Comments on 'Affirmative Action for the Future'

• Just a Few Points
• Posted by Roger Clegg , President and General Counsel at Center for Equal Opportunity on November 18, 2009 at 7:00am EST

• 1. Some kinds of “affirmative action” are uncontroversial, as a matter of law or policy, like taking positive steps to ensure no discrimination, or recruiting far and wide to ensure the best possible pool of candidates. But affirmative discrimination—favoring some over others because of race—assuredly is controversial.

  2. In this interview, at least, the author does not seem to be very forthcoming in acknowledging that he is defending such discrimination. He is also wrong in calling the various ballot propositions banning it deceptive, and he is being deceptive in suggesting that they banned all affirmative action, since they did not (see point one).

  3. Of the three justifications he gives for affirmative action, the first does not involve discrimination, and the second (his favorite, apparently, based on his answer to the last question) is legally a nonstarter, since the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected general, societal discrimination as an excuse for new, improved discrimination. The diversity rationale has Justice O’Connor’s expiration date on it, and may fall before that, since it is dubious legally and based on flimsy sociological evidence. And do we really want to use race as a proxy for what experiences and viewpoints someone brings to a campus?

  4. But even if you think there are some benefits to affirmative discrimination, one must weigh them against the undeniable costs of such discrimination, and of course there is no mention of them here: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership. In an increasingly multiethnic and multiracial society, we cannot embrace a legal regime that sorts people according to skin color and what country their ancestors came from, and treats some better and others worse depending on what box they have checked.

• Posted by Parent on November 18, 2009 at 9:00am EST

•  

  I would like to thank Roger Clegg for his cogent thoughts on affirmative action, many of which are shared even by political liberals. At one point in my career I was general counsel to a state agency that, among other things, oversaw a minority- and woman-owned business certification process, part of an affirmative action program to increase the number of state contractors from certain racial and ethnic groups. Administering this process involved such activities as having to get the opinion of a professor of geography as to whether Afghanistan is part of “South Asia,” as South Asians were a statutorily-designated affirmative action minority and an Afghani applicant claimed Afghanistan is part of South Asia. The case that caused me to wake up at night shaking with anxiety involved an applicant with Hispanic first and middle names who had been born and raised in Cuba as a Cuban citizen, was a native Spanish speaker, escaped from the Castro regime without a penny to his name, became a professional engineer and started his own successful business. But his Jewish parents had escaped from Nazi Europe, having been sent alone as young teenagers by their families to Cuba, where they built their lives from scratch by hard work while the rest of their families perished in Nazi concentration camps. The “bloodline analysis” on this applicant indicated he did not have ”Hispanic blood,” and he was denied minority certification, a decision upheld by an administrative law judge. I had a hard time distinguishing between the process used by the state agency and that used by the Nazis. This kind of analysis is utterly distasteful no matter what the ultimate purpose, and, in my opinion, is fraught with moral problems. I am glad Roger Clegg continues to articulate these concerns.

   

• affirmative action rationale
• Posted by ind2002 at Pace University on November 18, 2009 at 9:30am EST

• ".....ultimate goals of attaining a colorblind (racially just), a gender-free (sexually just) and equal opportunity (economically just) society."

  There is an inherent contradiction in the above statement: How is achieving a colorblind society accomplished by implementing policies that are explicitly based on favoring specific nonminority, , i.e., nonwhite, and nonmale candidates?

  All the points delineated by Roger Clegg, especially point #4, have it exactly right, and I say this as a liberal. The achievement gap will diminish when factors such as the prevalence of out of wedlock births to single mothers who are abandoned by their male partners and thrust into an economic pattern that promises poverty, with its attendant social, cognitive and psychological consequences, are addressed. White males do not put a gun to the head of minority youth and force them to drop out of school and/or join a life of crime on the streets. With all the resources that have already been invested in racial preference programs over the past two generations since their inception, it's time for others to exercise some accountability and stop blaming white hegemony.

• Affirmative Action for the future
• Posted by rosanne soifer , adjunct prof. at Touro College on November 18, 2009 at 9:30am EST

• I agree with Roger Clegg and Parent who posted above. I believe I was perhaps both a recipient and then a victim of affirmative action around 25 years ago, when I was hired as the first woman business agent for a professional organization to which I belonged. I loved my job...but one of the main reasons I quit after 2 years was because it seemed as if hiring me was a catalyst for the organization to then hire under qualified and unqualified people. Yes , I broke a barrier, but to what end? Affirmative action downgrades those of us who worked very hard professionally, plus it gives the un/under qualified a status they haven't earned. This is unfair and demoralizing. I'm in the arts, and to me affirmative action is little more than window-dressing.

• Posted by Steve Foerster on November 18, 2009 at 10:45am EST

• I want to add my voice to the chorus agreeing with Roger Clegg. My family is multiethnic, and it's complete idiocy that one of my sons would be eligible for affirmative action while the others are not. Prof. Sterba mentions affirmative action on the basis of economic disadvantage as one approach, and when it comes to that I suppose I am willing to hear more. But when it comes to continuing to use ethnicity as a means to sort people in the twenty-first century, I am intractably opposed.

