The Last of Affirmative Action

 

The Last of Affirmative Action

This is the last of the Hillsdale article on "disparate outcomes," the outcomes of education and crime. Whatever the causes, they are a crisis for the black community. And, regardless of what these politicians say, identities cannot separate and insulate us; failure of one is failure of all.

In 2019, 66 percent of all black 12th graders did not possess even partial mastery of basic 12th-grade math skills, defined as being able to do arithmetic and to read a graph. Only seven percent of black 12th graders were proficient in 12th-grade math, defined as being able to calculate using ratios. The number of black 12th graders who were advanced in math was too small to show up statistically in a national sample. The picture was not much better in reading. Fifty percent of black 12th graders did not possess even partial mastery of basic reading, and only four percent were advanced.

According to the ACT, a standardized college admissions test, only three percent of black high school seniors were college-ready in 2023. The disparities in other such tests—the SAT, the LSAT, the GRE, and the GMAT—are just as wide. Remember these data when politicians and others vilify Americans as racist because this or that institution is not proportionally diverse.

We can argue about why these disparities exist and how to close them—something that policymakers and philanthropists have been trying to do for decades. But in light of these skills gaps, it is irrational to expect 13 percent black representation on a medical school faculty or among a law firm’s partners under meritocratic standards. At present, you can have proportional diversity or you can have a meritocracy. You cannot have both.

As for the criminal justice system, the bodies speak for themselves. President Biden is fond of intoning that black parents are right to fear that their children will be killed by a police officer or by a white gunslinger every time those children step outside. The mayor of Kansas City proclaimed last year that “existing while black” is another high-risk activity that blacks must engage in. The mayor was partially right: existing while black is far more dangerous than existing while white—but the reason is black crime, not white vigilantes.

In the post-George Floyd era, black juveniles are shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. Blacks between the ages of ten and 24 are killed in drive-by shootings at nearly 25 times the rate of whites in that same age cohort. Dozens of blacks are murdered every day, more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are just 13 percent of the population. The country turns its eyes away. Who is killing these black victims? Not the police, not whites, but other blacks.

As for interracial violence, blacks are a greater threat to whites than whites are to blacks. Blacks commit 85 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites. A black person is 35 times more likely to commit an act of non-lethal violence against a white person than vice versa. Yet the national narrative insists on the opposite idea—and too many dutifully play along.

These crime disparities mean that the police cannot restore law and order in neighborhoods where innocent people are most being victimized without having a disparate impact on black criminals. So the political establishment has decided not to restore law and order at all.

We must fight back against disparate impact thinking. As long as racism remains the only allowable explanation for racial disparities, the Left wins, and our civilization will continue to crumble.

Even the arts are coming down. Classical music, visual art, theater—all are dismissed as a function of white oppression. The Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an astonishing show last year called the Fictions of Emancipation. The show’s premise was that if a white artist creates a work intended to show the cruelties of slavery, that artist (in this case, the great 19th-century French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux) is in fact arguing that the natural condition of blacks is slavery. Prosecuting this nonsensical argument required the Met to ignore or distort almost every feature of the Western art tradition—including the representation of the nude human body, artists’ use of models, and the sale of art.

Only Western art is subjected to this kind of hostile interpretation. Chinese, African, and Indian cultural traditions are still treated with curatorial respect, their works analyzed following their creators’ intent. As soon as a critic turns his eye or ear on Western art, however, all he can see or hear is imperialism and white privilege. It is a perverse obsession. We are teaching young people to dismiss the greatest creations of humanity. We are stripping them of the capacity to escape their narrow identities and to lose themselves in beauty, sublimity, and wit. No wonder so many Americans are drowning in meaninglessness and despair.

We must stop apologizing for Western Civilization. To be sure, slavery and segregation were grotesque violations of America’s founding ideals. For much of our history, black Americans suffered injustice and gratuitous cruelty. Today, however, every mainstream institution is twisting itself into knots to hire and promote as many underrepresented minorities as possible. Yet those same institutions grovelingly accuse themselves of racism.

The West has liberated the world from universal squalor and disease, thanks to the scientific method and the Western passion for discovery and knowledge. It has given the world plumbing, hot showers in frigid winters, flight, clean water, steel, antibiotics, and just about every structure and every device that we take for granted in our miraculously privileged existence—and I use the word “privilege” here to refer to anyone whose life has been transformed by Western ingenuity—i.e., virtually every human being on the planet.

It was in the West that the ideas of constitutional government and civil rights were born. Yes, to our shame, we had slavery. What civilization did not? But only the Anglosphere expended lives and capital to end the nearly universal practice. Britain had to occupy Lagos in 1861 to get its ruler to give up the slave trade. The British Navy used 13 percent of its manpower to blockade slave ships leaving the western coast of Africa in the 19th century, as Nigel Biggar has documented. Every ideal that the Left uses today to bash the West—such as equality or tolerance—originated in the West.

