Thursday, February 8: Ward Connerly responds to commenters’ accusations of hypocrisy.
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Note: How could I have forgotten to link to Heather Mac Donald’s must-read article, “Elites to Anti-Affirmative-Action Voters: Drop Dead”? She writes:
After Prop. 209’s passage, UC Berkeley, like the rest of the UC system, “went through a depression figuring out what to do,†says Robert Laird, Berkeley’s pro-preferences admissions director from 1993 to 1999. The system’s despair was understandable. It had relied on wildly unequal double standards to achieve its smattering of “underrepresented minorities,†especially at Berkeley and UCLA, the most competitive campuses. The median SAT score of blacks and Hispanics in Berkeley’s liberal arts programs was 250 points lower (on a 1,600-point scale) than that of whites and Asians. This test-score gap was hard to miss in the classroom. Renowned Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle, who judges affirmative action “a disaster,†recounts that “they admitted people who could barely read.â€
The downward trajectory of those students was inevitable, Searle says. “You’d be delighted to find that your introductory philosophy class looked like the United Nations, but that salt-and-pepper effect was lost after six to eight weeks,†he recalls. “There was a huge dropout rate of affirmative-action admits in my classes by mid-terms. No one had taught them the need to go to class. So we started introducing BS majors, in an effort to make the university ready for them, rather than making them ready for the university.†Searle recalls a black studies class before his that was “as segregated as Mississippi in the 1950s.†One day, Searle recounts, the professor had written on the blackboard that a particular tribe in Africa “wore colorful clothing.â€
Read it all, and applaud measures like Proposition 209 and Proposal 2.
Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity put in a freedom of information request and found out what’s really going on at the government-supported University of Michigan.
Yes! Ban racial profiling…including racial profiling in government hiring and admissions. (Hat tip: Discriminations)
*** Scroll down for updates***
It’s been a long time since one of my race preferences posts generated 100+ comments.
Comments tend to build on posts where commenters who care about the issue drill down into certain aspects of the issue. That happened on a recent post about the Supreme Court’s decision not to reverse the 6th Circuit’s order to Michigan state universities to begin implementing Proposal 2 without delay. Something about the post struck a chord, and the “debate” kept going.
I’m pleased to see so many comments, of course. But even if my posts produced zero, plenty of readers who’ve never and likely will never comment benefit from reading a different and much-needed perspective. I once wrote that if this blog received no or much fewer comments, I’d still be here, updating and occupying my corner of the blogosphere. As long as I’m expressing myself well and sharing what I believe are important ideas, I’m satisfied. 
Today I want to cover the race preferences issue from a different perspective. First, read “The Michigan Win,” by Ward Connerly, the man behind three state campaigns that successfully banned race preferences in government hiring and admissions. He’s confident that ballot initiatives against preferences are the way to go, which is why preference proponents, like most liberals, prefer the courts. Lowered-standards policies are deeply entrenched in America, so opponents need to be prepared for a long fight.
Check out Connerly’s semi-autobiographical book, Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences. (read my review)
What struck me in Connerly’s article was this statement (emphasis added): “It appears that ‘white guilt,’ as Shelby Steele describes the phenomenon, has just about run its course with respect to the people’s tolerance for race preferences.”
You may know that Shelby Steele, one of those “black conservatives,” wrote a book titled, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Steele argues that blacks, who once embraced personal responsibility and independence, now prefer to accept government handouts and to use skin color for gain and guilt. Whites, feeling guilty about past discrimination and subjugation of blacks, excuse certain destructive behaviors and encourage the handout mentality. It offends me beyond words that some whites may judge me by lower standards. But that’s the culture we live in, and policies like race preferences are directly to blame. Not only do some (few? many?) whites judge blacks by lower standards, blacks judge themselves by lower standards.
It’s kind of sick, really. 
The discussions about race on this blog are unusual. People usually don’t talk about policies like “affirmative action” in mixed company. If they don’t have anything good to say about it, most don’t say anything at all, especially if blacks are nearby. They prefer the distance of an online forum, and I’m happy to provide it. Today I’d like to do something different. Rather than arguing for or against race preferences, I’d like to hear from white readers who may have a tinge of “white guilt.”
I have to do a little segregating here, so don’t hold it against me.
Questions for white readers (Be honest!):
1) What have you done or thought lately that appears to be based on white guilt?
2) If you once suffered from white guilt but now you’re over it, how/why did you get over it?
Questions for black readers (Be honest!):
1) Do you loath government-mandated, lowered-standards policies like race preferences as much as I do?
2) If not, why do you believe race preferences are necessary in America?
Update: In response to the first set of questions, Eugene Levitzky wrote:
(1) One thing I did recently that was based on white guilt was to allow for a black employee to get away with behavior I did not allow others to get away with. That is, I did not comment on his behavior and did not speak to him as I do to others about ethics in the workplace or did not talk to him about how his behavior affected others on the job. Being Christian, I had a tremendous call to say something to him, to set him straight. But 20 plus years of my former liberalism kicked in and I made excuses for his behavior.
(2) I am mostly over any white guilt I may have had (except for the above mentioned case) and the reason for this is Christ. What kind of man am I if I treat someone differently because of their race? I no longer cringe at the way I often abased myself in certain social situations and at the way I made “excuses†for bad behavior or criminal behavior because of someone’s skin color. I feel it is a sin to give the finger to someone in traffic, but I still do it when my anger boils over. But I feel it is an even greater sin to not give the finger to someone because that someone is black. Why, even in my anger, would I differentiate? I know I’m giving a silly example but I’ve often thought about this — why did I treat someone differently, whether I was being kind or being cruel? Because I was a “racialist.†I was reducing a man’s character to his race. I was hamstringing my relations with people by putting blacks on a pedestal and self-censoring my speech in fear of letting what would be an offensive word or two slip and hurt someone’s feelings.
Resources:
- Repeating History – brief background on affirmative action
- White Guilt and the Western Past
- Racism — fact or fiction?
