Mary Sue Coleman please obey the law and the will of the people

U of M MUST ENTER THE RACE FREE ZONE.

As a Master of Arts from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, I call upon the University president Mary Sue Coleman to cease her attempts to use the courts to defy the clear mandate delivered when voters declared by 58-42% that the time for race and gender preferences in Michigan is finally at an end. With the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, all state-college students in Michigan will know they earned their diplomas free and clear.

As a State of Michigan taxpayer, I demand that Coleman stop using the taxpayers’ money to defy the taxpayers’ will. That is not her money to use for her favorite political cause. It is our money, to be used to educate our young citizens. If she wants to have a lawsuit, she should pay for it herself. Otherwise, Governor Granholm should fire her for gross misconduct in the form of gross misuse of the people’s resources.

As a parent of a multi-race, multi-gender family, with two children in state-funded colleges, I call upon all state institutions to stop picking between our children by race and gender, and value them instead by personal credentials and effort.

As the granddaughter of poor immigrants, I call upon the University of Michigan to end its “Legacy” program, giving special favors to the children of alumni. U of M is supported by all Michigan taxpayers, including my parents and grandparents, who never went to college.

As an American, I call upon America to judge each individual only by merit, personal drive, and intellectual energy. Celebrate freedom, for with the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, we are one giant leap closer to it.

Diane Carey
RaceFreeZone.com

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Preferences forever? Mary Sue Coleman seems to want to only selectively obey the will of the people who pay her undeserved immense salary.

JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL
Preferences Forever? The University of Michigan's president does her best George Wallace impersonation. Monday, November 20, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Michigan voters struck a blow for equality this month, when 58% of them approved an amendment to the state constitution banning racial discrimination in public universities and contracting. Almost identical measures have previously passed by similar majorities in California and Washington state. That means the original meaning of the 1964 Civil Rights Act--that racial discrimination of any kind is illegal--has won reaffirmation in three liberal states, none of which have voted for a Republican for president since 1988. Supporters now plan to carry the fight to other states.
From the outraged cries of affirmative action diehards, you would think the dark night of fascism was descending with the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. Mary Sue Coleman is president of the University of Michigan, which has already spent millions of taxpayers' dollars defending its racial preferences in courts. She addressed what Tom Bray of the Detroit News called "a howling mob of hundreds of student and faculty protestors" last week. "Diversity matters at Michigan," she declared. "It matters today, and it will matter tomorrow." Echoes of George Wallace, who in 1963 declared from the steps of Alabama's Capitol: "I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
Ms. Coleman isn't the only Michigan official to employ Wallace-style rhetoric against MCRI. Detroit's Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick told a fundraiser last April that the measure would usher in an era of racial prejudice. "Bring it on!" he bellowed. "We will affirm to the world that affirmative action will be here today, it will be here tomorrow, and there will be affirmative action in the state forever."
Another leader in Michigan's massive resistance is Karen Moss, the executive director of the state ACLU. "I do think it's necessary for the courts to slow this thing down and . . . interpret some of the language," she told the Washington Post. That "thing" is an amendment that simply states: "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting." As the blog Discriminations.us notes, "What part of that language does the ACLU find vague or unclear and in need of "interpretation'?"