***

The ongoing attack on colorblind excellence in the U.S. is putting our scientific edge at risk. China, which cares nothing for identity politics, is throwing everything it has at its most talented students. China ranks number one in international tests of K-12 math, science, and reading skills; the U.S. ranks twenty-fifth.

China is racing ahead in nanophysics, artificial intelligence, and other critical defense technologies. Chinese teams dominate the International Olympiad in Informatics. Meanwhile, the American Mathematical Association declares math to be racist and President Biden puts a soil geologist with no background in physics at the top of the Department of Energy’s science programs. This new science director may know nothing about nuclear weapons and nuclear physics, but she checks off several identity politics boxes and publishes on such topics as “A Critical Feminist Approach to Transforming Workplace Climate.”

What do we do in response to such civilizational immolation? We proclaim that standards are not racist and that excellence is not racist. We assert that categories like race, gender, and sexual preference are never qualifications for a job. I know for a fact that being female is not an accomplishment. I am equally sure that being gay or being black are also not accomplishments.

Should conservative political candidates campaign against disparate impact thinking and in favor of standards of merit? Of course, they should! They will be accused of waging a culture war. But it is the progressive elites, not their conservative opponents, who are engaging in cultural revolution!

Most conservatives today are not even playing defense. How about legislation to ban racial preferences in medical training and practice? How about eliminating the disparate impact standard in statutes and regulations? Conservatives should by all means promote the virtues of free markets and limited government, but the diversity regime is the nemesis of both.

Lowering standards helps no one since high expectations are the key to achievement. In defense of excellence, we must speak the truth, never apologize, and never back down.

More Affirmative Action

 More Affirmative Action

"Disparate results" require lowering of standards in the legal profession, which came up with the disparate impact concept in the first place. Upon taking office in 2021, President Biden announced that he would no longer submit his judicial nominees to the American Bar Association (ABA) for a preliminary rating. Why? According to a member of the White House Counsel’s Office, allowing the ABA to vet candidates would be incompatible with the “diversification of the judiciary.”

This claim was dubious. The ABA, after all, cannot open its collective mouth without issuing a bromide about the need to diversify the bar. Its leading members are obsessed with the demographics of corporate law firms and law school faculties. This is the same ABA that gave its highest rating to a Supreme Court nominee who as a justice would make the false claim during a challenge to Covid vaccine mandates that “over 100,000 children are in serious condition [from Covid] and many are on ventilators.”

State bar associations are also busy watering down standards to eliminate disparate impact. In 2020, California lowered the pass score on its bar exam because black applicants were disproportionately failing. Only five percent of black law school graduates passed the California bar on their first try in February 2020, compared to 52 percent of white law school graduates and 42 percent of Asian law school graduates. The lack of proportional representation among California’s attorneys was held to be proof of a discriminatory credentialing system.

The pressure to eliminate the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) requirement for law school admissions is growing, because it too has a disparate impact. As a single mother told an ABA panel, “I would hate to give up on my dream of becoming a lawyer just due to not being able to successfully handle this test.” Note the assumption: the problem always lies with the test, never with the test taker. The LSAT requirement will almost certainly be axed.

But equality of circumstance is a lot different than equality before the law. The curious state of our criminal justice system today is a function of the disparate impact principle. If you wonder why police officers are not making certain arrests, or why district attorneys are not prosecuting whole categories of crimes—such as shoplifting, trespassing, or farebeating—it is because apprehending lawbreakers and prosecuting crime have a disparate impact on black criminals. Urban leaders have decided that they would rather not enforce the law at all, no matter how constitutional that enforcement, than put more black criminals in jail.

Walgreens, CVS, and Target would rather close down entire stores and deprive their elderly customers of access to their medications than confront shoplifters and hand them over to the law, because doing so would disproportionately yield black shoplifters, as the viral looting videos attest. Macy’s flagship store in New York City was sued several years ago because most of the people its employees stopped for shoplifting were black. The only allowable explanation for that fact was that Macy’s was racist. It was not permissible to argue that Macy’s arrests mirrored the shoplifting population.

Even colorblind technology is racist. Speeding and red-light cameras disproportionately identify black drivers as traffic scofflaws. The solution to such disparate impact is the same as we saw with the medical licensing exam: throw out the cameras.

The result of this de-prosecution and de-policing has been widespread urban anarchy and, in 2020, the largest one-year spike in homicide in this nation’s history. Thousands more black lives have been lost to drive-by shootings. Dozens of black children have been fatally gunned down in their beds, in their front yards, and in their parents’ cars. No one says their names because their assailants were not police officers or white supremacists. They were other blacks.

