Race Free Zone

Thirty-Seven Words: An analysis of the petition process and the language of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative by Diane Carey

2007-09-05T13:17:00.000-04:00

THIRTY-SEVEN WORDS
An analysis of the petition process and
the language of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative

by Diane Carey
RaceFreeZone.com and MCRI petition circulator

Despite losing court challenge after court challenge, opponents of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) continue to accuse MCRI’s workers and volunteers of “widespread and systematic racially-targeted fraud” to gather enough signatures to put the measure on the 2006 ballot. Though these charges have never been substantiated, they are accepted carte blanche by many officials who should be objective and deal with facts, but instead are driven by personal political motives. Even judges who have ruled time after time in favor of MCRI lower their brows and give lip service to “disturbing allegations,” yet have no evidence to cite. From the courtroom to the Michigan Civil Rights Commission to the Board of Canvassers, MCRI prevails despite undisguised, calcified biases against it by these persons who have sworn oaths to protect everyone’s rights. The media then lead with the part of the MCRI story that is least substantiated--the politically motivated mantra--but never demand proof. “Alleged” does not mean “true.”
Charges of vague language, code words, and undisclosed effects persist in a constant drumbeat from One United Michigan, By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), and other detractors. Their shrill attacks have garnered much media attention, but little cold scrutiny. In the law, though, certain words mean specific things. Law is different from common lingo.
Radical opponents are not only tarring the mission with unproven allegations, but they are tarring me---personally. I was among the most pro-active petition circulators for the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. I contacted hundreds of registered voters by phone, sent out more than 1500 petitions, each with 15 spaces for signatures. Those people acted as circulators for their own families, friends, churches, offices, and neighbors, then either returned the completed petitions to me or sent them directly to the Lansing collection point. Assuming that these petitions were half-full on average, I can make an educated guess that I helped gather at least 3000 and possibly as many as 10,500 signatures. I resent and refute the accusations of “fraud.”

REPEAT A LIE OFTEN ENOUGH . . .

The modern movement to treat Americans without regard to race or gender began in California 1997 with Proposition 209, after University of California Trustee Ward Connerly discovered that the University was using racial and gender criteria for admissions and employment, despite its credo of “equal opportunity without regard to race or gender.” Initiative 200 passed in Washington State in 1998. Similar executive orders were enacted in Florida and Texas. In 2006 Proposal 2, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, enjoyed a landslide victory after a venomous campaign by its opponents. More than 25% of the U. S. population now lives in preference-free states. But did the citizens of these states understand what they were voting upon?
Opponents claim that the language of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative is designed to “hoodwink”, that the title is itself deceptive, and that “widespread fraud and deceit” were used to collect the signatures. They claim specially trained paid signature gatherers infiltrated centers of dense black population like Detroit and Flint, telling black voters that MCRI would “protect civil rights” or “protect affirmative action,” and thus that black signers were duped into helping end racial preferences.
Where is the evidence? Hearsay is not evidence. A political tactic is not evidence. Persistent accusations are not evidence.
TO HIRE OR NOT TO HIRE
Were some signature gatherers paid? Yes. In the American political system, the sponsor of a ballot initiative assembles both volunteer and paid signature gatherers in order to succeed within the time limit. There’s nothing corrupt about this cottage industry that offers piecemeal employment to itinerant workers who want temp jobs. Some supporters donate time, while some donate money so others can be hired to do the work. The hired workers represent supporters who gave money. Money donations are free speech at work. All circulators act independently, can’t possibly be individually monitored, and may or may not represent the petition accurately. This is why every adult knows not to sign something he or she has not read or doesn’t understand. In any contract, the final responsibility lies with the person signing his or her name. People must read.
Since poll after poll showed Michigan voters in favor of ending race and gender preferences, why would any gatherer bother to lie about it?
BAMN’s website claims that paid gatherers “systematically” targeted black voters. They have never explained why anybody would deliberately target blacks. Are they saying blacks are collectively too stupid to read 37 little words before signing a legal document? Talk about racist insults!
Opponents have also complained that some of the signature gatherers in Detroit were themselves black. How is this a problem? Are they saying blacks lied to other blacks just for pay? Should the campaign have not hired blacks? The hiring was as race-neutral as the premise. What would BAMN and OUM say if there had been no black circulators?
However, I and my family and friends who circulated the petitions were all volunteers. The 1500+ petitions I mobilized were circulated without pay, as were thousands more in the state. Should voluntary efforts be rendered null by flimsy accusations? Since we were not paid, there was no motivation other than our own personal philosophies. This high-energy grassroots success has been ignored by the opponents, by the complicit bureaucrats and even by the hostile judges who have been unable to find a legal way to stop our organic groundswell.
Why would I work so hard for this? Am I a racist? Am I against women?
My grandparents were Assyrian immigrants. I’m a mother with a multi-race family. I have a white daughter, a white son, and a son adopted from Guatemala. I have a niece and three nephews who are half-black. My daughter is a financial analyst, my nieces involved in sports, and one is studying sports medicine at MSU. I don’t want my children divided by race, or told they have different rights from their own siblings and cousins. They are Americans, equal before the law. It’s that simple.
BAMN’s website says, “The actual effect of this proposal would be to exclude the majority of fully qualified black, Latina/o and Native American students from admission to the University of Michigan and other colleges and universities in our state.”
If these applicants are “fully qualified” and race is not a factor, why would they be excluded?
And why would I work so hard to exclude my own son, niece and nephews from higher education? Maybe something else is going on.

THE TRAINING SESSION

I attended the Lansing training session for signature gatherers. The session was a dry, non-political seminar on a legal process and how to avoid mistakes such as using birthdates instead of the date of signing. Use black ink. Do not sign the circulator’s name until after the petition is complete. Send it to this address. Have people read the language, or read it to them.
Never were we told to get signatures “by any means necessary.” In fact, we were encouraged to explain fully that the initiative affected only State government education, hiring or contracts.
In Mid-Michigan, I sent out multiple press releases, wrote op-eds explaining the initiative, was interviewed by newspapers and TV stations, spoke on several talk radio shows, addressed gatherings, was a panelist in debates all over the state, and engaged in every possible effort to publicize the facts of MCRI. I even started a blog called RaceFreeZone.com and loaded it with facts, analysis and research, including quotations by many black scholars and race relations experts. If this is fraud, I’m lousy at it.

37 LITTLE WORDS

BAMN’s website says, “The ‘Michigan Civil Rights Initiative’ is a fraud. The entire effort is an attempt to hoodwink the population of Michigan. The rightwing wishes to sugarcoat the poison by calling it a ‘civil rights initiative’ when its aim is to overturn the laws and the programs that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s secured in Michigan.”
Let’s have a look at what the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative actually says, right out in the open:

THE MICHIGAN CIVIL RIGHTS INITIATIVE PETITION LANGUAGE
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.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964

All persons shall be entitled to be free, at any establishment or place, from discrimination or segregation of any kind on the grounds of race, color, religion, or national origin, if such discrimination or segregation is or purports to be required by any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, rule, or order of a State or any agency of political subdivision thereof.

These initiatives are named “Civil Rights” initiatives because they are modeled after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Civil rights do not belong to any group or race. We all have civil rights.
If MCRI secretly aims to overturn the Civil Rights movement, why does it so closely mirror the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Maybe something else is going on.

BY ANY OTHER NAME . . .

After losing their fight to deny the people of Michigan our right to vote on this initiative, opponents went after the actual wording. They claimed that “preferential treatment” is a code phrase to avoid saying “affirmative action.” If so, then the Civil Rights Act of 1964 engages the same “code.” There is no mention of affirmative action in the Act.
Ultimately the Bureau of Elections caved and changed the ballot wording to this:

