The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati lifted Michigan’s ban on affirmative action, declaring it unconstitutional. The referendum, known as Proposition 2 and passed by 58 percent of voters in 2006, was declared illegal because it “undermines the Equal Protection Clause’s guarantee that all citizens ought to have equal access to the tools of political change,” Judge R. Guy Cole Jr. wrote in the majority opinion.

Additionally, the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), the group that challenged the ban, says it expects the number of Black and Latino students at universities to at least double once affirmative action is reinstituted.

Reactions to Affirmative Action in Michigan

“We are pleased that the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has made the common-sense ruling that diversity can be a part of the consideration in university admissions, state hiring and state contracting. The private sector takes affirmative steps regularly to ensure that they have hiring, promotion and contracting practices that are inclusive,” says Thomas Costello, president and CEO of the Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion.

He continues, “It is foolish to prevent the public sector from using the best practices of our most successful businesses and corporations. We hope that Michigan will again begin the judicious use of affirmative-action policies to ensure true equal access to opportunity in our state.”

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, however, has sworn to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, citing the need for merit-based admissions and a desire to uphold the fair rule of law. And Jennifer Gratz, the white plaintiff in the 2003 Supreme Court case that challenged University of Michigan undergraduate admissions policies, wrote on her Facebook wall: “The court has given me a clear mission: I must re-engage in the fight to guarantee fair and equal treatment for all. The court has no right to overturn the will of the people and decide that equality is unconstitutional.”

Read more reactions to the ruling.

What’s Affirmative Action’s Future?

The decision comes at a critical watershed for affirmative action—the U.S. Supreme Court currently is examining whether race-based college admissions are constitutional as a whole. The Fisher v. University of Texas case, which was heard in October and should be decided next year, could result in the repeal of the historic Grutter v. Bollinger decision from 2003, which upheld race was a viable factor in determining college acceptance.

Corporations who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of affirmative action in the Fisher case—and attested to the bottom-line benefits of maintaining a diverse pipeline—include several DiversityInc Top 50 companies: Aetna (No. 24), Merck & Co. (No. 16), Northrop Grumman (No. 42) and Procter & Gamble (No. 5).

For more on affirmative action, read the following:

Ask the White Guy: Racism and Affirmative Action—Why White Victims Are the Key to the Solution

Affirmative Action Benefits Whites Too … More Than You Think

Affirmative Action: Why Is Ward Connerly Wrong?

The post Affirmative Action Not Dead Yet: Appeals Court Strikes Down Michigan Ban appeared first on DiversityInc.

Question:

I would love to see your response to this article, A New Kind of Affirmative Action Can Ensure Diversity. You always have powerful, well researched insights. My thoughts are these:

• I appreciate the author’s efforts to address the reality of economic disadvantage.

• Just because racial discrimination, racial disadvantage and affirmative efforts to address those issues make the author uncomfortable, that doesn’t mean ignoring racial disadvantage and eliminating all race-aware selection processes make for good public policy.

• Today’s greatest racial disadvantages come not from the type of overt racism that is subject to legal actions and protections, but from micro-inequities, the insult of low expectations and other subtle forms of discrimination. These subtle but very damaging forces cannot be curtailed by enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, as the author suggests.

Answer:
This is an outstanding question, one I’ve been giving a lot of thought to.

I think we need to face the reality that affirmative action as we know it is going away, almost certainly with the pending Supreme Court decision. I’m writing this as a proponent of affirmative action, so bear with me.

There are legal arguments for and against affirmative action, but the emotional argument always has an influence. Since 2004, I’ve perceived a decrease in public support of affirmative action, and polls back up my perception. The Supreme Court in 2004 was arguably more liberal—but most people don’t know that the justice widely perceived as having saved affirmative action, Sandra Day O’Connor, had a horrible (from my perspective) record on decisions based on race. So as good as we thought we had it then (and it wasn’t so good), I think it’s worse now. Further, the Millennial generation is firmly against affirmative action, including well over 40 percent of Black and Latino students.