• AA at UO
• Posted by UO Matters , Professor at University of Oregon on November 18, 2009 at 10:45am EST

• I would like to see more on the details of how affirmative action is implemented. At the UO, our affirmative action office is extremely officious and interfering in academic searches, to the point of telling us we may have to go back to the pool if we come up with a short list that doesn't have women or minorities. This is despite the fact that our faculty does not have under-representation of either group.

  On the other hand, the AA office has no problem letting the administration hire Vice Provosts and so on without conducting *any* sort of an open search - no public notice of a job opening, in many cases.

  The most recent example - ironically - is our Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity. He was hired on an interim basis without a search, then given the job full time, then given tenure and a promotion to Vice President, all without any sort of public notice that the position was open or any attempt to identify the best person for the job.

  The Affirmative Action Director claims that all this is entirely legal, because the open search rule does not apply to administrative jobs. Maybe true, but to do this for the head of our diversity efforts! http://uomatters.com has more on this.

  On another note I thought the authors comment on Asians and AA was a bit offensive. Asians have done so well in large part because of ability and hard work. Is there really any evidence that AA had much to do with it? And at this point, in the UC schools, AA is now being used to *limit* asian enrollments, I believe.

• Thanks, and a Word to the University of Oregon
• Posted by Roger Clegg , President and General Counsel at Center for Equal Opportunity on November 18, 2009 at 11:11am EST

• Thanks very much for the kind words that have been posted so far. I also wanted to suggest that "Professor at University of Oregon" show this link to someone in the general counsel's office at his school: http://www.popecenter.org/clarion_call/article.html?id=2209 It explains why there are indeed legal problems with what's going on at his school.

• Affirmative Action - White Priviledge
• Posted by Nicole Davis on November 18, 2009 at 11:15am EST

• While I understand the points being made about the fear of unqualified candidates being given positions that they are not qualified for, let's be clear. This is not a concern that solely emerged under affirmative action. It is something that has always been realized thanks to white priviledge hence one of the reasons why affirmative action has come to be. Historically, people of color and women have been denied opportunities or been alienated when they "make it" by their white counterparts because of many white's mindset that "they" did not belong there. So please stop trying to pin the concern as something that only arose with the advent of affirmative action. It's been a concern for many years before as "women and people of color" have spent centuries in this country barred from opportunties that their white, male counterparts took for granted until the perceived threat arose with the creation of affirmative action.

• What about discrimination against the disabled?
• Posted by Cristy Passman , Compliance Officer, ADA Coordinator at Los Angeles City College on November 18, 2009 at 11:57am EST

• Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act were intended to level the playing field for people with disabilities in much the same way that that other Civil Rights legislation did for women and for racial and ethnic minorities. We see this every day in accommodations (now properly called academic adjustments) made in our college classrooms. However, even though this legislation addresses employment as well as education, implementation in the employment context is minimal and the visibility of persons with disabilites in faculty and administrative positions is very small.

• Equal Opportunity is Good
• Posted by Daniel L. Bennett at The Center for College Affordability and Productivity on November 18, 2009 at 12:00pm EST

• Thanks for Roger Clegg for his always judicious comments on affirmative action. One thing mentioned in the article that I seriously question is the claim made by Sterba that:
  "The success of some Asian American groups is a proven success of affirmative action."
  Being married to an Asian woman, my perception is that education is a top priority of Asian parents, and is stressed from an early age. This attitude is prevalent in Asian countries as well as among Asian American families. This leads me to believe that the success among some Asian groups in education is a result of cultural emphasis on education more so than it is of affirmative action.
  Also, by explicitly placing all Asian and white students in the category of "privileged" is a real injustice and another example of affirmative discrimination. Many meritorious Asian and white students come from socio-economically conditions similar to that of inner-city minority students that are favored by affirmative action policies. If the objective of affirmative action is to level the playing field, then its proponents need to focus on socio-economic status and throw out the race / ethnicity card that has caused so much controversy.

• Yes, Nicole, but...
• Posted by Parker on November 18, 2009 at 12:00pm EST

• it is also a concern that discriminatory affirmative action does nothing to address.

• Two (or three) wrongs...
• Posted by ADD on November 18, 2009 at 1:30pm EST

• "For example, once opponents do a comparative evaluation of diversity affirmative action against two other preference programs in higher education – legacy preference and athletic preference – each of which is twice the usual size of the college or university affirmative action program, it is difficult for them not to see the superior moral and educational justification of diversity affirmative action."

  Prof. Sterba argues that legacy and athletic preferences justify "diversity affirmative action." Whether or not it is as bad as the two examples that he gives is debatable. However, two (or three) wrongs don't make a right. If the preferences given to legacies and athletes are bad, they should be eliminated. The existence of other preferences doesn't legitimize discrimination based on race.

