SCOTUS OKs Racial Discrimination Again - As Long As Victims Are White

[protectionist]

They've done it again. As many US Supreme courts before them, this 2016 SCOTUS has once again affirmed the shameful notion that it's OK to discriminate on the basis of race > as long as Whites are the victims. On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld the University of Texas’ affirmative action policies and shot down claims by Abigail Fisher that the policy was unconstitutional.

Well of course it's unconstitutional. And it violates the civil rights laws. But hey, if it give freebies to blacks, we gotta do it right ? Has this country gone completely unhinged ? Affirmative action discrimination against whites is the # 1 racism in America, which has damaged, by far, the largest number of victims (whites), and has been doing it for 55 years. These fools on the Supreme Court, had an opportunity to finally put a top to this madness, and they blew it.

Instead of proclaiming that "diversity is still needed", they should have declared that REPARATIONS for discriminated-against whites is what is needed. Millions of people whose lives have been reduced economically, and every other way, due to AA, still suffer it's racist ramifications now in retirement, with reduced Social Security benefits. Many others have already gotten very old and died, while racist Supreme Courts, one after another, disregard their victimization because they are white.

Hang your heads in SHAME 2016 SCOTUS. Feel free to include yourselves with the KKK, the Nazi Party, the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, the New Black Panther Party, and other racist groups.

Cheers for Justice Samuel Alito, who slammed the decision as "affirmative action gone wild" in a 51-page dissent that dwarfed the court's 20-page opinion. He said it allows the university to seek out African-American students with privileged backgrounds over low-income white and Asian students. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas joined his dissent.

It's notable also, that if Justice Scalia was alive, this wouldn't have happened. What ought to happen is that black groups ought to show some integrity, and denounce this decision, and declare their opposition to this racism. If they had an ounce of decency they would. Apparently they don't.

Supreme Court upholds affirmative action in university admissions

 

[TheResister]

If this gets enough coverage, it might be a reason people vote for Trump. Him being white, he might put someone one the Supreme Court that won't be a black racist.

 

[Stardust]

They've done it again. As many US Supreme courts before them, this 2016 SCOTUS has once again affirmed the shameful notion that it's OK to discriminate on the basis of race > as long as Whites are the victims. On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld the University of Texas’ affirmative action policies and shot down claims by Abigail Fisher that the policy was unconstitutional.

Well of course it's unconstitutional. And it violates the civil rights laws. But hey, if it give freebies to blacks, we gotta do it right ? Has this country gone completely unhinged ? Affirmative action discrimination against whites is the # 1 racism in America, which has damaged, by far, the largest number of victims (whites), and has been doing it for 55 years. These fools on the Supreme Court, had an opportunity to finally put a top to this madness, and they blew it.

Instead of proclaiming that "diversity is still needed", they should have declared that REPARATIONS for discriminated-against whites is what is needed. Millions of people whose lives have been reduced economically, and every other way, due to AA, still suffer it's racist ramifications now in retirement, with reduced Social Security benefits. Many others have already gotten very old and died, while racist Supreme Courts, one after another, disregard their victimization because they are white.

Hang your heads in SHAME 2016 SCOTUS. Feel free to include yourselves with the KKK, the Nazi Party, the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, the New Black Panther Party, and other racist groups.

Cheers for Justice Samuel Alito, who slammed the decision as "affirmative action gone wild" in a 51-page dissent that dwarfed the court's 20-page opinion. He said it allows the university to seek out African-American students with privileged backgrounds over low-income white and Asian students. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas joined his dissent.

It's notable also, that if Justice Scalia was alive, this wouldn't have happened. What ought to happen is that black groups ought to show some integrity, and denounce this decision, and declare their opposition to this racism. If they had an ounce of decency they would. Apparently they don't.

Supreme Court upholds affirmative action in university admissions

I applaud you for a very well written analysis. Another example of racism against White Americans is the idea that White Americans need to make reparations for Black enslavement but Black Americans shouldn't have to make reparations for nearly 1400 yrs. of the white slave trade from Europe into the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. During one 400 yr. period, the trading of women and children was so immense, White Europeans did not live along the coastline at all from Spain to the British Isles.