With that reality, I think those of us who see affirmative action as our chief viable solution to social injustice must adjust. We’re a business publication, so I’m going to make the case why this is a pressing business concern later in this column. But first, let’s address the problem. I have a combined total of 21 years of board experience among Bennett College (historically Black), New Jersey City University (Hispanic serving) and Rutgers University, where I chair the fundraising committee for Rutgers Future Scholars. I focus all of my board work on enabling poor students to attain the education their potential shows they can attain. I’ve endowed scholarships at all three schools and have donated roughly $750,000 since 2006. Here’s what I see:

In my opinion, today’s greatest racial discrimination is economically based. Pew Research Center analysis shows that Black and Latino households were dramatically and disproportionately clobbered in this subprime crisis and subsequent recession. Unemployment rates show the same bias. The prison-industrial complex feeds on poor people and is part of the depressive economic cycle for Blacks and Latinos. Our country imprisons people at by far the highest per-capita rate in the world; 58 percent of prisoners are Black and Latino. Our four-decade-old “war on drugs” is supported by the people who make money off it—nobody wages a war for 40 years unless they’re winning it. In my opinion, our president made a huge mistake in ending No Child Left Behind.

I’ve heard Secretary of Education Arne Duncan speak several times and he frankly makes no sense to me; it’s as if he digs up every non-fact and cliché and strings them together. (Here’s a transcript of his latest speech.) His position is passive—what we should do—as if he just arrived on the scene. The fact is that our public schools do a criminally poor job. I find it amazing to be asked to speak at dozens of economic-development events where people from cities with shrinking or stagnant economies wring their hands—yet are able to segregate their school systems into successful/white and criminally negligent/Black and Latino districts. Then they ask me for advice on how to lure companies to their employee-desert brown fields. Please.

In short, there are economic forces that benefit by crushing Black and Latino households. This is no micro-inequity, unless you would describe being sucker-punched by Sonny Liston in his prime as “subtle.”

But this is impacting more than just Black and Latino households. In today’s New York Times, there is an article about the national declining standard of living. According to the Times, “By last year, family income was 8 percent lower than it had been 11 years earlier, at its peak in 2000, according to inflation-adjusted numbers from the Census Bureau. On average in 11-year periods in the decades just after World War II, inflation-adjusted median income rose by almost 30 percent.” That’s a lot of white people being ground up by the same forces. To quote Frederick Douglass: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”

On to the compelling interest for corporate decision makers: The combination of forces behind economic discrimination is destroying this “recovery.” There are millions of jobs open—and many more millions of unemployed people who are incapable of filling these jobs because they are not prepared. The negative cycle of decreasing household wealth, incompetent schools and predation by the prison-industrial complex is attacking our country’s consumer base AND talent pool.

We must wage a war on poverty and we can’t wait for the government to lead the way. Corporations can be convinced to do what’s good for them and take the problem firmly in hand by forcing school systems to stop gerrymandering proper education standards. My experience is that progressive companies are increasingly interested in building their own pipelines, so they can convince the schools they recruit from to start using the Rutgers Future Scholars model (or something like it). The reason is simple: People are created equally, therefore talent is distributed equally, and if you subvert the potential of groups of people, companies cannot possibly recruit the best and brightest—much less expect to sell to them. The fact that racially based economic discrimination has now ensnared a growing group of white people enables us to build some force behind this effort. It’s distasteful but true—by including white people, you can disarm the bigots who have been whipping up a portion of our electorate for the past six years by appealing to overt bigotry. You also appeal to people of every group, especially the Millennial generation that is far more progressive than older generations but ironically is at the tipping point of ending affirmative action; these people grew up watching injustice on YouTube and are far better connected than my generation could ever hope to be.

Here’s your hope for the future: Undergraduates at Rutgers can apply for a for-credit course to be a mentor in the Rutgers Future Scholars program. There are 10 times the number of students (representationally white, by the way) wanting to be mentors than there are spots available—and we have 1,000 middle- and high-school students in the program to mentor.

Luke Visconti’s Ask the White Guy column is a top draw on DiversityInc.com. Visconti, the founder and CEO of DiversityInc, is a nationally recognized leader in diversity management. In his popular column, readers who ask Visconti tough questions about race/culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and age can expect smart, direct and disarmingly frank answers.

The post Ask the White Guy: Racism and Affirmative Action—Why White Victims Are the Key to the Solution appeared first on DiversityInc.

Question:
As an educated black female, how is it that I have worked alongside several whites (both male and female) in Fortune 500 companies that are my peers in the management ranks that only have obtained high-school diplomas and their salary levels and oftentimes their titles are higher than mine and all the other minority managers. Yet I, and others that look like me, are considered products of affirmative action? What kind of ‘action’ would you label that? My résumé would never have made it out of the inbox had I not have obtained at least two degrees and a substantive amount of experience in my field. I have yet to work alongside someone of color in a management position that doesn’t have at least one degree, usually they have two or more.

Who really is the recipient of affirmative action here? Perhaps we should conduct a study to see who the people at the top are, and how they got there and what credentials are in place (and I’m not taking about the weekend executive degree programs). We may find that we need a new label for that type of action! We may be surprised to find out who has historically received the perks.