A PROPOSAL TO AMEND THE STATE CONSTITUTION TO BAN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PROGRAMS THAT GIVE PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT TO GROUPS OR INDIVIDUALS BASED ON THEIR RACE, GENDER, COLOR, ETHNICITY OR NATIONAL ORIGIN FOR PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT, EDUCATION OR CONTRACTING PURPOSES.
This language is not that of the actual state constitutional amendment. The amendment itself reads exactly as the petition language reads, so what was the point of changing it on the ballot? The addition of “affirmative action programs” was forced in on the assumption that voters would support and defend “affirmative action.” Would they?
The phrase “affirmative action” is legally undefined, therefore hard to interpret in law. It was coined by President John F. Kennedy on January 9, 1961: “The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.” (emphasis added)
“Without regard” means that race, creed, color or national origin must carry no influence for special treatment, for or against a person.
President Lyndon Johnson later revised Kennedy’s phrase into meaning the exact opposite of Kennedy’s intents. In 1965 Executive Order 11246 required federal contractors to “take affirmative action” to employ minorities and to document those efforts. President Richard Nixon later added “goals and timetables” to “increase minority employment.” With two strokes of the executive pen, Johnson and Nixon had invented racial quotas. This upside-down version became the common interpretation of affirmative action: unearned rewards based on race. Gender was added in 1967.
The result has been a decades-long scramble to define “minority,” a feeding frenzy of “front” businesses with token 51% minority of female “owners,” billions of dollars poured into remedial training sinkholes, separate college admissions pools, and uncounted minority students boosted into colleges beyond their academic skills, counted as “diversity in admissions,” only to flunk out and be forgotten, rather than attending colleges better matched to them and actually graduating. This applies to everybody—I would fail at Harvard, but I know better than to go there.
But what else does “affirmative action” mean? Is it based on race or on economic disadvantage? Or based on sex? Does it apply to poor whites? Does it apply to rich blacks? Does race trump gender? Can a millionaire woman get it just by being a woman? Is a poor white boy rejected while a wealthy boy claiming he’s 1/32nd Cherokee gets a boost? Will there be affirmative action DNA tests--in America? What if the white boy is in a wheelchair? Do recently immigrated Hispanics get more favors than Hispanics who were born here? Does it mean money? Does it mean tokenism? Quotas? A place at the head of the line? Does it mean 20 free points in a college admissions test? Does it mean “no whites need apply”? Do Asians get it, or are they too successful on their own? How does it choose between a Pacific-rim woman and a Puerto Rican man? Or is it only for those whose ancestors were oppressed on American soil? If so, why are foreign millionaires coming here and getting juicy contracts based on “minority” status? Do Eskimos get it even though they were never oppressed? Were blacks historically more “oppressed” than Chinese railroad workers, imported sex slaves or Irish paupers? Does a black from Morocco count just by being black? What exactly is “affirmative action”?
The truth is that no one knows. The term has never been legally defined. It is an amorphous colloquialism, meaning something different to each person. Forcing “affirmative action” into the ballot language may have actually helped get MCRI approved in the general election, because people used their own imaginations to define it.
The movements to ban race/gender-based preferences mean what they say: the state governments may not prefer or reject based upon physical features or nationality. Not all affirmative action is banned, as BAMN and OUM insist. There is zero effect on economic-based affirmative action; poor people of all colors can get help. There is zero effect on health programs; there’s nothing in the language about health care. There is no effect on privately managed race- or gender-based affirmative action programs, schools, scholarships, businesses or hiring. For legal purposes, “preference” is actually the more accurate term.

BY THE NUMBERS

The MCRI petition needed 313,757 signatures to qualify for appearance on the ballot. The petition campaign collected 508,282 signatures, submitted January 6, 2005, more than any other ballot initiative in Michigan’s history.

7/13/2005 - Public record: The Secretary of State Staff Report
concludes that 455,373 of the 505,970 facially-valid signatures
(or 90%) submitted by MCRI are from registered voters. The
Staff Report concludes through the random sampling technique
that there is greater than a 99.9% chance that MCRI has enough
signatures (317,757) to qualify, requiring that the initiative be
certified.

According to the law, certification was required. Frantic challengers wanted the law to do their dirty work, but didn’t mind ignoring the law when it suited them. They suddenly declared that “as many as” 125, 000 signatures may have been gathered from black people who were told that MCRI “protects affirmative action” or “protects civil rights.” Where did they get this number? In no court case or venue were they able to field more than a few dozen after-the-fact testimonials, numbering somewhere between 160 and 200—the number is never the same. Several are from people who never signed and could not prove they were approached. There is no basis for the wildly imaginary number of 125,000.
But let’s entertain the fanciful. Let’s throw out every possible black signature, including those who signed willingly because they want to be judged on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin. If we subtract 125,000 from the 505,970 signatures accepted as “valid,” there are still 380,970 signatures; 90% of that number is 342,873 – still well over the required 313,757. This is not imaginary.
That’s 342,873 people whose civil rights are being ignored by those who claim fraud which they cannot prove. Dare I say “disenfranchised”?

ONE WOMAN’S POLL

Frustrated by persistent accusations of fraud or misunderstanding, I pulled out my partial list of circulators and signatories, and phoned all over the state at random—Fenton, Flint, Traverse City, Zeeland, Pontiac, Eastpointe, and more. “Remember that petition to stop the state from choosing between us by race and gender?” I asked. “Did you comprehend the meaning and goals?”
I called 111 signers and 17 circulators. Every single one had comprehended the petition language and signed willingly. Because I deal with hard evidence, I asked for original-signature statements attesting to their understanding of the initiative.
Not one person turned me down. I can easily get more. I now have “testimonials” of a comparable number to those collected by opponents, which they call “evidence of fraud.” I have evidence that there was not fraud. I invite all media to investigate.

“I read it. I understood it. Now let me vote on it.”
Patty Alspach
Michigan voter

Those half-million-plus signatures did not change the law. If the people of Michigan had believed the language unclear or that fraud existed, there was a second chance to reject MCRI: the election of November 2006. The amendment passed by a resounding 58-42% margin, with “Yes” votes from a secure 2,141,010 voters during a very left-leaning election. The result debunked assumptions that MCRI is strictly a conservative, libertarian, right wing or Republican plot. Even people who always or occasionally vote Democrat declared, “Yes, we understand. Race and gender affirmative action is wrong. Americans should be equal before the law.” The victory cut across racial lines, party lines, age lines and gender lines. These results also destroyed the wistful dream that the California and Washington State elections were somehow just mistakes.

JUST THE FACTS, MA’AM
The claim that MCRI is awash in fraud is itself an orchestrated artifice. Opponents lie from the hip about the initiative’s intent and impact, saying that MCRI is against equal opportunity—in fact, it guarantees equal opportunity. Affirmative action is the opposite of equal opportunity. They insist that MCRI prohibits gender-specific health programs like cervical cancer, breast cancer or prostate cancer screenings. Nonsense. No such program has been stopped in California or Washington State, as proven by both states’ official websites. Public gender-based health and education programs are alive and well. Check the Sally Ride program at Berkeley. It’s still there.
Jobs that depend on gender, like female undercover police officers, are not affected, as the opposition claims. Women’s and girls’ sports programs are not affected, as the opposition claims. Pay equity for women, fair housing and lending programs for women and minorities are not affected, as the opposition claims.
Opponents invented wilder claims as they became more desperate, including one completely off-the-wall scare tactic that MCRI would affect the adoption of special-needs children (on the Norm Jones Show, Talk 580). Go back and read the actual language. I am an adoptive mother. Why would I support anything that would hinder adoption?
Maybe there’s something else going on . . .
Maybe the “widespread and systematic fraud” is on the other foot.

Affirmative Action Backfires by Gail Heriot from the August 24, 2007 Wall Street Journal, Op-Ed Page

2007-08-29T11:12:00.000-04:00

Affirmative Action Backfires

Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action -- and indeed, among those who were not.

Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions -- about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong school.
No one claims the findings in Mr. Sander's study, "A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," are the last word on the subject. Although so far his work has held up to scrutiny at least as well as that of his critics, all fair-minded scholars agree that more research is necessary before the "mismatch thesis" can be definitively accepted or rejected.
Unfortunately, fair-minded scholars are hard to come by when the issue is affirmative action. Some of the same people who argue Mr. Sander's data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they apparently don't want you -- or anyone else -- to know.

