I hope we as a society remember why intelligence and ability are important before planes start falling out of the sky and things just stop working.
Racial quotas aside, it seems that over the last 20 years or so our country has almost completely given up on meaningful education and can only focus on getting the lowest performing students, many of them with no hope of an academic career, to pass some high school test. Everything is about credentials now, less and less about ability. The fact that this is now taking hold in medical school, law schools, and other similar institutions is scary.
The American ideal of political equality has, in the face of seemingly intractable racial performance gaps, so thoroughly morphed into a religious postulate of actual equality of ability, that I don’t think American society will tolerate truly race-neutral policies right now. The guilt and fear are too great, at least among some.
“That being said, anti-wokes must be intelligent in which policies they pursue and courts should think carefully about the impacts of their decisions. The history of Supreme Court jurisprudence in this area shows that halfway measures can sometimes lead to unintended consequences and ultimately backfire.”
I agree entirely. When advocating for a policy, it’s important to consider the likely second-order political effects of that policy. Even if the new policy would be, on its face, an improvement, the legal and cultural environment could generate responses that would make things worse than they were before the initial policy was implemented.
Libertarians are particularly prone to shortsighted thinking about this, as they often have a somewhat naïve expectation that no new policies will be implemented when they successfully restrain the government in some way. It’s not enough to say that *you personally* oppose these second-order effects; you have to anticipate them and account for them before you advocate for the initial change.
That’s why I think your recent cheerleading for Republican school voucher policies is shortsighted. I agree that universal vouchers would be preferable in an environment in which private schools had exactly the same, relatively light, restrictions upon their admissions and expulsions policies. But things aren’t likely to stay that way.
The ideas that “Disparate Impact Bad” and “Discrimination Bad” can potentially destroy *any standard whatsoever*, since the maintenance of any standard involves some degree of discrimination and disparate impact. So the Civil Rights regime holds a legal sledgehammer that it can arbitrarily use to crush any particular standard that it chooses to crush.
Private school standards of admissions and conduct are absolutely susceptible to being crushed in this way. They just aren’t, currently, since progressives have focused on universal public schooling. But if voucher policies were to starve public schools of funding and force them to close, the progressives would simply drop the Civil Rights sledgehammer on private schools, turning their admissions offices into the equivalent of Fortune 500 HR departments. Entrance exams would be racist, behavioral standards would be racist, et cetera. It would be trivially easy for them to do this. They just haven’t…yet.
The current school situation is very far from an ideal system, but it may be a delicate local maximum that would be destroyed if voucher policies were implemented while Civil Rights law remained in effect. Private schools would be ruined.
California shows the way. AA was banned in 1996 and rejected again in 2020. The UCs have been innovating ways around the law this whole time—both at the student and faculty level. Even so, the students are still weighted asian, so it appears the bans somewhat reduce discrimination at the student level.
The underlying issue is that reparations for historical discrimination are a moral imperative (at least on the left) but policies used to implement them run up against the explicit language of the 14th Amendment. We're going to keep having this conversation until proper reparations are instituted that absolve America of its historical sins, and that would require an understanding that while the language of the 14th Amendment says that you can't discriminate, the intent of it was to make the lives of black people better and reparations like affirmative action are consistent with that intent.
Interesting. I would have assumed you would just be in favor of getting rid of disparate impact entirely, but here you seem to want it to be kept in place for university admissions? Perhaps you think the former is way too ambitious for the court? (I'm looking forward to your book.)
Personally I think anti-wokes (and I am one) should spend more time thinking about state institutions over which they have some direct control rather than fighting endlessly against the Ivy League. Simply require the University of Florida to admit based on a standardized subject-based test system like A levels in England, of the French Bac, or whatever. If the Ivy League wants to do something else, so be it.
Economic diversity is more than a subterfuge for racial diversity. A plumber’s daughter who scores 1400 on the SAT (old scale) is likely smarter than a doctor’s son who scores 1500. Give the smart, working class kid four years in a supportive learning environment, and she can blossom in a way the slightly duller doctor’s son might not.
If the Supreme Court chickens out, I think that itself would warrant some commentary, Richard. Conservatives spent decades plus countless amounts of money and effort to achieve the crown jewel of their movement in the early 21st century, a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. And yet, it still may fall short. That would be rather impressive. It would shore up a bit the notion you’ve criticized that conservatives have in their minds that ‘even when we win, somehow we still lose.’
Does anyone think we'd have any where near the level of racial strife if either of the two concerns were not present?
