Legal Commentary

The Harvard Crimson Defends Discrimination

Posted on February 19, 2008
The editors of the Harvard Crimson argue today that discrimination against Asian applicants is necessary in order to produce the ?diversity? they think if of overriding importance. (HatTip to reader Ed Chin) Hans Bader, an alumnus, strenuously disagrees...

When Is Condemning Race-Baiting Race-Baiting?

Posted on February 19, 2008
Richard Ford, the Stanford law professor and author of the new book The Race Card (discussed recently here), had an interesting article in the Washington Post?s Outlook section Sunday. You should read the whole thing, since I?m not summarizing it. Briefly, Ford argues that race-baiting by politicians doesn?t so much reflect or play to the racist concerns of voters as magnify or even create them...

Superfacial Voters

Posted on February 19, 2008
No, ?superfacial? is not a typo (though it is not, or at least until now has not been, a word). According to a report in this morning?s Wired Campus, a blog from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeremy N. Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University (would that be virtual humans or virtual interaction?) and his students conducted some experiments using virtual reality and concluded that voters who don?t feel a strong connection to either political party are more likely to vote for the politician whose face resembles their own...

It?s The Republicans? Fault (Even If There Weren?t Any)

Posted on February 18, 2008
InstaPundit links to two post (here and here) commenting on the dramatic error in the following paragraph that appeared near the end of a long article, ?The Charisma Mandate,? in yesterday?s New York Times Week in Review: When Mrs. Clinton talked about how it took Johnson as well as the Rev...

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Talking Through Your Hat, Or: The Democratic Party As A Post-Modern Institution

Posted on February 17, 2008
Watching the Democrats debating whether or not to follow their own ?rules? is like watching post-modernists trying to have a principled argument. Listen, for example, to Harold Ickes, a top adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton?s campaign who voted for Democratic Party rules that stripped Michigan and Florida of their delegates, now is arguing against the very penalty he helped pass...

Unintended But Anticipated Effects Of Civil Rights Protection

Posted on February 16, 2008
Mickey Kaus, in linking to this post below (thanks, Mickey!), asks: If a Hispanic who has performed as poorly and prominently as Patti Solis Doyle can?t be fired without her employer getting grief from Hispanic leaders, isn?t that a pretty big disincentive to hiring a Hispanic in the first place? Message: Stick to white males ? if they screw up, you can sack them and nobody will whine...

Univ. of Missouri Officials Worried...

Posted on February 15, 2008
... that Missouri voters might eliminate their ability to engage in racial discrimination, i.e., ?diversity efforts.? Ann Korschgen, vice provost for enrollment management, recently told the MU faculty council that ?a referendum on the ballot in November that would not allow race to be considered in enrollment decisions? would present an ?enrollment challenge...

Call For Affirmative Action Decried As ?Insulting?

Posted on February 15, 2008
At the BBC, reports the Times Online, An award-winning BBC reporter has accused Lenny Henry of insulting her white colleagues by calling for affirmative action employment polices at the corporation. The comedian claimed that racism was still rife within broadcasting and asked why ethnic minorities were often found only in menial roles...

Harvard Generously Imposes A Quota On Blacks

Posted on February 15, 2008
Harvard, as many of you know, has recently adopted a new financial aid scheme that ?substantially discount[s] costs for all but the very wealthiest students.? This move immediately generated fears, as expressed in this article from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, that Harvard?s largesse ?will lure affluent and brightest blacks away from state universities...

Secrecy Is Contagious

Posted on February 14, 2008
A university that covers up its racial data will also, if the University of Oregon is typical, cover up, or attempt to cover up, its financial data. I have written before about University of Oregon economics professor Bill Harbaugh?s dogged efforts to pry information about the operations of its affirmative action programs from resistant university administrators (see here and here)...

Friendship, Loyalty, And ?Civil Rights?

Posted on February 14, 2008
Does ?civil rights? require the subordination of friendship and personal loyalty to racial solidarity? According Detroit Congressman John Conyers, apparently so, since racial solidarity is a way of ?avoiding social embarrassment.? Explaining his endorsement of Obama instead of his ?dear old friends,? the Clintons, Conyers told an interviewer: ?To me, there?s a historical consideration in this as well,? Conyers says...

More Handwringing Orthodoxy From The College Board

Posted on February 14, 2008
This morning the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a new report from the College Board on the demographics of its Advanced Placement exams. Once again (similar results last year), the overall numbers are encouraging; the numbers for blacks are not...

The Democrats As The United Nations Of American Politics

Posted on February 13, 2008
I argued in my last post that ?[t]he Democrats seem increasingly less like a political party and more like a precarious confederation of conflicting tribes.? Actually, I take that back. They seem more like the United Nations, the tail wagging the dog of their sovereign constituent groups...

Breyer Supports ?A Little Affirmative Action?

Posted on February 13, 2008
In Hawaii for a panel discussion of the racially restrictive admissions policy of the Kamehameha Schools (see my discussion here, here, and here), Justice Stephen Breyer stated that he favors ?allow[ing] a little affirmative action? in order to prevent people from underrepresented groups looking at the leadership of the military or corporations and saying, ?They?re not us...

Univ. of Nebraska Closes Door On Debating Civil Rights Initiative

Posted on February 13, 2008
The Lincoln (Neb.) Journal-Star reports today that [a] University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor says the NU Board of Regents violated open-meetings law last month when it discussed a proposed affirmative-action ban without specifically listing the topic on its printed agenda...

