From The New York Times:
Sotomayor’s Focus on Race Issues May Be Hurdle
Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesBy DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: May 29, 2009WASHINGTON — The selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court has opened a new battle in the fight over affirmative action and other race-conscious remedies for patterns of inequality, with each side invoking the election of the first black president in support of its cause.
Judge Sotomayor, whose parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico, has championed the importance of considering race and ethnicity in admissions, hiring and even judicial selection at almost every stage of her career — as a student activist at Princeton and at Yale Law School, as a board member of left-leaning Hispanic advocacy groups and as a federal judge arguing for diversity on the bench.
Now conservatives say her strong identification with such race-based approaches to the law is perhaps the strongest argument against her confirmation, contending that her views put her outside an evolving consensus that such race-conscious public policy is growing obsolete.
“The American ideal is that justice should be colorblind,” said Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “As we see people like Barack Obama achieve the highest office in the land and Judge Sotomayor’s own nomination to the highest court, I think it is harder and harder to see the justifications for race-conscious decisions across the board.”
Mr. Cornyn added, “This is a hot-button issue and one that needs to be confronted head on.”
That this story is from The New York Times, a normally liberally-biased source, is telling: even the Times does not whitewash — pun intended — the fact that Judge Sotomayor has been a strong advocate of including race as part of the points on which decisions are taken. If I am hiring someone, and between two apparently equally qualified candidates, I select the white candidate over the black candidate simply because he is white, everyone is going to say that I was using racism in my selection. Yet Judge Sotomayor would have us, in choosing between two apparently equally qualified candidates, choose the black or Hispanic candidate, using race or ethnicity as a decision point; how is that not racism?
While there’s some conservative resistance to this nomination, a Republican filibuster seems improbable, and, absent a filibuster, Judge Sotomayor’s nomination cannot be defeated unless there are a substantial number of Democrats who don’t like racial preferences; that seems unlikely.
Well, let me correct that to a substantial number of Democratic senators, which is very different from Democrats in general. When California had a ballot initiative ending state discrimination based on race, Proposition 209 in 1996, it carried by a 54-46% majority. In the November 2006 elections, in which Democrats won sweeping victories, the voters passed the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which outlaws discrimination on the basis of race by Michigan state government, particularly universities, by a 58-42% margin.
I very seriously doubt that Judge Sotomayor will be denied confirmation, and thus we must accept the fact that her race-conscious decision-taking will become part of our jurisprudence. And that brings me to a question I wish one of our Republican senators would ask of the judge during her confirmation hearings. In the case of Grutter v Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), the University of Michigan Law School Affirmative Action case, in her majority opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote:
We are mindful, however, that “[a] core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to do away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race.” Palmore v. Sidoti, 466 U.S. 429, 432 (1984). Accordingly, race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time. This requirement reflects that racial classifications, however compelling their goals, are potentially so dangerous that they may be employed no more broadly than the interest demands. Enshrining a permanent justification for racial preferences would offend this fundamental equal protection principle. We see no reason to exempt race-conscious admissions programs from the requirement that all governmental use of race must have a logical end point. The Law School, too, concedes that all “race-conscious programs must have reasonable durational limits.” Brief for Respondents Bollinger et al. 32.
In the context of higher education, the durational requirement can be met by sunset provisions in race-conscious admissions policies and periodic reviews to determine whether racial preferences are still necessary to achieve student body diversity. Universities in California, Florida, and Washington State, where racial preferences in admissions are prohibited by state law, are currently engaged in experimenting with a wide variety of alternative approaches. Universities in other States can and should draw on the most promising aspects of these race-neutral alternatives as they develop. Cf. United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 581 (1995) (Kennedy, J., concurring) (“[T]he States may perform their role as laboratories for experimentation to devise various solutions where the best solution is far from clear”).