• Promoting a Culture of Education
• Posted by Ismael on November 18, 2009 at 1:45pm EST

• Right. I'm for just making admonitions in the sincere hope that cultural change doesn't happen over night. As a white male I wouldn't welcome the increased competition. At the same time I know that racism, and sexism and all other forms of discrimination are mostly "under water," intangible, and sufficient to hold off any more competition than I can handle. Nor am I genuinely interested in any such thing as justice, racial or otherwise. That's why you won't ever see me working with others to help bring about change. What? I'm going to help others compete against me in the marketplace? Get real. What I can do is admonish others to change their lifestyles and secretly rejoice in all that makes it especially difficult for them to do so.

  I can secretly celebrate, for example, our placing Blacks and Latinos under extra surveillance so as to catch a higher percentage of them, say, doing drugs so they can be locked up, while my guilty white friends go unnoticed. Not as much need for us to survive via the working class version of the underground economy. Who would want to live like that? (A line from The Grapes of Wrath about unwelcome migrant "Okies" crossing a border into California.) Then I can accuse all Black or Latino men of abandoning their families. What do I care about the specific social-historical pressures they're under, one way or another? I feel fine about a status quo that leaves me and my favored Asian Americans in an economically advantageous position. I said that once to an Asian man and he was actually offended. He felt I saw him as a stereotype. I don't. I'm very proud of our model minority. Oh, well. Not to worry. Life goes on, doesn't it? Life is not fair. Pursuit of happiness and all that.

  Seriously, folks. It's going to take a great deal more than just AA to create a more just society. No, not a color-blind one. I have good friends of different colors and we all celebrate each others' colors. But our economy is competitive rather than cooperative. That makes solidarity tough, especially among unequals. Think about it. 'S'gonna take a whole lot more . . .

• Posted by Fred on November 18, 2009 at 2:00pm EST

• Nichole, I doubt any serious person maintains that hiring of incompetents dates from the beginning of affirmative action. That's the very emobodiment of the strawman argument. To further argue that because incompetents are (or were) hired through nepotism or racism or whatever, we should add a new source of hiring incompetents (i.e. affirmative action) is plain silly. Also, a significant difference between the pre- and post- affirmative action hiring of incompetents is that refusing to hire incompetents before affirmative action didn't result in ruinous lawsuits and boycotts.

• Thank you
• Posted by Common Sense on November 18, 2009 at 2:45pm EST

• I must defer to Roger Clegg's outstanding comment; there is no more eloquent way to put it which speaks the truth so clearly. Affirmative Action and race-based preferences are wrong, illegal, and immoral. Way to go Roger!

• "Minorities"?
• Posted by b_reynaldo on November 18, 2009 at 6:15pm EST

• "Affirmative action is a policy of favoring qualified women, minority, or economically disadvantaged candidates over qualified men,"

  "Minority" makes no sense in California, where no coherent ethnic or racial group has majority status. (Whites are less that 45% of the population.) In fact, Latinos are now a slight majority of K-12 students, and will soon be a majority of all age groups. Thus AA will require discrimination in California against white and Asian minorities, in favor of a Latino majority. How long will such a system be tenable before "minorities" start protesting their unequal treatment, as previous minorities did before.

  Of course, the AA battle could have been won in California with the passage of Proposition 209. But the massive continued immigration from Latin America into that state, which is favored by Roger Clegg and Linda Chavez, has made the pressure for hiring and admissions preferences more acute rather than less. In fact, Richard Atkinson, former President of the University of California, has publicly expressed the hope that a Latino majority will overturn 209 in the near future.

  Increasingly granting preferences to immigrants from country A and not from country B, while discriminating outright against whites with multigenerational roots in the U.S. is a recipe for civil war.

• Posted by Greg on November 18, 2009 at 7:00pm EST

• from another article in today's IHE: "Among the 120 universities in the subdivision, in the 2009 season there are seven African-American coaches, one Latino coach and one Asian coach -- a net increase of one minority coach since 2008. The report also notes that institutional leaders at these universities are overwhelmingly white in the bowl subdivision. White people make up 100 percent of the conference commissioners, 93.3 percent of presidents, 86.7 percent of athletics directors, 92.6 percent of faculty athletics representatives, 92.5 percent of head football coaches, and 82.9 percent of the faculty, the study found."

  So in response to most of you responders,Yes, your collective rhetoric is impressive, but thinly veiled and reminiscent of speechs from the sixties. The stats are an example that there is a problem of white entitlement that permeates not just education, but every venue. How can you say that there is not a problem? Or that if there is, it will go away on it’s own? When in reality what you are saying is why should it go away?

• Posted by chaosakita on November 18, 2009 at 7:00pm EST

• I think that saying Asian-Americans only are where they are today because of AA is insulting not only to Asians but other minorities. "Hey look, Asians could do it, but why not you?"

  Despite the usage of AA for over 40 years, blacks and Latinos are not really in any better shape. People need to think of more involved ways of reaching equality of they want it as much as they say they do.

