Are We Winning or Losing?

Roger CleggUncategorized

Like most people, I have good days and bad days on my job.  Sometimes you feel like you’re getting ahead, and some days not so much. At the Center for Equal Opportunity, getting ahead means stopping the powers that be from using race-based decision-making — that is, from treating Americans differently on the basis of skin color and what country their ancestors they came from.  That means saying no to old-fashioned, politically incorrect discrimination, of course, but also to today’s more fashionable and politically correct discrimination:  affirmative action and the use of the “disparate impact” approach to civil-rights enforcement.  And …

Divided We Stand

Terry EastlandRacial Preferences

Writers said to inhabit the political center (usually means they are liberal] are reporting some interesting news, which is, as Eric Kaufmann says in the New York Times, that “the country is not divided by racial conflict but by conflict over racial ideology.” As he also says, “America isn’t racially divided, it’s divided by racial ideology.” Seems right to me.  “Race pertains to communities defined by ancestry and physical appearance,” says Kaufmann, while “racial ideology turns instead on race as a political idea.” Kaufmann says that white is “a description of a person’s race whereas feelings about whether whites are …

The College Admissions Scandal and Racial Preferences

Roger CleggEducation

The Left is trying hard to let no scandal go to waste by asserting that last week’s college-admission indictments prove that we need to continue racial preferences. White people cheat and bribe to get in, you see, so we have to this counterbalance to give nonwhites a boost. Of course this is silly. It requires, for starters, that we equate being white with being wealthy and corrupt. But the overwhelming majority of whites are neither, needless to say, and one suspects that most of the students who were cheated out of a slot here were themselves white. Conversely, it is …

About Grutter . . . 

Terry EastlandEducation

Some thoughts & observations The  Grutter case decided in 2003 is best (though infamously) known for holding that the attainment of a racially diverse student body is “a compelling government interest.” Otherwise, the admissions preferences under challenge in Grutter could not have been justified. These issues are back in the federal courts, and may well rise to the Supreme Court by 2020-21. There is yet more to observe about Grutter—in particular a sentence early in the Court’s opinion in the case by Justice O’Connor: “As part of its goal of ‘assembling a class that is both exceptionally academically qualified and …

Americans Overwhelmingly Reject Racial Preferences in Admissions

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

My colleague Terry Eastland wrote about this last week, but in case you missed it: Accordingly to a new Pew Research Center survey, 73 percent of Americans believe that race and ethnicity should play no role in university admissions. All racial and ethnic groups reject this discrimination: 78 percent of whites, 62 percent of blacks, 65 percent of Hispanics, and 59 percent of Asian Americans. This result is no outlier, by the way, and is line with other surveys over the years. *** And for the same reason — which can be summed up as E Pluribus Unum — reparations …

Our Constitution Is Colorblind

Terry EastlandRacial Preferences

Comes now notice of a new survey by the Pew Research Center. It finds that most Americans–73%–say that colleges and universities should not consider race or ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions; that 7% say that race should be a major factor in college admissions; and that 19% say it should be a minor factor. The survey does not explain what it means to “consider” race or ethnicity when deciding who gets in. But it would seem to mean using race in ways that favor the chances of getting in for “underrepresented minorities” when there are a limited number …

We Need More Black Drug Dealers, Part II

Roger CleggCulture & Society

The Huffington Post last week had an article headlined, “Ocasio-Cortez Slams the ‘Racial Injustice’ of the Cannabis Business As White Men Profit,” reporting that the “New York congresswoman suggests ‘affirmative-action licensing’ to mitigate the ‘racial wealth gap’ in areas that paid the price of the war on drugs.”  She’s offended by the fact that too many white men are making money on legalized pot, and suggests that maybe licenses should be distributed so as to favor nonwhites, to make up for the fact that so many of them were arrested in the past for dealing drugs illegally. I’m not happy …

Jo Ro Co & Ho

Terry EastlandUncategorized

Stopping Discrimination Assuming that the Roberts Court remains conservative for at least the next two or three years, Roberts should have chances to vote to overrule several liberal precedents, arguably the most important being Grutter v. Bollinger, the racial admissions preferences case from ages ago (2003 to be exact). Currently there are two race cases in early stages of litigation either of which might make it to the Supreme Court by 2021. One is a challenge to preferences underway at Harvard and the other a challenge to the racial admissions at the University of North Carolina. The Court may be …

Pocahontas or Pioneer?

Roger CleggEducation

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 …

How Compelling is a Compelling Government Interest?

Terry EastlandUncategorized

With major lawsuits on affirmative action pending, it might be useful to review some essential points. The place to start, of course, is with the Constitution, which, together with federal law, forbids government discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity. Government runs afoul of the law when it “classifies” or distinguishes among people in terms of their race and takes action against them. That happened in World War II. During “the crisis of war and of threatened invasion,” the federal government prohibited all people of Japanese descent from West Coast military zones. The government defended against challenges to its …