 

[protectionist]

I applaud you for a very well written analysis. Another example of racism against White Americans is the idea that White Americans need to make reparations for Black enslavement but Black Americans shouldn't have to make reparations for nearly 1400 yrs. of the white slave trade from Europe into the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. During one 400 yr. period, the trading of women and children was so immense, White Europeans did not live along the coastline at all from Spain to the British Isles.

White Americans ought to be paid reparations$$ for the 55 years of Affirmative Action DISCRIMINATION they have endured, as well as having to listen to moronic blacks bitch about them being the victims (when they are the beneficiaries)

 

[EatTheRich]

Abigail Fisher applies to a university that rejects her based on her mediocre qualifications. The university at the same time admits 42 whites and 5 Blacks with lower test scores than hers. 168 applicants of color with higher test scores meanwhile are also rejected--even though their higher test scores arguably likely reflect greater actual capacity given the racial obstacles they had to overcome to get those scores.

Yet she argues that UT's program to ensure racial diversity--instead of an all-white campus--somehow is a program of "freebies" for Blacks. In other words, she seems to think that her white skin, alone, "proves" that she is more qualified than the 5 Blacks with lower test scores who are admitted, although she does not argue with the university's decision to likewise admit 42 whites with lower test scores. As if--despite the dozens and dozens of Blacks with higher test scores who were likewise rejected--the ONLY reason the Black students got in ahead of her was a racial entitlement, rather than what it actually is--an upper bound on the de facto racial entitlement given to Fisher and other whites.

 

[protectionist]

Abigail Fisher applies to a university that rejects her based on her mediocre qualifications. The university at the same time admits 42 whites and 5 Blacks with lower test scores than hers. 168 applicants of color with higher test scores meanwhile are also rejected--even though their higher test scores arguably likely reflect greater actual capacity given the racial obstacles they had to overcome to get those scores.

Yet she argues that UT's program to ensure racial diversity--instead of an all-white campus--somehow is a program of "freebies" for Blacks. In other words, she seems to think that her white skin, alone, "proves" that she is more qualified than the 5 Blacks with lower test scores who are admitted, although she does not argue with the university's decision to likewise admit 42 whites with lower test scores. As if--despite the dozens and dozens of Blacks with higher test scores who were likewise rejected--the ONLY reason the Black students got in ahead of her was a racial entitlement, rather than what it actually is--an upper bound on the de facto racial entitlement given to Fisher and other whites.

You can say whatever you want about Abagail Fisher and the Univ. of Texas, but Affirmative Action is racial discrimination against whites. It is also the largest racial discrimination in America, having victimized, by far, the largest number of people, for 55 years.
We could discuss thousands of individual cases including one of mine, when I was discriminated against by AA, at Memphis State Univ graduate school when I was denies an assistantship. Of 33 students I was rated in the top 5 academically ( I was told). Only 8 assistantships were granted, all to the only 8 black students who applied, (I was told) who were in the bottom 10 academically. 25 students applied. 17 students were denied, all of them by race.
This is common across the country, and has been for 55 years, and now endorsed by a racist part of "our" Supreme Court, which openly stated that "it is still necessary to ensure diversity."

 

[EatTheRich]

You can say whatever you want about Abagail Fisher and the Univ. of Texas, but Affirmative Action is racial discrimination against whites. It is also the largest racial discrimination in America, having victimized, by far, the largest number of people, for 55 years.
We could discuss thousands of individual cases including one of mine, when I was discriminated against by AA, at Memphis State Univ graduate school when I was denies an assistantship. Of 33 students I was rated in the top 5 academically ( I was told). Only 8 assistantships were granted, all to the only 8 black students who applied, (I was told) who were in the bottom 10 academically. 25 students applied. 17 students were denied, all of them by race.
This is common across the country, and has been for 55 years, and now endorsed by a racist part of "our" Supreme Court, which openly stated that "it is still necessary to ensure diversity."

Whites are more likely than members of any other race to be admitted to their first-choice schools. Affirmative action does not give nonwhites an absolute advantage over whites, it only partly mitigates the many hidden preferences available to whites. Some examples courtesy of Tim Wise:

We strike the pose of self-sufficiency while ignoring the advantages we have been afforded in every realm of activity: housing, education, employment, criminal justice, politics and business. We ignore that at every turn, our hard work has been met with access to an opportunity structure to which millions of others have been denied similar access. Privilege, to us, is like water to the fish: invisible precisely because we cannot imagine life without it.​

It is that context that best explains the duplicity of the President’s critique of affirmative action at the University of Michigan, during the recent court battle over so-called “racial preferences” at that institution. President Bush, himself a lifelong recipient of affirmative action — the kind set-aside for the rich and mediocre — proclaimed that the school’s policies were unfair. Yet in doing so he not only showed a profound ignorance of the Michigan policy, but also made clear the inability of yet another white person to grasp the magnitude of white privilege still in operation; an inability sadly ratified by the Supreme Court when it ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the Michigan case, in June 2003.

