Track Mangoes

When discussing Affirmative Action (AA), I have often been led to believe that the process under examination is nothing more than a tiebreaker. It is a good thing, given this country’s racial history, that in a situation in which two candidates, of equal ability, apply for a admission into a school that the admission be given to the candidate whose skin color is something other-than-white. This is a good thing, and a healthy thing. But, if this were what AA was, a tip of the scale, then the entire debate on AA would be quite petty.

Very few people deny the racist history of America. Some deny the racist present of America. I deny neither while still recognizing that the dichotomized tip-of-the-scale scenario is a simplified version of what AA really is. In discussing AA we have to discuss a range of factors and qualifications, quotas, standardized testing, and the merit of the applicant. Very seldom do we engage in an examination of these kinds of qualifications. We simply don’t want to.

Being an opponent of AA is not part of a sinister conservative agenda. Being an opponent of AA is to acknowledge the problem of racial injustice and posit that AA may not be the best way to solve it; and do it fearless of what liberal Twinkies might think of you.

Data, some of which I will present here, suggests that AA has not worked since the late 80s. I agree with the liberal contention that race is not talked about enough in higher education, but I argue that AA's existence is a symptom of that lack of discourse.

The language that liberals use when talking about AA has some rhetorical power that, above all else, has a sort of polarizing tenor. Words like “inequality,” “re-segregation,” “white privilege,” “systemic,” “racist,” and “power,” without being very specific, induce anxiety and guilt. The language itself casts a shadow over any classroom. This kind of language may distract us from the actual logic of the case, distract us from the data.

Another trick that many Queer Theorists have employed, and AA supporters have appropriated, is the usage of narrative in the place of argument. Hampshire’s own faculty panel kicked off with an array of testaments from students about the school’s myriad injustices. This kind of narrative has a populist persuasion, not a cool headed academic rigor. “I am a black lesbian and someone called me a nigger and I was hurt,” someone will say. The audience will gasp. “When I finally found another black lesbian we got together and we were the only black lesbian couple on campus and I was discriminated against.” The audience will gasp again, not really knowing why. (I chuckle at the comment, in awe that people actually believe that at a school where the student body is less than 2000 there should be more than one black lesbian couple. Please). So, whenever I hear someone say “Where I’m coming from…” or “In my experience…” or worse yet “don’t fuck with my story,” I know indeed that person has nothing to say at all. “I was raped” “White people are evil” “I can’t marry the woman I love.” This person hides behind pathos, the emotional appeal, because he/she can’t construct a logical argument, or he/she can but wishes not to. The logical argument he/she can posit has not the rhetorical power of the narrative, the narrative which causes an entire audience to feel like they cannot oppose AA, anti-discrimination legislation, and gay marriage without “offending” a black lesbian.

The combination of polarizing vocabulary and the glib use of narrative feeds into a larger rhetorical tool deemed the Doctrine of Liberal Infallibility. Liberals can say whatever they want because their entire mode of discourse entails sticking their fingers at conservatives. "My husband died in the twin towers," turns into "look at what America has done to me." A conservative can say “historically free-market economy has been good for developing countries” while a liberal will in turn say “CAPITALIST PIG!” Such acrobatics have no place in the academic world. They cause us overlook important data. Data that we know is significant but are afraid to address.

But how, I ask, can data be offensive?

How is it offensive that, in 1991, in terms of all the students who were admitted to a particular selective law schools in CA, that there were 421 black students, 24 of whom were admitted according to what the qualification for white and Asian students were, meaning that the rest, if it had not been for AA, would not have made it in? Is that statistic offensive in and of itself? The bleeding heart liberal will take my simple comment and say “yes! He is suggesting that black students are not as smart as white students!” but this is not the case. I simply mean to outline the degree to which racial preference operates in the admissions process.

At UC Berkley after 1988, attrition rate ran in lockstep with SAT scores for black students meaning that the lower the SAT score the higher the chance the student had of dropping out. Now, I respect the assertion that standardized tests might not mean anything. But, if anything, in the case of UC Berkley, SAT scores over-predicted the degree to which black students graduated. Richard Sander has noted that with black students in over 163 law schools, because so many of them were admitted for a commitment to diversity and not on the basis of merit, that over half of them failed the Bar Examination.

In 1998 proposition 209 banned the use of racial preference in university admissions in California. In what the liberal media called the “aftermath” of proposition 209, black students saw a 20% increase in the number of students who, not only graduated, but went on to receive PhD’s. Is this a bad thing? According to a liberal, any situation in which AA has been removed is a bad one, irrespective of the outcome: read, higher matriculation.