Take William Kidder, a University of California staff advisor and co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander's study. When Mr. Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure "risks stigmatizing African American attorneys." At the same time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling over sideways, gleefully warned that the state bar would be sued if it cooperated with Mr. Sander.
Sadly, the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the pressure. The committee members didn't formally explain their decision to deny Mr. Sander's request for this data (in which no names would be disclosed), but the root cause is clear: Over the last 40 years, many distinguished citizens -- university presidents, judges, philanthropists and other leaders -- have built their reputations on their support for race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs as part of the resulting diversity bureaucracy.
If the policy is not working, they, too, don't want anyone to know.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hopes that it can persuade the State Bar to reconsider. Its soon-to-be released report on affirmative action in law schools specifically calls for state bar authorities to cooperate with qualified scholars studying the mismatch issue. The recommendation is modest. The commission doesn't claim that Mr. Sander is right or his critics wrong. It simply seeks to encourage and facilitate important research.
The Commission's deeper purpose is to remind those who support and administer affirmative action polices that good intentions are not enough. Consequences also matter. And conscious, deliberately chosen ignorance is not a good-faith option.
Mr. Sander's original article noted that when elite law schools lower their academic standards in order to admit a more racially diverse class, schools one or two tiers down feel they must do the same. As a result, there is now a serious gap in academic credentials between minority and non-minority law students across the pecking order, with the average black student's academic index more than two standard deviations below that of his average white classmate.
Not surprisingly, such a gap leads to problems. Students who attend schools where their academic credentials are substantially below those of their fellow students tend to perform poorly.
The reason is simple: While some students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.
Supporters of race-based admissions argue that, despite the likelihood of poor grades, minority students are still better off accepting the benefit of a preference and graduating from a more prestigious school. But Mr. Sander's research suggests that just the opposite may be true -- that law students, no matter what their race, may learn less, not more, when they enroll in schools for which they are not academically prepared. Students who could have performed well at less competitive schools may end up lost and demoralized. As a result, they may fail the bar.
Specifically, Mr. Sander found that when black and white students with similar academic credentials compete against each other at the same school, they earn about the same grades. Similarly, when black and white students with similar grades from the same tier law school take the bar examination, they pass at about the same rate.
Yet, paradoxically, black students as a whole have dramatically lower bar passage rates than white students with similar credentials. Something is wrong.
The Sander study argued that the most plausible explanation is that, as a result of affirmative action, black and white students with similar credentials are not attending the same schools. The white students are more likely to be attending a school that takes things a little more slowly and spends more time on matters that are covered on the bar exam. They are learning, while their minority peers are struggling at more elite schools.
Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to use color-blind admissions policies, fewer black law students would be admitted to law schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those who were admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In the end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567) and more would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the current system of race preferences. Obviously, these figures are just approximations, but they are troubling nonetheless.
Mr. Sander has his critics -- some thoughtful, some just strident -- but so far none has offered a plausible alternative explanation for the data. Of course, Mr. Sander doesn't need to be proven 100% correct for his research to be devastating news for affirmative-action supporters.
Suppose the consequences of race-based admissions turn out to be a wash -- neither increasing nor decreasing the number of minority attorneys. In that case, few people would think it worth the costs, not least among them the human costs that result from the failure of the supposed beneficiaries to graduate and pass the bar.
Under current practices, only 45% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar on their first attempt as opposed to over 78% of whites. Even after multiple tries, only 57% of blacks succeed. The rest are often saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt. How great an increase in the number of black attorneys is needed to justify these costs?
The most important other recommendation of the Civil Rights Commission is a call for transparency. As a matter of consumer fairness, law school applicants -- regardless of race -- need to know the statistical likelihood that someone with their academic credentials will successfully graduate and pass the bar. Once informed, they can better decide whether to undertake the risk of attending that particular school, or any law school at all. If law schools are unwilling to undertake this simple reform, it should be mandated by law.
Under current practices, law school applicants are at the mercy of admissions officers for that information; it is almost never provided except on a class-wide basis where success rates are positively misleading. Minority students whose academic credentials are substantially below their average classmates are lulled into believing that they are just as likely to graduate and pass the bar. When they don't, they may be stuck with the bills, not to mention the loss of several years of their lives.
The problem is that the admissions officer's job is to enroll students, not to draw the risks of failure to their attention. Indeed, in some cases, the officer may be frantic to enroll minority students in order to comply with the stringent new diversity standards of the American Bar Association Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. As the federal government's accrediting agency for law schools, the ABA Council determines whether a law school will be eligible for the federal student-loan program. The law school that fails to satisfy its diversity requirements does so at its peril -- as a number of law school deans can amply attest.
Decades of law students have relied upon the good faith of law school officials to tell them what they needed to know. For the 43% of black law students who never became lawyers, maybe that reliance was misplaced.
Ms. Heriot is professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

Diane Carey Opines on the "Radical Idea" that Diversity is not a goal.

2007-06-30T13:11:00.000-04:00

DIVERSITY IS NOT A GOAL

My son attends a nearly all-white school. There’s not much diversity, tragically. The school, believe it or not, just educates any kid who enters its doors. Radical idea! After all, how can the kids learn if there aren’t different colors of faces around them?

I asked my son if it’s hurting him to be in a predominantly white school. He was mystified, since he just made the B honor roll and is proud of his achievement. His 6th grade project was, his teachers said, the best in 10 years. I don’t know how he did it. It’s unimaginable for him to have succeeded.

You see, my son is Guatemalan. We adopted him at the age of three months. His skin is brown. His hair is very black. According to the “diversity” crowd, he’s being damaged by attending a non-diverse public school in our mid-Michigan district. The diversity pushers think his white pals should be put on busses and shipped to, say, Flint, because there aren’t enough white faces in the Flint schools. The black children of Flint should be shipped 30 miles back to our district so they can show their black faces, so the school can claim it’s “diverse.”

Fortunately, the Supreme Court just struck down the Mengele-esque concept that public schools should be able to hold a color wheel up to a child’s face and decide on the value of his hue, so diversity can be “created.”
Justice Stephen Breyer says that not having diversity as a primary goal undermines the promise of integrated schools the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education from 53 years past.

"To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown," Breyer said.

The “promise of Brown”? When did the promise of the Brown morph from educated children without regard to race into forcing diversity by looking only children’s faces? The “promise” was that public schools in America would be open to all children of any color who resided within a school’s district. The promise does not involve shuffling kids like marbles to achieve color balances. Any child, of any color, in any order, in any balance, should be educated equally with the others.
"What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today," says Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court’s only black member. "The plans before us base school assignment decisions on students' race. Because 'our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,' such race-based decisionmaking is unconstitutional."

My son agrees. “Diversity” should not be a goal of schools. Education should be the goal of schools. Radical idea, huh?

Diane Carey
Racefreezone.com
Owosso, Michigan

Juan Williams Says it All in Today's New York Times. Read it!

2007-06-29T21:08:00.000-04:00

Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education

By JUAN WILLIAMS
Published: June 29, 2007
Washington

LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision.

With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.

Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.

And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

By the early ’90s, support in the federal courts for the central work of Brown — racial integration of public schools — began to rapidly expire. In a series of cases in Atlanta, Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo., frustrated parents, black and white, appealed to federal judges to stop shifting children from school to school like pieces on a game board. The parents wanted better neighborhood schools and a better education for their children, no matter the racial make-up of the school. In their rulings ending court mandates for school integration, the judges, too, spoke of the futility of using schoolchildren to address social ills caused by adults holding fast to patterns of residential segregation by both class and race.

The focus of efforts to improve elementary and secondary schools shifted to magnet schools, to allowing parents the choice to move their children out of failing schools and, most recently, to vouchers and charter schools. The federal No Child Left Behind plan has many critics, but there’s no denying that it is an effective tool for forcing teachers’ unions and school administrators to take responsibility for educating poor and minority students.

It was an idealistic Supreme Court that in 1954 approved of Brown as a race-conscious policy needed to repair the damage of school segregation and protect every child’s 14th-Amendment right to equal treatment under law. In 1971, Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for a unanimous court still embracing Brown, said local school officials could make racial integration a priority even if it did not improve educational outcomes because it helped “to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society.”

But today a high court with a conservative majority concludes that any policy based on race — no matter how well intentioned — is a violation of every child’s 14th-Amendment right to be treated as an individual without regard to race. We’ve come full circle.

In 1990, after months of interviews with Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund on the Brown case, I sat in his Supreme Court chambers with a final question. Almost 40 years later, was he satisfied with the outcome of the decision? Outside the courthouse, the failing Washington school system was hypersegregated, with more than 90 percent of its students black and Latino. Schools in the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, were mostly white and producing some of the top students in the nation.

Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children?

His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools — both in the 17 states where racially separate schools were required by law and in other states where they were a matter of culture.

If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Justice Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.

Racial malice is no longer the primary motive in shaping inferior schools for minority children. Many failing big city schools today are operated by black superintendents and mostly black school boards.

And today the argument that school reform should provide equal opportunity for children, or prepare them to live in a pluralistic society, is spent. The winning argument is that better schools are needed for all children — black, white, brown and every other hue — in order to foster a competitive workforce in a global economy.

Dealing with racism and the bitter fruit of slavery and “separate but equal” legal segregation was at the heart of the court’s brave decision 53 years ago. With Brown officially relegated to the past, the challenge for brave leaders now is to deliver on the promise of a good education for every child.

Juan Williams, a senior correspondent for NPR and a political analyst for Fox News Channel, is the author of “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America.”

Ward Connerly Comments for RaceFreeZone.Com on Yesterday's Supreme Court Decisions

2007-06-29T10:18:00.000-04:00

RaceFreeZone.com received the following message from Ward Connerly this morning, June 29, 2007:

"The decision(s) of the Supreme Court declaring that the use of "race" in k-12 student placement is unconstitutional is of crucial value in the movement to purge race out of the public arena. Coming on the heels of the overwhelming rejection of race preferences in Michigan by the people of that state, the Supreme Court has nudged America one step further toward its destiny of being 'colorblind.' "

I don't think it's possible to overestimate the influence of Ward Connerly and his supporters in setting America on a course into a truly "colorblind" twenty-first century.

