HL Mencken once defined Fundamentalism as "the terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun". I've been thinking of this a lot watching some of the attacks on Sotomayor, but I'd frame the critics as suffering from the terrible, pervasive fear that some brown person, somewhere, is getting away with something.
Posit that everything the critics say about Sotomayor is true; that indeed, everything they say about affirmative action is true. Is this the biggest problem facing America? Is this the biggest problem facing America from Sonia Sotomayor?
Given my politics, I am probably not going to like how she rules on many, maybe even most, issues. But almost none of those issues involve racial preferences, which, even if they are a problem, are a small problem for America, affecting fewer people than almost any of the other major policy questions we're debating today. Making race, or racial politics, the central complaint, makes it seem like your biggest policy priority is making sure that not one minority in the land gets anything they don't deserve. But hey, we all get things we don't deserve. I'll go further: almost all of us get something we don't deserve as a result of our race, including white people. Perhaps even especially white people.
If you don't believe it, ask yourself why repeated studies show that resumes with identifiably black names get fewer interview offers than identical white resumes. Being identifiably black hurts your chances worse than having a felony conviction. Even if you want to argue that an identifiably black name is a socio-economic marker for a certain kind of parenting, an argument I find pretty dubious, are you really willing to argue that black kids should be permanently barred from employment because their parents have dubious taste in names? Well, go ahead, I guess, but I'm going to find it hard to take you seriously when you complain about affirmative action because it undermines our fantabulous American meritocracy.
Sonia Sotomayor is not manifestly unqualified to be a Supreme Court justice, so focusing on affirmative action is completely irrelevant. You can argue with her politics or her legal judgement, and hey, I'm all ears. But the affirmative action complaints aren't advancing our quest to find out whether or not she'd be a good justice. They're just alienating the people you want to convince.
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Sonia Sotomayor is not manifestly unqualified to be a Supreme Court justice, so focusing on affirmative action is completely irrelevant. You can argue with her politics or her legal judgement, and hey, I'm all ears.
I am struggling to reconcile these two sentences, since her thoughts on AA reflect both her politics and her legal judgment.
Additionally, the biggest problem with AA isn't so much that a small number of people get something they don't deserve. It's that it perpetuates an unhealthy social obsession with race, serves as a barrier to integration, and is of dubious value to many of its "beneficiaries."
There were probably a goodly number of black kids who got adequate educations at segregated schools (at least compared to some of our modern-day inner-city schools), but that doesn't make it somehow OK.
(IIRC, the "black names" study showed a bigger variance within racial groups than it did between them. Not saying there isn't a serious problem, just wondering how well we understand the problem.)
Wait, did I misunderstand? Are there actually people complaining that she was picked because of her sex and ethnicity, and that there are more qualified white men out there who deserve the job more?
That is dumb.
I seem to have seen some articles, prior to the decision being announced that said that while it is unknown who will be picked, the nominee would most likely be a Latina woman. Assuming that is correct, it shows that whites were not even considered.
Is is still dumb?
Dear Ken,
Actually, the selection process considered at least nine people. Two of those people were men. Over half of those people were white.
For the past 200+ years, the hundreds of possible candidates for the Supreme Court have been white men. This shows that women and other minorities -- who were manifestly qualified -- were not even considered.
That seems pretty dumb to me.
Yes, it is. We should be less concerned with how things were played out in the past, and more concerned with how they will be handled in the future... starting now. I hear the same type of complaint when someone mentions the new massive spending, "Well Bush started it." Who cares who started it? We're supposed to be adults. I want to know who's going to end it. And, as a female, I was embarrassed to read he would most likely choose a woman. It leaves me to believe the candidate was chosen by sex (and race in this case) rather than merit. Would you prefer to land that big promotion because of your race\sex or because you earned it?
I agree that complaining about Sotomayor being an affirmative action pick is dumb but I haven't seen that argument made. If it has been, not many people have made it. Sotomayor is qualified and, as someone who is strongly opposed to racial quotas, I don't have as big a problem with the use of ethnicity as a tie breaking factor. I'd bet that the majority of Americans aren't offended by that either. Plus, how can anyone say that one particular candidate is really the most qualified. There are multiple qualified candidates for this position and Sotomayor is surely more than minimally qualified. That being said, people are right to be worried about her focus on race as it bears on her judicial philosophy.
Her statements about legislating from the bench when she spoke at Duke Law School are even worse, however. She sounded pretty smug to me. She seemed like someone who would revel in shooting the bird to conservatives just because she can. That seems to be corroborated by her poor reviews at the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary. She is a hard left liberal and I wonder if the Democrats want to be reminded about their previous concern for the rights of the minority. Here is what Harry Reid said after Bush won 51% of the popular vote in 2004,
Obviously, Obama has the power to get Sotomayor confirmed but he only won 52.7% of the popular vote in 2008. I think that Republicans should have some fun recycling Democrat arguments regarding Bush's judicial appointments. I also seem to remember that Democrats attacked Janice Brown (African American, DC Circuit Judge, former California Supreme Court Justice, libertarian) for her supposed lack of judicial temperament. And who can forget that John Bolton hurt a liberal's feelings 15 years ago and how that seemed so important at his confirmation hearing?
I think we're all wandering off-topic and Megan is steering us back. Circus aside, the key question when evaluating SJ nominees *should be* is America getting the best judicial talent to rule on the most important judicial questions of the day? What other criteria are we supposed to be evaluating? (as an aside, instead the question has been turned on its head -- which nominee is most likely to rule in favor of *my* personal choices, judicially right or wrong?)
Sotomayor's ethnicity is a red herring. We should consider the possibility that she may be sufficiently qualified first before assuming she is an AA beneficiary. Is she really the best judicial mind to sit on that bench? Or, after a decade on the bench, is she merely a competent appellate judge among many, but through the magic of AA, we excuse any lack of excellence?
The folks who constantly rip on Clarence Thomas for his perceived inadequacy, to be intellectually fair, should be asking identical questions of Sotomayor.
I see vacations have sharped Megan's humor. The last sentence gets the laugh of the day award so far.
I mean sharpened. Goddamnint.
You know, as someone with both White and Korean relatives of roughly comparable social class, I have to say that snarky "perhaps even especially white people" is like 20 years out of date. Even just on the level of baseline expectations (e.g. what kinds of places will hire me, what kinds of schools can I get into, what kinds of jobs can I do), White people already seem to operate at a massive psychological disadvantage, at least vis-a-vis Koreans (and probably a lot of other Asians).
It's quite possible that the studies you cite are indeed evidence of lingering racial animus, but there are other possible explanations (other than the studies being rigged in some way, of course). It could, for example, be a perfectly rational response to anti-discrimination laws. For obvious reasons, failure-to-hire claims are less common than failure-to-promote and wrongful termination claims. As an employer, therefore, it makes sense to discriminate against marginal black applicants when it might very well make sense to hire marginal white applicants.
You're probably right that some conservatives take their opposition to affirmative action too far, but cases like Judge Sotomayor are an example of one cost of race-conscious policies: it's impossible to know, in any particular instance, the extent to which any individual person's success is attributable to their own efforts and abilities or a scheme of racial preferences.
A couple weeks after the election of President Obama, I was watching CNN and there was a person on from Black Entertainment Television. His argument was that now that Barack was elected, blacks could take pride in their country and neighborhoods. Their kids can start dressing and speaking right and valuing education. Basically he was saying that self alienated blacks would now start embracing and integrating into society. There was a general positive response to this line of argument from the panel on CNN.
When I thought about his comments more, and we have all heard similar types of arguments before from liberals, isn’t most racism rational? What is wrong with people who want to live and work around people with the same value system? Let’s turn his remarks around.
Do you want to live around people who don’t take pride in their neighborhood and community?
Do you want to send your kids to school with kids who don’t want to learn?
These theories sound nice in the macro level, but when they are implemented at a micro level, most people reject them. Who wouldn’t? This is just people pursuing their own rational self interest. In fact, most racism practiced by white people today is valued based. We are not avoiding skin color; we are avoiding a different value system that we perceive as destructive. On the other hand, most minority racism is irrational. It is strictly based in skin color, sex, or nationality today. It is the hateful and unjust kind of racism and should be rejected.
While I will most likely disagree with many of Sotomayor's opinions, that does not disqualify her from the supreme court. However, the idea that the administration is picking judges on the basis of sex and ethnicity first and only then based on merit, strikes me as incredibly wrong. Even if a justice picked agreed with me on every single subject, I still think it is wrong to pick one based on sex and ethnicity. Obama played the race card many times during his campaign. His supporters, even more so. Now the race card is being played in picking supreme court justices. Is there some other metric that determines national decisions?
That said, Sonia Sotomayor statement that a Latina woman is likely to make better decisions than a white man strikes me as wrong on many levels.
1. Its pretty blatant discrimination.
2. It assumes there a great unifying force that connects all white men in existence. The a gay white guy from Seattle will decide the same as a white rancher from rural Texas, who will in turn not decide as well as a Latina woman from next door.
"However, the idea that the administration is picking judges on the basis of sex and ethnicity first and only then based on merit, strikes me as incredibly wrong."
Hasn't it always been the case that administrations pick judges on the basis of sex and ethnicity first? It just happened that they were always white men. The practice was sooooo entrenched, that people of other races and genders were not even considered -- no matter how qualified they were. And in any case, your statement is wrong. Obama took his duties pretty seriously and considered at least 9 candidates -- white people and men too. You seem to think that Sotomayor was the only candidate he seriously considered because her name was floated around so early in the process by the media.
Second, is it fair to lobby this complaint against a woman as accomplished as Sotomayor? Can you tell me what it is about her that scares you so much? Is it that she is a scary "Mexican"? Because to me she is a role model -- not just to Latina women, but to all Americans. To graduate Phi Beta Kappa with all those odds against you, win the top prize given to any undergraduate at Princeton, then to excel at Yale Law School, and be a judge on the bench for longer than any other Justice on the Supreme Court seem to make her pretty qualified.
Another way to view the Sotomayor pick is that she met the bar for merit AND she happens to have an inspiring life story -- a VERY AMERICAN life story. She brings the best of everything to the situation -- she is a powerful candidate with a great life background. I see nothing wrong with that.
RCE, you seem to be trying to make the point that 200 years of white men was because of racism in the Supreme Court selection process, which is blatantly false. White men weren't hired for the Supreme Court because they were white men, the were picked because every qualified applicant was a white man. This is what happens when racism and sexism at law schools and lower courts prevents people who aren't white men from getting qualified enough. I don't know the history of the American judiciary, but I'd wager it was probably only inside the last 50 years that any more than a vanishing percentage of those remotely qualified(say, Harriet Miers or better) for the Supreme Court were anything other than white men, and probably a shorter time frame than that.
The substance of your claim is largely accurate - racism and sexism were real and pervasive. But the way you're presenting it is rather lacking.
One other point, though - if we're selecting Supreme Court justices by their life story, we should have our collective heads examined. Let's pick good judges, and be damned to everything else.
It's not affirmative action that's the issue here; I'm OK with continued AA, although it should be time limited. Rather, it's about a member of the highest court in the land viewing their job as interpreting law through the prism of their race. This impacts much more than simply discrimination/AA claims and violates their oath of office.
Who cares. She's a qualified judge. He's the President. She's in. Whether we agree with her or not. She's been a judge for awhile and has done pretty well even though I disagree with almost all of her politics.
That's the way it works, some people should just stop whining over it.
Is she as qualified as Sam Alito or John Roberts? Possibly. Certainly not more qualified.
Obama voted against both of them. Tit-for-tat. Obama should never get a single Republican vote for anyone he nominates.
It won't make any more difference than Obama's Senate votes made, she will get in. It will set down a marker though: When she makes an unpopular ruling, that can be used to try and pick-up Senate seats next time.
"Certainly not more qualified."
Can you tell me how you can possibly justify that sentence? Have you read these people's opinions?
Here's some objective data for you to feed on:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/roberts-sotomayor-alito.html
That said, Sonia Sotomayor statement that a Latina woman is likely to make better decisions than a white man strikes me as wrong on many levels.
It was said in the context of race discrimination cases, not all decisions ever.
Normatively, that still strikes me as wrong on many levels. As a descriptive matter, I won't disagree that judges are going to be affected by their own backgrounds, what they ate for lunch, and the size of their feet, but what makes Sotomayor's statements outrageous is that her point is that normatively a racial, Latina jurisprudence (on any point) could be intrinsicly superior to a White jurisprudence. Judges are supposed to work to restrain their biases, not embrace them and hold them out as normatively superior, no matter the context (at least, as far as judicial contexts are concerned -- they can do what they like in their private time).
I don't think that's true, she was talking generally. Although the speech was pretty incoherent...
My understanding was the comment was in reference to discrimination issues. Alito answered a question in a similar fashion as well, citing his and his family's ethnic background as a prism to view such cases. I don't think it's a big deal really. I would be more concerned with how she has ruled on cases of federal importance.
If that were true, it seems to imply at least one of two possibilities.
a) Latina women are better able to deduce the facts concerning a discrimination case.
b) Latina women are better able to read/reason about discrimination law says.
I'd be curious to know which of these two possibilities she meant.
I'm also curious why Latina women's deductive and logical abilities are only useful in the context of discrimination cases. Shouldn't their excellent logical and deductive abilities also be useful elsewhere, e.g. computer programming or securities law?
