The Supreme Court’s momentous decision in Students for Fair Admissions has come down, and John McWhorter and I finally got a chance to talk about it. We’ve all known this result, or one like it, was on its way, but now that it’s a reality, a post-mortem is in order. Of course, this isn’t really the end. The question of race’s role in education, hiring, and any number of other domains is still a live one.
Word. It was long overdue for the US Supreme Court to strike down race-based affirmative action in higher education. However majority of the populations of historically disadvantaged groups like Blacks and Hispanics are not out of the woods yet. Getting early childhood education right sets a good foundation on which to build. Jews and Asians did this from the get-go and so should Blacks and Hispanics today. Creative innovations like Montessori and Charter school models should be encouraged. Religious institutions should also be supported by the State because they make a significant contribution to society.
In related matters, here is the tale of a female trombonist that was used extensively in marketing materials by her big, fancy music school to demonstrate their “diverse” student body, aka lack of female students in the jazz program. She received horrible treatment overall and it is not atypical for females in music programs. https://medium.com/@kaliamariev/token-girl-564457c86f13
Back to the bias vs development narratives. We need to address the gigantic skills gap that keeps the supply of qualified candidates for colleges so low.
I have far too many thoughts on this to be able to communicate them all fully, with the necessary nuance and depth. That disclaimer aside... I listened to the entire podcast AND read Roland Fryer's NYT piece first, BTW.
Easy stuff first. Those who decry the SCOTUS majority decision, including the members of the SCOTUS who dissented, have to believe one thing. Black and Latino students are not now, and will never be, capable of competing with white, and by extension, Asian students, on the basis of supposedly meritocratic rubrics. That is a startling admission, but absolutely factual! It is also depressing. Even if you believe that historical reasons justify supposed differences in performance against current meritocratic rubrics, one simply has to believe these differences are fixable. Or are we saying, again, that Black and Latino students can never measure up? Are we saying, conversely, that Asian students are (genetically) intellectually superior? If not, then no justification can be found for continuing to admit Blacks and Latino students at lower performance quartiles. None. Zero.
And, if that is true, the best course of action, the ONLY truly informed and egalitarian alternative, is to fix the issue. That includes no longer using the ostensible affirmative action. Fryer's ideas are good in this regard, but I wonder if it cannot be done more simply. Asians did not ascend to ostensible academic prominence due to feeder schools. (As an obvious aside, Blacks did not ascend to dominate the NBA due to special dribbling academies either. 😁) Simply put, remove the guardrails for everyone and let's see what happens. We Black folks can close any gap we desire, and we don't need virtue signaling, protective benevolence narrative encumbered, white people to nurture us along. That might sound salty, but it is what it is. I stand by it.
So, the simple answer to Glenn's question about why Jackson, in her dissent, did not focus on the 14th amendment and the constitutional questions is addressed in paragraph 2 of her dissent:
"JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR has persuasively established that nothing in the Constitution or Title VI prohibits institutions from taking race into account to ensure the racial di- versity of admits in higher education. I join her opinion without qualification. I write separately to expound upon the universal benefits of considering race in this context, in response to a suggestion that has permeated this legal action from the start. "
Anything any justice writes is fair game for criticism. But if one is going to criticize I don't think it is fair to ignore the justice's own explanation.
At oral argument in this very case, Jackson did make the originalist case for a 14th Amendment that is not color blind. Agree or disagree with her points, it is a simple fact that she made them.
Justice Thomas, by the way, did his own argument a great disservice by choosing to make the point that, during Reconstruction, the term "freedman" was a race-neutral description of status, ignoring the contemporaneous evidence that the term was used interchangably with racial classifications, that it was used to describe Black Americans from the north who had not themselves been enslaved, and that there is precious little if any historical evidence that the term was ever applied to White people. He didn't need to go there to make the same argument, and by doing so he undercut his own credibility.
The term "Affirmative Action" has been highjacked by racists. It arose in the 1960s when the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department reviewed what companies and educational institutions were doing to combat racism in hiring/admissions. All of the entities reviewed pointed proudly to policy statements that made use of race in decisions forbidden.
