If you listen to some people, Blacks don't graduate at the same rate from college as white students because of affirmative action.
Right now, overall, the percentage of Blacks in college is around 14%.
The number of Blacks with a college degree is around 12% while, for whites, it's about 28%.
I bring this up for one reason:
Study: Most College Students Lack Skills
Jan 19 2:43 PM US/Eastern
By BEN FELLER
Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.
More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.
More than 50%?
That can't be mainly Black students, can it?
I'd heard about this story on one of my mailing lists. A woman sues harvard claiming race and gender discrimination (layer "appearance discrimination" on top of that because the woman is supposed to be attractive). She loses the lawsuit.
Do a google search on "bobo" and "honorary degree".
Larry Bobo is one of the best social scientists in the game, and he's black. He is now at Harvard in the Department of African American Studies. You see that "honorary" degree that Bobo got from Harvard in 1997? There is no way in hell Harvard is going to hire someone with an undergraduate degree from Loyola Marymount. Ain't gonna happen.
Unless you change the rules. Like award the Loyola cat an honorary Harvard degree.
The woman was lost from day one...because she received her Master's from Simmons College. And while you can sue for race and gender discrimination (while not both simultaenously) you cannot sue for class discrimination.
Go to the right school and the world opens up. Go to the wrong one and try to get into the right networks, and in many cases the world will swallow you whole.
I guess it's my turn up on the game called "Lets Discuss Affirmative Action!" My turn in the mix comes from a blog entry made by LaShawn.
Generally, the "discussion" about affirmative action centers around statistics "showing" that those who are benefitted by affirmative action are not worthy.
Or, the "discussion" can also center around the perception that Blacks' self-esteem is some how damaged. Or, the "discussion" centers around how whites perceive Blacks to be incompetant.
I'll try to address those issues, but I'll do so by gathering previous comments that I've made. I've added more to some of the initial comments.
My ramblings start here.
The SATs are said to be predictors of first year grades only, but people assume it's a predictor of success in school. Additionally, the SAT score is more likely to predict the economic status of the student vs. the performance of the student in school. Furthermore, the highschool grades of Black students are better predictors of success in college than the SAT score.
When she wanted to go to a new school, typically mostly minority, she had to justify the school visit. Then, after the visit, if the high school had little or no responses, she had to justify why they should try again.
She felt it was a double standard, and from what I was told, it was a double standard. This is how she addressed it.
She created a list of high schools that the university always went to for prospective students. She determined the high school's application rate, the high school's student rejection rate, and the acceptance rate of students who went to the high school they recruited.
Later, when she was asked to justify why she should return to the school to recruit, she used the list and statistics and responded by asking why they went to certain schools although they received similar poor responses.
When she left the school to pursue other career interests, she wondered what would happen to the school's minority recruiting efforts. It was clear to her that the people she left behind would not go beyond their, white, comfort zone.
Armstrong Williams has written something similar to this when he has written about finding Blacks to work at the Supreme Court as clerks. He stated that he found it offensive when other justices on the court said they could not find qualified Blacks. Williams said the justices had to look beyond the Yale's and Harvard's. He also said that those who were qualified and were offered positions, would turn them down because of other offers.
Something else. Rush Limbaugh has stated that he would not go out of his way to expand the pool of minority candidates because it would lead to "quotas. " So, let me ask you. If you say you want to find qualified Blacks, but you continue to go to the same white sources, what's going to happen?
When responding to someone who said that affirmative action causes people to have no incentitive to do well.
The incentive is graduating. The incentive is doing the best that you can do. Once you get in, you’re in, but you still have get through. There is no such thing as affirmative action for getting grades. However, there is a thing called “grading on the curve” which applies to the entire class. In other words, your comment is lacking.
Let that same Black person, as an adult, comments that he/she doesn’t read much, doesn’t pay attention to details, and gets others to look into the issues and summarize it for him.
People would yell and scream about the state of Blacks, wail against affirmative action, yada yada yada.
Yet for George W. Bush, silence.
Blacks “drop out” of college in much greater proportion because of funding issues. That much was shown in an Urban League report.
The studies that "show" that Black students who they aledge entered as affirmative action students, have yet to show why the students left school. Was it funding? Did they transfer? Did they realize that school wasn't for them? Did they realize they weren't prepared? Other personal reasons? Does anyone know?
And what about the fact that the graduation rate of Blacks is shown to increased when the length of the study is increased? Meaning, when the period surveyed is increased from 4 to 6 years, it shows the graduation rate has increased.
