As Justice Alito's concurring opinion in Ricci documented in amusing detail, Frank Ricci and colleagues were the victims of blatant racial discrimination by a black power broker and his allied white mayor in New Haven.
Stanford Law Professor Richard Thompson Ford says, that, well, equal protection of the laws isn't the point of civil rights legislation. Sure, the laws include a lot of colorblind rhetoric, but the whole point is to benefit blacks at the expense of whites, so it's a dirty trick for the Supreme Court to read the laws and the Constitution literally and apply them evenhandedly. He writes in Slate:
Stanford Law Professor Richard Thompson Ford says, that, well, equal protection of the laws isn't the point of civil rights legislation. Sure, the laws include a lot of colorblind rhetoric, but the whole point is to benefit blacks at the expense of whites, so it's a dirty trick for the Supreme Court to read the laws and the Constitution literally and apply them evenhandedly. He writes in Slate:
The plaintiffs in Ricci were undoubtedly sympathetic: hardworking public servants—17 of them white, one Hispanic—who expected that the exam they studied for and did well on would determine their eligibility for moving up the ranks. But their legal argument is the latest in a long-standing campaign to turn civil rights laws against themselves. There's a striking progression in the attacks on civil rights. In the early 1970s, affirmative action was widely considered to be a logical extension of civil rights principles: Even President Nixon—a man not known for his enlightened racial attitudes—supported it. But by the end of the decade, affirmative action was under attack as reverse discrimination. And now we see the next step in the march against civil rights with the part of federal civil rights law—Title VII—called "disparate impact" that prohibits employers from using promotional or hiring procedures that screen out minorities unless they can prove that the procedure is closely job-related.My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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33 comments:
It's time for equality.
End affirmative action now.
Everyone seems to be using this new slogan "It's time for equality. End affirmative action now."
Pretty catchy.
Pass it on.
Use it.
Comment about how many people are using it.
It summarizes everything. The ONE was elected and ushered in a new era. It's time. It's time for equality.
The most important aspect of the slogan is that it appeals to the decent people in the center. It's obviously right and it acknowledges how they believe Obama's election was an important milestone and how the old civil rights era is over, and it's time for a new era, the equality era.
Pass it on, its going to be big.
I get the distinct impression that being mindless is a precondition to writing for Slate. I have never, not once, seen anything written there which was not the worst sort of left-wing agitprop.
You can't even get away from it watching Wimbledon on ESPN. I was looking though a copy of Brad Gilbert’s first book, Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis, and was amused to see this:
"In order to follow the plan succesfully, you need to understand what’s going on in the match, with your game, your opponent’s game, and with the interaction of the two. My coach at Pepperdine, Allen Fox, used to tell me “always be asking yourself during a match who’s doing what to whom.” That means knowing how and why points are being won and lost. It means knowing what’s going on out on the court."
pp.69-70
http://books.google.com/books?id=-ycjQqzdQugC&printsec=frontcover
Since Gilbert coached both Agassi and Roddick to the no. 1 ranking, and is generally considered the best coach of the last 15 years, I guess it turns out Leninst political doctrine is a lot more effective on the tennis court than one might have expected.
Extra credit if you can point out what else Gilbert and Fox have in common.
Only an evil racist would insist on a modicum of internal consistency in the rule of law...
colorbling rhetoric
Best mixed metaphor evar!
Professor Ford is black of course he is not going to like the Ricci decision.
Could Professor Richard Thompson Ford please define civil rights? I thought civil rights are the rights we have as citizens. How did we get disparate impact from equal protection and equality before the law?
Anonymous, you are quite right. You can buy the slogan on hats, bumper stickers, t-shirts, etc., here
http://www.zazzle.com/rexfmay+affirmative+action+equality+gifts
I like how race in the U.S. is still construed and constructed as "black vs. white", like it's 1971. Chinese, Jews, Koreans, Armenians, Persians, Hindoos, Lebanese, Vietnamese, and the like are atop whitey - his irrelevance is pretty much assured at this stage - and Senor Down South has kicked the Dark Man to the curb in every sense of the phrase.
