Pocahontas or Pioneer? | Center for Equal Opportunity

Here’s an interesting case: A medical school has been sued for racial discrimination because an admissions officer there advised a (white) applicant that her chances of admission would be better if she took a DNA test and could point to some African American or Native American blood.

Now, surely, this has to be filed in the category of “appalling but not surprising.” That is, under the lamentable current state of the law, schools can weigh race and ethnicity in admissions, and this helps you if you belong to some groups and hurts you if you belong to other groups, so isn’t the advice given the applicant here perfectly sound? Indeed, the admissions officer here pointed to a past case where her suggested approach worked.

Racial preferences are ugly, divisive, and unfair; they must be fought; but in the meantime and as a hedge, we should all buy stock in those DNA companies!

The three areas where racial preferences are most commonly used are education, contracting, and employment. Well, above we have a DNA test being suggested in the first category. I wrote earlier on NRO about a DNA test being used in the contracting context. And as for employment, we all know of the pioneering work being done here by Elizabeth Warren.

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“Assimilation” Is Not a Dirty Word – Tom Brokaw has gotten criticism recently from the Left for endorsing assimilation; to the Left, assimilation is a dirty word. That’s wrong, and in fact the Center for Equal Opportunity has long urged that more attention be paid to assimilation.
So I thought I would add to the discussion my top-ten list of what we should expect from those who want to become Americans — and those who are already Americans, for that matter. The list was first published and discussed nearly 20 years ago in a National Review Online column, and it is further fleshed out in this Congressional testimony. The basic idea is that we don’t all have to eat hamburgers and listen to country music, but there are some values and behaviors we have to hold in common for our particular multiracial, multiethnic society to work.

1. Don’t disparage anyone else’s race or ethnicity.
2. Respect women.
3. Learn to speak English.
4. Be polite.
5. Don’t break the law.
6. Don’t have children out of wedlock.
7. Don’t demand anything because of your race or ethnicity. 8. Don’t view working and studying hard as “acting white.”
9. Don’t hold historical grudges.
10. Be proud of being an American.

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Thoughts on the Northam controversy – Events are happening so quickly here — that is, in the matter involving Virginia governor Ralph Northam and a photo on his page in his medical school yearbook — that I suspect whatever I write now will be overtaken by them, but nonetheless here are a few thoughts:

1. Context is everything. No photo is inherently offensive: After all, many news organizations are publishing the present one, simply to show what the controversy is about. The other extreme would be if the caption were, “I like the KKK and I don’t like black people.” The photo here falls between the two extremes, and the argument, I suppose, is that the photo makes light of something that ought not be made light of: racism and, in the case of the KKK, racial terrorism. That’s offensive. Okay, fair enough.
2. But do we know who made the joke? Northam now says he is not in the photo, and so perhaps the yearbook editors chose it to go with the quote that Northam submitted. The quote is, “There are more old drunks than old doctors in this world so I think I’ll have another beer.” The two figures in the photo are each apparently holding a beer can. A CNN story found “more racist and objectionable images in the yearbook” — that is, more offensive attempts at humor — which suggests that the yearbook editors could indeed be to blame.
3. But apparently Northam knows he is still vulnerable because he did indeed appear in blackface around this time, even if not in this photo, namely when impersonating pop singer Michael Jackson in dance contests. Bu here again, context is everything, and not every appearance in blackface is equally offensive.
4. Bear in mind that this yearbook was published 35 years ago. Is the new rule to be that you cannot hold public office if you did something that might now be considered racially offensive at any time in your adult life, no matter how long ago it was?
5. Which brings us to my last point: I have no particular love for Governor Northam (I voted against him and I’d be happy for him to resign over his defense of late-term abortions last week instead), but what’s at stake here is the Left’s ultimate desire to disqualify from public life anyone who has ever done anything that it decides now is politically incorrect. That’s a scary prospect.

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