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Let Race Not Divide Us
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The Politics Factory
June 28, 2007 - 9:54pm
Today, the Supreme Court made a historic decision involving race in Parents Involved v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, outlawing the use of race as a factor in placing students in public schools. Had the Supreme Court ruled the other way, they would have turned back the clock 53 years. For those who do not know what I am referring to, in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education prohibited segregation in our schools based on race. Back then, the Supreme Court determined that a student's race does not measure his worth, yet America faces the same problem today. Had schools been able to allocate students based on race, children would have devolved, as Justice Kennedy said in his concurring opinion, into "racial chits valued and traded according to one school’s supply and another’s demand." As much as I admire the free market, children do not belong in it. By recognizing this, the Supreme Court made a decision that CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin says will "rank with the great, important school desegregation opinions of the court's history, starting with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954."
Now several observed that the decision would only affect a small number of students, hoping this would mitigate the race factor. Under the challenged plan, schools would only play the race card if too many people wanted to go to a certain school. Then, schools would consider race as a tiebreaking factor. While the scope at which race applies is narrow, it still does not change the fact that schools unjustly used race as a factor, whether for a few students or many students. Would hate crimes cease to be hate crimes if only a select few crimes qualified as hate crimes each year? Here is the basic fact: groupings such as "white or non-white" as well as "black or other” existed. Race and race alone determined one's status. Any use of race alone, at any stage of the process, inherently qualifies as discrimination.
If an African-American grew up in a racist neighborhood located in the heart of the deep South, they have every right to refer to that when it comes time for college admissions. However, instead consider another African-American, or Hispanic, or whatever, raised in a rich family in an affluent neighborhood, a place that embodies the very essence of tolerance and diversity, creating no hardships due to race. Should that person benefit from being a racial minority? No! Not only would a blanket standard benefit people who do not need it, but it oversimplifies the issue of race. Although Cornell University has used methods such as "on-campus programs and recruitment in inner-city public schools" to reach out to minorities, as an article from the Daily Sun states, according to a different article, other elite universities took a different approach, boosting minority numbers by recruiting immigrants from the upper echelons of their countries. Beyond the two contrasts I have already mentioned, others exist which cover the issue of race at nearly every level of life. Race simply cannot be classified as a black-and-white issue.
For this reason, the Supreme Court decisions on education and race have pretty much pleased me. In 1978, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke affirmed the premise of affirmative action, but it also blocked a blatant example of reverse discrimination, racial quotas. The Court would reaffirm the use of affirmative action in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, but at the same time they rejected a point system that automatically gave points to certain minorities in Gratz v. Bollinger. Now today, with Parents Involved v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, the Supreme Court has continued the trend of not letting just the factor of race alone contribute to decision-making, whether by quotas, points, or tiebreakers. Race should never be an automatic factor.
Reverse discrimination
Discrimination means that you are making a decision based on a group membership or affiliation rather than on an individual's qualities or merits. There is no such thing as "reverse discrimiation" it is a non-sensical term. Why is that white people need a different term for discrimination when it happens to them?
Reverse discrimimation would actually be selecting people based on their merits, rather than their group affiliation.
Reverse discrimination exists
Discriminaton has traditionally implied non-selection of members of a minority group (for jobs, housing, school enrollment, whatever) based on group membership rather than on an individual's qualities or merits. Reverse discrimination means selection of members of the minority group based on their group membership rather than on individual qualities and merits. The former harms the members of the minority group unjustly; the latter benefits them unjustly.
This has nothing to do with "white people" needing a different name for discrimination when it happens to them.
RE: Reverse Discrimination
The previous post wrote "Reverse discrimimation would actually be selecting people based on their merits, rather than their group affiliation."
I entirely disagree. Reverse discrimination is exactly NOT selecting people based on their merits, BECAUSE of their group affiliation, especially if they are considered part of a "more privileged" ethnic group.
In other words, for the sake of example, in a corporate environment that has to maintain a certain ethnic quota to keep the affirmative action wolves at bay, a "white" candidate who is superbly qualified for a position will be passed over in favor of a, perhaps less qualified, "asian" or "hispanic" or "black" candidate, simply to meet quota. The candidate was not passed over because of their individual merits or qualifications, but purely because of race by not fitting into the "diversity formula." Note also that this same type of discrimination can also include other variables, such as gender, as well.
That is the definition of "reverse discrimination" my friend.
Race-blindness is fair to every student
As one of Asians, who immigrated to the US, I am not subject to discrimination or reverse of it, which stems from the American history. That said, a race-blind selection process seems fair to a student of any race.
Discriminiation is Not Merely a Southern Issue
A huge part of the problem is clearly displayed right within this very article. Racially discriminating attitudes and administrative policies do not exist in old "strongholds" of racism. It's not as though the american South is the only place in which discrimination exists, nor are all black people, or those of any other non-Caucasian heritage, located in places one might typically associate them with.
The problem of discrimination is a widespread one, but an even greater problem is the assumption that just because a family lives in a supposedly affluent area, their children grow up affluent, or unaffected by racism. Imagine growing up black with the children of rich white people, and seeing children constantly look at you strangely because you're a true minority in their eyes - with little in the way of a social group to fall back into when you feel uncomfortabloe with the privileged white people around you.
I'm white. I went to public school in a district where only 40% of the kids were white, but 90% of the children in honor classes were white. And that's not because black kids are stupid, or the children of immigrants can't learn to speak English and excel their classes.