The requirement that all race-conscious admissions programs have a termination point “assure[s] all citizens that the deviation from the norm of equal treatment of all racial and ethnic groups is a temporary matter, a measure taken in the service of the goal of equality itself.” Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U.S., at 510 (plurality opinion); see also Nathanson & Bartnik, The Constitutionality of Preferential Treatment for Minority Applicants to Professional Schools, 58 Chicago Bar Rec. 282, 293 (May—June 1977) (“It would be a sad day indeed, were America to become a quota-ridden society, with each identifiable minority assigned proportional representation in every desirable walk of life. But that is not the rationale for programs of preferential treatment; the acid test of their justification will be their efficacy in eliminating the need for any racial or ethnic preferences at all”).
We take the Law School at its word that it would “like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula” and will terminate its race-conscious admissions program as soon as practicable. See Brief for Respondents Bollinger et al. 34; Bakke, supra, at 317—318 (opinion of Powell, J.) (presuming good faith of university officials in the absence of a showing to the contrary). It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 43. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
Emphasis mine. Grutter was handed down on 23 June 2003. That means that six of Justice O’Connor’s twenty-five years have elapsed. What I would like to ask Judge Sotomayor, who at 52 years of age could well still be on the court in 2028, does she view the twenty-five year limit “expected” by the five Justices in the majority as a date certain, a time beyond which racial preferences would no longer be allowed? If our noble progressives are to tell us that we need to continue with Affirmative Action, because women and minorities would not do as well as white men without it, due to the residual effects of cultural discrimination, we need to know if there is a point at which they will no longer find such necessary.
Race-conscious preferences were first allowed by the Supreme Court in the infamous case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978). They existed before that date in 1978, but if we take Justice O’Connor’s 2028 “end date” for state sponsored racial discrimination race-based preferences to remedy past discrimination, we would be looking at an even fifty years, or two whole generations, of race-based preferences.
As a Supreme Court Justice, would Sonia Sotomayor consider that as having been enough time? Or is this a case where we are not really seeking equal opportunity, but equality of outcomes?
Those U. of Michigan cases are legally fascinating… Gratz v. Bollinger, of course, made it illegal to use race as part of a rigorous formula. The reasons why the Law School’s admission policy was okay while the University’s policy isn’t still isn’t quite clear to me.
Anyway, to address your post itself…
Yet Judge Sotomayor would have us, in choosing between two apparently equally qualified candidates, choose the black or Hispanic candidate, using race or ethnicity as a decision point; how is that not racism?
The simple answer is that it is racism. However, not all racism is created equal, and this is of a completely different sort. In the case of “affirmative action” (invented by the flaming liberal Richard Nixon), the “racism” serves as sort of a corrective, a nod to the fact that, in general, it’s harder to be black in this country than it is to be white, and so let’s give the black guy a break for once. In the case of the “racism” we usually think of when we use the term, one candidate is favored over another because of the boss’ distaste for the other candidate’s race. The latter involves race-based animosity, the other is compensation for the continued existence of said animosity.
My two cents: I’d like to see class status considered in affirmative action, since you’ll nowadays occasionally run into a case where a poor white person is matched against a privileged black person… in that case, you’d have to do some serious thinking as to who was place on the harder path.
In the case involving the firefighter promotion exam, the white firefighter who scored high in spite of his reading handicap did not get a fair deal. This was racial bias. The judge is not stupid but neither is she fair.
Filibuster. Even if the Republicans lose on this one, they can show that they are the party of fairness and not of arbitrary quotas.
In the immortal words of Redd Foxx – “Godzilla!”
Art: “Even if the Republicans lose on this one, they can show that they are the party of fairness and not of arbitrary quotas.”
Arbitrary quotas are an attempt at fairness to make up for some sins in our past, so your statement is contradictory.
You can’t have it both ways, Art, or can you? An “activist” judge takes “fairness” into account in reaching a decision, whereas a “strict constructionist” judge, the type of a judge that you Conservatives say you want, rules on the basis of the law. In this case, it can be argued that Sotomayor ruled on legal grounds. Therefore, she gets criticized by you Republicans no matter what she does, it seems to me. Thus, Art, you are behaving as usual, like a partisan ideologue re Sotomayor. It’s time for you to admit that you can have it both ways, in which we rely on good judgment, based on expertise on the law and experience, in which we judge our judges on that basis, and admit it! It all comes down to ideology! Elections count!!