"Shouldn't their excellent logical and deductive abilities also be useful elsewhere, e.g. computer programming or securities law?"
If those subjects were part of the discussion she was involved in that might work as an argument. Considering the discussion was to a latino audience about the latinos in the judiciary, it doesn't work IMO.
The experience of minority women in life and actions that may involve discrimination are probably a bit different than non-minorities, therefore giving that person a more personal view of such cases. For example, someone who has only studied plans for a construction project probably will not have as good of a perspective on the realities of project management as a project manager on site.
My question about deductive abilities was merely a side note meant to emphasize the strangeness of claiming that latina women have better logical/deductive abilities.
As for the personal view of discrimination cases, insofar as the judge allows it to influence outcomes in court, the judge is not doing their job.
Similarly, I may have a personal view of cases involving robberies by black men. Should I allow that to influence my rulings on such cases, supposing I were a judge?
Ninja,
That's a good point and I honestly don't think a claim that anyone is wiser based on their ethnicity is sound. And I do believe case law should be the source of judgments. my only point was cases are not always cut and dry and a personal experience in cases in which the judge has a shared experience with those involved is not necesarily a bad thing.
Assuming that is correct, it shows that whites were not even considered. Is is still dumb?
Yes. It's offensive and stupid to make picks by race, no doubt, but the time for complaining was then, not now. She deserves from us what she didn't get from Obama: colorblindness.
Ken Magalnik wrote
This is also what I thought initially, until I read a CNN article putting things in context.
The next phrase in her speech was:
"Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice [Benjamin] Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society."
and a little bit ahead
we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group ... [but] there may be some [difference in her judging] based on my gender and my Latina heritage.
I must say that Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay's roles in this whole "Sotomayor is racist" story were pretty repulsive. Once again, some sleazy politicians took an out-of-context sentence and used it to defame someone for political profit. They expect to get away with this sort of thing because they rely on the general laziness of the media.
They are not disappointed. Now that the dust is settling, all the fuss generated by what comes down to a quite uncontroversial supreme court nomination is pretty surreal.
Pish posh -- have you actually read the speech? The speech is mostly uncontroversial stuff, true, but she tosses out a number of shockers:
"Whatever the reasons why we may have different perspectives, either as some theorists suggest because of our cultural experiences or as others postulate because we have basic differences in logic and reasoning,"
Huh? No, she really did mean that:
"Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging."
Well. You could dismiss this all as legal race-realism -- jurisprudence by way of Steve Sailer -- but she doesn't stop there. She actually makes the normative point about "wise Latinas" tending to reach better judgments than White men. Towards the close, she circles back and makes the same normative point:
"I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate."
i.e. she is convinced there are points where it is appropriate to embrace your prejudices, they just need to be the right ones. Yes, some commentators are overselling the point here -- she's not Jeremiah Wright -- but this is an entirely legitimate criticism. Viewed in context.
I don't have any issues with the quotes that Sotomayor makes, especially the ones that you bolded. We are a product of our experiences and our biases whether we actually attribute them to our race is a matter of personal decision. Coming out and saying it is quite bold and forthright actually. Do you think that the white male will ever ask the question "How would I view this question if I were a black female?" Maybe. I doubt it. How often do you think minority judges have to ask themselves "How should I view this question as objectively as possible?"
Of course, the argument is that EVERYONE should judge as "objectively as possible" until you realize that when it comes to law and social questions, there is no "objective" point of view. And "objective" is just another way of saying "the way of the white male" (whose philosophies has for good or for bad built the Western hemisphere).
The point is that Sotomayor should never have to ask herself "How should I view this question as objectively as possible?" because she is a Latina female. She should embrace her different point of view.
One last point with regards to the second quote that you quoted. Different races view the same things differently. http://www.pnas.org/content/102/35/12629.abstract I am somewhat amused that liberals took X number of years trying to convince people that minorities are equal to whites. And nothing that went against that assertion was correct (ie "The Bell Curve" book assertion). Now we have a presumably liberal judge who is going on record to try and convince people of the concept of "equal, but different." It's going to be years before people accept it.
A confused person said:
Fail.
ob·jec·tive (b-jktv)
adj.
1. Of or having to do with a material object.
2. Having actual existence or reality.
3.
a. Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices: an objective critic. See Synonyms at fair1.
b. Based on observable phenomena; presented factually: an objective appraisal.
It is probably impossible for any human to be completely objective. But every judge should strive for it. When a judge's personal experience and opinions influence their actions, they have failed.
Sotomayer's judicial philosophy seems to embrace this failure, rather than attempt to mitigate it. For this reason, she is completely unsuitable to be a judge anywhere besides American Idol.
To say "people with different backgrounds will view situations differently" is realism, and proper.
To say "this particular background produces better decisions than that one" is racism, and improper.
To say "Judicial reasoning should welcome this, and seek to take advantage of it" not only approves of this racism, but violates basic tenets of American legal jurisprudence, namely that justice is to be blind and dispassionate, and exists solely to apply the law as created by the legislature.
Justice Sotomayer clearly approves all three statements in her speech. The critics who claim this marks her as a racist are correct; and the critics who claim this marks her as an activist who intends to use the American legal system as a tyrannical weapon to force America to swallow Progressive morality whole, without recourse, are correct as well.
Those who think these comments are harmless prove by saying so that they do not understand the things that project American justice from tyranny.
I seem to have seen some articles, prior to the decision being announced that said that while it is unknown who will be picked, the nominee would most likely be a Latina woman.
A broken clock is right twice a day. Somebody was going to pick the race/gender of the Supreme Court pick correctly, especially if that someone had inside knowledge that Sotomayor was on the short list of nominees.
But almost none of those issues involve racial preferences, which, even if they are a problem, are a small problem for America, affecting fewer people than almost any of the other major policy questions we're debating today. Making race, or racial politics, the central complaint, makes it seem like your biggest policy priority is making sure that not one minority in the land gets anything they don't deserve.
I'll agree that racial politics are overhyped in the US, but that's probably because lots of Americans have been brought up to think racism is worse than murder. It's not surprising in any way that such myopia is going to lead to massive distortions in public discourse, such that frivolous allegations of racism and reverse-racism elicit venom and bile all out of proportion with their real significance. That people who play the race card, as Sotomayor seems to have done repeatedly, get bitten by the beast they fed has a kind of poetic justice to it, but I do agree it's kind of silly.
The larger discursive point that people promoting this line are trying to rebut, though, is the idiotic and counterproductive notion that one occasionally encounters, that non-Whites cannot be racist. And that -- if Americans must continue to obsess over race and race counting -- is a point worth making any time.
The problem with Affirmative Action is the same problem with Congressional Earmarks...their impact is small, but their existence is a corrupting and corroding presence. Earmarks and AA bring a measure of political payoffs into the public arena....as well as generate a cynicism that government is nothing more than a competition as to who gets the spoils.
That people who play the race card, as Sotomayor seems to have done repeatedly
You would need to provide proof that she has played the race card repeatedly.
I think Cheerful Iconoclast has hit the nail on the head when identifying the problem with the "racial animus as proved by disparate treatment of racially identifiable names" study.
This is a perfectly logical and predictable outcome of our current civil-rights industry -- or, in other words, one of the unintended negative consequences of well-meaning policies like affirmitive action.
Any future action taken with a hire who can avail himself of the civil rights legal industry -- filing suits of discrimination in the workplace, filing suit about unlawful termination, etc. -- is necessarily more expensive than the same action taken with someone who cannot, which makes them less likely to be hired in the first place. You are not allowed to ask race on applications but if you see a name that is a good proxy for membership in a race, this lets you know that this potential employee is potentially more expensive to deal with, and that information gets factored in.
It is exactly as if we had implemented French-style labor law for one subset of the population. Would we expect that to affect the rate at which that subset gets hired or the "interest-level" shown in applications that are identifiably subject to that law? Of course we would.
In short, you can be a perfect non-racist and still have your business decisions swayed by the higher potential cost of employees "protected" by various civil rights regimes. Just as you can be a very patriotic and entrepreneurial Frenchman and yet still not hire as quickly as your American counterpart due to the higher costs you face in later trying to deal with unwanted employees due to the well-intentioned labor law the French have.
All that aside, I think it's silly to rail against folk like Sotomayor on the basis that they have benefited from Affirmative Action, if that is the argument Megan is objecting to here. I do share other's troubled feelings on the fact that Sotomayor apparently sees nothing wrong with announcing in public that she finds it impossible to be impartial because minorities, perhaps due to "inherent physiological" reasons, have "basic differences in logic and reasoning".
That's a pretty amazing thing for anyone to say, let alone someone who expects to become a Supreme Court Justice.
I found it equally odd when Rev. Wright gave his speech discussing how black and white brains work differently but at the very least no one was talking about making him one of the final arbiters of U.S. law.
It was said in the context of race discrimination cases, not all decisions ever.
Still wrong. A district judge can quite justifiably twist and turn a bit with the law to do justice in particular cases, but SCOTUS is making precedent that will survive most of the current members of the court. If she's favoring one side over another because of the rich experience she had of somebody being a jerk to her when she was 19, then she's (almost) irreversibly screwing the law up for all of us.
Supreme Court nominations function as hugely valuable non-election year fund raisers for the political parities.
The President nominates a justice for the court, and the fund raisers of the opposing party sends a blitz to its base saying the nominee, if confirmed, will destroy [all that is holy to the nation, er, party] ... and then the other party says we must confirm the candidate to save [all that is holy to the party] from the infidels ... and they both say SEND MONEY!
But there is not a whole lot of money to spend on a judicial nomination fight, so the money goes into the pockets of the parties and their operatives.
I'd like to think I'm being cynical about this, but I'm not. Follow the cash flow.
In reality, of course, no President today could name a justice who is truly radical in any way, even within the bounds of past justices who actually sat on the court. The obligatory mud fight over each nominee is 90% motivated to keep the bases active and the campaign contributions coming in. You can't just pass on a fund-raising opportunity like this.
They're just alienating the people you want to convince.
Republicans have said they aren't going to filibuster, which means Sotomayor is certain to get approved unless the public is outraged about her to the point where she "voluntarily" withdraws.
Her legal views may be more important than her racial views, but her racial views are greater potential to make voters angry. Her position on strict constructionism might be more relevant to her job, but it isn't something that'll get people to make angry calls to their congresscritters.
Growing up, my best friend was latino. And I repeatedly witnessed instances of discrimination she experienced because of her race. It changed my views of race relations, I know it shaped my friend's views of race relations. I can't imagine Sotomayor is any different; since each individual is the sum of their experiences.
In fact, I find it refreshing that Sotomayor admits she would view things differently; and her honesty would be an asset on the Supreme Court. Certainly Alito's experience as a white male is reflected in his decisions, and no body's claiming he's racist because he's ALWAYS sided with the white-male dominated CEO's of the nation.
But I have a slightly different take on Conservative's rejection of Sotomayor; firsts I suspect it's part and parcel of rejecting anything and everything proposed by Obama. A simple knee-jerk reaction that everything in America is a political battle.
Second, and perhaps more important, I think dislike of Sotomayor stems from her decision in the baseball strike. She sided with labor over management. I think there's a suspicion she'll side with unions on things like Card Check. And in this era of rage against the corporate elite, I think conservatives find it more palatable to express concerns over reverse racism then working people.
This sort of comment drives me nuts. Any implication that a person's "sensitivity," "honesty," "experience," "courage," "passion," "compassion," or any other emotion-laden noun will be an asset to the Supreme Court, ignores the fundamental fact of American law that the job of a court is to apply the law, period, without passion, feeling, or sentiment.
If her experience and candor is beneficial in your view, that's a decent qualification recommending her to sit on the legislature, where the experiences and sentiments of the people are welcome and appropriate. What we need on the judicial bench is dispassionate application of the law.
PLUMB BOB: "Any implication that a person's 'sensitivity' ... or any other emotion-laden noun will be an asset to the Supreme Court, ignores the fundamental fact of American law that the job of a court is to apply the law, period."
Even if it's true that a judge's sole role is to apply the existing law, your conclusions are wrong. Here's why, by way of example.
Suppose you're a Supreme Court judge. You have a case before you, in which you have to determine whether a certain sort of punishment -- say, chain-gang-style hard labor -- is "cruel and unusual" and thus in violation the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Now, how do you decide what counts as "cruel and unusual"? No simple formula will tell you how to apply constitutional law in this case -- you have to consider carefully the psychological and physical impact that such punishment has on the prisoners, perhaps the proportionality between the severity of the punishment and the severity of the crime, etc. etc. You need to consider plenty of empirical (psychological, social, physical) facts in order to decide whether the legal fact (i.e., the wording of the 8th Amendment) applies in this case.
Now, in order to consider the impact of chain gangs on the prisoners, you might need to listen to those prisoners describe their experiences. And in order to do that, you must have a genuine willingness to listen to them. You have to be the kind of person who realizes that their perspective matters, too. And -- getting finally to the relevance of personal background -- your personal background might affect how willing you are to take this perspective into account.
So, to sum up: While your personal background might be irrelevant to INTERPRETING what the law says, it may well be relevant to your ability to APPLY the law to particular cases.
And pretending that experience doesn't matter -- as Alito did, presenting a false impression of himself -- is far worse.
Any judge is the sum total of her or his experience. I'd prefer someone honest enough to admit it, particularly since a large part of the job includes bringing those perspectives to others on the bench. The law, when applied in the abstract of fair and impartial, can stray far from the notion of equality; particularly when our national legal history is movement toward more inclusive equality. Diversity on the bench should be celebrated, the very heart of that progress.
