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1) Affirmative action is reverse discrimination:  Out of all the silly reasons to hate affirmative action, this is probably the most popular. The idea of reverse discrimination is interesting, because it helps to alleviate millions of Americans from the guilt of what their ancestors did to Black people for more than 400 years.

Reverse discrimination promotes the idea of entitlement.  It says that even though White family wealth is several times greater than that of Black families, White folks are somehow being harmed by no longer having complete and total dominance over our society.

We all know just how oppressed the White man has been in America.  If only white guys could catch a break!

2) Slavery and Jim Crow are in the past:  The easiest way to be deemed a “radical and angry Black man/woman” at work is to bring up the past.  Now that we are holding hands and singing, “We shall overcome,” at Martin Luther King Jr. dinners every year, people think that the past has just disappeared in the wind.   If only convicted murderers could use this “let-bygones-be-bygones” defense in the court of law.

The problem with the “past is the past” argument is that the past creates the present.  You can’t understand America’s racial inequality without understanding how we built it.  As a result of a 400-year commitment to forcing one group of people to be subjugated by another, Black children are less likely to get a good education at their inner city schools, Black families have far less wealth than Whites, and most major corporations and universities are controlled by Whites. The list goes on and on.  So, to argue that the past doesn’t matter is to ignore everything that made us into what we are today.

Additionally, the damage that has been done in the past is only going to be corrected if we choose to fix it.  A few years of good intentions is not going to do the trick.

3) Affirmative action promotes unqualified Black people:  One of the easiest ways to perpetuate the on-going inferiority complex of African Americans is to convince us to seek validation from the descendants of our historical oppressors. When I sought promotion at Syracuse University, I had a bunch of people who’d never promoted a Black person in more than 100 years telling me that I wasn’t good enough, while Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Michael Eric Dyson, and Cornel West were saying that I am very good at my job.   Of course, none of my colleagues cared what any of these individuals thought, because they’d been pre-programmed to disrespect Black people, Black scholars, and Black public figures. Getting approval from the right white guy, though, would have pushed me right to the top.

The challenge I experienced is similar to what millions of Black folks go through all across America:  You are rarely going to be rewarded or validated in a system that is designed to deem you to be inferior.  That’s why millions of intelligent Black boys are placed in special education and millions of Black adults waddle their way through irrational stigmas, perpetual frustration, and relentless glass ceilings in corporate America: Being who you are is a crime, so you spend your life trying to become somebody else.   It is unfortunate, but true, that in light of all the cultural biases that lead us to be defined as inferior, affirmative action is necessary for us to even get a shot.

4) America is (allegedly) the land of opportunity:  For some reason, there are those who think that racial inequality is going to go away just because we’ve decided to stop being racist.   That’s no different from thinking that the milk I spilled on the floor is going to clean itself up if I promise not to spill anymore milk.   Aiming for equal opportunity — which still doesn’t exist for kids who are plagued by horrible inner city schools — is quite the noble cause, but it doesn’t change the fact that many of the important decisions of major institutions are being made by White men.

While some want to believe that equal opportunity is the simple fix to complex structural inequality, the fact is that ladders of opportunity tend to be lowered to people who look like those in power.  A young Black male in corporate America is not likely to have managers who care enough to give him access to the same opportunities he might receive from another Black man. So pretending that an undeniably biased system of hiring and promotion is based on merit is simply delusional.

The bottom line here is that America remains racially broken.  It’s not because people wake up every morning hell bent on oppressing black people.  It’s because you can’t spend 400 years building a structurally imbalanced society and then hope that it will clean itself up.  You must be affirmatively determined to make things right, which is why we actually do need affirmative action.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is a Professor at Syracuse University. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.

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The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a new case, Fisher v. Texas, No. 11-345, brought by Abigail Fisher, a white student who claims she was denied admission to the University of Texas because she is white, The New York Times reports.

The top ten percent of all graduating high school seniors in Texas schools are granted automatic admission into the state’s University system. Fisher missed the cutoff, but feels a less-than-qualified student took a remaining non-automatic spot she should have received.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger: that public colleges and universities could not use a point system to boost minority enrollment but could take race into account in vaguer way to ensure academic diversity, the New York Times reports.

Here is more from The Times:

The court’s membership has changed since 2003, most notably for these purposes with the appointment of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who replaced Justice O’Connor in 2006. Justice Alito has voted with the court’s more conservative justices in decisions hostile to the use of racial classifications by the government.

“There thus seem five votes — Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito — to overrule Grutter and hold that affirmative action programs are unconstitutional,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in a recent book, “The Conservative Assault on the Constitution.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been particularly skeptical of government programs that take account of race. “Racial balancing is not transformed from ‘patently unconstitutional’ to a compelling state interest simply by relabeling it ‘racial diversity,’ ” he wrote, for instance, in a 2007 decision limiting the use of race to achieve integration in public schools.

Go to the Times for more on this story. Also, do you feel Affirmative Action programs are still needed or are the policies relics of the past? Sound off!

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A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeal heard arguments in the latest legal challenge to Proposition 209, the landmark voter initiative that barred racial, ethnic and gender preferences in public education, employment and contracting.

The affirmative action ban has withstood multiple challenges since voters approved it in 1996, but advocates say their campaign to overturn it has been bolstered by recent court decisions, as well as support from Gov. Jerry Brown.