To wit, the President, and ultimately the Supreme Court, attacked Michigan’s policy of awarding twenty points (on a 150-point evaluation scale) to undergraduate applicants who were members of underrepresented minorities, which at U of M means blacks, Latinos and American Indians. To many whites such a “preference” was blatantly discriminatory. Yet what Bush and the Court failed to mention were the greater numbers of points awarded for other things, and which had the clear effect of preferencing whites to the exclusion of people of color.

For example, Michigan awarded twenty points to any student from a low-income background, regardless of race. Since those points could not be combined with those for minority status (in other words poor blacks don’t get forty points), in effect this was a preference for poor whites. Then Michigan awarded sixteen points to students from the Upper Peninsula of the state: a rural and almost completely white area.

Of course both preferences were fair, based as they were on the recognition that economic status and geography (as with race) can have a profound effect on the quality of schooling that one receives, and that no one should be punished for such things that are beyond their control. But note that such preferences, though disproportionately awarded to whites, remained uncriticized throughout the litigation on this case, while preferences for people of color become the target for reactionary anger. Once again, white preference remained hidden because it wasn’t called white preference, even if that was the effect.

But that’s not all. Ten points were awarded under the Michigan plan to students who attended top high schools, and another eight points were given to students who took an especially demanding AP and Honors curriculum. As with points for those from the Upper Peninsula, these preferences may have been race-neutral in theory, but in practice they were anything but. Because of intense racial isolation (and Michigan’s schools are the most segregated in America for blacks according to research by the Harvard Civil Rights Project), students of color will rarely attend the “best” schools, and on average, schools serving mostly black and Latino students offer only a third as many AP and honors courses as schools serving mostly whites. So even truly talented students of color would have been unable to access those extra points simply because of where they live, their economic status, and ultimately their race, which is intertwined with both.

Then up to twelve points were awarded for a student’s SAT score, which is itself directly correlated with a student’s socioeconomic status, which in turn is highly correlated with race in a way that favors whites and disadvantages most students of color.

Four more points were awarded to students with a parent who attended the U of M: a kind of affirmative action with which the President is intimately familiar, and which almost exclusively goes to whites.

In other words, Michigan was offering twenty “extra” points to the typical black, Latino or indigenous applicant, while offering various combinations worth up to 70 extra points for students who would almost all be white. But while the first of these were seen as examples of racial preferences, the second were not, hidden as they were behind the structure of social inequities that limit where people live, where they go to school, and the kinds of opportunities they have been afforded. White preferences, by being the result of the normal workings of a racist society, can remain out of sight and out of mind, while the power of the state is turned against the paltry preferences meant to offset them.

To recognize just how blind so many white Americans are to the workings of white privilege, one need only consider the oft-heard comment by whites that “if I had only been black I would have gotten into my first-choice college.” Such a statement not only ignores the fact that whites are more likely than members of any group, even with affirmative action, to get into their first-choice school, but it also presumes, as anti-racist activist Paul Marcus explains, “that if these whites were black, everything else about their life would have remained the same: that it would have made no negative difference as to where they went to school, what their family income was, or anything else.”

But this ability to believe that being black would have made no difference (other than a beneficial one when it came time for college), and that being white has made no positive difference, is rooted in privilege itself: the privilege of not having one’s intelligence questioned by books like The Bell Curve, or one’s culture attacked as dysfunctional by politicians and so-called scholars; the privilege of not having to worry about being viewed as “out of place” when driving, shopping, buying a home, or attending the University of Michigan; the privilege of not being denied an interview for a job because your name sounds “too black,” as a recent study discovered happens often to African American job-seekers.