1) The black-white IQ gap, whether it's nature or nurture or both. If black men and women were able to intellectually compete with whites without artificial interventions (i.e. affirmative action), we would not have such disparities in income, educational attainment or criminality. Much of the racial strife is due to blacks' insecurity at being intellectually noncompetitive and then being susceptible to race mongers like Al Sharpton or Eric Michael Dyson displacing their anger to non-blacks and scapegoating non-blacks (especially whites).
2) The reality that black women don't date or marry out much. This might be due to their own preferences. However there is a great deal of evidence non-black men (and rising number of black men) don't want to date or marry them:
a) The rise of the 'passport bros' within the black male community. These are basically black American men (often higher IQ and higher income black men) who are so fed up with trying to date and marry black American women that they are leaving the country to seek social opportunities (i.e. long or short term) outside America, like the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Colombia and other part of Latin America.
b) The reality that non-black American men don't date or marry black American women much- despite there being signs of massive interest in non-black men by black women:
In the United States, there has been a historical disparity between Black female and Black male exogamy ratios: according to the United States Census Bureau, there were 354,000 White female/Black male and 196,000 Black female/White male marriages in March 2009, representing a ratio of 181:100.[40] This traditional disparity has seen a rapid decline over the last two decades, contrasted with its peak in 1981 when the ratio was still 371:100.[41] In 2007, 4.6% of all married Blacks in the United States were wed to a White partner, and 0.4% of all Whites were married to a Black partner.[42]
-I won't link any sources right now, but there is a major deficit in black female porn stars. If racism is the only reason for this, why are some non-white or some Hapa female porn stars so highly desired? Such as Tara Patrick or Asia Akira?
Basically if black men and women did not have the disparities in income, educational attainment or crime rates and/or if black women did not have the disparities in dating and marriage, it is highly likely they'd feel more invested in preserving American society and continuing the American legacy.
I think BLM and SJWism is what happens when such a group (and especially black women) feels largely cut off from the greater American society and is now seeking some mechanisms like reparations and cancel culture to redistribute resources and power.
This is self-defeating anyway. If you don't admit based on merit, you will lower quality. Today people want to go to Harvard and pay $60K a year because of the prestige. But professors already came out indicating they had to lower standards in class. So, it will in the end only result in less quality coming out of these institutions. Corporations will notice and start recruiting somewhere else. And if not earlier, then students will notice too and also just go somewhere else.
Of course, it will take time, as these institutions can live on their past reputations for quite some time, I suspect. Also woke corporations will continue hire 'Ivy Leage' nitwits for departments like HR and marketing that don't matter anyway. But core work where skills = money, will be based on merit. Hard Benjamins will win.
It will be interesting to see what the institutions then will do. I suspect they'll double down on recruiting foreign students, to keep the money flowing. There the reputation probably last longer. But either way, you cannot expect to keep rising prices and lower quality.
> For too long, institutions have been allowed to operate contrary to the text of the Civil Rights Act
This perspective seems to be in tension with your more famous position that wokeness is the Civil Rights Act and therefore stopping it means repealing the Act.
If American race policy contravenes the Civil Rights Act rather than complying with it, why do we think the Act is the problem?
Is there evidence that any of the justices see things this way, or are likely to do this? I have a suspicion Gorsuch is slightly woke, given his ruling in Bostock.
If Harvard and other elites reduce standards so as to have more black students even when they can’t admit that’s what they’re doing, would an employer or a grad school apply the diversity discount only against black graduates? Would it be credible for a white or Asian grad to say, “Look, we know Harvard has gone downhill but that only applies to the blacks they let in. People like us got in, and graduated, on merit like we always did. So we’re good bets to hire!” (Or on legacy but let’s not go there today.)
> Imagine that there was a Southern municipality with a history of discriminating against black people. It is taken to court, at which point a judge decrees that while the city cannot simply refuse to hire blacks, it’s fine for it to only recruit from white areas in hopes of achieving a certain demographic composition of its workforce.
What if the end result was that its workforce was racially balanced? If these schools, for example, still don't have Asians being underrepresented vs their share of the population, they could more believably say that they're not just trying to keep out Asians. Recall also that it wasn't top-down government force that ended quotas against Jews in the Ivy League, it was school admins deciding to embrace meritocracy by themselves.
I hope we as a society remember why intelligence and ability are important before planes start falling out of the sky and things just stop working.
Racial quotas aside, it seems that over the last 20 years or so our country has almost completely given up on meaningful education and can only focus on getting the lowest performing students, many of them with no hope of an academic career, to pass some high school test. Everything is about credentials now, less and less about ability. The fact that this is now taking hold in medical school, law schools, and other similar institutions is scary.