(more from a Hilsdale lecture)

Ex Post Facto

“The surest way to reduce the trade deficit is to wreck the economy.”--Riley

From a paper on a China medical program: The New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) rolled out in China from 2003-2008 provided insurance to 800 million rural Chinese. We combine aggregate mortality data with individual survey data, and identify the impact of the NCMS from program rollout and heterogeneity across areas in their rural share. We find that there was a significant decline in aggregate mortality, with the program saving more than one million lives per year at its peak, and explaining 78% of the entire increase in life expectancy in China over this period. We confirm these mortality effects using micro-data on mortality, other health outcomes, and utilization.

Leslie Van Houten is loose.

Ex Post Facto

Ex post facto law and Bill of Attainder are two legal outrages specifically forbidden in the American Constitution simply because they are so abusive. Ex post facto applies laws in retrospect, making something legal previously, illegal at the time it was legal. A Bill of Attainder is a law aimed at a specific individual. These concepts are so obviously unjust--and are so often generated by personal malice or political enthusiasm--that any thoughtful person--and the Founding Fathers had them in abundance--would easily reject the concept. As would anybody.

But not now. Now people are being held legally responsible for legal acts done by total strangers years ago when those acts were legal but currently despised. Vicarious--or imputed--liability is a real legal concept, usually with respect to parent-child or employer-employee. A child or employee can be seen as an agent of the parent or employer. That concept is a reasonable debate. But how is holding total strangers, generations later, responsible for presumed consequences of legal acts hundreds of years ago at all reasonable?

How could ex post facto laws be taken seriously, then made inherited?

The answer is hidden in Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent in the Harvard discrimination case: The Black community needs assistance--legal, reasonable, abusive or not. That is the sign of a culture twisting itself to accommodate a protected class.

Pivot

Samuel Hammond: “European AI safety is focused on privacy while American AI safety is focused on paternalism. Neither make us more safe in any substantive sense.”

A recently passed bill in Michigan could make it a felony to intimidate someone by intentionally using the wrong gender pronouns, according to some legal experts.
Michigan's state House of Representatives has passed bill HB 4474, a piece of legislation that criminalizes causing someone to feel threatened by words.
Under the new bill, offenders are "guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than 5 years, or by a fine of not more than $10,000."

Jack Wilson's son, Jake, is a shortstop and expected to be a first rounder this year.

The difference between investigation and management. White House cocaine: Greg Gutfeld pointed out the differing declarations of the location of the discovery, as District of Columbia fire officials reportedly said over their radio that it was found in the library – which is notably part of the East Wing – while the U.S. Secret Service reportedly said it was discovered in the more heavily-traversed West Wing.

Pivot

The people who have fought with such outrage in favor of the university's right--even obligation--to select students on the basis of an arbitrary vision of their student body makeup and the history of past admissions are now organizing against university legacy admissions. The are using the arguments of those that defeated them in the Harvard preference case. Taking up the weapons of the victors is weird enough, but weirder when you claim you're the moral side. So, their attack on Justice Thomas for being an affirmative action product makes more sense.

As the Supreme Court dissents show, there is little philosophy here and, thus, continuity. The recurring point is not the reverence for concept and consistency, it is results. There is a model in the minds of the Left that must be achieved in some way, regardless how circuitous or insincere. This is an important point since the Constitution was created to provide confines to government activity, not a blueprint. Certain individual rights are ceded to the government in very defined ways. The rest are reserved to the citizen, based upon the belief in every individual's inherent value and dignity. (And, regrettably, competence.)

Ours is a system of refined process, not outcome. And opposition is easy as it is not confined by ordinary, human thinking. It is a matter of passion.

The Logistics of Extortion

The global commercial surrogacy industry grew to an estimated $14 billion in 2022. By 2032, that figure is forecast to rise to $129 billion. In Georgia, as in Ukraine, commercial surrogacy programs cost around $40,000-$50,000, while in Mexico they are about $60,000-$70,000. That compares with an average of $120,000 and higher in the U.S.

***

The peso is the top-performing major currency this year, according to Bloomberg, and has more than recovered from its coronavirus pandemic weakness. It has risen 8.5 percent this year to trade above 18 to the dollar…
Foreign direct investment in Mexico hit $35.3bn last year, the highest level since 2015, according to economy ministry data. Transport manufacturing accounted for 12 percent of that.
Another source of foreign income has been resilient remittances from Mexican migrants in the US. The transfers from abroad now make up 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Even after growing to record levels last year, in January remittances were 12.5 percent higher than the same month a year earlier, according to Bank of Mexico figures.

***

An interview with an MIT professor discusses China’s lackluster technological innovation and why declining foreign investment is more of a concern than a declining population.

***

The Logistics of Extortion

The geniuses in the race industry have begun to ask funny questions, like where will the reparations come from?

Vaguely sensing that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, Hannah-Jones asks where the federal government would get the money to pay such a massive amount. Wouldn’t taxes have to be raised, she queries. [Duke University economist Sandy] Darity confidently asserts that no such action is necessary.