That URL didn't work, somehow. Try clicking
HERE
Richard Ford Thompson, a black man, http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Richard%20Thompson%20Ford&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
and legal scholar at Stanford, assuredly knows better. If we all devolve into booster groups looking for a leg up on other groups based on race, sex, and class, then none of our laws are going to be honestly interpreted.
There is something hopeful to glean from this. If leftists were really concerned with preserving affirmative action, they wouldn't be advancing such idiotic arguments in any public fora. So at some level, they must honestly believe that pablum, because this case is obviously and completely indefensible. It isn't a case of some monstrous, plotting evil.
Anyone else notice the parallels shared by Ricci and the "same-sex marriage" cases?
One side, like a disobedient schoolchild ignoring the instructions given with an assignment, brings to the deciding official less than what was demanded. Then, when the desired privilege is understandably denied, this party claims its "rights" have been violated.
Much, maybe most, of what is called "civil rights" is in truth uncivil demands.
I think this is only tangentially about whites using AA to get jobs. What's really behind complaints about the result of the Ricci case is the fear that whites are starting to think ethnically (again). Blacks have an (understandable to some degree) fear of this for historical reasons, but white liberals are likely terrified because it may entail choosing sides, and neither side wants to accept them.
"I have never, not once, seen anything written there which was not the worst sort of left-wing agitprop."
Well for a little while in late 2007, Saletan's "Liberal Creationism" articles contradict that. Though the subsequent backlash from other Slate.com writers and Saletan's later censure of Sailer might discount that fleeting (and hopeful) display of candor.
You have to wonder what would have happened if this happened in a primarily hispanic/black fire department and the 15 who passed were 14 hispanics and 1 black. Would the test be invalidated?
We are going to start seeing this, ya know.
Wow, 3,240 hits on Google already for the phrase "It's time for equality."
This thing is taking off like a rocket.
but white liberals are likely terrified because it may entail choosing sides, and neither side wants to accept them.
Judging from where the particularly nasty comments about the Ricci case are coming from (e.g. Emily Bazelon and others), "white liberals" might not be the best name for the group most afraid of increasing white ethnic identification.
Richard Thompson Ford writes: "Even President Nixon—a man not known for his enlightened racial attitudes—supported" affirmative action.
Actually, Nixon was known during his political career as a progressive Republican, especially on race issues. The Link in Ford's article is to a recent release of Nixon tapes in which Nixon uses racial slurs. But if we had private tapes of JFK, Teddy Kennedy, Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Obama, Biden, Hillary, etc., what would they reveal?
(Ford's link is to a Christopher Hitchens article in which Hitch rehashes his lifelong loathing of Nixon and Kissinger, all tied to the Vietnam War, which Hitch opposed, although he now supports the much less justifiable American wars in the Middle East. Must be part of some Trotskyite dialectic. We've always been at war with Eastasia. We've never been at war with Eastasia.)
Our low-IQ populations will never submit to the inevitability of the meritocracy.
And that is why we can safely say that multiracial states are a bad idea. Fair enough we tried it, it hasn't worked.
Low achieving groups are unhappy and high achieving groups attract resentment. What reasonable person would disagree?
An interesting point is raised in the 7/2/09 WSJ article Sotomayor Helped Push Minority Cases (link may rot). 1980-1992, Sotomayor was a board member and holder of various ranking executive positions at the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.
--- begin WSJ excerpt ---
In a class-action complaint, the [PRLDEF] alleged that New York City's police sergeant's exam was "discriminatory and not job related," according to the group's 1987 report. To settle the litigation, the city agreed to provide "positions of sergeant consistent with the percentage of Hispanic test-takers. As a result almost 100 Hispanics were promoted, over twice the number that would have been promoted without the settlement," the group reported, adding that they received "backpay and retroactive seniority." To reach that number, the settlement involved promoting minority officers ahead of whites who had higher scores.
