Tag Archive for: affirmative action

Prop. 16 is Real Racism to Combat Perceived Racism

Lest anyone be tempted to suggest this analysis is written under a pretense of journalistic indifference, let’s make its ideological position clear: Affirmative action, preferential hiring or admissions, or legislatively enforced quotas of any kind – based on race, gender, religion, income, or anything else relating to an identifiable “group” – is counterproductive, if not immoral. Affirmative action may masquerade as something good, but it’s not.

If policies designed to destroy America’s meritocracy are not stopped, they will destroy everything that makes America great. They will breed cynicism, corruption, mediocrity; they will sow hatred and resentment; they will encourage indifference to results and discourage hard work; they will misdirect America’s institutional priorities from productivity and innovation to bureaucratic “process” and ideological indoctrination; they will consign America to 2nd class status and ultimately rob it of both prosperity and civil cohesion.

Got that?

With all that in mind, consider the latest assault on competence in America, courtesy of the California State Legislature. It should come as no surprise that California is the source of the attack, since California’s legislature is overwhelmingly dominated by politicians who rely on the narrative of systemic racism to attract voters. Moreover, most of the Democrats that control California’s state legislature are beholden to public sector unions, the teachers’ unions in particular. For decades, these unions have made racial quotas and equality of outcome – at any cost – a cornerstone of their political agenda.

Proposition 16, put onto California’s November 2020 ballot by the state legislature, will amend the California constitution to “repeal Proposition 209, passed in 1996, from the California Constitution. Proposition 209 stated that discrimination and preferential treatment were prohibited in public employment, public education, and public contracting on account of a person’s or group’s race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

Imagine that. California has a law that bans racism and sexism in public employment, education and contracting. We can’t have that now, can we. Better fix that right away.

In one of the most deceptive guest columns ever written, recently published by the San Diego Union Tribune, union marionette and member of the California State Assembly Shirley Weber argues that Prop. 209, which outlawed racism and sexism in California’s public sphere, actually created racist and sexist outcomes. Here is an example of Weber’s reasoning: ”

“This law [Prop. 209] has allowed discriminatory hiring and contracting processes to flourish in California. The result is that the number of women and Latinos employed by the state of California has decreased significantly relative to population growth. In 1994, Latinos were admitted to the UCs above the average rate, and African-Americans at 6 points below average; in 2019, they were admitted at 6 points and 16 points below average, respectively.”

What Weber is actually objecting to, however, is not racism caused by a law outlawing racism. Rather her objection is to allocating opportunities based on competence instead of race.

In this chart, the first column shows what percentage of students taking the SAT, by ethnicity, achieved a score at or above the minimum to be considered “college ready.” The second column shows the ethnic breakdown of college age students in California. Column three, “merit based admissions,” is the hypothetical kicker: It displays a result calculated from columns one and two. For each ethnicity, the percent of college ready students is multiplied by that ethnicity’s percent of the total pool of college age Californians in order to calculate a crude but significant indicator of what percentage of 2017 college admissions would be offered to students of each ethnicity, if admissions were offered to every applicant who scored “college ready” or better on their SAT. Column four shows the actual admissions to California’s UC System in 2017 by ethnicity.

There are a few obvious takeaways from the above chart. First of all, it becomes immediately clear that at 33 percent (col. 4) of all admissions, Latinos are admitted to the University of California in amounts almost perfectly proportional to their share, 35 percent (col. 3), of all college ready applicants. What proponents of Prop. 16 such as Shirley Weber advocate is to bring that share up to 50 percent (col. 2), which would mean Latinos would enter the UC System not based on their ability to do the work, but based on their raw percentage of the population.

Equally salient is the fact that white applicants, if SAT scores were the sole basis for admission, are clear victims of discrimination. After all, if based on their college readiness as assessed by their SAT performance combined with their percentage of the population, they should have earned 41 percent of the admissions to the UC System (col. 3), why were they only 23 percent of the incoming freshmen in 2017 (col. 4)? But there are other disparities that point to an even bigger problem.

Why, for example, do actual Asian admissions, 34 percent (col. 4), exceed the merit based admissions percentage, 21 percent (col. 3), as indicated based on their percentage of the college age population and the percentage of them achieving the SAT benchmark? Why, for that matter, are the actual Latino admissions, 33 percent (col. 4), slightly less than the amount they would theoretically earn, 35 percent (col. 3), based that same criteria?

The answer in both cases is the same, and can be best summarized in this quote taken from a report released in 2017 by the Brookings Institution:

“Race gaps on the SATs are especially pronounced at the tails of the distribution. In a perfectly equal distribution, the racial breakdown of scores at every point in the distribution would mirror the composition of test-takers as whole i.e. 51 percent white, 21 percent Latino, 14 percent black, and 14 percent Asian. But in fact, among top scorers—those scoring between a 750 and 800—60 percent are Asian and 33 percent are white, compared to 5 percent Latino and 2 percent black. Meanwhile, among those scoring between 300 and 350, 37 percent are Latino, 35 percent are black, 21 percent are white, and 6 percent are Asian.”