So long as those privileges remain firmly in place and the preferential treatment that flows from those privileges continues to work to the benefit of whites, all talk of ending affirmative action is not only premature but a slap in the face to those who have fought and died for equal opportunity.​

 

[justoffal]

Whites are more likely than members of any other race to be admitted to their first-choice schools. Affirmative action does not give nonwhites an absolute advantage over whites, it only partly mitigates the many hidden preferences available to whites. Some examples courtesy of Tim Wise:

We strike the pose of self-sufficiency while ignoring the advantages we have been afforded in every realm of activity: housing, education, employment, criminal justice, politics and business. We ignore that at every turn, our hard work has been met with access to an opportunity structure to which millions of others have been denied similar access. Privilege, to us, is like water to the fish: invisible precisely because we cannot imagine life without it.​

It is that context that best explains the duplicity of the President’s critique of affirmative action at the University of Michigan, during the recent court battle over so-called “racial preferences” at that institution. President Bush, himself a lifelong recipient of affirmative action — the kind set-aside for the rich and mediocre — proclaimed that the school’s policies were unfair. Yet in doing so he not only showed a profound ignorance of the Michigan policy, but also made clear the inability of yet another white person to grasp the magnitude of white privilege still in operation; an inability sadly ratified by the Supreme Court when it ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the Michigan case, in June 2003.

To wit, the President, and ultimately the Supreme Court, attacked Michigan’s policy of awarding twenty points (on a 150-point evaluation scale) to undergraduate applicants who were members of underrepresented minorities, which at U of M means blacks, Latinos and American Indians. To many whites such a “preference” was blatantly discriminatory. Yet what Bush and the Court failed to mention were the greater numbers of points awarded for other things, and which had the clear effect of preferencing whites to the exclusion of people of color.

For example, Michigan awarded twenty points to any student from a low-income background, regardless of race. Since those points could not be combined with those for minority status (in other words poor blacks don’t get forty points), in effect this was a preference for poor whites. Then Michigan awarded sixteen points to students from the Upper Peninsula of the state: a rural and almost completely white area.

Of course both preferences were fair, based as they were on the recognition that economic status and geography (as with race) can have a profound effect on the quality of schooling that one receives, and that no one should be punished for such things that are beyond their control. But note that such preferences, though disproportionately awarded to whites, remained uncriticized throughout the litigation on this case, while preferences for people of color become the target for reactionary anger. Once again, white preference remained hidden because it wasn’t called white preference, even if that was the effect.

But that’s not all. Ten points were awarded under the Michigan plan to students who attended top high schools, and another eight points were given to students who took an especially demanding AP and Honors curriculum. As with points for those from the Upper Peninsula, these preferences may have been race-neutral in theory, but in practice they were anything but. Because of intense racial isolation (and Michigan’s schools are the most segregated in America for blacks according to research by the Harvard Civil Rights Project), students of color will rarely attend the “best” schools, and on average, schools serving mostly black and Latino students offer only a third as many AP and honors courses as schools serving mostly whites. So even truly talented students of color would have been unable to access those extra points simply because of where they live, their economic status, and ultimately their race, which is intertwined with both.

Then up to twelve points were awarded for a student’s SAT score, which is itself directly correlated with a student’s socioeconomic status, which in turn is highly correlated with race in a way that favors whites and disadvantages most students of color.

Four more points were awarded to students with a parent who attended the U of M: a kind of affirmative action with which the President is intimately familiar, and which almost exclusively goes to whites.

In other words, Michigan was offering twenty “extra” points to the typical black, Latino or indigenous applicant, while offering various combinations worth up to 70 extra points for students who would almost all be white. But while the first of these were seen as examples of racial preferences, the second were not, hidden as they were behind the structure of social inequities that limit where people live, where they go to school, and the kinds of opportunities they have been afforded. White preferences, by being the result of the normal workings of a racist society, can remain out of sight and out of mind, while the power of the state is turned against the paltry preferences meant to offset them.

To recognize just how blind so many white Americans are to the workings of white privilege, one need only consider the oft-heard comment by whites that “if I had only been black I would have gotten into my first-choice college.” Such a statement not only ignores the fact that whites are more likely than members of any group, even with affirmative action, to get into their first-choice school, but it also presumes, as anti-racist activist Paul Marcus explains, “that if these whites were black, everything else about their life would have remained the same: that it would have made no negative difference as to where they went to school, what their family income was, or anything else.”