“It’s a matter of the federal government financing it in the same way that it financed…the stimulus package for the Great Recession” and the COVID-era CARES Act, Darity continues. To do so, the federal government needs only “spend the money but without raising taxes.” (David Henderson and Phil Magness)

There is a kind of symmetry between the mindless 1619 cult and the mindless view of economics the devotees and hustlers bring to fund it. And stupid ideas and behavior can be innocuous when small and contained. But...

Race

Civil forfeiture is the power to seize property suspected of being produced by, or involved in, crime. The property owners must prove that they and their property are innocent of such involvement. Proving this can be, and government has a motive to make it be, a protracted, costly ordeal against a government that has unlimited resources. The government entity that seizes the property often is allowed to keep or sell it. Lucrative law enforcement involves blatant moral hazard — an incentive for perverse behavior.--will

***

Inequality.
In three recent studies, existential significance, or the feeling that one’s life matters, was the facet of meaning that primarily explained the link between attractiveness and meaning in life. In addition, a person’s view of their own attractiveness is more indicative of their well-being than outsider ratings.

***

Governments.
Papua New Guinea’s prime minister says he does not know the exact size of his country’s population after a report suggested that the number of people living in the Pacific nation could be almost twice the official figure.

A new study compiled by the UN Population Fund has implied that Papua New Guinea’s population may have ballooned to 17mn compared with the official figure of 9.4mn, according to a report in The Australian newspaper. James Marape, who was re-elected as Papua New Guinean prime minister in August, told the newspaper he believed that the population could be 11mn but admitted he might be wrong.

The lack of clarity around the size of the country’s population has serious implications for its economic status and raises doubts over its ability to provide services to its people.

***

A study on the effect of direct cash subsidies to Chinese firms:

"Our results provide little evidence to support the view that government subsidies have been given to more productive firms or that they have enhanced the productivity of the Chinese listed firms."

Hayek lives.

***

Race

Distortion results in distortion, often creating what it was created to prevent.

In his new book, Charles Murray discusses how he believes identity politics, with its manifold prejudices, squashes honest scientific and medical research, misleads our lawmakers, misdirects our policies, and creates division by separating people into groups rather than looking at them as individuals.

He then raises some valid questions about the future. What if, for example, working-class and middle-class whites adopt identity politics, as some will surely do? What if our universities, corporations, and governments continue to place more emphasis on racial preferences than on talent and skill? Fighting white privilege may appeal to some faculty members in an Ivy League university or to the Disney board of directors, but as Murray writes, most white citizens:
"believe that everyone has a God-given right to be treated equally. Now all of them are being told that they are privileged and racist, and they are asking on what grounds. They are living ordinary lives, with average incomes, working hard to make ends meet. They can’t see what ‘White privilege’ they have ever enjoyed."

Or does identity politics assume the good humor or kind passivity of the white community or sensible non-whites?

Wood on 1619

Mandates are concerning for two reasons. First, it is not clear they are ethical. The standard rule in medicine is simple: We do not intrude upon individual autonomy unless that intervention provides sufficient benefit to third parties. This means there must be a large benefit to others— enough so the loss of autonomy is acceptable. Given that the Covid-19 vaccine does not halt virus transmission, the prerequisite is not met.--Prasad

***

Warming is said to be bad for the economy but Florida, on average 26 degrees warmer than Michigan, has grown faster.

***

Interesting article in the WSJ on the Durham case that discusses the FBI and, more importantly, the Press and the management of the Trump fiascoes. One line: the Columbia Journalism Review criticized MSNBC not for opposing Mr. Trump reflexively but for doing so stupidly—in ways that strengthened him.

***

If Catholic schools were a state, they’d be the highest performing in the nation on all four NAEP tests.

***

Wood on 1619

A letter to the NYT by historian Gordon Wood on the growingly farcical 1619 Project:

I have read your response to our letter concerning the 1619 Project. I have no quarrel with the idea behind the project. Demonstrating the importance of slavery in the history of our country is essential and commendable. But that necessary and worthy goal will be seriously harmed if the facts in the project turn out to be wrong and the interpretations of events are deemed to be perverse and distorted. In the long run the Project will lose its credibility, standing, and persuasiveness with the nation as a whole. I fear that it will eventually hurt the cause rather than help it. We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth.

I have spent my career studying the American Revolution and cannot accept the view that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776. If southerners were concerned about losing their slaves, why didn’t they make efforts to ally with the slaveholding planters in the British West Indies? Perhaps some southern slaveholders were alarmed by news of the Somerset decision, but we don’t have any evidence of that. Besides, that decision was not known in the colonies until the fall of 1772 and by that date the colonists were well along in their drive to independence. Remember, it all started in 1765 with the Stamp Act. The same is true of Dunmore’s proclamation of 1775. It may have tipped the scales for some hesitant Virginia planters, but by then the revolutionary movement was already well along in Virginia.

