Two Caveats re Race and the Coronavirus
The data are starting to show that the coronavirus is having a disproportionate impact on African Americans. I raise two caveats.
First, beware of using race as a proxy for underlying conditions (various health issues and, a step removed, poverty and geography) that are the real reason for the disparities.
Second, beware of blaming discrimination as the sole or even main cause of these underlying conditions, when there are likely many other causes, often cultural and behavioral.
A Study of Little Interest
A recent study says it has found that, in states that have banned racial preferences in public university admissions, the number of “underrepresented minorities” admitted and enrolled has declined. An excerpt from my response to an article on this:
(1) it’s unremarkable that, when you stop giving an admissions preference to a group, the number admitted from that group declines; (2) the study appears to ignore the mismatch objection to admission preferences, since it does not look at graduation rates, grades, and the like for the students admitted — thus, for example, the number of black students graduating at these schools may have gone done much less than the percentage admitted has gone down; (3) the study likewise does not consider that the students not admitted to a flagship school may go to another school, let alone that they may perform better there; (4) the disparity measured might simply reflect to some degree the fact that there is an increase in the percentage of non-college-bound students in a particular state; and (5) the word “underrepresented” does not appear in the title of the article, but should, since apparently the study found no decline, and perhaps would have found an increase, in the number of, for example, Asian American students admitted at the studied schools.
Finally, I’ll note that the many costs of allowing racial discrimination in admissions by public universities outweigh the politically correct desire to have more students of a particular melanin content or ethnic ancestry at them: https://pacificlegal.org/roger-clegg-on-why-racial-preferences-remain-wrongheaded/
CEO Loses a Dear Friend
Abigail Thernstrom passed away late last week. She was a friend and a longtime board member of the Center for Equal Opportunity — and an invaluable expert on a wide variety of racial and civil-rights issues.
Although, to understate the matter, Abby did not begin her life, education, and career in circles friendly to conservatism, that’s where her intellectual honesty and her courage led her, and she became a star in the conservative firmament.
She and her husband Stephan were frequent coauthors, and in 2007 shared the prestigious Bradley Foundation Prize for their outstanding intellectual achievement. Their books together included America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible and No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. On her own, she wrote Whose Votes Count?: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights and Voting Rights— and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections. Abby and Stephan also co-edited yet another book, Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America. Their and her books were award-winning; their and her shorter pieces, in newspapers and journals of all sorts, are innumerable.
In addition to being on CEO’s board and the board of the Institute for Justice, Abby’s career included service as vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under President George W. Bush and as a member of the Massachusetts board of education, as well as being an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Quite a career and quite a lady, whose warmth, energy, humor, intelligence, and willingness to be out of step will be greatly missed.