Dozens of minority students backing the plaintiffs filled the courtroom for the hour-long hearing, when the justices questioned whether they should tamper with a 1997 ruling in which the same appellate court upheld Proposition 209.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs said affirmative action is needed to increase racial diversity at the University of California’s most prestigious campuses and professional schools. Data shows that UC’s efforts to enroll diverse student populations without considering race have failed, they argued.

“What you see before you is a new form of separate and unequal going on right before our eyes,” plaintiffs’ attorney George Washington told the three male justices.

Ralph Kasarda, who is defending Proposition 209, told the justices that the San Francisco-based appellate court was correct when it upheld the affirmative-action ban. He called the current challenge “redundant and baseless.”

“Proposition 209 guarantees everyone’s right to be treated fairly and not be discriminated against based on skin color or gender,” said Kasarda, an attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented the sponsors of the 1996 ballot measure.

The complaint was filed in January 2010 by several dozen minority students and advocacy groups who say the ban violates the civil rights of black, Latino and Native American students. Those groups make up about half of California’s high school graduates, but much smaller percentages at UC’s most competitive campuses.

For example, at UC Berkeley, the current freshmen class of California residents is roughly 1 percent Native American, 3.5 percent black, 15 percent Latino, 30 percent white and 48 percent Asian, according to UC data.

“As a state-serving institution, the university should reflect the demographics of California, and right now it doesn’t,” said Magali Flores, 20, a third-year Latina student majoring in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. “Prop. 209 wants to pretend that race isn’t real.”

The court agreed to hear the case after U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti dismissed the lawsuit in December 2010. The California Supreme Court has twice ruled that Proposition 209 is constitutional.

Advocates say justices need to reconsider in light of recent court rulings on the issue.

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the University of Michigan Law School could consider race in admissions decisions to promote campus diversity.

Last year, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals cited that ruling when it overturned Michigan’s affirmative action ban. The full appellate court has agreed to reconsider the case.

Brown joined the plaintiffs in arguing the affirmative action ban is unconstitutional.

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Ward Connerly, for years the champion of white conservatives and the bane of Black liberals, is alleged to have received excessive compensation on behalf of his American Civil Rights Institute, which is under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service.

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The New York Times reports:

Mr. Connerly has faced accusations of profiteering before, as supporters of affirmative action highlighted his salary in an effort to discredit his cause. But this time, the allegations are more detailed and come from another significant movement figure: Jennifer Gratz, the named plaintiff in a landmark 2003 Supreme Court case that struck down a race-based admissions policy at the University of Michigan.

After she won that case, Mr. Connerly hired Ms. Gratz to conduct research and run campaigns supporting anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives. She resigned last September and, through her lawyer, sent the group’s board a five-page letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

“For years, Ms. Gratz was aware of the allegations that Mr. Connerly received excessive compensation,” it said. “She presumed that the issue was politically motivated and raised solely by opponents of the organization’s mission. It has come to her attention, however, that there may be some merit to the allegations of financial impropriety.”

Ward Connerly defended himself against the accusations:

Interviewed by phone and e-mail, Mr. Connerly, 72, acknowledged that his group had had financial difficulties, but said its board had not responded to the letter because “90 percent” of it was false. He portrayed Ms. Gratz as a “disgruntled former employee” trying to “besmirch me personally” because she wanted to replace him.

Black Americans and Californian’s especially will remember Connerly as an unapologetic enemy of race-based admissions at state schools and was the chief proponent of California Proposition 209, eliminating race- and gender-based priorities in state hiring.

Read more at the New York Times

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Johnson’s suggestion was inspired by the NFL’s so-called “Rooney Rule,” a rule that requires teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior operations positions.

“The RLJ Rule is principally designed to encourage companies to voluntarily establish a ‘best practices’ policy to identify and interview the tremendous talent pool of African-American managers and African-American companies that are often overlooked because of traditional hiring or procurement practices,” said Johnson in a statement.

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The video shows an animation of a white student paying attention in class while a Black students is sleeping next to him. The next frame shows the Black student receiving a college acceptance letter and an Asian student being rejected.

Later, the video shows an Asian student with an SAT score of 2290 being rejected from college, while a Black student with an SAT score of 1990 is accepted.

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Now questions on whether the referendum process, which lets citizens petition to overturn laws already on the books, will hurt the efforts of Affirmative Action proponents.

While this ruling will probably be ruled up by the full 6th Circuit, and if need be, by the United States Supreme Court, where the conservative majority is expected to uphold the precedent banning Affirmative Action, the reasoning for the overturning is what is probably the most interesting aspect of the ruling.

Are African-Americans, Latinos and other racial minorities unduly hurt by the referendum process, when the public policy is focused on them?

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The New York Times reports:

The court’s 2-to-1 ruling, which is likely to be appealed, said the voter-approved ban “unconstitutionally alters Michigan’s political structure by impermissibly burdening racial minorities.”

Read The Whole Story At The New York Times

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Reverend James Meeks, a Chicago reverend and candidate for mayor was discussing affirmative action on a Chicago radio station, and said that he believed “minority” contracts should go to African-Americans and not other minorities. The Huffington Post reports:

“I think that the word ‘minority,’ from our standpoint, should mean African-American,” Meeks said, as reported by FOX Chicago. “I don’t think women, Asians and Hispanics should be able to use that title. That’s why our numbers cannot improve, because we use women, Asians and Hispanics, who are not people of color, who are not people who have been discriminated against.”