The Hopwood vs Texas Law School case was an interesting “anti-affirmative action” case. In the end, Hopwood got compensation of $1. “The Right” looked at it as a verification of “reverse discrimination.” But here’s the details that people over looked:
1. Hopwood would have still been denied because her undergrad school was not an accredited school which was the requirement for entrance to the law school.
2. Whites with lower test scores than her scores were accepted to the school.
3. The lawyers for Hopwood didn’t prove that she was denied entrance because of her race. There were other entrance requirements that she did not meet.
Linda Chavez’s CEO does “reviews” of schools to see if they are discriminating against white students. They reviewed the University of Virginia, and based on the reviews, “determined” that Black students were getting in who weren’t qualified. The problem with her analysis, is that the Black student’s graduation rate matched those of white students.
What lowered standards?
Responding to someone who said that economic affirmative action would provide no complaints.
In Maryland, Gov. Erhlich changed the state college scholarship program to favor students in need vs. students with great scores. The white community in Maryland had a fit.
So, exactly what are we talking about here?
Additionally, 85% of Blacks who attend college, have scores within the standard deviation of the mean for those who attend the school.
The group also looked at Bowie University in Maryland. Her group claimed that more Black students were accepted to Bowie with lower grades than whites. The fact is, Bowie is an HBCU with an affirmative action program for white students. Not only that, but they combined the day program with Bowie's evening program. It turns out that the proportion of whites who attend Bowie's evening program is much higher than those who attend the day program. In short, like other affirmative action studies, the statistics are flawed.
I would like to raise a pointabout attributions of racism. Often these don't take into account matters of equilibrium. I covered this at length with a longish story about Xerox over at Cobb.
What I'm saying about equilibrium is that there are situations around the status quo which may not represent true equality but they are the best that can be done under the circumstances - that supply and demand are in balance and/or that systems are incapable of greater accomodation. Such systems establish limits to reform/change/progress independent of the chauvinisms and self-interests of the players on either side.
What I am suggesting is that such equilibria are not often recognized for what they are. People expecting equality come up with arbitrary standards which have no bearing on the ability of systems to be changed. The Xerox example is supposed to illustrate the difference between proportional representation vs balanced workforce.
In essence, balanced workforce was as broad and fair a program as could be established and managed at Xerox, and yet it fell short of the expectations of blacks who knew more could be done via aggressive recruiting. You simply couldn't shove more minority participation down Xerox' throat. Xerox was at a negotiated equilibrium, any further agitation threatened the good faith established up to then.
The vaunted cultural equilibrium is basically this: Is Corporate America integrated? The answer is yes. Do we need more Affirmative Action to integrate it more? The answer is no. This is not my opinion, this is public opinion. I don't believe you can change public opinion to be more positive about Affirmative Action for the purposes of integration. The public consensus is that the cure is worse than the disease. And yet Affirmative Action persists. I think it is unlikely to reach the Supreme Court again and that the Amicus Brief in Grutter represents what Corporate America will maintain from here forward.
The raw stuff of integration as I experienced at Xerox is no longer what I percieve to be the case. Now the arguments about 'diversity' and 'stigma' dominate the conversation. I don't think there are CEOs like Kearns who would stand up and say "I want a black group vice president". Rather I presume that the assumption is made that such appropriately qualified blacks will rise of their own accord. Consequently, I don't believe that software models of succession plans and BWF are eyeballing the facts. Basically, I believe that the rigor is gone and that the success of the Diversity argument has made the hardball nose-counting go away.
Subsquently, I believe that Corporate America might 'feel' better for minorities, but they may not in fact be as numerically strong as they might be if Affirmative Action programs were as acceptable today as they were 20 years ago. Understand that 20 years ago it was OK for the CEO to say, I want this black PhD in physics to get a boost, or I want these young black MBAs to get a boost. Now unless you are dirt poor, nobody thinks you should get a boost. In every conversation about Affirmative Action we hear the gratuitous comparison between somebody in the black middle class and some white hillbilly, er uhm excuse me 'Appalachian'.
Essentially, the playing field may not be level, but nobody wants to drive the bulldozer, and many people have forgotten how. This is an equilibrium.
Let me be clear and assert that there are active and passive equilibria. Sometimes the status quo is just that - a situation that nobody examines closely or that all parties have let lie like a sleeping dog. I believe that black participation with Republicans is such a sleeping dog. Neither side is truly challenging the other to change the status quo. This is a passive equilibrium. Opportunity for change is largely foregone.
