Race and Fairness

To a great many White Americans, the election of Barack Obama brought the hope that our country's long fixation on race and racism might finally be coming to an end.  Unfortunately that has not happened, and, if anything, there is more government attention being paid to "disparate impact" than ever before. 

[There are 847,000 links in a Google search for the term.  Here's one: DOJ to Hire 50 More Lawyers, Gear Up for Civil Rights Enforcement Drive:

The U.S. Department of Justice is gearing up for a renewed emphasis on traditional civil rights enforcement after a shift in focus during the administration of former President George W. Bush to a greater emphasis on religious rights, human trafficking and individual cases in which there was evidence of intentional discrimination.

Under Attorney General Eric Holder, the DOJ is planning to bring more disparate-impact cases based on statistical evidence that minorities are treated less favorably in arenas ranging from housing to hiring, [Emphasis mine-SW] reports the New York Times.]

Disparate impact is the pernicious legal theory that guides much of the government's approach to ferreting out hidden racism.  Overt racism is a fringe element in the American zeitgeist, and has been for quite some time, so disparate impact became a useful answer to the questions of how to explain diverse economic outcomes for different minorities and how to maintain full employment for diversity engineers.  Of course, not all minorities and all disparate impacts are equal. [HT: Steve Hsu]

Do colleges redline Asian-Americans?

SAT SCORES aren’t everything. But they can tell some fascinating stories.

Take 1,623, for instance. That’s the average score of Asian-Americans, a group that Daniel Golden - editor at large of Bloomberg News and author of “The Price of Admission’’ - has labeled “The New Jews.’’ After all, much like Jews a century ago, Asian-Americans tend to earn good grades and high scores. And now they too face serious discrimination in the college admissions process.

Notably, 1,623 - out of a possible 2,400 - not only separates Asians from other minorities (Hispanics and blacks average 1,364 and 1,276 on the SAT, respectively). The score also puts them ahead of Caucasians, who average 1,581. And the consequences of this are stark.

...

A few years ago, however, when I worked as a reader for Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions, it became immediately clear to me that Asians - who constitute 5 percent of the US population - faced an uphill slog. They tended to get excellent scores, take advantage of AP offerings, and shine in extracurricular activities. Frequently, they also had hard-knock stories: families that had immigrated to America under difficult circumstances, parents working as kitchen assistants and store clerks, and households in which no English was spoken.

But would Yale be willing to make 50 percent of its freshman class Asian? Probably not.

Indeed, as Princeton’s Nieli suggests, most elite universities appear determined to keep their Asian-American totals in a narrow range. Yale’s class of 2013 is 15.5 percent Asian-American, compared with 16.1 percent at Dartmouth, 19.1 percent at Harvard, and 17.6 percent at Princeton.

“There are a lot of poor Asians, immigrant kids,’’ says University of Oregon physics professor Stephen Hsu, who has written about the admissions process. “But generally that story doesn’t do as much as it would for a non-Asian student. Statistically, it’s true that Asians generally have to get higher scores than others to get in.’’

In a country built on individual liberty and promise, that feels deeply unfair. If a teenager spends much time studying, excels at an instrument or sport, and garners wonderful teacher recommendations, should he be punished for being part of a high-achieving group? Are his accomplishments diminished by the fact that people he has never met - but who look somewhat like him - also work hard?

The prevailing myth in Academia is that there is no such thing as "race", ie it is merely a social construct, in which case, all evidence of disparate outcomes must imply discrimination.  The President's good friend, Skip Gates, is a proponent of such a theory, as noted in this interview with Raina Kelley  of Newsweek: [HT: OneSTDV]

Blackness 101

Skip Gates talks about Black History Month--and what it means to be black today.

And what did you discover about American diversity?
We discovered that no matter what the law was during the day, at night when the lights came down, everyone was sleeping with everyone else. I have never [DNA-]tested a black person who was 100 percent African. Everybody had some percentage of European blood. Elizabeth Alexander [the chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale] is 66 percent European. Even Stephen Colbert, a proud son of Ireland, discovered that the oldest relative we could find on his family tree was German. Meryl Streep thought she was Dutch, but it turns out she is also descended from the English founders of this nation. Diversity doesn't just mean black and white. America was about the blurring of bloodlines in the creation of a new people. I realized how connected, how inextricably combined we were. 