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SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit challenging California’s voter-approved ban on affirmative action in public university admissions.

U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti ruled against the challenge to Proposition 209, which barred racial, ethnic or gender preferences in public education, employment and contracting.

The plaintiffs argued that the law violated the civil rights of black, Latino and Native American students whose numbers have been reduced at the University of California’s most prestigious campuses, particularly UCLA and UC Berkeley, since the ban passed in 1996.

According to the lawsuit, black, Latino and Native American students make up about one-quarter of the freshmen enrolled at UC’s nine undergraduate campuses even though they comprise nearly half of all public high school graduates.

But the judge sided with Ward Connelly and other affirmative-action opponents who sought the lawsuit’s dismissal. In his ruling, Conti said the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals already rejected a similar legal challenge to California’s affirmative-action ban.

Connelly, a former UC Regent and Sacramento businessman, called the ruling a “powerful victory for fundamental rights.”

“Everyone is owed a full measure of equal treatment, including applicants to the UC system, and indeed all students,” Connelly said in a statement. “None of us should be classified by race or sex, by government.”

The lawsuit was filed by the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the group By Any Means Necessary and 56 California high school and college students.

Yvette Felarca, a national organizer with BAMN, said her group plans to appeal the ruling and seek support from Gov.-elect Jerry Brown, who opposes the affirmative-action ban.

“We’re not going to stop our fight to end the increasing racial inequality and segregation that Proposition 209 has created,” Felarca said. “We cannot have an apartheid-like admissions system in California.”

UC spokesman Steve Montiel said university attorneys were not available for comment Wednesday.

In August, the California Supreme Court also upheld the state’s affirmative action ban, rejecting arguments from the city of San Francisco and then-Attorney General Jerry Brown that the law violates federal equality protections.

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Arizona voters on Tuesday approved Proposition 107 to ban the consideration of race, ethnicity or gender by units of state government, including public colleges and universities. With 2,075 of 2,239 precincts reporting as of early Wednesday morning, unofficial results from the state had the measure passing with just under 60 percent support.

California, Michigan, Nebraska and Washington State have already imposed such bans. Only one state — Colorado — has rejected in a statewide vote a proposed ban on the consideration of race and ethnicity.

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SAN FRANCISCO — California’s high court on Monday upheld the state’s 14-year-old law barring preferential treatment of women and minorities in public school admissions, government hiring and contracting.

In a 6-1 ruling, the state Supreme Court rejected arguments from the city of San Francisco and Attorney General Jerry Brown that the law, known as Proposition 209, violates federal equality protections.

Opponents of the ban say it creates barriers for minorities and women that don’t exist for other groups, such as veterans seeking preference.

The ruling written by Justice Kathryn Werdegar came in response to lawsuits filed by white contractors challenging San Francisco’s affirmative action program, which was suspended in 2003.

“As the court recognized, Proposition 209 is a civil rights measure that protects everyone, regardless of background,” said Sharon Browne, a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented the contractors. “Under Proposition 209, no one can be victimized by unfair government policies that discriminate or grant preferences based on sex or skin color.”

If San Francisco wants to resurrect the program, the Supreme Court said it must show compelling evidence the city “purposefully or intentionally discriminated against” minority and women contractors and that such a law was the only way to fix the problem.

Justice Carlos Moreno dissented, writing that it’s unfair to explicitly single out minorities and women while other special groups continue to enjoy preferential treatment in school admissions and elsewhere.

“In the wake of Proposition 209, veterans, the economically disadvantaged, the physically disabled, children of alumni, in-state residents, etc., all may continue to seek, obtain, and benefit from preferential legislation as before,” Moreno wrote. “The same is no longer true for those seeking race- and sex-conscious legislation.”

Another challenge to Proposition 209 on different legal grounds is pending after being filed in federal court earlier this year.

The pro-affirmative action known as By Any Means Necessary is seeking to invalidate the law by arguing that minority students and their parents are unfairly restricted by state admission policies that can’t take into account race or gender but does consider other factors.

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The head of the Virginia Conference of the NAACP lashed out at Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) Monday, three days after Webb stirred controversy with an op-ed piece suggesting most government diversity programs should be abolished because they “marginalized” white Americans.

In a Wall Street Journal column published Friday, titled “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege,” Webb complained that “the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America.” As he has repeatedly in the past, including during his 2006 campaign, Webb said that affirmative action programs made sense for African Americans who suffered from the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws but not for other ethnic groups and recent immigrants.

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From WashingtonPost.com:

Just as race issues have returned to the forefront of political debate, Virginia Sen. James Webb (D) on Friday reiterated his opposition to some affirmative action programs and suggested that white Americans are being “marginalized” by current government policies.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege,” Webb writes: “Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers.”

This is not a new topic for Webb, whose complicated views on race-based programs were an issue in his 2006 Senate campaign, when some of his fellow Democrats complained that Webb sounded like a Republican. In a 2000 book review, also published in the Wall Street Journal, Webb wrote that affirmative action “has within one generation brought about a permeating state-sponsored racism that is as odious as the Jim Crow laws it sought to countermand.”