• Game, Set, Match to Roger Clegg
• Posted by ACF on November 19, 2009 at 5:45am EST

• Roger's points are dead on, and they devastate the tortured answers to the soft ball line of questioning in this piece of "journalism."

• See Tim Wise
• Posted by Ismael on November 19, 2009 at 7:30am EST

• See Tim Wise on Affirmative Action as well. The discussion continues.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uH0vpGZJCo

• Artificial Scarcity
• Posted by Curro Romero on November 19, 2009 at 8:00am EST

• In a "marketplace" based on artificial scarcity (the only way there can be an overclass and an underclass) we will continue debating how to divide up a seemingly limited pie, including the problem of perception versus objectivity. Terry Eagleton writes,

  "Only those with patience, honesty, courage and persistence can delve through the dense layers of self-deception which prevent us from seeing the situation as it really is. This is especially difficult for those who wield power--for power tends to breed fantasy, reducing the self to a state of querulous narcissism. For all its tough-minded pragmatism, it is riddled with delusion, assuming that the whole world centres subserviently upon itself. It dissolves reality to a mirror of its own desires. It is those whose material existence is pretty solid who tend to assume that the world is not. Power is naturally solipsistic, incapable of getting outside its own skin. Like sexuality, it is where we are most infantile. It is the powerless who are more likely to appreciate that the world does not exist to pander to our needs, and rolls on its own sweet way with scarecly a side glance at us" ( _After Theory_ 132).

• Another Thank You To Roger Clegg
• Posted by Concerned Educator on November 19, 2009 at 9:45am EST

• I have worked in the field of education for over thirty years and consider myself fairly liberal; however, I must say that I agree with everything that Roger Clegg stated. Gregg, I do not agree with you. The number of coaches and other athletic positions, divided by race, is not an indication of "white entitlement." Perhaps the percentages are this way, because the most qualified individuals were selected to fill the positions. For example, I seriously doubt that any minority could have claimed to have more qualifications than Roy Williams when the head basketball coaching position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was open. It has been my experience that if any group holds an attitude of entitlement, it is certain minorties. Most whites know that they will get what they want only on the basis of their qualifications.

• Unless, Concerned Educator
• Posted by Curro Romero on November 19, 2009 at 10:30am EST

• "Most whites," you insist, "know that they will get what they want only on the basis of their qualifications."

  If we are to take Terry Eagleton's point above, it might be more accurate to say, Most whites ASSUME that they will get . . .,etc. We have always to consider the possiblity of self-delusion and social-historical ideology. But I also know there are many poor and working class whites who, as members of the powerless, know for a fact that the cards are stacked against them, too, on the basis of class.

  We cannot have an underclass without an overclass. A true deomocracy would not put up with such imbalances of power, one in which the overclass, in its narcissistic fantasy world, is allowed to dictate how big the pie is to be for the rest of us. What I see in Roger Clegg's defense of the "high ground" of power is a desire to preserve that power structure on a divide-and-conquer basis. Could his impeccable reasoning be a kind of dream logic?

  Revolutionaries in South America have a saying: "Cabemos todos." There's room for all of us. We can all become highly qualified at making a prosperous world--if we get beyond the artifical scarcity imposed on us by a narcissistic overclass for whom any slight slippage from their vertiginous height must feel pretty scary indeed.

• Curro
• Posted by DFS on November 19, 2009 at 12:45pm EST

• "Know" or "assume" -- What's your point?

  What's the difference? If only their qualifications are the sole reason (and therefore in their own minds), who cares what goes on in their heads, other than you?

  Get a clue. Not everyone on this planet is interested in mind control, as obviously you are.

• Civil Rights Accounting Fraud
• Posted by eddy on November 19, 2009 at 2:00pm EST

• Failing to see the forest for the trees allows the conflation of demographic groups with the individuals that do possess civil rights. It is institutional racism to adopt the attitude "We aren't obligated to be fair to you, just your demographic group".

  The message being sent is that if our institutions aren't obligated to honor our right to non-discrimination, then surely we as individuals are free to practice our own racial preferences.

• Fairness and Affirmative Action
• Posted by Concerned Educator on November 19, 2009 at 3:45pm EST

• Affirmative action is, by defintion, discriminatory. Males are discriminated against. Whites are discrimated against. The economically advantaged are discriminated against. If one favors affirmative action, then one favors fairness to some people but not to others. In essence, affirmative action is reverse discrimination. This is why some states have barred it and why the number of critics are growing.

