Arthur Hu Nov 18, 1996 d:\doc\96\07\ccri.doc WAR IS PEACE. SLAVERY IS FREEDOM. COLOR-BLINDNESS IS RACISM California just voted to return to the days of White Male Domination. Well at least that's what some people think of the "deceptively" titled California Civil Rights Act, Proposition 209. It has the gall not only to ban discrimination but all racial favoritism. Today, anyone who quotes Martin Luther King by judging not by the color of one's skin is called a racist, and it's just as easy to find affirmative action wonks who claim that color blindness is just another tool of racism as those who claim that affirmative action isn't preferential at all. Now I've heard it all when the ACLU says prohibiting preferences violates equal protection of the law. It passed in nearly every county except Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, the only areas with substantial numbers of minorities. That proves that it's racist, right? And Washington is next. Last year, Ron "Spanish is the language of dishwashers" Taber and a state legislator tried to get something started in Washington state. They're going to try again. By drumming in that that CCRI would ban all affirmative action, opponents were really admitting they are the ones who have been lying all the time. They say that affirmative action isn't about quotas, preferences and lowering standards. Yet when you look not at what they say, but what they do, the bottom line isn't a lack of discrimination, but using whatever discrimination is necessary to impose DIVERSITY. People say that we shouldn't take just test scores into account. But they're throwing out test sores and grades completely, and hiring by percentages of bodies. If you look at the bottom line that will make people happy, the reason we need affirmative action is because minorities and women are underrepresented. Period. You can hire by merit only, or you can hire by quota, or you can do something in-between. But the activists are only fooling themselves when they say there isn't any conflict between defining discrimination as hiring someone who is less qualified instead of failing to the hire the group that is least represented and most "deserving" of social justice. In their ideal fantasy world which bears as much scientific resemblance to reality as the flat earth, all groups would be equally represented in everything in the absence of discrimination. But the fact is that no two group of people are equal in anything, and they only way to enforce numerical equality is by discriminating (OOPS!, that PREFERRING) by race. They want to say affirmative action is color blind, but they scream like heck if you hold them to their word. It used to be that colleges and corporations promised that they didn't discriminate. Now they say that they SEEK DIVERSITY, and that diversity IS excellence to quote Chancellor Chiang Lin Tien. What's diversity? Today diversity merely means much more than non-discrimination, or even just reflecting the population. To the University of California, it means admitting half of all the minority students into the top two flagships, while redirecting whites and Asians into lesser campuses to give the storefront appearance of racial balance. But it's a total joke when whites and Asians are 50/50, and all the other campuses are nearly devoid of minorities. If UCLA and Berkeley are called the "most diverse" campuses with only 30% whites in a state where they are over half the population, then a campus that is perfectly 100% diverse would logically have zero whites. Now students are outraged that they'll have to get the same test scores and grades as everybody else to get into the best campuses, and blacks and Hispanics will become under-represented (Just like the white students!) How unfair can you get? To the Los Angeles Fire Department, it meant hiring only 25% whites under a court order to hire 50% minorities, and reserving 50% of white positions for women and then saying they don't use quotas. To the Los Angeles police department, it means hiring new police to within one percentage point of the 1990 Census population of each race, being committed to hiring blacks over better scoring whites even when they already exceed population, and hiring 43% women to match the labor force whether or not it matches the pool of interested or qualified candidates. To San Jose, it meant hiring only one white male out of 21 new firefighters, and firing a black chief who refused to promote any white males even though blacks exceed population by a factor of four at the highest ranks. To the Seattle Fire Department's black fire chief, it means having all 3 top officials being black, and blacks being over 2 times their population among all fire officials and administrators. To the US Department of Justice, it's prosecuting the City of Torrance because they did NOT have any quotas or preferences in place to "reflect the labor force of Los Angeles County". To the University of Washington law school, diversity means Wallace Low creating a law school class that is 40 percent minority in a state that is 85 percent White. To the School of Social Work, it means complaining about not meeting their diversity goals with "only" 50% African Americans. To planners of the renovation of Seattle's most notorious housing project, it means "preserving" the 90% nonwhite "character" of the community. To governor-elect Gary Locke, it means promising to impose racial preferences "wherever this is a numerical disparity", without any mention of whether it had anything to do with proven discrimination. President Johnson got the ball rolling by proclaiming that we should act affirmatively to hire WITHOUT REGARD TO RACE. How did we get from a 1964 Civil Rights act which forbids discrimination into an environment where you can be sued for NOT implementing quotas? Well, when a guy called Bakke finally figured out that quotas were favoring the under-qualified, the Supreme Court countered by deciding that Congress was only kidding, and preferences were necessary to reverse the legacy of discrimination, just as long you're not foolish enough to call it a quota.. So without a single vote, and not a single law on the books that explicitly permits racial preferences, legalized discrimination became the law the land. The folks who dreamed up CCRI had a brilliant idea when they realized that the polls showed that people support affirmative action, but NOT racial preferences. They took the 1964 Act but removed the loophole by stating NO PREFERENCES. Man, how deceptive, huh? One honest problem with having no preferences at all is that if your goal is really to equalize outcomes over merit considerations, discriminating by test scores will do nearly as good a job of keeping blacks out of the best colleges and jobs as if you did by race alone. But unlike alumni or veteran preferences, racial discrimination is ILLEGAL. Or at least it's supposed to be. I wouldn't have such big problems if people were honest about preferences, and said in so many words, why don't we let in a few people with lower qualifications just to get some color around here. Just write a new proposition that "It shall be illegal to discriminate EXCEPT against Christians, Whites, Chinese and men". Go ahead, I dare you. But things have gotten so far out of hand. The easiest way to prevent massive abuse of affirmative action is to get rid of all preferences. Norman Matloff of UC Davis says that Asians are a race of bigots, and Asians have always given Republican candidates a few more points than Whites. But Asian Californians actually opposed 209 by 55 to 45 percent. That was consistent earlier an Field Poll survey. Not only that , USA Today found Asian teens were the least likely to oppose racial preferences as a means of equalizing outcomes. Yet Asians are already over-represented where they want to be like MIT, Berkeley and med school. The only groups with lower test scores and higher admission rates are other minorities. The reason there aren't enough Asian teachers and firefighters is because they'd rather be engineers and doctors, and lowering standards won't change that. "Asians For Affirmative Action Against Asians" like Norman Matloff, Chancellor Tien and Gary Locke not only defend turning down better qualified Asians over lesser-represented minorities. Emil Guillermo says it's just as unfair for Berkeley to be "all-Asian" as "all-White". Henry Der even defended San Francisco's infamous Chinese quotas at Lowell High, saying there was "no evidence" of discrimination against Chinese. God help us if he ends up as Education Secretary if Clinton needs an Asian badly enough. So by furthering their own careers sacrificing the opportunities the children of ordinary angry Asian parents, they proven that the answer to the Big Question as Asians are Black or White is that they are really acting as liberal Whites. +- Views do not reflect any other organization or group--------------+ + Arthur Hu Join my diversity mailing list or arthurhu@halcyon.com Check index and articles on web: Kirkland WA http://www.halcyon.com/arthurhu/ +- Views do not reflect any other organization or group--------------+ Arthur Hu Check out collecting toys page Hot Wheels, JL arthurhu@halcyon.com Matchbox McD BK toys Thomas Tank Engine email to join my toy mailing list Kirkland WA 98034 http://www.halcyon.com/arthurhu/collect.htm