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Thomas “T.J.” Jefferson and Race-Based School Admissions
White parents and Asian parents are fighting over how many black students should be allowed into Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Alexandria, Virginia. The school, universally known as “T.J.,” is among the finest STEM high schools in the United States. Given its role as a feeder school into the upper echelons of tech in America, this is more than another culture war battle. It is not an exaggeration to say it affects national security, which is why the issue is likely to be sorted out by the Supreme Court.
From its beginnings until summer of 2020, the only way into prestigious T.J. for residents was to pass the rigorous entrance exam. Then in 2020, following the death of George Floyd, T.J. officials became concerned about their negligible number of black and Hispanic students and changed admissions standards. The test was gone, replaced by a holistic review that included “experience factors, including students who are economically disadvantaged, English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools.”
The results were as intended: without the entrance test, black students grew to seven percent from one percent of the class, while the number of Asian American students fell to 54 percent from 73 percent, the lowest share in years. The number of white students also fell, but no one seemed to care that they accounted for only 22 percent of admissions, despite being 65 percent of the county population. A group of mostly Asian American parents objected to the new plan and started the Coalition for T.J. The coalition filed a lawsuit with the help of the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. Instead of seeing weighting of experience factors as a way to level the playing field for underrepresented groups (or whether such a thing was even necessary) they saw racism. The experience factors were just a work-around for straight up race-based decisions.
After some action in lower courts, in May 2023 the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the new admissions process, finding T.J. had not discriminated against Asian American students in its admissions policies. The appellate court, in a two to one ruling, found that there was not sufficient evidence the changes were adopted with discriminatory intent. Writing for the majority, Judge Robert King, a Clinton appointee, said that the school had a legitimate interest in “expanding the array of student backgrounds.” Too bad for the Asians, the on-and-off again minority; there’s only so many seats available at T.J. The court finding was that T.J.’s essay-based admission policy was race neutral and was not a proxy for race-based decisions. T.J. was able to make racially-motivated decisions without appearing legally to make racially-motivated decisions.
This was of course all before the June 2023 Supreme Court rulings in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, which asked three questions: can race be a factor for admission, has Harvard violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by penalizing Asian American applicants by engaging in racial balancing, overemphasizing race and rejecting workable race-neutral alternatives, and whether a university can reject a race-neutral alternative because it would change the composition of the student body, without proving that the alternative would cause a dramatic sacrifice in academic quality or the educational benefits of overall student-body diversity. In short, can race continue to be an admission factor? The emphasis was on displacing Asian American students with black ones, which is why the Supreme Court cases saw amici filings by the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, the Asian American Coalition For Education, and the Asian American Legal Foundation. Also included was the Coalition for T.J.
The Pacific Legal Foundation now wants the Supreme Court to overturn the Appeals Court decision, arguing that T.J.’s new admissions policies disadvantage Asian American applicants. “They are, in our view, using proxies for race in order to get a racial result,” said Joshua Thompson, a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation. In its filing Monday asking the Supreme Court to review the case, the Foundation argued that T.J.’s admissions plan was “intentionally designed to achieve the same results as overt racial discrimination.” Specifically referring to the Supreme Court’s June affirmative action decision, the filing said that its “guarantees might mean little if schools could accomplish the same discriminatory result through race-neutral proxies.” Is T.J. flouting the most recent Supreme Court decision?
It should be a helluva fight if the Supreme Court takes the T.J. case. In a forthcoming paper in the Stanford Law Review quoted in the New York Times, Sonja Starr, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Chicago, writes the plaintiffs are “laying the groundwork for a much bigger legal transformation” that could ban any public policy effort to close racial gaps, ultimately reverberating in “areas beyond education, such as fair housing, environmental permitting, and social welfare policies.”
In tension are the most basic of rights, that institutions should not discriminate based on race versus a more modern belief that institutions have a fundamental role to play in achieving racial balance in schools and the workplace. The Court’s decision in Harvard, et al, did not address the proxy concept, that by focusing on say essays schools could achieve racist ends by proxy means. In dissent at the Appeals Court, Judge Allison Rushing wrote the majority refused “to look past the policy’s neutral varnish” and consider instead “an undisputed racial motivation and an undeniable racial result.” Judge Rushing, appointed by Donald Trump, added that the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection “would be hollow if governments could intentionally achieve discriminatory ends under cover of neutral means.” She means, like T.J. is doing.