Let's be clear what is really at stake here. Racial preferences were intended to help disadvantaged minorities, but they have turned into a spoils system for the privileged. "Most go to children of powerful politicians, civil-rights activists, and other relatively well-off blacks and Hispanics," notes Stuart Taylor of National Journal. "This does nothing for the people most in need of help, who lack the minimal qualifications to get into the game."
School choice and other dramatic efforts to improve the quality of K-12 education would do far more to improve the chances of minorities entering and finishing college than any racial set-asides. Indeed, school choice would represent genuine "affirmative action" in favor of millions of disadvantaged kids trapped in failing schools.
Despite all the demagoguery and misrepresentations hurled at the MCRI, a CNN exit poll of 1,955 Michigan voters showed that the measure had widespread appeal across many demographic groups. A majority of both sexes voted for MCRI, as did 40% of self-described liberals and Democrats. Among nonwhite voters, 30% of men and 18% of women voted "yes."
The public sentiment against racial preferences is in accord with the overwhelming belief of the lawmakers who passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They thought they were ending segregation, not sanctioning new race-conscious violations of the Constitution. But it didn't take long for activist courts and bureaucrats to claim the act actually authorized the creation of preference programs.
In recent years, the courts have been slowly inching back towards a belief that the legitimate quest for diversity does not justify any and all race-conscious means to achieve it. In 2003 Jennifer Gratz, a young white woman denied admission as an undergraduate to the University of Michigan, won her case before the Supreme Court. By a vote of 6-3, the high court held that the school's undergraduate college had unconstitutionally awarded applicants a set number of points solely for not being white.
On the same day, however, the court ruled 5-4 against Barbara Grutter's suit against the University of Michigan's law school. The court decided that the law school used race as only one factor among many and upheld the view of the late Justice Lewis Powell, who held in the 1978 Bakke case that race could be used to achieve "diversity" in higher education.
Justice Sandra O'Connor, who sided with Ms. Gratz but wrote the opinion in Grutter, issued some cautionary language that supporters of affirmative action should heed: "The court expects that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." After noting that institutions of higher education in California and Washington were pursuing alternatives to racial preferences, she urged that "universities in other states should draw on the most promising aspects of these race-neutral alternatives as they develop." Just last week, the now-retired Justice O'Connor was asked her opinion of MCRI's approval. She replied that it was "entirely within the right and privilege of voters" to enact a ban on racial preferences.

The blind anger that supporters of racial preferences have shown towards efforts at their reform betrays a lack of imagination. Ms. Gratz, who won her Supreme Court case against the University of Michigan and spearheaded this year's effort to ban quotas in that state, says she would be happy to explore alternatives if the opponents would sit down with her. She believes universities could look to socioeconomic factors rather than racial ones when considering applicants. Economic elements "should be taken into account, regardless of your skin color," she says.
Ms. Gratz is showing great forbearance in holding out an olive branch to her opponents. Just last June Ms. Gratz filed a report with Detroit police accusing Luke Massie, national chairman of the activist group By Any Means Necessary, of displaying a knife during a heated confrontation outside a state civil rights meeting. "It was one of several attempts to either intimidate me or attack my character," she said yesterday in an interview after a speech she gave at the National Association of Scholars meeting in Boston. She said Mr. Massie had a knife in his right pants pocket and toyed with it, pulling it halfway out of his pants but not drawing its blade. Mr. Massie denies the allegation.
What isn't in dispute is that supporters of racial preferences sometimes engage in behavior that resembles the "massive resistance" campaign that tried to preserve segregation in the South, and even led some counties to close their public schools rather than allow integration. Some supporters of preference programs in Michigan are talking about lowering state university admission standards dramatically in hopes that the university will then accept what, in their view, is the proper number of minority students.
Earlier this year, some 250 high school students staged a near riot at a hearing of the state's Board of Canvassers, which was charged with determining whether the initiative qualified for the ballot. The board's four commissioners were preparing to vote when members of Mr. Massie's group began yelling, "They say Jim Crow. We say hell no." Some 50 students began marching on the board, knocking over a table before Lansing police could stop them. Other protesters began stomping their feet, with one yelling at Paul Mitchell, an African-American commissioner, "Be a black man about this, please!"
The board adjourned for two hours only to be faced with more catcalls when they reconvened. In the end, two Republican appointees voted to place the measure on the ballot, but Mr. Mitchell voted "no," and Doyle O'Connor, the other Democratic appointee, refused to vote. Three votes were needed for the measure to secure ballot access. Eventually an appellate court had to finally order the board to do its sworn duty.

We've come a long way since 1964, when the late civil rights hero Hubert Humphrey stood on the Senate floor and told his colleagues that if the civil rights bill contained "any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there."
Four decades later, supporters of racial preferences imposed by government agencies are blocking legal efforts to establish the color-blind society that Martin Luther King envisioned. Dr. King's dream is alive in Michigan, and in other states, but a large number of people seem interested in stirring up a nightmare of massive resistance. Such efforts are likely not only to only fail, but to harden the public's opposition to divisive racial quotas.

