Make Sure Your Pollution Is Racially Fair!

Roger CleggUncategorized

Supporters of the Center for Equal Opportunity know that I don’t like the “disparate impact” approach to civil-rights enforcement.  And while it’s a bad idea when used to challenge firefighter exams, criminal background checks, English proficiency, school discipline policies, policing, mortgage lending, and voter ID laws — to give just a few examples — I’ve always had a special place in my heart for its use by bureaucrats to challenge pollution that fails to strike the right racial balance. But, “[i]n recognition of Earth Day and Arbor Day,” the Obama administration recently highlighted those efforts in its own publication. Now, I’m …

The Court Should Grant Review (Again) in the Fisher Case

Roger CleggEducation

Earlier this year, the lawyers for Abigail Fisher asked the Supreme Court to grant review — again — of her lawsuit challenging the University of Texas’s use of racial and ethnic preferences in its admissions. The Court will consider whether to grant Fisher’s request at its conference on Thursday this week (May 21 — though I caution that sometimes the Court doesn’t decide immediately on what it will do).  The Center for Equal Opportunity has joined and helped write a brief filed by Pacific Legal Foundation that highlights CEO’s work in this area and that urges the Court to grant …

“Microaggression” and Macro Silliness

Roger CleggUncategorized

A new report is out, purporting to document racial stereotyping and “microaggression” at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  The latter is another addition to the jargon of political correctness, and is defined as slights or snubs, often unintentional, but which communicate derogatory or negative messages.  From the first news story I saw on this study: “‘They [i.e., students] shared very detailed personal stories of experiencing racism on campus,’ [report coauthor Stacy] Harwood said. For example, some students said they heard classmates comment that racial minorities were less qualified and only admitted because of affirmative action. Others said their advisers encouraged them …

Just hire the best qualified!

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

This week I thought I’d share with you an exchange of emails that is typical of one part of the day-to-day work that the Center for Equal Opportunity does.  This exchange started when one of our routine news.google.com searches — conducted several times a day, every day — hit an article about a school district’s “equity plan.”  Since the plan seemed clearly to embrace hiring with an eye on race, ethnicity, and sex, this in turn prompted us to send one of our frequent emails to a local government official (here, the school superintendent), pointing out that there are laws …

Disparity Nonsense

Roger CleggUncategorized

The New York Times had a long editorial-screed over the weekend, titled “Forcing Black Men Out of Society.”  It’s a predictable lament:  The racist war on drugs has unfairly imprisoned large numbers of black men, and this has made it harder for them to get jobs when they get out, and it has made it impossible for black women to marry and so they instead have children out of wedlock.  What’s more, the fact that so many blacks go to prison reinforces racist stereotypes, so that African Americans can’t get jobs even when they don’t have a criminal record, and …

“Disparate Impact” at Harvard Law School

Roger CleggDisparate Impact

Last week I spoke at Harvard Law School against the use of a “disparate impact” approach in civil-rights law.  It went very well, and I thought in this week’s email I would give you an account of what I said. Under a disparate-impact claim of discrimination, discriminatory motive is irrelevant: It need not be alleged nor proved, and it doesn’t even matter if the defendant proves that there was no discriminatory motive. If a policy or procedure results in a disproportion of some sort — not only on the basis of race, color, or national origin, but also religion, sex, …

Jeb Bush, the Washington Post, and Affirmative Action

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

There was a front-page story in the Washington Post last week, headlined “Black enrollment dwindles at major Florida colleges.”  The article takes Jeb Bush to task for his claim that, as governor, he was able to abolish racial preferences in public university admissions in that state and still have a system “where there were more African American and Hispanic kinds attending” than before the preferences were ended.  Bush replaced the racial preferences with a guarantee that the top 20 percent of each graduating high-school class could go to a state university, and added other measures like more college preparatory courses …

Two Steps Forward, One Back

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

Two good items of note this week so far, and one bad.  National Review Online (for which I am a contributing editor) has an excellent article on smashing the bamboo curtain — that is, ending anti-Asian American discrimination in university admissions — here.  It includes an amusing discussion of how “Vijay Chokal-Ingam, an Indian American who happens to be the brother of Fox comedy star Mindy Kaling, revealed that he won acceptance to medical school by claiming to be black. Frustrated at being rejected by medical schools in part because of mediocre test scores and a 3.1 grade point average, …

Felons and the Vote

Roger CleggVoting Rights

Last week, a perennial bill was reintroduced in Congress, which would prohibit the states from barring felons from voting once they were no longer in prison.  That is, it would require states to let felons vote. I’ve testified against this bill before Congress a couple of times in the past, and recently co-authored a paper on the subject that you can read here.  So I thought I would take the occasion of the bill’s reintroduction last week to note all that, and also to share with you here a shorter piece I did on this topic that appeared last month …

Destroying Records to Hide Race Discrimination

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

Stanford and Yale are destroying student records that would likely open them to charges of illegal racial discrimination.  See this news story in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  This ought to be a very big deal. And note this:  “Students for Fair Admissions, an advocacy group that has filed lawsuits challenging the race-conscious admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on Thursday sent Yale and several other Ivy League institutions letters warning that they put themselves at legal risk if they destroy such records.” *          *          * Maryland’s medical marijuana commission will be …