The T.J. case matters; if the Supreme Court rules for the Asian American parents’ group, that means race-neutral admissions will be the next in line to fall after the Court’s June affirmative action ruling.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Free Speech and Fair Play are a Bitch
If there were two lessons from the high school civics class most Americans seemed to skip that they should learn now they are: rights are for everyone and free speech sometimes protects speech you don’t like yourself. Luckily, the Supreme Court recently offered America a tutorial on both topics.
In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina the Court made the common sense ruling that discrimination of some colors of people is a poor way to fix discrimination of other colors of people. What woke mind could possibly conceive that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection under the law meant treating a large portion of the population grossly unfairly at the expense of another? Kind of a common-sense argument but one America needed to travel all the way to the Supreme Court to resolve.
Starting back with 1979’s Bakke and largely confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2003’s Grutter, America’s higher education institutions decided it was they who would fix systemic racism in America by offering preferential treatment by race, specifically, white and yellow colored students were considered less deserving of a good education at say Harvard, and had to sit out the Ivy League so that some black and brown kids could take their places. The word for this back in the day was not racism (which it was) but “affirmative action.” It would right wrongs. This “reverse discrimination” was allowed through some clever word play because its goal of a diverse student body was considered a “compelling state interest” that overshadowed other compelling interests, such as equal protection for all under the law. It was sanctioned by the Supreme Court of its day, but only as a temporary solution; Justice Sarah Day O’Conner in one of the key cases upholding affirmative action wrote, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
It didn’t seem to work, short or long term, in significantly changing society, if black and brown activists of 2023 are to be believed. Decades of pushing aside white and yellow kids (the former privileged because once upon a time other unrelated white people owned slaves and the latter just too damn hard working and smart) for black and brown did not seem significantly change society. There are of course individual examples, both fake (blacks or browns who would have succeeded in any system) and occasionally real, true by-their-bootstraps stories once they got that helping hand.
“When affirmative action was conceptualized, it was to right past wrongs,” one commenter said. “Then, it became sort of endless. It wasn’t just African Americans. It was Native Americans and Hispanics. And then it was women, LGBT, etc., and that wiped out the moral imperative of it a little, because diversity is not quite as strong a claim as correcting past wrongs.”
There were other problems. Letting someone into Harvard is not the same as him succeeding at Harvard. I learned that in high school too, by the way. If some program had sent me to an Ivy school at age 18 I would have failed miserably, coming out of a non-rigorous but nice enough Ohio high school where upon graduation I had neither read one classic book nor written one proper research paper. I think Harvard expects you to know that kind of thing and white as I am, I would have floundered. I’m sure they have some sort of remedial program for their unqualified students but it seems unlikely to make up for many years of half-hearted education before it. And that exposes another dirty little secret about why affirmative action failed; America is divided by class, not race (though the two overlap in a Venn diagram.)
America’s second recent high school civics lesson is you as an individual may not like everything other people use their freedom of speech to say and do; in fact, their deeply held beliefs may run 180 degrees from yours. Protip for exam time: this is the whole point of the First Amendment free speech clause and it was on display in another recent Supreme Court decision, 303 Creative v. Elenis.
The crux of the case is that one side, a web designer, wanted to know what would happen if she refused to produce a hypothetical celebratory wedding page for a gay couple, claiming her religion did not allow her to support same-sex marriage. The couple would have sued because of course they would, likely claiming as a protected class by sex in Colorado, the cake maker must be forced by the government to make the cake they wanted celebrating their nuptials. Lower courts had weighed in in favor, claiming various cake makers, florists, and web designers must be forced to practice their craft (i.e., their expression, their speech) to avoid LGBT discrimination. It was as if one side had more rights than they other and would have resulted in the government of the United States using the threat of arrest or fine to force the web designer to produce speech she was opposed to.
That’s a big no-no in a democracy, compelling speech.
Though the state can demand businesses provide goods and services to all customers in protected categories, it cannot demand individuals engage in speech proclaiming messages that they oppose, such as in web page design. In Justice Samuel Alito’s words, a win for the state of Colorado would mean some businesses that provide custom speech for customers could be forced to “espouse things they loathe.”