--- end WSJ excerpt ---
Here is a natural experiment for evaluating New Haven's and Ricci's respective claims about testing that has run nearly twenty years!
(A) ~45 Hispanics who passed the test and were hired;
(B) ~55 Hispanics who flunked and were hired anyway;
(C) Non-Hispanic whites who passed and were hired.
How did groups A, B, and C perform over the next two decades? Look at performance evaluations, promotions, citations, complaints, disciplinary actions -- whatever metrics are used to evaluate a cop's career.
Compared to A and B, C might have benefitted from pro-white racism and good-old-boy networking. And C might have been hurt by informal and formal preferences given to NAMs.
But such factors shouldn't influence the relative performance of A and B. These Hispanic sergeants would have been equally affected by race-biased measures.
Mayor DeStefano and Rev. Kimber ought to know that the 1987 flunkees performed just as well as those who passed.
Ricci and his co-plaintiffs ought to know that the quota-sergeants fared worse over time than the ones promoted due to their higher scores.
So which is it?
Powered with an n of about 50 per group, well-controlled, 20-years runtime--this data should be a snap to analyze.
I wonder which sociology department or civil-rights group will be first to secure the data and publish their findings?
Anon, I'm not a fan of Jared Taylor, but I think White Identity politics is in fact inevitable.
In Britain, the BNP has made great strides, by doing something impossible here -- going on a socialist bent, accepting the defacto socialist nature of the British economy and society, and offering a "better deal" for White Women to peel them off the coalition of non-Whites, Women, gays etc. National Health being the main issue -- arguing that kicking out immigrants allows a "proper" National Health system. Now it's a nightmare.
As government runs EVERYTHING, from hiring, firing, GM, Chrysler, banks, corporations and their decisions on promotions, hiring, firing, and every aspect of daily life from mandatory "green" 3 minute showers to health care (Blacks, Gays, Hispanics, and Women first, Straight White Men last), the requirement to embrace identity politics is a matter of survival. Pure and simple.
During good times, men could accept AA and the opportunity loss, because rocking the boat was too expensive, particularly in the mating market (women are solidly in favor of AA). Now in brutal times, economically, with Obama's finger on every scale, that's not affordable. Hence the identity politics.
Complicated by Gender. It took quite a lot, basically women being shoved aside into junior partnership by aggressive Muslims, for the BNP's strategy to reach play, and there's still resistance among women who want to be fashionable. Which is most of them -- the full recession has not hit women yet, and will hit them late and least (being mostly government jobs unaffected by immigration).
[*I am aware of TGGP's data, out of the GSS, but it's not dimensioned by time and age of respondent, I'll have a full analysis later of women vs. immigration later. It is true, however that women vote Dem far higher than men across all age ranges, and outside of nurses face little immigrant competition and benefit from cheap nannies/gardeners. You should never use the Webtool, always download the data, dump into MySQL or whatever, examine each observation by age/race/gender. Some years have only 6 observations of White men age 55, for example.]
(Yes I am also Whiskey).
"John Seiler said...
(Ford's link is to a Christopher Hitchens article in which Hitch rehashes his lifelong loathing of Nixon and Kissinger, all tied to the Vietnam War, which Hitch opposed, although he now supports the much less justifiable American wars in the Middle East. Must be part of some Trotskyite dialectic. We've always been at war with Eastasia. We've never been at war with Eastasia.)"
Yeah, leave it to Hitchens to drag up poor old Dick Nixon. He's been dead for 15 years, and disgraced for 35 years. Let it go, Chris. Have a drink. Have another.
