It’s racial discrimination no matter how you cut it!
The end to racial preferences in college admissions is “a devastating blow to the fight for racial justice in the United States,” the socialists at The Nation magazine wail. Good!
The U.S. Supreme Court’s overdue kibosh on affirmative action is also a well deserved rebuke to Woke progressivism. Let’s say it right here: the Left’s “fight for racial justice” has destroyed personal accountability, defunded the police, and dumbed down education at all levels. Identity politics is stifling free speech and causing chaos in the classroom. It teaches victimhood, fosters grievance, and promotes intolerance. (Which is why Republican legislators want to defund $32 million worth of well paid DEI culture warriors in UW system schools.)
The logic of Students for Fair Admissions is bull strong, pig tight, and horse high. Say it with Chief Justice John Roberts:
Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
In other words, discriminating in favor of one race discriminates against other races. That a wrong was done to your grandfather does not justify harming my innocent grandchild.
→ Even Elie Mystal acknowledges that black graduates have an invisible asterisk attached to their degrees due to the stigma of affirmative action.
Jennifer Cheatham
Apply that logic to our schools
Since the arrival in Madison WI of the disastrous superintendent Jennifer Cheatham 10 years ago, our public schools have been playing the same game: dumbing down education and the requisite discipline in a cynical attempt to make the racial numbers work.
Cheatham currently spreads her toxin at Harvard (not coincidentally, one of the defendants in the Supreme Court case). She indoctrinates future school bosses with courses like: “Are your leadership practices good enough for racial justice?” Unsurprisingly, it stresses “eliminating white supremacy.”
In the cause of “racial justice,” Madison schools are renaming schools (no more James Madison Memorial high school — in Madison WI!), abolishing honors classes, and forcing disciplinarians like Mr. Rob at Whitehouse middle school out onto the street.
A moratorium on out-of-school suspensions in Madison elementary schools has been in place since fall 2021 because black students are disproportionately suspended. During the 2019-20 school year, 60% of fourth- and fifth-grade students given out-of-school suspensions were black, while those students made up 19% of district enrollment.
Race or behavior?
Put another way, an insufficient number of white or Asian students were suspended. This is racial profiling of another kind. Here we need to ask a question: Does this disparity owe to rank racism or behavior? Madison’s school board never answers.
Let’s be clear: Madison schools did not end out-of-school suspensions for educational reasons but because of race. In point of fact, “in-school” suspensions require over-worked teachers, already stretched thin, to babysit the young miscreants. That harms the kids who do play by the rules. They have been discriminated against.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Demand more of the kids at risk of failure in the elementary schools and they won’t need affirmative action for admittance to college.
15 responses to “Racial preferences amount to racial IN-justice”
This am lamestream broadcast (Channel 15) featured race hustler extraordinaire Al Sharpton pontificating on the Supreme Court ruling. Wasn’t expecting comment from an Asian.
“Wasn’t expecting comment from an Asian.”
Asians are too busy working to better their lot…
The Gotch
[…] This post originally appeared at https://davidblaska.com/2023/06/30/racial-preferences-amount-to-racial-in-justice/ […]
This won’t change much. Harvard has already stated what their end around will be. Good thing is white liberals who still have kids to put through college aren’t going to huff and puff about it. Gives Sharpton new life.
“The logic of Students for Fair Admissions is bull strong, pig tight, and horse high.”
Ok, what’s the logic to making an exception for military academies? Our Supreme Court is not particularly fond of logic. It is a world of political opinion shrouded in logic-ish wording.
Illogical is an understatement. The left doesn’t buy that “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race, is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Instead, they are screaming, “Two wrongs DO make a right!” and figuring out work arounds.
As your resident limousine liberal (well without the limo), I can join your skepticism about affirmative action in elite colleges, BUT for different reasons that you may or may not agree with.
My belief is that the harms done from slavery and Jim Crow still persist in the form of the fractured families that perpetually traps them in an intractable form of poverty based on these observations around us, which is not necessarily the same thing as everyone with black skin.
As one example, the success of impoverished Asians who are driven to have their children succeed, which they do in disproportionate numbers tends to show that poverty is not the missing link to success.
As another, the success of the new generation of African immigrants — much like any new wave of immigrants who are typically more ambitious than us native Americans — tends to show that, while racism persists in pockets like policing, skin pigmentation is also not that missing link to success.
