Michigan’s State Universities and it’s Governor Challenge the Will of the People of Michigan (their bosses) in Court!
The Michigan Citizen breathlessly reports, “Civil rights advocates are optimistic that the voter-approved affirmative action ban will eventually be completely rescinded. To delay the implementation of Proposal 2 at three major state universities is considered a win.
“I think this is a tremendous victory,” said George Washington, attorney for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). “Now we must mobilize to win a stay for the rest of the year and every year afterwards. We have an excellent chance of winning our lawsuit against this racist law.”
According to Mr. Washington, attorney for BAMN, “Proposal 2 created discrimination at the heart of the political process,” he said. “A veteran, a resident, an alumni, a son of a congressman or a university administrator can still get preferential treatment at the universities, but the only people who cannot are Blacks, Latinos and other minorities, and women.”
As John Rosenberg of Discriminations (http://www.discriminations.us/) points out, “By BAMN logic, a “veteran, a resident, an alumni, a son of a congressman or a university administrator” could all be excluded from or denied benefits of or be subject to discrimination under some educational program receiving federal assistance without running afoul of Title VI. Title VI, in this twisted view, affirmatively encourages discrimination against everyone except a small subset of people who are protected because of their specially protected “race, color, or national origin.” ”
There is nothing more "racist" (and I hate using that word) than presuming incompetence on the part of another.
Sadly, it is the essence of the white Liberal or "do-gooder." It's why those folks tend to see their ilk (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry, etc) as "erudite elites" and Conservatives from Dan Quayle to G W Bush as stumbling, bumbling imbeciles, who aren't as "enlightened" as they are.
Of course, these folks are actually pseudo-elites. Al Gore, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry all did far worse in College than did G W Bush.
Carter was a bright man, with absolutely no common sense and Bill Clinton was another bright man, who'd come up from poverty, but never developed a conscience in his travels.
Still, Clinton, at least had the common sense to be a pragmatist. He headed the DLC that tried to move the Democratic Party t the Right (back toward the center) and he signed onto 7 of the 10 planks of Gingrich's "Contract With America."
But back to preferences and presumed incompetence - when I first got on the FDNY (back in March of 1986), I worked with a black Battalion Chief named Reggie Julius (a real great guy, who'd worked with my Dad in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn back in the "war years" - the late sixties and early seventies, when ONE THIRD of the buildings in NYC burned down).
Chief Julius was not only a very bright guy, but he was a real character as well and he had a real problem with race and gender based preferences.
At that time, I'd met few blacks who opposed such things and was curious, so one day I asked him about it, and his response was, "Every time I walk into a room, I KNOW most of the people in there think I was given these stars (Battalion Chiefs wear two gold stars, one on each collar) and it pisses me off cause I was never given nuthin and never asked to be given nuthin by anybody. I scored at the top of every exam list on every test I took and I resent people assuming I didn't, but that's the stigma that quotas put on us - people just assume every black person is unable to compete."
Chief Julius had real self pride, not "ethnic pride," nobody ever "earned" their ethnicity, he was rightfully proud of the person he forged himself into being.
I think the thing that Chief Julious and other blacks who oppose preferences really understand is that there is no more tacit an endorsement of white supremacy than accepting race/gender-based preferences as necessary, as it endorses black incompetence and thus white supremacy.
In that regard, the real "white supremacists" are those who support race/gender-based preferences and the blacks who support them are the ones who've accepted white supremacy/black incompetence as reality.
It's NOT reality.
It's a false reality, partially enhanced by the stigma that so-good whites have heaped on those they claim they want to help.
The problem with "helpers" is that you're always looking down to those you help and unless you do a lot of self reflection, you can easily slip into feeling "better than" others.
That's probably why so much harm has been done in the name of "good intentions."
Education is access to knowledge and knowledge is a form of wealth and like any form of wealth, you can only get out of it, what you are able to put in.
That's why there are people like Bill Gates and others who've used knowledge effectively even though they've dropped out of College and why so many Lottery winners quickly wind up bankrupt after a few years - they're not prepared to leverage that money to earn them even more money, or to "grow their assets."