There is no evidence in 1776 of a rising movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, as the 1619 Project erroneously asserts, nor is there any evidence the British government was eager to do so. But even if either were the case, ending the Atlantic slave trade would have been welcomed by the Virginia planters, who already had more slaves than they needed. Indeed, the Virginians in the years following independence took the lead in moving to abolish the despicable international slave trade.

How could slavery be worth preserving for someone like John Adams, who hated slavery and owned no slaves? If anyone in the Continental Congress was responsible for the Declaration of Independence, it was Adams. And much of our countrymen now know that from seeing the film of the musical “1776.” Ignoring his and other northerners’ roles in the decision for independence can only undermine the credibility of your project with the general public. Far from preserving slavery the North saw the Revolution as an opportunity to abolish the institution. The first anti-slave movements in the history of the world, supported by whites as well as blacks, took place in the northern states in the years immediately following 1776.

I could go on with many more objections, some of which I mentioned in my interview with the World Socialist Web Site. But for now this may be enough to justify some correction and modification of the project. Again, let me emphasize my wholehearted support of the goal of the project to demonstrate accurately and truthfully to all Americans the importance of slavery in our history. 

 

Academics and Grifters

 

Academics and Grifters

A note on Ms. Jones, the esteemed author of the 1619 scam.

'Nikole Hannah Jones has not written a single line for the newspaper where she is employed as a reporter in over two years. She also lacks a terminal degree in any field, has no prior teaching experience in higher ed, and has no scholarly publications. To cap that off, she has been credibly accused of severe acts of journalistic misconduct, including ghost-editing the web copy of her published articles in an effort to game the Pulitzer Prize review process.

Those facts combined render her fundamentally unqualified to hold a faculty position of any type, let alone one that is hired at the full professor level with tenure.

And now she’s outright grifting off of the taxpayers of North Carolina by securing a payout settlement from UNC to withdraw her lawsuit against the university for receiving all of those things and then declining the offer because the university’s board of trustees briefly pushed back against it.'--Magness

Murray and Murder

P J O'Rourk has died.

The Durham accusation is serious, but is it deep?

                         
Murray and Murder

In his new book, Charles Murray reviews the database for New York City murders and finds that of the 1,906 blacks killed from 2006-2017, 89 percent were killed by African Americans. Latinos committed 10 percent of these murders, and just 0.6 percent of black homicide victims died at the hands of whites. These figures, Murray writes, are “useful as a counterweight to much of the rhetoric from the Black Lives Matter movement.”

The problem with this kind of logical criticism is that it assumes the sincerity of its opponents.

Whoopi

Whoopi

Whoopi Goldberg must stand in the corner for two weeks not for what she believes but for what she let out of the bag.

She said yesterday that the Holocaust was not about race. Strange that both the Nazis and the Jews thought it was. But what seems like just another moronic celebrity declaration is actually quite revealing.

Hitler hated the Jews, refining a strong European tradition. He--and Europe--thought them an inferior subset, distinctive both culturally and genetically. But Jews are not a true race. So, is Whoopi right?

Do we need Ms. Goldberg to clarify the motives of a murderous regime? Teach the basics of race to homicidal goons? I don't think that was her intent. She is not interested in violence toward helpless victims, she is concerned about the 'racism' brand.

Tribalism identifies an 'other,' then turns on him. From the Hatfields and the McCoys to the Hutus and Tutsis, the hatred depends on identifying, dehumanizing, then obliterating an 'other.' Racism looks no different from tribalism because it is tribalism, only easier. Racism makes identifying the other more simple.

Ms. Goldberg has revealed her concern: racism must not be confused with broader tribalisms. Racism must be special, never part of man's general defects, never part of man's larger problems. According to Ms. Goldberg, the Holocaust was pretty awful, but it does not rise to the level of real racism. Anger at Islamist is one thing, but it does not distill into real evil until it is branded racism.

Nothing must allow common tribal animosity to dilute racism. Racism must always be particular, must always stand out. It must never become just anther arrow of disgust in the quiver of the pure.

 

 

Are Some Wounds Self-Inflicted?

               Are Some Wounds Self-Inflicted?

From a City Journal article by MacDonald:

"The prevalence of systemic racism in the U.S. is far from an established fact, however. Other credible explanations exist for ongoing racial disparities, including family structure, cultural attitudes, and individual behavior. To declare from the highest reaches of the academy that racism is the defining and all-explaining feature of American society is to adopt a political position, not to state a scientific truth. That political position entails a host of unspoken assumptions about the world, themselves open to debate. In aligning itself with one particular political position, the academy is betraying what Max Weber saw as its mission: to stay assiduously neutral and to teach “inconvenient” facts about the world that undercut received assumptions across the political spectrum. Political action was antithetical to scholarship, Weber argued.