The policy statements were window dressing in practice. Racial discrimination against people of color still took place in violation of the policies with no consequences. The attorneys in the Civil Rights Division announced that policy statements by themselves were not enough; it was necessary to ACT AFFIRMATIVELY to broaden the talent pool through such measures as advertising in publications of interest to the underrepresented minorities, holding recruiting events in minority neighborhoods, schools and churches, and soliciting highly qualified individuals from underrepresented groups to apply.
Broadening the talent pool was a goal no one with a measurable IQ could oppose. At some point affirmative action, a logical and admirable undertaking, was stolen and its meaning perverted to the opposite, racial preferences. The authoritarian Left has been allowed to define terms of discussion for too long in too many fora.
Loved the idea put forward by Roland Fryer. Never gonna happen. Our colleges are so protective of their endowments that they would not actually use the built up assets for anything other than to hand them to their investment professionals so they can make more tax exempt money with the funds. Sorry to be so cynical
We were waiting for their reaction and our two professors did not disappoint. I honestly think the topic of Affirmative Action is subjective because I feel that there are many blacks who are not aware of it works. I also think there are people who just go along with the group who favors it because it's the black thing to do.
Glenn has a good point about those legacy admissions. If your family has been donating to the university for generations, they would like a return on their investment. Admitting my grandson can be seen as fulfiling a financial quota. But violating the Constitutional rights of one racial group to favor another group is a whole other ball game.
That Roland Fryer idea about development is the right thing to do. If enough people actually cared about the development of blacks, they would follow that formula of building schools and programs to prepare kids who would like to enter and compete at those major universities.
I am curious as to when brown hispanics became part the group that "needs" the protection of affirmative action. There are many groups that have suffered from social animus since the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 14th amendment. What is special about brown hispanics?
tldr: Actual white support for reparations is far lower than how they may like to talk about it and if push came to shove would get barely any support from whites.
Glenn, you ask about the Harvard/UNC cases’ potential effects in reparations, and I agree that the conservative six would never allow it at a national (or state/local**) level. But I’d like to offer a different approach. I think the vast majority of white America has no interest in reparations and would—mostly silently—rebel against any meaningfully large attempt at a wealth-transfer reparations measure, and vote any backers out if it actually seemed imminent. For support, I offer myself as a mostly-liberal white guy who moves in center-left-to-very-left circles, and I appeal to the Maher-tesian “I don’t know it for a fact … I just know it’s true” maxim. For center and right whites it’s a nonstarter. Among lefty whites I think agreement with reparations is no deeper than what face-saving requires—black people bring it up and whites get afraid of being called racist and are pissing themselves, to use John’s beautiful imagery, so they tepidly agree. I almost never hear lefty whites—in “mixed company”—raise reparations on their own and full-throatedly endorse it like those whites will do with talk of systematic racism or police oppression or even white supremacy (be that endorsement performative or sincere). With reparations they mostly just nod along to what their black friends say. Among groups of just whites I may have heard reparations raised maybe once or twice ever in my memory. In a super liberal city I could see whites feeling like they “have to” go along with blacks’ (or other “people of colors’”) reparations talk and maybe even city councilor types would vote with secret reluctance to avoid being called a racist. But I don’t see whites other than the most theatrically-performative-anti-racist die hards doing much active to push a measure through. Why such non-support? It’s simple: as much as whites may genuinely support racial preferences or police reform etc. etc., the idea of their money being taken from their pockets to be redistributed based on race is, at a brute fiscal level, has no appeal whatsoever. Because philosophically, however much they may buy in to systematic racism and acknowledge white privilege, it strikes whites (maybe whose ancestors owned slaves or were here in the 1800’s, and especially those descended from post-1865 immigrants) that having their money taken and given to blacks, when slavery ended almost 160 years ago, strikes as irreducibly illogical and at a more important gut/heart level entirely unfair.
**Assuming conditions like standing and jurisdiction are met.
I don’t think many Black people were surprised by the SCITUS decision. Now let’s do an episode about teaching the Tulsa Race Massacre without mentioning race. Follow that with the dismissal of the lawsuit brought by survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Maybe we could ask the survivors if they think that race was a factor.
For those having fun about Brown-Jackson using flawed numbers from an amicus group, be aware that John Robert’s gutted voting rights in Shelby County v Holder based on bogus numbers.
Shelby County v. Holder
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to stop several southern states from denying African Americans their constitutional right to vote. The law initially required six states — Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia — to get federal approval for their election laws and any contemplated changes. The original act expired after five years, but Congress renewed the landmark civil rights law repeatedly and, in 2006, extended it another 25 years.
