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New World Order Title: Racial quotas, speech codes and the thought police It's racially discriminatory to prohibit racial discrimination. That's the bottom line of a decision issued Friday, just before the Fourth of July weekend, by the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. The case was brought by an organization called By Any Means Necessary to overturn a state constitutional amendment passed by a 58 percent majority of Michigan voters in November 2006. This was not BAMN's first challenge to the proposition. It staged a mini-riot in the secretary of state's office to try to block submission of the signatures that put the proposition on the ballot. The ballot proposition, sponsored by the indefatigable Ward Connerly, banned racial discrimination by state colleges and universities and by state government generally. It is consistent with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and in line with the aims of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Its chief goal was to ban the racial quotas and preferences long used in admissions by Michigan's state universities. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 overturned the explicit quotas used by the University of Michigan's undergraduate college but, in a controlling opinion by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, approved the "holistic" admissions process of Michigan's law school. The 6th Circuit ruling seems unlikely to stand. Its citation of Supreme Court precedents is unpersuasive. The proposition that a state's voters cannot ban racial discrimination seems palpably absurd. But it does stand as a monument to the contortions that liberal lawyers and judges will go through to perpetuate the racial quotas and preferences that have become embedded in important parts of American life. The first step in these contortions is to ignore the fact that any racial quota or preference violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discriminating by race is racial discrimination, even if your intention is to help black people. The next step is, as the 6th Circuit panel did explicitly and O'Connor did more surreptitiously, to close your eyes to the fact that racial quotas and preferences are being employed. The admissions directors and the corporate human relations departments are just being, um, "holistic." All of which is intellectually dishonest and corrosive to honest discourse. In my view the strongest argument against racial quotas and preferences is that they tend to cast a pall of illegitimacy over the achievements of the intended beneficiaries. We see this every time a liberal critic questions the competence of Justice Clarence Thomas. Within colleges and universities the existence of racial quotas and preferences, unacknowledged but understood by everyone, tends to make relations between blacks and whites more tense and distant. We see all-black dorms on campus, separate orientations for students of color, separate graduation ceremonies -- everything but separate drinking fountains. In addition, the obvious unfairness of racial quotas and preferences has led to the adoption of speech codes to suppress any criticism and prohibit any statement that makes someone feel uncomfortable. Campuses that were once havens of free speech are now patrolled and regulated by thought police. Intellectual dishonesty has become a job requirement for university administrators. The argument for racial quotas and preferences is that every sort of talent and ability is equally distributed among every conceivable category of persons, but that quotas and preferences are needed to identify qualified members of groups that were objects of discrimination in the past. But the idea of equal distribution of talents and abilities, as Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray showed definitively in their 1994 book "The Bell Curve," is simply factually wrong. The ordinary American knows this -- and knows also that that is not a rational basis for discriminating against members of any group. It's not very hard to understand that beneath any group average there is a wide range of individual abilities. Why are university and legal elites so determined to preserve racial quotas and preferences? One reason, I suspect, is that they can't bear to see lower percentages of blacks in the institutions they run than you find in the U.S. Army or many local police departments. Such attitudes help explain the 6th Circuit decision and indicate that, even if it is overturned, racial quotas and preferences will remain intact, if unacknowledged and disguised, in higher education. In 2003 O'Connor suggested that we might need such policies for only another 25 years. I'm betting they'll be around a lot longer than that.
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#1. To: Happy Quanzaa (#0)
(Edited)
To combat institutional/inherited racism.
Do you get paid by the number of posts you make in a day, Destro? Or does Robin issue brownie points?
You are not refuting my post I see. Let me know when you can do so.
Quotas are racism because they are predicated on the belief non whites cannot make it on their own merits. You sure are one dumb Euro-peon, Destro.
That is correct because non-whites are blocked from institutions due to inherit racism. I mean Harvard had Bush, jr as a student. He took the place of a black man who was smarter than he was (Powell).
First Powell never applied to Harvard. Secondly Powell is dumber than Bush. For example Powell thinks we should have voted for the black guy like him. Powell likes to take our guns away if he could. Powell is an example of a man who got a chance because of his skin color. He was a decent General I suppose. But no leader of the nation.
Good. And I hope you scum resist him and his troops when he tries.
Should I hope that you become a victim of Obamas foreign policy?
Greece is on Obama and NATO's list, so it's a distinct possibility that Destro may become a victim of "humanitarian liberation". If he waves the hammer and sickle flag, maybe the bomber drones will miss him.
That must make sense to someone.
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