• Qualifications?
• Posted by Sandy Thatcher on November 19, 2009 at 4:15pm EST

• There seems to be an assumption running through many of the comments that "qualifications" can be defined in some sort of objective, neutral way. If we've learned nothing else from postmodernists (and I personally despise their jargon), we should know that this kind of attitude about social reality is surely illusory. Do you remember the days when no black athlete was considered "qualified" to play the position of quarterback on a college football team? Or when women were denied many executive-level positions because they were considered to be too influenced by hormones to be trusted making "rational" decisions under stress? (I speak as a WASP, by the way.) One wonders how many jobs today are still described in such a way as to screen out certain types of "undesirable" candidates? I don't think it is an accident at all that minorities are so vastly underrepresented in college coaching positions, and it has nothing to do with their "qualifications." Racial/ethnic discrimination is not as overt as it was in the days of Jim Crow, but it surely still permeates our society in all sorts of insidious ways. Why? Partly because it is in the interests of the most powerful segments of our society to foster fissures and tensions among groups that might otherwise be able to see what economic interests they have in common, such as inner-city blacks and lower-class white male workers. Corporate America also benefits from the labor of undocumented workers from Mexico, who are now part of the new underclass in our country. And they are happy to sponsor superficial palliative measures rather than dealing with the crux of the problem, which is the creation of conditions in the Mexican economy that displace workers there and create the incentives for immigration in the first place. I am astonished that so many of the commentators seem content with the status quo in this country and buy into the rhetoric of personal responsibility that scholars like Jacob Hacker (see his "The Great Risk Shift") have shown so convincingly to be at the root of our many economic ills today and led the middle class into a situation of extreme income volatility and inadequate social support because of the alleged "moral hazard" promoted by traditional social insurance programs. If everybody thinks all is just hunky-dory, we're in for a long and troubled future.

• Response to Qualifications?
• Posted by Concerned Educator on November 19, 2009 at 5:30pm EST

• Perhaps qualifications cannot be measured objectively. I will make one observation related to my previous post. Apparently, the University of North Carolina believed it had a way to measure the ability to coach basketball objectively. I would say that whatever means was used was accurate. Roy Williams has won two national championships since he was hired as head coach.

• Straw Man City
• Posted by DFS on November 19, 2009 at 6:15pm EST

• There's too many here, Sandy.

  If the gig was up, then why are lawyers successful?

  I'm just trying to be brief, and I know this will alarm some people, but damn it, some past things, most notably the most important things, are prohibited now.

  Are you saying that our current status is totally under the control of the status quo? That would mean that nothing would ever change, and would never even have a chance of changing, no matter what laws were shoved down our throats. Shit -- we would all be forced towards another Armeggidon of some ilk.

  (I don't mean the academically 'totally' -- rather, the English 'totally.')

  I refuse to acknowlege that nothing has changed over the last six decades of my life in the south. The other Twits-in-Academia can say what they will -- I am one living witness among millions.

  There has been sufficient change for civilization to prevail.

• Civilization over against What?
• Posted by Curro Romero on November 20, 2009 at 8:00am EST

• DFS: You write, "There has been sufficient change for civilization to prevail." Over what?

  In any case, you touch the fundamental disagreement. I take it a more conservative position is that change has, and is, proceeding at about the right pace such that the center can hold and, as Yeats famously said, "mere anarchy is [not] loosed upon the world."

  Progressives want too much change too fast in the socio-cultural realm of being, though not in the advancing, techno-capitalist sense? How will we know when we've reached parity? When there are proportionate numbers of Blacks in CEO and boardroom positions?

  Maybe there are two possible reasons why African-Americans are disproportionately represented in the underclass: Because the rest of society has all sorts of conscious and unconsious ways of keeping them there (and of needing an underclass for its own sake). Or because people in the under class really are, well, just sort of, you know, inferior.

  How do you see the phenomenon of the underclass? If "all [people] are created equal" as a slave-owing Jefferson intoned, why is there an underclass?

• An Underclass Will Always Exist
• Posted by Concerned Educator on November 20, 2009 at 9:30am EST

• Curro, there will always be an underclass and no affirmative action program is going to solve that fact. The phrase, "all men are created equal" sounds lofty: however, it just is not true. All are not born with equal intelligence; some are born on the left hand side of the bell-curve. Then, there are the innate abilities that each of us are born with which "fit" better in different periods of time. For example, individuals with no mechanical ability will suffer less for the lack of such ability than they would have suffered had they lived in their grandparents' time. Also, people do not have equal initiative. There are those who work seventy to eighty hours a week. They tend to progress further than those who put in only forty hours a week. Personal habits determine class as well. If one chooses to have children out of wedlock, there are consequences to this behavior. If one chooses to buy items on credit and run up a credit card debt, as opposed to charging only the amount that can be paid for when the bill arrives, then the credit card company can displace that individual to the underclass very quickly; the person makes that choice.

• Posted by Greg on November 20, 2009 at 12:00pm EST

• Concerned Educator, sure they found something objective in the search, a colour! And with the talent that exists on this team you and I could have coached them to a championship :-)

  Greg

• Class and Affirmative Action
• Posted by Curro Romero on November 20, 2009 at 1:00pm EST

• Concerned Educator: So you come down on the side of seeing some of your fellow citizens as inferior? "There will always be an undercalss." You write, "The phrase, 'all men are created equal' sounds lofty: however, it just is not true. All are not born with equal intelligence; some are born on the left hand side of the bell-curve." So slavery was, and is, in the Third World, and in pockets of the Third World within our own borders, justified? People can be genetically and/or culturally inferior?