We would all do well to examine charges of racism in light of equibrium. It is easy to suggest that some inequitable condition, black vs white credit for example, is the result of racism. Examining the inequities might bring one to the conclusion that an institution is racist, which implies that they are actively pursuing a racist policy, when in fact they are not. Redlining is illegal. They very may well be actively trying to gain African American customers, but the rate at which they do so cannot overcome their historical redlining. It might also be the case that within an institution not considered racist, bigotry is alive and well.
America has a great number of traditions and institutions which have absorbed a capacity to persist in a flatly racist environment. Every large corporation that operated profitably before the Civil Rights Era did so at the expense of minority employment and service. So institutional racism comes as no surprise, yet much must be examined before one can definitively say that 'The Man' is actively holding us down. As often as not, we are the man sitting next to 'The Man'. Can he be that clever?
I believe we have clearly arrived at a new plateau of racial integration after many years of successful struggle. Yet I am not convinced that any of that prior energy, either for progress or backlash, will be sustained in the years ahead. We are at a new social equilibrium, where reactionaries and bigots can only get so far and where progressives and defenders are equally frustrated. The days of getting broad coalitions in support or opposition to matters of race seem to be winding down. Is it the end of racism? No, not by a longshot. But the war is over as is wartime strategy. Only isolated battles and skirmishes remain. Nobody can get elected by promising anything about race, and nobody who says the absolute right thing can make significant gains from it.
The material significance of race has declined and yet its symbolism remains. What are we to make of that?
In order to present an alternative to race/gender based Affirmative Action, both Texas and Florida instituted a plan that would allocate college spots to the top 10% of each state high school. This plan would lead not only to racial diversity, but also to class diversity. It was viewed by many as the solution to the sticky issue of college admissions.
But not any longer. Here's a snippet (because registration may be required to see the whole piece:)
Critics of the rule say that students from poor high schools without the resources of wealthier institutions are not ready for the work at an elite public university, and that too many graduates of high-powered high schools are leaving the state for college when they do not get into the University of Texas."Those kids are not prepared," said Douglas S. Craig, a lawyer in Houston whose son, Charles, was not accepted at the university. Charles Craig went to the University of Colorado at Boulder instead, Mr. Craig said, adding that getting into the top 10 percent at his son's selective private high school was very difficult. "His class was two-thirds National Merit scholars and semifinalists. Their scores are all very, very high."
I figured this would happen. Note that the same metaphors are coming into play--standards, preparation, etc. Here's the question for me. Why don't the not-so-elite students simply TRANSFER SCHOOLS?
But that would be too much like right. I'm thinking the plan will be gradually abolished. Too bad.
The Michigan State House recently passed legislation that ties state aid for universities to their rules on Affirmative Action. If you've GOT Affirmative Action, you don't get the aid. While on the one hand this is a nice trick, one you've got to give conservatives credit for, we should also be aware of the fact that Affirmative Action is the law of the land...recognized by every sane individual and institution as good for the country, good for business, good for citizens of whatever color or gender.
And we should take care to remember the names.
I'm not sure who the judge is in this case, but this is a clear victory for the side of the right and the just. While America is not the anti-racist nation it could be, it is not quite the racist nation that it once was. What that means for those of us who support Affirmative Action is that it is very difficult to gut Affirmative Action in a straightforward manner. It has to be cut a piece at a time, usually using minor to major forms of deception. As long as organizations maintain vigilance we should be ok. The trick though is still to build up k-12 given our 25 year window.
(Edited to add the question mark. Ward Bell notes that this probably shouldn't be called a "victory" given that signatures are still being collected. We'll know more soon, but he has a point.)
OK. A group of black contractors in Albany, Ga. are threatening to sue because they feel they've been locked out of contracts. Here's the original story. Jim's thinking the issue a bit overblown, and truly hopes that Jackson doesn't come rolling in to save the day. Dean chimes in by noting that when given a choice between reason and politics...folks will choose politics most of the time. Math makes people's head hurt. And of course, people chiming in on both sites are arguing that what black folks really want are guarenteed contracts, regardless of whether the bid is the lowest.
I'm thinking some context is in order.