Type the later part of the post, that you want to hide, here

A great article from Powerline.com, one of the Internet's best Blogs.

2007-04-15T13:53:00.000-04:00

Mark Steyn's dream

In need of a laugh, I sought out Mark Steyn's column this morning. Instead of a laugh I find Steyn's dream in the Imus Affair:

Needless to say, [CBS President Les] Moonves fired Imus after first meeting with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton. I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where a white guy can be fired for racist remarks without his employers having to prostrate themselves before clapped-out professional grievance mongers and shakedown artists. But dream on. Two men who slandered the Duke lacrosse players not just as racists but as rapists (by the way, has the Rev. Jackson come through on his promise to pay for the "victim" to go to college?) are the go-to guys when it comes to judging rhetorical excess in respect to varsity sports teams. Surely even a network president isn't such a craven squish he can go through a meeting like that with a straight face?
Mark's unfunny conclusion brought me up short:
As a female correspondent to the Powerline Web site commented: "Here are these tough women on top of the world, and they are so fragile that a remark knocks them down. Hey, why wouldn't they have said 'F--- you? Who the heck is this fool Imus? We are queens of national basketball, and there is no stopping us now. We can be and do anything we choose to be or do. … We don't need Al Sharpton to protect us.' But no, they look devastated and say they are damaged irreparably."

Only in America: a team of champions who think they're victims, an old white fool who talks like a gangsta rapper, and multi-millionaires grown rich on race-baiting who promote themselves as guardians of civility. Good thing there are no real problems to worry about.

PAUL adds: I got my laugh for the day from the title of Steyn's piece as it appears on Steyn Online -- "Hello, Imus Be Going."

Race, gender still rule school accreditations, but "many Michigans" are aborning says Alabama Op-Ed

2007-04-15T09:34:00.000-04:00

Published Sunday, April 15, 2007
DAVID K. PERRY AND CHARLES W. NUCKOLLS: Race, gender still rule school accreditations

As the era of legally sanctioned racial and gender preferences in public higher education likely winds down, the chains of intellectual tyranny (i.e., political correctness) in some ways seem to be tightening. Perhaps this represents desperation, a Battle-of-the-Bulge effort, among those who wish to forestall or delay race- and gender-neutral admission and hiring policies. Possibly, it merely illustrates a law of political thermodynamics that every action begets a reaction.

The landslide passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative last November is the most-recent indication that the U.S. public is completely exhausted by the durability of “temporary" preferences. Among other things, the MCRI prohibits discriminatory or preferential hiring and admissions by public universities in that state. It followed similar votes years earlier in California and Washington.

It passed despite seemingly overwhelming opposition among the Michigan political establishment. Opponents included business and labor groups, many Democratic and Republican politicians, and the Michigan Catholic Conference, not to mention the president of the University of Michigan and a majority of its faculty. In its wake, plans exist for similar proposals to appear on the ballot in as many as nine states next year. It is more than likely that voters will pass, and do so overwhelmingly, measures like the one Michigan approved.

The MCRI was created following mixed U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 2003 about challenges to admission policies at the University of Michigan. In one case, the court ruled 6-3 against a racial point system for potential undergraduates. Yet, the court also voted 5-4 to uphold race as a factor in law school selections. Retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who cast a critical vote with the majority in the latter decision, recently expressed doubts about the life expectancy of such preferences. She was quoted as telling a National Press Club symposium in Washington that the “future of affirmative action in higher education today is certainly muddy" due to such things as the MCRI.

One potential tool of reaction involves professional accreditation agencies, such as The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. This organization certifies media programs at about 100 universities. Hundreds more remain unaccredited. Some significant programs, including those at Ohio State and Wisconsin-Madison, have pulled out. Among the complaints are that larger schools face more-stringent standards than do smaller ones and that such accreditation limits a program’s curricular options. The journalism department at The University of Alabama is among the accredited, although no faculty vote has occurred in several decades about the matter.

For about 20 years, ACEJMC has evaluated academic media units in part according to their so-called “diversity." The stringency of the standard and its application at times has waxed and waned. In recent years, things have gotten noticeably tougher. According to the ACEJMC Web site, an academic unit now is expected to demonstrate “effective efforts to recruit women and minority faculty and professional staff" and to provide “an environment that supports their retention, progress and success." Also, a unit is supposed to demonstrate “effective efforts to help recruit and retain a student population reflecting the diversity of the population eligible to enroll in institutions of higher education in the region or population it serves, with special attention to recruiting under-represented groups."

We can hardly imagine a more obvious, if formally unstated, call for quotas. Units evidently must not only cast a wide net among prospective faculty and students but also catch certain numbers or percentages of various types of fish. Yet, ACEJMC also requires accreditation teams to apply these “in compliance with applicable federal and state laws and regulations." What happens if state laws, such as that/screated by the MCRI, forbid racial or gender preferences and the widest practicable net continually yields too many tuna and not enough salmon? Perhaps such agencies will have no choice but to overlook transgression in states such as Michigan.

Yet, a fallback position may exist. According to newspaper columnist Walter Williams, the diversity movement on campus basically represents a reaction to court limitations on affirmative action. ACEJMC criteria also require that the journalism and mass communication curricula foster “understanding of issues and perspectives that are inclusive in terms of gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation." At worst, this could amount to a demand that a sort of diversity training, as well as discussion about legitimate topics such as news and stereotypes, be included in courses. Perhaps some even believe that journalism students, having experienced a curricular interest-group feeding frenzy, will incorporate diversity training in the news, leading to public opposition to future MCRIs. We seriously doubt that any such plan would have the intended consequences, however.

Ultimately, the effect of these accreditation policies is best summarized by partly appropriating a phrase from a 20th century Argentinean revolutionary. By steeling the determination of those who believe that attending to color does not cause color-blindness, such tactics may even help create two, three, many Michigans.

David K. Perry (perry @jn.ua.edu) is an associate professor of journalism and Charles W. Nuckolls (charlesnuckolls @sprynet.com) is a professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama.

Race Free Zone responds to comments

2007-03-15T16:48:00.000-04:00

I keep hearing this "You can't understand unless you're black," excuse all over. It's the same as saying, "I've lost the reasonable discussion, so I'm going to claim that only blacks can possibly understand, which eliminates my having to pay attention to anybody else's opinion." It you want to lie to yourself, that's your business. At least accept that many prominent blacks who are skilled race relations experts, scholars, politicians, and successful businesspersons are saying exactly what Race Free Zone is saying, and they're . . . black. Many of them came out of poverty in the real Jim Crow era, and managed to ignore race obsession and make good on the American promise. Please scan our "Quotables" section to read their own words: Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, John H. McWhorter, Ward Connerly, Star Parker, and more. If you only take the word of blacks, there they are.

This is not new--it goes back to the slaves, like Frederick Douglas, who rejected paternalism and encouraged blacks to make it on their own because America was the one place where they could do that. When we say that "real racism" is mostly gone, we're referring to the old-fashioned kind of racism that resulted in such ridiculous moments as a white father's not letting a black medical specialist work on his child. I provided a very clear example so the readers would understand.

While there is still racism because that's natural and will never completely go away, largely because of the paranoia encouraged by social programs, the media and squabbling over money, set-asides and hand-outs, America is much better than ever before in history for a person of any heritage to "make it here." It's still one of the best places in the world for a person of any color to succeed. Only those who are held back by the chips on their own shoulders are doomed to fail in America.

My Hispanic son will never be affected by racism because he will simply shrug and move on to the next best opportunity, rather than wallowing in self-pity and victimhood. He's not a victim and he knows it. He's in charge of his life. Notice that I did not say he would not ENCOUNTER racism--I said he would never be AFFECTED by it. That's because what happens to you is random, while how you react to it is your own choice. Go out into the world and be a person. Don't be a color. Be an American.

Diane Carey - Race Free Zone

A Word Too Far : Blogger and Law Professor, Ann Althouse, teaches us how political correctness does the opposite of what it was intended to do

2007-03-03T09:57:00.000-05:00

A Word Too Far

By ANN ALTHOUSE

Published: March 3, 2007
Recently, the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski had to grovel after one of its recruiters used a racist epithet in an interview exercise at Duke University Law School.

The recruiter was quoting a Waco, Tex., prosecutor in a 1920s murder case in which Leon Jaworski, one of the firm’s founding partners, represented a black defendant.

But never mind. One student heard an upsetting word and lodged a complaint.

Without explaining the context of the partner’s use of that horrible word, the law school’s dean, Katharine Bartlett, sent e-mail to students, saying: “I appreciate the strong feelings this incident has raised.” And before long, Steven Pfeiffer, the chairman of the firm’s executive committee, was traveling to Durham, N.C., to apologize.