  Well, I agree. History may show that capitalist culture turned out to be not well-reasoned, but a pathetic rationalization for its own inferiorty. Why? Because it was a political set-up. It did not maximize human talent, initiative, and happiness. It did not promote the flourishing of all its people. Instead, like all other kleptocracies before it, it rationalized itself as such.

  1. You are thinking dialectically, but not dialectically enough. Yes, think of all the Michael Jordans who lived and died before basketball was even invented. Now think of all the, say, medical talent being wasted now because of the economics of our present mode of health care. We might have more and better doctors if the eoconomics didn't dictate that they process as many patients as they do. Doctors in this system must be high-speed workaholics as well, not just medically gifted.

  2. Mechanical ability. In The Grapes of Wrath (1930s) Tom Joad's brother is a mechanical genius. He's starving alongside the rest of his family.

  3. Initiative. Our present school system kills students' natural curiosity and initiative as it serves its soul-killing function of reproducing an underclass that the system needs (see below).

  4. Working 70-80 hours a week. Many there are in the middle and working class who do just that and get nowhere. Why? They aren't as well organized or connected politically. They are being exploited and can't break free. Why? "There will always be an underclass" because the overclass needs an underclass. Hegel argued that the master turns out to be dependent on the slave.

  5. Credit card debt. That's no accident on the part of banks. See economist Rick Wolff on that score. Does capitalist culture positively promote addiction? Yes.

  6. Personal choice. You're so right about that. Many there are who make the personal choice to work 70-80 hours a week figuring out how to scam consumers, sqeeze more out of workers and devise policies that play a stong role in promoting such vulnerability in the first place.

  Cornel West says, Everyone must indeed take personal responsibility for his or her choices. It's just that under certain circumstances it becomes harder and harder to make good choices. Those in the overclass are making the stupidest choice of all: to exploit people in difficult circumstances even as they lobby Washington for more policies that help produce those circumstances. Just because they don't suffer economically doesn't mean they're not stupid. They're morally bankrupt. Choices don't happen in a political vacuum. Culture is reciprocal. That is not to teach students just to blame the system as a way of avoiding personal responsibilty. Rather, our political situation is all our responsibility, Concerned Educator.

• Crisscrossing Double Standards? A Predicament of History
• Posted by Curro Romero on November 21, 2009 at 9:15pm EST

• Roger Clegg: On another IHE blog you post, "please don't bother arguing that illegitimacy is caused by racism. The percentage of out-of-wedlock births for African Americans has actually gotten much, much higher as discrimination has diminished."

  What is the underlying belief here? That African Americans show their true inferiority by actually deteriorating socially after Civil Rights legislation? How do you know that discrimination hasn't actually increased in all kinds of ways, despite the gains of the 60s? How do you know that gains in one historically out group doesn't actually trigger (unconscious) reactionary effects in the population at large, finding other "unofficial" ways to politically disconnect them? There are studies on this phenomenon. It is a predicament of our history.

  On illegitimacy: Single parent homes in more affluent, politically connected households need not have such a devastating effect on children. Nor, for that matter, does having two parents of the same sex. Illegitimacy is only one factor in holding children back. I don't think we can afford to be reductionist here. It's downright dismissive.

  Other factors might be all the racist messages children get from society at large such that they "internalize" the racism. That is, children come to believe the lies told about them through media culture, imagery,and attitudes they pick up on from society, etc.

  On another blog, some white men are complaining about prejudice they experience in the classroom (and I'm sure it is not always imagined). A Communication Professor says young white men SHOULD flunk out if they habitually come to class late, drunk, and do no work. S/hecomes off utterly dismissive of such behavior, attributing it stereotypically to a young, white male demographic. A dad, concerned about the low turn-out among young white men in liberal arts college, complains that the politically correct atmosphere would cause him, too, to show up drunk the third or fourth class. So when is it "the system," and when is it just individual responsibility?
  Or is it always both? Since when is political correctness exclusively a "leftist" attitude?

  Maybe society promulgates personal responsibility better where all members are treated like human beings. And self-destructive behavior is more prevalent among historically out groups. The key is listening. Hard to do with so many hostile vibes and double standards crisscrossing. A predicament of history.