Even the premise that ethnic diversity holds some sort of mythical positive value is flawed, to say the least. In point of fact, ethnic diversity is value-neutral - that is, it has neither a positive nor a negative value.
Japan and Iceland do incredibly well with their homogeneous (non-diverse) populations, and places like Britain and France are now suffering with increasing diversity, albeit the root cause of those nation's problem seems to be an increasing Muslim population, not mere ethnic diversity.
Self-segregation is a fact of life.
I dealt with it in College, where the bulk of both blacks & whites CHOSE to sit together in class and in the cafeteria. I was one of two white players on the basketball team and saw this first-hand - sometimes members of the team would sit together and other times, they went their own ways.
Again, the problem with the very premise of race/gender preferences is the presumed incompetence it is rooted in.
Given that there is no such thing as "test bias," (there isn't), as Thomas Sowell has shown that the area with the greatest ethnic variance on such standardized exams, isn't the verbal section, as most would think, but the math section and in math, as Dr. Sowell notes, "Numbers are the same in the inner city, as they are in the suburbs," so the ONLY rationalization for race/gender preferences is the presumed incompetence of those groups who are deemed to require such preferences.
Are "donor," "alumni" and "geographic" preferences equally wrong?
Of course, in my view they are, though for different reasons - donor & alumni preferences amount to an illicit quid pro quo that shouldn't exist in the admissions process, while geographic preferences are themselves rooted in the fallacy that "geographic diversity" holds some mythic value that it quantifiably does not, as it too, is value neutral.
The fact is that most blacks prefer to live among other blacks, most whites among other whites and Hispanics among Hispanics. It may well be a false comfort, but for many, it is a comforting factor none-the-less.
It is probably why some blacks vehemently opposed the gentrification of Harlem and Bill Clinton opening an office up there almost ten years ago. They saw Harlem as "their community," and didn't want it changed.
Since Harlem has been "gentrified" many blacks have moved out, though some would say "they were forced out due to rising rents, etc.," it's just as true that many of them reacted the same way that many whites do when a white area becomes predominantly black or Hispanic - there's a sense of "not belonging," that comes with that and that is what many of the blacks who've left Harlem have articulated.
Choice, even short-sighted choice doesn't necessarily make one a bigot, because while bigotry is malevolent, such personal choices usually aren't. For instance, to a white male who is attracted to black women, a black women asserting that she's only interested in dating black males, might seem "prejudicial," if only because it impacts him negatively, but that woman certainly and without question has a basic right to date whomever she pleases, doesn't she?
Indeed, I can't imagine anyone denying that she has a basic human right to be discriminating in her own tastes. We ALL do, and we exercise such "discrimination" when choosing the color of our car, or the walls of our home, or our favorite foods...and yes, often when we choose our friends.
In fact, that's why preferences on standardized exams are not only wrong, but patently absurd. So long as the same exam is given to everyone, the rim is the same 10' for us all.
Now, if one were to argue that the jobs that DON'T rely on any standardized criteria and rely entirely upon the subjective "interview process," then I'd agree that THAT system relies on too many subjective, non-standardized criteria to be considered "fair." An interviewer black or white, may subconcsciously have an aversion to a candidate of a different background. I've always felt that such interviews should be vocoded (so you couldn't tell if its a man or woman by voice) and in a sort of Confessional box, where you couldn't see anything bu the interviewee's silhouette, ideally, in my view, most jobs should be filled via some objective, quantifiable standards, ideally some form of standardized exam.
Bottom line, any and all race/gender preferences violate both equal access to opportunity, as well as equality before the law. Of that, there is no question, for to give a preference to one ethnic group or gender is to deny that same preference (access to opportunity) and indeed inflict a barrier upon another.
The very idea of ethnic preferences spits in the face of the most basic principles this country was founded upon.
UPDATE:
In a recent development U.S. District Court judge David Lawson has barred intervention in the case by Ward Connerly and Jennifer Gratz, as the 6th Circuit Court has ordered an expedited briefing on Judge Lawson’s order enjoining Proposition 2.
It’s astounding that a federal judge doesn’t understand that a Constitutional Amendment that passed with nearly 60% of the popular vote, that bars race based preferences would even delay that law’s implementation.