What this means in plain English is that in the UC System, where supposedly only the most elite high school graduates are granted admission, you will find the distribution of the higher SAT scores by ethnicity skewed even more in favor of Asian and White students than you find when evaluating how many students merely achieve the “benchmark” SAT score. In particular, this is why Asian admissions, which are arguably the only UC admissions in 2017 that were based truly on merit, skew higher than you would otherwise expect. That is also the reason that Latino admissions skew somewhat lower. And it also indicates that White applicants are discriminated against even more than shown on the table.

The next chart shows just how significantly math SAT scores differ by ethnic group.

These are not subtle differences. Most striking is the disparity occurring at the extremes of the distribution. It is those whose abilities fall within these gifted extremes who, overwhelmingly, become the inventors and researchers whose breakthroughs ensure American technological preeminence and benefit the world. Note how nearly 15 percent of all Asians were able to score over 750 on their math SAT.

Using math SAT scores as criteria, Asians are underrepresented in the University of California, even though they are overrepresented in proportion to their percentage of the population.

SAT Scores ARE Predictive of Academic Success

Just to be thorough, lest anyone repeat yet another shibboleth turned fact merely by virtue of repetition, namely, that SAT scores are not predictive of academic success, here is data that proves the value of SAT scores.

In May 2016 the Public Policy Institute of California produced a study that includes data that tracks the correlation between math SAT scores (horizontal axis) and graduation rates (vertical axis). The upper chart depicts six year graduation rates, the lower chart depicts four year graduation rates. The orange dots represent results for Cal State campuses, which were the focus of the study. The more numerous grey dots represent similar universities nationwide.

As can be seen, the trend line is unambiguous. It is roughly accurate to state that for every 50 point improvement in a student’s Math SAT score, there is a 10% greater probability that they will graduate from college. And yet California’s UC System, in pursuit of social justice, equity, and inclusion, as of May 2020 has abandoned the SAT requirement altogether. This is an astonishing denial of reality. 

Despite compelling evidence that SAT scores matter, proponents of affirmative action continue their assault on these objective metrics. Proportional representation in all things, or “equity,” is their solution to group underachievement. But this approach harms the very people it is designed to help, and there are better solutions.

The Consequences of Affirmative Action, and the Tough But Much Better Alternatives

The direct correlation between SAT scores and graduation rates, along with the huge gaps in SAT scores between ethnic groups, yields an inescapable conclusion: Students are less likely to experience academic success when they are admitted to schools where the average SAT of the student body is significantly higher than their own score. This conclusion can be applied across the spectrum of higher education. Academically unqualified students admitted to elite universities are more likely to fail academically, whereas if they had attended a less selective college they might have excelled. Similarly, academically unqualified students admitted to reputable but not top-tier colleges with lower SAT scores are also more likely to fail, whereas if they had instead enrolled in a community college they might have excelled.

To cope with this, universities have invented entire new fields of study oriented to “social justice,” with watered down majors designed to accommodate students who lack the aptitude to keep up in more rigorous academic disciplines. At the same time, these universities have hired armies of bureaucrats whose mission is to enforce “diversity, equity and inclusion.” In practice the role of these administrators is to inculcate unqualified students with the notion that their academic struggles are the product of racism, rather than the plain fact that they should never have been enrolled to begin with.

Heather MacDonald, a researcher with the Manhattan Institute, has written extensively on this topic. Her recent book, The Diversity Delusion, provides overwhelming evidence of how harmful affirmative action is to minority students who could excel if they were simply treated the same as everybody else. She writes, “racial preferences paper over the vast academic skills gap by catapulting minority students into academic environments for which they are unprepared. By allowing the country to turn its attention away from that skills gap, colleges are retarding the cause of racial progress, not advancing it.”

Along with placing students in academic environments where they can compete and excel, the solution to disparities in academic group achievement needs to go to the source: reform of K-12 public schools. Taking this step, unfortunately, runs into resistance from the most powerful political special interest in California, the teachers’ unions. Even bipartisan attempts to incrementally reform California’s K-12 public school system have been stopped by these unions.

A good example of this is the Vergara case, dismissed by the California Supreme Court in 2016 on a technicality despite sailing through the appellate courts. Vergara was predicated on the assertion that quality public education is a civil right. It petitioned for three common sense reforms to union negotiated work rules: a streamlined process to fire incompetent teachers, the ability during layoffs to retain excellent teachers instead of teachers with seniority, and extension of the probationary period for new teachers beyond the mere 18 months of classroom observation currently in effect.

Along with opposing reforms as basic as those proposed in the Vergara case, California’s teachers’ unions have used their political clout to wage war on alternative educational venues. The most glaring example of this is the suppression of charter schools, which are a threat to the monopoly the teachers’ unions have on traditional public schools. Similar threats in the form of private schools, parochial schools, virtual schools, home schooling, and recent pandemic inspired innovations such as expanded home schooling coops, micro-schools and “learning pods,” are all under relentless attack from the teachers’ unions.