The American ideal of political equality has, in the face of seemingly intractable racial performance gaps, so thoroughly morphed into a religious postulate of actual equality of ability, that I don’t think American society will tolerate truly race-neutral policies right now. The guilt and fear are too great, at least among some.
“That being said, anti-wokes must be intelligent in which policies they pursue and courts should think carefully about the impacts of their decisions. The history of Supreme Court jurisprudence in this area shows that halfway measures can sometimes lead to unintended consequences and ultimately backfire.”
I agree entirely. When advocating for a policy, it’s important to consider the likely second-order political effects of that policy. Even if the new policy would be, on its face, an improvement, the legal and cultural environment could generate responses that would make things worse than they were before the initial policy was implemented.
Libertarians are particularly prone to shortsighted thinking about this, as they often have a somewhat naïve expectation that no new policies will be implemented when they successfully restrain the government in some way. It’s not enough to say that *you personally* oppose these second-order effects; you have to anticipate them and account for them before you advocate for the initial change.
That’s why I think your recent cheerleading for Republican school voucher policies is shortsighted. I agree that universal vouchers would be preferable in an environment in which private schools had exactly the same, relatively light, restrictions upon their admissions and expulsions policies. But things aren’t likely to stay that way.
The ideas that “Disparate Impact Bad” and “Discrimination Bad” can potentially destroy *any standard whatsoever*, since the maintenance of any standard involves some degree of discrimination and disparate impact. So the Civil Rights regime holds a legal sledgehammer that it can arbitrarily use to crush any particular standard that it chooses to crush.
Private school standards of admissions and conduct are absolutely susceptible to being crushed in this way. They just aren’t, currently, since progressives have focused on universal public schooling. But if voucher policies were to starve public schools of funding and force them to close, the progressives would simply drop the Civil Rights sledgehammer on private schools, turning their admissions offices into the equivalent of Fortune 500 HR departments. Entrance exams would be racist, behavioral standards would be racist, et cetera. It would be trivially easy for them to do this. They just haven’t…yet.
The current school situation is very far from an ideal system, but it may be a delicate local maximum that would be destroyed if voucher policies were implemented while Civil Rights law remained in effect. Private schools would be ruined.
California shows the way. AA was banned in 1996 and rejected again in 2020. The UCs have been innovating ways around the law this whole time—both at the student and faculty level. Even so, the students are still weighted asian, so it appears the bans somewhat reduce discrimination at the student level.
The underlying issue is that reparations for historical discrimination are a moral imperative (at least on the left) but policies used to implement them run up against the explicit language of the 14th Amendment. We're going to keep having this conversation until proper reparations are instituted that absolve America of its historical sins, and that would require an understanding that while the language of the 14th Amendment says that you can't discriminate, the intent of it was to make the lives of black people better and reparations like affirmative action are consistent with that intent.
I’m still waiting for someone to sue the NBA for systemic discrimination against Asian and White players.
Interesting. I would have assumed you would just be in favor of getting rid of disparate impact entirely, but here you seem to want it to be kept in place for university admissions? Perhaps you think the former is way too ambitious for the court? (I'm looking forward to your book.)
Personally I think anti-wokes (and I am one) should spend more time thinking about state institutions over which they have some direct control rather than fighting endlessly against the Ivy League. Simply require the University of Florida to admit based on a standardized subject-based test system like A levels in England, of the French Bac, or whatever. If the Ivy League wants to do something else, so be it.
Economic diversity is more than a subterfuge for racial diversity. A plumber’s daughter who scores 1400 on the SAT (old scale) is likely smarter than a doctor’s son who scores 1500. Give the smart, working class kid four years in a supportive learning environment, and she can blossom in a way the slightly duller doctor’s son might not.
If the Supreme Court chickens out, I think that itself would warrant some commentary, Richard. Conservatives spent decades plus countless amounts of money and effort to achieve the crown jewel of their movement in the early 21st century, a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. And yet, it still may fall short. That would be rather impressive. It would shore up a bit the notion you’ve criticized that conservatives have in their minds that ‘even when we win, somehow we still lose.’
Universities like Harvard are private institutions. If they consider it their mission to increase diversity, why shouldnt they be allowed to do this?
Does anyone think we'd have any where near the level of racial strife if either of the two concerns were not present?