In a 2013 case called Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, determined that it was no longer necessary to keep the six states under federal oversight. America had changed, the court concluded. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, called the “extraordinary and unprecedented” requirements of the Voting Rights Act outdated and unfair.
To illustrate his point, Roberts constructed a chart and published it in the body of the opinion. It compared voter registration rates for whites and blacks from 1965 and 2004 in the six southern states subject to special oversight. Roberts assembled his chart from data in congressional reports produced when lawmakers last renewed the act. The data displayed clearly that registration gaps between blacks and whites had shrunk dramatically.
But some of the numbers Roberts included in his chart were wrong.
The chart suggested that rates of registration for blacks in 2004 had matched or even outstripped those for whites. But Roberts used numbers that counted Hispanics as white, including many Hispanics who weren’t U.S. citizens and could not register to vote, which had the effect of inaccurately lowering the rate for white registration.
There is no question great strides had been made in black voter registration in Georgia, which reached 64.2 percent in 2004. However, white registration was 68 percent, not 63.5 percent, as Roberts’ chart claimed. The rate of registration for whites exceeded that of blacks by 4 percent, rather than trailing it.
Similarly, the chief justice’s chart asserted that in Virginia, the rate of registration for whites was just 10 percent higher than the rate of registration for blacks, a narrowing that would have reflected enormous progress. But the actual gap, removing erroneously counted Hispanics, was 14.2 percent.
The argument Roberts was making — that the progress in southern states had been so substantial that there was no longer a need for the U.S. Department of Justice’s exacting oversight — might have remained persuasive. But the data he used as evidence was not true.
How did Roberts arrive at his numbers?
Roberts had relied on a report generated by the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2006. The committee’s staffers went to the right source: the U.S. Census Bureau’s post-election survey in 2004. The survey provides estimates of voter registration and turnout by state, gender, race and ethnicity, and citizenship.
Word. It was long overdue for the US Supreme Court to strike down race-based affirmative action in higher education. However majority of the populations of historically disadvantaged groups like Blacks and Hispanics are not out of the woods yet. Getting early childhood education right sets a good foundation on which to build. Jews and Asians did this from the get-go and so should Blacks and Hispanics today. Creative innovations like Montessori and Charter school models should be encouraged. Religious institutions should also be supported by the State because they make a significant contribution to society.
In related matters, here is the tale of a female trombonist that was used extensively in marketing materials by her big, fancy music school to demonstrate their “diverse” student body, aka lack of female students in the jazz program. She received horrible treatment overall and it is not atypical for females in music programs. https://medium.com/@kaliamariev/token-girl-564457c86f13
Back to the bias vs development narratives. We need to address the gigantic skills gap that keeps the supply of qualified candidates for colleges so low.
I have far too many thoughts on this to be able to communicate them all fully, with the necessary nuance and depth. That disclaimer aside... I listened to the entire podcast AND read Roland Fryer's NYT piece first, BTW.
Easy stuff first. Those who decry the SCOTUS majority decision, including the members of the SCOTUS who dissented, have to believe one thing. Black and Latino students are not now, and will never be, capable of competing with white, and by extension, Asian students, on the basis of supposedly meritocratic rubrics. That is a startling admission, but absolutely factual! It is also depressing. Even if you believe that historical reasons justify supposed differences in performance against current meritocratic rubrics, one simply has to believe these differences are fixable. Or are we saying, again, that Black and Latino students can never measure up? Are we saying, conversely, that Asian students are (genetically) intellectually superior? If not, then no justification can be found for continuing to admit Blacks and Latino students at lower performance quartiles. None. Zero.
And, if that is true, the best course of action, the ONLY truly informed and egalitarian alternative, is to fix the issue. That includes no longer using the ostensible affirmative action. Fryer's ideas are good in this regard, but I wonder if it cannot be done more simply. Asians did not ascend to ostensible academic prominence due to feeder schools. (As an obvious aside, Blacks did not ascend to dominate the NBA due to special dribbling academies either. 😁) Simply put, remove the guardrails for everyone and let's see what happens. We Black folks can close any gap we desire, and we don't need virtue signaling, protective benevolence narrative encumbered, white people to nurture us along. That might sound salty, but it is what it is. I stand by it.