This all goes back to 1943’s West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette when during WWII the Supreme Court held West Virginia could not make Jehovah’s Witness students pledge allegiance to the American flag. The decision contained arguably the most famous finding in American First Amendment law: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” The key finding in 303 Creative is the designer is not denying a service on the basis of status of a protected class but instead refusing to engage in speech because she disagreed with its message (Masterpiece Cakeshop failed to yield a definitive ruling and is not relevant here.)
Despite all the hub-bub, the Court correctly applied the broader civics class way of thinking in 2023, focusing on the First Amendment speech clause, and said nothing directly about the more contentious and limited religious aspect of all this, and passed on 2023’s wokist definition of discrimination. Had the recent case involved a Jehovah’s Witness’ web page and not ostensibly something to do with gay rights, you would barely have heard of the matter even though the real significance would have been about the same.
It’s easy to forget most of what you heard in high school, especially in a one-off class like civics. But common sense can get you a long ways. It is easy to write off the Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions as discriminatory, with only a little thought that what it did away with — affirmative action — was discriminatory as heck. Same for 303 Creative v. Elenis, which is being promoted by the MSM as anti-LGBT thing when in fact it is an example of how robust our First Amendment is. At the Founding no one could have conceived of a free speech battle between a web designer and gay clients, but that is what the First Amendment expanded to take in. The Supreme Court has not gone rogue, and democracy is not in danger. These two recent cases prove if anything the system is flexible for the times and robust in defending the most basic freedoms a democracy is built upon.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Academic Racism By a Different Name
A decision by the Supreme Court in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina/Harvard College is due very soon. It is widely held the decision will do away with or greatly weaken affirmative action in college admissions, removing or dramatically limiting race as a criterion. But far from helping solve the festering problem of race in America, the Supreme Court decision will simply shift the battle from affirmative action to so-called “race-neutral criteria.” This is an already-in-place end run around any end to affirmative action, designed to pretend criteria such as class rank or home zip code are not racial. The theory of racial neutrality in academic decision making holds the use of such “neutral” criteria to create racially balanced classrooms is proper where affirmative action was once called into play to do the same.
At present schools may use race as an admissions criterion as long as it is not the only basis for a decision, with the implied so long as the goal is diversity (good) and not whitewashing (bad). This allowed a nation pretending to strive toward equality to instead enact the opposite, by upholding separate standards based on skin color.
The hypocrisy began with Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a 1978 Supreme Court case which held a university violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if it made admissions decisions on the “definite and exclusive basis” of race. That bit about “definite and exclusive basis” was crucial—race could be a criteria, but just not the only one.
The Court ruled that a university’s use of racial “quotas” in its admissions process was unconstitutional, but a school’s use of affirmative action to accept more minority applicants was constitutional. In this case, the university’s offense was being too clear; the University of California explicitly held 16 out of 100 admission spots exclusively for black students instead of just putting its thumb on the scale elsewhere in the process and—presto!—filling those slots with black students.
In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) the Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions policy, which used racial preference (bad) to promote diversity (good.) Black applicants were admitted under different standards than members of every other group. The fudge was again to say that affirmative action is constitutional so long as it treats race as one factor among many, and does not substitute for individualized review of the applicants. But Grutter in 2003 came with an interesting addendum: affirmative action was supposed to be a temporary policy, an imperfect expedient, while society worked out the larger issues. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest in student body diversity.” Some two decades later with that imperfect expedient likely to be declared unconstitutional, what comes next?
Though the expected Supreme Court decision will focus on university admission, the next battleground will likely be a high school in Northern Virginia. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known to everyone as “T.J.” is considered one of the best STEM high schools in the country. Until about a year ago, the only way to get in was to pass a very competitive entrance exam. Entry into T.J. meant you were a smart kid with the discipline to put in hard hours with no guarantee of success, a perfect definition of those who would also go on to succeed at MIT, CalTech, or an Ivy. However, in the aftermath of George Floyd, this was somehow not enough. As many as 73 percent of students admitted to Thomas Jefferson High School were Asian. Only about two percent of T.J. students were black. T.J.’s school’s principal said “Our 32 Black students and 47 Hispanic students fill three classrooms. If our demographics actually represented those of the county’s public schools, we would enroll 180 Black and 460 Hispanic students, filling nearly 22 classrooms.”