First things first. I don't think Jim has anything to worry about as far as Jackson or Al are concerned. I'm pretty sure there's no loot in it for them, and no major press coverage. I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
For some reason, I'm reminded of voting rights. When folks say that black people couldn't vote in the South, what they really mean is that MOST black people couldn't vote. There's an interesting story, or set of stories, to be told about the few black people that were allowed to participate. What did they agree to do in exchange for their participation? If they couldn't ever vote against the grain (voting in effect, AGAINST white supremacy) then why in the hell would they vote in the first place? Status plays an important role here most likely. Being able to SAY they could vote was more important than actually voting for their long term interests.
But I'm waxing nostalgic.
If we were to look at the number of registered black people in the deep south who actually voted, I'm betting that number would be fairly high. Taking a look at Hanes Walton's seminal INVISIBLE POLITICS for example I find that in Louisiana between 1900 and 1930, black voter registration hovered around 100. There's no typo there. Out of a black population of 200,000 only 100 were registered.
I'm betting if we looked at black voting in Louisiana as a percent of registration, it'd be around 70% or so. We'd be silly though to use this information as proof of African American political empowerment. Now of course the Albany case is nowhere close--I'm just using the Louisiana example to show that resource allocation should be studied in two stages. The first stage concerns access, the second stage concerns results.
While there is much about the Albany case we don't know, it is clear to me that an argument can at least be made that the first stage requirement of access hasn't been met. Black contractors in Albany probably don't need to know multivariate regression to know that.
Ok. We've been given a 25 year window to make due with Affirmative Action before the doors close.
Assuming that someone doesn't pull the rug out from under us, it now behooves us to ask a question that we haven't really begun to grapple with on a significant national level. What can we do between now and 2028 to abrogate the need for Affirmative Action in higher education?
Of course there is no one right answer...although there are probably several wrong ones. "Nothing" for example is a sure fire wrong answer.
Thinking about the civil rights movement, scholars like Charles Payne (author of the brilliant I'VE GOT THE LIGHT OF FREEDOM) argue persuasively that there were at least three modes of civil rights activism. One mode was largely legalistic...sue, get your case before the Supreme Court, and get the SC to change the law. The other mode was the large scale use of nonviolent protest. The third mode was door to door organizing.
The first two modes are what most of us think of when we think of the Civil Rights Movement, and its victories. Brown v. Board, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the student sponsored sit-ins...
But it's that third mode that really helped blacks and whites make the turn to a better democracy. Because they were about getting regular folks to recognize their rights and their full responsibility as citizens. This task was thankless. There were no cameras documenting these actions for prosperity. There was no cushy Supreme Court Justice job awaiting.
Bob Moses and the Student Nonviolent (later National) Coordinating Committee was one of the thankless heroes of this movement. He's now working on teaching kids in Mississippi math. HIs ideas are worth serious discussion.
Ok. We've been given a 25 year window to make due with Affirmative Action before the doors close.
Assuming that someone doesn't pull the rug out from under us, it now behooves us to ask a question that we haven't really begun to grapple with on a significant national level. What can we do between now and 2028 to abrogate the need for Affirmative Action in higher education?
Of course there is no one right answer...although there are probably several wrong ones. "Nothing" for example is a sure fire wrong answer.
Thinking about the civil rights movement, scholars like Charles Payne (author of the brilliant I'VE GOT THE LIGHT OF FREEDOM) argue persuasively that there were at least three modes of civil rights activism. One mode was largely legalistic...sue, get your case before the Supreme Court, and get the SC to change the law. The other mode was the large scale use of nonviolent protest. The third mode was door to door organizing.
The first two modes are what most of us think of when we think of the Civil Rights Movement, and its victories. Brown v. Board, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the student sponsored sit-ins...
But it's that third mode that really helped blacks and whites make the turn to a better democracy. Because they were about getting regular folks to recognize their rights and their full responsibility as citizens. This task was thankless. There were no cameras documenting these actions for prosperity. There was no cushy Supreme Court Justice job awaiting.
Bob Moses and the Student Nonviolent (later National) Coordinating Committee was one of the thankless heroes of this movement. He's now working on teaching kids in Mississippi math. HIs ideas are worth serious discussion.
For Moses the key wasn't simply changing the system, it was giving individuals the capacity to realize their OWN ability to change the system. So it wasn't just about giving someone a voter registration form, asking them to fill it out and turning it in, it was about educating people about citizenship itself. About educating them about the role of regular people in maintaining and growing a living democracy.
He now believes that the best way to continue this mission is to take the same principles and teach them to grade school kids in the south. By using their lived environment as a template by which to not only teach them higher mathmatical principles, but to teach them the value of teaching others like themselves, Moses is hoping to build a new cadre of intellectual-activists. The book that descibes this project is called RADICAL EQUATIONS.
Our first steps should be to institute programs in school that will both give kids the ability to understand and change their lived reality, and the ability to succeed at whatever mechanism colleges use to sort kids into niches. Like getting people in Mississippi to vote, this is a thankless job. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson will never be a part of it. Tavis Smiley will probably never want to interview you about it. And you won't be recruited to join Cornel West at Princeton after you do it.
But I'm fully convinced that at the end of those 25 years, you'll be able to see a tremendous change that will make all the thankless work worth it.
More later.
Ward Connerly has recently announced plans to put an anti-Affirmative Action initiative on the ballot that would disallow the consideration of race or gender in public education, in contracting, and in government employment (might be wrong on this last piece).
Interesting response from the Republican Party--they don't want any part of Ward. Michigan's Republican Party has a tiny fracture beneath the surface that pops up every now and then--there is a staunch social conservative wing, and a more liberal cosmopolitan wing. Their unwillingness to support this initiative could signify that for the time being at least, the cosmopoles run the Republican tent.
Another spin though, would just look at 2004. Michigan looks to be a highly contested state in the presidential election...and the last thing Republican stalworths of whatever ideological stripe want is the "sleeper" to be awakened. The sleepers in this case are cities like Flint, Pontiac, Lansing...and of course Detroit. Connerly gets enough signatures to put this issue on the ballot, and he single handedly ensures that the mobilization engine is upgraded to 3.0...and black voters across the state will turn out to defeat it.
It is very possible that Connerly's initiative will pass...but I'm almost positive that there is no way for the initiative to pass AND still have a Bush victory in Michigan.
Just to gum up the works, I'm suggesting that everyone I know in the state of Michigan sign the petitions.
I hear "Mickey Mouse" is a popular name.
(reprinted from Cobb)
At this point my understanding of the SC decision on Affirmative Action is fairly straightforward. The Court likes 'individualized' decisions which take race into account, as exemplified by the U of M's Law School admissions process, but strikes down more numerically oriented processes which automatically fix some numerical value to racial identity in a preferential manner. This was the point system used by the undergraduate school.
My reaction is mixed. The most important aspect of the decisions was that they didn't break Bakke which essentially said, no quotas but race can be taken into account. Although I like the principle of not weighing race by numbers, I'm a numerical kind of guy.
One of the old standards for Affirmative Action was 'community representation' which was rather numerical but squishy. One of the reasons I mentioned Caspar, Wyoming was to express the common sense notion that if there are not 8% blacks at the local college there nobody really expects a loud complaint. But if there were not 8% blacks at Emory University in Atlanta, GA people would rightly smell a rat. I always liked the idea of the institution as a semi-permeable membrane. The inside should more or less resemble the outside, not be a fortress, even a fortress of meritocracy. While the rule for inclusion cannot be mathematical, people are still going to count noses and they are still going to compare the inside with the outside.
When it comes to university, I like the idea of 'critical mass' much more than I do 'diversity', but I do so strictly within the limits of the cultural value of a mixed race campus. I don't believe that any Supreme Court ruling should have been necessary in that regard and that universities should have been able to work within Bakke indefinitely. I acknowledge the political axe of 'colorblindness' as well as those who see any racial discrimination as racist regardless of intent to exclude. They forced the issue.
My prime objective in supporting Affirmative Action, aside from defending the political rights of African Americans to demand any concession they damn well please after bearing the burdens they have for this nation, is to reinforce the idea of racial integration as a practical matter. In that context, there is very little that I expect from integration at the college level. Integration is much more important in housing and in work, but I'll take it where I can get it. Nevertheless at college it is more important at the undergraduate level than at the level of professional schools. So the failure of the point system is a disappointment for me.
For the same reasons I think 'diversity' at university is squishy, clumsy and sometimes dead wrong, I think a point system is good and the idea of undergraduate meritocracy highly suspect. That is to say, I find the baked-in essentiality of racial identity in 18 year old freshmen to be fairly lacking in substance. People go to college to learn, to be molded and shaped. Certainly people bring a fair amount of 'baggage / authentical goodness' to the table as freshmen, but how seriously are we to take this? How many college freshmen have a good sense of the literature of their ethnicity and understand squarely their place within it? That seems to me to be something that becomes more defined at college, not something fixed before and unchanging during college. Thus the premise of diversity, that these essential qualities must be deliberately managed and finessed to deliver a finer outcome rings hollow for college. This is where the reasoning of diversity as a justification for Affirmative Action has gone awry. It has forced black students to actively represent something racial, rather than just acknowledge the general disadvantages attending black communities despite the strength of those students' ambitions.