So, the simple answer to Glenn's question about why Jackson, in her dissent, did not focus on the 14th amendment and the constitutional questions is addressed in paragraph 2 of her dissent:
"JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR has persuasively established that nothing in the Constitution or Title VI prohibits institutions from taking race into account to ensure the racial di- versity of admits in higher education. I join her opinion without qualification. I write separately to expound upon the universal benefits of considering race in this context, in response to a suggestion that has permeated this legal action from the start. "
Anything any justice writes is fair game for criticism. But if one is going to criticize I don't think it is fair to ignore the justice's own explanation.
At oral argument in this very case, Jackson did make the originalist case for a 14th Amendment that is not color blind. Agree or disagree with her points, it is a simple fact that she made them.
Justice Thomas, by the way, did his own argument a great disservice by choosing to make the point that, during Reconstruction, the term "freedman" was a race-neutral description of status, ignoring the contemporaneous evidence that the term was used interchangably with racial classifications, that it was used to describe Black Americans from the north who had not themselves been enslaved, and that there is precious little if any historical evidence that the term was ever applied to White people. He didn't need to go there to make the same argument, and by doing so he undercut his own credibility.
as far as universities are concerned, can anyone explain what the qualatative difference between an ivy league and state university education is?
Dr. Loury,
The term "Affirmative Action" has been highjacked by racists. It arose in the 1960s when the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department reviewed what companies and educational institutions were doing to combat racism in hiring/admissions. All of the entities reviewed pointed proudly to policy statements that made use of race in decisions forbidden.
The policy statements were window dressing in practice. Racial discrimination against people of color still took place in violation of the policies with no consequences. The attorneys in the Civil Rights Division announced that policy statements by themselves were not enough; it was necessary to ACT AFFIRMATIVELY to broaden the talent pool through such measures as advertising in publications of interest to the underrepresented minorities, holding recruiting events in minority neighborhoods, schools and churches, and soliciting highly qualified individuals from underrepresented groups to apply.
Broadening the talent pool was a goal no one with a measurable IQ could oppose. At some point affirmative action, a logical and admirable undertaking, was stolen and its meaning perverted to the opposite, racial preferences. The authoritarian Left has been allowed to define terms of discussion for too long in too many fora.
Any chance we invest in schools and give children a proper education that encourages logic and thinking and challenges and athletics?
Or should we continue funding world wide war?
Feel free to call me crazy, its just a thought.
Loved the idea put forward by Roland Fryer. Never gonna happen. Our colleges are so protective of their endowments that they would not actually use the built up assets for anything other than to hand them to their investment professionals so they can make more tax exempt money with the funds. Sorry to be so cynical
Affirmative Legacy
We were waiting for their reaction and our two professors did not disappoint. I honestly think the topic of Affirmative Action is subjective because I feel that there are many blacks who are not aware of it works. I also think there are people who just go along with the group who favors it because it's the black thing to do.
Glenn has a good point about those legacy admissions. If your family has been donating to the university for generations, they would like a return on their investment. Admitting my grandson can be seen as fulfiling a financial quota. But violating the Constitutional rights of one racial group to favor another group is a whole other ball game.
That Roland Fryer idea about development is the right thing to do. If enough people actually cared about the development of blacks, they would follow that formula of building schools and programs to prepare kids who would like to enter and compete at those major universities.
Good discussion. Some interesting points of view.
I am curious as to when brown hispanics became part the group that "needs" the protection of affirmative action. There are many groups that have suffered from social animus since the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 14th amendment. What is special about brown hispanics?
tldr: Actual white support for reparations is far lower than how they may like to talk about it and if push came to shove would get barely any support from whites.
