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race issues Archive

Saturday

24

November 2012

0

COMMENTS

Michigan Court: Equality Violates Equal Protection Clause

Written by , Posted in The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

You can’t make this stuff up. Last week a liberal majority ruled that a provision of the Michigan state constitution passed in 2006 that prohibited racial preferences in college admissions was unconstitutional. Their logic? It created an unequal burden on minorities who wished to change the law by requiring them to amend the state’s constitution to do so.

You. Can’t. Make. This. Up.

By this logic, any constitutional provision creates an unconstitutional burden on groups that may wish to repeal it. In other words, it’s completely absurd.

Ilya Shapiro writes:

The court voted 8-7 that making people more equal under the law violates the constitutional provision that requires people to be treated equally under the law!

The Sixth Circuit’s “logic” would similarly prevent Congress from outlawing racial preferences under federal law.

Fortunately, this crazy ruling will not long survive. The California-based Ninth Circuit has (remarkably) ruled the other way; conflict between the lower courts virtually ensures that the Supreme Court will take the case.

And don’t forget that the Court this term is already considering the propriety of racial preferences in UT-Austin’s admissions program. If the Court finds racial preferences themselves to be unconstitutional—that’s my view—then the Sixth Circuit’s ruling has no practical effect anyway.

Friday

4

May 2012

2

COMMENTS

Nancy Pelosi Blows the Whistle

Written by , Posted in Liberty & Limited Government

The dog whistle, that is:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wants President Barack Obama to lay off the weed.

Reacting to an ongoing crackdown on medical marijuana facilities in California, Pelosi said in a Wednesday statement, “I have strong concerns about the recent actions by the federal government that threaten the safe access of medicinal marijuana to alleviate the suffering of patients in California.”

The California Democrat said that medical marijuana is “both a medical and a states’ rights issue.

States’ rights? States’ rights? Doesn’t Nancy know that invoking states’ rights is dog-whistle racism? Or so the left tells us anytime someone on the right points at that, no, the federal government cannot just do whatever it wants and, yes, states do have sovereignty over some areas in which the federal government has no authority.

Nancy Pelosi is actually right for once; the federal government is grossly overstepping its bounds in pursuit of the “drug war.” And I should point out that “states’ rights” is actually a misnomer, as only people have rights. States have sovereignty. Regardless, since she is using the language of the racist small-government types, I am eagerly awaiting* the usual leftist uproar directed at the former Speaker.

*And by eagerly awaiting, I mean not holding my breath.

Saturday

6

August 2011

0

COMMENTS

Bloomberg’s Lazy Initiative to Help Minorities

Written by , Posted in Economics & the Economy, Education

Chronic poverty, broken families, unemployment, low graduation rates, and high crime rates plague minority groups, particularly in urban areas. These problems are certainly not unique to minorities, but they are particularly acute enough to have drawn special attention from the political class. But worry not, as some rich do-gooders have come to save the day! They’re going to throw money at the problems:

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg Thursday unveiled a $127.5 million campaign to help black and Hispanic youths who suffer from staggeringly high unemployment, crime and poverty rates.

The Young Men’s Initiative aims to bring in policy reforms to “connect young men to educational, employment and mentoring opportunities across more than a dozen agencies,” a statement from New York’s City Hall said.

The three-year program will be funded jointly by private and public dollars.

Billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation pledged $30 million, while the Bloomberg Philanthropies also donated $30 million with the remaining $67.5 million to come from city funds.

…According to a recent report commissioned by the city, the poverty rate among young blacks and Latino men ages 18-14 in New York City’s five boroughs is 50 percent higher than among their white and Asian peers.

Unemployment rates among the group were 60 percent higher and more than 90 percent of young murder victims and perpetrators are black and Latino, it said.

…Specific initiatives within the program include $24 million that will be invested over three years to focus on college and career readiness among minorities.

There will also be initiatives to restructure in-jail services for inmates to prepare them for release, and more than $9 million will on expanding an internship program to help training for in-demand positions such as paramedics.

“This is a crisis that demands a crisis response,” said New York Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs. “Expressly naming the problem of disparities and aggressively fighting barriers is how we are going to begin to achieve change.”

The benefits of this effort will be marginal, at best. They may well help some folks, but it sounds like the last thing they are likely to do is actually address the “barriers” at issue here. Those barriers are, after all, primarily of government construction.

Want to help improve the high minority youth unemployment rate? Get rid of minimum wage laws that price low-skilled labor out of the market, denying young people of all colors, but particularly those of poorer, less educated backgrounds, from learning the skills and work habits they need to advance.

Want to improve education among minorities? End the government school monopoly which traps the poor in failing schools, penalizing them compared to the wealthy who can afford to escape failing government schools for private alternatives.