Answer:
You’re absolutely right. Practically every white person in this country disproportionately benefits from “affirmative action.”

President Obama was the recipient of affirmative action. Professor Ira Katznelson wrote When Affirmative Action Was White to document how 20th-century social programs (Social Security, the GI Bill, Great Society) benefited mostly white people and were purposefully subverted to be that way by Southern legislators under the old rubric of “states rights,” which is often the last refuge of bigots. My friend, the great attorney Weldon Latham, recently told me a story about white-shoe law-firm partners who would not qualify to be recruited into their own firms if the standards were equally applied.

As president of the Anti-Slavery Society, Benjamin Franklin wrote the most elegant proposal for affirmative action that I’ve ever read. It was one-half of a page (the best ideas are often not complicated). He understood that ending slavery was not enough … it was the obligation of our society to provide for and nurture people restored to freedom. We have not followed his advice and pay the price to this day.

Ultimately, affirmative-action programs are necessary to provide access for people who were prevented access by reasons of racism. They are a benefit to our entire society because increasing wealth for underrepresented groups increases wealth for all. Here’s a quick fact: Black households have one-tenth the wealth of white households in this country. If our society caught black households up it would be the equivalent of injecting the entire GDP of Japan into our economy. Who would benefit the most from this? White people. A rising tide lifts all boats, and there are more “white boats” in the bay.

Unfortunately, this does not help you. It is my personal observation that many of the Black women executives I know are laboring at least two levels below where they should be. I suggest you consider where you’re working. There are some companies that have much better management than most. The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity is a great place to start looking.

Luke Visconti’s Ask the White Guy column is a top draw on DiversityInc.com. Visconti, the founder and CEO of DiversityInc, is a nationally recognized leader in diversity management. In his popular column, readers who ask Visconti tough questions about race/culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and age can expect smart, direct and disarmingly frank answers.

The post Affirmative Action Benefits Whites Too … More Than You Think appeared first on DiversityInc.

The lawsuit before the court on Wednesday could result in the reversal of the college’s affirmative-action admissions policies—and potentially deem all instances of race-based criterion in higher-education admissions “unconstitutional.” This would overturn the landmark Grutter v. Bollinger decision in 2003, which upheld the use of race as one of multiple factors when determining acceptance.

If Fisher Wins & Affirmative Action Ends …

Educational and civic leaders are “very concerned that a [negative] decision will impact any and all incoming students from high school or transfers,” said Ben Reese, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE). “We are looking for an admissions system that is inclusive of all the qualities that students bring, including race, not stunting the growth of community colleges and four-year schools and building an appropriate workforce.”

Collateral consequences of a Fisher win would be a narrowing of Black and Latino admissions to four-year colleges only, which would limit community-college transfers and increase pressure on smaller, two-year schools that already are strained and turning students away because of limited budgets, according to executives representing nine higher education associations.

These include: The American Association for Affirmative Action, American Council on Education, American Indian Higher Education Consortium, Association of American Medical Colleges, College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education and NADOHE.

“Too much is at stake. We need to build truly inclusive learning environments and can’t afford to go backward at this point,” they said.

The Case

Abigail Fisher, a white high-school student, filed the lawsuit in 2008 after she was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin, which she claims was unequal treatment because of reverse discrimination and, therefore, a violation of the14th Amendment. Project on Fair Representation, a legal-defense foundation, is representing Fisher. Watch this organization’s video on the case below.

Learn more about the case and affirmative action by watching the video above, then read these articles:

Is Affirmative Action Over?

Affirmative Action Foe Ward Connerly Comments at the DiversityInc Conference

Why We Still Need Affirmative Action

Talent Development Creates Ability for INROADS Students to Succeed

Corporate Diversity: Outreach With Rutgers Future Scholars Enhances Talent Pipelines

The post Affirmative Action: What If the Supreme Court Ends It? appeared first on DiversityInc.

DiversityInc’s Luke Visconti was the keynote speaker at The Skanner Foundation’s 21st annual Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast in Portland, Ore. More than 1,200 people attended:

What would King say?

Bernie Foster built a bridge by asking me to speak at this event–a white publisher invited by a black publisher to speak to an audience about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It’s quite an honor.

Bernie and I met at another event where I was discussing “the business case for diversity.” That the business case for diversity is a reality and not just a theory is directly due to Dr. King and the civil-rights era.

The business case for diversity is based on two factors: changing demographics and corresponding changes in economic power.

