On May 17, we will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. And that is certainly something worth celebrating. The only fly in the ointment is that this event will also prompt many solemn pronouncements that, alas, our schools are just as segregated as ever and/or that they are resegregating. We will be told that therefore the promise of Brown remains unfulfilled, and that this is the reason for continuing racial disparities in education. But this is not true. Here’s the key statistic that must always be borne in mind: The number of segregated …
Top Ten Rules for Americans
Here’s CEO’s 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 in a National Review Online column a decade ago, and it is fleshed out in Congressional testimony: 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 …
Congress Can Help End Racial Discrimination
The federal government wittingly and unwittingly endorses a great deal of racial discrimination in America. A 2011 report by the Congressional Research Service catalogued literally hundreds of government-wide and agency-specific set-aside and preference programs and grants throughout the entire executive branch that amount to some form of racial discrimination. If Congress wants to do something about it, and drastically reduce the amount of discrimination that goes on, it should look carefully at each of four bills that the Center for Equal Opportunity — working with the Heritage Foundation — recently drafted as model legislation. (The bills are described in detail …
Reparations and Other Bad Ideas
Ta-Nehisi Coates has gotten some attention with his essay “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic, but I’m not impressed. There’s no dispute that America has a long sad history of racial discrimination and that it and its effects are still with us, despite inspiring progress, and there’s also no shortage of talk and scholarship (serious and otherwise) on this topic. The other part of Mr. Coates’s thesis is, as the title of the essay says, some sort of “reparations,” but he is openly vague about what that would look like, though he does endorse Rep. John Conyers’s proposed bill …
There Is No “Resegregation”
Last Saturday was the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, and that prompted many on the Left to claim that any celebration should be tempered by a recognition that “segregation” and/or “resegregation” continues. Below is an op-ed I wrote for USA Today that explains why these claims are specious. Center for Equal Opportunity board member Abigail Thernstrom and her husband Stephan likewise set the record straight in their excellent Wall Street Journal op-ed here. On May 17, we will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. And that is …
The Multi-Front War against Racial Admission Preferences
Our friends at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy recently asked me to write for them on the latest developments in the fight to end racial and ethnic preferences in university admissions. Here’s what I said: Racial preferences have never been popular among most Americans, and in fact they are becoming less and less popular. One reason is the simple passage of time. Many people felt viscerally that some sort of affirmative action made sense 50 or 60 years ago, when Jim Crow had been the law until quite recently and the beneficiaries of preferences would be individuals …
Bean-Counting and Bias
An AP story this week laments: “U.S. teachers are nowhere near as diverse as their students,” and says liberal groups “want more to be done to help teachers mirror more accurately the students in their classrooms.” Those groups say that minority students do better if they have a teacher “who looks just like them” and — rather contradictorily — that white students benefit by “engaging with people who think, talk, and act differently than them” (uh, stereotype much?). But, the article concludes, it “will take political will” and better “programs and policies” designed “to increase the number of minority teachers.” But …
Victory in the Supreme Court!
Last week the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Michigan ballot initiative that banned, among other kinds of affirmative action, racial and ethnic preferences in admissions to public universities. This is a case that the Center for Equal Opportunity has been involved with for a long time. We had joined amicus briefs with the court of appeals and the en banc court of appeals, and then also joined two briefs in the Supreme Court: one urging the Court to take the case and, when the Court did so, another urging it to rule the way it did. What’s more, …
Center for Equal Opportunity Applauds SCOTUS’s Affirmative Action Decision
Calls on Federal, State, and Local Governments to Enact Similar Bans on Preferences 4/22/14- (Falls Church, VA) The Supreme Court today upheld the right of states and local governments to ban preferential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex. Related posts: TESTIMONY OF ROGER CLEGG, PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTER FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITY BEFORE THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS REGARDING THE PROPOSED EMPLOYMENT NON-DISCRIMINATION ACT We Need More Bills Like This BAMN! The Center for Equal Opportunity Zaps Racial Preferences Update on the Struggle against Universities’ Affirmative Discrimination
Some GOOD Things That Congress Could Do
The federal government wittingly and unwittingly endorses a great deal of racial discrimination in America. A 2011 report by the Congressional Research Service catalogued literally hundreds of government-wide and agency-specific set-aside and preference programs and grants throughout the entire executive branch that amount to some form of racial discrimination. If Congress wants to do something about it, and drastically reduce the amount of discrimination that goes on, it should look carefully at each of four bills that the Center for Equal Opportunity and the Heritage Foundation recently drafted as model legislation. (The bills are described in detail here, and this …