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La Shawn Barber of Townhall.com on the MCRI

Race preferences defeated in Michigan By La Shawn BarberTuesday, November 14, 2006
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If you thought the turbulent Civil Rights Movement – culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – ended skin color discrimination, you were mistaken.
Half a century ago, America faced a moral and legal struggle to end government-mandated preferential treatment based on race. Half a century later, America faces a moral and legal struggle to end government-mandated preferential treatment based on race.
Rev. Al Sharpton gives the keynote speech to the Yale Political Union on affirmative action, at Yale, in New Haven, Conn., Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2006. Sharpton vigorously defended affirmative action and criticized conservatives who seek to ban the use of race and gender preferences in a speech that opened debate on the topic at the Yale Political Union. (AP Photo/Douglas Healey)
Related Audio:
Michigan voters opposed affirmative action
Our government still treats people differently based on the color of their skin. This time around, minorities (Asians excluded) benefit from unconstitutional race-based programs. So-called equal opportunity policies in federal, state, and local agencies across the country are nothing more than thinly veiled race preferences.
In the last 10 years, however, at least three states have done away with discriminatory programs. In 1996, Californians voted YES on Proposition 209, which amended the state constitution to bar public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin by 54 percent. In 1998, voters in Washington State passed a similar measure by 58 percent.
On November 7, 2006, 58 percent of voters in Michigan said YES to Proposal 2, which bars the state from treating its citizens differently based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.
Groups like the hilariously named Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) tried to defeat the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) every step of the way.
Two years ago, BAMN and other groups challenged the legality of the petition to get MCRI on the ballot. A Michigan circuit court ruled that the petition language was misleading and should not have been approved, but a Court of Appeals panel disagreed, unanimously affirming the legality of the petition language. The case went to the Michigan Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. As a result, MCRI appeared on the ballot as Proposal 2, and the people of Michigan decided that government-backed discrimination had seen its final days.
Some were shocked, of course, including University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman. In a meandering post-election speech, she expressed disappointment that voters rejected the government’s use of race preferences and vowed not to allow California’s “failed experiment that has dramatically weakened the diversity of the state’s most selective universities” to “take seed here at Michigan.”
This woman, a state employee at a state institution subject to the will of the people of the state, is barking mad and ill-informed.
Regarding California’s “failed experiment,” minority enrollment and graduation rates have improved since that state banned race preferences. Eryn Hadley of the Pacific Legal Foundation found that the black graduation rate of the freshman class entering UC Berkley in fall 1998 – post-Proposition 209 – increased 6.5 percent. At UC San Diego, the average freshman GPAs for minorities “all but converged with the GPAs of white and Asian students, just one year after Proposition 209 was implemented.” See Did the Sky Really Fall?
In other words, when admission is based on academic qualifications rather than skin color, Hadley contends, black students are capable of competing with whites and Asians.
Skin-color obsessed, race-baiting, and will of the people-hating folks like Coleman couldn’t care less if black admittees are academically underqualified or unprepared to do the work. As long as minority admission rates are impressive on paper (Asians excluded) and brown faces adorn the university’s web sites and admissions brochures, liberals get to feel good about themselves.
And America’s moral and legal struggle continues…
La Shawn Barber is a freelance writer and Townhall.com book reviewer who blogs at http://www.lashawnbarber.com/.
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Some Very Perceptive Post Election Analysis: Read this.

Learning from the MCRI

by Roger Clegg, published on NRO.com, National Review on line

Five comments in light of another vote to end racial preferences.By Roger Clegg
A few brief observations regarding the passage this week of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which bans discrimination and preferences by state government for the purposes of education, employment, and contracting:

1. Preferences of this sort are very unpopular. How unpopular? Well, they were banned by a margin of 58-42 percent of the popular vote; in a blue state; in a Democratic year; with opponents vastly outspending the supporters; and the former calling the latter racists and sexists. The voters approved the amendment over the well-publicized objections of the corporate establishment, and the political establishment (Democratic and Republican alike), and the media establishment, and the civil rights establishment, and the labor unions, and even the clergy. And this success follows that of identical bans — also by decisive margins — in two other blue states (California and Washington) in two other Democratic years (1996 and 1998).So, pretty unpopular.