In Dr. King’s time, there were roughly nine white people for every one person of color in our country. Immigration had ended in the late 1920s and would not resume until the mid-1960s, so our racial demographics were relatively stable. African Americans were our largest demographic of people of color, and access to college and corporate America did not exist for them. Most African Americans did not even have the right to vote.

Shifting Demographics

Today we live in an era of more immigration per capita than any time in American history. For Americans under 40 years old, there are less than 1.5 white people for every person of color. White people will probably be the minority by 2040.

People of color are increasing educational attainment more quickly than their rise as a percent in our population. Households of color are increasing their household income at more than double the rate of white households–and have been doing so since 1990.

In essence, people of color are our country’s engine of growth. When you factor demographic changes with household-income changes, people of color have an eightfold higher growth rate than white people.

This has caused a group of companies to take notice and become more progressive. My company runs a competition once a year to determine The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity. This year more than 600 companies asked for a survey, and we expect over 350 to compete–participation is up over 100 percent from three years ago.

We ask over 230 questions on four areas: CEO Commitment, Human Capital, Supplier Diversity and Corporate Communications. Just so you know, there is no connection between our list and business conducted with my company. The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies are very different than typical companies. For example:

• Although they employ 5 percent of the work force, they employ 17 percent of college-educated people of color
• They hire 43 percent people of color even though the U.S. work force is only 28 percent people of color
• 7.5 percent of their procurement budget is spent with minority- and women’s-business enterprises. The national average is 2 percent.

And perhaps the most important business indicator, the DiversityInc Top 50, expressed as a stock index, outperforms the DJIA, Nasdaq and S&P 500.

What this tells you is not that diversity is driving stock price, but that diversity is a core management practice of superior companies. It also tells you that diversity brings sustainability to a company. The numbers show that companies which have diversity in their DNA will dominate competitors which do not.

Despite the compelling business case, 80 percent of the Fortune 1000 does not practice diversity management. By diversity management, I mean disciplined, measured, accountable management–not just Mexican food in the cafeteria on May 5.

Why the lack of attention? Most corporations are run by straight, able-bodied white men. The luxury of being in the majority culture is never having to think about race.

Now that doesn’t make all white people bad. Some of my best friends are white and they’re OK. But being in the majority makes most white people oblivious, and we miss a lot of opportunities because of that. For example, the median worth of a black household is one-tenth that of a white household, and at the current rate of closure, it will take 1000 years for black households to catch up.

However, if you caught black household wealth up to the median of white households today, it would be like injecting the entire gross domestic product of Japan into our economy–over 4 trillion dollars. How many houses, office buildings, schools, cars, plasma TVs would we have to build with all that new capital in our economy?

So, who is being hurt most by this kind of a program not being implemented at once? White people. Why? There’s more of us.

If the facts are so clear, why are a minority of companies practicing diversity management? Why isn’t there an emergency program to enable black households to build wealth?

One reason is that we all have counter-productive human tendencies, like the feeling that if another group gets something, we’ll lose something–this is called the zero-sum argument. It works when we’re all hunting antelope in the jungle with spears. If the other tribe gets the antelope, our tribe goes hungry. However, zero-sum doesn’t work in an economic model as you can see with just this one household-wealth example.

There’s another reason for a lack of progress: People will do a lot to avoid feeling guilty. To look at our society and effect programs to build an equitable situation would cause us white people to really look at ourselves more clearly. It’s far easier to blame the victim.

But let’s look more closely at the cost of disparities. If you believe that all people are created equally, then you have to assume that talent is also distributed equally. Unfortunately, we can tell by graduation rates that a vastly disproportionate percent of the black and brown talent in this country is dashed on the rocks of a poorly funded public-school system. This can be fixed, but it would require a huge commitment of resources.

In his August 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King spoke of our country’s obligation to live up to the promises made by our founders–that “black men as well as white men would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’”

He spoke of a check that had been returned marked “insufficient funds.” He did that before he got to the often-taken-out-of-context parts like “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The “I Have a Dream” speech isn’t about being colorblind; it’s about the obligation that had to be paid before our society could move forward together.

The check still hasn’t cleared. Have we cashed other checks? Is it worth it to pay this long overdue bill, or should we continue to ignore the knocking at the door? Let’s look to history.

Following World War II and Korea, millions of veterans went to college for free on the GI Bill. Due to the implementation of this program, white veterans disproportionately benefited, so let’s focus on white people. Before WWII, less than 7 percent of white people attended college. Today, 44 percent of white people attend college. Our country’s workers went from industrial and agrarian employment to knowledge-worker employment. The corresponding generation of wealth from white people working to the true extent of their potential was unprecedented in human history.