These are things that can be done to actually help people. But they’re politically difficult and require real leadership. It’s easier for those who really just want publicity to throw some money at the problem. It’s almost like they’re more concerned about looking like they’re solving problems than actually solving them.

Tuesday

10

May 2011

0

COMMENTS

Here We Go Again

Written by , Posted in Identity Politics, The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

I’ve noted before that we learned absolutely nothing from the causes of the 2008 financial market collapse. Clearly, that remains true:

Two lawsuits accusing Wells Fargo of discriminatory lending practices have been allowed to move forward, a victory for plaintiffs that have accused the bank of steering African-Americans toward predatory loans.

…Judge Anderson’s ruling came two weeks after Judge J. Frederick Motz, of Federal District Court in Maryland denied Wells Fargo’s attempt to dismiss a similar lawsuit brought by the mayor and city council of Baltimore. Two previous versions of that lawsuit, claiming reverse redlining, in which the bank steered African-Americans toward more predatory loans, had been dismissed by the court.

But this time, Judge Motz said city officials had narrowed the allegations enough to show a plausible link between Well Fargo’s actions and its impact on the city. The issue, he said, was whether “the city has plausibly alleged that the properties in question would not have become vacant but for the allegedly improper loans made by Wells Fargo.”

Redlining, we were told, was a horrible practice whereby banks refused to offer services to areas because of their racial make-up, rather than for simple financial or business reasons. These dubious accusations were frequently used as a cudgel to force banks to service loans to unqualified applicants, or face shakedowns and lawsuits should they refuse. This ill-conceived pursuit of ‘racial justice’ through home loans was one of the many market distortions contributing to the financial crisis.

Now the boogeyman is reverse redlining, where banks supposedly give worse rates or higher charges to minority borrowers. But once again, these charges ignore the economic realities that drive the determination of lending rates. As the New York Federal Reserve has demonstrated, the studies alleging reverse redlining are pure bunk:

Did lenders target minorities with higher-cost loans, relative to their white counterparts? Consumer advocates have long trumpeted this as fact, using studies commissioned by their own staff and publicly-available data via the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to allege that banks routinely and deliberately offered disparate terms to minority borrowers. And legislators have taken these findings at face value, no questions asked.

The … problem is often the data itself: HMDA data is notoriously incomplete, meaning that conclusions based on analysis of that particular data often can be missing critical key credit indicators that might otherwise explain disparities that seem to be reported in previous studies.<

The NY Fed study is groundbreaking particularly because it uses a hybrid data set that isn’t reliant on just the HDMA data; the first such study to do so. The researchers matched approximately 70 percent of loan-level data in a database provided by First American LoanPerformance to unique mortgage data in the HDMA. Doing so was “extensive work,” Andrew Haughwout, Christopher Mayer, and Joseph Tracy — co-authors of the study — note in review.

The study, it turns out, actually showed more favorable rates for minority borrowers:

In contrast to previous findings, our results show that if anything, minority borrwers get slightly favorable terms, although the size of these effects are quite small. Black and Hispanic borrowers pay very slightly lower initial mortgage rates than other borrowers — about 2.5 basis points (0.0025 percent) compared with a mean initial mortgage rate of 7.3 percent. Black and Hispanic borrowers also have slightly lower margins (about 1.7 to 5 basis points, or 0.0017 to 0.005 percent) compared to a mean margin of 5.9 percent. Asian borrowers pay slightly higher initial rates and reset margins (about 3 basis points). We find no appreciable differences in lending terms by the gender of the borrower. These results control for the mortgage risk characteristics and neighborhood composition. While many of these differences are statistically significant, they are economically insignificant.

A second important finding is that 2/28 mortgages were cheaper in Zip Codes with a higher percentage of Asian, black and Hispanic residents, as well as in counties with higher unemployment rates, once we control for the individual risk characteristics of the borrower.

While there’s perfectly valid reasons to criticize lending practice generally, and loose lending standards (for whatever reason you may think they developed) there is no real evidence sustaining the hypothesis that such practices worked along racial lines. But don’t expect these facts to stop the racial grievance mongers from once again causing market distortions with their abuse of the law in the name of identity politics.

Update: Speaking of not learning lessons, the Obama administration is taking the tried and true approach to ruining the housing market and is now “cracking down” on redlining.

Friday

29

April 2011

0

COMMENTS

Another British PC Outrage

Written by , Posted in Identity Politics

Run away liberalism continues to drive the decline of Great Britain. The latest absurdity (Hat-tip: Blue Collar Philosophy):

Simon Ledger says he fears he will end up with a criminal record for performing the 1974 disco classic at a seafront bar on the Isle of Wight on Sunday after two people walking past apparently took offence.

