“Keith Lamont Scott Is Sixth Person to Die in Police Shooting in Charlotte This Year,” says an NBC News headline. Well, yeah, but if you actually read the story, near the end you learn some interesting facts. All those shot were men. Each was 43 or younger. Four were black, one was Asian, and one was white. And all except for one was armed.
What’s more, here are the details on the one who was not armed: “Daniel Kevin Harris, a white, unarmed, 29-year-old, was shot on Aug. 18, after a state trooper tried to pull him over for speeding but he kept driving. He was shot when he finally got out of his car. His family says he was hearing impaired.”
The state trooper was black, by the way. Somehow, though, his shooting did not prompt riots. H/t Mike Tremoglie (a former Philadelphia cop).
There will always be police shootings, and it is a statistical certainty that some of them will involve African Americans, and the law of averages says some of those will involve police who are not African Americans, and inevitably sometimes the circumstances will make it easy to second guess the decisions made by the police.
So it’s illogical to think, “Gee, another black guy shot by a white cop — maybe there really is a problem here.” It’s wrong to jump to conclusions even in a particular case before all the facts are known. And it’s ludicrous to pounce on each such shooting as proving anything about the police generally.
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One of our frequent allies at the Center for Equal Opportunity in opposing racial preferences is the Mountain States Legal Foundation, headed by Perry Pendley. MSLF is suing the Obama administration’s Federal Aviation Administration for abandoning a race-neutral system for the selection of air-traffic controllers (in place since 1991) and ending the use of these schools to train them.
Perry notes that the FAA is insinuating that these schools discriminate against minorities. The insinuation is a lie, says Perry, but if the Obama administration really believes it, why is it not investigating? Good question. He’s posted about it on Facebook and Twitter.
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The Harvard Crimson editorialized recently on the lawsuit that has been brought against the school for discriminating against Asian Americans in its admissions. There was so much bad reasoning in the editorial, and the bad reasoning was (alas) so typical, that it is worth annotating. The editorial with my bracketed, italicized annotations follows.
“More Nuance in Affirmative Action” [That should be “Preferences Based on Race and Ethnicity.”]
Using the Anti-Affirmative Action Lawsuit to Improve Considerations of Race [Right: “improved” racial discrimination.]
After two years of stagnation, Harvard’s hand will be forced to release six years of admissions data in response to an anti-affirmative action lawsuit. The organization Students for Fair Admissions claims that affirmative action illegally discriminates against Asian-Americans by setting a percentage quota. [Catch that, “illegally discriminates” – as opposed to the legal discrimination against Asian Americans that the Supreme Court has blessed.] U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs has decided that more “comprehensive data” than the basic yearly demographics released by Harvard will be necessary for investigating these claims.
While we strongly disagree with the objective of this lawsuit [I.e., one supposes, stopping racial discrimination of all kinds, including that against non-Hispanic white Americans.], we believe that claims of discrimination against Asian-Americans do justify greater scrutiny of Harvard’s admissions process. Despite the unfortunate and unnecessary context in which it is taking place, the release of additional data is a step towards transparency and a better understanding of this highly selective — and, alas, sometimes equally mysterious — process.
Affirmative action is crucial for diversity on campus. [That is, for skin color diversity. There’s no assertion here that it’s necessary for other kinds of diversity.] African-Americans and Hispanic students live with many socioeconomic challenges that depress their access to education [So do many white students. So do many Asian American students. And many — most — African-American and Hispanic students do NOT face “socioeconomic challenges.” So why are we using skin color and national origin as a proxy for them? William Bowen and Derek Bok acknowledged in their classic apologia for racial preferences The Shape of the River that only 14 percent of the African Americans admitted to selective schools like Harvard come from low-SES backgrounds.], including the chronic underfunding of schools with students of color at every poverty level, or the psychological traumas that result from fearing or experiencing discrimination. An inability to accept the importance of race in a society that is far from race-blind will feed this cycle of deprivation.
[Note that the justification being offered here for racial preferences has nothing to do with the purported “educational benefits” of “diversity,” which is the only justification in this context that the Supreme Court has recognized and is, therefore, the only one that Harvard relies on. Rather, this is a broad claim of “societal” and “historical” discrimination that the Court has rejected.]
Nevertheless, the benefits of affirmative action do not justify fully ignoring claims about Asian-American admissions. [Those benefits, as discussed, are dubious both factually and legally. And note that there has been no discussion of the undeniable and heavy COSTS of such discrimination, against which the flimsy and disputed benefits must be weighed: 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 — an untenable legal regime as America becomes an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic society and as individual Americans are themselves more and more likely to be multiracial and multiethnic (starting with our president).] Crucially, affirmative action ought not to be framed as a zero-sum game where the admission of an African-American or Hispanic student constitutes the replacement of more qualified Asian-American student. [That may be “crucial” but it’s also obviously false. Admissions IS a zero-sum game, and less qualified people ARE being admitted over more qualified people. If preferences weren’t being given on the basis of race, there would be no issue, and certainly no legal issue.] This wrongheaded narrative ignores, among other considerations, the fact that legacy students and others are also granted preference in the admissions process. [This is what is called “changing the subject.” The fact that there exist preferences for nonracial reasons has nothing to do with whether racial preferences — which are uniquely ugly and divisive and are the explicit subject of legal prohibitions — are wise or fair.]
Rather than pitting minorities against each other, the greater scrutiny that Harvard is undergoing should shed light on the mechanics of admissions for the sake of transparency. [The fact is that some minorities ARE being discriminated against in favor of other minorities. This may be inconvenient for the Left’s narrative, but it’s a fact. It’s also an important fact, because it underscores one of the problems (already noted above) with using racial preferences in a country that is increasingly multiracial and multiethnic.] For instance, one study found that Asian-Americans require 140 more SAT points than white peers to gain entry to private colleges. While statistics like this one may very well be benign, it deserves more attention to counter claims of discrimination. [It’s unlikely that these statistics are “benign”; it’s also the fact that similar statistics can be deduced for discrimination against non-Hispanic whites vis-à-vis African Americans and Hispanics.]
This lawsuit is a chance for Harvard to reexamine its ambiguous criteria for “well-roundedness” and potentially refine the way it thinks about affirmative action. The current policy may fail to take into account significant variations within race — grouping dozens of countries and cultures into a generalized whole, or overlooking patterns of socioeconomic privilege among individuals. [True enough. But these “groupings” are now a favorite tool of the Left, not Right, in distributing privilege. Hey, here’s a wild idea: What if we ignored all groupings — and dispense with trying to correct this by coming up with better subgroupings — on the basis of skin color and what country someone’s ancestors came from, and instead judged each person as an individual?] As Harvard further scrutinizes its admissions policies, we hope that it will find nuances to reconsider. [There’s a time and place for nuance, and there’s a time and place for bright lines. Racial discrimination falls in the latter category: Just don’t do it.]