• Class and Affirmative Action
• Posted by Concerned Educator on November 23, 2009 at 8:45am EST

• Curro, I rest my case, because I can see that you will not be satisfied until the majority of upper-management positions are held by minorities. But before I close, please allow me to tell a true story. Both of my parents were reared during the depression. Dad's family, in particular, was extremely poor. They were at the bottom of the underclass. Children went to school with no coats. One pair of shoes had to last a year. Winter temperatures frequently went to zero where they lived. He told me he knew of only one or two children born out of wedlock in the community the entire time he was growing up; the consequences were too great with no free handouts from the government. He went to a major university. He wanted an education enough that during his first quarter at college he lost thirty pounds and almost starved to death. There was no financial aid during the 1940's. He interrupted his education to defend the freedom of the United States in WWII. After returning, he completed his education with the help of the GI bill and continuing to work. Two weeks after he graduated and married my mom, he went to work. They had no credit card debt. They did without until they saved for an item. Cars, as well as the majority of the construction of a house, were paid for in cash. He expected nothing to be given to him and I never, ever heard him say that anybody owed him anything. I heard the contrary, "I have been given much; therefore, I owe much in return." He always worked hard and prepared for another depression. He is on his deathbed right now in a nursing home. Medicaid is not paying for that, because he prepared for this as well. He is worth over $1 million. Don't bother to comment in return, because the response will be that only a white man could do this. Here is the clincher my friend, Dad was a state employee who never held a position above the rank of middle management.

• Oh, But I Must Respond
• Posted by Curro Romero on November 23, 2009 at 11:30am EST

• Your father has lived the truly good life, individualist and self-reliant like Emerson and Thoreau, yet not of their more elevated social class, and a superb role model to his son. He is what Everyman ought to be. He is on his death bed and you do him the honor he deserves.

  "Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince;/ And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"

• Posted by Tyler on November 24, 2009 at 8:45pm EST

• About his comments on Asian American success: I think it's very clear that Asian Americans have succeeded not because of affirmative action, but because of their culturally rooted emphasis on education. I still haven't seen a cogent argument as to why affirmative action will remove the class disparity; in fact, I can only see it creating massive societal problems (as if we aren't already culturally segregated enough). Rectifying the minority disparity isn't simple, but I think what it will ultimately come down to is education reform of some sort. Affirmative action leads us in the wrong direction. How can you possibly achieve unity through deliberate disunity?

• People not created equal
• Posted by Common Sense on November 25, 2009 at 11:00am EST

• Curro says: "People can be genetically and/or culturally inferior?"

  I say emphatically and resoundingly, YES! In fact, I would push further to say that all this modern day diversity effort nonsense is purely rhetorical; everyone is already 100% diverse from one another, even in the same race. There is absolutely no one with the exact same set of DNA, life circumstances, and unique sets of talents and ideas as me. Not in the whole world. You should always pick the best, brightest, and most qualified for a position at work or slot at school. Preferences based on race and gender are wrong and immoral. Let's address the giant elephant in the room already! I do believe the Asian work ethic is culturally inspired and superior to any other group. The "thug" culture present in black society which glorifies drug use, gangs, violence, murder, aggression, family irresponsibility, entitlement, baggy pants, and cop killing is genetically and culturally inferior to producitve societal gains.

  There are so many reasons why some people succeed and others do not. Intelligence is one of many traits which define us, and perhaps the most important difference between "qualifications" that you see. For example, the average IQ in Nigeria, and most of black Africa, is 85, or mildly retarded. The average IQ of blacks living in the U.S. is about 100, due to the infusion of white genes during the slave era. When compared to the average IQ of Asians, Whites, and Hispanics, Blacks simply are much lower on the scale. This is not racist. This is pure fact. There are some blacks on the right side of their bell curve who are much smarter than some whites on the left side of their bell curve. And there are some whites who are better athletes than some blacks. Its about the averages. During the course of history for as far back as history dates, all of white civilization experienced great advances in culture, science, and society. For example, the Greeks gave us the idea of democracy and government. They gave us great advances in astronomy, navigation, time keeping, written language, farming, and the recording of history in books. They gave us complex and abstract mathematics and the discovery of pi. They experimented in chemistry and the forging of metals. Cities were built. Governments were formed. Resources were allocated. Huge advances in divisional labor, trades, and complex ideas in community organization. Similarly, the Romans gave us running water through the aquaducts and the rennaissance gave us great complex works of art. Advances in tools and machinery. Even advancements in war. During the course of thousands of years while all these great advancements were made, black Africa stood still; they literally were chained by IQ to the stone age. When the Anglo-Zulu war was fought in 1879 (after which the movie Zulu was made), it was a massacre: about 100 British military defeated over 10,000 Zulu warriors due to technolgy differences. Black Africa was left thousands of years behind.

  Other differences between people are culture, moral values, ambition, work ethic, and God-given talent; people CAN and DO make up for their intelligence differences through these factors. There simply cannot, and will not ever be a way to address the deficiencies some people have in these areas and make everyone equal. The problem makes itself visible when the deficiencies continuously show themselves in one race or another. When Jefferson said "All men were created equal", he wasn't speaking genetically, culturally, or even by gender. He was casting a spear at the inherent rights given to nobility in the English system. People were "born" into royalty; he was addressing that people were created equal in terms of their birthrights: the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness through whatever course they choose.