1) The black-white IQ gap, whether it's nature or nurture or both. If black men and women were able to intellectually compete with whites without artificial interventions (i.e. affirmative action), we would not have such disparities in income, educational attainment or criminality. Much of the racial strife is due to blacks' insecurity at being intellectually noncompetitive and then being susceptible to race mongers like Al Sharpton or Eric Michael Dyson displacing their anger to non-blacks and scapegoating non-blacks (especially whites).
2) The reality that black women don't date or marry out much. This might be due to their own preferences. However there is a great deal of evidence non-black men (and rising number of black men) don't want to date or marry them:
a) The rise of the 'passport bros' within the black male community. These are basically black American men (often higher IQ and higher income black men) who are so fed up with trying to date and marry black American women that they are leaving the country to seek social opportunities (i.e. long or short term) outside America, like the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Colombia and other part of Latin America.
https://www.google.com/search?q=passport+bro&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS992US992&oq=passport+bro&aqs=chrome..69i57j46i10i433i512j0i10i131i433i512j0i10i512j0i3j0i10i512l4.3259j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:c0bb8f35,vid:WVp3eEGUpjs
b) The reality that non-black American men don't date or marry black American women much- despite there being signs of massive interest in non-black men by black women:
https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/raceandattraction20092014.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States#Black_and_White
From wikipedia article:
In the United States, there has been a historical disparity between Black female and Black male exogamy ratios: according to the United States Census Bureau, there were 354,000 White female/Black male and 196,000 Black female/White male marriages in March 2009, representing a ratio of 181:100.[40] This traditional disparity has seen a rapid decline over the last two decades, contrasted with its peak in 1981 when the ratio was still 371:100.[41] In 2007, 4.6% of all married Blacks in the United States were wed to a White partner, and 0.4% of all Whites were married to a Black partner.[42]
-I won't link any sources right now, but there is a major deficit in black female porn stars. If racism is the only reason for this, why are some non-white or some Hapa female porn stars so highly desired? Such as Tara Patrick or Asia Akira?
Basically if black men and women did not have the disparities in income, educational attainment or crime rates and/or if black women did not have the disparities in dating and marriage, it is highly likely they'd feel more invested in preserving American society and continuing the American legacy.
I think BLM and SJWism is what happens when such a group (and especially black women) feels largely cut off from the greater American society and is now seeking some mechanisms like reparations and cancel culture to redistribute resources and power.
This is self-defeating anyway. If you don't admit based on merit, you will lower quality. Today people want to go to Harvard and pay $60K a year because of the prestige. But professors already came out indicating they had to lower standards in class. So, it will in the end only result in less quality coming out of these institutions. Corporations will notice and start recruiting somewhere else. And if not earlier, then students will notice too and also just go somewhere else.
Of course, it will take time, as these institutions can live on their past reputations for quite some time, I suspect. Also woke corporations will continue hire 'Ivy Leage' nitwits for departments like HR and marketing that don't matter anyway. But core work where skills = money, will be based on merit. Hard Benjamins will win.
It will be interesting to see what the institutions then will do. I suspect they'll double down on recruiting foreign students, to keep the money flowing. There the reputation probably last longer. But either way, you cannot expect to keep rising prices and lower quality.
> For too long, institutions have been allowed to operate contrary to the text of the Civil Rights Act
This perspective seems to be in tension with your more famous position that wokeness is the Civil Rights Act and therefore stopping it means repealing the Act.
If American race policy contravenes the Civil Rights Act rather than complying with it, why do we think the Act is the problem?
Is there evidence that any of the justices see things this way, or are likely to do this? I have a suspicion Gorsuch is slightly woke, given his ruling in Bostock.
If Harvard and other elites reduce standards so as to have more black students even when they can’t admit that’s what they’re doing, would an employer or a grad school apply the diversity discount only against black graduates? Would it be credible for a white or Asian grad to say, “Look, we know Harvard has gone downhill but that only applies to the blacks they let in. People like us got in, and graduated, on merit like we always did. So we’re good bets to hire!” (Or on legacy but let’s not go there today.)
> Imagine that there was a Southern municipality with a history of discriminating against black people. It is taken to court, at which point a judge decrees that while the city cannot simply refuse to hire blacks, it’s fine for it to only recruit from white areas in hopes of achieving a certain demographic composition of its workforce.
What if the end result was that its workforce was racially balanced? If these schools, for example, still don't have Asians being underrepresented vs their share of the population, they could more believably say that they're not just trying to keep out Asians. Recall also that it wasn't top-down government force that ended quotas against Jews in the Ivy League, it was school admins deciding to embrace meritocracy by themselves.
>One judicial decision will not uproot this entire system.
Abolish public education. One decision.