2. The political significance of the vote is twofold.First, it makes it likely that other states will enact similar referenda. Ward Connerly, who, along with Jennifer Gratz, ran the Michigan campaign, seems ready to make it four for four (he also ran the successful campaigns in California and Washington).Second, it makes it more likely that Republicans nationally will rethink their stupid decision not to aggressively oppose preferences, and maybe even that Democrats will rethink their demagogic decision to embrace them.

3. The legal significance of the vote is also twofold.First, the Supreme Court does to an extent follow “th’ illiction returns.” Specifically, those justices who worry about establishment disapproval if they do the (legally) right thing and strike down racial preferences may be reassured if the public, at least, has provided them some political cover.Second, as more and more universities stop using racial-admission preferences, it becomes harder and harder for the remaining schools to insist that one simply cannot run a decent university without them.Consider: The University of California public system of higher education — probably the nation’s best — has not used preferences for ten years now. The state of Washington’s public universities have not used them since 1998. Florida abandoned its system of preferences in 1999. Texas used no preferences between 1996 and 2004. The University of Georgia, too, went without preferences for a time, in the early 2000s. And now we add another highly regarded state system — Michigan’s — to the mix. Finally, bear in mind that most schools have never used racial preferences, because they just aren’t that selective. None of these schools is collapsing under the weight of nondiscrimination.“How essential, then, can preferences be?,” the Supreme Court will eventually ask. There will be no persuasive answer.

4. And, when you think about it, how can an increasingly multi-racial and multi-ethnic America survive in the 21st century with a system of state-imposed racial and ethnic preferences? How will we decide which groups are to be preferred and which ones discriminated against, and how will we define and police membership in the various groups? This madness simply must stop.

5. Ward Connerly and Jennifer Gratz are national treasures.— Roger Clegg is president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which last month published three studies demonstrating the heavy weight being given to race and ethnicity by the University of Michigan in its undergraduate, law, and medical school admissions.

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We won. Now look at the opposition to civil rights for everyone in the light of day.

All of the people of Michigan have won an increase in their civil rights by voting to restore America's constitutional values. This was achieved by what the philosophers of the enlightenment, whose works influenced and guided men such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, called the genius of the people.

The campaign against the MCRI was despicable and directed by white and black elites anxious to preserve their control over complacent black voters. Blinded by their fear of losing power they ignored the facts and sowed fears of illogical consequences. The politicians of both major political parties rejected the expansion of civil rights and adopted fear as their reason for doing so. The idiotic Republican candidate talked about "unintended consequences," and the clueless Democrat incumbent spoke of "consequences." The Republican actually lost the election on this issue, because by embracing the MCRI he would have won.

I, for one, will now stop using hyphens to describe human beings as divided into groups for political purposes especially tribal, religious, or skin-tone groups. In fact I will never again use a hyphen to describe a human being's politics. I start off by officially consigingn so-called descriptive, but actually intended to be divisive, words such as African-American, Black, Negro, and colored to the garbage dump of history, because they are used up and cannot be recycled for any good purpose.

Welcome to the first morning of a Michigan where all people are created equal without the need for hyphens.

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The Wall Street Journal has the penultimate word on the MCRI. The ultimate decision is yours. VOTE YES ON PROPOSAL 2

Uncivil Rights

November 7, 2006; Page A12
Today in Michigan, voters face a choice on Proposal 2, which would add the following language to the state constitution: "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting."

One might think a law banning discrimination would be a triumph for civil rights. Instead, opponents have spent $3 million trying to defeat it, using some of the most low-down arguments of this low-down election year. Consider this ad running on Detroit radio:

"If you could have prevented 9/11 from ever happening . . . would you have? If you could have prevented Katrina from ever happening . . . what would you have done? On Nov. 7th there's a national disaster headed for Michigan . . . the elimination of affirmative action. And on Nov. 7th there's only one way to stop this disaster . . . by voting no on Proposal 2."

We're not against "negative" advertising, but to equate the abolition of racial and gender preferences to the damage done by terrorists and a hurricane seems a tad hyperbolic, not to mention dishonest.

Women's groups are also in on the distortion. They're using statewide ads to claim that ending affirmative action would lead to an end to women's health clinics, programs to tutor girls in math and science, and funding for breast cancer treatment. There's one problem with these scare tactics: The initiative doesn't apply to health clinics or tutoring programs. Two states -- California and Washington -- have passed nearly identical initiatives, and there has been no negative effect on women's opportunities.