Webb has said he supports some preferential programs for African Americans but not for other ethnic and immigrant groups. He reiterated that point in Friday’s op-ed.

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The New York Times Company recently took some criticism for creating financial incentives for the company’s executives to hire a more diverse workforce.The Business Insider levied quite a few questions about whether or not it was appropriate for The Times to specifically address the hiring of women and minorities. According to the text of an internal corporate document: “The [Compensation] Committee also retained the discretion to increase or decrease the individual component of the total bonus paid to each executive by up to 10% based on the continuing development of a diverse work force, including the inclusion of diverse candidates in hiring processes and the demonstration of personal commitment to diversity through participation in diversity-related activities, such as mentoring and sponsorship of affinity groups.”

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NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A group of black Connecticut firefighters hopes to block promotions for white firefighters who won a discrimination case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The black New Haven firefighters argue in papers filed Monday that they still have a right to challenge the validity of the promotional exam.

The white firefighters sued New Haven after the city threw out results of some 2003 promotion exams when too few minorities did well. The Supreme Court ruled in June in their favor.

The attorney for the white firefighters filed papers in U.S. District Court Friday asking for promotions. Attorneys for New Haven filed similar papers.

But the attorneys for seven black firefighters say there still has been no finding that the promotional tests were valid.

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From The Detroit Free Press:

Michigan’s ban on racial preferences in public university admissions and government hiring was in court again Tuesday, another step closer to its assumed destination: the doorstep of the U.S. Supreme Court.

“I don’t see how they would give up, and we’re not either,” said George Washington, an attorney representing those fighting the ban.

Michael Rosman, attorney for the Washington-based Center for Individual Rights which has argued to keep the ban in place, agreed. Any decision by the three-judge panel that heard oral arguments Tuesday can be appealed to the full 6th Circuit Court, in Cincinnati, or to the nation’s highest court. It would be up to those panels to decide whether they’d hear the case.

At issue is the decision by Michigan voters in 2006 to make illegal policies like those at the University of Michigan, where officials could consider race in admissions decisions.

For years, U-M had argued that the policy helped build a diverse student body. In fact, the percentages of African-American freshmen and law school students have since dropped among its freshman classes and law school students. Wayne State University medical school also has seen a dip in its numbers of African-American students.

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]]> http://newsone.com/357417/michigans-ban-on-racial-preferences-moves-closer-to-supreme-court/feed/ 3 Michigan's Ban On Racial Preferences Moves Closer To Supreme Court (thumbnail) ionesfontaine supreme_court_building1 http://newsone.com/267147/opinion-blacks-and-latinos-hit-harder-in-hard-times/ http://newsone.com/267147/opinion-blacks-and-latinos-hit-harder-in-hard-times/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:30:03 +0000 NewsOne Staff http://newsone.com/?p=267147 ]]>

I don’t have to tell you that it’s tough out there. I’m talking about the recession, of course. In the end, the bursting of America’s economic bubble is the worst financial news since the Great Depression. And ultimately, it is clear that the deleterious effects of U.S. capitalism know no race, ethnicity or class. Titans of industry are reduced to pauper status, working families are out of work, food, healthcare and a home, and people of all backgrounds are watching their life’s work eviscerate before their very eyes. We are all bit players in the casino, and with a few exceptions such as the lucky bailout winners, most of us have crapped out, the way the casino operators intended it to work.

But at the same time, it’s a little more complicated than that. While “official” unemployment nationwide is high at around 10 percent (far more when you factor in all of those people who are underemployed or have given up all hope of finding a job), unemployment is and always has been much higher in Black and Latino communities. But the gap has widened during this recession. In fact, Black unemployment is nearly double that of Whites, while Latinos are unemployed at a rate one-third higher than their White counterparts. The situation is particularly chronic in New York City, where there are 80,000 more unemployed Blacks than Whites, even though there are about 1.5 million more Whites than Blacks in that city.

One explanation is that people of color are the folks last hired and first fired, or that their communities have a lower level of entrepreneurship. Some people will be quick to attribute the difference in employment levels to differences in education levels. Their argument is that people of color are lazy and not so smart, and don’t apply themselves. But among those with a college education, as the Economic Policy Institute reported, Black unemployment in recent months has doubled that of Whites.

Perhaps institutional racism can explain some of the difference in unemployment levels. As James Koch, an economics professor at Old Dominion University noted, “When the economy is at or near full employment, employers don’t have any choice. They have to hire the people that are available. Right now, employers can be fairly choosy. They may well choose not to hire African Americans.”

This notion is worth exploring, at a time when civil rights foes have pushed back against the age of Obama. In the name of “reverse discrimination”, they have declared that affirmative action and other diversity programs are a thing of the past. The unqualified minorities are taking all of the good jobs from the ever-qualified and ever-capable White men, they say. Blacks have the White House, after all, so what more do they want?

These malcontents yearn for the day when people of color were relegated to captive labor, or migrant labor, out of sight and out of mind, and nothing more. They point to the Supreme Court ruling in Ricci v. Stefano. In Ricci, the court found in favor of 17 aggrieved White New Haven firefighters (and one Latino) who claimed they were discriminated against in promotions after they passed a promotional exam. When no Black firefighters passed that exam, in a city where people of color are 60% of the population, the city discarded the results.