…[A]fter striking up the melody in front of customers at the weekend he noticed a man of Chinese origin walking past with his mother, making gestures at him and taking a picture on his mobile phone.

He said that he later received a telephone call from police – while he was dining in a Chinese restaurant – asking him to meet officers about the incident.

He was then arrested and questioned before being bailed.

Hampshire Police said that it had been following up a complaint of racially aggravated harassment.

…“We were performing Kung Fu Fighting, as we do during all our sets,” Mr Ledger, 34, told The Sun.

Will America heed the British warning against allowing runaway liberalism, identity politics and political correctness to take hold?

Thursday

10

February 2011

2

COMMENTS

Sheila Jackson Lee: Super Bowl Commercial was Raaaaaacist

Written by , Posted in Identity Politics

The ever insightful Sheila Jackson Lee has blessed us with her wisdom once again. While the rest of us saw an amusing Pepsi commercial during the football game Sunday night, she saw racism. Here’s the ad:

For those too lazy to watch, it’s easy to understand. A woman is taming her husband’s sweet tooth with the kind of violence only a wife could get away with. When he’s finally caught with a soda, the husband expects to be scolded, until we learn – ah ha!- that Pepsi Max is actually good for you, or something. Anyway, after the husband gets a reprieve for his soda drinking, he then gets caught oogling a nearby female jogger, and his wife promptly responds with more violence but misses the man and hit the woman, ending the commercial. Ha ha, cute and harmless enough, right?

Wrong. You see, while us normal people saw a typical American couple in a number of humorous situations, those obsessed with identity politics saw a black man oogling a white woman, and we just can’t have that (wasn’t it the whites that used to get upset about that? My how far we’ve come). It’s racist, or something.

I didn’t see that. I didn’t see their races at all. I didn’t even remember that the couple in question was black until this story came up, because it never mattered. They were just a couple, and she was just a pretty jogger. Color blind.

Racism is judging people by the color of their skin even when it has no bearing on anything.  By that understanding, the only racist here is Sheila Jackson Lee.

Sunday

1

August 2010

1

COMMENTS

Ethics Enforcement Is Rrrrrrrrrracist

Written by , Posted in Identity Politics

It’s no surprise, in today’s race obsessed political environment, to find yet another instance in which race is being used to deflect from troubling behavior or bad news.  This time, the entire idea of ethics is being challenged as racist.  You see, there are just too many black members of Congress being investigated for corruption.

Politico reports complaining, and cries of racism, coming from the Congressional Black Caucus regarding the number of their members currently in the spotlight for ethics violations.

The politically charged decisions by veteran Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel of New York and Maxine Waters of California to force public trials by the House ethics committee are raising questions about race and whether black lawmakers face more scrutiny over allegations of ethical or criminal wrongdoing than their white colleagues

…The question of whether black lawmakers are now being singled out for scrutiny has been simmering throughout the 111th Congress, with the Office of Congressional Ethics a focal point of the concerns. At one point earlier this year, all eight lawmakers under formal investigation by the House ethics committee, including Rangel and Waters, were black Democrats. All those investigations originated with the OCE, which can make recommendations — but take no final actions — on such cases.

There’s a “dual standard, one for most members and one for African-Americans,” said one member of the Congressional Black Caucus, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The article continues on without the authors ever once considering the most obvious explanation.  Maybe CBC members are being “disproportionally” investigated because they are disproportionally unethical.

This explanation is not to say that blacks are more likely to be unethical than whites. Rather, I think there are other forces at work.

Politicians, as a general rule, are scum.  It doesn’t matter what race they belong to.  They would almost all commit the worst of crimes if they thought they could get away with them (and many do think this quite often, usually to be proven right).  The question is, in so far as they do hold back from unethical behavior, what is the cause and why might it impact some politicians more than others?

The answer to the first question is easy.  Politicians are interested in getting elected.  If they think something will harm their electoral chances, they will usually refrain.

The next question, then, is whether there is any reason to believe that black politicians are less likely to be punished by their voters for ethical violations than white politicians.

Black politicians tend to be elected in overwhelmingly black districts, often gerrymandered for the purpose of ensuring “minority” representation.  Their voters, having been inundated with destructive identity politics propaganda for generations, have come to believe that they can only be fairly represented by someone who looks like them.  Race becomes the dominant qualifying criteria in these districts, much more so than other electorates.  White politicians are hardly ever voted for simply for being white (it wouldn’t make sense to do so even if some voters were so inclined, as they are usually running against white opponents).  The same is not true of black politicians. A corrupt black politician is still preferable to a white representative under this racial representation paradigm.