Which, by the way, I actually agree with you, because I do believe that the idea of fairness is appropriate to include in arriving at a judgment on certain issues, this being one. The context in which our forefathers operated has changed over 200 years, therefore the Constitution has to be interpreted in today’s context, where fairness plays a role because of our history of discrimination against women and blacks.
I have never bought into the “strict constructionist” line which seems to actually be an activist approach on, for example, the Second Amendment, which applied to the militias of old, not to these days of assault rifles.
The setting of arbitrary quotas has been an attempt to take fairness into account, in recognition of a 200 plus year’s history of discrimination against our women and our black brothers and sisters. Admittedly, quotas should be viewed as only temporary measures, which are probably at the time when they need to be cut back, eventually eliminated.
Ideologues pick and choose their fairness issues, which is to be expected and debated, even at the SCOTUS level. To not agree is to be in denial of reality. Thus, none of us are really strict constructionists — we are all activists in support of our ideological agendas. Again, elections count!
Jeff wrote:
I congratulate you, Jeff: you are the first person I have ever read who has said that there are both good racisms and bad racisms.
This strikes me as a “hair of the dog” prescription for the hangover.
How would you define “class status?” This seems to me to be just another can or worms that ought never to be opened.
But, in a way, what you have written almost answers the question: are we seeking equal opportunity or equal outcomes? If you base on class status, you are, in effect, basing the decision point on how successful the applicant — or his parents — were previously in life.
THis is a theme which I think deserves further development.
Art wrote:
True enough, but that’s the dark side of Affirmative Action: if you throw in considerations outside of measured qualifications, you have always made the process unfair to someone.
Perry continued the argument with:
In a way, this defines fairness as a generational thing. Slavery was certainly unfair, but there are no former American slaves alive today; if there is anyone alive today who was the child of a former American slave, he would have to be very elderly.
The Jim Crow laws have been dead and gone for two generations.
This leaves the question: is it somehow fair for the grandchildren to have to pay for the sins of the grandparents? The people who profited from legal segregation are now all elderly; the man who, at age 22, got the coveted job in 1965, due to segregation, is now 66 years old; you can’t go back and undo his life.
In what you have defined as “an attempt to take fairness into account,” are we not being unfair to those who did nothing wrong? The young applicants of today were not the ones who oppressed blacks fifty and seventy and 200 years ago. To favor one group, whether based on skin color or social class, as Jeff suggested would be a better idea, or anything extraneous to the position, is going to be unfair, automatically, to the group which is discriminated against. To whom will we be fair today?
Justice O’Connor suggested — not mandated — a rather arbitrary end point for such preferences, in 2028. What happens if, in 2028, there are still demonstrable differences between the achievement rates of white men and black men, as measured by income?
Perry wrote:
For this to be true, you’d have to show where the Framers intended that the state could restrict firearm ownership solely to those who belonged to the militia. And even if you could do that, there is the problem that, if such was what was meant, that isn’t what the Framers finally wrote into the Constitution. It does not say that “the right of the militia members to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
The Framers clearly did not anticipate the invention of fully automatic machine guns. If you believe that ownership of such should be curtailed, then you should push for another constitutional amendment, repealing the second. That would be the honest way to do things; to pretend that the Second somehow doesn’t apply to anyone not in the militia, and that it somehow frees us only to own flintlocks, is disingenuous.
Always refreshing and exciting to find our right-leaning friends suddenly interesting in racial justice! Why, it seems like only yesterday that any concern at all with racial fairness was being attacked in these very pages as “playing the race card” – but here we are and it’s a new day, and racism is suddenly a matter of great concern! awesome! can I expect an upcoming post about the racist application of the death penalty? I’m assuming CSPT will be most troubled by that, now that it’s a site with a strong stance against racism at the level of government.
Point taken, Dana.
But does the remedy to assault rifles require a Constitutional Amendment? I would think that having a law banning them would be the proper first step. Eventually then we would probably have the SCOTUS making a ruling on the law.
I also agree with Jeff’s point, and said as much in my previous post. But let me respond to your argument, Dana:
“Perry continued the argument with:
Arbitrary quotas are an attempt at fairness to make up for some sins in our past, so your statement is contradictory.