Proponents of AA noted that in the “aftermath” hundreds of minority students with 4.0 GPAs and high SAT scores were not admitted. They correlated this “injustice” to proposition 209. But they completely neglected the even higher percentage of white students with equal GPA and SAT scores who were not admitted because of the rising number of total college applicants. Who is cookin' the books now?

Race-Blind/colorblind ideology has failed in personal discourse (it's silly to think that we will solve small pox by being small pox blind), but it may be what we need for university admissions. Race-Blind admissions exposed minority students to a level standard across the board that, yes I’ll admit it, put them at a disadvantage for entrance into elite, I repeat, elite schools. But with a higher number of minority students funneling into UC San Diego rather than UC Berkely, graduation rates increased, grades increased, MA’s increased, and (as previously noted) PhDs increased for minority students. Yet, the liberals whine that because they are being excluded from the “best” institutions, racism is still rampant. Can we, in good faith, really pin proposition 209 on racist plots?

I’m not arguing for re-segregation. Nor am I arguing for the abolition of civil rights laws. Nor am I arguing that we should “keep all those Negroes over there with all the other black people.” But, staying true to my Libertarianism, I am arguing that AA has provided yet another example of how the federal government has tried to ameliorate society through legislation and failed. Privatization has historically been good for the economy, and it has also been good for Education.

AA began as a way to combat open racism in higher education. Then it became a way to promote diversity. But today, AA has become a way to admit unqualified students into elite schools. Open racism is waning these days. Diversity is bunk. Can preferential policies deliver on the promise of AA?

Take the case of the sciences. Not many minority students go on to take on a degree in the sciences. 5.3% of the country’s science degrees come from black students, while they make up approximately 9% of the polytechnic college enrollment. Minority students aren’t less interested in science (in fact minority students were, on average, more interested in majoring in the sciences than whites were). So we must assume that something else is at play. In a study done by Rogers Elliot, it was found that at four different elite schools the mean SAT math score for black students admitted was 2.6 standard deviations below the mean for white students (to give you perspective, if you haven't taken STAT, 3 standard deviations would be about the difference from the mean score to 0).

Of course, liberals, with their stripped pants and flowered shirts, will fall back on the argument that SAT scores do not reflect academic ability. (Okay okay. Calm down.) My basic assumption for this argument is that grades and SAT scores predict, to some modicum of a degree, students’ performance. I think we can agree that, while SAT scores might not mean everything, they mean "something." It may be safe to say that if schools admit students with low grades on the basis of racial preference, they will, on the average, receive equally low grades in college. And indeed, in Elliot’s study, he found that at these four elite schools black students interested in science had, on the average, a full GPA lower than their white counterparts. Such a performance gap makes it difficult for a student to find the motivation to continue a degree in science. This is why, Elliot found, at these schools one a third of the students who started a degree in science actually finished a degree in science, a rate twice the that of whites.

What I wish to illustrate here is not that black students are incapable of receiving a degree in science, but that, statistically speaking, the total value of your SAT score has less to do with your future performance than the relative value of your SAT score in junction with your other classmates. If this is true, then preferential policy, by definition, does not work, and in the case of these four elite schools, has not worked.

Upon examining the number of MA’s and PhD’s in science given out by historically black universities, you would find that an alarmingly higher number of students go on to peruse and receive these degrees than they do in the 4 elite institutions in Elliot’s study. The situation AA has created is, then, that elite schools that have the pick of the best performing students of color are getting them, even though these elite schools have the poorest track record for maintaining students of color. On the other hand, universities that have the best track record for graduating students of color are getting the middling students. AA has ruined a system of privatized education by socializing equality. As has been proved again and again, socializing equality does not work.

Racial diversity is a trope that takes attention away from socioeconomic diversity, something which an institution by its nature can never achieve. The fact is, no matter how you jigger the statistics, skin color does not correlate to economic status the way it did in the 50’s, and, as such, cannot merit preference by itself. Of the 257 African American freshman who entered UC Berkeley in the last class before proposition 209, only 83 had parents whose total yearly income was $30,000 a year or less. No less than 174 of the 257 came from homes where the parents’ income was at least $40,000, and usually much more. Is this what liberals mean when they talk about diversity? A bunch of rich black people going to school with a bunch of rich white snobs? Diversity indeed.