The US military is diverse, and race seems to be a minor consideration in any individual's success in the military. Yet when people return to civilian life, those racial prejudices take hold. Among former military, historically, unemployment is lowest among white males, and highest (by a very large margin,) for latino women. This would suggest that while being named "Jamal" might trigger discrimination in hiring, a name like "Maria Gomez" is even more likely to be rejected from the resume pile.
And I gotta tell ya, bias in hiring is just the tip of the racial iceberg.
Judicial application of the law requires, in my view, a clear understanding of these issues. It should not drive decision making from the bench, but it most certainly should inform decision making. And a bunch of white guys from Harvard and Yale ain't gonna get us there.
Ken Magalnik wrote
This is also what I thought initially, until I read a CNN article putting things in context.
The next phrase in her speech was:
Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice [Benjamin] Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society.
and a little bit ahead
we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group ... [but] there may be some [difference in her judging] based on my gender and my Latina heritage.
I must say that Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay's roles in this whole "Sotomayor is racist" story were pretty repulsive. Once again, some sleazy politicians took an out-of-context sentence and used it to defame someone for political profit. They expect to get away with this sort of thing because they rely on the general laziness of the media.
They are not disappointed. Now that the dust is settling, all the fuss generated by what comes down to a quite uncontroversial supreme court nomination is pretty surreal.
Affirmative action may not be the biggest issue the Supreme Court will be dealing with, but the way society and the law treats race is incredibly important and the racial classification system we have now is doing far more to hurt the intended beneficiaries as well as third parties to simply dismiss it as only affecting "a few people". The very idea that certain people belonging to "oppressed" races should be treated different from the general population sends a message to everyone--one that breeds resentment from the "non-oppressed" races that feel--rightly--that they are at a disadvantage when competing with the "oppressed" and also supports feelings of inferiority among the "oppressed". There are better ways to address the actual problems facing the underprivileged in our society without jostling the numbers around to ease the guilt of white policymakers, and affirmative action does nothing more than help hide the disparity that should be addressed.
Should her stance on affirmative action determine whether Sotomayor gets confirmed? No, if only because frankly any replacement is not going to be better on that issue, and as I said it's not the most pressing issue facing the Supreme Court. But AA shouldn't be dismissed as some minor glitch. It's one of the biggest stumbling blocks in race relations today.
"ask yourself why repeated studies show that resumes with identifiably black names get fewer interview offers than identical white resumes."
Thought experiment: Two applications are submitted by identifiably white names. One of them is David S. Wainwright. The other is Angus Q. MacFarnsworth. Their qualifications are identical. Which one probably gets shortlisted for the interview schedule? Why?
Second thought experiment: Two more candidates have identifiably black names, but one lists US citizenship and an address in Mississippi, while the other shows a US work visa and a contact address in Kenya. Which one probably gets shortlisted for the interview schedule? Why?
This is the worst post I've ever read here. Most of the actual claims are wrong, most of the inherent assumptions are as well, and it's all with nastiness of a college freshman who still believes anyone who thinks differently must be a racist. I wouldn't have thought you capable of it. A few samples:
1. The most common complaints have been based on Sotomayor inappropriately claiming her latinaness makes her a better judge. This is not a complaint about AA.
2. We aren't worried about "some brown person" (an incredibly offensive styling) getting away with something. People dislike discrimination and we feel entitled to point it out even when it's against us. Some people should look in their own hearts and try to understand why others asking to be treated fairly draws such a reaction.
3. Ahh, the "it's only a little discrimination" argument. You should be embarassed.
4. It isn't true that all of us unfairly benefit because of our race. It is true that for most people benefits (or lack therof) are only indirectly related to things we would consider fair.
5. NPR has been reporting matter of factly that Sotomayor has been thought of as a future SCJ in part because of her race/gender since she made the federal bench. This is CW and is further supported by the statements of the nominator's surrogates who emphasized her race/gender. If there's nothing wrong with AA, why is it a big deal to point out she's a beneficiary? Why is it a problem for "critics", but not supporters like NPR?
Hear, hear!
What is ironic about the whole affirmative action debate is that Sotomayor is a nonwhite minority solely because of America's only-in-the-world classification of Hispanics as a de facto race regardless of physical appearance. In any other country she's a Caucasian woman who happens to be from a Spanish-speaking background.
In any other country she's a Caucasian woman who happens to be from a Spanish-speaking background.
Yeah, and Cardozo was the first Hispanic justice, come to that. He was just impolite enough to be a Sephardic Jew.
Well, that and his family hadn't lived in a Spanish-speaking area for centuries, no? I read somewhere recently that his family fled to Holland during the Inquisition, and then immigrated to the US generations later. That and, if you look at his time, and even many decades later, "Hispanics" don't really seem to have been a broadly disadvantaged class, socially speaking. Take James Jesus Angleton, for example. One of the original CIA men. Attended Malvern Colleged in England, then Yale, and Harvard Law. In The Good Shepherd, he's reworked into an uber-WASP -- the only sort of person modern Americans imagine would be sent off to school in England, and then go on to Yale and Harvard -- but in fact, his mother was Mexican. His father met her while he was stationed in Mexico. Unlike Cardozo, he would pretty clearly be considered Hispanic today, but as far as I can see, his race was pretty much an irrelevancy. Certainly there were poor Hispanics who were discriminated against, but class -- as far as I can see -- clearly predominated over race.
Certainly there were poor Hispanics who were discriminated against, but class -- as far as I can see -- clearly predominated over race.
We still don't use race as the deciding factor in drawing Hispanic/non-Hispanic distinctions. While most Hispanics are visibly nonwhite, being mestizo, Indio or mulatto, some are not (case in point: Sotomayor). We instead treat all Hispanics as a single, nonwhite race.
To Holland, then to England. Cardozo's ancestors emigrated to the US from London, before the American Revolution. To call him "Hispanic" in the context of modern evaluation is more than a bit of a stretch. Chances are that the last time his family had seen a Latin country as anything but a tourist destination was the 16th century.
It's interesting, though, that Jews are not regarded as minorities in the calculus of American race-baiting, no?
MJ has very apt points. Megan is being assimilated into a very Lefty Washington consensus - see her vote for Obama and telling us all that McCain would be worse.
On the name issue: it's a class signaling mechanism. Your resume is going to be tossed much more often if your name is Shanikwa or Billy-Bob, while Robert Jones and Winthrop Smith III are going to be called rather quickly. Same reason why you get more call backs with a Harvard degree than NW Arkansas state.
Asian immigrants face similar issues. They are much less likely to be called back if they have a non-English name. Most employers want someone who can fully speak English and understands the culture. If you have an English name (or at least use an English name) it's a signal that you're likely to be fully assimilated.
You're liable to get similar disparities on hiring from people with French, German, Italian, or Greek versions of common names. Giuseppe Bentovoglio is not going to get as many call backs as Joe Bentovoglio, just as Heinz Schmidt isn't going to be as popular as Hank Schmidt.
These are VERY good proxies for class, language skills, and cultural understanding. Which is why there are so many Betty Wongs and Chris Chus, and why the Sopranos named their son Anthony instead of Antonio.
It would be nice if Megan didn't join the rest of her friends in calling her readers unintellectual racists.
Dude, it would also be nice if you weren't such a namby-pamby who read accusations of unintellectual racism into a perfectly reasonable post whose merits you could debate on much less whiny grounds. But this is the Internet. So.
Sigh.
"Given my politics, I am probably not going to like how she rules on many, maybe even most, issues."
Out of curiosity, can you provide examples? If you do not think you will like how she will rule on most issues, one must assume this means you do not like how she has ruled on "many, maybe even most" of her past cases. So what are these past cases that have you quite convinced you will not agree with her future decisions? You did go over her past cases before you said that you'd disagree with "most" (over 50%?) of her future decisions. I guess this means you disagreed with over 50% of her past rulings.
I'm a libertarian. I disagree with many, even most, appellate court decisions.
It's really heartening whenever I see how intelligently discourse like this plays out:
1) Find one controversial statement made by the person in question.
2) Debate the merits or lack thereof of that one, lone statement for the next week or two. (Be sure to ignore context -- like, if the major concern raised by said statement is effectively refuted a few sentences later -- and definitely make sure the controversial statement remains the focal point of the discussion, even if the person in question has produced thousands upon thousands of other words salient to the bigger picture.)
3) Assume that the controversial statement represents exactly the viewpoint held by the person in question. People always use precisely the right words, and do not ever phrase things poorly, especially when they're speaking in public. (What? No! Do not give anyone the benefit of the doubt! If someone wants to be a Supreme Court justice, they had better not have ever said anything less than perfectly. This is an eminently reasonable demand.)
Moff, following up a statement that indicates racial bias with an affirmation that racial bias is wrong does not "refute" the original statement. It just suggests that the person is blind to their own biases. Few racists actually think they are racist.
It most certainly doesn't "just" suggest that. It doesn't just suggest anything. It may suggest that the person is blind to their own biases. It may also suggest that the person phrased their previous statement poorly; it may also suggest many other things.
If only there were some way to make sense of it; if only Sonia Sotomayor had ever said anything else. But alas, no -- all we can do is keep going over this one handful of words, and hope that someday, somehow, we manage to extrapolate all of her feelings and beliefs about race and gender and identity and wisdom and the judicial process, in their totality, from them.
This fails on two points. The first is to assume that there is just one uniquely 'best' candidate for the position. That's simply not the case, as far as I can tell. There are probably dozens - nay, hundreds - of people who are all equally qualified to fill the spot. This goes to the second point:
AA is not - or shouldn't be - a quota system. The way I have heard it told is that, all other qualificationss being equal for a given post, the minority candidate is then the preferred candidate. Which I agree with, btw. It most assuredly does not mean that if you have two candidates, one of whom is mainstream and is slightly better qualified than the other, who happens to be a minority, that the minority candidate then gets the job. And something I don't agree with.
That's why the critics are, generally speaking, in the wrong. They're assuming a quota system, when actually it's anything but that.
SOV,
Actually my comment does not assume there is one uniquely qualified candidate. Nor does my comment treat AA as a quota system. What makes you think either of these things is true?
It most assuredly does not mean that if you have two candidates, one of whom is mainstream and is slightly better qualified than the other, who happens to be a minority, that the minority candidate then gets the job.
Well, AA in any number of other contexts has meant exactly that: government contracts going to somebody other than the lowest bidder because the lowest bidder was white, colleges explicitly adding bonus points to college applications based on race, fire departments refusing promotions to people who passed a promotions test because "too many" of them were white, etc. That is to say, the sort of AA you disapprove of is not unheard of, and indeed is probably fairly common (even though it is also vulnerable to legal challenge). And the sort you approve of--tie breakers--was recently (and somewhat weirdly) disapproved in the Seattle School District case.
But you're right, in the SCOTUS context, there are undoubtedly hundreds of people of varied hues who are good enough, so no harm done other than being rather creepy.
Balfegor,
You seem to be misinterpreting your own quotes, or perhaps using an extremely broad definition of racism.
Nobody who listened to or read the speech is convinced that she is advocating the absurd claim that female Latin-Americans are racially or culturally disposed to be better judges overall, and that therefore all white male judges should substituted by "wise Latinas". That would in fact be racism. And this is exactly the interpretation that Gingrich and Tom DeLay are disingenuously choosing for her words.
So, continuously judging when "opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate" is the same as embracing them? Also, you missed the "as the Supreme Court suggests" in the quote. Looks like her position coincides with a Supreme Court recommendation.
I do agree that the "basic differences in logic and reasoning" is a weird thing to say. But if this is the most outrageous thing that has come up in examining all her rulings and public appearances, it's kind of mild. Specially when you consider the full speech.
Anyway, here's the full transcript:
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/4982.htm
I believe that Megan's first quote is actually a statement that Mark Twain made about Puritanism. At least that's the way I've always heard/read it.
The definition "Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy." appears on page 59 of the American Mercury, January 1925, in a section called "Clinical Notes" by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan.
(It can be found in Google Books at this link, assuming Google's links are persistent: http://books.google.com/books?id=mcanHQkBIOMC&pg=PA59&vq=puritanism&dq=%22american+mercury%22+%22january+to+april%22+1925&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0 )
I can't find any sign that the definition predates 1925. Twain's a notorious magnet for quote attribution (like Churchill, Wilde, Shaw, and Mencken himself, among others). I'm inclined to guess that if Twain had said it, it wouldn't be that hard to find a source. (If anyone can find one, I'd appreciate a pointer.)
BTW, for a follow up relating to a quote that's probably not unpopular around these parts, try finding out who first said "That government governs best which governs least." (Hint: it's not Thomas Jefferson. Or Thoreau. Or, pace the generally excellent Yale Book of Quotations, John L. O'Sullivan.)
Thanks for the correction. You're spot on re quote magnet point, especially the names you cite.
It seems to me the best way to weigh the merits of Megan's post would be empirically. What do the opinion polls suggest about whether Americans support AA and -- perhaps more importantly -- how strongly they feel about the issue?
My offhand recollection is that a pretty wide majority of Americans oppose AA, but that recollection is likely colored by the fact that I oppose AA.
As for the importance of AA in the typical person's life, I think Megan understates it, perhaps because she's never worked at a large employer with a highly regimented promotion policy. Folks who have know that it's very frustrating to watch pretty obviously unqualified minorities take a goodly percentage of the open jobs and available promotions.