In a way, this defines fairness as a generational thing. Slavery was certainly unfair, but there are no former American slaves alive today; if there is anyone alive today who was the child of a former American slave, he would have to be very elderly.” (et seq)
You are treating affirmative action and the like as punishment of perpetrators rather than as compensation, compensation for the heritage of slavery which is still present in America and compensation for continued discrimination of both blacks and women, all with the goal of moving closer to equal opportunity for all(not equal outcome).
Now I have to go out to “lawn the mow”.
There is no such thing as reverse racism. Racism is racism. Reverse the placing of “latina woman” and “white male” in Ms. Sotomayor’s infamous remarks and you would have a person who would be professionally ruined. Leftists who peddle this redisributive nonsense should review Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have A Dream Speech.” The goal of the Civil Rights movement was not to replace one form of injustice with another.
edgycater.blogspot.com
Perry wrote:
We already have a law banni9ng assault weapons, but, yes, I do think it should require a constitutional amendment. The second amendment says that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Regardless of whether you believe that some weapons are so horrible or so deadly that they simply should not be allowed, the text of the second amendment does not allow such. The problem is that we have ducked and evaded the clear words of the Constitution, in more than just second amendment issues, because we seem to think it the right thing to do. We have all sorts of restrictions on speech, we limit the free exercise of religion, and we ignore the fourteenth amendment’s statement that we shall not deny to anyone the equal protection of the laws, all in the interests of a good, orderly society and doing what we think is right.
To me, that’s wholly wrong. If Affirmative Action is just such a right thing to do, then we ought to amend the fourteenth amendment, which by any fair reading bans it. If we want to criminalize “hate speech,” then we ought to amend the first amendment, which states that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.
Perry wrote:
Compensation to one person or group requires that someone else pay that compensation. The way that Affirmative Action is structured, it is not the people who discriminated against women or blacks who are paying the compensation, but their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
The Fourteenth Amendment says, in part, that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Regardless of whether you believe the purposes of Affirmative Action to be good, such a program, when run by or pushed by the state, does deny to some people the equal protection of the laws.
Perry wrote:
That expression is an old Picoism. Back in 1991 or 1992, when she’d have been three or four years old, the older Miss Pico saw her favorite daddy heading out the back door at Stately Pico Manor and asked, “Daddy, are you going out to lawn the mow?” This immediately stuck, and lawn the mow has been a Picoism ever since.
The older Miss Pico, earlier this year, far right, front standing row. She is a bit bigger than the wide-eyed innocent four year old of 1992!
The White Supremicists are still strong, and they still have power.
Actually, a Republican Senator, even not to long ago, it was who voted against the amendment, that would be an apology for the slavery our country was responsible for in its time. I’ll have to get back to you on the name of that Senator.
The name I was looking for was Trent Lott. But, one can’t offend their base. That is why we need run off voting, publicly supported.
Your daughter is a doll, Dana.
Mr Tallis wrote:
At CSPT, we are divided in opinion on capital punishment. I oppose it in all cases, but others here do not.
However, in the United States, a sentence of death must be passed by the jury, and it must be unanimous; one single dissenter, and capital punishment cannot be imposed. For juries to impose death, the crime must have been pretty horrible, and the juries, different in every instance, are not imposing the penalty in general, but in individual instances.
Most of the states in which capital punishment is imposed with any frequency have substantial minority populations. With a requirement for jury unanimity to impose the death penalty, and significant barriers to seating a jury — especially in a capital case — which is all white, it’s difficult to claim that racism led to the imposition of the death sentence. It might be easier to claim that racism in favor of whites led to greater mercy from juries, but I don’t know if the subject has even been researched from that angle.
I wonder if you are aware that currently there are more girls than boys with great grades and test scores applying to colleges. Many of the elite colleges have managed to maintain an equal number of males and females in their schools. But the less elite schools have significantly more females than males. Most of the schools have lower admission standards for males than females. Guys get in with lower grades and test scores.
If I really believed in blind admissions, I would be against the effort to bring in the less qualified males. But, as the mom of a girl, I actually support giving the guys the extra boost. I am thinking that down the road, there will be more high quality husbands available. Also, I am thinking that the we need the guys to be productive workers and many of the females will hopefully stay home with their children.