What ought to be on California’s ballot this November is not a restoration of affirmative action. California’s voters ought to instead have an opportunity to eliminate the work rules that are crippling traditional public schools. At the same time, California’s voters ought to have an opportunity to approve implementation of school vouchers, whereby parents would get payment vouchers each year that they could redeem at any accredited school they wish. Such a bold step would introduce competition to K-12 education, greatly improving the chances for students of all ethnic groups and income levels to get the quality education they deserve.

Will Californians Vote in November to Reinstate Racist Policies?

It is difficult to imagine how affirmative action based purely on proportional representation by race is going to benefit California’s Asian students. If affirmative action is reinstated by California’s voters, and UC admissions are granted in amounts perfectly proportional to the racial composition of California’s college age students, the following would happen:

Asian enrollment would drop from 34 percent to 13 percent.
Black enrollment would increase from 5 percent to 6 percent.
Latino enrollment would increase from 33 percent to 50 percent.
White enrollment would increase from 23 percent to 31 percent.

Then again, it would be naive to think “affirmative action” in California would merely mean applying proportional quotas by race in public admissions, hiring and contracts. It is likely that a social justice hierarchy of disadvantage will become a more relevant criteria than pure ethnic proportionality. Affirmative action programs  And in this manner, the unwarranted and pervasive privilege enjoyed by virtue of whites being whites shall justify less than proportional representation.

This theory of how considerations of race can be selectively manipulated to exclude, just for example, whites and Asians from admission in favor of Latinos despite higher SAT scores is consistent with the US Supreme Court’s 2016 ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas. In that ruling, the court wrote “The record here reveals that the university articulated concrete and precise goals — e.g., ending stereotypes, promoting ‘cross-racial understanding,’ preparing students for ‘an increasingly diverse workforce and society,’ and cultivating leaders with ‘legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry’ — that mirror the compelling interest this court has approved in prior cases.”

Put another way, absent further clarification from the U.S. Supreme Court, America’s university administrators can come up with a variety of factors, the more diverse the better, that will allow them to manipulate the ethnic composition of their student body in whatever proportions they choose. California’s UC Regents, and the legislature that controls them, will be able to do whatever they want. Admission guidelines will be derived based on explicitly political motivations, and less connected to competence than ever.

There is a good chance that Prop. 16’s flawed attempt at greater “social justice” will be approved by California’s voters. Latinos and Blacks may see no reason to oppose something that will increase the rates of enrollment of their children in the University of California. And white liberals, who dominate California’s diminishing population of white voters, will vote for anything called “affirmative action.”

The Asian vote will be the wild card, but at 15 percent of California’s population, their numbers are still too small to swing an election unless it is close, and their vote is monolithic. That is possible but unlikely, because Asians in California still typically vote with Democrats, and California’s Democratic party is solidly in favor of restoring racism in the name of fighting racism.

There is one great hope, however, and that is if a groundswell of opposition by members of California’s Asian community becomes sufficiently pervasive and persuasive, it will stimulate California’s other voting blocs to express solidarity with them and reject Prop. 16. Should that occur, it will open the door to a broader reevaluation of identity politics and social justice ideology.

By putting Prop. 16 onto the state ballot this November, California’s legislature may, just may, get more than they bargained for. Maybe the good guys will win.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Policy Center.

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Will California Voters Reinstate Affirmative Action?

Lest anyone be tempted to suggest this essay is written under a pretense of journalistic indifference, let’s make its ideological position clear: Affirmative action, preferential hiring or admissions, or legislatively enforced quotas of any kind – based on race, gender, religion, income, or anything else relating to an identifiable “group” – is pure evil. Affirmative action may masquerade as something good, but that’s an old game, and nobody plays it better than the wicked one.

If policies designed to destroy America’s meritocracy are not stopped, they will destroy everything that makes America great. They will breed cynicism, corruption, mediocrity; they will sow hatred and resentment; they will encourage indifference to results and discourage hard work; they will misdirect America’s institutional priorities from productivity and innovation to bureaucratic “process” and ideological indoctrination; they will consign America to 2nd class status and ultimately rob it of both prosperity and civil cohesion.

Got that?

With all that in mind, consider the latest assault on competence in America, courtesy of the California State Legislature. It should come as no surprise that California is the source of the attack, since California’s legislature is overwhelmingly dominated by “democratic socialists,” hard core Marxists, professional race baiting hustlers, Chicano nationalists, openly and virulently anti-white racists, gender obsessed crackpots, bought-and-paid-for climate catastrophists, and public sector union power-mongers. These individuals, most of which are an “intersectional” composite incorporating many if not all of the just mentioned descriptions, constitute a collective political swill so diabolical that calling them “politicians” is an insult to politicians.

Proposition 16, put onto California’s November 2020 ballot by the state legislature, will amend the California constitution to “repeal Proposition 209, passed in 1996, from the California Constitution. Proposition 209 stated that discrimination and preferential treatment were prohibited in public employment, public education, and public contracting on account of a person’s or group’s race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

Imagine that. California has a law that bans racism and sexism in public employment, education and contracting. We can’t have that now, can we. Better fix that right away.

