Why Not Just “American American”? | Center for Equal Opportunity

We are supposed to be excited because the Congress has passed, and President Obama has just signed into law, a bill that will get rid of “insulting” words like “Oriental” and “Negro,” changing them to more enlightened terms like “Asian American” and “African American.”

But wouldn’t it have been better if all references to race has just be taken out of the U.S. Code altogether, since the reason they’re in there these days is principally to advance race-based preferences and decision-making by the federal government?

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The Chronicle of Higher Education — which, like it or not is the periodical of record for college and university issues — recently had a long article about a program designed to increase opportunities for students interested in earning a Ph.D. The problem was that it made it sound like this program was open only to “underrepresented minority” students (i.e., blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans).

Now, the Center for Equal Opportunity has long objected to such programs, and has successfully challenged them, so naturally this did not set well with us. But when we contacted the executive director of the program … well, you can read the rest in my published response to the Chronicle of Higher Education here (which was given the title, “Worth Noting That Program for Riskiest Students Is Open to All Races”):

One might get the impression from your article, “2 Colleges Build Better ‘Bridge’ to Ph.D.s for Minority Students” (The Chronicle, May 27), that the program discussed is open only to underrepresented minority students, but it is important for readers to know that this is not the case. According to the program’s executive director: “All students can apply. All races/ethnicities are represented in the program.”

That’s as it should be, and kudos to those running the program for recognizing this. It’s fine to provide special programs tailored to “diamonds in the rough.” But diamonds come in all colors, and there is no persuasive reason to limit these programs to “the riskiest students” who are black, brown, or red but to exclude those who are white or yellow.

The reasons given in the article that might be cited in favor of this kind of limitation — e.g., only some groups are afflicted by “stereotype threat” — are likely to be aggravated if students of particular colors are singled out as particularly in need of special help. Fairness aside, if a program were not just racially preferential but in fact racially exclusive, then it is almost certainly illegal under the Supreme Court’s decisions.

Oh, and the fact that, as the article notes, schools are under pressure from crybully students to set and meet racial quotas is no excuse to engage in racial discrimination — as a matter of law or policy or morality.

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There’s another article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about an “unsparing report” at Yale released last month on the school’s failure to have a politically correct racial, ethnic, and gender mix in its faculty.

A non-Yale expert is quoted as saying that the findings are consistent with what “she sees across higher education.” The solution? “Every college, she said, should collect hiring and retention data down to the departmental level, and hold people accountable for a lack of progress” (my italics).

And we know that that means, don’t we, comrades?

Certainly the authors of the Yale report do: “The report makes 19 recommendations, including setting numerical goals for hiring” (again, my italics; see recommendation #2 on page 5 of the report itself, here).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Not only is hiring by the numbers unfair and divisive, and not only is it bad for students and the university not to hire the most qualified individuals to teach and do research there, but it is illegal.

The words “law” and “legal” each appear exactly once in the report, by the way (in a reference to “law students” and in a historical discussion of “legal mandates” during the late 1960s and early 1970s), and there is no citation at all of the relevant federal law prohibiting hiring discrimination. So apparently this little problem was just ignored.

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Finally, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently had a meeting with witnesses on promoting “diversity” in the tech industry. The focus in this area has been on increasing the number of some minority groups (especially African Americans and Latinos), since there are thought to be too high a percentage of whites and, in particular, other minority groups (i.e., Asian Americans); the number of women relative to men is also thought to be too low.

The EEOC also said that it would accept public comments on the issue, and here’s what the Center for Equal Opportunity sent in:

The Center for Equal Opportunity respectfully submits these three links, which we think are relevant to this meeting:

https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/meetings/archive/2-28-07/clegg1.html

https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/meetings/archive/2-28-07/clegg2.html

http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/39865/parable-lifeguard-roger-clegg

The bottom line is simple: Companies in any industry should recruit, hire, and promote the best qualified individuals, without regard to race, ethnicity, or sex, and without a desire to achieve a predetermined racial, ethnic, and gender mix.

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