So, if I am willing to cut the guys slack that way, maybe I am being unrealistic about the race thing. Maybe it really is better to have more minority firefighters even if it seems unfair to the whites. I don’t know.
I think Perry kind of danced around this point, but I’ll make it anyway – affirmative action is unfairness that serves as a corrective for built-in unfairness from the other side. This is why I like the Bollinger rulings. They keep the spirit of affirmative action alive, which I’ll describe as “give a break to a guy who has had a tough time getting one,” while getting rid of a rigid system of racial consideration that would perpetrate more unfairness than we’re willing to put up with.
(I’ll also add that I wonder what this does to the other forms of affirmative action, such as legacy admissions, in which colleges frequently engage. The college admissions process is complex and relies on a ton of different factors, and to say race shouldn’t be a factor while everything else about you, from where your parents attended school to whether or not you play the tuba, should be a factor borders on the absurd. Keep in mind that according to some studies, legacy admissions are 15% of Ivy League students and 25% of Notre Dame students, though I don’t believe these studies differentiated between clearly qualified legacies and “affirmative-action” legacies…)
Now. You asked a question with your post title. I believe you’ve posed a false choice here. (Two in one day – not bad, Pico!) Equality of opportunity should lead to equality of outcomes – the two are connected, not opposed, and affirmative action seeks to equalize outcomes by tilting the opportunity scale a little more towards equality.
What thinking carefully about your question reveals, however, is that affirmative action, which necessarily functions closer to the end of the opportunity/outcome process, is merely a Band-Aid solution to a deeper problem. There are a lot of other, more salient factors that keep young black kids out of college, from a poorly functioning education system to a lack of role models to a lack of college recruitment efforts in poor minority areas. It’d be fascinating to look at Texas A&M’s demographics over the past few years – they’ve abolished both race-based and legacy affirmative action and stepped up recruitment in inner cities. Would this have more of an effect on equality of outcome than would a simple racial preference system?
One indication of ignorance of the RKBA is an expression of concern over so-called ‘assault weapons’. This typically comes from a person who cannot define the term.
We saw an episode of this recently in a spate of editorials and op-ed pieces claiming that Mexican drug thugs were buying ‘assault weapons’ in the USA and smuggling them back to Mexico. This ignores reality. Firearms that look like military firearms and can legally be purchased run around $1000 each in the USA. A firearm capable of fully automatic operation can be legally obtained for a price many times that amount. There are also legal hoops to be jumped. The third world is awash with fully-automatic AK-47s for a few dollars. Why pay around $1000 for semi-automatic firearm to be used in criminal activity when the real thing can be bought for $25? Are drug dealers that stupid?
When I discussed this with the editor of a local paper, he admitted his ignorance of the issue and published my op-ed rebuttal. There was no rebuttal forthcoming to my response.
Jeff wrote:
Kind of runs afoul of equal protection of the laws, doesn’t it? If individuals or private companies, including colleges, are unfair, well, that’s their right. But I don’t see how the government can do that.
This assumes that we really are all created equal. That might be true under the law, but it isn’t necessarily the case in reality. The biggest problem in the black community today is that a huge percentage of black boys drop out of school. That automatically limits their futures individually, and has the aggregate effect of depressing income among blacks in general. This is not something that AA can, or even should, address.
Actually, the ownership of fully automatic weapons IS curtailed – you can still own one, but you need a Federal permit, and have to pay a $200 license fee to the gov’t.
No, the “assault weapons” debate is really over semi-automatic civilian versions of military weapons like the M-16 and AK-47. The press and the anti-gunners want people to believe that the NRA is pushing for people’s unrestricted right to own machine guns, when that simply isn’t the case.
(That said, I’ve always wanted a full auto M-16 just like Al Pacino had in Scarface. “Say Hello to my leetle friend!”)
Dana: This is not something that AA can, or even should, address.
I think we’re agreeing on this point. AA can only go so far – to really fix the problem of inequality of both opportunity and outcome, we need to address the underlying problem. Why are so many young black men dropping out of school? Is the school system doing enough to keep them in school? Are there other factors that push them out of school and if so, how would they best be addressed? Those are the questions that really need answering, and I fear that, to some extent, affirmative action keeps us from having to look at those questions.