It's important for me to say that I see race at the undergraduate level as a proxy for the economic and educational deprivations latent in the legacy of Jim Crow. It's not that college students are these racially charged ions which need the strong force of diversity to bind them into cohesive molecules of society. Rather that their achievements are all tainted by the structural advantages and disadvantages of separate and unequal neighborhoods. If one substituted zipcodes for race and awarded points that would be just fine with me.
It is precisely for that reason that I am not particularly irked at a point system such as U of M's now illegal method. I think one can be 20 points of 'athlete' and that counts as much as 20 points of 'asian' or 20 points of 'legacy' at the age of 18. That these are all positive discriminations gives these characteristics the benefit of a doubt. Fine. But now that the automatic granting of points is no good I am just as well suited to accept an essay on any such topic (pick two from "My Ethnicity", "My Athleticism", "My Religion", "My Dad's Old Boy Network"..etc) and assign points to the quality of the essay. There's nothing particularly mechanized about that.
But, that still won't stop people from counting noses. Which means in the end, people will still fret and sue if the college seems too black. Of course next time they will start investigating the essays and we Americans will really be showing our collective ass.
I still stand to say that America is standing at a stilted racial equilibrium. Integration is not complete. The semi-permeable membranes of America's institutions are still not balancing their supply of opportunity with the demand by those on the outside. This decision against point systems, while strictly sensible, has slowed down the process at the undergraduate level in one of the few places integration still takes place. I would have rather seen it go the other way, especially considering the numerical nature of the GRE, GMAT etc and the premise of professional certification. (And the certification arguments on meritocracy are fascinating in their own right). There are many reasons for that chief among them is that I would prefer the kind of society that depends far less on exceptional racial tokens, and more on neighbors. Be that as it may, I can abide the decisions as I see them. Of course, I will look closer again.
Much is being made of Sandra Day O'Connor's swing vote upholding the U of M's Law School admissions policy. What's irking me is probably irking you as well. That is, the suggestion that there is no logic in her decision. Then people (like Kinsley and Sullivan) rant on illogically to 'prove' their points.
I've said a few things on the subject here. But over here would be a good place to observe things that [white] conservatives are supposed to think about the way things have been adjudicated.
I saw the following quote in reference to the SCOTUS ruling today on Affirmative Action in college admissions:
"The Constitution protects the rights of individuals, not racial groups,"
This is the common conservative interpretation.
It's wrong.
Check out the 13th Amendment.
While the 14th Amendment definitely talks about protecting individuals from discrimination, the 13th AMendment talks not only about ending slavery but protecting GROUPS from the badges of enslavement. Now in practice this amendment has been used to apply to prostitutes and a whole host of subjugated classes. Seems to me that the group it was intended for still bears that badge. Does not make us victims in an ontological sense. I am by no means a "victim." (As a sidenote just got CONTEMPT AND PITY by Daryl Michael Scott. Scott makes an excellent argument about the way that "victim arguments" have been used by liberals, radicals, and conservatives to help/hurt African American progress. Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and most recently Stanley Crouch have made similar arguments...)
Colorblindness cripples. How much it does so becomes apparent when its principles are applied without nuance. The plaintiffs who argued their case before the Supreme Court this week sounded to me to be of the persuasion that there should absolutely be no regard to color. This is a problem.
I'm not close enough to the law to understand what the Constitution directs historically with regard to its ability to percieve race but I do have a principle I think which ought to be applied. I call the idea 'effective resonance'.
The reasoning behind it has to do with the notion that all racist acts are not equal either in intent or effect. The state does have a compelling interest in insuring that society does not exclude groups but I don't see that it is useful in policing all instances of racist discriminations. For this reason I have come up with three classes of racist offense. These of course are informal and don't stand up to legalistic definitions but you should get the picture:
Class Three - Background Noise
This will include all such insults, slights and disrespect as is generally expected to be found everywhere in this nation. Examples include but are not limited to being ignored by cabbies, flying confederate flags, nazi propaganda, being mistaken for the help, being shown costume jewelry, being asked one's opinion of, or to account for the opinions of the Fungibles, and most nigger calls.