Even before the Floyd riots, universities were notoriously hostile to points of view that challenged the already-powerful campus orthodoxies. Students and professors erupted in sometimes violent rage toward outside speakers who brought nonconforming ideas onto campus. Those few courageous faculty members who dared dispute the racism thesis found themselves ostracized. University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax was denounced by her dean, the aforementioned Ted Ruger, and removed from teaching first-year classes, for mentioning the academic skills gap. Other dissidents from the diversity ideology, like Evergreen State College’s Bret Weinstein, were driven out of their jobs. Most freethinking students or professors simply kept quiet, terrified lest they become the next pariah.

Anyone who thought that the intellectual conformity on college campuses could not get worse lacked imagination. In the post-Floyd era, any prospective Ph.D. proposing to study the behavioral components of inequality will find it almost impossible to be admitted to a graduate program, much less to find a job afterward. A few reckless undergraduates may still push back against the received wisdom, but their numbers will shrink, and the social and professional toll from their obstinacy will be higher. Candidates for the federal bench during the Trump administration have already seen their nominations torpedoed because of undergraduate journalism mocking the pieties of multiculturalism. In the future, the costs of such heresies will rise, and the inhibitions on free thought and speech will grow more crushing.

Each diversity initiative, whether in academia or in business, requires pretending that it was not preceded by a long line of identical efforts. Instead, every new diversity campaign starts with penance for the alleged bias that leads schools and corporations to overlook some vast untapped pool of competitively qualified blacks and Hispanics. Now, the pressure to admit and hire on the basis of race will redouble in force, elevating even less skilled candidates to positions of power throughout society. American institutions will pay the price.

What if the racism explanation for ongoing disparities is wrong, however? What if racial economic and incarceration gaps cannot close without addressing personal responsibility and family culture—without a sea change in the attitudes that many inner-city black children bring with them to school regarding studying, paying attention in class, and respecting teachers, for example? What if the breakdown of the family is producing children with too little capacity to control their impulses and defer gratification? With the university now explicitly committed to the racism explanation for all self-defeating choices, there will be little chance of changing course and addressing the behaviors that lie behind many racial disparities. The persistence of inequality will then produce a new round of quotas and self-incrimination—as well as more violence and anger. And the graduates of these ideologically monolithic universities will proceed further to dismantle our civilization in conformity to a lie."

Racism Uber Alles

                Racism Uber Alles 

Racism overcomes the most callous of money-grubbing motives. This is from somewhere, but it sounds like Bordeaux.

Corkery describes the 2018 closing of a Target store in inner-city Baltimore as “a sobering reminder of the realities of capitalism” (“Target Store Closings Show Limits of Pledge to Black Communities,” June 30). The text of the story suggests that, by this charge, Mr. Corkery doesn’t mean that the operation of a large retail outlet in such a neighborhood is unprofitable. Instead, the insinuation is that capitalism is either naively or evilly biased against inner-city communities of people of color.

Such an insinuation is odd given the widespread belief – especially in Progressive circles – that capitalists are incurably greedy for ever-greater profits. One wonders why Target’s profiteers intentionally abandoned profits by closing that store. Surely, among the “realities of capitalism” is not the refusal to seize opportunities for profit.

Here, though, is a genuine – and decidedly not sobering – reality of capitalism: entrepreneurial opportunity. If a large retail store in that location can indeed be run profitably, then Mr. Corkery or some of the people he interviewed for his report should themselves open up such a store in that location. If they’re correct that Target abandoned a profitable opportunity, they’ll earn with their store handsome profits while simultaneously improving the lives of many Baltimoreans.

But they’d better hurry up and do so! Now that word is out that Target is leaving profit on ground in parts of Baltimore, experienced retailers such as Walmart are sure to rush in to take advantage of this golden opportunity.

Black Deaths

                             Black Deaths

The commonest cause of death in the cohort of Black males under the age of forty-four is homicide, Well, here's a really cynical opinion on MLM's attitude toward Black culture and lives by some guy named Salzman:

"Two-parent families are even more prevalent among Asians of all origins, who are today among the most successful people in America, not because they are “people of color” or “adjacent white,” but because their culture emphasizes family values and educational achievement. But BLM doesn’t want any of that for African Americans. As members of the African American elite, BLM is quite happy to have African Americans segregated, weak, and dependent upon them. The members of the BLM elite are doing quite well, thank you.

The facts are that very few African Americans are killed by police, and African Americans are not overrepresented in being killed once the African American crime rate is taken into account. At the same time, African Americans are highly overrepresented as victims of shootings, murders, rapes, assaults, carjackings, and other serious violent crimes. African Americans are almost 50% of the murder victims, although they make up around 13% of the population. But it is not police or white nationalists who are to blame. Ninety percent of African American murders are perpetrated by other African Americans. In short—although it is now regarded as “racist” to say this—the greatest violent threat to African Americans is African American criminals."

