Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Affirmative Action
A Post-Racial America? Not Quite Yet.
03 months ago
In a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Ward Connerly, a long-time foe of affirmative action, repeats his call for the end of race conscious decision making. Connerly points to the race of the president and other elected officials throughout the country as “evidence” that the United States has achieved a color-blind society. He effectively pronounces discrimination and inequality dead.
In response to Connerly’s opinion piece, Dennis Parker, Director of the Racial Justice Program, writes:
Ward Connerly conveniently ignores evidence that discrimination and inequality continue to block access to even the most basic opportunities that every American should be able to expect. Considering race by itself is not the cure-all for the inequalities that persist in America today. But the fact remains that programs considering race have been successful in improving prospects for people of color, women and others who have been denied opportunity both historically and today.
The true state of bias and inequality in America is told in the numerous studies and statistics showing that African-Americans and Latinos are almost a third more likely to get a high-priced loan than white borrowers with the same credit scores, or that African-Americans with no criminal record are less likely to be called back for a job interview than similarly qualified whites with a felony conviction. The current median wealth of white households is now 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic’s – the most lopsided it has been since the government began publishing data a quarter century ago. Black and Hispanic unemployment is twice that of whites, and blacks are 70 percent more likely to lose their homes to foreclosures.
All of these are stark reminders that even if the disease of discrimination and inequality is in some ways less virulent than it has been in the past, it is premature to pronounce it cured. Eliminating affirmative action would be a tragedy which would only move us further from the goals of fairness and excellence that Mr. Connerly claims to support.
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Supreme Court Keeps Firefighters’ Civil Rights Claim Alive
01 year ago
Once again, a city fire department is in the hot seat for employment discrimination and prompting the Supreme Court to set crucial precedents for civil rights law. This time, thousands of Black firefighters in Chicago got the green light from the Supreme Court to broaden the scope of their civil rights claim despite having passed a deadline to do so.
In contrasting the ruling with the Lily Ledbetter gender-discrimination case–in which the court upheld time limits on claims–the New York Times editorial board predicts:
If interpreted properly by the lower courts, the ruling could give a chance at relief to minority groups, women, the elderly the disabled and others claiming to be victims of a discriminatory employment practice long after the practice went into effect.
The case, Lewis v. City of Chicago, centered on a controversial firefighter test that systematically excluded candidates of color over a number of years. The main issue was not the discriminatory “disparate impact,” which a lower court already ruled on, but the time limits attached to the case. The high court ruled that test takers could take legal action against the racially biased test even after a technical deadline for bringing claims had passed.
The immediate impact of the decision will be local, affecting several thousand firefighter candidates, who may be entitled to remedies including the hiring of about 120 Black candidates and millions in damages. But Lewis adds another crease to the bizarre patchwork of legal and political opinions surrounding the Civil Rights Act in the 21st century.
Last year, in Ricci v. DeStefano, a sharply divided bench sided with a group of mostly white firefighters who challenged the city’s decision to invalidate test results that excluded Blacks. Right-wing critics of the city decried the consequences of “political correctness,” while defenders of affirmative action stressed the need to hold government agencies accountable for compensating for racial inequities in the civil service.
The “disparate impact” argument in Chicago turned on arbitrary cut-offs in a written test given to 26,000 aspiring firefighters in 1995. Fran Spielman at the Sun-Times explains that in siphoning the test results:
the city established a cut-off score of 89 and hired randomly from the top 1,800 “well-qualified” candidates…. In 2005, a federal judge ruled that the city’s decision had the effect of perpetuating the predominantly white status quo, since 78 percent of those “well-qualified” candidates were white.
Although there is a standard 300-day window for filing civil rights cases in response to an act of discrimination, Spielman continues, “African-American firefighters maintained — and the Supreme Court agreed — that a new act of discrimination occurred every time the scores were used to hire firefighters between May, 1996 and October, 2001.”
Writing for the court, Justice Antonin Scalia, no friend of affirmative action, stated that while test itself was the initial discriminatory act, “it does not follow that no new violations occurred – and no new claims could arise–when the city implemented that decision down the road.”
While the Court’s decision to uphold time limits in Ledbetter eventually prompted Congress to pass corrective legislation, the Lewis ruling appears to broaden channels for redress in the courts. Either way, it may be worth revisiting the reflections of New York University sociologist Dalton Conley on trying to litigate our way to equal opportunity. After the Ricci decision, he wrote that in the face of entrenched racial divides pervading America’s public institutions—
Expecting a single test to compensate for all that is unrealistic — silly even. This is a symptom of a larger pathology in the American psyche where our deep and abiding belief in meritocracy clashes with our culture of individualism: We expect testing (and schools) to do the work of social policy when it can’t really carry that heavy a load.
But policymakers, for their part, have been less than eager to take on that load. So for now, in Chicago and beyond, the people weighed down by generations of discrimination have no choice but to look to the courts to lessen their burden.
Photo credit: Creative Commons/Brett Gustafson
Obama Administration Offers Support for UT Austin’s Affirmative Action Policies
01 year ago
The Obama Administration filed an amicus brief in support of the University of Texas, Austin, which includes a component that considers race and ethnicity in its admissions decisions. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is currently hearing a case brought by two white students who were denied admission to UT Austin and claimed that their civil rights were violated. A federal judge affirmed the university’s right to take race and ethnicity into account in August of 2009.
The prestigious public university currently operates with a hybrid admissions process whereby the vast majority of UT Austin’s admittees are accepted via an entirely race-neutral process. The entire top ten percent of any accredited Texas high school’s graduating class is assured admission to a public college or university. More than 80 percent of UT Austin’s fall 2009 freshman class was accepted through this rule, commonly called the “top ten percent plan.”
The rest of the freshman class is filled with admittees who are accepted through a “holistic review” where race alone is never a deciding factor. UT Austin does not and is actually forbidden to use quotas or a point system to give preference to students of color. Neither does the university keep track of the racial composition of the admitted pool of students in its process. In fact, fully 65 percent of the freshmen UT Austin admitted in 2009 through the so-called “non-top ten” rule were white.
We’re not exactly talking radical policy here. Controversial, yes, but still legal and reasonable. The brief also points out the ways that white students, and indeed the entire student body, benefit from UT Austin’s policy.
“[UT Austin] treats race not as a matter that defines each student, but as a factor that can place in context, and thus offer a deeper understanding of, a person’s experiences and accomplishments and her potential to contribute to the university community,” the brief, which was submitted jointly by the Department of Education and the Department of Justice, states.
The case is seen as an attempts to challenge the 2003 Supreme Court decision in Grutter v. Bollinger that allowed a public institution to take race into consideration in admissions in very specific instances. The brief notes that UT Austin both complies with Grutter and upholds the ideals laid out in that decision. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the Grutter decision, wrote that, “Effective participation of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our Nation is essential if the dream of one Nation, indivisible, is to be realized.”
Ironically, the plaintiffs’ arguments are that UT Austin does not meet standards outlined in the Grutter decision.
“This is a clever attempt by white plaintiffs to fashion a remedy when there’s not harm,” said Michael A. Olivas, a law professor at the University of Houston. “They’re whistling past the graveyard.” Olivas expects the federal court of appeals will uphold the trial court decision.
Stay tuned for more updates.