It is because of a number of determining factors, many of which occur entirely outside of racial boundaries, and relative income is definitely one of these factors, along with the relative education levels of one's parents, many of whom were affected by the same problems as children
It's hard to compete with kids whose parents make hundreds of thousands of dollars, and work 40-50 hours a week in white collar jobs after having spent a minimum of 16 years in school, when your parents don't speak the dominant language, work 60+ hours a week serving your peers parents (landscaping, food service, housekeeping, manufacturing, etc.), and have many less years of education to draw upon when helping with your homework.
The cost of a good (professional) tutor in my area when i was going to high school? Often $75-100 an hour, if not more. I grew up in Westchester County, New York, and i can tell you from experience that everyone did not share in the affluence attributed to that rather affluent county. And the most affluent districts drew many of the best teachers, luring them with higher salaries and less "problem students" REally, the teachers were just trading potentially disrupting students for demanding, bitchy parents with overly entitled, often lazy children whose parents had the time and money to bail them out, yell at their teachers, hire them tutors, and convince their principal to intervene on their behalf.
I think that the idea of children being traded like "racial chits" is an easy idea to terrify people with. It IS, indeed, a disgusting concept. But in a large city, like seattle, or any of a number of major metropolises, there are many schools- some of them connected with rich neighbrhoods, many not. While all of the rich kids get the benefit of a great education, the children in poorer districts can be easily exposed to a school system full of unhappy professors, a distinct lack of funding and parent support, and no little prospect of escape from an unhappy place where they have to work hard to survive, much less thrive.
The use of race as a factor in choosing the overall population blend of a public school is, i believe, justified, but race is not the only factor that we must base our assignments upon.
If the system of selection were more broadly based, i believe race could be an important but not unfair factor in deciding upon the selections made. Indeed, a greater degree of exposure to a multiracial environment, or a tough school, helps the children of the affluent by introducing them to a less sheltered, cloistered way of life than they might otherwise live in.
Racial and societal mixing can benefit everyone, but great care must be taken to preserve children's identities and not just see them as racial chits within a larger bureaucratic trade system ranking them by points and breaking ties with the race card.
The supreme court was right in preventing schools from using race as a main tiebreaking factor, but the forced desegregation of schools is essential to our health as a country. The youth of our nation cannot grow up sheltered and ignorant of how their less or more affluent peers live - Otherwise there will be little in the way of an idea in most students' minds of how their country is truly made up, as they will be living in an environment that could hardly be called diverse.
Does Money Also Insure Against DWB In ("Their") Affluent Environ
Mike Wacker's flawed analysis of "Race" in U.S. society is pathological and decidedly reactionary. But let this not surprise YOU, the genuinely so 'Affected', as we exist in a society that relishes in Blind Hatreds as regards matters of race ("Blacks"), religion (Islam), gender (Female and Alternative Gender), nationality (Africa and its Diaspora) and class (the Poor).
In this latter instance "Class" discrimination not always presents itself in stark terms of the privileges which "money" can and often does afford, for this too is misleading.
In its purest form, Class, in Anglo-American society, translates as "Entitlement" which, psycho-socially, is actualized en vitro!
This phenomena transcends matters of "Economics" as Mike Wacker, apparently, has yet to comprehend.
Indeed, Mr. Wacker demeans his university's sensitivity to the need for corrective measures to be taken in our society to "Right" the historically well documented injustices done to those who are the 'Direct Descendants of Slaves': the "pure" African-American whose ancestors were chosen to "do the work that others would not do!"
To add insult to further injury, Mike alludes to the Diversity Recruitment programs of peer institutions to Cornell in quite revealing terms!
The idea, should we assume that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford, for example, are peer institutions to Cornell, that these schools would deliberately seek out and recruit their "Minority" student population from abroad, even in "Africa," is to cheapen and lessen the value of any education one might receive from such schools of "higher" learning as these and would be seen as behaving in complete dereliction of the Blacks and Reds who MADE this nation what it "had" become. That nation which gave to Mr. Wacker the wherewithal to speak his mind free of fear of whatever potential for censorship!
"Over-stepping," as both Mike and the "Court" have done on the issue under discussion, is eventually unmasked and hence shall be revealed as distinctly lunatic.
Nonetheless, the need for Race Based Preferences, today, remain a necessary reality for a "Democratic" society who, unfortunately, appears to suffer from Selective Amnesia, when it comes to its true history. So-called "Blacks," for nearly 400 years, individually and collectively, were not permitted to so much as "think" about learning to Read, Write, and Calculate, under pain of Death. Those among us who are either practitioners and/or students of Neuroscience and/or other Behavioral disciplines KNOW and understand the meaning of "Conditioning." Query: When you take a group of "Rats" and pile them one atop another within a "enclosed" environ, what might you believe to be the outcome of their predicament?
As those five (5) Justices who, in all there affected "Holiness," are attempting to permanently re-write our "Civil Rights" laws and thwart various Progressive legislative efforts designed to protect and ensure for the proper application of 'Law' (in cases where the "Poor" are especially and prejudiciously concerned) I am confident that they will be revisted by our "New" Charles H. Houstons and Thurgood Marshalls, all, in due course!
The Judaeo-Christian "Bible" informs us that "God is on the side of the Poor, the Meek, the Oppressed, and the Downtrodden." And, for those of us who believe in "God," well, we know that GOD doesn't permit any who either intends or succeeds in bringing harm to "His People."
To the African-American, "Education and Suffrage" equates to Freedom. To affect one or the other, unjustly, is tantamount to calling out "Muhammad Ali" with Allah and His Heavenly Hosts, ALL, garnered about at the ready!