But this ability to believe that being black would have made no difference (other than a beneficial one when it came time for college), and that being white has made no positive difference, is rooted in privilege itself: the privilege of not having one’s intelligence questioned by books like The Bell Curve, or one’s culture attacked as dysfunctional by politicians and so-called scholars; the privilege of not having to worry about being viewed as “out of place” when driving, shopping, buying a home, or attending the University of Michigan; the privilege of not being denied an interview for a job because your name sounds “too black,” as a recent study discovered happens often to African American job-seekers.

So long as those privileges remain firmly in place and the preferential treatment that flows from those privileges continues to work to the benefit of whites, all talk of ending affirmative action is not only premature but a slap in the face to those who have fought and died for equal opportunity.​

I'm not sure what your statistical training background is but I suspect it stinks. I see many politically motivated statements but nothing to account for the skew of Affirmative action numbers that have been produced by political correctness. Whites still make up the bulk of the American population and therefore are more likely to be in the majority of anything for any reason. I have not done a full number analysis on the education side of this issue but I suspect that like most other issues it too is bombarded by lunatic lefty noises that lie about the real causes of number skew by skin color results making an effort to create a false number impression for political leverage.

JO

 

[EatTheRich]

I'm not sure what your statistical training background is but I suspect it stinks. I see many politically motivated statements but nothing to account for the skew of Affirmative action numbers that have been produced by political correctness. Whites still make up the bulk of the American population and therefore are more likely to be in the majority of anything for any reason. I have not done a full number analysis on the education side of this issue but I suspect that like most other issues it too is bombarded by lunatic lefty noises that lie about the real causes of number skew by skin color results making an effort to create a false number impression for political leverage.

JO

It's not that whites make up a majority of those who get into their school of first choice. It's that whites DISPROPORTIONATELY get into their schools of first choice. Just as whites disproportionately have jobs, higher wages at their jobs, access to the best schools, to the best housing, to a healthy environment, to decent health care, the ability to get away with committing crimes, the opportunity to avoid military service, protection from being fired, opportunities to dissent or to differ from the ideologically specified norm (e.g. by being gay or for that matter female) and escape severe punishment, and personal physical security.

The "skew" of racial allocation of privilege--despite affirmative action--is unequivocally in favor of whites.

 

[EatTheRich]

http://www.timwise.org/2013/05/whine-merchants-privilege-inequality-and-the-persistent-myth-of-white-victimhood/

 

[justoffal]

It's not that whites make up a majority of those who get into their school of first choice. It's that whites DISPROPORTIONATELY get into their schools of first choice. Just as whites disproportionately have jobs, higher wages at their jobs, access to the best schools, to the best housing, to a healthy environment, to decent health care, the ability to get away with committing crimes, the opportunity to avoid military service, protection from being fired, opportunities to dissent or to differ from the ideologically specified norm (e.g. by being gay or for that matter female) and escape severe punishment, and personal physical security.

The "skew" of racial allocation of privilege--despite affirmative action--is unequivocally in favor of whites.

WOW.....

Any one of the premises in your sermon above could fill a volume in analytical debate.

"The opportunity fo avoid military service".... ????????????????

When is this not a choice?

JO

 

[EatTheRich]

WOW.....

Any one of the premises in your sermon above could fill a volume in analytical debate.

"The opportunity fo avoid military service".... ????????????????

When is this not a choice?

JO

When it's the only way to get a badly needed job, of course.

 

[EatTheRich]

WOW.....

Any one of the premises in your sermon above could fill a volume in analytical debate.

Only if one side is deliberately obfuscating the evident facts. It is clear to even the most casual of honest observers that white supremacy is omnipresent.

 

[justoffal]

Only if one side is deliberately obfuscating the evident facts. It is clear to even the most casual of honest observers that white supremacy is omnipresent.

Wow again...

Do you realize that 90 percent of your prose is couched in sarcasm and presumption?
No wonder your compass points south.

 

[EatTheRich]

Wow again...

Do you realize that 90 percent of your prose is couched in sarcasm and presumption?

I would say that's a reasonable response to the sort of disingenuous faux-naivete on display in this thread. Even if some white people really are blinded by white-supremacist ideology to the way the white-supremacist system gives them systematic racial advantage, they are blinded because they are afraid of what opening their eyes will reveal to them.

No wonder your compass points south.

You talking about my dick? How would you know?