Little is said, however, of the recent ruling by a federal judge that New York City discriminates against people of color in the hiring of its firefighters. Specifically, New York City, which is over 60% of color, has a fire department which is over 90% White (and nearly all male), a statistic that stands in marked contrast to other major cities. Blacks and Latinos disproportionately failed the recruitment exams, and those who did pass were placed further down the list than White candidates. The judge determined that “the city did not take sufficient measures to ensure that better performers on its examinations would actually be better firefighters.” He added that “when an employment test is not adequately related to the job for which it tests – and when the test adversely affects minority groups – we may not fall back on the notion that better test takers make better employees.”

In a majority-minority city such as New York, African Americans and Latinos are seldom found as firefighters, and some professions apparently are the functional equivalent of a family business. It seems more than mere coincidence that unemployment among people of color has skyrocketed.

Some people will always point to the scores, but the truth is that intelligence, achievement and merit cannot be reduced to a single score. But gatekeepers in education and the professions have long used standardized testing as a tool to keep racial, ethnic, class and gender diversity from entering the gate. The tests and the racism always went hand in hand. As anthropologist Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban points out in Race and Racism: An Introduction, standardized intelligence testing was born of the eugenics movement and the IQ tests. These pseudo-scientific tests were first used to prove that immigrant groups, “certain undesirable non-Anglo-Saxons – especially Jews, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, and Italians – ‘were mentally defective.’” What worked as a tool of class and ethnic discrimination against European immigrants was then utilized to prove the racial inferiority of “Negro, Mexican and Spanish-Indian children.” And according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, “IQ tests are nothing more than a type of achievement test which primarily measures knowledge of standard English and exposure to the cultural experiences of middle class whites.” Yet, society still relies on these exams, commonly known today as the SAT, ACT, GRE, MCAT, GMAT, LSAT, and bar exam, among others.

Society’s gatekeepers have a lot of power. They decide who gets the job and why. They determine who is a team player, who is a good fit, who is fit to lead and who is not. They decide who is too much of this or not enough of that, who is qualified, underqualified, or overqualified. They decide if an applicant’s name sounds too “Black” or “Latino”, whatever that means. They determine whose hair looks too Black. Gatekeepers create the reality, however subjective, flawed or biased the methodology. They choose the images in Hollywood and on TV, and which people will portray criminals or upstanding citizens, or nothing at all. Gatekeepers make the policies that create a mostly Black and Brown prison population, and a mostly White legal profession. They decide to fill the special education classes and foster care systems with children of color, who will, in turn, fill the prisons. Gatekeepers decide to have a panel discussion on a cable news program, and the topic is the nation’s first Latina Supreme Court justice, yet none of the panelists are Latinas.

And gatekeepers lack diversity, in a nation that is becoming more and more diverse by the day. Often, their goal is to maintain a system where everyone looks the same, like the good ol’ days. That is why steps are needed to ensure that the game is not rigged, as it has been for so long, so that we do not revert to the nation’s default settings of power and privilege.

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates – who had a less than positive experience with the Cambridge police department of late – said it best in his commencement address to Berea College in 2008:

For me, no matter how intelligent I may or may not be, for me to have been one of those six black boys who graduated from Yale in 1966, affirmative action was a class escalator. As far as I’m concerned, ladies and gentlemen, no one in the American academy has benefited more from affirmative action than I have. And that’s why I will go to my grave as an ardent and passionate defender of affirmative action. For me to become so successful in America, and for me to become a gatekeeper of American society and stand at the gate and protest affirmative action to keep out women or people of color would make me a hypocrite as big as Justice Clarence Thomas, and I’m not that kind of person. We need more affirmative action in this country, not less affirmative action. I don’t care what the White House says, and I don’t care what the minority on the Supreme Court says, and that’s the subject of my address this afternoon.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

OPINION: MSNBC, Fire Buchanan Or I’ll Boycott

From HuffingtonPost.com:

If by some chance you haven’t heard yet, last night on the Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC pundit Pat Buchanan, who’s been urging the GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to oppose the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor by blissing out to their inner sense of racial superiority, had something of an epic battle with Rachel Maddow over the History of Race in America. Maddow concluded that Buchanan was “dating himself,” and basically made Buchanan look like a fool, but first and foremost, let’s remember that this tilt was probably great for ratings, and Buchanan will likely be back on MSNBC tomorrow, spitting whatever nonsense comes dribbling out of his face, right after Steve Capus finishes popping champagne over this most recent, awesomely successful advancement of the political discourse.

Click here for full story and VIDEO.

OPINION: MSNBC, Fire Buchanan Or I’ll Boycott

From The Huffington Post:

Barack Obama has broken racial barriers. But his stint at Columbia was not one of them.
Obama’s status as a son of an African immigrant puts him in a category and debate that largely remains behind Ivy League walls: black students from immigrant families are overrepresented in Ivy League schools.

“Immigrant blacks,” who come from families who have emigrated from the West Indies or Africa (mostly Ghana or Nigeria), make up 41 percent of the black population of Ivy League schools, according to a 2007 study by Princeton and University of Pennsylvania researchers. In contrast, black immigrants only make up 13 percent of the black population of 18-19 year olds in the United States.