Obfuscation In Colorado

Posted on February 12, 2008
Conceding that they cannot win an honest contest over racial preferences, the opponents of colorblind equality in Colorado have turned, as preferentialists always do, to disingenuousness and obfuscation. Combining a sly version of the tried and true ?if you can?t beat ?em, join ?em? tactic with a bait and switch, two sentence initiative where the second sentence negates the first, the clever Colorado preferentialists are proposing their own counter initiative: Colorado Equal Opportunity Initiative The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any group or individual on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public contracting, or public education...

Hillary ?Disloyal? To Hispanics!

Posted on February 12, 2008
Although entirely predictable, the following would be funny if it weren?t so sad (HatTip to reader Jian Li): February 12, 2008 -- A prominent member of the national Democratic Party has circulated a sharp e-mail saying the removal of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle was disloyal to Hispanics and should give ?pause? to superdelegates and voters...

Guess Who?s ?Underrepresented?

Posted on February 11, 2008
Steve Burton did some number-crunching concerning 20 of the top universities and found that white male gentiles are seriously ?underrepresented,? even more so than blacks at about half of them. (HatTip to InstaPundit?s HatTip)

Susan Estrich Plays The Race Card Talks About Obama?s Race

Posted on February 11, 2008
Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis?s campaign manager, writes that even if large numbers of her fellow ?good Democrats? won?t vote for Obama because of his race, she hates to mention ? but presumably the good of the party compels her to suggest ? what will happen in the fall if Obama is the nominee when all those not-so-good independents and positively evil Republicans get a chance to vote.

UPDATE

Posted on February 10, 2008
This post has been updated.

Duplicitous (Or Maybe Just Dumb) Defenders Of Discrimination

Posted on February 10, 2008
Booker Evans is described here as a ?minority activist? in Arizona who is a leading opponent of the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative. Evans, believe it or not, actually argues that prohibiting state discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or gender would ?create a divide among people? based on race, ethnicity, and gender...

The ?Philadelphia Plan? Still Lives

Posted on February 08, 2008
Many readers will not know (though some who are as old I am will remember) that ?affirmative action? in its current form, i.e., racial preference blending in to racial quotas, originated with President Richard Nixon and his ?Philadelphia Plan.? If proof was needed of Nixon?s role in the creation of affirmative action, it can be found in the story of the 1969 Philadelphia Plan, which required all contractors working on large federally funded projects to adopt ?numerical goals and timetables? to assure the desegregation of their workforces...

More Mainstream Media Misrepresentation Of Civil Rights

Posted on February 06, 2008
Angela Tablac begins her article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch on the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative as follows: A California businessman is leading an effort in Missouri to end goals in awarding government contracts to minority and women entrepreneurs...

Super Tuesday?

Posted on February 06, 2008
Watching all the talking heads and pundits and pollsters and analysts and campaign operatives discuss the returns Tuesday night, I was struck by the fact that the most glaring difference between the political parties was never mentioned. Practically all the discussion of Democratic returns focused exclusively on demographics: how did blacks, whites, old people, young people, Latino people, male people, female people, etc...

Could UVa Really Be Planning Racially Restrictive Programs?

Posted on February 05, 2008
Last night Maurice Apprey, the Dean of African American Affairs at the University of Virginia, seemed to announce plans to launch a series of new racially restrictive programs. The Office of African-American Affairs plans to establish new programs designed to promote graduate study among black and other minority students and to initiate more open interethnic dialogue among community members, OAAA Dean Maurice Apprey said last night during his ?Student Affairs as Capacity Building? address...

The Sad State Of Pro-Preference Argument

Posted on February 04, 2008
A good example of the sad state of pro-preference argument can be found in this public conversation between Prof. Kevin Gaines, the director of the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Michigan, and Byron Maxey, a U-M junior...

Affirmative Action: Discrimination ?Without Any Restrictions??

Posted on February 03, 2008
I always find it instructive when people say, unselfconsciously, what they really mean when they say ?affirmative action.? Here?s a good example from the American heartland, Mason City, Iowa. Minorities make up 1.2 percent of the city workforce ? far below the the minority makeup of the city as a whole...

?Diversity? Money ? Well Spent?

Posted on February 02, 2008
In 2007 the University of Iowa increased its budget for the ?administrative costs for affirmative action, diversity and multicultural programs? by 25%. ?UI expects to spend $738,718 in FY 2007 compared to $589,018 in FY 2006.? And what did all those ?affirmative action, diversity and multicultural programs? achieve? Non-minority students graduated at a 67 percent rate compared with a 57 percent rate for minority students, according to six-year-graduation rates from 2001 to 2007...

Democrats And ?Disparate Impact?: Discrimination Without Discriminators

Posted on January 31, 2008
There they go again, in a nice preview of what they?ll do if they take over the Senate and the White House in 2008. ?They,? of course, are the Democrats. More specifically, ?they? are Sen. Ted Kennedy and friends, who recently introduced S. 2554, the ?Civil Rights Act of 2008...

New Report: Asians, Not Whites, Gain When AA Ends

Posted on January 30, 2008
This morning the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on yet another study that confirms Asians benefit much more than whites when racial preference policies are eliminated. In fact, the proportion of whites admitted often decreases when race preferences are curtailed...

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