What is happening is that somehow the perpetrators are now being seen as something other than criminals.

Shooting the Analyst

 

                Shooting the Analyst

Professor Sandra Sellers of Georgetown Law School, in what she thought was a private conversation with a fellow faculty member after a virtual class, said, after discussing the performance of a black student in her mediation class:

"You know what? I hate to say this, I end up having this angst every semester, that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. It happens almost every semester, and it’s like oh, come on. You know, we get some really good ones but there also are usually some of them that are just plain at the bottom."

Unbeknownst to the professors, the conversation was still being recorded and was uploaded, along with the rest of the class, into a digital database.

Georgetown Black Law Students Association (BLSA) became aware of the conversation and immediately BLSA claimed:

"These racist statements reveal not only Sellers’ beliefs about black students in her classes, but also how her racist thoughts have translated to racist actions. Professor Sellers’ bias has impacted the grades of black students in her classes historically, in her own words."

In fairness to Sellers, that looks like a bit of a reach. Sellers' statement looks like an observation, not a conclusion. No matter. Off with her head. Georgetown fired Professor Sellers and put the other professor on leave.

The lesson here is uncertain. Silence? Uninvolvement? Take no notice? And is the endpoint here that the Good Samaritan should turn a blind eye?

Maher

 

                           Maher

Bill Maher recently sounded normal.

The comedian Kevin Hart had recently told the New York Times “You’re witnessing white power and white privilege at an all-time high.”

Maher commented, “This is one of the big problems with wokeness, that what you say doesn’t have to make sense or jibe with the facts, or ever be challenged, lest the challenge itself be conflated with racism.”

He added: “Saying white power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous. Higher than a century ago, the year of the Tulsa race massacre? Higher than when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow unchallenged?” He acknowledged that “racism is unfortunately still with us,” and its “legacy of injustice” lingers. “I understand best I can how racism singes a person’s soul so much they might see it everywhere. But seeing clearly is necessary for actually fixing problems, and clearly racism is no longer everywhere. It’s not in my home, and it’s probably not in yours if I read my audience right, and I think I do. For most of the country, the most unhip thing you could ever be today is a racist.”

Hyperbole is very successful in advertising but it risks diminishing the truth of the matter when challenged.

The Obligation to Testify Against Yourself

 

          The Obligation to Testify Against Yourself

Just when you thought that the country had no standards. 

The editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the country’s pre-eminent medical research journals, is stepping down after the publication produced a podcast episode and a tweet that questioned the existence of racism in medicine.

On Feb. 24, JAMA’s official Twitter account posted a message that read in part, “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?” The message urged readers to listen to an episode of a JAMA podcast hosted by Edward Livingston, a top editor at the journal, in which, according to several news reports, he said, “Many people like myself are offended by the implication that we are somehow racist.”

The podcast episode and the tweet have since been deleted. In place of the podcast on the JAMA website is a recording of Dr. Bauchner apologizing for the discussion.

“Comments made in the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, and hurtful, and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA,” Dr. Bauchner said in the recording. “Racism and structural racism exist in the United States, and in healthcare.”

In a JAMA statement Tuesday, Dr. Bauchner said as top editor he was ultimately responsible for the incident, despite not having been involved in the production of either the podcast episode or the tweet. His departure is effective from June 30.

Dr. Livingston, who resigned as deputy editor of JAMA on March 10, couldn’t be reached to comment.

And no wonder. Defending yourself from charges of racism can get you fired. After you've lost your job, who knows what's next.

Racial Determinism

                                 

                          Racial Determinism

Robin DiAngelo, the author of "White Fragility," has a new book that Whites can torture themselves with. A quote from her new book: “Perhaps on my way to Whole Foods, I must pass an indigenous man who appears to be lying on the sidewalk.” "Must" presumably because White cultural, social, and economic forces demand it. "Appears"....I have no idea why the "indigenous man" "appears" to be lying on the sidewalk.

Callahan summarizes the old book this way: "The onus is solely on white America to bring about structural and economic change — except white America can’t, because as whites, we can never change for intrinsic, unfixable, immutable reasons."

Writing in the Atlantic last year, John McWhorter, the esteemed black linguist, author, and Columbia professor, said that with “White Fragility,” DiAngelo “openly infantilized black people” and “simply dehumanized us.” On NPR, McWhorter called it an “Orwellian indoctrination program” that “is racist . . . If you write a book that teaches that black people’s feelings must be stepped around to an exquisitely sensitive degree that hasn’t been required of any other human beings, you’re condescending to black people. In supposing that black people have no resilience, you are saying that black people are unusually weak. You’re saying that we are lesser . . . that’s discriminatory.”

Ms. DAngelo, who is white, has a consulting business that teaches groups and corporations why they are racist and why they can't do anything about it. At $15K a session.