Glenn, you ask about the Harvard/UNC cases’ potential effects in reparations, and I agree that the conservative six would never allow it at a national (or state/local**) level. But I’d like to offer a different approach. I think the vast majority of white America has no interest in reparations and would—mostly silently—rebel against any meaningfully large attempt at a wealth-transfer reparations measure, and vote any backers out if it actually seemed imminent. For support, I offer myself as a mostly-liberal white guy who moves in center-left-to-very-left circles, and I appeal to the Maher-tesian “I don’t know it for a fact … I just know it’s true” maxim. For center and right whites it’s a nonstarter. Among lefty whites I think agreement with reparations is no deeper than what face-saving requires—black people bring it up and whites get afraid of being called racist and are pissing themselves, to use John’s beautiful imagery, so they tepidly agree. I almost never hear lefty whites—in “mixed company”—raise reparations on their own and full-throatedly endorse it like those whites will do with talk of systematic racism or police oppression or even white supremacy (be that endorsement performative or sincere). With reparations they mostly just nod along to what their black friends say. Among groups of just whites I may have heard reparations raised maybe once or twice ever in my memory. In a super liberal city I could see whites feeling like they “have to” go along with blacks’ (or other “people of colors’”) reparations talk and maybe even city councilor types would vote with secret reluctance to avoid being called a racist. But I don’t see whites other than the most theatrically-performative-anti-racist die hards doing much active to push a measure through. Why such non-support? It’s simple: as much as whites may genuinely support racial preferences or police reform etc. etc., the idea of their money being taken from their pockets to be redistributed based on race is, at a brute fiscal level, has no appeal whatsoever. Because philosophically, however much they may buy in to systematic racism and acknowledge white privilege, it strikes whites (maybe whose ancestors owned slaves or were here in the 1800’s, and especially those descended from post-1865 immigrants) that having their money taken and given to blacks, when slavery ended almost 160 years ago, strikes as irreducibly illogical and at a more important gut/heart level entirely unfair.
**Assuming conditions like standing and jurisdiction are met.
I don’t think many Black people were surprised by the SCITUS decision. Now let’s do an episode about teaching the Tulsa Race Massacre without mentioning race. Follow that with the dismissal of the lawsuit brought by survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Maybe we could ask the survivors if they think that race was a factor.
For those having fun about Brown-Jackson using flawed numbers from an amicus group, be aware that John Robert’s gutted voting rights in Shelby County v Holder based on bogus numbers.
Shelby County v. Holder
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to stop several southern states from denying African Americans their constitutional right to vote. The law initially required six states — Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia — to get federal approval for their election laws and any contemplated changes. The original act expired after five years, but Congress renewed the landmark civil rights law repeatedly and, in 2006, extended it another 25 years.
In a 2013 case called Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, determined that it was no longer necessary to keep the six states under federal oversight. America had changed, the court concluded. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, called the “extraordinary and unprecedented” requirements of the Voting Rights Act outdated and unfair.
To illustrate his point, Roberts constructed a chart and published it in the body of the opinion. It compared voter registration rates for whites and blacks from 1965 and 2004 in the six southern states subject to special oversight. Roberts assembled his chart from data in congressional reports produced when lawmakers last renewed the act. The data displayed clearly that registration gaps between blacks and whites had shrunk dramatically.
But some of the numbers Roberts included in his chart were wrong.
The chart suggested that rates of registration for blacks in 2004 had matched or even outstripped those for whites. But Roberts used numbers that counted Hispanics as white, including many Hispanics who weren’t U.S. citizens and could not register to vote, which had the effect of inaccurately lowering the rate for white registration.
There is no question great strides had been made in black voter registration in Georgia, which reached 64.2 percent in 2004. However, white registration was 68 percent, not 63.5 percent, as Roberts’ chart claimed. The rate of registration for whites exceeded that of blacks by 4 percent, rather than trailing it.
Similarly, the chief justice’s chart asserted that in Virginia, the rate of registration for whites was just 10 percent higher than the rate of registration for blacks, a narrowing that would have reflected enormous progress. But the actual gap, removing erroneously counted Hispanics, was 14.2 percent.
The argument Roberts was making — that the progress in southern states had been so substantial that there was no longer a need for the U.S. Department of Justice’s exacting oversight — might have remained persuasive. But the data he used as evidence was not true.
How did Roberts arrive at his numbers?
Roberts had relied on a report generated by the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2006. The committee’s staffers went to the right source: the U.S. Census Bureau’s post-election survey in 2004. The survey provides estimates of voter registration and turnout by state, gender, race and ethnicity, and citizenship.
https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-errors-are-not-hard-to-find
Given your innumeracy, if I were you I wouldn’t trust my own estimation of my wealth.
Just saying
Well-done, brethren 👏👏👏
An elderly black physician I knew married an east asian woman. She cleaned his bank account out and transported his Mercedes with her back to India.