I think you can make the case that the $4 trillion in missing black household wealth is a drop in the bucket compared to what we’re sacrificing to maintain a society of “them” and “us.”

This is where it gets scary for our country.

White people will be the minority by 2040 in this country; however, 75 percent of the planet is already not white. The elimination of information barriers–most importantly the Internet–has liberated the talents of billions of people world wide. The Chinese now have as many people on the Internet as we have citizens–and they are building colleges faster than any country on the planet. People in India can call the U.S. for less money than it costs for us to call them.

Talent can now flow from where it is to where it is best treated. There are six billion people on the planet and only 300 million Americans. Unleashing the talent of formerly oppressed Americans has made our market robust. As the world’s formerly oppressed people have been able to exercise the talent they were born with, the global economy is surging. Investors in this country have already reacted. According to the current issue of Barron’s magazine, an amazing 90 percent of inflows to mutual funds went offshore in 2006.

By non-violent protest, Dr. King forced our federal government to action in the 1960s. I don’t think you can say that Washington is any more visionary today. Last June, my magazine ran a story in our Top 50 Companies for Diversity issue titled “The Worst Company for Diversity? The United States Senate,” which described the almost total lack of diversity in key senate staff positions. In that article we ran a photograph of the Alito hearings. Out of roughly 300 people in the room, there wasn’t a single black person. Not one.

In this environment of malignant neglect, there is a concerted effort in this country to enter a new era of oppression.

Bigots like Linda Chavez and Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity along with sad souls like Ward Connerly are actively working against affirmative action and diversity. They say we should be “colorblind”–that all things are equal and affirmative action is wrong. They have worked to end affirmative action in California, Texas and Florida and most recently in Michigan, where the recently passed “Civil Rights” initiative eliminated affirmative action.

Their arguments disregard the lasting effects of racism and ignore the obvious disparities in our society. The fact is that we don’t have a colorblind society. It takes the blinders of the majority or the deception of evil people to not deal with the obvious:

• A colorblind society would not have more segregation in schools today than ever before in our history.

• A colorblind society wouldn’t foster a prison industrial complex and incarcerate people disproportionately by race–and have highest incarceration rate per thousand in the world, even surpassing the former record in the Soviet Union.

• A colorblind society would have rebuilt New Orleans by now.

• A colorblind society would understand that not having universal healthcare is the equivalent of wealth redistribution–from poor to wealthy.

• A colorblind society would have 50 percent women senators and roughly 28 percent senators who are people of color.

• A colorblind society would have equal rights for both straight people and gay people.

• A colorblind society would keep track of Iraqi civilian deaths as carefully as we’ve tracked our own soldiers’ deaths.

• A colorblind society with the mightiest military in human history wouldn’t stand by as 2 million people are herded to their execution in Darfur.

• A colorblind society would understand that “unalienable rights” were not limited in our Constitution only for those with the right documents.

• A colorblind society would not allow admissions to public colleges to be determined by tests which have different results by race, like the SATs.

• A colorblind society will have an equal chance of a white publisher inviting a black publisher to speak about America.

Ward Connerly and Linda Chavez are well funded and working nationwide. They have attacked affirmative action at the state level and have attacked diversity programs at the corporate and university levels. Be aware. Dr. King taught us that we have the obligation to forthrightly address the practices that preserve racism. For more on affirmative action, read “Why We Still Need Affirmative Action.”

We also have the obligation to act.

Vote your ethics. Most eligible people of color are either not registered or do not vote. The reality is that your elected officials look at who votes and portion their attention accordingly.

Be careful about who you do business with and work for. Reward companies that share your vision.

Become financially literate. Build your family wealth through homeownership.

Read other accounts on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Before MLK, None of My Accomplishments Would Have Been Possible
DiversityInc’s Denyse Leslie, senior vice president of consulting, draws a parallel between Dr. King’s firsts (first arrest, first book published, first Black man to win the Nobel Peace Prize) and the firsts of Blacks still alive (or recently deceased) as they live out Dr. King’s vision.

Taking Risks for Your Brothers: The Power of Martin Luther King’s Words
Human-rights activist Raymond Brown learned about the need for humanity from Dr. King.

Civil-Rights Progress: Helping LGBT Youth
GLSEN’s Executive Director Dr. Eliza Byard notes how Dr. King’s message that Black people would eventually reach the promised land is a reminder today that progress, no matter how slow, is crucial.