Black politicians are thus taught by their electorates that they are entitled to their positions.  Nothing they do can justify removing them from office, for the simple reason that they can never lose their color, the defining characteristic in the world of  identity politics.

While career politicians who routinely commit ethics violations are ultimately to blame for their actions, the voters who avert their eyes from such behavior have to take their share of the responsibility for creating politicians, like Charlie Rangel, who think that they are above the law.  If the Congressional Black Caucus really wants to know why so many of their members are running afoul of what little ethics enforcement politicians can muster to bring upon themselves, maybe they should start by asking their voters to care more about the character of their representatives, instead of their color.

Friday

23

April 2010

0

COMMENTS

Some Rare Honesty On Slavery

Written by , Posted in General/Misc.

Professor Henry Gates has penned an insightful op-ed regarding slavery, blame and reparations.  In it he spends significant time discussing the role of black Africans in promoting the slave trade, a topic all too often ignored in both history texts and popular discussion:

While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.

…Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.

The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”

Although I enjoyed his historical account and thoughtful approach to the issue, I fundamentally differ with Professor Gates on whether reparations ought to be paid at all.  While he acknowledges that, “Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted,” he misses an important point.

The issue of extraction is not merely complicated by the role of Africans in the slave trade. The fundamental obstacle to reparations is the fact that no one responsible for slavery is alive today.  While we can, in some crude fashion, measure the negative impact on those who are alive today, we cannot place any blame on people for the actions of their ancestors. Nor can we condemn whole groups (American whites, particular African tribes, etc.) for their histories. Reparations should never happen because extracting the payments from anyone would be fundamentally unjust.

Thursday

22

April 2010

4

COMMENTS

Is Bill Gates Racist?

Written by , Posted in Identity Politics

In my recent post on Bill Gate’s exclusion of whites from his scholarship, I insinuated that Bill Gates might be racist by saying that people are free not to purchase the products of such a person. What I didn’t do was explain my terminology, which lead to James Joyner of Outside the Beltway asking the question, “Does Bill Gates Hate White People?

Brian Garst observes, “Now, he is free to direct that his money be spent however he pleases.  The rest of us, likewise, are free not to purchase the products of a racist.” He’s right on both counts.   But is Gates really a racist?

First, to state the obvious, Gates looks, um, white.  I mean, he could be the archetype of whiteness.  Granted, there’s such a thing as self-loathing.  But charges of racism against your own kind do tend to require a higher burden of proof.

Second, the stated purpose of the Gates Millennium Scholars program is “is to promote academic excellence and to provide an opportunity for outstanding minority students with significant financial need to reach their highest potential.”   Given that whites remain the majority (if not for long), we’re excluded by definition.

Both of these points are valid.  I don’t think Gates hates white people, or has anything against white people at all.  One possibility that Joyner missed, however, is that Gates might see non-whites as less capable, and therefore in need of special advantages.  That kind of paternalistic racism is hardly uncommon these days.  I don’t actually know that Gates sees non-whites in that way.  I give him the benefit of the doubt and just assume that he has been sucked into the popular culture that has come to treat minorities in such a fashion without second thought.   But one thing I hammer over and over again on this blog is the idea that something doesn’t have to be hateful to be racist.  Identity politics is, by its very nature, a form of racism.

Whites are not a minority, but men are (a fact often obscured since the word “minorities” is often preceded by the words “women and.”)  Why is race a pertinent characteristic and not gender?  Left-handed people are a minority, too.  What makes race more worthy of singling out than any other such characteristics?  Nothing, other than the fact that so many people cannot look at another human being and see anything other than their race.  That’s a kind of racism.

Is Bill Gates doing good with his scholarship? Absolutely.  But his decision to bring in a characteristic absolutely irrelevant to education as a qualifier is a hallmark of the kind of racism that I despise, precisely because so few realize how destructive it is.  After all, it isn’t hateful.  Yet no matter how well meaning, this kind of identity politics perpetuates and exacerbates tensions between races for no good reason.  It is just this kind of paternalistic racism that prevents us from ever reaching the day when we look at our neighbors and just see Americans, without any hyphens.

Wednesday

21

April 2010

2

COMMENTS

Bill Gates Doesn't Care About White People

Written by , Posted in Identity Politics

This is not a new story, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.  Apparently Bill Gates has explicitly barred whites from applying for scholarships from his foundation.  In order to qualify, an applicant must check the box for either African American, American Indian / Alaska Native, Asian Pacific Islander / American, or Hispanic American.

Now, he is free to direct that his money be spent however he pleases.  The rest of us, likewise, are free not to purchase the products of a racist.