It's a major problem with working at a big corporation (or government agency) so AA really is a very important legal and cultural issue.
And I am sure you probably have never seen a qualified minority,eh?
Let's recall the great lengths the liberals went to in excusing Sotomayer right in this post. She didn't mean what she said, she said other things less obviously racist, despite having odd racial beliefs she might still be the best judge available, there are worse things than believing your race makes you a better judge.
And then we have dcase. Who apparently believes an insufficient level of enthusiasm for AA means one must be racist. And where are our famous Solons, those enforcers of restraint who seem so concerned about having complete evidence before judgement?
Well, we have their total thoughts right here: " ".
I wasn't trying to argue that no minority candidates are qualified for anything. I was simply trying to argue against Megan's assertion that AA doesn't do any serious harm to most white (and Asian) people and thus isn't really a big issue.
AA does do serious harm to vast majority of white people. Employers and colleges and other institutions aren't just setting aside token positions for certain ethnic groups and leaving the rest open to meritocratic competition. They are reserving huge chunks -- 20 percent, 25 percent, 30 percent -- of every coveted item -- admission, promotion, contracts -- for certain races regardless of merit.
If you are white, that has serious consequences for you many times throughout your life. You will go to a worse college than you would have if every elite college didn't reserve 20 percent of its slots for blacks and Hispanics. (Yes, I realize they reserves spots for athletes and alumni kids, too, and I don't support that either.) You will get a worse job out of college and you will get fewer promotions throughout your career than you would if you were a black or Hispanic person with exactly the same ability and accomplishments.
The practice is racist and wrong. More to the point of this discussion, many people believe that the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution actually prohibits the government from behaving in such ways. Again -- disagreeing with Megan -- I think the legal aspects of race relations constitute some of biggest issues the court will deal with over the next decade. Quotas are already a huge problem and they will become a much bigger one as the minority population grows.
I suppose you'll all agree at least with the argument that only a racial minority woman could say
"Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging"
and still be a candidate for the Supreme Court. No white man would get off with that, would he?
Let us not forget that prior to being appointed, while clerking at SCOTUS, Rehnquist defended the separate but equal doctrine upheld in Plessy.
Megan, What are the costs of affirmative action?
Edwin Rubinstein estimates racial preferences cost 8% of GDP. Whereas in 1993 Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer estimated that racial preferences cost 4% of GDP.
Since whites pay most of the cost of racial preferences and whites are a declining percentage of the populace I suspect the cost per white is rising fairly rapidly.
Is this sustainable? Is it fair?
Actually, whites aren't bearing the cost of AA but rather powerless minorities like Asians do (by being shortchanged by the system). At least in the context of college admissions. For example, in the wake of Prop 209, black/hispanic college enrollment dropped, asian enrollment shot up, and white enrollment was mostly unchanged.
So basically the white overclass expunged its white guilt *at no cost to themselves* simply by trading away the futures of asians in favor of blacks and hispanics.
Most people will accept the morality of AA because it is implicitly noble of whites to sacrifice opportunities of other whites in favor of blacks and hispanics (but of course, not those other minorities), but I'm suggesting a much more noxious dynamic -- that instead AA is just racism in another form.
But AA for college admissions in California is atypical for the US as a whole. Asians are much more highly concentrated in California than in most of the rest of the US.
Also, college admissions is not the biggest area where AA happens. The biggest area is the job market and that encompasses lots of working class jobs such as fireman, policeman, utility company workers, and other areas where, yes, whites are the biggest competitors.
Megan instructed us, "ask yourself why repeated studies show that resumes with identifiably black names get fewer interview offers than identical white resumes."
I don't know about "repeated studies"; there's one that is repeatedly cited, "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?" by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan. I doubt she's read it, or she wouldn't characterize it as saying "are you really willing to argue that black kids should be permanently barred from employment because their parents have dubious taste in names?"
The authors claimed only that the presumptively white names got 50 percent more callbacks than the black ones. But poor Emily, despite her titular role, actually did worse than four of the nine black females. (It was a very small study.)
But the authors simply assume, they do not demonstrate, that the employers who were the unwitting research subjects in this experiment were using the names as proxies for race. As several comments have pointed out, class is also salient for employers.
A study by David Figlio of 55,000 children in a Florida school district, "Names, Expectations and the Black-White Test Score Gap," specifically addressed the class issue. He identified several phonological and orthographic characteristics of children's names associated with low socioeconomic status (often, but not always in black families). Those children did less well academically (even comparing siblings). Teachers (who certainly did not need a proxy to guess the race of the children in their class) appeared to respond to these names with lower expectations.
"I suggest," Figlio says, "that teachers may use a child's name as a signal of unobserved parental contributions to that child's education, and expect less from children with names that 'sound' like they were given by uneducated parents. These names, empirically, are given most frequently by Blacks, but they are also given by White and Hispanic parents as well."
(Abstract at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=684721)
I would encourage looking at the principles for the National Policy Institute.
http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/statement-of-principles/
Key line from the principles. Excuse me if I think they have some sort of agenda.
In the United States, whites are projected to become a minority of the national population in less than fifty years. The result will impoverish not only their descendants but the world in general and will jeopardize the civilization and free governments that whites have created.
I would have no problem with AA if A) there was an explicit expiration date on the policies and B) it was based on economic and social circumstances, rather than ethnicity.
In the absence of a real scandal, she will be confirmed nearly unanimously. Her ascension to the court changes nothing- the judge she is replacing is a carbon copy of her judicial philosophy.
The real battle will erupt when/if Obama gets an opportunity to name replacements for Kennedy, Thomas, or Scalia.
the judge she is replacing is a carbon copy of her judicial philosophy.
But he's a white guy, so the poverty of his life experience leads him to make inferior decisions. We should be glad he's retiring.
But he's a white guy, so the poverty of his life experience leads him to make inferior decisions. We should be glad he's retiring.
Just go read the speech and make your own conclusions. It was a speech 6-7 years ago and is much milder than people are making it out to be when read in context.
Yeah, true. White guys getting sued for discrimination used to have someone who made better decisions because he had a more empathic understanding of their plight.
And any golfing related cases are going to suffer because of Souter's retirement. Who could expect a woman to make as good decisions in that area?
Just go read the speech and make your own conclusions.
I have. And while I think Gingrich is being an idiot, my take on the speech as a whole is that it's disquieting in its obsessive focus on identity politics. I suppose that makes sense given the venue, but it doesn't make me any happier with it.
That particular line is delightfully poorly thought out, but the rest of the speech is not much better, just less pithy.
Megan,
Do you think you were a beneficiary of affirmative action in getting admitted to Penn and Chicago? E.g., do you think a man with the same GPA and GMAT score would have been admitted to the GSB at Chicago? Of course, I don't know the answer to this, as I don't know what your GPA or GMAT score was, so this isn't a rhetorical question. I'm wondering if your views on affirmative action are colored by any AA preferences you may have received. White women are, after all, the most numerous beneficiaries of AA.
do you think a man with the same GPA and GMAT score would have been admitted to the GSB at Chicago? Of course, I don't know the answer to this, as I don't know what your GPA or GMAT score was, so this isn't a rhetorical question.
Business school admissions for the top tier programs are not based solely upon two quantitative measures, so it's not a meaningful question. The process is necessarily subjective and is purposely designed to consider a broad range of factors, such as career experience and extracurriculars, in a deliberate effort to find good candidates who didn't necessarily get the highest undergraduate grades or GMAT. Nobody even pretends that it's just about numbers, and the class is probably better off because it isn't just about the numbers.
In any case, when white males squirm at the thought of affirmative action, it reminds me that we still need it. It's just a matter of self-preservation; they don't want the competition, and would prefer that their forms of affirmative action (inherited money and Rolodexes) allow them to keep power concentrated with the legacies that serve them most.
Bush 43 was the typical beneficiary of white guy affirmative action. Had it not been for his dad getting him into schools that probably wouldn't have accepted him on merit and Pops otherwise using his connections to give him an advantage, Bush would have never had the advantages that he had. Connected white folks tend not complain about that obvious fudging very much, because that's the sort of fairness that they'd prefer to see for themselves.
"Business school admissions for the top tier programs are not based solely upon two quantitative measures, so it's not a meaningful question."
Of course admissions aren't based solely on those two quantitative measures, but they are the two most important factors, so it is a meaningful question.
"In any case, when white males squirm at the thought of affirmative action, it reminds me that we still need it."
Keep that thought while you consider this info from Mark Perry's Carpe Diem blog:
Women at Penn were not beneficiaries of affirmative action, nor women at Chicago so far as I know--the percentage of women admitted to the GSB was roughly in line with the (low) percentage of women in the applicant pool. My GMATs were very high even for a GSB student, my college GPA low for a GSB student, but on the other hand, I'd been working for five years . . . business school admissions is much less about grades and test scores than other professional schools, so there's not even any way to compare myself to a male applicant with different work experience.
Women may (for all I know) be the largest beneficiaries of AA in government jobs or some such, but in academia, they're 50% or more of most classes, and schools (other than engineering schools) are not actively trying to recruit them. And I don't know any female engineers who thought it was possible to quota their way through materials science.
But I think you're oddly confirming what Sotomayor said--that a white male, who is disadvantaged by AA, somehow has a more authentic and true perspective on the system than those who are advantaged by it. This being approximately what Sotomayor is saying about the current economic/legal system.
You treat all white males as if the advantage of connections and wealth are available to all of them. Treating a diverse group that size as if they had Bush's family background makes no more sense than setting public policy assuming all blacks have the advantages of being Bob Johnson's children.
Megan,
Sotomayor is on record as saying that certain people are more qualified than others because of their race or cultural heritage.
Call it whatever you want, it is racism, and it is wrong.
Does this airy theorizing yield any testable predictions? A first reading leads to the conclusion that black unemployment rates would be increasing more slowly than white ones . . . Whoops! In New York, from March to April, blacks were 170 times more likely to lose their job than whites, iirc.
Needless to say, I don't find this theory of differential hires particularly persuasive.
A long time ago, a standard rape defense was 'she was asking for it', which I understand was quite successful back in the day when 'she was asking for it' included any garb that didn't button up to the neck or extend down to the wrists and ankles. Even in 90 degree weather with 95% humidity. Since then, since women have gotten a little more input into the system, I'm told that this defense no longer flies very well. Do you think their own insights and experiences might have had something to do with this?
Your implication here is that women's input into case law caused the rape "defense" to lose effectiveness, and that men didn't have much to do with it. So, the follow up question is: did women start deciding cases and establishing case law determining that the defense was no longer effective, or was it, as I suspect, due to changing attitudes on the parts of the male judges and juries too? And, to tie it in to the current discussion, are white men not capable of adjusting their own attitudes in a progressive manner, or does the movement all have to come from the minority? Just asking.
This doesn't make any sense to me. Could you explain? Are you perhaps assuming facts not in evidence?
Well, I'm assuming you remember your 4:37 post. I suppose I could be wrong.
Good terminology. I take it everyone here opposes quotas. Is there anyone who disapproves of AA as I tie-breaker? And if so, why? Given the historical disparities in certain fields, this would seem to be a no-brainer, but I'm open to logical, coherent arguments as to why tie-breakers are bad too - bad enough to outweigh their obvious merits.
I suppose I have to ask what the obvious merits are. Assuming the person hiring is truly not racist, and judging candidates equally, then the idea of AA as a tiebreaker seems to be flagrantly racist, though less bad than quotas.
I can see a justification for AA as a compensation for bias. If, for example, you know you tend to be a bit harder on black people than they deserve, then you should be aware that a perceived tie is probably a sign that the black guy is better, and hire him.
If, however, you are genuinely colour-blind, then I'd much prefer you flip a coin to break ties than to bring in irrelevant characteristics about the individual in an effort to expunge collective guilt. The whole point of eliminating racism is supposed to be that race doesn't matter - let's work towards that, rather than trying to tilt the scales the other way and call it balance.
t's just a matter of self-preservation; they don't want the competition, and would prefer that their forms of affirmative action (inherited money and Rolodexes) allow them to keep power concentrated with the legacies that serve them most.
I do not understand this (common) argument at all. The vast, vast majority of white men have neither significant inherited wealth nor powerfully connected families. SoV isn't exactly silver-spoon material, and neither am I; are we allowed to object, or is that just evidence of the need for AA. Indeed, it is quite possible that broadly applied AA, which benefits "few" minorities, benefits more people than the kind of connections than Bush 43 (or Al Gore, or John Kerry) enjoyed.
I'm open to logical, coherent arguments as to why tie-breakers are bad too
I'm not opposed to genuine tie-breakers, but 1) I have my doubts about how common they really are, as opposed to quotas or lowering standards, and whether the tie-breaker rationale isn't used far more often to disguise quotas than truthfully, and 2) one could argue that any race consciousness at all is socially corrosive.
I'm actually not opposed to some non-tie-breaking AA in selected contexts, such as military officers, DA's, and police, all of whom need the trust of minority communities enough to justify some degree of explicit preferences. But law school AA strikes me as absurd: haven't you gotten enough AA at the college level?
If she wasn't Hispanic and female, she wouldn't have gotten into Princeton. Once there, she became a Hispanic woman who went Princeton and thus, Yale Law. She's probably no dumber or smarter than various other people in her professional strata. I don't think she's a genius, but the country has large problems facing it than who replaces Souter. For an Obama pick, she's fine.