How Has Dr. King’s Legacy Changed Lives?
While Hurricane Irene hit during the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial dedication, R. Fenimore Fisher reflected on how Dr. King’s actions changed the law that changed society.

The post What Dr. King Really Meant: The Obligation That Benefits Everyone appeared first on DiversityInc.

Comment:
What I am told in office settings all the time is, “But you’re DIFFERENT.” It goes like this:

At a meeting we’re debating how to raise the level of teaching standards, and someone says everyone starts from how they were raised and taught themselves. I say that my teaching approach has little to do with those, but is informed by my view of the world, my studies, and my desire to do better for future generations. Then someone says that, referring to our majority teachers being Black, that people can’t be challenged/expected to change an attitude (ie their philosophical approach to teaching kids)when their culture and life experience come from a certain perspective. That’s when I usually remind them that I too am Black, the only one in my family with a college degree, and that my excellent university education was not due to having had significantly more money than most of the community they are speaking about, namely poor/working class Black folks (which is my background as well.)

Then it is a race to see who’ll jump in first with, “But you’re DIFFERENT.”

They turn cause and effect around backwards. People are so used to thinking that higher education comes only from having financial access that they then say, “Oh, you’ve had THAT kind of education, so you must have had middle class roots, unlike your work peers.”

That, or they chalk it up to their unspoken assumption: “must have been some good Affirmative Action…”

Answer:
I would argue that you ARE different. You have more grit than the average person–regardless of race. A lower socioeconomic background means you live in the lower rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy much more often than the typical middle-class person. Add our society’s bigotry to that and you have the perfect mix of circumstances to destroy a person of average perseverance. I’m sure you could tell us of many friends who you felt were as smart as you who simply didn’t make it because they just couldn’t overcome one catastrophe or another that typically befalls poorer people much more often than wealthy people.

Your e-mail dovetailed into my thoughts about Ward Connerly’s recent editorial where he railed against University of California (UC) admissions policies that “discriminate” against Asians. Deceptively, Ward Connerly uses a comment from an unnamed “UC administrator” (who must have eaten paint chips as a child) that “Asians are too dull–they study, study, study” to argue against a program to balance admissions to fit the demographics of the state. It’s not about Asians, it’s really about his life’s work; he and Linda Chavez are the two public faces of the wealthy people who stealthily fund the anti-affirmative action movement.

Connerly takes that “UC administrator’s” foolish words and builds a whole case on it (as if that fool was speaking for all UC administrators).

Ultimately, it is the University of California’s obligation–and the obligation of EVERY publicly funded school (or private school that accepts any tax breaks, including property tax exemptions)–to serve the people EQUALLY. Where society has failed public education, which is sharply divided by socioeconomic level, it is the public school of higher education’s OBLIGATION to force a solution. This isn’t “social engineering” as Connerly calls it; it’s how our country works.

Our government, which derives its power from “the people,” does not serve “we the people” (read the preamble of the Constitution) by maintaining an apartheid education system. Education quality in this country is directly relative to relative wealth. Wealth is primarily defined around racial lines.

Here’s where every American has to answer a question: “Do you believe people are created equally?”

If you do, then we have to realize that we have a fundamental problem: We’re not treating people equally. Affirmative action is just a stop-gap measure to attempt to overcome disparities in how our country allocates the basic building block of governmental service: education.

This relatively new affirmative action is the inverse of the traditional affirmative action that has been practiced since the start of our country. From Bushrod Washington (George’s nephew) to our last president, people have been given special access to the best opportunities based on who they are, not how talented or accomplished they are. Many of the problems our country have been the work of middling talented sons and daughters of very wealthy people who were given special access despite having no outside strife or disadvantage in their lives. Good affirmative action attempts to overcome the bias in our society by providing access to groups of people who are FORMALLY prevented from having equal access.

Yes, FORMALLY. The disaster that is the public school system in Newark would not be tolerated for five minutes where I grew up (eight miles from Newark). The parents of my hometown would run the administrators AND the unions out of town on a rail. The difference? The parents of my hometown are relatively wealthy. They have access to information and almost all of them were educated in far better school systems than the parents in Newark. We may argue on how accountable you can hold the parent-victims of a bad school system, but only bigots turn their back on the Black and Latino child victims of the government-run child abuse that’s occurring daily in Newark. (Click here to read about the DiversityInc Foundation.) I agree with Attorney General Holder: We are cowards when it comes to discussing race.