The opponents of Proposal 2 have also rolled out Tommy Amaker and Tom Izzo, the men's basketball coaches at Michigan and Michigan State University, respectively. They declared at a press conference that the initiative would hurt the university system by reducing "diversity." Once upon a time, the goal of civil rights legislation was equal opportunity. But with that goal largely achieved, the proponents of racial preferences have now moved the goalposts to "diversity" for its own sake. This sets race above other qualities, which erodes public confidence in individual merit as opposed to group rights.

In any case, the proponents of the Civil Rights Initiative sent the two coaches a question: "Do you use quotas or preferences when you choose the players on your basketball teams?"

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Michigan universities may not use race as a primary factor in admissions but could use it as one of several. But a new study from the Center for Equal Opportunity shows that race is an even larger factor now than before at the University of Michigan. In 2005, an Asian or white student with a 1240 SAT and 3.2 grade point average had only a 1 in 10 chance gaining admission, while a black student with the same record had a 9 in 10 chance.

Another reason opponents are spending so much money to defeat this initiative is that it would ban the "setting aside" of minority business contracts -- a practice that has made a lot of people very rich in Michigan. Left unsaid is that those set-asides can cost Michigan taxpayers millions of dollars in inflated contracting costs.

There's nothing wrong with schools or businesses considering a candidate's background when deciding whether to admit or hire. But the application of racial and gender quotas has become a corrupting and divisive process that violates our Constitutional heritage of equal rights and fairness. Polls in Michigan had the Civil Rights Initiative narrowly ahead in the final days, notwithstanding the 3-to-1 funding advantage of the opponents. If it prevails despite the distortions used by opponents, it will be a tribute to the faith among Michigan voters in equal opportunity.

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A Common Sense view of the MCRI from a Los Angeles' Police Officer who says that the issue is:

Michigan’s “Diversity” Hoax
MCRI’s opponents get desperate as Election Day nears.

By Jack Dunphy

There is more at stake in Tuesday’s election than control of the House and Senate. In Michigan, voters will decide the fate of Proposal 2, also known as the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. Modeled after California’s Proposition 209, which in 1996 passed by a 55-45 margin, MCRI would amend Michigan’s state constitution so as to prohibit public agencies from granting “preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes.”

Sounds simple enough, no? Who, one might ask, could argue with it? Plenty of people, as it turns out, and they have resorted to a wide range of scare-mongering tactics in their effort to see race and gender preferences continue undisturbed in Michigan. Among the recent attacks is a press release from a group called One United Michigan, which opposes the passage of MCRI. Law-enforcement leaders, it says, “are urging a No vote on Proposal 2, saying it will limit diversity in law enforcement and make communities less safe.”

Will it? First of all, it’s difficult to imagine how Detroit, for example, with a murder rate more than seven times the national average, could be any less safe. But, leaving the grim statistics aside for the moment, is One United Michigan actually taking the position that minority applicants are incapable of becoming police officers unless they are artificially helped along by racial preferences? Would the city of Detroit, where virtually the entire governmental apparatus is run by blacks, suddenly be unable to hire black police officers if MCRI were to pass?

The press release also cites the dubious notion that a police department should reflect the diversity of the community it serves. “Detroit Deputy Police Chief Claudia Barden-Jackson said she would have had little opportunity to become a police officer in the 1970s,” One United Michigan says, “when women and people of color were locked out of police departments despite laws against discrimination. ‘The Detroit Police Department in 1970 certainly did not reflect the diversity of the community, and the community did not respect the department. Affirmative action opened the doors for women and people of color. Proposal 2 slams these doors shut. We can't go back.’”

A police department that is representative of the city it serves is all well and good, to a point. It’s difficult to envision the Detroit Police Department becoming all or even mostly white, even if MCRI were to pass, but there are neighborhoods in Detroit where less than four percent of the residents have bachelor’s degrees, and where less than half have graduated from high school. Should the police officers who patrol those neighborhoods reflect this same level of education?