The answer was T.J.’s entrance exam was replaced with “a holistic review” that included “experience factors, including students who are economically disadvantaged, English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools.”
In addition, spots for the top students from every public middle school in the area (several of which are predominantly black or Hispanic) were set aside, pushing more black and other non-white and non-Asian students into T.J. Ignored of course is that the term “Asian” itself is yet another racial fudge, that somehow Chinese, Thais, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Laotians, Indians, Bangladeshis, et al., are part of one omnibus racial rejection pile.
It worked, for T.J.: the percentage of Asian American students dropped from 73 percent to 54 percent. The percentage of black students grew from two to seven percent while the percentage of Hispanic students grew to 11 percent from three.
Despite the obvious racially-divided results, and perhaps cleverly anticipating the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision doing away with affirmative action, T.J. is drawing the next line in the sand, claiming its criteria are racially neutral, and emphasizing the fact that admissions officers at the school are not told the race, sex or name of any applicant. Harvard is also toying with the idea of such racially neutral criteria, judging applicants in part now based on likability, courage, and kindness.
So who is kidding who here? In the face of the end of affirmative action, is racially neutral criteria just another workaround to allow schools to patch together a student body racially diverse enough to satisfy 2023’s woke standards?
Though it is uncertain the coming affirmative action decision will address racial neutrality, the courts are indeed aware of the issue. After the Supreme Court passed on the T.J. case last year (in the context of an application for emergency relief) and remanded it to a lower court, a divided three-judge panel at the Fourth Circuit federal appeals court in May allowed T.J. to continue with its revised admissions policy. But in a dissent that seemed to be addressed to a Supreme Court of some future date, Trump-appointee Judge Allison J. Rushing wrote the majority had refused “to look past [T.J.’s] policy’s neutral varnish” and consider instead “an undisputed racial motivation and an undeniable racial result,” and that the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection “would be hollow if governments could intentionally achieve discriminatory ends under cover of neutral means.”
Just as the Supreme Court allowed discriminatory decisions by race as constitutional (“affirmative action”), the courts will soon face the question of whether so-called racially neutral criteria are constitutional. The issue is likely to come before the Supreme Court as early as this autumn, on the heels of the downfall of affirmative action.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Supreme Court to Hear Case on Affirmative Action in Academia
If you thought the Supreme Court threw up some dust overturning Roe v. Wade, wait until this autumn when they look at overturning Grutter v. Bollinger. The Supreme Court will decide whether race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are lawful.
The two cases which might overturn Grutter, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina have been consolidated into one entity which asks three questions: can race be a factor for admission, has Harvard violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by penalizing Asian American applicants by engaging in racial balancing, overemphasizing race and rejecting workable race-neutral alternatives, and whether a university can reject a race-neutral alternative because it would change the composition of the student body, without proving that the alternative would cause a dramatic sacrifice in academic quality or the educational benefits of overall student-body diversity.
In short, can race continue to be an admission factor?
Grutter upholds affirmative action in academic admissions, saying race can indeed be a factor in deciding who to admit alongside things like tests and previous grades. In 2003, after being denied admission to University of Michigan Law School, white student Barbara Grutter sued, alleging the school discriminated against her on the basis of race in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s right to equal protection, as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She claimed despite her high test scores she was rejected because the Law School uses race as a “predominant” factor, giving applicants belonging to certain minority groups a significantly greater chance of admission than students with similar credentials from disfavored racial groups like whites and Asians.
Precedent was not on her side. The earlier case of Bakke was seen as binding precedent establishing diversity as a “compelling state interest,” and that the Law School’s use of race was narrowly tailored because race was merely a “potential ‘plus’ factor.” In short, race as a type of bonus for an application was allowed, though race as the predominant criteria for admission was not. The Court found the Law School’s “narrowly tailored use of race” in admissions decisions furthered a compelling interest in the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body and is not prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause. What some came to call “reverse discrimination” was allowed within certain boundaries because its goal of a more diverse student body and broader access to higher education was a compelling state interest.
The idea behind Grutter (a kind of mission statement for America these days) is disparities between groups in things like admissions are always the result of discrimination, the U.S. is irredeemably racist, racism is everywhere, invisible power structures of structural oppression are equally ubiquitous and need to be dismantled, meritocracy is a myth, color-blindness is misleading concept, and a focus on individual rights (such as Barbara Grutter’s) distracts from the more important struggle against systemic racism.