As reported in the Texas Lawyer, Pfeiffer said, “There is no excuse for what happened on this campus. There is no context for which that is permissible conduct.”

Closer to home, a perplexing event took place at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where I teach.

As reported in The Capital Times: “Clearly, eloquently and sometimes tearfully, the seven young Asian women who raised the issue of a law professor’s allegedly insulting remarks about the Hmong told their story at a public forum Thursday night.”

What were these “allegedly insulting remarks”? Well, we’re only talking about alleged remarks, because even though the incident in question took place in mid-February, we have yet to hear the law professor’s version of the story of what he said to his class. Teaching a lesson about the failure of the law to take cultural differences into account, Prof. Leonard Kaplan said something about the Hmong that upset several students.

Despite the confusion about what happened, demands for apologies and remedies fill the air. The truth that seems to matter is the fact that the students felt bad.

You might think that a law school would want to teach scrupulous procedure, including a passion for the search for the truth and the need to find the facts before devising the remedy. But the notion instead seemed to be that we could simply treat the feelings and try to make everyone feel good again.

Ironically, you have to care enough about engaging energetically with issues of race to run into this sort of trouble. It’s so much easier to skip the subject altogether, to embrace a theory of colorblindness or to scoop out gobs of politically correct pabulum. It’s only when you challenge the students and confront them with something that can be experienced as ugly — even if you’re only trying to highlight your law firm’s illustrious fight against racism — that you create the risk that someone may take offense.

Perhaps students will jot down the few words you just said that made their ears perk up. What was the rest of this complicated pedagogical exercise, intrusively stirring up difficult emotions?

It would have been so much easier to teach using simple, straightforward lecturing, with every sentence carefully composed, with a sharp eye on the goal of never giving anyone any reason to question the purity of your beliefs and the beneficence of your heart.

Your colleagues may sympathize with you in private, but most likely they’ll be rethinking this idea — heartily promoted in law schools since the 1980s — that they ought to actively incorporate delicate issues of race into their courses.

Publicly, the school goes into damage-control mode. After all, it has worked so hard to bring together a diverse student body and to convey a feeling of welcome to everyone. How can we bear to hear a student say, as one Wisconsin student did on Thursday, that “unless we have a safe learning environment,” the school’s commitment to diversity “doesn’t mean anything”?

But this is madness! Our question should not be about what we can do to make you comfortable or how we can make your life pleasant again.

We owe our law students respect, but part of that respect is the recognition that they are adults who are spending many thousands of dollars and hours of study trying to acquire the critical thinking and fortitude that will enable them to serve clients and to stand up to adversaries who are only too ready to shake their nerve — like that real racist, the prosecutor who tried to intimidate Leon Jaworski in Texas in the 1920s.

Ann Althouse is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and writes the blog Althouse. This is her last guest column.

Race Free Zone commentary: American History Month

2007-03-01T15:16:00.000-05:00

By Diane Carey

When we agreed to adopt a little boy who had been born in Guatemala, the adoption agency called us the next night to give us a chance to “get out of it.” Of course, we wondered what was wrong. They told us, “Well . . . he’s dark.”

Dark?

I asked, “Dark green?”

In Guatemala, apparently, there’s a “caste” system—where people are judged along a color scale of light to dark. The lighter-skinned children, usually of Spanish descent, are preferred for adoption, while the darker-skinned children, mostly Central American Indian, are “lower class.”

Of course, my husband and I don’t care about color. We adopted our beautiful boy and he’s now hail and hearty at 12 years old, playing football, shooting archery, and thinking of himself as an all-American, because that’s what he is. He’s still dark, but in America nobody really cares. We pretend to be obsessed with race, but on an individual basis, we really don’t care. Gone are the days when a white father would say, “I don’t want that black paramedic working on my child.” That’s real racism, and it’s mostly gone.

We are Americans, no matter our color. Each of us should be completely equal to the next, a person without “category.” We are made up of myriad complex and mixed bloodlines.

“White” Americans are often painted as one homogenous group, but that’s not accurate. In fact, “white” means a thousand bloodlines—British, Irish, Jewish, French, German, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Basque, many strains of Middle-Eastern mixes (like me), and hundreds of others, and a smattering of religions. Many “white” people have American Indian or Negro blood because there was so much mixing on the frontiers. America was the place where the “mixed” could find prosperity as color lines blurred.

Asians living in America are also not a single bloodline. There are multiple roots for “Asian” – Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Cambodian, Indonesian, Polynesian, Manchurian, Mongolian, and so on. Hispanics the same—Mexican, Spaniard, Guatemalan, Brazilian, Venezualan, coming from much different regions of the globe. The only thing that these groups have in common is that they have nothing in common. Yet we lump them together into “Asian” and “Hispanic.”

We do the same thing to “blacks.” The Negro race is actually made up of dozens of genetic roots who lived hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other, had separate religions, separate languages, separate cultures, different physical features and different skin tones. Often they were (and are) bitter enemies, engaging in wholesale slaughter of each other. Black slaves were captured and sold by other blacks.

Many modern black Americans have ancestry much more deeply and recently rooted in the Caribbean or South America than in Africa. Most black Americans have been American much deeper into their family history than white Americans like me whose ancestors didn’t immigrate until the 18th, 19th, or 20th centuries.

My son comes from Guatemala, where everybody speaks Spanish, but my son is almost pure Mayan, or Central American Indian, while others in Guatemala are various other strains, usually measured by color. He is much closer genetically to the American Indians and Eskimos than to Mexicans or the Spanish. His ancestors were from this continent, while the Spanish-Hispanics were not.

Spanish-Hispanics? What are we doing to ourselves! Is this any sillier than Something-American? That hyphen is killing us, driving us apart, separating us from other Americans in order to get a “group identity,” because we’ve forgotten that we’re individuals, each with his own identity.

Instead, we pander to “group identity.” We celebrate only the group, not the individual. We convince ourselves that whatever comes in front of the hyphen is more important than what comes after it: “American.” We celebrate everything except being American. A case in point: Black History Month.

Why do we have this? I haven’t noticed that Black History Month really celebrates accomplishments. It seems more to spotlight America’s old bad habits which have been repudiated by most of “white” society. Among whites, a white racist is a pariah. We shun him. He embarrasses us. Instead of letting him crawl into the corner and die, we trumpet his existence by shoving Black History Month down the throats of every child in American, black, white, and otherwise. Is there anything more goofy than Black History Month in Hawaii and Alaska?

Black History Month tells black children that they are separate and will never be just Americans. It hammers the faulty idea that “whites” did something bad to “them.” We tell white children that they “did” something which they never did, and that they should be ashamed of things done four hundred years ago by people who looked something like them. We tell black children that white society owes them, and the pay-off is Black History Month, a separatist and pandering concept with no substance, and that they’re dopey enough to be satisfied with such skin-thin tokens. It tells them their identities are frail, their individualism non-existent. It treats them like spoiled brats who must get one more Christmas present than anybody else so they won’t sulk.

The dream of the slaves was one of freedom from this kind of behavior, an America that didn’t even remember the times of separation by race. The dream of M. L. King, Jr. was that his children, and mine, would be judged by the content of character, while the color of their skin would be a non-factor. Instead, we enshrine color of skin. We celebrate separation by race and force ourselves to remember the ugliest details, as if that heals anything. Don’t we know the danger of reopening old wounds? We end up with infections like Black History Month.

We can tell that Black History Month is nothing more than political pandering by noting which blacks are celebrated. When’s the last time a conservative black was showcased? When have Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas been celebrated as the “first blacks” of their high accomplishments? Of course they can’t be celebrated, because they were appointed by a white Republican president, and we can’t have that remembered, can we?

When have the brilliants writings and accomplishments of Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Ward Connerly or John McWhorter been read by black and white school children? In the politically correct “celebration,” there are no black conservatives. There are no blacks who think outside the “group” box. There are no blacks who want to concentrate on the content of character, not the color of skin. They just don’t exist.

We don’t have Irish History Month, Chinese History Month, or Jewish History Month, even though these groups were also persecuted on American soil. Frederick Douglass, who was raised in slavery—real slavery, not the fake image we teach our children in school—cheered America as the great hope of blacks. He said that blacks had come here as heathens and now had the Bible in their hands, that blacks had come in chains and now held the American ballot. He saw America as having given blacks a great gift—an identity that was not in any way African. He demanded that blacks in America be wholly recognized as full-fledged Americans, not Black Americans.

Black History Month is white guilt at its worst. In the words of black American author Shelby Steele, it treats American blacks like pets getting thrown a cookie. It balms white embarrassment for things most never did and never would do. It cleaves American from American and assures that we will never see each other as brothers under one flag.

We are all one race: we are the American race. Let’s have American History Month.

Black History Month is not every black person's idea of a good idea.