And this raises another question: Should a city’s black police officers (or firemen or teachers or what have you) be mandated to work in its black neighborhoods? If ethnic identity is so highly prized in forging community relationships, should black cops be excluded from white neighborhoods? Here in Los Angeles, for example, police officers can choose to work in any of its 19 patrol divisions. Most of the city’s black population lives in the four divisions that make up South and South-Central L.A., but there are proportionally more black officers working the mostly white areas of the city’s Westside. Should those officers be denied the freedom to work where they choose for the sake of conforming to some nebulous “diversity” model?

Taking it further, if black officers are the only ones presumed to be culturally attuned to black neighborhoods, are white officers the only ones qualified to work white neighborhoods?

Inherent in the argument put forth by One United Michigan and other proponents of racial preferences is the insidious belief that minorities simply cannot and will not succeed without latching on to the helping hand of government. “Hiring the best employees for the jobs we do,” says Washtenaw County Prosecutor Brian Mackie, “cannot be reduced to a rigid formula where grades and test scores determine who we want to represent us in court and in the community.”

I was a lackluster student in college, so I’d be the first to agree that grade-point averages are often not the measure of a man. But can there be no objective criteria by which to evaluate candidates for a job or a place in college or law school, criteria that ignore the melanin content of the candidate’s skin?

When I was new to the LAPD, promotions were based on both written and oral examinations, with each counting for half the candidate’s total score. The weight of the written exam has since been whittled down to the point that it is now simply a pass-fail test, with only a 70-percent score required to pass. Today, candidates who pass the written test are placed on promotional lists according to the results of the more subjective oral interview. I asked a longtime friend and mentor why this change was brought about. “Because,” he said, “they don’t want to limit the promotional opportunities for stupid people.”

I have worked for a number of those stupid people over the years. I hope the people of Michigan have better luck.

— Jack Dunphy is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. "Jack Dunphy" is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.










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A Challenge from Race Free Zone: Some Questions for Debbie Dingell, so-called Champion of the Disadvantaged

Can some newsperson please ask Debbie Dingle what she thinks of GM building a new assembly plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico to build a crossover wagon that will be the Opel Astra in Germany and Mexico, Brazil, and points south, and a Chevrolet in the US and Canada. Why is GM going to build in Mexico instead of Michigan? Why is GM going to hire 1800 Mexican workers who will by virtue of the pay for the job enter and enlarge the Mexican middle class instead of hiring 1800 Michigan workers, so they can remain in the middle class?

How does Debbie reconcile the hypocrisy of the employer who gave her a cushy high-paid do-nothing-on-her-own governmental relations job with the unemployed thousands in her husband's hereditary congressional district?

Please ask Debbie if she is running for the Wayne State U. Board of Governors to prove to the Michigan Democratic Party that she can be elected to something, before they run her to succeed her sooner-than-later to be "late" husband?

Please ask Debbie if she has a mutual support deal with Jennifer Granholm to appoint her to fill her husband's seat should he die of old age?

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Scott Johnson of the excellent Powerlineblog.com speaks out on the MCRI