But why can't AA beneficiaries acknowledge the benefits they received?
Folks, please try to remember - the Constitution says that it is unconstitutional to deny any individual the equal protection of the law due to race. The arguments for AA and for racism are the same arguments. We had a civil war over this stuff and teh equal rights side won, so, let's have equal rights under the law. The law says that discrimination in employment on the basis of race is illegal. It is illegal for anyone to do it and there is no "good intentions" defense. The only reason to make this complex is to try to avoid the clear law to achieve a political end, you know, what fascists do (or did). Note to left wingers, the ends never justify the means. The law is about the means, it cannot ever be about the ends. Judge Sotomayor is disquailifed to be a judge because she does not believe in this self evident truth.
Wow, where does one begin with this mess?
1. The issue is not affirmative action, it is the judges open admissions of racial bias and inability to be objective. Her decisions reflect these problems. She is also an activist, another statement she makes clear in regard to the court "setting policy".
2. Does affirmative action need to be the "biggest problem facing America" to merit consideration and/or action? To those that have been victims of it (like the firefighters the judge ruled against) it IS a pretty big deal.
3. Racial preferences are a LARGE problem for America and until they are left behind resentment and distrust among races will continue.
4. It isn't only "racial politics" that are subject to complaint, it is her inability to fulfill the oath of her appointment given her own statements.
5. "We all get things we don't deserve"? Really? Funny, most people I know are hard working folks who earned everything they got, many of them have also been discriminated against for any number of reasons too. They don't make that the central focus of their philosophical outlook and spend the rest of their lives trying to exact revenge against groups that they perceive have slighted them however. We know that BO and his associates have taken this route however, this judge is another cog in that wheel.
6. If anything racial preferences have hurt the African American cause, which could explain the study you mentioned. As another poster mentioned, it is easier to not hire a minority to avoid the potential risk of a discrimination suit. In addition, high achieving minorities who don't need affirmative action are assumed to be inferior by it's mere existence. Lastly, (and sadly) black applicants as a group are more likely to have criminal records and/or substandard academic backgrounds. This is a matter of statistics, I am not saying it is right or fair.
7. She certainly is unqualified for her role as a Supreme Court justice, even a cursory review of her past statements and decisions indicate that. Again, I haven't heard many people mentioning affirmative action in regard to this matter, and if we are going to cave in to this nonsense in the name of not "alienating people" then we stand for nothing. Liberals are going to trash Conservatives whether we go along with this crap or not.
I seriously have to wonder, McArdle: Do you ever wish you had more commenters who, like, occasionally thought they might be wrong? About anything?
Everybody has a 100% record at winning debates on the internet. If you're ever in doubt about this, just ask them.
Honestly, affirmative action will never stop. It conveys a tremendous amount of power to minorities. It is to their benefit to remain “disadvantaged” rather than become a part of mainstream society. Dr. King must be rolling over in his grave. “Content of their character” indeed. Personally, I’m exhausted by every Hispanic that is disadvantaged. Of course learning English might help. Getting an education might help. Same with Blacks. We have a black president, black members of SCOTUS, black members of Congress, black business owners.
It will never be enough. Ever. Wasn’t Obama’s election supposed to lay this issue to rest? Finally, Blacks are equal. How did the Black Panther put it to the white guy trying to vote in Pennsylvania while holding a club?? “You’re about to be ruled by a black man, cracker.” How quaint. Honest to god, I’m exhausted. America has very little left to give. Affirmative action is racist – period. It punishes every deserving individual who is not the right color and conveys a right to an individual simply because of their color. That is simply not good for America.
Of course admissions aren't based solely on those two quantitative measures, but they are the two most important factors, so it is a meaningful question.
You evidently don't know much about MBA admissions processes.
Many graduate school admissions are numbers driven. Business schools absolutely are not. When I was applying, Kellogg liked to take pride in the fact they rejected three of every four candidates who had GMATs of 800 (perfect scores), while noting that there were others with scores of under 600 who were admitted.
They want diverse classes. Count on a few do gooders, some "poets", a star athlete, and a lot of quants to be mixed in with the class of analysts and junior consultants. It is not what you believe it to be, nor frankly should it be. Most business schools involve cooperative learning, and an ability to work with other people is highly relevant.
The vast, vast majority of white men have neither significant inherited wealth nor powerfully connected families.
If white people get the jobs and give the open slots to other white people, then whites will maintain the power and relative wealth at all class levels.
Lower class whites have more sympathy for their upper class brethren than they do for minorities closer to their tier because those minorities are more of a direct competitive threat, and because they relate better to the whites, who at least seem to be more like themselves.
Racism was literally institutionalized in the United States, and it will take several more decades to eliminate it. In the meantime, benchmarks are required to make sure that is being purged. Without them, the traditions can return in full force and there will be no mechanisms to end them.
Since whites have never had to deal with it, they don't particularly get it. There came a point when minorities tired of waiting, and just demanded results, even if it came without the epiphany of the majority.
Had the system not been so blatantly rigged, there would have been no need for affirmative action. If whites don't care for it, they should remember that it is self-inflicted.
"You evidently don't know much about MBA admissions processes.
Many graduate school admissions are numbers driven. Business schools absolutely are not."
All graduate school admissions are at least partly (if not mostly) numbers driven, hence the schools' use of standardized test scores and undergraduate GPAs. Graduate schools in other fields also take into account qualitative/subjective/diversity/affirmative action factors as well. Given that the student populations of business schools remain much more male-dominated than, for example, law schools or medical schools, it's reasonable to assume that business schools would be likely to give more preference to female applicants in the goal of increasing gender balance.
"When I was applying, Kellogg liked to take pride in the fact they rejected three of every four candidates who had GMATs of 800 (perfect scores), while noting that there were others with scores of under 600 who were admitted."
If Kellogg rejected three out of four candidates with perfect GMAT scores, it was only because they knew the vast majority of these applicants were applying to Kellogg only as a safety school and would go to elsewhere instead. By preemptively rejecting these applicants, Kellogg boosts the percentage of accepted students who decide to attend Kellogg. This is pretty common at elite (though not highest-tier) schools, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.
So how do we tell when the racism (and by extension need for affirmative action) is over? Is inequity of outcome (as opposed to opportunity) the sign of racism or realism?
Asserting that "the traditions" will return "in full force" seems to ignore the social change that's occurred since... um... yes, since 1861 or so. Preferences and discrimination laws did have a place, but they seem to be economically unnecessary, if not harmful, now. Socially, the US has become much more tolerant of minorities and will continue to do so regardless of "you must think X" legislation.
If whites don't care for it, they should remember that it is self-inflicted.
Only if you assume that "white people" can fairly be held responsible for the crimes of other people with the same skin color from previous generations. Really, in what sense is George Wallace sufficiently identifiable as me that "self"-inflicted makes the slightest sense?
I'm open to the notion that racism is institutionalized and requires remedy, but when arguments are made in such a crude and nakedly tribalist manner, it reinforces my belief that AA is not the solution, but part of the problem. I suspect you'd object to anyone saying that white mistrust of blacks is "self-inflicted" because blacks have a higher crime rate than whites (I certainly object), so what makes you feel OK about saying something very similar about whites?
A long time ago, a standard rape defense was 'she was asking for it', which I understand was quite successful back in the day
My criminal law professor, something of a scholar of the history of rape law, concluded after much study that the historical treatment of rape was less a crime, and more of an affirmative defense to an accusation of fornication. Sort of like how self-defense is a defense to a murder charge today. FWIW.
Are the two of you talking about the same era here?
Ms. McArdle, a young emotional female like you probably cannot accept
the truth I am about to state, but try hard to follow the facts:
Judges are as careful with their words as you are with your numbers;
Sotomayor contradicted a statement by Sandra Day O'Connor, that
A Wise old woman would render the same judgment as a wise old man.
There is nothing there about ethnicity or suffering, because they
do not matter; Wisdom comes with age (sometimes) and someone will
win a Nobel for explicating the exact physiological/psychological
basis for a fact known from antiquity.
Sotomayor's version is both sexist and classist, and worse, is in
support of a divisive political point of view which is going to make
our rapidly approaching close encounter of the worst kind with
social collapse worse than it needs to be, by emphasizing the
dichotomy between US and THEM, when we most need to accept that we
are all in the same boat, and it is sinking.
M. Report's post illustrates the importance of context. Isolated, the first sentence seems condescending and prejudiced. In context, we can see that M. Report is just a well-meaning but very confused individual.
I'm a libertarian. I disagree with many, even most, appellate court decisions.
Whoa, there. I think this is a logical leap.
"Libertarian" suggests you think the government ought to have less power. But "ought" does not imply "is". One can prefer a more pro-individual legal system and still acknowledge when a judge correctly rules that the legislature did, in fact, have the constitutional power to pass a particular law or the executive did, in fact, have the power to take a particular action pursuant to law.
Sure, fine, whatever.
Why worry about justice? Why worry about fairness? Why worry about institutionalizing government race-based categories for another generation? After all, don't we have more important things to worry about?
FWIW from my standpoint, it's not about worrying that some black kid will get a break, it's about whether my kids will be treated fairly. I'm an American -- but in the government's catalog I am an Asian-American. That means that it's open season for discriminating against my kids. It will be harder for them to get into college, to get a job, to get grants if they are in academia, all because my mom was Japanese. This is not the America we want, is it?
I had hopes when I was growing up that all the affronts I had to face would not be there for my kids, but your attitude seems to be that we will always have more important things to worry about than justice when picking judges. Will my kids be judged by the "content of their character"? Not on Obama's watch. BO and SS will make sure that this abhorrent system of skin-type preferences will last at least another generation.
But that's okay, we've got more important things to worry about than justice.
BBB
My problem with Sotomayor has nothing to do with the reason why she was chosen. She's at least as well-educated and accomplished as other justices, so that complaint is a non-starter. And I agree that even if she were picked, in part, because to her race, this still wouldn't be a big deal.
My concerns, instead, have to do with Sotomayor's personal opinions regarding race. She believes that Latina have richer experiences than white males? This seems like a pretty sweeping and essentialist statement. It is reasonable to wonder if there are any other attributes that Sotomayor believes differ among different arbitrary groups of people. Does she have other beliefs that are based on conjectures and useless categorizations, rather than evidence? Does she maintain the proper humility to recognize that no one could possibly understand, let alone tally, the diverse experiences of all human beings?
Sotomayor's opponents have no good reason to make an issue of her race. Her views on race, however, are a different story.
If you don't believe it, ask yourself why repeated studies show that resumes with identifiably black names get fewer interview offers than identical white resumes
Because "demonstrably black" is itself a racist formulation meaning "unusual, and often misspelled." Whites with poorly spelled names or unusual names have the same problem; blacks with more usual names do not. This is not racism, it's legitimate filtering. Your name is not your race, it's your culture and some indication of your character.
You might just as well complain people with facial tattoos are underrpresented as CEOs.
are you really willing to argue that black kids should be permanently barred from employment because their parents have dubious taste in names
You can change your name pretty easily. Lots of girls do this to be taken more seriously professionally, as something other than "Crystal" or "Kitty."
Ms. McArdle, I generally find your blog educational and frequently thought provoking, as your outlook is fairly different from mine. This is good. However, I really don't understand your thinking here and I would appreciate a future post with greater detail regarding your thoughts about affirmative action. I don't understand why race which is in the news literally every day, is one of America's major problems, yet affirmative action based on race is a small thing. I teach my children that judging a person based on their pigment is one of the most foolish things they can do, and thus am at a loss to explain why it is so important that a future Justice is of a particular background. I don't think I have benefited from racial preferences as I live in Appalachia, and 93% (the actual number) of the residents of the county where I live look just like me. I can't explain to my children why if they discriminate against a person of a minority background, even one who may have had advantages they did not, it is racism, but if someone who looks like them is passed over in favor of a equally qualified minority it is a social good. As for Judge Sotomayor, I do not know enough law to fairly decide if she will be a great Justice. I do know that if I was to appear in her court I am not sure I would be treated in the same manner as a minority. This is not good. Would it not be better for all, including minorities, if affirmative action was based on economic background and not race?
Well, go ahead, I guess, but I'm going to find it hard to take you seriously when you complain about affirmative action because it undermines our fantabulous American meritocracy.
I think there is something to be said for economic affirmative action, but racist affirmative action just doesn't make any sense. Do Oprah Winfrey's kids need a leg up? Do penniless immigrants from Asia deserve to be penalized?
Plus, it's... racist. Racism is supposed to be bad. You can't say "Well, this kind of racism over here is good, because it offsets that other kind of racism over there."
We already have economic affirmative action at the community level (at least here in NJ). For example, the poorest school districts have even higher per-student spending on education (about $16k per year) than the state average (about $13k per year). That's from redistribution of tax revenues to the poorer areas. If you instituted this sort of economic affirmative action at the individual level, it would lead to rampant gaming of the system, e.g., parents working off the books, or choosing to raise their kids as single parents to make their economic situation look worse, etc.
It is, of course, in our society's interest for highly-talented poor kids to be given the opportunity to get quality educations, but I would venture that "highly-talented poor kids" is a relatively small population, which is already well-served by existing scholarship opportunities. This shouldn't be surprising: smart people generally aren't poor, so their kids generally aren't poor either. If you attempt to institutionalize economic affirmative action at the individual level, you'll run into the same problems we have with current affirmative action programs: 1) a paucity of candidates eligible for preferences who have the ability to fully take advantage of such preferences; 2) the unfairness of discriminating against talented individuals for something they have no control over (their parents' income, in this case).
it would lead to rampant gaming of the system, e.g., parents working off the books, or choosing to raise their kids as single parents to make their economic situation look worse, etc.