The problems are many, even if you accept most of America’s Racial Mission Statement. Primarily, space at all academic institutions, and especially at the top tier ones, is limited and to disproportionally allow in one group usually means excluding another. That is why Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College has amici groups which believe Harvard is violating the Civil Rights Act by penalizing Asian American applicants in favor of blacks. These include Chinese American Citizens Alliance, the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, The Asian American Coalition For Education, and The Asian American Legal Foundation. Also included is the Coalition for TJ, a group representing Northern Virginia’s super magnet-school Thomas Jefferson High, which just won a suit recently declaring the school’s race-based admissions policy illegal.
The tide may be turning even ahead of the Supreme Court. In addition to the win for a return to merit-based admissions at Thomas Jefferson High, the San Francisco School Board recently returned the admissions policy at Lowell, the city’s most prestigious public high school, to the merit-based system that it had used for more than a century. New York City’s most sought-after high schools, including Stuyvesant, held on to their merit-based system even as the mass of high schools otherwise switched to a lottery.
If Grutter is overturned and loses hold of stare decisis, that would end 45 years of precedent saying race could be used as one factor among many in evaluating applicants. The universities argue race-based decisions are lawful, and serve an important national interest.
College admission has a long, sordid history chock-a-block with discrimination. Kenneth Marcus, assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department in the Trump administration, said Harvard’s treatment of Asian students was reminiscent of its efforts to limit Jewish enrollment. “Just as Harvard in the 1930s thought that Jewish students lacked the character to make them good Harvard men,” he said, “so today they often view Asian students as lacking the appropriate character.” One defender for affirmative action in admissions almost seems to confirm his opposition’s point, saying “Race-conscious admissions policies are a critical tool that ensures students of color are not overlooked in a process that does not typically value their determination, accomplishments and immense talents.”
Like Roe, Grutter, and earlier, Bakke, represent efforts by the Supreme Court to remake society through judicial opinion. With Grutter, the Court took it upon itself to again endorse the use of race as an admissions criteria by claiming the nation had a compelling interest in racially diverse higher education even at the risk of failing to provide access equally to groups like Asians and Jews. The irony of displacing one group to favor another is not lost, that the solution to discrimination is more discrimination, that all blacks are helpless and foreclosed; such is the thinking of racists, that one skin color carries with it some merit that is worth rewarding even at the expense of other colors.
Apart from the socio-political impact, the issue is not a small one. According to documents filed with the Supreme Court, a significant reversal of current racial-forward standard could shrink the percentage of black students admitted to Harvard by more than two-thirds. Some 7.58 percent of blacks who applied to Harvard were admitted. For whites only 4.89 percent of applicants were admitted. Asians trailed Hispanics 5.13 to 6.16 percent. Despite the higher enrollment percentages, SAT scores for blacks were significantly lower than whites. Harvard’s policies roughly quadrupled the likelihood an African American applicant would be accepted relative to a white student with similar academic qualifications, while multiplying the likelihood of admissions 2.4 times for Hispanics. Most African Americans fell into the bottom 20 percent of all applicants to both Harvard and UNC, but they were admitted at the highest rate for almost every performance decile.
In the upcoming decision the Court has a chance to realign itself and college admissions with American thought; a 2019 survey found 73 percent of Americans said colleges and universities should not consider race or ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions. Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson will not recuse herself from these cases, despite having been involved with them in the lower courts. She will join liberals Kagan and Sotomayor largely unsupported by both the public and their Court colleagues in standing up for continued affirmative admissions. The next class at Harvard and other sought-after schools may look very different from the one which starts this fall ahead of the Supreme Court’s decision.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Solution to Racism is… Separate But Equal?!?
Schools now have affinity groups, quasi-social/political gatherings which are separated by among other things, race. You have to be black to walk in to some of them. Seems like there’s a history to this.
“Separate but equal” refers to the Supreme Court 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson claiming separate rail cars for whites and blacks were equal as required by the 14th Amendment. The upshot was constitutional sanction to laws known as Jim Crow (the name comes from a popular blackface stage character of the time) designed to achieve racial segregation by means of separate public facilities and services. This led to the era of the Green Book, which told blacks which hotels would allow them, as well as The Jewish Vacation Guide, which offered the same kind of advice but which we do not like to talk about much anymore. “Victims of Racism” is a pretty segregated category of its own it seems. The Court in Brown v. Board of Education ended separate but equal in that 1954 landmark civil rights case.