In one of the most deceptive guest columns ever written, recently published by the San Diego Union Tribune, union marionette and member of the California State Assembly Shirley Weber argues that Prop. 209, which outlawed racism and sexism in California’s public sphere, actually created racist and sexist outcomes. Here is an example of Weber’s reasoning: ”

“This law [Prop. 209] has allowed discriminatory hiring and contracting processes to flourish in California. The result is that the number of women and Latinos employed by the state of California has decreased significantly relative to population growth. In 1994, Latinos were admitted to the UCs above the average rate, and African-Americans at 6 points below average; in 2019, they were admitted at 6 points and 16 points below average, respectively.”

What Weber is actually objecting to, however, is not racism caused by a law outlawing racism. Rather her objection is to allocating opportunities based on competence instead of race.

In this chart, the first column shows what percentage of students taking the SAT, by ethnicity, achieved a score at or above the minimum to be considered “college ready.” The second column shows the ethnic breakdown of college age students in California. Column three, “merit based admissions,” is the hypothetical kicker: It displays a result calculated from columns one and two. For each ethnicity, the percent of college ready students is multiplied by that ethnicity’s percent of the total pool of college age Californians in order to calculate a crude but significant indicator of what percentage of 2017 college admissions would be offered to students of each ethnicity, if admissions were offered to every applicant who scored “college ready” or better on their SAT. Column four shows the actual admissions to California’s UC System in 2017 by ethnicity.

There are a few obvious takeaways from the above chart. First of all, it becomes immediately clear that at 33 percent (col. 4) of all admissions, Latinos are admitted to the University of California in amounts almost perfectly proportional to their share, 35 percent (col. 3), of all college ready applicants. What proponents of Prop. 16 such as Shirley Weber advocate is to bring that share up to 50 percent (col. 2), which would mean Latinos would enter the UC System not based on their ability to do the work, but based on their raw percentage of the population.

Equally salient is the fact that white applicants, if SAT scores were the sole basis for admission, are clear victims of discrimination. After all, if based on their college readiness as assessed by their SAT performance combined with their percentage of the population, they should have earned 41 percent of the admissions to the UC System (col. 3), why were they only 23 percent of the incoming freshmen in 2017 (col. 4)? But there are other disparities that point to an even bigger problem.

Why, for example, do actual Asian admissions, 34 percent (col. 4), exceed the merit based admissions percentage, 21 percent (col. 3), as indicated based on their percentage of the college age population and the percentage of them achieving the SAT benchmark? Why, for that matter, are the actual Latino admissions, 33 percent (col. 4), slightly less than the amount they would theoretically earn, 35 percent (col. 3), based that same criteria?

The answer in both cases is the same, and can be best summarized in this quote taken from a report released in 2017 by the Brookings Institution:

“Race gaps on the SATs are especially pronounced at the tails of the distribution. In a perfectly equal distribution, the racial breakdown of scores at every point in the distribution would mirror the composition of test-takers as whole i.e. 51 percent white, 21 percent Latino, 14 percent black, and 14 percent Asian. But in fact, among top scorers—those scoring between a 750 and 800—60 percent are Asian and 33 percent are white, compared to 5 percent Latino and 2 percent black. Meanwhile, among those scoring between 300 and 350, 37 percent are Latino, 35 percent are black, 21 percent are white, and 6 percent are Asian.”

What this means in plain English is that in the UC System, where supposedly only the most elite high school graduates are granted admission, you will find the distribution of the higher SAT scores by ethnicity skewed even more in favor of Asian and White students than you find when evaluating how many students merely achieve the “benchmark” SAT score. In particular, this is why Asian admissions, which are arguably the only UC admissions in 2017 that were based truly on merit, skew higher than you would otherwise expect. That is also the reason that Latino admissions skew somewhat lower. And it also indicates that White applicants are discriminated against even more than shown on the table.

The next chart shows just how significantly math SAT scores differ by ethnic group.

These are not subtle differences. Most striking is the disparity occurring at the extremes of the distribution. It is those whose abilities fall within these gifted extremes who, overwhelmingly, become the inventors and researchers whose breakthroughs ensure American technological preeminence and benefit the world. Note how nearly 15 percent of all Asians were able to score over 750 on their math SAT.

Using math SAT scores as criteria, Asians are underrepresented in the University of California, even though they are overrepresented in proportion to their percentage of the population.

SAT Scores ARE Predictive of Academic Success

Just to be thorough, lest anyone repeat yet another shibboleth turned fact merely by virtue of repetition, namely, that SAT scores are not predictive of academic success, here is data that proves the value of SAT scores.

In May 2016 the Public Policy Institute of California produced a study that includes data that tracks the correlation between math SAT scores (horizontal axis) and graduation rates (vertical axis). The upper chart depicts six year graduation rates, the lower chart depicts four year graduation rates. The orange dots represent results for Cal State campuses, which were the focus of the study. The more numerous grey dots represent similar universities nationwide.

As can be seen, the trend line is unambiguous. It is roughly accurate to state that for every 50 point improvement in a student’s Math SAT score, there is a 10% greater probability that they will graduate from college. And yet California’s UC System, in pursuit of social justice, equity, and inclusion, as of May 2020 has abandoned the SAT requirement altogether. This is an astonishing denial of reality. 

Will Californians Vote in November to Reinstate Racist Policies?

It is difficult to imagine how affirmative action based purely on proportional representation by race is going to benefit California’s Asian students. If affirmative action is reinstated by California’s voters, and UC admissions are granted in amounts perfectly proportional to the racial composition of California’s college age students, the following would happen:

Asian enrollment would drop from 34 percent to 13 percent.
Black enrollment would increase from 5 percent to 6 percent.
Latino enrollment would increase from 33 percent to 50 percent.
White enrollment would increase from 23 percent to 31 percent.

Then again, it would be naive to think “affirmative action” in California would merely mean applying proportional quotas by race in public admissions, hiring and contracts. It is likely that a social justice hierarchy of disadvantage will become a more relevant criteria than pure ethnic proportionality. Affirmative action programs  And in this manner, the unwarranted and pervasive privilege enjoyed by virtue of whites being whites shall justify less than proportional representation.

This theory of how considerations of race can be selectively manipulated to exclude, just for example, whites and Asians from admission in favor of Latinos despite higher SAT scores is consistent with the US Supreme Court’s 2016 ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas. In that ruling, the court wrote “The record here reveals that the university articulated concrete and precise goals — e.g., ending stereotypes, promoting ‘cross-racial understanding,’ preparing students for ‘an increasingly diverse workforce and society,’ and cultivating leaders with ‘legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry’ — that mirror the compelling interest this court has approved in prior cases.”

Put another way, absent further clarification from the U.S. Supreme Court, America’s university administrators can come up with a variety of factors, the more diverse the better, that will allow them to manipulate the ethnic composition of their students body in whatever proportions they choose. California’s UC Regents, and the legislature that controls them, will be able to do whatever they want. Admission guidelines will be derived based on explicitly political motivations, and less connected to competence than ever.

There is a good chance that Prop. 16’s flawed attempt at greater “social justice” will be approved by California’s voters. Latinos and Blacks may see no reason to oppose something that will increase the rates of enrollment of their children in the University of California. And white liberals, who dominate California’s diminishing population of white voters, will vote for anything called “affirmative action.”

The Asian vote will be the wild card, but at 15 percent of California’s population, their numbers are still too small to swing an election unless it is close, and their vote is monolithic. That is possible but unlikely, because Asians in California still typically vote with Democrats, and California’s Democratic party is solidly in favor of restoring racism in the name of fighting racism.

There is one great hope, however, and that is if a groundswell of opposition by members of California’s Asian community becomes sufficiently pervasive and persuasive, it will stimulate California’s other voting blocs to express solidarity with them and reject Prop. 16. Should that occur, it will open the door to a broader reevaluation of identity politics and social justice ideology.

By putting Prop. 16 onto the state ballot this November, California’s legislature may, just may, get more than they bargained for. Maybe the good guys will win.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Needs of the Few and the Paralysis of Perfectionism

“Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
– Leonard Nimoy’s character Spock, Wrath of Khan, 1982

For anyone who has questioned whether or not the COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a severe enough threat to justify a soft version of martial law and a possible economic depression, Spock’s classic claim might be inverted. It would go more like this: “The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.”

There is plenty of logic and data supporting the argument that COVID-19 poses a threat sufficiently dire to justify everything that’s being done. It is a poorly understood, highly contagious disease that afflicts people in unpredictable ways, with possible recurrences even in people who have recovered, and so far there is no effective therapy and no vaccine. Fair enough.

But the response to COVID-19, should it be an overreaction, highlights a trend in American society that has grown over the past several decades into an overwhelming problem. Increasingly, we are paralyzing ourselves, losing individual freedoms, and squandering our prosperity as a nation in the pursuit of impossible perfection. Why? Because we have decided the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

Before providing examples of this, and they are countless, one must acknowledge the moral arguments in favor of allowing the needs of the few to outweigh the needs of the many. Christian compassion would make the obvious case that the few matter as much as the many, and it is the obligation of the many to help them.

Contemporary leftist ideology would consider the many to be privileged, the few to be victims of “othering.” And regardless of ideology or religion, American culture, and most Americans, consider it their duty to help the less fortunate. In principle, they’re right.

But when it goes too far—and it has—what are the consequences?

One of the biggest problems with putting the needs of the few in front of the needs of the many is that it doesn’t just happen. Imagine how much of America’s wealth is transferred to private plaintiff attorneys, nonprofit pressure groups, corporate monopolies and public bureaucrats, in the fight to protect rights and guarantee the same opportunities to everyone? The costs add up.

A huge example comes in the realm of public education, where students are “mainstreamed” into classrooms without regard for their individual abilities or behaviors. On the one hand, it is laudable to mix K-12 students up so that disadvantaged, disabled, and disruptive students are in the same classroom with their more fortunate counterparts, but it is also the reason large class sizes are so problematic.