• A Problem on Every Claim You Make, Common Sense
• Posted by Curro Romero on November 26, 2009 at 6:00am EST

• Common Sense, Unfortunately, I don't have time just now to challenge you on each and every point you offer. When you write, "Everyone is already 100% diverse from one another, even in the same race," you seem to me to contradict yourself with all the Bell Curve stuff (that was scientifically refuted back in the 90s) and when you say all this is not racist but pure fact. I think it may be what we call "racially conditioned."

  When you talk of African Americans having a higher IQ than present day Nigerians due to mixing with whites it really confuses things. In the first place, "whiteness" is not a race but an institution that did not come into existence until colonial times. It was a political invention to divide European and African servants who were intermarrying and planning revolts against their mutual masters.

  Next, scientists have been telling us a long time now that there are no races, only one human race, and due to eons of migration and trade they've been mixing.

  Next, what IQ tests are you talking about that have been given to Nigerians and African Americans alike? What validity are they supposed to have?

  Next, there is no such thing as a pure culture. Again, humans have been trading and exchanging ideas with one another forever. During the middle ages Africans were known throughout Europe for their exquisite glass beads. Where did Africans get the glass? From Europe. All cultures have always been hybrid.

  Next, Greek civilization. Yes, the enabling conditions were ripe at that time for Greece (and not somebody else) to flourish--lots of wisdom and civilized developement. Hmmm. Where did they get their ideas? Well, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Macedonia, etc. Greece was a hybrid of all these (which is why we are well advised to encourage diversity in our own society, the synergy of hybridity!) Yes, they codified ideas in a certain way. But those myths, mathematics, art, drama, and architecture were not necessarily original with them. The library at Alexandria burned, and we don't know what from what all else from previous and other civilizations the Greeks learned. The Romans learned from those THEY conquered: the Greeks.

  It doesn't take greater intelligence, by the way, to go out and conquer someone else, just ruthlessness, luck, timing, and, yes, technology. But some societies, having reached a certain equilibrium put their wisdom into, say, emotional intelligence before warfare.

  As to the British having a technological advantage over the Zulus, remember that African societies were functioning before imperialists and colonists arrived on the scene and utterly disrupted those cultures. Once the cultures are smashed and the people trashed, and policies put in place to keep things that way, it could easily lead to the false notion that the people under occupation always lived that way. See? Just look around, how they live. Lucky we came along to bring them some civilization. It's called presentism.

  I submit, that you are looking at the situation of, say, African Americans today, forgetting history, and jumping to the erroneous conclusion that, on the whole, they are inferior. Remember, the Greeks represented a flowering of culture not that long before the Romans supplanted them. I thought the Greeks were supposed to be superior. Then how come they got conquered? Conquest has nothing to do with intelligence. Only ruthlessness. As far as Athenian democracy, sure they were a free society. But their imperial behavior to others was monstrous. Much like the U.S. today. We are a republic with democratic institutions. And we do dastardly things to the third world. After the other world powers exhausted themselves in two world wars, America stepped in toward the end and finished them off and came out on top. Sure, industrial might, heroic effort, bravery, but most importantly, luck, positioning and timing. Once in that position, "Hmmm, this must mean we're superior." Very faulty reasoning.

  I'm not just for Affirmative Action, but a revolution in our consciousness and behavior such that we can see that present-day legitimations of class structures are just as ludicrous as the old Late Feudal model (which, by the way,coincides with ruthless and immoral colonialism, conquest and the primitive accumulation--theft!--of capital that led to the Industrial Revolution. As I said above, I do believe in inferior culture--that of capitalism. That is the Big Thug culture that produces little thug cultures. What do we expect to come out of an economic mode which accelerated exploitation like nothing that came before it? One thing Big Thug cultures do is they pick out a favorite child, as in the Asian "model minority," and produce it in a certain way and designate others as a scapegoat. Once racism has been perpetrated on a target group, that group may indeed internalize that racism against itself and experience the symptoms of the larger diseased culture.

  Capitalism is merely instrumental, not wise, not good, not superior. It is progressive only in that now its evil but productive genius could be transformed into something better and more egalitarian. Then see what would happen to the little "thug" cultures. They would be no longer needed and would dissipate. How do I know? The indentured servants that came from England and Ireland had behaviors that disgusted their "betters" too. Those who wound up making good had a personality transformation into less self-destructive tendencies (while retaining, say, their proper Irish culture.) Your analysis mistakes group dynamics for some essentialized notion of a Bell Curve, a static photograph that misleads rather than a motion picture that better depicts what's going on historically.

  But consider that today it is precisely capitalism that violates all human values of solidarity and oneness. Capitalism is the reason why there is such a temptation to apply the mere bandaid of Affirmative Action. After all, we buy commodities with no idea of what workers around the world must endure in order to manufacture them. And we are divided by class because, just like the master in the master/slave dialectic, the overclass is dependent for its very existence on an underclass.

  There are several other claims in your speech that I'd like to re-open for discussion, but time will not allow. I invite you to mull over what I consider to be a more dynamic perspective on our historical predicament. We're talking about our brothers and sisters and the underlying oneness of humanity here.

  Hastily submitted.