Liberal hoho’s argue that "Diversity is beneficial for education." Is it? Really? How? Such a correlation is difficult to prove. A commitment to diversity alone is not enough to sustain preferential policy (not to mention it is, by definition, racist). So far our "commitment to diversity" has done harm than good.

I defy liberal mollies to ask themselves, what does it mean to be “disadvantaged?” What do we mean when we say “under-privileged?” In the Hampshire teach-in, when a girl with an alternative learning style, got up to ask a question, I saw proponents of Action-Awareness Week snickering at her odd choice of attire. What is this, I ask, but ableism? When a child says he is happy, and a liberal ding-dong tells him he ought not be so for the injustices of the world are great upon him, what is this but ageism?

We are all of us "oppressed." Whatever that means. We all ask for more. Whatever that means. And, we are usually told that we are asking "too much, too soon." This is something pertinent to, but not unique to, people of color. What we choose to do with such adversity is another matter. Personally I do not enjoy the idea of the government having the final say in my agency and I prefer to have the responsibility in my own hands.

Finally, the unsettling “whiteness” of the AA debate suggests to me that grievance is at work here, not discourse. This kind of discourse, addled with ideological tissues, cry-fests, and namby-pamby civil rights jargon, we must remember, is devoted not to action but to guilt-tripping and the power it breeds.

We are not cosmically disadvantaged. And even if we are, what good does it do to superimpose federal regulations to ameliorate said disadvantages? And here is my opinion, completely void of any evidence, but only replete with a hunch: but our adversity, our struggle, our hardship and strife is directly propionate to our genius. I have written on the genius of gay men, here I speak to the genius of people of color. We are better than white people because we must be in order to even survive. But this is no predicament, it is, to me, a gift from the highest corners of heaven.

Victim-centered ideology has failed for feminists in the same way it has failed for African Americans in the same way it has failed for Queers. We can say that women make x percent less than men on the dollar, but if 40% of NYC’s streets have potholes, we do not deem it illegal to drive over twenty miles per hour anywhere in the city. We can, however, take it upon ourselves to learn how to be better drivers and, as a result, the roads are safer. For people with communist tendencies, Liberals have little faith in the human race.

And not of the family-groups kind either. Oh no. The gay side of the immigration debate.

Sigh.

This makes me nervous:






Why has this become the priority for most candidates? Are we going back to the days of Hughey Long? Is Hilary just Father Coughlin in a power skirt? Or is she a Teddy Roosevelt with small hands?

I should also add: Why is she toting herself as working class? Is this the same Hilary that Peter Paul and Simon Lee, not very credible granted, are up in arms about? To me Hilary is a genteel teddy bear with a temper. She may stand for working class values though. More so than Obama. Thoughts?

It's almost 1AM now, but I have some ideas for my first real post, which I will make... later. Given the political atmosphere, it may be "Hey Libertarians: You Are Not Pragmatists"; or, if I'm ambitious I might discuss the social and intellectual implications of academic language. I think I could probably write a book on the latter topic though, so we'll see how I feel. Topics I may also cover include male psychology and sexuality, my take on feminist divides, punctuation, and brief portraits of artists (authors and musicians, mainly). I'm not sure how much time I'm willing to devote to this blog, but I guess we'll find out.

Is that supposed to be surprising? And what does that mean for Obama?In my opinion not much. I was speaking with the café's new dishwarsher, Robin, who has been volunteering at Oregon's OBAMA headquarters, and he tells me the read is pretty clear: Obama is going to win Oregon by a landslide. Most seem to think he will take Kentucky as well.

However, with blacks and whites polarizing more and more each day, I predict the objective of the democratic candidates is going to radically shift from health care and working-class issues to race politics. It's a sad and pathetic macrocosm to Hampshire's "Action Awareness Week."

Joan Walsh writes

Everybody's [democrats] going to have to be more careful in the next few months, in the way they talk about race, while also talking about it. A lot. I don't know how we figure that one out, but we have to. It's a fact that Barack Obama's getting more than 90 percent of the black vote in recent primaries. It's a fact that Hillary Clinton's getting at least 60 percent of the white vote in the same time frame. To unite the party behind the eventual nominee, who is almost certainly Obama, Democrats will have to talk about the motivations behind those numbers, the grievances, the affinities, the hopes, the dreams, and the biases. And most Democrats who've opened their mouths about it this week have done a bad job.

I don't doubt Obama, that wet noodle, has the upper hand now, but I just wonder if he can hold a candle to McCain?