I will cut the Newark school system a little slack by pointing out that it’s only logical that public schools are open 365 days a year in poor neighborhoods–and that they serve three hot meals a day (even to parents). This investment would likely have an enormous return, probably far greater than the 8-to-1 return on investment for the GI Bill (which gave returning World War II and Korean War veterans free college educations).

You may flinch at this, but I think No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is the first step on a path to enforce standards of performance for schools that are independent of socioeconomic class. Where NCLB failed is that it needed to provide funding to bring promising/performing schools up to commensurate infrastructure and teacher-quality standards.

Connerly and his spiritual sister Linda Chavez provide arguments designed to whip up hate in ignorant people. They enable people to say “YEAH, it’s THEIR problem.” Our nation became strong by enabling many people to achieve. The better we enable, the stronger we will be–because it’s OUR problem when talent cannot reach its potential. It’s that simple.

The post Affirmative Action: Why Is Ward Connerly Wrong? appeared first on DiversityInc.

Question:
By your refusal to accept other points of view on the subject of affirmative action, you fit the dictionary definition of a bigot yourself! 

Is discrimination of any kind wrong? I say it is. Affirmative action IS a form of discrimination, and therefore, in my opinion, it is wrong. How does discrimination become right in your defense of affirmative action?

Answer:
The American Heritage Dictionary definition of a bigot is: “One who is strongly partial to one’s own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.”

I’m white and I am completely tolerant of other groups, religions, races and politics, unless those groups work against human rights. I am tolerant of Roger Clegg and Ward Connerly to the point of allowing them to air their views in an issue of DiversityInc magazine. I don’t agree with them and will also include differing opinions, including my own.

I am indeed not tolerant of groups like neo-Nazis–but not to the point of denying anyone their constitutional rights.

You are welcome to your opinion, but it doesn’t change the fact that people suffer because of their “religion, race, or politics.” Although great strides have been made, discrimination is alive and well in the United States today and the aftereffects of virulent, violent and legislated racism persist and can be measured. For example, black households currently have one-tenth the wealth of white households, Barack Obama is only the third black senator since Reconstruction (more than 100 years ago), there are not 50 percent women senators, at least 30 percent of work-capable college-educated people with disabilities are unemployed, etc.

In my opinion, affirmative action does not discriminate, it provides access. I think it’s detrimental to our society to deny Americans equal access (based on a factor like race) to education and capital that will allow them to develop to their true human potential. It is not their fault, nor mine, that they and their ancestors were discriminated against, but I feel it is my responsibility to support affirmative action to correct the past injustices and provide a level playing field so the best talent wins. This must be a proactive program.

Now I know the thought on many people’s minds is that it is illegal to discriminate and therefore affirmative action is not needed. That opinion brings up a deep and potentially disturbing question: Are people created equal or NOT created equal?

If you feel that people ARE created equal, then, logically, talent is equally distributed too. I believe this–I also believe that the evidence of representation of wealth and power in our country demonstrates something went wrong along lines of race, gender, orientation, disability and age. I believe that our country is best served by enabling the best talent and making sure it has access to where it will best serve and flourish.

That is affirmative action. You can narrowly define it as “discrimination” and attack it, which is what bigot Roger Clegg does, but I think it’s anti-American to deny people the right to exist as equals. I think it’s simply not in our best interest. Sometimes you have to help a person become an equal. This raises the stature of both the helper and the helped and, in the end, our society.

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Question:
Oprah & Cosby: donor fatigue. Me: taxpayer fatigue. My two Asian, college daughters: overrepresented minority fatigue. “The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there. If you ask the (inner-city?) kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers.” Even old ditzy-flitzy weathervane Supreme Court Justice Sandy Day O’Connor put a 25-year limit on her last opinion in favor of affirmative action. White Guy, do you think women and minorities will be appreciably different by 2028, so that they won’t “need” free stuff for their sex and/or skin color?

Answer:
If you believe all people are created equal, then the timeline to end affirmative action is easy to determine: We can end affirmative action when household income is statistically within one standard deviation for all races.

This is a simple and fair measure of the equity in our society. It will take some work to make this happen, however it is the only way for our country to truly show that we have the strength of our own convictions. If you do the math, you can tell that whatever investment we need to make will be miniscule compared with the benefit our entire economy will reap. For example, if black households had the same median wealth of white households, it would be equivalent to injecting the entire GDP of Japan into our economy—every year.

Please understand that this isn’t wealth redistribution. This is simply removing the impediments to talent development. There are several precedents for societal change on this scale. For example, the G.I. Bill gave education to veterans returning from World War II and Korea. This democratized higher education. Our country went from an industrial/agrarian society to a knowledge-worker society in one generation. The resulting creation of wealth due to the more effective use of human capital in this country was unprecedented in human history.