This "thesis" violates every American concept of optimism about the individual, the ability to control your life without the guiding hand of politicians and do-gooders, and ignores the incredible sacrifices made by countless individuals, families and communities to guarantee these precepts for everyone in this country.

But sometimes entrepreneurship must be its own reward.

Truth in Variables

 

                 Truth in Variables

Here is part of a weird article from JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, about the racial background and sexual behavior of medical journal editors, things you probably weren't thinking about. The concept must be important, though, because they wrote about it. Maybe height is the next variable.

"At 25 leading medical and scientific journals, our survey found nearly equal numbers of men and women editors, more than 75% White editors, about 15% Asian editors, very few Black, Hispanic, Latinx, or of Spanish origin editors, and no editors that identified as American Indian or Native American. For the US-based journals, the percentage of editors who identified as Black (1.1%) can be compared with 3.6% of US medical school faculty, 5.0% of practicing physicians in the US,³ and 13.0% of US adults⁴ who are Black; the editors who identified as Hispanic, Latinx, or of Spanish origin (3.8%) can be compared with 5.5% of medical school faculty, 5.8% of practicing physicians,³ and 16.4% of adults⁴ with these ethnicities. Data about sexual orientation and gender minority individuals (ie, nonbinary, transgender) in comparable populations are limited. About 11% to 12% of US medical school students identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer⁵; this can be compared with approximately 9% of editors, although none identified as transgender.

Our findings, although limited to a sample of 25 journals, provide novel data on multiple aspects of editor diversity via self-report, not assumptions about an editor’s identity based on a name or photograph. We could not, however, determine if the 368 editors who responded have similar characteristics to the 286 (43.7%) who did not. "

There was one brave comment, supportive of what the writer felt was an important article. No one commented on the curious rate of homosexuality that is almost 10x the reported national average. And neither the article nor a commentator suggested what, if anything, made these demographics important.

Uncritical Theories

                        Uncritical Theories

"Critical race theory (CRT) is decades old but, having insinuated itself just in the last few years into cable television, social media, public school systems, and the very public institution of “cancel culture,” is receiving precisely the backlash one would hope for, even from those who do not know it by its name.

Developed in academia, it combines paranoid racial conspiracy theories with a now-orphaned pro-Soviet Marxist ideology. The fingerprints of its creators show up in its singular focus on racism in one particular country and in one particular era against one particular group. This makes it a very narrow idea, whose adherents can simultaneously turn a blind eye toward actual genocide in China while making the ludicrous claim that everyday life in America is a constant genocide.

…..

It is also a thoroughly racist ideology because it imputes evil to people solely based on the color of their skin. It is already bad enough to attribute faults to people based on their own ancestors’ misdeeds before they were born. But critical race theory establishes guilt based on far less than that — a vague resemblance to long-dead suspects is sufficient."

This is from the Washington Examiner and is a reasonable summary of the pernicious anti-American quasi-philosophy of Critical Theory. It is impossible to have a culture based upon reverence for the individual when everyone is seen as members of malicious, competing groups. This bigoted, racist nostalgia for the problems of Old Europe--and the equally vicious "solutions" of the new "Old Left"--would be laughable were they not so incredibly dangerous, Proven dangerous.

Anyone with a brain who believed such a horror would, with any conscience, devote their lives to eradicating it.

By the Numbers

                          

                   By the Numbers 

Althea Nagai of the Center for Equal Opportunity has spent years studying racial disparities in undergraduate and law school admissions. She’s studied law-school admissions at the University of Oklahoma, University of Wisconsin, University of Nebraska, University of Utah, University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and University of Michigan. It is said that every single one of these law schools admitted black applicants who were significantly less academically qualified than white applicants. 

This is what Dr. Nagai found:

"In all 15 cases, the median LSATs of white admittees were greater than the medians of black admittees. The largest differences were found at Nebraska in 2006 (a 12-point difference), Wisconsin in 2006 (11 points), and Nebraska in 2007 (10 points). The smallest gap in median LSAT scores between white and black admittees was at Arizona State in 2007 (5 points).

In all 15 cases, the college GPAs of white admittees were greater than those of black admittees. Here too the largest black-white difference was found at Nebraska in 2006 (a 0.6-point difference), followed by Arizona in 2006 and Arizona State (0.5 of a point). The smallest difference was at Arizona in 2005 (a 0.1-point difference)." 

Are those numbers big? Small? Are they significant numbers at all?

Measuring people is fraught with assumptions and unknowns and this culture has no humility. Those differences in LSATs do not look big on the graph below.

LSATs give three scores on Test Day:

• A raw score (0-~101), the total number of scored questions answered correctly translated into…
• A scaled score (120-180), the score by which law schools will evaluate your candidacy; and
• A percentile score, comparing test-takers across various testing cohorts
• These number s are a little old but the basics are the same. Grades range from 180, the highest, to 120, the lowest.

An average score is 151 with a standard deviation of 9. Are any of these numbers important?