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

They've done it again. As many US Supreme courts before them, this 2016 SCOTUS has once again affirmed the shameful notion that it's OK to discriminate on the basis of race > as long as Whites are the victims. On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld the University of Texas’ affirmative action policies and shot down claims by Abigail Fisher that the policy was unconstitutional.

Well of course it's unconstitutional. And it violates the civil rights laws. But hey, if it give freebies to blacks, we gotta do it right ? Has this country gone completely unhinged ? Affirmative action discrimination against whites is the # 1 racism in America, which has damaged, by far, the largest number of victims (whites), and has been doing it for 55 years. These fools on the Supreme Court, had an opportunity to finally put a top to this madness, and they blew it.

Instead of proclaiming that "diversity is still needed", they should have declared that REPARATIONS for discriminated-against whites is what is needed. Millions of people whose lives have been reduced economically, and every other way, due to AA, still suffer it's racist ramifications now in retirement, with reduced Social Security benefits. Many others have already gotten very old and died, while racist Supreme Courts, one after another, disregard their victimization because they are white.

Hang your heads in SHAME 2016 SCOTUS. Feel free to include yourselves with the KKK, the Nazi Party, the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, the New Black Panther Party, and other racist groups.

Cheers for Justice Samuel Alito, who slammed the decision as "affirmative action gone wild" in a 51-page dissent that dwarfed the court's 20-page opinion. He said it allows the university to seek out African-American students with privileged backgrounds over low-income white and Asian students. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas joined his dissent.

It's notable also, that if Justice Scalia was alive, this wouldn't have happened. What ought to happen is that black groups ought to show some integrity, and denounce this decision, and declare their opposition to this racism. If they had an ounce of decency they would. Apparently they don't.

Supreme Court upholds affirmative action in university admissions

As I mention to JAG lawyer, @Peter1469, judicial review had nothing specifically to do with Marbury's case against Madison. Therefore, it was obiter dictum and non-binding.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Abigail Fisher applies to a university that rejects her based on her mediocre qualifications. The university at the same time admits 42 whites and 5 Blacks with lower test scores than hers. 168 applicants of color with higher test scores meanwhile are also rejected--even though their higher test scores arguably likely reflect greater actual capacity given the racial obstacles they had to overcome to get those scores.

Yet she argues that UT's program to ensure racial diversity--instead of an all-white campus--somehow is a program of "freebies" for Blacks. In other words, she seems to think that her white skin, alone, "proves" that she is more qualified than the 5 Blacks with lower test scores who are admitted, although she does not argue with the university's decision to likewise admit 42 whites with lower test scores. As if--despite the dozens and dozens of Blacks with higher test scores who were likewise rejected--the ONLY reason the Black students got in ahead of her was a racial entitlement, rather than what it actually is--an upper bound on the de facto racial entitlement given to Fisher and other whites.

Diversity Is Perversity; Integration Is Disintegration

Then it's a setup: put up a weak case in order to continue getting away with this Whiteys Hating Whitey favoritism. How much did George Soros pay Fisher to go ahead with this scam?

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Whites are more likely than members of any other race to be admitted to their first-choice schools. Affirmative action does not give nonwhites an absolute advantage over whites, it only partly mitigates the many hidden preferences available to whites. Some examples courtesy of Tim Wise:

We strike the pose of self-sufficiency while ignoring the advantages we have been afforded in every realm of activity: housing, education, employment, criminal justice, politics and business. We ignore that at every turn, our hard work has been met with access to an opportunity structure to which millions of others have been denied similar access. Privilege, to us, is like water to the fish: invisible precisely because we cannot imagine life without it.​

It is that context that best explains the duplicity of the President’s critique of affirmative action at the University of Michigan, during the recent court battle over so-called “racial preferences” at that institution. President Bush, himself a lifelong recipient of affirmative action — the kind set-aside for the rich and mediocre — proclaimed that the school’s policies were unfair. Yet in doing so he not only showed a profound ignorance of the Michigan policy, but also made clear the inability of yet another white person to grasp the magnitude of white privilege still in operation; an inability sadly ratified by the Supreme Court when it ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the Michigan case, in June 2003.