Kind of runs afoul of equal protection of the laws, doesn’t it? If individuals or private companies, including colleges, are unfair, well, that’s their right. But I don’t see how the government can do that.
Affirmative action, as I understand it, kinda gets around the 14th (and, for private businesses engaged in interstate commerce, the Civil Rights Act of 1964) by saying that there must be a decision between two equally qualified candidates for race to kick in as a factor. At that point, it’s a coin toss anyway, and AA just weights the coin. It requires a reading of equal protection that allows a little give in cases where the damage done is minimal, kind of like the popular reading of the Establishment Clause that allows us to keep “In God We Trust” on our money.
Jeff and I are closer in agreement than one might think:
The main reason that young black males are dropping out of school is because of the inner-city black cultural notion that doing well in school is somehow “acting white.” If there’s anything good that can come out of the Obama presidency, I think it might be some impact on that hideous, internally-harmful notion; President Obama — and his wife — were young black people who didn’t drop out of school, who did everything they could to get ahead, and somehow, some way, they’re still black. Just changing that one, single dynamic, if it happened, would be the greatest contribution the President could ever make to our society.
There is more, much more, that is internally harmful in today’s black urban subculture: the acceptance of drug use, the “stop snitchin’” mentality which simply enables the internal predators, and the lack of male responsibility for rearing their own children. We well-intentioned white people can identify the problems easily enough, but we can’t fix them: fixing the cultural problems will have to come from within the black community itself.
I’ll admit that I hadn’t thought of the idea that AA might actually be keeping us from looking at the problems, that AA is touted as the solution so people keep asking for more of it. But what good are preferential considerations for collegiate admissions to people who haven’t finished high school?
One figure, which I have seen but can’t find again, that came out when Grutter and Gratz were before the Supreme Court, was that about 85% of colleges don’t have selective admissions, that anyone who meets the basic requirements is admitted. The notion that if someone doesn’t get into the University of Michigan, he won’t be able to go to college, is ridiculous; it simply means he won’t be able to go to the University of Michigan. But there are colleges all over the place, both public and private, in which acceptance is guaranteed if you have a high school diploma and have taken the SAT or ACT. If someone can’t make the cut at the University of Michigan without special preferences, maybe he shouldn’t go to Michigan, but start in a college where he actually has a better chance to succeed. We could do perfectly well without the contentious AA admissions if we’d just admit to ourselves that there are other colleges where people can do just fine.
Dana: The main reason that young black males are dropping out of school is because of the inner-city black cultural notion that doing well in school is somehow “acting white.”
It’s tempting to place the blame solely on cultural factors, but to me it strains credulity to say that inner-city culture is the main factor in keeping black kids out of college. I’ve read much of Jonathan Kozol’s “Shame of the Nation,” which details just how screwed up our education system is, and how it doesn’t serve the inner cities well at all. Kozol’s a lefty even by my standards, but the experiences and interviews he relates are worth the price of the book even if you don’t buy his conclusions. We can quibble over the means (I like higher teacher salaries, more teacher accountability/elimination of tenure, more charter/magnet schools, less rigid curricula that allow teachers to adapt lessons on the fly, and some sort of school choice/voucher program), but the fact is that fixing the public education system will go a long way toward equalizing opportunity. And it might kick-start the elimination of the culture of poverty you mention, as well…
Jeff, I keep hearing the argument that we need higher salaries to attract better people into teaching, and my response is always the same: if we need better people in teaching, then paying higher salaries to the people already in teaching is silly. They haven’t earned them, and higher salaries will only keep the people currently in the profession teaching longer.
Then again, my view is that the problems with today’s public schools don’t stem from poor teachers, but poor students. When I was in public school, kids would never get away with the crap that they do today; they’d have been hauled off to the principal’s office to get their asses busted, and when they got home, they’d get it again — probably worse — from their fathers.
I’ve heard too many of the horror stories from teachers: unruly students, spending too much time trying to manage the classroom rather than teaching, the mainstreaming of special education students in some classes, which slows down progress for everybody else, the whole deal.