But a new version of separate but equal seems to be back. The goal of many progressives now appears to be more segregated spaces and more segrated paths into academia and jobs. Progressives do not oppose segregation any more, they demand it.
Jim Crow is being resurrected in schools, this time through euphemisms such as black spaces, affinity circles, affinity dialogue, and community building groups. One of my own kids was confronted as an undergrad with the problem of choosing which affinity group to join, as she fell into several different categories. Should she go with the Asians, or more broadly the POC group? Or female POC? Centennial Elementary School in Denver advertised a “Families of Color Playground Night.” The Wheeler School in Providence, Rhode Island, hosted a “meet and talk” with an actress from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air exclusively for its Students of Color affinity group. There are events that squeeze the rules tighter, such as black women feminists only. Of course February is Black History Month in America, though people of all hues are allowed to feel bad for all of February equally. We track obsessively the “First black…” to the point where the NYT felt compelled to single out such accomplishments last year as the first black to be recognized as a pro triathlete, the first black woman to win a gold medal in wrestling, and the first black to be interred at the Panthéon in Paris.
In explaining the rationale for exclusionary events, one college newspaper wrote “Black students need events in which there are other black men and women as a means to help them feel comfortable… a safe place for black students to be black without consequence,” which with a few words replaced would be exactly the garbage coming out of the worst cracker’s mouth in 1963 Birmingham, you know, something about how it ain’t right for the races to mix. The KKK are as in favor of more color-designated spaces as BLM.
And famously we have been taught of all the people wrongly killed or injured by law enforcement, only one color of life matters. When Black Lives Matter as a slogan first began to populate social media, for about a week it was cool to say “All Lives Matter” to show you were an ally, that the cops could not get away with killing anyone yellow or white, either. “All lives” quickly morphed into a racist slogan, segregation mattering even in undeserved deaths.
The return of separate but equal is most visible today in school admissions (and Supreme Court nominations.) Separate but equal has been reimagined as offering two tracks into select schools — one of merit, usually some sort of exam, and another that tests nothing but skin color, with standards rigged to matriculate the required percentage of blacks. That the latter often results in Asians (the on-again, off-again POC) being red lined out seems to be another thing we don’t like to talk about. The rules may be changing; the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether race-based admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are lawful.
The problems with separate but equal are many. A real danger is positioning unprepared students to fail. If you cannot show you know the subject material well enough to engage with it on a high level day one, and if you cannot show you have been willing to forego fun activities to put in the study hours, granting you a seat at some elite school via the back door will not solve anything. Imagine if the SEALS did away with their famous physical and mental tests and just picked commandos by lottery. That is what is happening through separate but equal employment programs, such as one at Morgan Stanley limited to blacks, browns, reds, and gays, or another at my own alma mater of sorts, the U.S. State Department, where I worked for 24 years
State has had a diversity problem going back to the earliest days of the Republic, when it was said to qualify as a diplomat you needed to be Male, Pale, and Yale. To fix this two centuries later, the Department created two fellowships that have been used as vehicles to recruit people of “diverse backgrounds,” who worked out to be overwhelming black people. In place are the Thomas Pickering Fellowship (run by HBCU Howard University) and the Charles B. Rangel Fellowship. Both claim entrants take the same entrance exams as anyone else, but omit that they do so after two summer internships with the State Department, including time abroad, plus assigned mentors. Fellows are also identified as such to those administering the oral exam required of all prospective diplomats. Having administered the oral exam myself, I knew I would have to justify to my boss’ boss any move to fail a Fellow before being overruled by her anyway. The programs increased the number of unwhite diplomats, as they were intended to do as a separate but equal pathway.
The problems came down the road, when black diplomats encountered the same promotion and evaluation system their white, green, and blue colleagues did (along with Hispanics and Asians, etc.) Diversity in the senior ranks of the State Department actually regressed over time. In 2008, black diplomats made up about 8.6 percent of the top ranks of the diplomatic corps. By 2020 only 2.8 percent of the same top ranks are black. The answer? It must be more racism (characterized diplomatically as “institutional barriers.”) Suggestions focused on offering blacks more fellowships to create a bigger pool, and creating special opportunities for blacks to snag better assignments (described as “promote diverse officers’ career development.”) That of course simply repeats the original sin of pushing less-prepared people upward to their point of failure. FYI: the State Department classifies most of its gender and race promotion results and does not generally release them to the public. However, data leaked to the NYT shows that only 80 black diplomats and specialists were promoted in the 2019 fiscal year, about one percent.