2007-02-28T20:32:00.000-05:00

Why I Loathe Black History Month

How long will it be before my oblivious, white-looking biracial children notice that their militant black mother has no use for Black History Month?
By Debra J. Dickerson

I dread February.

I didn’t always. Though I make my living writing about race, Black History Month made about as much an impression on me as Arbor Day or a one-month anniversary with a new boyfriend who didn’t know that his days were already numbered. It’s all much ado about nothing, a purely symbolic exercise. I maintained a respectful silence about Black History Month since so many others were pretending it mattered.

So I used to be able to just ignore it—it barely penetrated my consciousness—but then I had kids. Now, they’re at the age where their teachers are required to tell them about Black History Month (“That’s when Dr. King let all the black people ride the buses”) and I’m facing a crossroads. How long will it be before my oblivious, white-looking biracial children notice that their militant black mother has no use for Black History Month?

"Black History Month is just too easy"

Black History Month should be significant. It just isn’t, and for that, blacks have only themselves to blame. The month should be more or less a combined State of the Union address and battle plan when, at best, it’s dressing up in the clothes of those who accomplished so much more for us against much worse odds. At worst, it’s the ritual excoriation of white people and history itself. Stentorian, facile condemnations of the past, and crowing over marginal, atypical victories like blacks in high office, take the place of forcefully enunciating racism’s modern contours, and most significantly, formulating specific agendas by which those contours will be redrawn.

Black History Month is far too much about the perfidy of whites and far too little about how blacks have faced up to the challenges, however monstrously unfair and difficult to surmount. Beginning at the turn of the 20th century, W.E.B. DuBois (the inventor of urban sociology) and Carter G. Woodson (the father of both black history and Black History Month) did their part at great personal sacrifice. What about us? Black History Month is just too easy. It’s like bragging about how often you visit your elders in the nursing home rather than taking care of them yourselves.

Yet Black History Month, just like those shut-in elders, must not be abandoned. They’re both relics that should be honored—however willfully cut off from our daily lives—because every now and then, some few of us will be caught unawares and actually driven to live up to and enlarge the history we’ve inherited.

Teaching our children to expect and embrace failure
Nearly a decade ago, I obediently suffered through an interminable Black History Month oration at an inner-city black Catholic church in honor of its newly formed diocesan basketball team. I held my peace while a 50ish black lay worker offered up pathetic McNuggets of black history. (“Who invented the stoplight? A black man, that’s who! White folks don’t want you to know that.”) It was the heaping side dishes of black bigotry I couldn’t stomach. His hatred of whites was so virulent, it contorted his very features just to speak of them; looking around this room of Christians, the only consternation I could see was my own.

When he happily told that group of adolescents to “expect to be cheated and to lose most games they played against the white churches,” I almost fell out of my folding chair. He was luxuriating in the hopelessness of any encounter with whites and teaching our future to do the same—he was advising them to expect and embrace failure! Much as I was used to hear this kind of “guidance” from my elders, for some reason that day, I reached a breaking point. I had to know what my inheritance truly was, so sure was I that this was not it.

I raced home and finally dove head first into that stack of books blacks quote out of context every February and swear we’re going to read some day (outside of excerpts in college survey courses)—books like The Miseducation of the Negro, The Souls of Black Folks, the collected works of Frederick Douglass and Dr. King, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, Sojourner Truth, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Albert Murray, every slave memoir I could lay hands on.

Our forebears couldn't take the easy way out… too bad we can
That’s when I learned that I’d been robbed of my true intellectual and moral heritage, but not by whites. It was my own people who lied to me about who I was because, post-civil rights movement, we’re too comfortable in our protected protests to put ourselves on the physical and philosophical line the way our brave forebears did. They couldn’t afford to take the easy way out; too bad we can.

Those books have stood the test of time not because they are about the evil of whites (they’re not, to my surprise) but because they’re about what is required of blacks to live in a world which despises us. They are internal critiques. These works celebrate an oppressed people’s manful responses to their oppression but, most often, catalogue the ways in which we have failed to rise to the challenges that face us; they are notable for the minimal amount of time they spend discussing the perfidy of whites. Their focus is on a love for, and belief in, their people that sets high standards for our behavior in the face of adversity. DuBois and Truth and Woodson—reaching out from across the centuries—were such a rebuke to me as I remembered sitting silently while racism was preached that I actually stopped reading repeatedly to hang my head.

Knowledge truly is power and, knowing what I now do, I can’t bear Black History Month. For my children’s sake, however, I’ll have to try. Somebody’s going to teach them who they are and I’ll be damned if they’ll quietly listen to 35 years of lies and racism the way I did. They’re only 5 and 3, so they’ve got a few more years before they inherit Mom’s books and have to offer dinner table critiques of all the pointless nonsense they hear every February.

Debra J. Dickerson is the author of The End of Blackness and An American Story.

Affirmative action challenge dead, but, unfortunately, BAMN still lives

2007-01-20T08:54:00.000-05:00

BAMN has been "BOOZLED" yet again. By any means necessary (BAMN) apparently means without any thought or logic at all. If they had challenged the clearly defined implementation date for the constitutional revision prior to the election the challenge back then might have had a hearing, and a court might have found in their favor. The BAMN lawyers don't seem to know when to quit wasting the court's time and our time. Perhaps someone should legally challenge BAMN's right to continue to file frivolous lawsuits, but, of course, that would be an interference with the new right to litigate settled issues endlessly. Michigan had 9 million citizens and 11,000 lawyers in 1972. Today we still have 9 million left (Michigan leads the country in net population flow out-2 people leave Michigan permanently for every 1 who settles here) but we have nearly 40,000 lawyers.

From this morning's Detroit Free Press:

Affirmative action challenge dead
January 20, 2007

BY KRISTEN JORDAN SHAMUS

FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER

A federal court battle about whether to let three state universities delay implementation of a voter-approved affirmative action ban in admissions policies appears to be over, with the U.S. Supreme Court declining to hear it Friday.

The Supreme Court's decision ends a debate over whether the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Wayne State University could delay changing admissions policies for six months. A vote in November banned the use of race or gender in those policies.

U-M officials had said it was going ahead with changes and the other schools said their policies were largely in line with the ban, though each school favored the delay while awaiting legal interpretations.

Several civil rights groups have a federal case challenging the referendum's constitutionality. And another lawsuit is set for a hearing Jan. 31 in Washtenaw County Circuit Court.

Contact KRISTEN JORDAN SHAMUS at 313-222-5997 or kshamus@freepress.com.

BAMN Still Makes (Meaningless) Noises

2007-01-08T14:19:00.000-05:00

On Martin Luther King,Jr. Day, Jan 15, at the University of Michigan Campus, apparently BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) will stage (meaning bus in) a protest by students wrangled out of high school classes in Detroit, their usual font of bodies for such protests. They will demand that there be "no drop" in "underrepresented minority students" in UM admissions because of Proposal 2, passed overwhelmingly in a high voter turn-out election last November. Proposal 2, of course, demands that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 be honored and that no person is judged by skin color, race, or sex in government-funded education.

BAMN claims to be defending the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Have they read it? If not, anyone who wishes to compare it to the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative language can do so on the RaceFreeZone.com blog, but the language of both seems very clear and almost identical. How can BAMN protest equal treatment under the law, demand that persons they deem to be "underrepresented" be pushed into college based on facial color or race, and claim they are defending the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

How can they, with straight faces and indignant voices, stage such a protest on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, when Martin Luther King, Jr. himself demanded that we all be judged "by the content of our character, not the color of our skin"?

Seems laughable at best, manipulative and race-baiting at worst.

We at RaceFreeZone wonder whether BAMN will be breaking any windows, damaging any cars, stealing any candy, or knocking over any tables, as they have done before during their "honorable" protests? Perhaps we should take some tables and cars, windows and candy to the protest so they will have a means by which to vent their high moral concerns for equality in education.

To the news media who will surely show up at the protest to dutifully report the anguish of these bussed-in students, we suggest they ask the following questions:

"Do you know what you've been brought here to accomplish?"

"Have you read the Civil Rights Act of 1964?"

"Have you read the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative?"

"Can you tell us the difference in the language?"

"Do you know that you have as much right to go to college as anybody else?"

"Do you think you should have more rights than somebody of a different color?"

"Do you know that enrollment of black students in California colleges went down briefly but then actually went up and is now higher after the same law was passed in California?"

"Do you know that more black students are actually graduating in California, actually coming out of college with diplomas, instead of flunking out after their faces are counted as 'diversity'?"

We challenge the media to ask the right questions, and see if these protesting students have any answers.