Sure, no system is perfect. You don't think people game the system now? It's rare that a claim of race is contested. How do you prove someone doesn't have a 1/16 inheritance? Plus, there's a social stigma to being poor, which will tend to deter that sort of thing.
2) the unfairness of discriminating against talented individuals for something they have no control over (their parents' income, in this case).
The fact they have no control over it is an argument we should be helping them, not an argument against helping them. The unfortunate talented kid who isn't poor enough to get as much help as the brilliant poor kid can console himself with the knowledge that his family isn't poor.
What's the poor smart Asian kid supposed to do? Be glad he isn't black? What a terrible message.
H L Mencken was a smart man.
"......but I'd frame the critics as suffering from the terrible, pervasive fear that some brown person, somewhere, is getting away with something."
Megan might I suggest the term "God's Step Children" for brown people and others who are constantly trying to appropriate privileges that belong to God's True Children.
It can be applied not just to brown people, but to political dissidents and other untermenchen that stand in the way of advancing the interests of the Righteous.
It was not unfair when white people were getting privileged access to certain opportunities because of discrimination against their Black competitors but it is unfair now that Blacks are getting privileged access to opportunities to make up for the inherited disadvantage stemming from prior racism.
It was not unfair when white people were getting privileged access to certain opportunities because of discrimination against their Black competitors
It wasn't? Then why did we have a civil rights movement?
but it is unfair now that Blacks are getting privileged access to opportunities to make up for the inherited disadvantage stemming from prior racism.
What inherited disadvantage do blacks have versus the children of poor Asian immigrants that means they should get a bump in their SAT scores? I'd say coming here after living in countries where they don't speak English and average PPP GDP per capita is well below our poverty line is a considerably greater handicap.
You know, there was a time when the Irish were discriminated against, a time when 100,000 Japanese were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, I'm sure one could dig up others.
But hey, why stop with race? There was a time when Mormons were persecuted. Studies show shorter people do less well economically. So do the less attractive. Where's the reparations for the ugly?
E Pluribus Unum. If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately. Divide et impera. A rising tide lifts all boats. We will all go together when we go.
When I encounter "race" on forms, I check "other" and write "American." Charity begins at home, and the USA is where my heart is. (Deus caritas est.)
Just to illustrate the idiocy of judging Sotomayor's record on one out of context sentence from a speech whose main theme was ethnic identity, Greenwald has this to say:
Greenwald's post goes on to describe a case in which the soft-hearted and biased towards minorites judge Sotomayor ruled against a poor black single mother that had, not only an extremely sympathetic case, but also a quite strong one from a legal point of view. It's a worthwhile read, as is the rest of Greenwald's post. He is in his territory on this.
I write this because this thread is filled with summary judgments on her competence and bias. Commenters naturally know less about Sotomayor's worthiness than practically any other topic posted in AI. Yet some people don't seem to be bothered by this ignorance in the least. So they go on and on spewing baseless opinions on a subject they know very little or nothing about.
Gingrich and DeLay's attack is a success already. The signal-to-noise ratio on this issue became extremely low, and people are now essentially discussing irrelevancies.
Was the ruling against the poor black single mother one of the 4 (out of 5 tried) cases she had overturned by the Supreme Court? I think the combination of the possibility of a judge overtly deciding cases based on something other than the law and the issue of competence are what are creating the storm here. But, of course, the issues have to be winnowed down to something consumable in bite-sized chunks for prime-time consumption.
Where to start?
Most commentators come out an say, sure she is an affirmative action hire and move on to her personal statements and to some extent her legal opinions. Affirmative action is the bogeyman, it cheapens anyone it touches.
How many personal examples do you want, the Columbus Ohio(my town)public service director with a high school diploma given an MPA from Harvard. The four high school administrators put in their personal Phd program, meeting only on weekends, and given Phd's. The Ohio State University Phd resident requirement in Phd programs waived for blacks.
I could go on for days about White/Asian students with superior grades and test scores who were bypassed for marginally qualified blacks.
How many years do "minorities" need to be told....learn to read, learn to do math, get good grades and compete against the rest of society.
Life isn't fair, people get a hand out, hand up etc. But not thousands and thousands of the same class and group. And that is the fear of many people with this kind of nomination, permanent affirmative action as dictated by the court.
STRAWMAN! The critics I've read haven't event mentioned affirmative action. As for the names of black children, what the heck are you talking about?? And who the heck is arguing we should discriminate against peoples' names? Megan, what are you thinking?
Racists - people who believe they are superior to others based on their ethnicity - shouldn't be advanced in our society.
We should not grant members of the KKK with powerful, unelected government positions for life, any more than we should grant Satomayor such a position.
She is a racist. She believes that the Latina is superior to the white male and will thus improve the court. The thought that she advocates is exactly the same one advocated by the KKK, except in subtlety.
Most of us don't care what race she is; however, the Obama administration certainly did and the press seems to be very interested in the fact that she's Hispanic. Wonder if a white male would've gotten such great press coverage. She's not the first woman on the Supreme Court but you wouldn't know it by the write ups in the east coast media. This woman is probably not the best qualified by any standards and I say that as a woman and a Democrat. This administration is so superficial in handling our government...our president is a rockstar, his wife is a glamour queen (not), his advisors' ethnicity and gender are determining...qualifications and accomplishments never enter to the equation...very, very sad.
I shouldn't have to do this but, what the hey ...
Would you care to rewrite this, substituting "white man" for "minority"?
Go ahead, try it? Sounds very familiar doesn't it? In fact, it is straight out of the mouths of the Liberal-tards who've been pushing the racial grievance and political correctness agenda for years.
Oh, and now it offends you?
How timely.
How hypocritical.
All graduate school admissions are at least partly (if not mostly) numbers driven
Now you're turning this into a straw man. Nobody disagrees that numbers play some role in the admissions process (although for a time, HBS dropped the GMAT requirement.)
However, your overall thesis is still inaccurate. In the case of business school, the numbers comprise a small component of the overall application package.
The admissions process is highly subjective, based upon numerous factors. What gets some people admitted and others denied is not that clear cut. If Ms. McArdle's experiences are similar to other applicants, she probably got into some and wasn't accepted by others.
The processes used for business schools admissions will not help you with your argument. Some other grad programs, such as law school, are far more numbers driven, and might make for better examples.
you assume that "white people" can fairly be held responsible for the crimes of other people with the same skin color from previous generations.
It's not a matter of sentencing whites for crimes, but of acknowledging that a lot of the advantages maintained by the majority were a matter of legacy privilege, rather than merit, and then making adjustments so that others who didn't weren't in the collective last will and testament get to inherit some of the past generations' shot at prosperity.
That's the myth of the meritocracy being disrupted here. People who had an inherent advantage from the start, through no merit of their own, want to believe that they earned everything that they have. They didn't.
This nation has never been much of a meritocracy. We are going to have difficulty fixing what ails us if we have tens of millions of mediocre people running around insisting that they are filled with merit, forced to butt heads with minorities who lack their fantastic skillz (did I spell that right?), when they are vastly overestimating their own talents.
It's also a matter of acknowledging that with the inheritance of benefits comes the yoke of responsibility. We are all byproducts of history, and if we are going to be accountable, then we need to recognize our duties, not just our rights.
I suspect you'd object to anyone saying that white mistrust of blacks is "self-inflicted" because blacks have a higher crime rate than whites (I certainly object), so what makes you feel OK about saying something very similar about whites?
Actually, you'd be wrong about that. On the other side of it, a lot of minority activists have done a poor job of addressing their own self-inflicted (no quotes) problems created by the gang subculture vis-a-vis their relations with the majority. All of us inherit affiliations and legacy, like it or not, and it is our responsibility to deal with these. We know that those such as Bill Cosby anger people when they target this, even though they clearly also have a point.
There's a slight difference between a "legacy of privilege" and "whites...aking for it," which was your original word choice. Don't be surprised by the reaction.
I'm more concerned about the lock on senior government posts by those from the Ivy League. Anyone else see something wrong with this picture?
Justice Roberts- Harvard Law School
Justice Scalia- Harvard Law School
Justice Kennedy- Harvard Law School
Justice Souter- Harvard Law School
Justice Breyer- Harvard Law School
Justice Thomas- Yale Law School
Justice Alito- Yale Law School
Justice Ginsberg- Columbia Law School
Justice Stevens- Northwestern
Now Obama ( Harvard) may find Sotomayor ( Princeton, Yale) adding real diversity to the court but what is about the 'richness' of her
background that differs from that of the other justices? Are there no decent legal minds graduating from our state universities? Is it
impossible to be qualified for the Supreme Court absent a diploma from an elite school? You have to go back to Nixon ( Duke) to find a president who thought so and maybe there is some truth to the complaint voiced when Nixon nominee Haynesworth was rejected that 'mediocre people deserve to represented too!'
Very disappointing.
Menchen also had a lot to say about "idiots," but that hardly implies that someone deliberately dumbing-down in order to feed the great American public a rote Dem talking point must be one. So stop writing like one, please.
You try to dismiss a serious concern by airily conflating it with an entirely different issue. The real issue is that the candidate has told us, as clearly as we are likely to hear via a public statement, that she has an agenda. For this agenda to be acceptable at the top of the American judicial system, we must postulate that there are "good" prejudices and "bad" prejudices, and that the candidate's are "good" prejudices, so it's all OK. Sorry, I'd have to issue a BS call on that one.
The evidence is that Sotomayer is carrying a cartload of prejudices - which isn't by itself all that great a fault - but thinks it her duty to justify the application of her prejudices to the job of judging - which is totally unacceptable. What she's trying to "get away with" is the perversion of the American judicial system. If disapproval of that tactic makes me a "fundamentalist," then so be it.
The question of judicial temperament is only reflected in a particular decision. It's central tenant is whether you judge according to the law provided you by the Constitution and the Legislature, or whether you make up your own law. Prior decisions, as they reflect such temperament, are a legitimate basis for congressional probing before voting to advise and consent. For the purpose of confirmation, affirmative action is only important to the process in this respect.
It is a major problem when a nominee for the Supreme Court indicates that she does not believe that we have one law for everyone irrespective of race, or that every individual, of any race, ethnicity, gender, creed, etc., is equal before the law.
Furthermore, a profession of bias in favor of a "poor man" against a "rich man" should be seen as just as obviously wrong as the opposite. I will refer you to a very ancient and quite estimable law book: the bible.
Leviticus 19:15 "You shall do no injustice in judgement; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great. but you are to judge your neighbor fairly."
Will you buy in to Leviticus 19:15, Megan?
Even if you grant her the most generous context for the controversial statement- that she thinks a minority might make a better decision in regards to a discrimination case, what are the implications of this? Does this mean all such cases should be steered into the courtrooms of the "more qualified" judges? Turn it around- do white, male judges make more appropriate decisions when white men are plaintiffs or defendants? What would we think if a white male had made such a statement?
It is impossible to defend that statement- it was really asinine, and the most convincing proof of this is that even Obama isn't defending it.
Nope. I've looked at it three, four times now. If you want to just say that I'm wrong without explaining why in a way that I can understand, fine. But I won't feel obliged then to continue this conversation.
This is true, but also not something that affirmative action can fully help, at least not as long as people know it exists. After all, people will say, "Oh, these resumes look identical, but this one candidate must have benefited from affirmative action in getting into school and in getting hired in previous jobs, so their resume isn't actually as impressive as it seems."
And that's for exactly the same reason as people discount George W. Bush's educational resume, or the educational resume of athletes.
I find racial preferences of any sort to be unfair, and in the case of the appointment of high officials not particulary motivated out of a concearn for justice but rather as symbolic gesture made for political reasons to enthnic catagories one is trying to obtain the votes of. I think it is obvious that the enthic background (as well as socio-economic class background) and particularly gender played a role in Sotomeyers's appointment. I think the fact that Thomas followed Marshall, Harriet Meyers was appointed to replace O'Conner and that failing that 7 out of 9 possible appointees considered by Obama were women, suggests that there is an unwritten quasi quota system in place on the supreme court (at least 1 black person and 2 women) that is essentially supported by both parties. (I wonder if something similar occured for northern vs southern justices before the civil war). My personal feeling is having a race/gender representation system is rediculous. Should we care how many of the justices are catholic, or jewish, evangelical christian, or atheist? Should we care how many are attractive or unattractive, tall or short, or of Meyers Briggs type INTJ or ESFP? There are many ways to classify people, many of which do effect ones thinking or how one is percieved by others, and the opportunities made available to you. Why are we so interested in keeping racial and gender balance? If anything it seems that a balance of judicial philosophies is what is desired. That being said, I think Megan makes a valid point with her provocative (to me anyways ) comparison to anti-racialist positions to fundamentalism. Whatever one might think the ideal metric for choosing supreme court justices is, it will always fall prey to the politics of the day. Is this focus on racial and gender identity really a problem, or is it just a little political theater? It seems that Sotomeyer is an outstanding jourist and more than qualified to be on the supreme court. One should not be angry that the politics of the day are favoring highly educated latinas over highly educated white men, any more than one should be upset that attractive people get more dates.