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Question:
I am a college biology professor who specializes in University Affirmative Action Programs. It is clear that human races are genetically different and have genetically adapted to where they evolved; these are scientific facts and are not debatable. For examples, because of body form and fat distribution, Eskamoes [sic] are better adapted for cold. The Thai, who evolved in hot & humid tropical forests, are superior thermal-coolers. Whites better absorb sunlight and make Vitamin D, whereas dark-skinned people are superior at blocking harmful UV radiation in the tropics. Tropical races have superior genetics for fighting malaria–for example, there are at least 7 different gene-based anti-malaria defenses among different populations in Papua New Guinea. I could list nearly 100 gene-based adaptations of specific human populations.

The point is that the races are not equal. For the most part, each is superior in their native environment. For example, white missionaries died like flies in Papua New Guinea due to inferior genes for fighting tropical diseases, whereas NA Indians died from lack of genes to fight European diseases.

Africans are generally better athletes than whites, but different African populations are better at different sports. Eastern Africans, who evolved in hot dry grasslands where long-distance walking was essential, are superior marathon runners. West Africans are the world’s best sprinters and jumpers.

Unfortunately, 100 years of IQ studies suggest that Jews, Europeans and Northeast Asians have superior IQ. The Basque people also apparently have a high IQ. In contrast, hundreds of IQ tests have suggested that Africans are at least one Standard Deviation lower than Europeans in IQ.

During 200,000 years of evolution, virtually no African peoples moved beyond the Stone Age, devised a written language, learned to work stone or metal to any extent, or invented the wheel. Today, despite 200 years of contact with the Europeans, there is not a single “working” sub-Sahara country. Also everywhere Africans have settled, be it Brazil, Haiti or Sweden, they remain at the bottom of society and technical accomplishment. African societies tend to be brutal and backwards, and with a low standard of living.

Having superior cold or hot tolerance or superior sun block or malaria-fighting ability or better athleticism was very important 1,000 years ago. But in today’s complicated technical civilizations, the most important factor for success is intelligence.

I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just trying to understand why the hundreds of black students who have come through my AA programs have generally not measured up to the average intelligence levels of white, Jewish and Asian students. What if, because of genes, the Eskimo will never be heat-tolerant, the Thai will never be cold-adapted, whites and Chinese will generally never be great long-distance runners or basketball players? And what if because of genes, blacks generally do not have equal intelligence to whites and Asians? A million years of Head Start and AA will not change that. Please send me your thoughts.

Answer:
Science has made tremendous advances in understanding genetics, especially over the past five years. The mapping of the human genome has proven that the outward, physical manifestations of race are determined by a very small number of genes (less than 6 percent). Genetic studies have also proved that there are no significant differences between human beings and that there is only one species of human. The concept of race has been judged to be biologically meaningless and the American Anthropological Association also rejects the concept of race.

External differences in human beings can be traced to geographic isolation after human beings migrated from Africa. This has been documented by the National Geographic Genographic Project. We are all of African decent.

What’s left to your e-mail is the social construct of race. Your eugenic observations on IQ make a scientifically invalid leap from culture to genetics to intelligence. On top of this, your reliance on a standardized test to determine intelligence is also bankrupt. We have written about standardized tests in the magazine and will have further articles in 2007. Tests don’t judge intelligence, and many factors impact test scores, notably economic level. That poverty can be traced to race in our country is the result of bigotry and racism, not genetics.

As far as your comments about Africa, you can connect almost all of the current problems in Africa to colonialism. The disgusting behavior of “civilized” European nations has not been proactively redressed to this day. It is a system maintained to extract raw materials without having to pay a fair price for them.

It’s sad to say that we human beings share a tendency to oppress. It is a common feeling to think that holding one group back elevates another group–but it doesn’t work that way in an economic model, noted by no less than George Washington, who observed that an acre of land was less expensive in Virginia than an acre of land in Pennsylvania–despite the quality of the Virginia land being superior. His conclusion, borne out by economists, was that slavery depressed value and freedom elevated it. In my opinion, science has caught up to economics. Now it’s a matter of we humans coming to grips with our own self-destructive behavior.

In closing, I have to note that I find it impossible to believe that a biology professor at a large public university would be so profoundly ignorant of the current state of genetic research and opinion. Your e-mail reflects a desire to be a bigot.

I’m sorry for your students. That you are involved with affirmative-action programs turns my stomach. You should consider yourself fortunate that you do not work for either of the two schools I am a board member of.

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