Nobody was upset by that?
No, but the biggest surprise was that anybody who was 100 percent European was disappointed. They wanted to be a little bit African-American or Native American. They didn't want to be just white. Because we were raised with the one-drop rule, we tend to think that if you have any black ancestors, you're black, but we're finding out that everybody is mixed race, so what does that do to our definition of black? It proves that culture is not biological, it's constructed.

So to be American is to be a mutt?
Yes, ethnic merging is inevitable. But it's going to be a long time until we all look like Polynesians. When we still see new migrants scapegoated for the economic problems of this country, we know there's still work to be done. We trace Eva Longoria back to her 11th great-grandfather in Spain, and her ninth great-grandfather came to the New World in 1603. That's 17 years before the Mayflower.

Because I am not an academic I have not been privy to explanations of how a lack of "racial purity" invalidates the fuzzy concept of racial groups but even if we were to accept such a non-scientific belief, we would be left with the need to understand failing minorities as being the result of failing "constructed" cultures. 

[It is not politic to ask, but here goes: Who constructs inner city culture, anyway?  Is it cooked up in some hidden smoke filled room somewhere by evil WASP Social Engineers and then imposed on unsuspecting black gang bangers?  Are rappers the unwitting agents of such nefarious plots aimed at destroying the work ethic and academic accomplishments of young black children?  The idea that the black community has suffered egregious social damage from the liberal enabled destruction of the black family is rarely mentioned in polite society.]

The basic problem that is forever avoided by those who purport to speak for the troubled minorities in America is that whether or not there is a biological contribution to their failures or the cause is predominantly cultural, we have not yet been able to figure out a way to erase their deficits.  Incredible amounts of money have been spent trying to erase disparities and it hasn't worked.  We should be realistic about the limitations of our efforts at a time when we have a troubled economy and the White House has already announced the need for tremendous expenditures to erase the disparity between minority and majority academic achievement.

[In the long run the most difficult data that is likely to emerge will come from human genetic studies, as specific gene alleles become linked with specific abilities.  It is a certainty that there exist gene alleles that produce proteins that facilitate increased branching in the CNS, for example, or other alleles that code for proteins that produce muscle cells that contract more efficiently.  As different groups are found to be gifted with different percentages of such alleles, we will be able to better determine how much group difference is ultimately biological.  One day, such results will make group disparities irrelevant as parents choose the constellation of attributes they desire in their offspring (or, more fancifully, we migrate into more robust hardware via uploading.)  When we have achieved such abilities the arguments over desirable traits will persist but everyone will have to be fully responsible for the traits they choose to contain and exhibit.]

As so often happens, when there are complex and difficult social issues involved, it is always a good idea to see what Thomas Sowell has in mind:

The Fallacy of "Fairness"

If there is ever a contest to pick which word has done the most damage to people's thinking, and to actions to carry out that thinking, my nomination would be the word "fair." It is a word thrown around by far more people than have ever bothered to even try to define it.

This mushy vagueness may be a big handicap in logic but it is a big advantage in politics. All sorts of people, with very different notions about what is or is not fair, can be mobilized behind this nice-sounding word, in utter disregard of the fact that they mean very different things when they use that word.

Some years ago, for example, there was a big outcry that various mental tests used for college admissions or for employment were biased and "unfair" to many individuals or groups. Fortunately there was one voice of sanity-- David Riesman, I believe-- who said: "The tests are not unfair. LIFE is unfair and the tests measure the result.

If by "fair" you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has never been anywhere close to being fair, anywhere or at any time. If you stop and think about it (however old-fashioned that may seem), it is hard even to conceive of how life could possibly be fair in that sense.

There is a powerful case that can be made that a country's economic progress can be related to the successful enabling of its Creative Class and/or Smart Fraction.  I suspect that evening the playing field in order to diminish disparate outcomes between the top and bottom, at the considerable cost of flattening the top tier, is a poor trade-off in the long term (and is explicitly not being done by our most significant rival, China, which is doing all it can to maximize its human potential.) 

As Thomas Sowell points out, life is terribly unfair. It might well be best for all if we could spend more time and energy on facilitating the successes of our most talented and gifted children (please note, this is not synonymous with most intelligent) rather than spending an always inadequate amount of money (because we do not yet know how to do the impossible) trying to raise those who by virtue of the unfair hand they were dealt by life can never become the high achieving, above average child that all must be.  Sadly for all, Lake Wobegon, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average" does not exist.