More, we expect too much from our schools. Half a century ago, we expected schools to teach the basics, and put a communitarian touch on socialization. Now we have schools assuming what ought to be parental responsibilities, in sex education, in feeding the students breakfast, even as after-school-care centers. In too many cases, we expect the schools to do the child-rearing for our society.
Well, schools simply can’t do that, and the more responsibilities we load on the public schools, the worse they are going to perform.
The way our education system is set up, anyone can get into college, if he has been graduated from high school and takes the SAT or ACT. He might not be admitted to a prestige institution, but he can get into a community college, at the very least. More, we provide all sorts of mechanisms by which he can pay for college. A disadvantaged student might have to jump through some hoops to get things done, but, in this country, if a student has his diploma, or even a GED, and takes the standardized tests, if he doesn’t go to college, it’s by his own choice, and not because we refused to admit him anywhere.
THe earliest form of Affirmative Action, of which I approved, was not a quota system, but a conscious effort to go into poorer communities and inform high school students of the possibilities that did exist, of the ways they could get into college and pay for it.
the acceptance of drug use
For what it’s worth, drug use is also commonly accepted in Silicon Valley culture.
For what it’s worth, drug use is also commonly accepted in Silicon Valley culture.
I once worked for the East Coast operation of a company based in Berkeley and there was an ‘illicit plant’ growing in the manager’s office. I never saw any drug use on site. The work was not sensitive in that clearances were required. Our Government customer was the NIH. The staff was very productive.
At another company that employed me there were a lot of ‘tokers’. I never saw any use at work but sometimes a pound would be divided into ounces. Beer was consumed by some at lunches eaten at the desk. Again, there was no DoD work.
I never saw any evidence of ‘hard’ drug use anywhere I have ever worked and have only known of four (powdered) cocaine users in my life.
So what sort of illegal drugs are commonly used in Silicon Valley? It it is nothing more than pot and hash, why worry?
Quotas were once used to limit the number of certain minorities in a profession. They were once used against Jews. Such quotas were used to negate the effect of ability and assure some equality of outcome.
Too many of our current quotas have the same effect of limiting access to people who score well on tests so as to assure an equality of outcome for those that do.
Are the tests ‘culturally biased’ or is something wrong with the culture that produces the poor achievers? Is there a lot of whining about the effect of self-inflicted wounds? When the type of effort needed to get good grades is denounced as ‘acting white’, should courts reward bad behavior? Why is there such a high incidence of bastardy in urban society? This is more of a factor in criminal behavior than race. Is it a mere coincidence that every black professional I know had a father in his household during his youth?
Some failed social experiments may be more to blame for current problems than any attitudes of most white Americans.
There are some racists of the sort typified by Huck Finn’s despicable father but they seem to be shrinking in number and influence. Yet the quotacrats denounce all who question the Emperor’s New Clothes as if honest questions equate to racism.
I never saw any use at work
Of course not. That wouldn’t be tolerated.
what sort of illegal drugs are commonly used in Silicon Valley
Pot, lsd, mushrooms, and ecstacy, from what I can tell.
Having low SAT Scores does not disqualify one from being a judge – but certainly should disqualify one from going to the most prestigious universities in the land. As I recall, Latinos or Hispanics weren’t enslaved in this country – so why should affirmative action apply to them – just because they are a minority in number? (We have reason to have much more empathy for the black experience in the U.S.) Asian students are often a minority in number but they have to qualify the old fashion way – based on test scores. America is all about helping the underdog, but this is ludicrous to let Ms. Sotomayor become a Supreme Court justice – just because she is Hispanic – just as it was to let her into Princeton to begin with. One can still be successful in the U.S. by going to a State School or to a community college or no college at all. We can give some leeway to financial hardship cases, which Judge Sotomayer had to overcome her under privilege childhood, but the Supreme Court should be made up of our best and brightest – whether on the right or left. It is likely that with the rising Hispanic population in the U.S. it will be just a matter of time before even better qualified and more Hispanic candidates create an available talent pool to choose from – if we deem it necessary to continue to appoint people based on color.