Class Two - Political Intransigence
Class Two racism involves denials of public accomodation or private standing which are not criminal, yet grossly unfair and unjust. Such acts would include imposition of glass cielings, racial profiling, white flight, medical misdiagnosis, educational tracking, false arrest, false imprisonment, racist vois dire, racist jury nullification, denials of service with plausible deniability, any institutional individual or institutional racism which must be tried in civil courts and all such active bigotry one associates with hate groups which fall short of incitement.
Class One - Crime
Theft, criminal defamation, cross burnings (now), hate crimes, murder, rape & all that stuff for which America has never made any extraordinary effort to repair.
The matter of Effective Resonance adds a second dimension to this classification. I consider it an important context because it takes into account the ability of a group to withstand the inevitable turmoil of ethnic, religious or racial animus. I believe this to be something that changes over time and that the law should be sensitive to that robustness or lack thereof.
Let us consider several well known examples from the not too distant past. In the first case consider the significance of the restrictions place against blacks from sitting in the front of the bus. In the course of human events, this is little more than humiliating. And yet in the case of Rosa Parks, the willingness to defy this racist rule was quite courageous. That is because at the time such rules exemplified the extraordinary control whites had over blacks.
One could hardly imagine it necessary today to escort black highschool children into a white school with federal troops. Yet this precaution, dare I say this remedy, was entirely appropriate for the integration of Little Rock highschool 2 generations ago.
What has changed greatly since those days is the power of black American individuals to move freely in society. This derives not soley from the change in the law, but because of the collective power of the group to work around such difficulties. Today the law is fairer and the power of individual blacks to absorb such pains as sitting in the back of the bus or not accept police escorts is greater.
What I am suggesting is that for the same reasons Class Three racist offenses have not been outlawed and criminalized is not because they are not racist, but because despite the fact that they are racist and offensive black mobility in society is not restricted inordinately. Blacks as a group and those interested in black success is too strong.
On the other hand, could we say the same thing for Arabs and Muslims in post 9/11 America? No. Today they are more vulnerable.
When we look at racial discriminations we should consider the robustness of the context of the group in question as well as the severity of the act itself. This is an important distinction that many critics of Affirmative Action make when they say it is not as necessary today as it was 20 years ago. Despite the fact that individual blacks may be just as underprivileged today as the very first Affirmative Action beneficiaries does nothing to diminsh its stigma today. One cannot escape the fact that individuals are judged in the context of the benefit to their group, in fact the entire question of Affirmative Action is one of social justice. Is America made weaker or stronger because of it?
If the legitimacy of positive discriminations for individuals of a group owes something to the status of that group, likewise the severity with which we judge negative discriminations should be considered in light of the status of the group to which the discriminated individual belongs. The aim after all is to keep all groups in the mainstream of American life with special regard to their race, gender and creed.
Glenn Loury has opined on Affirmative Action in an editorial series in the NYT. The Supreme Court hears the Michigan case next Tuesday. He makes a very common sense point which should be obvious; colorblindness is not. Rather, colorblindness is a kind of self-congratulatory denial.
Despite its superficial appeal, colorblindness is a false ideal. No understanding of the American social order that ignores racial categories is possible, because these socially constructed categories are embedded in the consciousness of all of us. Because we use race to articulate our self-understandings, we must sometimes be mindful of race as we conduct our public affairs.
If indeed one suggests that it is morally superior to be colorblind, it begs the question, why be colorblind? The inevitable answer is that seeing race is, in itself, considered a poisoned skill. But is it? If one recognizes a difference, is that recognition automatically prejudicial? I have often asked the question of whitefolks who considered themselves to be colorblind, whether or not they also consider themselves white. Almost all of them did. How does one reconcile the two facts? How can you be a color and know that has meaning to yourself and yet deny that others might attach meaning as well? One question I neglected to ask, but points towards the same dilemma is whether or not whitefolks consider their colorblindness to be exactly the same of that of others.
Loury is wise to put such existential questions at the heart of the debate on Affirmative Action.
Taking race into account, in university admissions or in other aspects of life, does not require abandoning a commitment to individualism. One can hold that race is irrelevant to a person's moral worth — that people, not groups, are the bearers of rights — and still affirm that to deal effectively with individuals, we must consider the categories of thought in which they understand themselves.