Blackmailing Scalise | Center for Equal Opportunity

Some recent news items like this one report that liberal civil-rights groups are hoping to use Rep. Steve Scalise’s troubles to their advantage. Their hope is that he can pressured to prove that he’s really not a racist by, among other things, promising to support the Left’s proposed legislation to resurrect Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act by overturning the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder.

Rep. Scalise should tell the groups that he’s not interested, and in no uncertain terms.

No new legislation is needed. The Supreme Court struck down only one provision in the Voting Rights Act, and there are plenty of other voting-rights laws available to ensure that the right to vote is not violated. What’s more, the bill that has been drafted is bad legislation. For example, it does not protect all races equally from discrimination; it contains much that has nothing to do with the Supreme Court’s decision; and it itself violates the Constitution by prohibiting practices that are not actually racially discriminatory but only have racially disproportionate effects. The bill has been extensively criticized on National Review Online and elsewhere: See here and here and here and here and here and here.

And so, at Senate hearings last year, it was clear that no Republican would favor it, because it is designed to give a partisan advantage to the Left. It would serve no purpose to hold hearings on the bill in the House. The bill is dead, and it should stay dead.

* * *

“Multiracial Marriage On the Rise”: That’s the title of a short but compelling discussion on the Brookings website here. It was brought to my attention by Washington, D.C.. lawyer Carissa Mulder, who asks, “How can racial preferences continue to be justified when more than 40% of Hispanics and Asians marry someone of a different race (usually white) and nearly 30% of new black marriages are to someone of a different race (usually white)? Are we going to ask kids the races of their parents and penalize the ones who have a white parent?”

Good questions, especially in the context of university admissions. Also makes you wonder a bit about just how racist a country we can be, with all this fraternization going on.

One other thing: That fraternization has been going on for a while. According to this recent article in the New York Times:

On average, … people who identified as African-American had genes that were only 73.2 percent African. European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans.
Latinos, on the other hand, had genes that were on average 65.1 percent European, 18 percent Native American, and 6.2 percent African. The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.

These broad estimates masked wide variation among individuals. Based on their sample, the researchers estimated that over six million European-Americans have some African ancestry. As many as five million have genomes that are at least 1 percent Native American in origin. One in five African-Americans, too, has Native American roots.

* * *

Speaking of sex, Attorney General Eric Holder has instructed the Department of Justice to take the position from now on that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate against individuals on the basis of their “sex” (among other things), thereby makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of “gender identity, including transgender status.” The memo acknowledges that “Congress may not have had such claims in mind when it enacted Title VII” — my nomination for understatement of the year — but that the “plain text” of the statute is best interpreted that way.

The Justice Department acknowledges that it is switching sides (so to speak) on this issue.

* * *

Misleading op-eds about affirmative action are, I know, as common as can be, but I thought I should end by noting this op-ed that the Washington Post recently, with the online title, “The misleading lawsuit accusing Harvard of bias against Asian Americans.” Here’s what I wrote in reply:

It’s the op-ed here that is misleading, not the lawsuit. It admits that, yes, schools like Harvard and Vanderbilt do consider race in admissions, which means that, yes, they do discriminate. No one believes that schools should automatically admit students based on SAT scores, but that’s not what’s at issue here. Most Americans, Asian Americans included, oppose racial admissions discrimination, and there is no good reason for it. A school doesn’t have to have a politically correct racial and ethnic mix to teach students anything.

And even if there were some benefit to such a mix, the costs overwhelm it. It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it mismatches African Americans and Latinos with institutions, setting them up for failure; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school and encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership.

Related posts: