical school’s own criteria were admitted in his place. In other words, the new rules had led to – amounted to – reverse discrimination against white men. One might as well use the term Nathan Glaser chose for the title of his book Affirmative Discrimination (1975), the first detailed study of what was going on by a major sociologist. Those charged with implementing the programs, however, had no idea how else to proceed in proving to the new breed of federal overseers that they were not discriminating against women and minorities.

In many respects, Bakke was a turning point. This is unfortunate, because the Court’s reasoning was a hopeless muddle. The Court struck down the specific admissions policy at the University of California at Davis Medical School. In other words, Allan Bakke had proven his case to the Court’s satisfaction. However, while acknowledging that even "benign" racial classifications are inherently suspect, Justice Powell’s majority opinion went on to introduce the notion of a "compelling governmental interest" that justified taking race into account. Just so they didn’t set hard quotas. The "compelling governmental interest" was in "the attainment of a diverse student body." Thus the concept of diversity entered the picture. In this light, race or ethnicity could count as a "plus" in decisions who to admit to a university or who to hire even in the absence of evidence of intentional discrimination. Precisely where such a rationale was to be found in the Constitution was never made clear. But Justice Blackmun was the one who spilled the beans. He opined that it was not possible to develop an affirmative action program that was completely race-neutral, without any preferential treatment, and still have it be successful. "In order to get beyond racism," he famously wrote, "we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must first treat them differently."

Read the rest