P.S. Shouldn't conservatives want more women and minorities on the supreme court for the reason that since being a woman or minority scores points on the left, the appointee can be less liberal. For instance Clearance Thomas could be more conservative because it would be more difficult to block the appointment of a black person.
I suppose this is the sort of thread that puts the "g" in glibertarian. This thread is, with few exceptions, a lot of people dissecting and elaborating on 2 or 3 sentences of a Sotomayor's speech. Instead of, you know, looking at her rulings.
Everybody has a Very Strong Opinion based on just these sentences. Almost nobody expresses any reservations about their own ignorance of the law or Sotomayor's career.
People here are the kind of sheep that Gingrich and DeLay were hoping to find in the public to amplify their "controversy". They can make a lot of noise out of almost no substance.
Welcome to the echo chamber.
It's sad, pathetic, and very noisy.
Nimed,
I looked at the majority of her opinions, and with almost no exceptions, I could have predicted her rulings by only knowing that a Democratic president would select her as a nominee. Now, this isn't a surprise, I can do so for almost all judges- there are very few judges in the Federal system that can accurately be described as moderate, and the reason for this is simple, the choosers aren't moderate themselves when it comes to court appointees.
She should, and she will be approved, and I doubt more than 5 senators vote against her.
This political theater only, not a real battle over confirmation. The real battle will come with the first Obama appointee that changes the court's present balance.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I have my doubts that you're familiar with the majority of her rulings. Nothing personal here; just that, you know, it would take a lot of work. If you know her record so well, that certainly makes you an exception in the thread.
There have been few news items who made an effort to characterize her legal approach. One of the these was a post by Glenn Greenwald, which I've mentioned in a previous comment. Maybe you distrust Greenwald, but he is one of the few people in the echo chamber, as zic put it, who in this particular case is familiar with the subject.
From his post (and the couple of Sotomayor rulings he mentions, which admittedly have anecdotal value), one gets the impression it would be pretty difficult to predict her political inclinations from her bench decisions.
I agree this is political theater. But most commenters around these parts happily assume their own (unpaid) role in the play. It's the role of sheep. They exhibit great confidence in their uninformed opinions, they parrot political talking points read elsewhere and they make very profound considerations about race, affirmative action, etc. that have no relevance to either Sotomayor's nomination or her job as a judge.
Why are people extrapolating from one single speech instead of the most relevant information - her rulings? Why are there commenters making the false claim that she was a beneficiary of an affirmative action program? This last point is quite revealing - she graduated summa cum laude in Princeton. That's something most Supreme Court judges haven't done (many of them do have lesser academic honors). Sotomayor's curriculum is quite impressive, not for a woman or a Latino, but for anybody.
I'm personally inclined to be against affirmative action. It has obvious perverse effects, which have been pointed out. But Sotomayor was neither a beneficiary nor does she get to write new legislation from the SCOTUS bench. It should be a non-issue in her nomination. In sheepland, it isn't.
Nimed,
Did you read the decision rendered in the case Greenwald wrote about?
The plaintiff really didn’t have a discrimination case. To have ruled in favor of the plaintiff’s appeal in this regard would have simply been silly (and a black mark against any judge doing so); and, in any case, Sotomayor did not completely rule against the plaintiff, as even Greenwald acknowledges- she still ended up winning $1.6 million dollars in a judgment, in the end- though that mark is against the jury, in my opinion.
What is really interesting to me is the desire to paint her as non-liberal when there is nothing in her decisions that really supports this. For the politically divisive cases she has ruled on, her opinions are exactly what one would expect from a Ginsberg, Stevens, Souter, or Breyer, and the opposite you would expect from a Scalia, Thomas, Alito, or Roberts. This professed uncertainty about her judicial philosophy is more theater than truth. Both sides are going to great extremes of exaggeration, and embarrassing themselves in the process. She is liberal, and she will do nothing to change the political balance of the court, in either direction. All of this reminds me, particularly, of both Ginsberg's and Breyer's nomination/confirmation process- both were relentlessly portrayed in the mainstream media as moderates, but they have been completely reliable liberal justices, as anyone who had actually read their prior judicial decisions could have predicted.
And one last thing for everyone- most federal court decisions are not politically driven in the first place. There are, thankfully, only a handful of cases each year where the justices let their politics derive their decisions.
In this specific case, yes. Did you?
Talk is cheap. Specifically, simply stating this without arguing anything about the case or backing up your opinions is cheap. I would say that what's silly is to qualify the case as crystalline. After all, the case did make it to second circuit. And Norville was arguing she was capable of resuming nurse work, as 2 other white nurses had done before in similar cases.
No, Sotomayor reinstated Norville's disability claim because she followed the law about disability requirements. The trial judge even latter admitted that he made a mistake.
As to the 1.6 million dollars being a "black mark" on the jury, how exactly does that work? Norville has a permanent disability because she was injured doing her job as a nurse. She wants to resume work, not the 1.6 million dollars, but the hospital doesn't rehire her alledging she is no longer capable of working as a nurse. She won't be hired by other hospitals also due to the disability. Where do you see a black mark?
Non-liberal? Obama's appointees will evidently be liberal-leaning. But you said she couldn't be described as a moderate, and I think she can.
As I said, talk is cheap. There are always lots of people saying you expected or could have predicted A after they know A. People who have had a career in law characterize Sotomayor has a technocrat, with narrow and legalistic rulings. Today, Republican senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama, J.D., supported her nomination in Meet the Press. It seems the more intimately you know the law and/or Sotomayor's career, the less you think of her as an activist judge, or as a racist, or whatever embarrassing accusations commenters are hurling at her.
Why would employers be less likely to hire people with certain names? Because sensible, smart employers who want to do the best thing for their businesses don't hire anyone they can't fire. These days it's pretty much impossible to fire "minorities" and old folks without getting sued because there are activist groups who've convinced people to think of themselves as "victims" (and members of a group, rather than individuals).
Sow what you reap, "victims".
Megan, honey, number one Mencken said "Puritans" not "Fundamentalists".
More importantly, the "thing" Sotomayor "got away with" is insisting that it was okay for New Haven to harm a dozen and a half white and hispanic firemen— real material harm, costing them money, pension benefits, and the emotional reward of an earned advancement — because no blacks earned that advancement.
The practice of judging leaves a lot of room for discretion, and for the abuse of discretion, particularly at the level of the an unreviewable Supreme Court. So what's troubling is not so much Sotomayor's prototypical lefty race-consciousness and identity politics, which is a dime a dozen, but her apparent willingness to indulge those politics in the Ricci case.
In Ricci, Sotomayor and her co-panelists did not just get the case wrong; they indulged in gamesmanship to attempt to hide the result and insulate the case from Supreme Court review. An actual opinion, rather than a summary disposition, makes the court accountable for the quality of its reasoning, and highlights the pertinent issues for possible Supreme Court review. What the Ricci court did was the ultimate in results-oriented jurisprudence, and it implies a political approach to the law which we may reasonably infer a Justice Sotomayor may take in race cases, and in any other case she feels strongly about.
Tom Goldstein looked at this issue:
"In the roughly 55 cases in which the panel affirmed district court decisions rejecting a claim of employment discrimination or retaliation, the panel published its opinion or order only 5 times."
Ms. Mcardle's comments today on the issues of race and privilege are the most uninteresting on that topic I have encountered since my high school social studies class--at a school where the students were all below average.
Wow. Just awful.
If you want your opinions to be taken seriously, it's might be wise not to announce that you were a below-average student in high school.
Sigh. It.
Given how much people pay me as an adult for my opinions , I must have something worth taking seriously when it comes to opining. ;)
Totally possible. On the other hand, Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher get paid pretty well for theirs.
Right. I've not seen much commentary on any cases, say, Ricci. But it's not hard to find:
Ricci seems to be the one case that a lot of people are focusing on, for obvious reasons. While a lot of people disagree with the outcome, it seems to indicate punting than any bias towards minorities.
Great quotes from scotusblog. It's refreshing to see someone providing relevant information on this thread.
Is there a reason for this? No offense, but it seems that a lot of MBA's I know seem to be functionally innumerate. While that's obviously anecdotal, and even if true, only so in a probabilistic sense, I've got to ask: aren't numbers, well, very important for the man of business? Or am I engaging in a bit of discrimination :-)
From March to April in New York, blacks were 170 times more likely to lose their jobs than whites. How does this fit into your theory?
I think we would need to see what kinds of jobs were lost before drawing any conclusions. If blacks were simply losing jobs at a ratio of 170:1, but "job" can mean any position whatsoever for each of those 171 persons, we don't really know much. If a black person was 170 times as likely to lose his or her job when working the same job at the same skill and qualifications level of someone from a different ethnicity, that would be meaningful data.
White men make up less than half of American Society. So why are 7 of 9 (:-) Supremes white men? And why are 8 of 9 men? Doesn't this suggest to you that there's just a tiny bit of discrimination going on?
Unless you subscribe to the point of view that a process can be judged based on the outcome rather than an examination of the process and its inputs -- a position I would not expect any competent statistician to be embracing -- then no, it suggests nothing of the kind. The process for becoming a SCOTUS justice isn't like the process for becoming, say, a McDonalds fry cook.
Oh, the flippancy... aMouseforallSeasons, do you think statisticians have a principle that states something like "A process should be judged based on an examination of a process and its inputs, not the outcome"?
"Judging a process" is a meaningless expression in statistics. Unless you mean something like assessing if a particular data set was generated from a stochastic process. But, in that case, you do "judge" based on the outcome (the data), as well as on the particular model and the input variables.
I sort of see the point you were trying to make - other variables besides race or gender discrimination influence SC appointments. But try to avoid talking about competent statisticians in the future. If you want to use appeal to authority as an argument, better be sure to not just make stuff up. Or better yet, don't use appeals to authority at all. 7 of 9 justices in the SCOTUS are white men. 8 of 9 are men. This has been roughly the state of affairs for quite a while. These statistics alone do not demonstrate discrimination, but they certainly suggest it. If you think otherwise, you should make a case yourself and leave competent statisticians out if it.
SoV has a long and storied history around here in regards to standards of evidence and logic, and the applicaiton of one's profession in understanding same, statistics in particular. AFAICT your arrival to the comments section post-dates much of this by at least 6-9 months, so you probably aren't in on the joke. No offense intended or taken, at any rate.
I see. Damn you people and your inside jokes.
I guess context really is important. Sorry about the misplaced sermon.
White men make up less than half of American Society. So why are 7 of 9 (:-) Supremes white men? And why are 8 of 9 men? Doesn't this suggest to you that there's just a tiny bit of discrimination going on?
It does suggest discrimination, which would have occurred when the people currently on the Supreme court were entering law school and when they were first being offered judge-ships, at least it would if those selected differed in their racial/gender proportions form the pools they are selected from. It seems that currently 25% of judges of state courts of last resort and 20% of federal judges are women, and having 2/9 comes quite close to the percentage of women in the pool from which Supreme court justices are selected. But my point was that rather than selecting supreme court justices without bias with respect to gender and some racial and ethnic categories, there is something of a consensus that we should try to keep the number of african americans or women where they are or raise them. It seems to me that Obama (and Bush) were trying to appoint a woman to replace O'Conner as if some informal quota system existed. The fact that 7/9 justices considered by Obama were women whereas the proportion of high raking state and local judges is the closer to 2/9 I think supports this. I suppose SoV may think this is a good thing, and a reasonable response to past and possibly current discrimination against women and minorities. I do not. I am unconvinced that discrimination is a serious issue currently at least in jobs requiring an advanced education. And even if it was, I am not sure that the solution to informal discrimination should be official reverse-descrimination. The basic concept of judging someone by their own merits seems like an important value to keep.
Is Judge Sotomayor a "brown person?" I find it interesting that race in this country is constructed in such a way that someone of primarily, or even entirely European ancestry, can be considered something other than white. She's had the experience of being poor, and of being a member of a community of recent immigrants in New York City. Like the Italians, Russian Jews, and Irish before her, she has been looked down on by people who fell off the boat a generation or three earlier. She's had the ethnic experience in full.
But it really alarms me when someone conflates "Hispanic" with "brown." Latin American has its own racial history and politics. There were Europeans in Puerto Rico, owning African slaves, decades before the English established themselves in Virginia. The Spanish and Portugese colonies had highly evolved systems of racial classification with, you guessed it, Europeans at the top. In much of Latin America, Venezuela and Bolivia excepted, they're still on top.
And yet, when people immigrate to the United States from Latin America, we throw out their previous racial affiliation and assign them to a category that means "disadvantaged by the historic European oppression of indigenous and African peoples." And therein lies the rub. When Judge Sotomayor made her by now famous "wise Latina" remarks, she claimed a special knowledge based on her experiences. If she was laying claim to her experiences as a children of immigrants, rising from poverty in the face of ethnic discrimination, I have no problem with that. But if she was trying to position herself as a person of color within a context of white discrimination against people of color, I don't buy it, because her ancestors were as European as mine.
Megan, for some of us affirmative action really does look like a massive injustice.
I'm a direct beneficiary of affirmative action. I got a full 4-year scholarship to one of the top mechanical engineering programs in the country, and I'm reasonably certain that the fact that I was female helped me get it. I know that I performed as well as the seven other freshmen who got the same scholarship when I first got there -- apart from one (a while male, wouldn't ya know, who managed always just to outscore me), but I fancy that another dozen freshment would have done as well.