Civil rights versus racial preferences
The great victory of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of moral persuasion: King persuaded Americans that it was wrong and deeply unAmerican to treat people differently based on the color of their skin. That victory of moral persuasion was translated into the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex in employment, public accommodations, and federally funded programs (including colleges and universities).
As Professor Edward Erler has commented, "No more powerful expression of a commitment to equal opportunity can be found in the annals of modern legislation anywhere in the world."
Despite the legal mandate of equal treatment, for the past 30 years many of America's educational institutions have blatantly violated the law in the name of "affirmative action" and "diversity." In reality these terms are extremely misleading euphemisms for the practice of gross racial discrimination.
The depth of the racial discrimination practiced in the university setting became evident in the two University of Michigan cases decided by the Supreme Court a few years back. In the undergraduate school, applicants for admission were simply sorted into different pools with lower admission standards if they identified themselves as African-American, Hispanic, or Native American, and higher standards if they identified themselves as white or members of non-preferred minority groups.
In the law school, the university rigged its standards year after year to achieve a minimum 10 percent quota of students from designated "underrepresented" minority groups (African American, Mexican American and Native American).
For years the university covered up the existence of the racial discrimination that it was practicing. Now it defends what it cannot conceal, and it does so in the name of "affirmative action" and "diversity."
The defense of racial preferences in the name of "affirmative action" and "diversity" has become part of contemporary civil rights orthodoxy and many purportedly sophisticated arguments have been advanced to justify them. Hillary Clinton has stated, in express disagreement with Martin Luther King's great 1963 speech on the Washington Mall, "If we don't take race as part of our character, then we are kidding ourselves."
However, it is the principle of equal treatment under law without regard to race that for one hundred and twenty-five years constituted the unvarying goal of antislavery crusaders and civil rights advocates. The most distinctive legal claim of the American civil rights tradition has been the principle of nondiscrimination, above all a claim for equal treatment by the government without regard to race.
The ideals of a color-blind Constitution and of color-blind law have deep historic roots in the first principle of freedom—the proposition, as Lincoln called it—that all men are created equal, and that this equality forms the basis of inalienable individual rights. It was to vindicate this principle that Americans ratified the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing "the equal protection of the laws" to all citizens. And it was to vindicate this principle that, beginning in the 1930's, the lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund embarked upon a litigation strategy designed to end public school segregation.
In 1947 Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (later appointed to serve on the Supreme Court) successfully argued that the University of Oklahoma Law School could not deny admission to a black applicant. According to Marshall, "classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society."
Two years later Marshall argued that "racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, odious to our way of life and specifically proscribed under the Fourteenth Amendment." This was also the argument that Marshall successfully urged in the climactic case of Brown v. Board of Education, asserting "that the Constitution is color-blind is our dedicated belief."
Given the failure of the United States Supreme Court in the Michigan cases to grasp the nettle and reject racial preferences outright, it now lies to the voters of Michigan to do so by voting for the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative on Tuesday. In the forthcoming issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, Harry Stein tells the sad tale of the betrayal of its founding principles by the Republican Party in Michigan in connection with the MCRI (and by the Bush administration in connection with the Michigan cases and its equivocation elsewhere)in "Now the GOP is for affirmative action?"
The promise of equal treatment without regard to race lies deep in the grain of the American creed and the civil rights tradition. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in response to prominent Democrats who urged him to rescind the Emancipation Proclamation: "The promise, being made, must be kept."
Posted by Scott at 08:07 AM

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Racefreezone.com founding member, Dave Galanter, points us to this excerpt from a current National Review Online article

Money quote: "The scare campaign against MCRI mirrors the onslaughtagainst California's Proposition 209, which passed in 1996. Itselimination of preferences was supposed to be the worst blow againstthe educational interests of minorities since Plessy v. Fergusonenshrined the principle of separate, but equal. Instead, Prop. 209 hasbeen a success. The top universities in the University of Californiasystem — Berkeley and UCLA — saw declines in minority enrollment. Butadmissions of minorities in other parts of the UC system, schools likeUC Santa Cruz and UC Riverside, increased. Overall, minorityadmissions stayed almost the same (down 1 percent from 1995 to 2000)."

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Precedents and Preferences What California’s Prop 209 foretells for Michigan.

Precedents and Preferences
What California’s Prop 209 foretells for Michigan.

By Henry Payne

In a replay of California’s Proposition 209 ten years ago, Michigan voters will vote this November on ballot Proposal 2, which seeks to eliminate racial preferences for “public employment, education or contracting purposes.” The proposal, drafted by Prop 209 author Ward Connerly, has encountered uniform opposition from Michigan’s establishment — from the
state’s biggest corporations, to both political parties, to labor unions and the ACLU. Joined under the banner of One United Michigan, opponents have run a scare campaign, warning that Prop 2 will turn back the clock on minorities and gut women’s programs.

But California’s decade under Prop 209 — virtually identical in language to Prop 2 — proves otherwise.

Prop 209 has largely worked as advertised, has not adversely affected women, and, most impressively, has benefited minorities by dramatically increasing graduation rates, thus boosting their chance for success in the job market.

One United Michigan warns that MCRI is “a national disaster headed for Michigan,” citing a marked reduction in black and Hispanic enrollment since Prop 209’s passage at California’s most elite schools, UC-Berkeley and UCLA.

But a closer look at the numbers reveals that Prop 209 has not meant an overall decline in minority enrollment in the California system, but a reapportionment of minorities to other schools. UC-Riverside and UC-Santa Cruz, for example, have seen dramatic increases in black admissions — with UC-Riverside’s enrollment alone up 240 percent.