The overrepresentation of immigrant blacks on Ivy League campuses is forcing students to redefine their own “blackness” and black culture, while raising questions about affirmative action and access to the best universities in America.

Click here for more.

The issue of reverse discrimination first reached the nation’s highest court in the 1970s, when a student with good grades named Allan Bakke accused a University of California medical school of twice denying him admission because he was white.

Strict racial quotas were unconstitutional, the court said – affirmative action was not. But that ruling far from decided what many considered the big-picture issue: does protecting minorities discriminate against the majority?

More than 30 years, and scores of lawsuits later, the question remains unanswered. Meanwhile, more Americans came to believe that affirmation action is no longer necessary, and that instead of leveling the playfield for minorities, it unfairly punishes whites.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case filed by white firefighters who claimed they were denied promotion because of the color of their skin.

“The laws that Congress wrote are clear – everyone is protected from racial discrimination,” said Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank that advocates eliminating race and ethnic considerations. “Not just blacks, but whites. Not just Latinos, but whites.”

Those who favor affirmative action say race divisions still exist in this country, 40 years after the civil rights movement.

“Race so permeates society that you can’t ignore it,” said Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Project.

Several states have recently faced legal battles waged by whites claiming they were unfairly treated in favor of protecting and promoting blacks and Hispanics.

Earlier this month in South Carolina, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued a historically black college on behalf of three white faculty members who complained they were forced from or denied jobs because of their race.

Simultaneously, federal officials said they had reached a settlement agreement, with Benedict College paying $55,000 to each instructor, including an art teacher who said she was denied promotion in favor of a black professor. The institution denied the accusations.

Last week, a white woman in Texas filed a federal lawsuit against an assisted-living center, contending she was discriminated against and harassed by Hispanics because she didn’t speak Spanish.

And in Florida, two transportation companies sued Broward County over efforts to steer public contracts to minority-owned businesses. The firms, which had provided car service for the handicapped and the elderly, claimed they were paid lower fees than other contractors because they didn’t comply with affirmative action requirements.

Affirmative action – policies designed to promote and protect groups previously and currently denied equal standing – originated with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Broadly speaking, it outlaws bias toward race, creed, color or national origin in school admissions, voting rights, employment and government contracting.

Sometimes those policies have set aside jobs, college admissions and government contracts for minority applicants, students and firms.

“Quotas do not end discrimination. They are discrimination,” Clegg said. “The law makes clear that race, ethnicity and sex are not to be part of who gets a government contract or who gets into a university or where someone goes to school.”

But there is wide disagreement on whether case law is clear at all.

In the Bakke case, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that universities could take race and ethnicity into account when deciding student admissions. But using rigid racial quotas to increase minorities on campus was unconstitutional, justices said.

In 1987, the high court said temporary and “narrowly tailored” quota systems were allowed. The case stemmed from an affirmative action plan that imposed a promotion standard of “one black for one white” in the Alabama state police ranks. The quota was justified, justices ruled, because of the department’s “long and shamefulrecord of delay and resistance” to black employment opportunities.

Twenty years later, a more conservative court declared that public school systems cannot try to achieve or maintain integration based on explicit race rules. In a 5-to-4 opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” At issue in the case were programs in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., that tried to maintain racial diversity by limiting transfers and admissions.

“The Supreme Court case law isn’t clear. There aren’t bright lines and clear guidance,” said attorney Deborah Archer, director of the Racial Justice Project at New York Law School. “It’s very difficult to extract a rule from those cases that can be applied across the board.”

Instead, “they have tended to be concerned with a specific aspect, and the decisions are made on case-by-case basis,” said Archer, whose group filed a friend-of-the-court brief for the city of New Haven, Conn., the defendant in last week’s Supreme Court hearing.

In its first consideration of race under the presidency of Barack Obama, a divided court heard arguments from white firemen claiming the city discriminated against them by jettisoning the results of a promotion exam that no blacks had passed.

The city contends it got rid of the test results because it was concerned that no African-American firefighters, and only two Hispanics, received passing scores. Officials said they worried the test was somehow flawed because it had such a disproportionate effect on minorities.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, as is common on social issues, appeared to have the swing vote. He questioned why the city didn’t weigh the test against a clear standard before deciding it was deficient and setting it aside.

That is the key legal question – can the test and its results legally be thrown out after the fact?

“Suppose an employer looked out the window and saw a line of Hispanics applying for jobs?” asked attorney Michael Rosman of the Center for Individual Rights, another group opposing affirmative action. “Suppose he told his secretary to cancel the interviews because he didn’t like who was lined up outside? No one would argue that wasn’t racial discrimination.”

Others say that scenario misses the point.

“We like to believe there is an equal playing field. In fact, there isn’t,” said Parker of the ACLU. “In this country, whites are still advantaged in many ways. You can say we shouldn’t take race into consideration, but that just continues the advantage.”

The deep divide over who needs help – and at what price – mirrors the equally deep racial divisions that still exist, Parker said.

“Clearly there have been changes. We have a black president. But if I were to go into any office on Wall Street, I think it would be hard to deny that white people aren’t getting jobs. You wouldn’t see a lot of black people and women,” he said.