Then there’s this: a former diplomat described her Rangel fellowship in 2010 as “more of a stigma than an honor” as white diplomats routinely assumed Fellows qualified for the real job only because of the fellowship. Some minorities at State feel compelled to share that they are not Pickering or Rangel Fellows to avoid the fall out over separate but equal. Can it be it is all just more racism all the way down?
When I did not get into the State Department my first try, it never occurred to me the written test, which was mostly history, geography, and economics, was set up to block me because of how I looked instead of whether I knew enough about history, geography, and economics. After more education I passed essentially the same test. It never occurred to me some special channel should have been set up to advance me. It becomes kind of a mindset, almost a philosophy, that anything that doesn’t work out percentage wise must by definition be racism and can only be rectified by some kind of separate but equal track.
Separate but equal in academia and employment, as well as in black spaces and all the rest, produces nothing more than cosmetic diversity. You want XX percent of students or diplomats to be black? Fine, we’ll gerrymander the system to produce that. But given the broader lack of societal progress from affirmative admissions and actions over some decades, it just might be easier to hire actors so the group photos look “right” and let decisions be less separate and more equal. Otherwise, what message are we sending to people of one color that their accomplishments have to be set aside so a person of another color can have their place, and what message are we sending to people of all colors the only way one group can succeed is with some special track? In the end aren’t those messages just a twisted version of what separate but equal originally meant, judgment based on race?
At some point if we are committed to ending discrimination by race we need to end discrimination by race.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Education in Fairfax, Virginia Vies for the Darwin Award
Fairfax County, Virginia is ground zero for wokeness. It is 65 percent white and votes solidly Democratic. The median income is over $124k. I used to live there; it was common to hear white people brag about having black friends (but at work you know, not the kind that come over to the house) and worry about whatever the issue-of-the-week is as promoted by NPR. Hell, with the county’s proximity to Washington, DC, a lot of people there work for NPR.The jewel in Fairfax’s public school system is Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known to all simply as TJ. TJ is widely considered the best high school in the country for STEM, and serves as a steady feeder into top universities. It would not be exaggeration to say TJ is a critical part of America staying ahead of other national economies. It’s a big deal, and it worked well until about a year ago based on the fact that the only way in was to pass a very competitive entrance exam. Kids would start studying in elementary school if their goal was TJ ten years later. Entry into TJ meant you were a smart kid with the discipline to put in the hard hours with no guarantee of success, a perfect definition of those who would also go on to succeed at Harvard.
The problem was with the danged Asians. As many as 73 percent of students offered admission to Thomas Jefferson High School were Asian. That drew criticism from people who felt black and Hispanic students were underrepresented. Typically only about two percent of the TJ students were black. The answer was a) to improve all middle schools in the area so they better prepare their kids to enter TJ; b) offer all students rigorous after-school programs to prepare for TJ c) or just lower TJ’s admission criteria to balance out the races.
Yeah, they did C. The crazy-hard entrance exam was dropped, the $100 application fee was dropped, and both were replaced by “A holistic review will be done of students whose applications demonstrate enhanced merit… Students will be evaluated on their grade point average; a student portrait sheet where they will be asked to demonstrate Portrait of a Graduate attributes and 21st century skills; a problem-solving essay; and experience factors, including students who are economically disadvantaged, English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools.”
Catch that last part? Experience factors? That basically opened the door to one of the criteria being “whatever we say this all means.” The result at TJ was a drop of more than 11 percent in the number of Asians, and double-digit growth on the part of blacks and Hispanics, achieved by making being poor a criteria for acceptance. No matter white students account for only 22 percent of admissions, despite being 65 percent of the county population. This was done despite 85 percent of voters opposing race as an admission criteria; this is mirrored nationally, where 73 percent of Americans said colleges and universities should not consider race in admissions decisions.