Richard Sander, a UCLA law professor who has closely studied college affirmative action programs, points to data from UC-San Diego to illustrate how race-neutral admissions is producing better students.

“If you compare 1995-96 with 1999-01 — a clear before-and-after Prop 209 comparison,” says Sander, a longtime liberal civil rights activist, “you’ll see that, for African-Americans, the 1995 class had a four-year graduation rate of 26%, while the 2001 class had a 52% graduation rate [Hispanics numbers are comparable]. For whites and Asians, it barely changes. This is
almost certainly due largely to the reduction of preferences. The five and six-year grad rates for minorities get pretty close to the white rates [within five points], which of course means that differences in academic performance have also narrowed a lot.”

Meanwhile, at the University of Michigan, black graduation rates are still a whopping 17 percentage points behind whites.

Sander is critical of such gaps, not only because they stigmatize minorities as poor performers, but because it leaves them without degrees. By contrast, he says, in the post-209 California system, “if we looked at actual BAs produced, rather than entering freshmen, the post-209 numbers for blacks and Hispanics would look even better.”

This should be of interest to Michigan corporations who fret that Prop 2 will reduce the minority job-applicant pool. General Motors, Ford, Detroit Edison utility, and others have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into One United Michigan’s anti-Prop 2 jihad. But, as California vividly illustrates, affirmative action has actually cost them qualified graduates.

In 2005, Sander cited race preferences for blacks failing the bar exam at four times the rate of whites nationally: “Black students admitted through preferences generally have quite low grades — not because of any racial characteristic, but because the preferences themselves put them at an enormous academic disadvantage.” The perverse result is that “the benefits of attending an elite school have been substantially overrated...job market data suggests that most black lawyers entering the job market would have higher earnings in the absence of preferential admissions, because better grades trump the costs in prestige.”

Are you listening General Motors?

A surprise benefit of Prop 209 has been its positive effect on academic outreach to the poor. One of the dirty secrets of race preferences was that elite colleges were chasing a small pool of applicants from upper income households. Forced to recruit without the benefit of race, the California system has broadened its outreach programs to all income groups. A study by The Pacific Legal Foundation’s Eryn Hadley found that elite schools have refocused resources on preparing “K-12 students for college life. The UC system now offers many race-neutral programs for individual students who are disadvantaged or attend low performing schools.” Consequently, students on Pell Grants — scholarships awarded to low income students — at UC-Berkeley and UCLA today make up nearly 40 percent of their student bodies.

By contrast, the University of Michigan — the state’s premier public college — has just 13 percent of students on Pell grants.

Despite minimal media coverage of Prop 209’s success, Michigan polls show voters seem inherently to understand the unfairness of race preferences. To counter this, One United Michigan has cynically tried to change the subject to women. “Math and science programs for women will be shut,” declares a One Michigan’s television ad. “When [Prop 209] passed in California, funding for breast and cervical cancer screenings were put at risk.”

Such rhetoric is as dishonest as it is calculated to con a demographic that makes up over 50 percent of the electorate.

Never mind that the two main proponents of the initiative are Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Gutter, both leading spokeswomen for Prop 2 who sued the University of Michigan for racial discrimination. Or that Prop 2’s language — which explicitly limits its purview to “public employment, education or contracting” — has no bearing on women’s services or courses.

The Pacific Legal Foundation’s lead attorney, Sharon Browne, confirms that not one lawsuit has eroded women’s disease research post-Prop 209: “Any such lawsuit would be laughed out of court.” Indeed, the Golden State today remains the world’s largest investor in women’s disease prevention. The state’s pre-Prop 209 breast cancer research program — which draws its $164 million through a check-off provision on the state’s personal income tax form — has continued unchallenged.

Despite being outspent, Connerly’s initiative remains ahead in the latest Detroit News poll just a week before Election Day. Passage would represent an opportunity for Michigan to break down the barriers of racial stigma and craft better solutions to minority achievement than the patronizing, discriminatory programs of racial preference.

Just as California has done in the wake of Prop 209.

— Henry Payne is a freelance writer in Detroit, and editorial cartoonist for the Detroit News.

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