When an instructor has to spend the majority of their time engaged in remedial instruction or fruitless attempts at discipline, the learning process is compromised. The solution? A generation (or two) ago, before this doctrine became standard procedure, classes of 35 students were not problematic, because disabled and disruptive students went to special classes and schools.

That sounds pretty coldhearted, but how many hundreds of billions is it worth to keep things going the way they are today? “Inclusion” in all things is a worthy goal. But we can’t always afford it.

Another example concerns laws designed to ensure handicapped access. There’s nothing wrong with taking reasonable steps to make it easier for people in wheelchairs to continue to enjoy access to public venues, but opportunistic plaintiff attorneys and indifferent bureaucrats have taken these laws to extremes.

The people most harmed by these laws, invariably, are small business owners, who usually lack the resources to comply with every technicality. And even if, for all practical purposes, they have fulfilled the intent of the Americans with Disabilities Act, code inspectors will tie them up in knots. “Your incline is a 7 percent slope and the ADA clearly requires a 6 percent slope,” and an entire subfloor and foundation have to be modified. And once the code inspectors are done, along come the trial attorneys with extortionate lawsuits. “Your handicapped stall is half an inch too narrow, pay me a settlement, and I’ll go away.”

Proclaiming the urgent needs of the few is an endless frontier. In a growing number of states, schools and public venues now have to provide special bathroom designations for “transgender” individuals. Is this really necessary, when even transgender advocates acknowledge they number barely one-half of one percent of the population? Is that worth the cost of rebuilding all of our public spaces, rewriting our laws, and reeducating our children?

Speaking of a frontier that is now fully settled, has anyone seen any public announcement during this pandemic that did not feature a deaf translator, grimacing and gesticulating in a pantomime that ought to be performance art next to the politician speaking? Who, in 2020, doesn’t have a closed captioning option on their television set? Why is this necessary? Sometimes the gyrations of these deaf translators are so dramatic they become a distraction from whatever the actual messenger is saying. What does that cost?

It’s easy enough to see how this line of argument comes across as cruel, but it is nonetheless necessary at a time like this to step back and ask: how much does it cost when the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many? It’s ironic and hypocritical that members of the Left are endlessly harping about the virtues of collectivism, yet also have to highlight every individual case of “othering” and use it to push for more spending, more bureaucracy, and more rules and restraints on the sacred collective.

Imagine how much money in tuition could be saved, sparing the many from crushing post-graduation debt burdens, if colleges quit pandering to students who are academically unqualified and instead only admitted applicants based on their SAT scores? Entire vast bureaucracies could be discharged overnight, because their entire existence depends on coddling students who never should have been admitted. Entire departments, promulgating degrees in useless, unmarketable “studies,” could be eliminated, because the students who desire these degrees are typically those who are incapable or unwilling to study more rigorous and useful academic disciplines. But the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

What Happens When the Few Become the Many?

In our quest to protect the disadvantaged few, Americans have enacted laws to ensure proportional representation in all facets of society. These laws are expansive and growing every year. At first, it was university admissions, then it quickly rolled into job hiring and promotions. First enforced in government agencies, it was extended to publicly traded large corporations, and increasingly is imposed on small businesses. The corruption and cynicism this engenders is tragic, and a profound drain on national productivity.

To get government contracts, there is now an entire industry of shell companies, with no assets but a principal who is a member of a “protected status group.” These shell companies form partnerships with established companies that cannot get government contracts without first creating the appearance of “minority ownership.” It isn’t fair, and it doesn’t always end well. The shell participants have no assets and no exposure. The participants of substance risk a lifetime’s worth of hard-earned assets, but they have no choice to cede a portion of their ownership and governance in order to win a contract. It is a farce, accomplishing nothing.

The fact that the “many” are no longer a majority ought to give one pause. In California, the cohort of white males under the age of 18 is now below 12 percent. Everyone else is the “few.” Think about this. In California, 78 percent of the younger generation is eligible for various forms of institutionalized preferences based on their status as female or a “person of color.” It is a preposterous conceit that can’t carry on much longer.

In the United States in 2019, nearly 20 percent of marriages in America were “interracial.” Twenty percent. We have the hilarious prospect, already happening, of people whose ancestry is mostly “white” invariably checking the box for some other race in order to get into school or get a job. What does it mean to have the few becoming the many, and the many becoming the few, at the same time as the few and the many are becoming increasingly indistinguishable?

In America today, we face the unlikely reality of Asian applicants with one “white” parent actually identifying as white. Asians perform so well on their SATs, a high-scoring Asian American might actually have a better chance of getting into, say, Harvard, if they’re competing to be part of the white quota. And of course, anyone with a parent with a Spanish surname will adopt that “Latinx” surname on any school or job application, and never mind if their skin is white as snow, speckled with freckles, with eyes so blue and hair so blond they could have been a poster child for the Aryan propagandists in 1930s Germany. Just never mind all that.

The Pursuit of Perfection Empowers Authoritarians and Crushes Everyone

The use of compassion, supposedly to create a Leftist utopia, extends into every facet of American life. Modern resistance to the injustice and ultimate futility of this overreach began around the time Rush Limbaugh debuted in the 1990s and recently acquired huge momentum with the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016.