Diane Carey Responds to Jack Lessenberry

2006-12-27T10:07:00.000-05:00

In today's Metro Times Op Ed writer Jack Lessenberry wrote:

I am totally in favor of affirmative action, always have been, and I am a middle-aged, white, Anglo-Saxon male, of class origins lower than those of that intellectual pinup girl for today's trailer park, Jennifer "Adenoidal Whine' Gratz.

I fought against Proposal 2, knowing all along that it would pass, that every laid-off metal bender in Center Line was just itching to stick it to the blacks, who, some of them really do think, get an automatic free ride, full scholarship to the University of Michigan, just for being Negroes.

And indeed, the voters of this state overwhelmingly and disgracefully chose to outlaw affirmative action in college admissions and government hiring. Affirmative action lost by a landslide everywhere except in Detroit, and the two counties surrounding Michigan State University and the University of Michigan.

But it isn't over till it's over, and, last week, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP filed suit in federal court asking, essentially, that the courts overturn the will of the voters. "We have come too far to allow the doors of opportunity to be shut in the face of the American promise of liberty and justice," intoned the Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit NAACP.

He claimed that "affirmative action is still the law of the land." He was joined by Kary Moss, who is executive director of the ACLU of Michigan.

She referred in a press release to the twin U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the U-M cases. She said those 2003 rulings "made it clear that it is entirely within the law for universities to consider race and gender as one of many criteria in selecting their student body."

Now, full disclosure on my part. I firmly believe in the American Civil Liberties Union. I give them money. I am on Kary Moss' advisory board. I think she is one of the best things Michigan has going for it.... (Lessenberry continues from this point to agree that the basis of the lawsuits brought to prevent the implementation of the MCRI are nonsense, but this is a legal argument for him. His true beliefs are stated above.)

To the above paragraphs Diane Carey responds:

To the Metro Times,

Please re-think your use of James Lessenberry's "opining." It's not "opining;" it's "Oh-whining." Lessenberry's membership in the socialist/affirmative action strike team diminishes his credibility. He calls names but misses points, displaying a journalistic liar of the first degree.

His tirade against Proposal 2 is faulty, and his reducing the voters of Michigan to "laid-off metal benders in Center Line" is a gross misinterpretation of what happened. I am the mother of a multi-race family and aunt of four mixed race (part black) children. I helped lead the charge against race preferences because my children are Americans and shouldn't have different rights from each other based on skin color.

Lessenberry merrily ignores the fact that 52% of women, 50% of labor households, 50% of non-labor households, and even 14% of blacks no longer want to be judged by race or gender. If the vote had happened in a conservative- slanting year, Lessenberry would have said that "rich white revenge" was at work, but since clearly that's not what happened, we're now all "metal benders" trying to "stick it to blacks." Can he explain why I would want to "stick it" to my own children?

Affirmative action is not the law of the land, despite the Lessenberry tantrum. Equal opportunity is the law of the land. Affirmative action (sorting people by race) is the opposite of equal opportunity (everyone the same before the law). Affirmative action is a corrupt political disease. As the next step in the Civil Rights march in America, we must dismantle it.

Diane Carey
RaceFreeZone.com
Owosso, Michigan

An Op Ed piece by Diane Carey that has been published in several Michigan nespapers:

2006-12-26T15:40:00.000-05:00

But wait a minute . . . before the election, Jennifer Granholm, Liz Boyd, Kwame Kilpatrick, the UM, WSU, MSU, Michigan’s cities and state agencies cried panic at the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. It was going to plunge us into Medieval times, cause an apocalypse and end the world. I traveled the state doing interviews and debates, and the howls of agony thundered everywhere. Minorities and women would shrivel away to their doom.

Now these people are saying the new law won’t change the rules, and they’re ignoring the will of the voters of Michigan? Suddenly, they only have to pay attention to Federal mandates about affirmative action?

Fine. Let Michigan’s state institutions and cities who want to keep race and sex preferences do so—as long as they don’t take one more dollar of state tax-payers’ money. Defy our will, be denied our funding.

Let’s see how they like being ignored.

Diane Carey
RaceFreeZone.com
Owosso, Michigan

Diane Carey replies to Dawson Bell's Free Press Story below

2006-12-13T20:46:00.000-05:00

Mr. Bell,

I was a front-line player in the MCRI debate, forming my own advocacy group, Race Free Zone and a hot-button blog, RaceFreeZone.com. Though "only" 24 states have ballot initiative processes, in fact this is a quintessential American tide. With a win in Michigan, although "only" in four states (California, Washington and Florida by exec order) now 25% of the population of the U.S. lives free of race/sex preferences. We do very well in high-density states, and I predict that the majority in the US will soon live in race free zones. Eventually the politicians in Washington will find out that this is a winning issue. Since politicians are weasels and always want to "lead" us to where we're already going, the ban on race/sex affirmative action has a national future.

Diane Carey
RaceFreeZone.com

The fight for equal rights and civil rights for all Americans continues

2006-12-13T20:40:00.000-05:00

Some thoughts based on my life experience. In 1959 I read a sociological study that had been printed in Scientific American in 1947 that detailed the discovery of the sea change in the attitudes of Americans who had fought in World War II with regard to racial equality and justice for all. We could all see even as early as 1959 that the greatest battles for civil rights beyond the battlefield were sometimes individual events like Harry Truman, who only finished high school and that in Missouri, integrating the armed services by executive order. Others were more profound like Earl Warren, the former conservative governor of California, demanding a 9-0 vote in Brown vs. The Board to overturn Plessy.

The negative commentors in today's Free Press, besides being poorly educated, don't take into account the history of the civil rights movement. Social movements reflect their times and are triggered into action by great events. The success of the simmering civil rights movement in America was born from our unambiguous victory in World War II. The Germans and the Japanese both based their imperialism on racial superiority. The discrediting of this idea in military defeat didn't go unnoticed by the huge number of citizen soldiers in America who rose up to crush both of these power crazed nations.

Now, the civil rights movement is mainstream, but every and any detail created to enable civil rights for all is not a sacred commitment to be forever enshrined in law. The children and grandchildren of those men and women who gave their lives to extend equality to all have determined that it is time to step back, look at everything that has been done, and redefine what is to be kept and what is to be discarded from the "tools" that were devised to make sure that equality was firmly entrenched in our social as well as our legal system.

We all winked at the inequity of affirmative action for some to ensure equality for all. Justice O'Connor said in Gratz v. Bollinger that she hoped in 25 years affirmative action wouldn't be necessary for the goal of equality to be reached. The process to guarantee that her statement become true is under way, and in truth it may take another generation, but the crutch, and that's all it is and ever was, of affirmative action is going away.

The equality that is every American's birthright will be ensured only for those who stand up without assistance and take it firmly in hand. You are free in America to make mistakes, dodge opportunity, and complain that the world, or people of a particular skin color owe you a living. You are not free, unless you actually are disabled, to demand that the rest of us simply do your part for you.

Every human being is born unable to take care of itself. That's what mother, family, friends, and community are for. But at some point you need to take care of yourself to prepare to give back to those who took care of you and to prepare to take care of the next generation.

The childhood of the American civil rights movement is over.

We must "put away the things of its childhood."

Farewell affirmative action for all but those Americans disabled by birth, accident, or war.

____________________________________________

From this morning's Free Press:

Published: December 13. 2006 3:00AM
Michigan
Prop 2 backers to take campaign to other states
December 13, 2006

BY DAWSON BELL

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Buoyed by a landmark victory in Michigan in November, backers of the anti-affirmative action Michigan Civil Rights Initiative -- also known as Proposal 2 -- are set to announce plans today for similar ballot proposals in other states in 2008.

Seven states, all west of the Mississippi River, are candidates for ballot efforts, said Jennifer Gratz, the Southgate native who directed the MCRI campaign and will participate in today's announcement.

In an interview Tuesday, she declined to say how many states ultimately would be targeted in 2008, but said: "We're definitely looking at multiple states."

Affirmative action proponents, who said they expected as much, continue to look for ways to blunt the appeal of the MCRI approach -- banning the use of race and gender preferences in government hiring, contracting and university admissions.

Ward Connerly, the California businessman and former University of California regent who led successful efforts to ban preferences in California and Washington state before bringing the fight to Michigan three years ago, is leading the latest initiative to take the battle to more states.

Gratz, whose lawsuit over race-based admissions policies at the University of Michigan helped propel the state into the middle of the affirmative action debate, said she will join Connerly's California-based American Civil Rights Institute and expects to work on the issue full-time.

Gratz confirmed the states where petition drives and ballot proposals are most likely. Those states are: Oregon, South Dakota, Nevada, Nebraska, Missouri, Arizona and Colorado.

She declined to say in how many states she expects to launch full campaigns, but predicted it will be more than one.

"We've always felt that if we could win in Michigan, we could win anywhere," she said.