I've often thought that socialists and liberals have been frozen in their beliefs my the mesmerizing, 5 o'clock shadowed scowl of old tricky Dick. As if they could never shake the identification of him with their hated, square parents, and how damned oppressive they were (making them clean up their rooms, turn down their stereo, sniffing their breath for pot, etc.) and, by extension, the whole fabric of the old pre 1970s America. It's part of the whole politics-as-fashion-statement phenomenon.
Testing 99 said: "I think White Identity politics is in fact inevitable [...] As government runs EVERYTHING, from hiring, firing, GM, Chrysler, banks, corporations and their decisions on promotions, hiring, firing, and every aspect of daily life [...] the requirement to embrace identity politics is a matter of survival. Pure and simple."
This is a very interesting point being made. I have often seen it asserted that race and gender preferences did not imact much on non-minority men, because they still had a large and vibrant, meritocratic private sector in which to compete. But as the private sector dwindles to nothing, this escape hatch will also disappear. Men being men, it is plausible that this change would indeed trigger resistance.
"And that is why we can safely say that multiracial states are a bad idea. Fair enough we tried it, it hasn't worked.
Low achieving groups are unhappy and high achieving groups attract resentment. What reasonable person would disagree?"
The sad part is that it doesn't even take innate widespread racial differences to cause this. All it would take is, say, a discrepancy in intelligence between White firefighters in New Haven and Black firefighters in New Haven. Only if we could all manage to "not see race" like Stephen Colbert could a multiracial society be free of racial strife. Sometimes we can be friends off the court but we're always wearing our uniforms.
All I can say is... I hope Richard Thompson Ford is right that this is the beginning of the end of law-mandated discrimination!
Re: socialism and identity politics
Social democracy does, in fact, 'work' in ethnically and culturally homogenous nations: everybody holds up their end of the social safety net because, hey, we're all family. (Long term of course, net tax consumption becomes disproportionate so the welfare state must resort to culturally destructive fiscal and social policies to make up the difference.)
If we all devolve into booster groups looking for a leg up on other groups based on race, sex, and class, then none of our laws are going to be honestly interpreted.
Correct, and when this "who - whom" society gets in full swing, what you know won't amount to a hill of beans compared to who you know. Which means the Anglo-Saxon business ideals of transparency and impersonal exchange will become a thing of the past. People will do business only with family because non-family you'll get cheated and chiseled over every cent. And if you're not in close enough consanguinity with local law enforcement, you are just SOL.
Like Southern Italy, basically.
This was so far detached from the facts of the case, it's not even polemic. It's a lie.
In the early 1970s, affirmative action was widely considered to be a logical extension of civil rights principles: Even President Nixon—a man not known for his enlightened racial attitudes—supported it.
The way "affirmative action" was first billed, it was "affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin." In other words, it was perfectly consistent with ultimately color-blind treatment of job applicants, school applicants, etc. So there was no big opposition when Presidents Kennedy and Johnson mandated its use. But contrary to Professor Ford's suggestion, "affirmative action" instantly became controversial when President Nixon started using the term to mean use of racial preferences, and the strong and vocal opposition to the practice that began in the 70s has remained with us ever since.
It is true, however that women vote Dem far higher than men across all age ranges
As usual with t99, what he says is true is not in fact true. Women skew Dem, but not "far higher".
Social democracy does, in fact, 'work' in ethnically and culturally homogenous nations: everybody holds up their end of the social safety net because, hey, we're all family.
Hayek liked to assert this and modern libertarians like to tell themselves it's true. But there is no evidence that it is actually true. The distinctly non-homogenous EU and US both manage to have "social democracy". The US had a lot less of it back in the days when it was culturally homogenous.
Anonymous - check your logic. You're attacking a conclusion I didn't draw.
The 'EU' is just a supra-national collection of bureaucrats. The homogenous member states practice kinder, gentler national socialism. (Also as I pointed out, this is not sustainable in the long term, even in the most communal-minded places like Scandinavia.)
The example of the US is a backhanded proof of my point. The US had no welfare state for years because Anglo-Celts of a strongly individualist bent built the place.
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