But how do you resist the chorus that shouts, with every institution as its mouthpiece, that we must do whatever it takes to protect the disadvantaged? And so what if we have now defined 90 percent of the people in our nation as disadvantaged?

What was once a drive to protect the unfortunate few in our society is now a drive for more than just equal access and opportunity. It is even more than just a drive to create double standards that go beyond equal opportunity to quota-based admissions, hiring, and contracting. Because it is now moving beyond the world of academia and business into defining the makeup of towns and suburbs, with growing mandates to create both economic and ethnic diversity in neighborhoods via “inclusive” zoning.

Where will this end?

In all of this, government bureaucracies and monopolistic businesses win, as individual freedoms and property rights are lost and small businesses are wiped out. The current pandemic epitomizes the difficulties, the lose-lose conundrum, trying to balance the needs of the few against the needs of the many. While everything that’s been done so far may have been necessary, we face epic choices ahead in the aftermath.

Working against solutions that preserve our rights, our legacy, and our freedom is the momentum of recent history. Protecting the few, at the expense of the many.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Challenging Liberal Racism

About a year ago, Vice published an article by Kesiena Boom called “100 Ways White People Can Make Life Less Frustrating For People of Color.” Offered as a way for the “anxious [White] allies of the world” to “be the change,” the article serves as a pretty good example of leftist attitudes on race. But what if these leftist, liberal attitudes are themselves racist?

By now we’re all familiar with the broad outlines of this narrative. Racism is real whether you can see it or not (No. 1). Don’t engage in “cultural appropriation” (No. 11). Don’t claim to know what is or isn’t racist (No. 17). Realize that “some days are mentally exhausting for people of color” (No. 20). Make a fuss if a collection of art, music, literature, or whatever, doesn’t include proportional representation by people of color (No. 27). Understand the “intersections of race and gender” (No. 43). Shut up and “just listen” (No. 68).

Perhaps the biggest common thread in Boom’s article is its air of moral superiority. People of color will dictate the terms of any discussion on race, and white people will keep quiet and listen. The problem with accepting this premise, however, is that the stakes are too high. According to Pew Research, by 2020 one-third of America’s eligible voters will be “nonwhites.”

Colorful Symmetries, Troubling Trends
If America’s “people of color” were as diverse in their voting preferences as non-Hispanic whites, the fact that they’re about to constitute one in every three voters wouldn’t mean much. But the opposite is the case. In the 2018 election, white voters leaned Republican, 54 to 44 percent, but Republican competitiveness ended there. Only 29 percent of Hispanics voted Republican, only 23 percent of Asians voted Republican, and only 9 percent of blacks voted Republican.

The conclusions you can draw from this unambiguous data have profound implications. The voting patterns of nonwhites are nearly monolithic in favor of Democrats, and the impact of this is transforming America’s political landscape. If nonwhites were the only voters, then today—based on the proportions of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians in the electorate—Democrats would get 78 percent of the vote. When you bring that monolithic preference into the total electorate, the symmetry is rather neat: without nonwhite voters, Republicans get 54 percent of the national vote; with everyone participating, Democrats get 54 percent of the vote.

This fact—that America’s politics are fundamentally altered by nonwhite voters preferring Democrats by a margin of nearly four to one—makes it necessary for white Republicans not only to stop being silent on issues of race and racism, but it obligates them to speak up. It is absurd, manipulative nonsense for anyone to tell white conservatives that they have to “shut up” and just be an “ally” on issues of race, when their destinies and their futures are being decided by nonwhite voters.

Not only are nonwhite voters already delivering the decisive swing vote in elections across the nation, and always in only one direction, but this reality is just beginning.

In just 16 years, between 2000 and 2016, the proportion of non-Hispanic white children in the U.S. declined from 61 percent of all children to 51 percent. Today, three years later, it’s less than 50 percent. Based on decades of consistent voting patterns and already established demographics, America is sliding, irrevocably, toward permanent rule by Democrats.

Shutting up is not an option. Whites have as much right to comment on issues of race as nonwhites, and just as much to lose if they are silent. And after all, what if the most toxic, devastating forms of racism aren’t coming from conservative Republicans, but from liberal Democrats? Wouldn’t everyone, especially nonwhites, want to hear the news?

Liberal Racism Rightly Understood
One of the reasons Republicans lose the vote of nonwhites is because Democrats have successfully tainted Republicans as racists. Who wants to vote for a party filled with racists? But if you examine the various types of racism infecting American society, there’s a strong argument to be made that the actual racism is coming from the Democrats.

First of all, you can rule out the obvious racism that everyone deplores. If you object to two people who love each other marrying because they’re from different races, you’re a racist. If you prejudge someone before you get to know them and dislike them because of their race, you’re a racist. If you deliberately deny someone an opportunity solely because of their race, you’re a racist. These are examples of toxic, indefensible racism that no serious person in American society defends.

But the third example provides a segue into what we might call liberal racism, because liberal racism isn’t whites denying nonwhites opportunities, it’s institutionalized discrimination against whites in favor of less qualified nonwhites.