To wit, the President, and ultimately the Supreme Court, attacked Michigan’s policy of awarding twenty points (on a 150-point evaluation scale) to undergraduate applicants who were members of underrepresented minorities, which at U of M means blacks, Latinos and American Indians. To many whites such a “preference” was blatantly discriminatory. Yet what Bush and the Court failed to mention were the greater numbers of points awarded for other things, and which had the clear effect of preferencing whites to the exclusion of people of color.

For example, Michigan awarded twenty points to any student from a low-income background, regardless of race. Since those points could not be combined with those for minority status (in other words poor blacks don’t get forty points), in effect this was a preference for poor whites. Then Michigan awarded sixteen points to students from the Upper Peninsula of the state: a rural and almost completely white area.

Of course both preferences were fair, based as they were on the recognition that economic status and geography (as with race) can have a profound effect on the quality of schooling that one receives, and that no one should be punished for such things that are beyond their control. But note that such preferences, though disproportionately awarded to whites, remained uncriticized throughout the litigation on this case, while preferences for people of color become the target for reactionary anger. Once again, white preference remained hidden because it wasn’t called white preference, even if that was the effect.

But that’s not all. Ten points were awarded under the Michigan plan to students who attended top high schools, and another eight points were given to students who took an especially demanding AP and Honors curriculum. As with points for those from the Upper Peninsula, these preferences may have been race-neutral in theory, but in practice they were anything but. Because of intense racial isolation (and Michigan’s schools are the most segregated in America for blacks according to research by the Harvard Civil Rights Project), students of color will rarely attend the “best” schools, and on average, schools serving mostly black and Latino students offer only a third as many AP and honors courses as schools serving mostly whites. So even truly talented students of color would have been unable to access those extra points simply because of where they live, their economic status, and ultimately their race, which is intertwined with both.

Then up to twelve points were awarded for a student’s SAT score, which is itself directly correlated with a student’s socioeconomic status, which in turn is highly correlated with race in a way that favors whites and disadvantages most students of color.

Four more points were awarded to students with a parent who attended the U of M: a kind of affirmative action with which the President is intimately familiar, and which almost exclusively goes to whites.

In other words, Michigan was offering twenty “extra” points to the typical black, Latino or indigenous applicant, while offering various combinations worth up to 70 extra points for students who would almost all be white. But while the first of these were seen as examples of racial preferences, the second were not, hidden as they were behind the structure of social inequities that limit where people live, where they go to school, and the kinds of opportunities they have been afforded. White preferences, by being the result of the normal workings of a racist society, can remain out of sight and out of mind, while the power of the state is turned against the paltry preferences meant to offset them.

To recognize just how blind so many white Americans are to the workings of white privilege, one need only consider the oft-heard comment by whites that “if I had only been black I would have gotten into my first-choice college.” Such a statement not only ignores the fact that whites are more likely than members of any group, even with affirmative action, to get into their first-choice school, but it also presumes, as anti-racist activist Paul Marcus explains, “that if these whites were black, everything else about their life would have remained the same: that it would have made no negative difference as to where they went to school, what their family income was, or anything else.”

But this ability to believe that being black would have made no difference (other than a beneficial one when it came time for college), and that being white has made no positive difference, is rooted in privilege itself: the privilege of not having one’s intelligence questioned by books like The Bell Curve, or one’s culture attacked as dysfunctional by politicians and so-called scholars; the privilege of not having to worry about being viewed as “out of place” when driving, shopping, buying a home, or attending the University of Michigan; the privilege of not being denied an interview for a job because your name sounds “too black,” as a recent study discovered happens often to African American job-seekers.

So long as those privileges remain firmly in place and the preferential treatment that flows from those privileges continues to work to the benefit of whites, all talk of ending affirmative action is not only premature but a slap in the face to those who have fought and died for equal opportunity.​

Time Does Not March On to Their Rhythm

The Bell Curve tolls the funeral procession for the unfit races.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Only if one side is deliberately obfuscating the evident facts. It is clear to even the most casual of honest observers that white supremacy is omnipresent.

Those Who Sponsor Racial Equality Secretly Favor Birth-Class Superiority

That's because White superiority is undeniably true. The races evolved from different species, many of which have passed their evolutionary expiration dates. They are living on borrowed time if they continue to challenge the pride of the advanced races.

 

[Fast Eddy]

Blacks still can't make it on their own, they need help. I guess this is proof they are inferior! That's what the SCOTUS message says to me.