But is it… racism? Seems so. One school board member texted another “I mean there has been an anti-Asian feel underlying some of this, hate to say it lol,” according to correspondence obtained by non-profit Parents Defending Education. In another exchange, Thomas Jefferson’s admissions director asked a school district official if she could “provide us a review of our current weighting (of experience factors) and whether or not this would be enough to level the playing field for our historically underrepresented groups.” She replied “My gut says that you may need to double all the points so the applicants can receive up to 200 points overall for these experience factors.” Another school board member wrote we “screwed up TJ and the Asians hate us” to which another responded he was “just dumb and too white” to address the diversity deficit in properly.
The school went further. There will now be three different “pathways” for admissions each year: the first for 350 high-performing students, the second for 100 students judged on a combination of half academic merit and half external factors, and 50 underrepresented students. Some people in town call them the Yellow, Brown, and Black lanes.
We’ve gotten so twisted in thinking America is shackled by systemic racism that we created a system of education admissions itself built on a foundation of systemic racism. We somehow think racially gerrymandering schools is a solution. We ignore John Roberts dictum “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Why are we hell-bent on self-harm by sacrificing our education system on layers of false progressive assumptions?
The first false assumption is access to learning equals learning. A student has to be prepared intellectually to succeed, or he fails, or the institution is forced to dumb down to accommodate him. Progressive education thought is to publicly disavow what we all know to be true in private, that some students are just smarter than others. We are absolutely not all alike. Imagine if colleges chose who’ll play on their football teams based not on athletic skill but racial quotas. Who knew education was only skin deep, and the football team more intellectually honest than the philosophy department?
The next false assumption is the magic number; XX percent of the population is black so XX percent of the student body should be black. If it is not, de facto some form of systemic racism is wished into being to blame. This typically focuses on the admissions process (to include testing, like the SAT) and thus the answer is to scrap every part of the admissions process that seems to rub against that XX percent. You don’t have to show question 27 on the SAT is itself “racist,” only that the SAT results won’t get XX percent of black kids into Harvard and must ipso facto be racist. So, let more black kids into Harvard by eliminating the SAT and that will result in more black doctors and lawyers and a more just society. Problem solved.
Well, sort of. There still is that issue of getting admitted to Harvard is not the same as graduating from Harvard; you have to be able to understand the classes and put in the hard work of studying, that ultimate form of delayed gratification. And Harvard only has so much space so to let in more black kids means saying no to others. In most progressive instances, that means telling “Asians” to go away (the term “Asian” itself is yet another false assumption, that somehow Chinese, Thais, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Laotians, Indians, Bangladeshis, et al, are lumpable into one omnibus racial garbage can.)
What you’re left with is the certainty that more exclusion by race is the answer to the alleged problem of exclusion by race. After some forty years of seeing something that egregiously dumb as a good idea, the issue is now coming again before the courts for a reality check, starting in Fairfax County, Virginia. Someone may decide it’s time to ask why we regularly end up with “cosmetically diverse” institutions, rather than anything real that leads to broad social progress.
A group calling themselves the Coalition for TJ sued the school system to reverse the admission process changes, which they allege were meant to diminish the number Asian students. That qualifies as discrimination based on race, outlawed under the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause, they claim. In late January a U.S. District judge turned down the Coalition’s request for a jury trial, claiming that since no material facts are at issue, he will instead issue a ruling later this year. Both sides will then be able to appeal, suggesting the issue will overlap another admissions season. A second suit is also in play. A bill before the Virginia legislature would also affect TJ, seeking to remove race as an admission criteria.
The move to eliminate racism in admissions processes in Virginia is mirrored at the national level. The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether race-based admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are lawful (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.) The case against Harvard accuses the school of discriminating against Asian students by using subjective criteria such as likability, courage, and kindness, effectively creating a ceiling for them in admissions, a nasty echo of the 1930s when it was thought Jews lacked the “character” to be Harvard men. In the North Carolina case, the argument is simply that the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to PO other C. Don’t expect a decision before next year.
Once upon a time Americans decided race should not be a factor in education, doing away with segregated schools and ending separate could be equal. Somewhere we lost our way, to the point where leveling down, and creating twisty definitions of things like “experience points” brought race directly into education again. Only this time we convinced ourselves that discriminating against whites and Asians was perfectly OK. That current system is under fresh attack in the courts, and well it should be. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. You don’t have to go to Harvard, or TJ, to figure that out.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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