In this way, conservatives have attempted to argue that their opposition to affirmative action is not racially motivated, but rather flows from noble principle.

There are general problems with this argument. For one, conservatives’ hand-wringing about merit seems not to apply to the estimated half of all job openings in the United States that aren’t posted and instead go to connected insiders.

Nor do such concerns apply to legacy admissions at universities, which account for a significantly higher percentage of entries than does affirmative action, especially at elite schools. (Though most media have been too polite to make much of it, John McCain himself would never have been accepted into the naval academy on his own merits and his well-documented abysmal performance while there would have sunk the career aspirations of a less well-connected midshipman.)

Both types of preferential treatment-legacy admits and non-competitive hires-disproportionately benefit the already better off. But if there were any doubts that the right-wing’s harping on affirmative action as the cause of declining American standards was disingenuous, Sarah Palin’s selection as the GOP’s choice for Vice President and the right-wing’s defense of her as a viable candidate should put those questions to rest.

To call Palin mediocre might be overly generous. Regardless, only a movement as contemptuous of American political institutions as the modern right, could argue with a straight face that she merits serious consideration as a possible President of the United States.

Her obvious, willful ignorance of basic knowledge and her evident pride in that ignorance were on full display when she crowed during the VP debate, “I’ve only been at this for, what, like five weeks.” This comment demonstrated her monumental self-delusion (does she actually think she’s been a quick-study?) and her conviction that being no more well-informed than a typical American adult is actually a badge of honor.

All of which is par for a movement that doesn’t actually care about merit. Instead, the modern right concerns itself with defending the ramparts of white privilege against the onslaught of “uppity” minorities and their liberal enablers. Hence, when blatantly inept aspirants prove themselves to be willing stooges for the perpetuation of that privilege, they become heroic precisely because of their lack of merit and qualification.

In a recent Newsweek article, Jon Meacham reminds us that we’ve been down this road before: “In 1970 a Nebraska senator, Roman L. Hruska, was defending Richard Nixon’s nomination of U.S. circuit Judge G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. An underwhelming figure, Carswell was facing criticism that he was too ‘mediocre’ for elevation. Hruska tried an interesting counterargument: ‘Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.’”

As Meacham notes, we can certainly come from humble circumstances and achieve great things. But the right-wing seems to aspire to mediocrity; they celebrate ignorance, lack of curiosity and an insistence that you need not ever be self-critical because you have no need to try to improve yourself. In these traits, the movement sees resoluteness. Others might reasonably see in it a recipe for arrogant incompetence.

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson penned a favorite phrase of conservatives, the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” This phrase is supposed to (a) convey compassion for those coddled poor souls whose low standards have only made them worse off in the long run, and (b) to project deep, serious thought about the need to uphold timeless verities and lofty standards worthy of a great nation.

But that’s all a sick joke in the face of the endemic crony-ism of the Bush years, the right wing’s embarrassingly thin arguments for defending baldly cynical nominees to the Supreme Court, like Carswell and Clarence Thomas (you don’t have to be white to play this game) and now Sarah Palin.

The bigotry on display here is, however, anything but “soft”-the undeserving are perfectly qualified as long as they show proper contempt for the actually under-privileged. And those “low expectations” are to be praised and fiercely defended so long as they’re in the service of bigotry and contempt.

Recently, Rush Limbaugh attacked Barack Obama as an affirmative action case saying he only got through Harvard because of affirmative action, and he was the Democrats’ affirmative action pick. Which begs the question, what about McCain? As the son of a decorated admiral, McCain was afforded many advantages in his education and career, many more than Obama was.

In high school, McCain was known more for his partying and repulsive personality than for his academics. McCain would often get into fights and received many demerits from his school. He was also known for sneaking off campus and going to bars and strip clubs. Despite his unremarkable high school career, where he was known more for being a tough guy than a good students he was accepted to US Naval Academy at Annapolis, the nation’s most prestigious Military School.

Could it be because his father was a high-ranking admiral? Would a black student known for mediocre grades, fighting and late night drinking in high school be accepted to West Point, the most prestigious Military School in the country?

Once admitted to Annapolis, McCain would continue his reckless ways, fighting and partying and receiving demerits. He eventually graduated in the bottom five per cent of his class. Despite his low ranking, he was accepted into the Air Pilot Flight Training School. Other people in his graduating class who were in the top 10% of his class were not admitted into the competitive program.

McCain’s acceptance into the flight program was clearly a case of white affirmative action which has been going on way before the civil rights movement. Because Mccain’s father and grandfather were both admirals, he was accepted to West Point despite his horrible high school grades and qualifications, and despite his awful performance at Annapolis, he was put into a prestigious Navy flying program. McCain would crash five U.S. planes while learning how to fly showing what a bad effect ‘white affirmative action’ has.

If you had a doctor would you want the one who goofed off drank and fought in high school then graduated in the bottom five percent of his class in college to operate on you? If you had a bus driver, would you want the one who crashed 4 buses before he drove your bus?

When McCain was shot down he was far away from his intended target. An instructor said McCain was “positively one of the weakest students to pass our way, and received consistently poor marks and a number of Dangerous Down grades assigned by more than one instructor. He had no real ability and was clearly out of his element in an airplane, and way over his head even as a junior naval officer.”