The thing that burns some of us about affirmative action and the case of Hispanics in particular is that the whole setup seems peculiarly unfair to immigrant children from other parts of the world. If your parents were poor immigrants from a Third World country, where the average person earns in a month what the poorest worker here earns in a day or two, and you first learned a language other than English, and that's what your parents still speak at home, well, then, you get a leg up in college admissions.
So long as the language in question is Spanish, or maybe Portuguese, or possibly Tagalog. Surnames like Gonzales and Jiminez and Escamillo OK; surnames like Chen and Kim and Nakamura and Nguyen and Dong, not so much. Because, you know, there're just too many of those people making the grade, as it were; and Asians are fungible, so far as the general public is concerned.
I hate this system. If struggling on next to no income while learning a second language represents a serious achievement, as I think it does, then it's a serious achievement no matter what the first language was. You ought not to be accorded extra credit for speaking and writing English well if you're s third-generation Mexican-American who's spoken nothing else since birth; you ought to get credit if your parents speak only Chinese and you immigrated at the age of ten. Even if your surname is Chen and there are an awkward number of Chens already in the freshman class.
SoV,
From March to April in New York, blacks were 170 times more likely to lose their jobs than whites. How does this fit into your theory?
Source, please? (And NY the city, or NY the state?)
I've got to ask: aren't numbers, well, very important for the man of business?
Arithmetic and algebra are sufficient for tackling most business problems. The math isn't so tough.
The problems arise when people don't take the trouble to even do what simple math there is or bother looking at the numbers. There's plenty of data out there, but a lot of folks are inclined to jump to conclusions without bothering to even looking at readily available facts. (You may recall this little issue arising during that earlier postal service privatization discussion.)
Surnames like Gonzales and Jiminez and Escamillo OK; surnames like Chen and Kim and Nakamura and Nguyen and Dong, not so much. Because, you know, there're just too many of those people making the grade, as it were; and Asians are fungible, so far as the general public is concerned.
A further point worth noting here is that the crude categorizations most AA programs use gloss over some very significant differences between different subgroups of categories like "Asian" and "Hispanic", penalizing some and unfairly advantaging others. Americans of Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Indian descent generally do quite well in school and in society - probably due to long settlement in and acclimation to the States and/or a self-selection effect (generally only the smartest and ablest people from those countries were able to immigrate to the U.S., meaning their descendants likely to be more gifted than average as well). Other Asian ethnic communities, e.g. the Hmong, Cambodians, Vietnamese, etc. do not have such favorable factors in their favor and do not do so well - indeed they face some of the same problems (crimes, gangs, drugs, etc.) that plague poor black and Hispanic communities. Yet by virtue of being, say, Hmong, and therefore Asian, a bright kid who manages to escape a bad childhood environment is actually disadvantaged by affirmative action, despite the fact that he has overcome circumstances no easier than those that face a disadvantaged black kid. Conversely, many of the slots meant to help disadvantaged blacks and Hispanics from the U.S. end up going to people who don't need them - case in point, the very Caucasian daughter of bilingual, European-descended Puerto Rican elite and the boarding school educated son of an English-Nigerian businessman with whom I attended college.
I'm not opposed to some sort of systematic effort to aid people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, but to define "disadvantaged" as meaning "of a certain ethnic/racial/national background" is wrongheaded and has way too many perverse unintended consequences.
"...but I'd frame the critics as suffering from the terrible, pervasive fear that some brown person, somewhere, is getting away with something."
Really? So, critics of Sotomayor are just racists. Huh. Must be the same for critics of Obama too. You get more shallow by the minute.
My beef in all this has nothing to do with racial discrimination and everything to do with age discrimination. Sotomayor's resume is reasonable for the job, but she's not really at the top of the heap. And the reason she isn't has nothing to do with racial/ethnic background or being female. It's because she's in her 50s and not her 60s. The top of the heap is older and has longer resumes.
There's even a perfectly reasonable Latino choice in the group -- Jose Cabranes. But nobody in that age group even makes the short list when openings on the court come up, because both parties favor young nominees who will get to serve for decades.
With this kind of age discrimination in place, you're basically screwed if your party is out of power as you go through your 50s. Even if you are the most qualified candidate as soon as your party gets back in.
If we really want the wise old folks to serve on the court, we should be willing to see them nominated. And as far as I'm concerned, this means conceding that most contentious ideological issues should be resolved by the elected branches of government rather than by the courts. That reduces the pressure to stack the court with people of any particular ideological stamp. Appointing older judges would result in more turnover on the court and more total appointments, and it would reduce the control that either party could exert beyond its time in elected office.
Maybe we'll have to wait until the Baby Boomers are dead for that one.
Refreshing, maybe, but also pretty sad.
It's sadder still that actual facts and cites aren't considered evidence. 7 of 9 are white men? That doesn't prove that there was discrimination. Black men 170 times more likely to lose their jobs than whites? That doesn't prove that black don't get hired because they're harder to fire. Only 2 dissensions in 75 cases? Doesn't prove that Sotomayor won't be an 'activist' on the bench when it comes to AA.
Notice that in one case the numbers don't prove discrimination, but in another, they don't prove that there isn't. Notice also that the people making these assertions don't got nothin' except to say that whatever objections offered aren't 'proof' that they're wrong. Well, no they're not, necessarily; they're objections. Objections that they've got to make some sort of cogent attempt to answer rather than doing various permutations of what boils down, basically, to "You can't make me say I'm wrong." Iow, to name one example, you can't baldly say that Sotomayor will practice discrimination, then brush aside any evidence to the contrary as not proof that she won't discriminate.
Sigh. One gets tired of pointing out this lapse of logic. Needless to say, the people who do this more than a few times are the people I no longer bother to expend any time or energy replying to.
But again, thanks for noticing :-)
It's sadder still that actual facts and cites aren't considered evidence. 7 of 9 are white men?....Notice that in one case the numbers don't prove discrimination, but in another, they don't prove that there isn't.
Don't equivocate, and if you must anyway, don't do it in such a sloppy fashion. Your own standards of logic and evidence exclude the right to stare at an outcome arising from complex factors, and then write in any simplistic backstory that suits a set of preconceptions. It is not self evident that a position as difficult to obtain as 1 of 9 positions in the SCOTUS bench -- in terms of self-selection for the career, the educational background, and the experience -- should exactly reflect the racial profile of a now-300 million strong country where people can pick out a lot of careers other than lawyering, and those who choose lawyering do not necessarily aspire to judicial bench.
If you want to argue that the legacies of social privilege have weighed disproportionately against minorities in the ability to seek law and bench positions, and may have contributed to the outcome, that's certainly a point fair-minded people can review and debate, but crying "racism! And evidence thereof!" every time you find an outcome you don't like is, at best, sophistic high school newspaper editorial material.
Need we review what all has happened to Clarence Thomas, the second black man ever to serve in the SCOTUS, and who has repeatedly led the charge? Hint: Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are not The White Man.
Michelle, this was discussed in this thread. My post is on May 18, 2009 1:17 PM, and I use BLS numbers, also pasted into my reply:
This was on a thread, btw, where it was oh-so-cutely asked why minorities were being foreclosed on at higher rates (subtext: CRA), without even looking at such elementary statistics as relative unemployment rates.
I'm glad you asked that, btw, because the figure is 17 times higher, not 170; I must have misremembered the figure as a percentage rather than a ratio.
ScentOfViolets,
Thanks. So it was neither NY state nor NYC, but national BLS stats, yes? (The numbers in your table are in thousands, per BLS.)
You might just as well conclude from the March-to-April change in your chart that every time a white person lost a job, a Hispanic got one; or that every time an adult woman lost a job, two teenagers got one each. I am not sure that tracking these things month-to-month tells us much, beyond giving us the opportunity to say 1700 percent!
The most obvious thing about that chart, actually, is that the Black/White unemployment ratio is now just about what it was a year ago, though things have gotten significantly worse for both groups. Meanwhile, as many have pointed out, men are getting hammered significantly relative to women.
And a general plea: Can all of us please stop saying "minorities" when we mean "Blacks," or "Blacks and Hispanics," or "URMs" as the academic-admissions people have taken to calling them?
Again, that depends on what you think AA is. If it's a tie breaker(thanks Rob) with all other qualifications being equal, I'm all for it in professions where the minority in question has been historically under-represented. If it's a straight quota system, where people whose scores are worse than others(modulo a few things like accessibility issues) but who are nevertheless admitted or promoted ahead of the more qualified solely because of minority status, well, yes, I'd say you have a legitimate grudge. Let me quote something I wrote elsewhere about Ricci:
Qualifications do take precedence of race and matters of redress; as one commenter said, "The question is whether guilty white liberalism is a good reason to die in afire because the person who came to get me couldn't figure out how long a hose to use."
Ah. I see. Yes I do recall that little contretemps; a sort of riff on 'but our amps go up to 11' as it were. I must say I'm a little disappointed however, because one of the classes I teach is 'Business Calc'. That's the name of the course. Another one is 'Finite Methods for Business'. Now I feel kind of bad about telling my students that they'll really use this stuff when they get out into the real world :-( In a bit of irony, I've actually done minimax examples of how many of what kind of model to carry at car dealerships.
About the studies on resumes and people with identifiably black names: I wonder if the results would be the same if the names were, instead, identifiably African (instead of identifiably "black") -- i.e., the Obama's, Quashie's, etc.
Sigh. This isn't how it works, Michelle, and you need to be more careful with what you quote. Let's go back to the beginning:
So here he have an explanation offered - with absolutely zero evidence, mind you - that blacks are harder to fire than whites. I replied with:
See, I don't have to explain or justify anything, and you don't get to flip around and demand that I prove that blacks aren't harder to fire than whites, and anyway that's not proof. Uh-uh. No way, Jose. That's simply not the way it works.
You're perfectly free to theorize that blacks are harder to fire than whites. But if I ask you to explain why the stats seem to show that in a given period blacks are 17 times more likely to lose their jobs than whites, you've got to make a creditable stab at actually providing some sort of explanation at why this doesn't actually go against your theory. Merely snapping "That's not proof" just won't cut it. Certain people don't seem to get that (I hope you're not one of them.)
So, assuming you agree with this theory, what's your explanation as to why this is the case? And to recap from above:
This is nonsensical. I simply took the difference in employment rates from March to April (the difference is actually given its own column, the last one, 15.0-13.3=1.7, 8.0-7.9=0.1) and gave a ratio 1.7 to 0.1 or 17 to 1. If you've got a problem with that reasoning, you need to say why. Sneering that it's just an excuse to drag in the 1700% figure simply won't cut it - particularly since it was given as a partial explanation for the differential default rates between blacks and whites.
ScentOfViolets,
You're holding me responsible for the argument you were rebutting. An argument which was not mine, and which I didn't even attempt to defend. All I expressed in the first instance was astonishment at the statement that Black workers in NY (state or city, you didn't say) were 170 times more likely to lose their jobs between March and April this year than were whites.
Correction from 170x to 17x appreciated, of course! I still don't know why you specified NY when using BLS stats for the whole country, or why March-to-April was so much more significant than (say) 2008-2009, or whatever.
I've heard the blacks-are-harder-to-fire-than-whites argument, by the way, and I think that the main problem in it is that the anti-black discrimination you can actually document is at the bottom of the economy rather than the top, whereas it's the people with fairly robust educational and financial resources that you'd expect to be able actually to sue. The sort of person who can't hold even a minimum-wage job with reasonable competence is unlikely to have the initiative even to pick up the phone when one of those contingency-fee lawyers' ads crosses his (yeah, more often than not his, so sue me) path.
Um, that's the column I was reading. 0.1% increase in unemployment for white males; 0.1% decrease in same for Hispanics/Latinos; 0.2% decrease in same for teenagers. What have I missed?
You deserve better readers than this, Megan. Most of these comments are atrociously stupid.
For the same reason I said 170 instead of 17 - I didn't remember correctly. This was on a thread about foreclosures in New York, I believe.
I don't know. I was merely pointing out that the theory has to fit the known facts, somehow. If the person advocating this particular theory can come up with plausible explanations for the points various people raise, and backed them up by some sort of empirical data, good for him. If not, I remain a skeptic. This has nothing to do with adopting the contrary position, btw. I have no evidence for the existence of God, for example, but that does not mean that I believe that God does not exist. I remain agnostic on the issue :-)
Briefly, for the same reason you can't take the average exam scores for different classes taking the same exam and simply average them to obtain an overall average. If you have two populations, A and B, with A having ten times the members, you can't say that a one percent drop in B translates into a one percent increase in A (with the usual assumptions, of course.) I know I didn't explain that as well as I could, so if you have any questions, feel free to say I'm a lousy teacher.
SOV, you're of course right about that last one, as I realized as soon as I'd written it, but was too embarrassed to correct. Obviously you can't compare jobs lost/jobs gained by percentages of groups who lost or gained w/o knowing the relative size of the groups. You would not believe how deeply I am blushing.
All the same, when you used the March-to-April comparison to show that "minorities" were suffering particularly from the recession, without noticing that the same table showed an uptick in Hispanic/Latino employment per capita, I do wonder who count as "minorities" for you. I repeat that the white/Black unemployment ratio looks little changed from a year ago, if the BLS is to believed, while the stats you linked say little to nothing about other "minorities" beyond the fact that the Hispanic/Latino cohort seems to be gaining (a very little) work recently, rather than losing it.