Gratz said MCRI had been contacted both during and since the Nov. 7 election -- in which Proposal 2 was approved 58%-42% -- by activists interested in mounting similar campaigns in various states. Some of the contacts came from the offices of elected officials, but many were from "ordinary people who just want to do something about equal rights," she said.

Although many predicted the Michigan election result could create momentum for the campaign to end race- and gender-based preferences in affirmative action programs nationally, the movement faces both political and practical limits.

States that can be targeted for ballot proposals -- the only method Connerly has been able to use to circumvent entrenched opposition -- are mostly in the West, and a minority. Only 24 states allow citizen-initiated referenda, and that includes California, Washington and Michigan.

But the success of Proposal 2 may rally some new, or previously flagging, support.

Advocates for affirmative action admit they've not found the formula for beating Connerly at the ballot box.

In Michigan, virtually every influential interest group, politician and public figure opposed Proposal 2, but that seemed to have little effect on voters.

Wade Henderson, president of the Washington, D.C.- based Leadership Council on Civil Rights, said a 2008 campaign on multiple fronts would pose "a real challenge."

"We obviously have to go back and rethink a bit" after what happened in Michigan, he said.

But Henderson said he believes a sustained, well-financed campaign that emphasizes the benefits of equal opportunity could be successful.

"I think ultimately the American people are fundamentally fair, and they recognize that opportunity has not been universally available," he said.

Contact DAWSON BELL at 313-222-6604 or dbell@freepress.com.

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Steve,

Telling people to sign a petition to pass a law treating everyone equal is not misleading. People who sign things without reading them are dumb, and there are a lot of dumb people in this country.

At an environmentalism rally I saw a comedian get hundreds of signatures to outlaw "Di-Hydrogen Monoxide." Mindless environmentalists signed with great alacrity, only to later find out they were banning water. If someone is dumb enough to sign something they disagree with, there should be no recourse.

Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 8:12 am

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ricardo, I can not begin to count the number of Michigan laws broken my the MCRI people. Much more upsetting, however, is the shady way that MCRI used cronies like Mike Cox to circumvent the proper process for placing a measure on the ballot.

Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 8:06 am

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Whatever the outcome in whatever other state, I only hope that
both sides will accept the will of the people following the vote
and that residents of those states are not subjected to the constant
whining that those of us here in Michigan are enduring.

Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 8:05 am

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"Where are the courts when we need them"? Why do you assume that the courts are set up to invalidate laws you don't like?

You might be in favor of affirmative action, but abandoning it is not racist. Assuming that minorities are too dumb and inept to make it in this society without a government hand-out, is racist.

Let me ask you this: If AA is so necessary, why stop at admission to college, why not extend it to the college classroom? Since minorities are on such an unlevel playing field, why not give minorities a 5.0 for an A, 4.0 for a B, 3.0 for a C, etc. and force whites to go by the standard GPA schedule? If minorities are unable to compete for jobs, and in an "unfair" financial position, why not have 2 prices for goods at grocery stores and retail stores--say a 20% discount to minorities on account of the "unlevel playing field." Maybe instead of employee pricing on Big 3 cars, we could have minority pricing, because minorities need cars, but with big bad society so dead set against them, they just aren't able to earn as much as white folks, so in an effort to level the playing field, minorities get cheaper cars.

Why are all of you who are in favor of disparate treatment based on race uncomfortable extending that from the contracting/admission arena into areas like retail prices, and in class grades? Are any of these ideas any more ridiculous than lowering the standards when it comes to getting a job? It is exactly the same, and if you don't see the irony you are kidding yourself or just plain dumb.

I know of no greater insult than to tell the hard working and intelligent minorities I go to school with that their skin color precludes them from ever having the abilities I do, so they need the government to bump them up to my level.

Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 8:05 am

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i request that anyone who wants to reply: "you're the racist!" or "you're the moron!" to please give details in your responses. the crypto-fascist clowns who love to post here usually just resort to "i know you are, but what am i?" 4th grade style personal attacks when they're presented with evidence that doesn't fit into their convoluted worldview.

Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 7:54 am

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The rule of law, which is the foundation of a truly free society, seems to have gone out of fashion at Michigan's taxpayer supported universities.

2006-12-06T13:15:00.000-05:00

A letter to the editor of the Detroit News from reader Eric W. Russell asks some questions about some Post Proposition 2 Pronouncements from Wayne State University on how to ensure that Michigan's amended constitution can be circumvented:

Dear Editor, The Detroit News:

Some folks at WSU Law School seem to have little respect for democratically enacted laws, such as the new constitutional amendment created by passage of Proposal 2. It is the apex of arrogance and contempt for the law for these people to publicly declare that they are formulating policy to skirt around what the electorate decided. Their idea to increase enrollment primarily from the City of Detroit is a slap in the face, since WSU is supported by tax money from everyone in the state, not just Detroit residents. In short, their proposed policy smacks of disrespect and dishonesty.

Sincerely,
Eric W. Russell

Diane Carey has some thoughts on knee-jerk charges of racism brought up in political campaigns to discourage discussion and debate

2006-12-05T19:01:00.000-05:00

Peter Brown (see below) hits it on the head: will Republicans have the spine to stand up to being called "racist" if they oppose race-based initiatives in 2008? They should--we need Republicans with spines. Democrat candidates also should look at these numbers and see which way the wind is blowing--huge numbers of Democrat voters cast ballots in favor of Proposal 2, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. This issue crosses political lines, and politicians would do well to notice that.

Will Michigan Vote Mean More Race Ballot Questions?
By Peter Brown

Lost amid the headlines of the Democratic takeover of Congress was the decision by Michigan voters to ban affirmative action/racial preferences. The vote raises the question of whether Republicans will see the issue as one they should champion anew elsewhere.

On Election Day, when Michigan easily re-elected a Democratic U.S. senator and governor, a ballot measure to end such programs in college admission and state government hiring and contracting won by an even larger margin.

But virtually every major GOP official and organization, including the gubernatorial candidate, opposed the measure, as did Democratic leaders and candidates.

Yet the proposal won overwhelming support from Republicans and independents, and almost all demographic groups.

There is no doubt that ballot questions about such programs, which backers call affirmative action and opponents call racial preferences, engender strong feelings.

Many African-Americans argue that it is racist to end programs developed over the past 35 years which give racial minorities, and in some cases white women, an edge in competitive situations.

Those who want to end affirmative action/preferences retort that the program themselves are racist since they discriminate based on race. These folks say they want to create a color-blind society.

In the 1980s and 1990s Republicans used racially-tinged issues to their benefit. But few GOP candidates have recently campaigned on affirmative action/preferences, even though they are aware of its potency at the polls.

In Michigan, even more than in California and Washington, which passed similar measures in the 1990s, feelings ran high. The major group opposing the measure calls itself "By Any Means Necessary" and used the courts, politicians and mass rallies to make its case.

BAMN is now threatening a lawsuit to block the law's implementation even though the federal courts refused a similar effort by activists in California after that state passed its measure. And the president of the University of Michigan has suggested her school will do what it can to circumvent the thrust of the new law.

Even though the opponents reportedly outspent the supporters by a five-to-one margin and had most of the major media in their camp editorially, the measure passed by a 58-42 percent margin.

Significantly, pre-election polls had shown the race roughly even. That means voters either changed their minds at the last minute, or more likely, knew how they would vote all along, but gave what might be considered the politically correct answer when asked by strangers over the telephone.

The ballot measure won majorities among virtually all demographic groups except blacks, self-described liberals and Democrats. It passed 64-36 percent among whites who were 85 percent of the electorate, and lost 86-14 among blacks, who were 12 percent (roughly the national average) of the electorate.

Other than a 50-50 split among the 15 percent of the electorate with incomes of $15,000-$30,000, the measure carried every income group and every age group. Interestingly, the only group of voters, when classified by education, among whom it lost was the 16 percent of the Michigan electorate with post-graduate degrees. And it received 49 percent from them.

Faced with these numbers, Republicans nationally may be reconsidering whether and how strongly to raise the issue in other states. After all, Michigan is among the more liberal states in the country, as are California and Washington. Given the vote there, one wonders how similar measures would play, for instance, in swing states during a presidential year like 2008.

Both parties have been putting measures that help them politically on state ballots. In 2006, for instance, Democratic-allied groups pushed measures to raise the minimum wage. And conservative/Republican groups have been putting ballot question on banning gay marriage on state ballots.

Democrats/liberals will argue, of course, that raising an issue that involves race is morally reprehensible. The Michigan vote, however, is additional evidence that most Americans don't see affirmative action/preferences as fair, and instead favor a color-blind society.

The political question is whether the Republicans have the stomach for reaching out to this broad constituency at the price of being called various unflattering names by the opposition.

Peter A. Brown is assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. He can be reached at peter.brown@quinnipiac.edu

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

2006-11-28T16:29:00.000-05:00

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