However, what I hope to convince you and your readers of is that the destruction of the black family during and in the aftermath of slavery, which too often persists today because it creates its own self perpetuating trap — is the reason for the poor average performance of African-Americans.
To circle back to why this libo does not see affirmative action for elite colleges as relevant to overcoming the lingering harms from slavery is because 71% of blacks admitted to Harvard are from families in which both parents went to college in household with incomes above the national average — i.e. from black elites who are not the black people who need the help.
If we are to finally have some chance to break the poverty trap of those born, through not fault of their own, in fractured families, that starts with doing everything possible to make sure that they learn to read fluently by the end of third grade.
For after that, schools switch from learning to read to reading to learn, and those who haven’t learned to read get left behind, alienated and resentful, which is the seed that leads to stealing cars and other antisocial behaviors.
Please, think about that generously. Think how you would feel if you were born in the same unfortunate circumstances. Better yet, come to some of Madison’s innovative schools like One City Schools and volunteer to help tutor these kids who need our help.
You — or at least most of you — are not bigots as liberals charge, but now is the time to show that by your actions. Tell them Groucho sent you.
Which is why my emphasis on discipline in the early grades. If momma is not providing it, the schools must.
Dave,
He’s six years old and some days, he comes in with so much anger he throws the crayons against the wall and curses out the teacher.
Kids with these intense problems are just not susceptible to tough discipline. Last week when he threw and screamed at the teacher – who has the most incredible training on what actually works – and she just gently looked at him and quietly said “I see you’re very angry today. Do you remember what we learned last week about how to work through our feelings?”
If she had instead responded like a nun would have, this boy would have slapped the nun and ramped up into a rage, requiring bringing in one of the big black authority figure teachers into the room and still require one or two hours to every so slowly ramp back down, that or suspend him as the District would have done.
If I were able to share with some of the horrors these little children experience at home, I hope you’d begin to understand.
What they’re doing at One City is not excusing the wild misbehaviors, like the District does to avoid disproportionate suspension stats, but working closely with the child to learn how to manage their feelings, without blaming or punishing them for it, which is a prescription for creating a juvenile delinquent.
If you’re open to possibly seeing your world view badly misses some very critical issues, I could ask if One City would let you join me to observe.
These folks are incredible and, with my own eyes, I’ve seen some miracles. A boy I tutored before Covid and is now mainstreamed popped into the Scholars’ Room from which he graduated to show Mr. Henderson a song that he had written and the index cards he was using to remember his phonics lesson. The limit the Scholars room to 8 kids, with two extremely well trained teachers to make all this possible.
We’re both a bit long on the tooth, I admit, but I like to think we’re not that old that we can’t learn new tricks.
You make the same mistake Ali Muldrow makes, that is, envisioning discipline as a stout hickory stick. Discipline is stick to-it-iveness, mastering a skill, etc. Requires work on the part of the recipient. That is not taught in most of our public schools. Once again, Peter, I have NOT prescribed one size fits all. That is why I champion school choice, for which Kaleem Caire can thank Tommy Thompson, Scott Walker, and Robin Vos.
It’s not slavery, it’s the welfare state that supports bad choices.
I really hope you’re not indoctrinating kids with this nonsense. They will be ruined for life.
This is so strange… SC says you can run a website business and discriminate against anyone you like – but if you run a college you can’t discriminate at all? Maybe a religious college could get away with being whites only, we’ll see. .. You see judge, it’s my religious expression!
Cue: but but, that’s not what the court is saying!! The court twists themselves into knots. Classic 1984 doublethink. The court says up is down, except when it’s sideways – best to check with us first.
“SC says you can run a website business and discriminate against anyone you like”
It doesn’t state, express, infer, imply, or posit anything like that at all; anyone claiming it does needs a Check-Up from the Neck-Up.
You’ll find that particular type of cluelessly inane Don’t Say Gay slobbering from those epically imbecilic The View morons….or here courtesy of the d!mw!tted Lazy @$$ Blogge Idiot TROLT.
Intentional obtuseness…or trolling; which…?
The Gotch
The court did not say the website designer could discriminate against anyone she wanted. It said she could not be forced to voice a message with which she disagreed. Compelled speech is not free speech. She discriminated against the message, not the messenger.
Why is it that progressives love word salad? Reminds of the debate technique: “speed and spread”.