Despite his heralded military service, McCain only served 20 hours in combat, yet he received 28 medals, his only notable accomplishment was getting his plane shot down and being saved by a Vietnamese peasant and becoming a Prisoner of War. With no other qualifications other than having his plain shot down and being a POW McCain was promoted to captain.

Barack Obama on the other hand had no famous relatives to open doors from him. He attended a prestigious private school where he was an average to good student. He was accepted to Occidental College, a good school but hardly Ivy League. Obama performed well Occidental and transfer to Columbia, a prestigious Ivy League school in New York.

At Columbia, Obama worked extremely hard, getting a B.A. in Political Science. Though his grades were good enough to get a high paying job on Wall Street, he decided to work as a community organizer in Chicago for ,000 dollars a year.

After working and saving for four years he would apply to Harvard Law School. Given his work history and education he was accepted. According to the New York Times, Obama didn’t mention his race on his application to avoid benefiting from affirmative action. Obama would be chosen as the Editor for The Harvard Law Review because of his grades and writing ability. He would go on to graduate Magna Cum Laude, at the top 5% of his class.

Who is the real affirmative action case? The hard working Law School student who has used his education to become a well renowned civil rights lawyer and law professor who graduated in the top 5% of his class, Magna Cum Laude, or the reckless pilot who was accepted to west point, flight schools and allowed to fly because of his father and grandfather and graduated in the bottom 5% of his class and graduated Magna Cum Asshole?

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When former Vice Presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro made the remarks to which she refers in her May 30 Boston Globe op-ed, pundits and commentators across the ideological spectrum consistently fell all over themselves to avoid accusing her of racism.  Seldom in political life has the sinner been granted so much immediate distance from her sin.

What Ferraro actually said bears little resemblance to the facile pseudo-summary she offers in her editorial. Her comments were not about “the influence of blacks” on the Obama campaign.  Her exact words to a California newspaper were “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” and she defended them by arguing that she, likewise, would not have been on the 1984 Democratic ticket if not for her gender.

Ferraro appeared not to recognize the obvious difference between being appointed to a ticket, as she was, and winning a record number of primary votes across the entire nation, as Obama has.  In the days following her initial remarks, she claimed, as in her Boston Globe op-ed, that “Racism works in two different directions. I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white. How’s that?”

Ludicrous-and sad. Ferraro has officially ruined her own obituary by adding a crimson asterisk of aggressively divisive, ill-informed, race-baiting to her own trailblazing career in public service.   More important than assessing the magnitude of her self-destruction, though, is examining the notion she puts forth: that whites in America have been rendered voiceless, that “you can’t open your mouth without being labeled a racist,” that to be black is to be ‘lucky’ (to paraphrase another of her comments about Obama).

I have no problem believing that people have been stopping Ferraro – although I suspect ‘sidling up to’ would be more accurate – to voice this ‘common sentiment.’  It is one that cuts to the heart of a crucial, under-examined aspect of America’s problem with race: the deeply-held conviction, on the part of many whites, that they have been marginalized, treated ‘unfairly,’ and cannot speak honestly about it.  That they, despite all appearances to the contrary, represent the new racial underclass.

Obama himself, in his landmark address on race, noted that many whites do not feel significantly advantaged because of the color of their skin.  In the single greatest misstep of that speech, he put this sentiment  – the resentment, fueled by a lack of opportunity, felt by the critical Democratic voting block of working-class whites – on a par with the ravaging effects of institutional racism on people of color.

Implicit in the white resentment Obama identified, of course, is whites’ belief that they should be significantly advantaged because of their race.  The entitlement they feel no longer squares with reality, and thus they feel cheated in a way they dare not articulate.

So, meanwhile, do their children.  One of the most fascinating trends of the last thirty years is the way cultural capital and hard capital have diverged.  American coolness is coded, more than ever, as American blackness, and young whites all over the country – many of them with little or no personal access to black people but with extensive cable TV packages – assume, based on the signifiers flashing on their screens, that blackness equals flashy, sexy wealth.

They feel locked out of the possibility of attaining that (imaginary) lifestyle, because of their skin color.  This strikes them as oppressive, and fuels a silent resentment.  They have no language with which to discuss it, and no interest in looking at the reams of evidence that would prove to them just how wrong they are – the inheritance of wealth, for instance, or the rates of home-ownership, traditional markers of prosperity that reveal just how privileged whites remain relative to blacks.

The supposed unfairness of affirmative action may be their parents’ signature racial issue; the difficulty of crafting a strong cultural identity as a young white person in this country is theirs.

Both are important to examine, but we can only do so against a backdrop of understanding the far more pernicious and persistent reality of institutional racism  – a cancer metastasizing through the educational system, the justice and penal systems, law enforcement, and every other aspect of American life.  It is this reality that Ferraro and her nameless common-sentiment-expressers fail to see – the essence of white privilege lies in not even realizing you have it – or to address honestly.

Instead, Ferraro rails against a racial gag order even as she proves unaffected by it, citing a silent-majority of whites able to muster outrage at their own ‘unfair treatment’ without acknowledging anyone else’s.  She denies their ‘racism, but acknowledges and justifies their ‘racial resentment.’   Which is different how, exactly?

Adam Mansbach is the author of the novels The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau, 2008) and Angry Black White Boy (Crown, 2005).