If that raises the hackles of social justice warriors and their professional enablers in the diversity bureaucracy, that’s just too bad. Because affirmative action of all kinds is racism, plain and simple. And it doesn’t do anyone any good. It places less qualified nonwhites into college classrooms and corporate offices where they are not able to compete with their peers. This tempts the underachievers to believe the diversity bureaucracy’s B.S. about needing safe spaces and special treatment, and it embitters every better-qualified college or job applicant who didn’t get the opportunity they’d earned through merit.

These laws breed corruption and resentment wherever they appear. Small business owners are told they can’t compete for contracts or loans unless they have nonwhite partners. A cottage industry is formed where nonwhite partners, with no assets to put at risk and minimal qualifications, make themselves available to business owners who have invested decades of their lives and every penny they’ve ever made into a business. Who carries more risk? Who worked harder? How is this helpful?

There are nonwhite conservatives who understand there are no shortcuts to success. The list of influential black conservative Republican intellectuals and influencers, is huge, including Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Herman Cain, Larry Elder, Ward Connerly, Condoleezza Rice, Alan Keyes, Star Parker, Walter Williams, Mia Love, Candace Owens, and countless others. Unfortunately, their work is marginalized by the liberal press and by their ideological opponents within their communities. But it isn’t just to nonwhites that white conservatives have to be more outspoken, it’s to other whites who have not questioned the liberal catechism on race.

Enforced racial quotas that do more harm than good to both whites and nonwhites are not the only liberal policy with racist consequences. Another example of liberal racism is K-12 public education policies, where the iron grip of leftist teachers unions have denied quality education to generations of nonwhites in America. Conservative Republicans didn’t destroy our public schools, the liberal Democrats did, by supporting teachers unions that care more about pay, benefits, and job security than about the children they’re supposed to educate.

Along with eliminating the ability to fire incompetent teachers, and drowning effective instruction in a torrent of “process” rules and bureaucracy, liberal Democrats have supported so-called “restorative justice,” which in practice makes it almost impossible to expel nonwhite students for discipline problems unless a proportional number of whites have also been expelled. Lack of discipline ranks as high as bad teachers and politicized curricula among the reasons why our public schools are failing, and expulsion quotas make matters worse, not better. Liberal Democrats are to blame for all of it.

Republicans, by contrast, support increasing the proportion of classroom teachers in K-12 schools and cutting back the expensive bureaucracy. Conservative Republicans support charter schools, homeschooling, private schools, and school vouchers—all designed to make schools compete to provide quality education. Conservative Republicans support bringing discipline back into the classroom, firing incompetent teachers, restoring math and language fundamentals to the curriculum, and reforming out-of-control teacher pensions that are bankrupting public education. What’s racist about any of that?

Environmental Justice?
Another example of liberal racism is the indirect but devastating effect of “green” politics. The real world result of renewable portfolio standards is huge increases to the cost of energy. This means members of low-income communities, often nonwhite, are less able to afford to pay their utility bills. Affluent white liberals can congratulate themselves for supporting expensive renewables because paying those bills doesn’t take up such a high percentage of their disposable income.

Environmentalist policies in general disproportionately harm nonwhites, along with all low-income communities. Restricting housing development under environmentalist pretexts creates a real estate bubble, forcing rents and home prices up. Low-income people have to pay higher rents to live in places further from their jobs, and then they have to sit in congested roads because liberals wanted to allocate public funds to high-speed rail and other impractical, but “environmentally correct” transportation boondoggles.

None of these green policies—certainly not renewable energy or restrictions on housing development—does much for the environment. But they do make life much harder for low-income households, many of which are nonwhite.

When it comes to liberal racism, the biggest culprit is socialism itself. Mainstream Joe Biden type Democrats are just corrupt liberals, mouthing anti-racist platitudes to attract votes while their liberal racist policies do more harm than good to nonwhites. But the rising tide of die-hard socialists within the Democratic party—fueled, in part, by rising percentages of nonwhite voters—threatens to bring new levels of misery to everyone, nonwhites most of all.

Whether this new breed of Democrats are just pandering cynics like U.S. Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), or fanatical ignoramuses like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), their ideas, including reparations, redistribution of wealth, open borders, free healthcare, free college tuition, 100 percent renewable energy, guaranteed income, guaranteed jobs, and so forth, are utterly infeasible. If even half of these schemes ever became law, the United States would lose the prosperity that is the surest and, possibly, only way that nonwhites can be assured the opportunity for upward mobility.

Ultimately, that’s what liberal racism is all about. It isn’t about raising nonwhites up through equal opportunity, it’s about enforcing equal outcome, no matter what the cost. In the real world, that cost would be crushing. History is filled with examples of failed socialist utopias, and current events provide additional examples unfolding before our eyes.

America’s “people of color” need to make some tough choices. Do they want to adhere to the liberal racist temptation to blame any shortcomings in their lives on white oppression, or do they want to grab the American dream the only way it can endure, which is through hard work and merit against an immutable and equally applied standard?

It is ludicrous that conservative whites cannot join that conversation. The future of America is at stake, and everyone’s voice must be heard.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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