race and ethnicity – praag.org

How should we respond to calls for white genocide?

by Dan Roodt

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This week on Twitter a former UKZN student representative council member, Sfiso “Mabhiza” Mbatha, tweeted: “We gonna kill every white cockcroach that breath(es) SA’s air”, while adding, “Would rape every 13yr old white girl after Mandela finally kick that bucket. Just for control.”

These tweets caused a lot of reaction, but no official complaints were laid. If any such statement were made about blacks, it would have provoked a far larger furore. The tweeter would have been charged with hate speech at the SA Human Rights Commission and MSM journalists would have “shamed” him with negative publicity about his “racism”.

As Mbatha explained afterwards, he thought it was something of a joke: “It was just a joke at the end of the day. But now I realise that they were uncalled for, they went overboard and pushed the limit. I did say that I was joking, but people responded by insulting me, so I insulted them back.”

A large number of whites did not react at all. This is typical of so-called “advanced groups” all over the world who almost expect to be resented and even hated by the less successful groups. The well-known ethnic expert and author of the book, Ethnic goups in conflict, David Horowitz, distinguishes between “advanced groups” and “backward groups”. I think it would be fair to say that South African whites fit the definition of an “advanced group” and therefore typically react like one. Advanced groups are more educated, entrepreneurial and occupy the higher social classes in an ethnically divided society. As Horowitz explains:

“Where backward groups seek proportionality in government employment, advanced groups seek only assurances of nondiscrimination. Where backward groups attempt to keep ethnic strangers from government service in their region, advanced groups affirm the principle of unrestricted mobility.”

Advanced groups are reluctant to secede if they find themselves living in diaspora in a “backward territory”. Significantly, Horowitz notes that advanced groups are “disproportionately victims of ethnic violence”. South Africa’s brutal farm murders are a case in point, targeting a specific language and racial group that is perceived to be in a better socio-economic position than the surrounding “backward” population.

If we are honest, we should admit that some form of white genocide or anti-white violence has always been at the core of the ANC’s “liberation strategy”. The ANC is essentially composed of elites identifying with the less successful ethnic groups in South Africa. It is therefore normal that, according to the laws of ethnic conflict, it should heap opprobium onto whites which it perceives as “the enemy” and responsible for the relative deprivation of South African blacks. It is also telling that the principle of proportional employment has been implemented, not only in the public sector, but also in the private sector in a clear attempt to curtail white social and economic prowess.

However, it would be too simplistic to transpose Horowitz’s theory of ethnic conflict onto South Africa as one might onto Nigeria, Sri Lanka or Malaysia. In addition to the ethnic dynamic at work in the South African conflict, there is also the ideological dimension in the form of political correctness, Western decadence and generalised anti-white attitudes to be found in the global mainstream media.

Against this backdrop, calls for a white genocide in South Africa seem almost normal or normalised. Foreign correspondents in Johannesburg from the BBC, the New York Times and the London Guardian who have been casting whites in the role of evil racists for years, are likely to report on anti-white animus among blacks with “understanding”. In the light of the aforegoing narrative, these correspondents might suggest: who can blame them?

White South African liberals and leftists who are loyal to Britain and share left-wing Anglo-American perspectives on their own countrymen, take an equally sanguine view of such manifestations of anti-white “racism”. Liberal Britons are indifferent to the killing of whites in South Africa, if not supportive of any would-be black genocidaires. I once spoke to an official from a London NGO who explained to me that we should not complain about being killed by blacks as “they were only getting their own back”, as if white leaders in the past had proceeded to similar public appeals to “exterminate the kaffirs”!

As we saw during the court case around Julius Malema’s “hate speech” against Afrikaner farmers, there was little media sympathy for white victims of ethnic and racial violence. Even though Malema was prohibited from singing the song, “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer”, the song kept on being sung all over the country. In fact, the governing ANC opposed the legal prohibition of the song, with its advocate Gilbert Marcus, brother of Reserve Bank governor Gill Marcus, arguing for the party’s “freedom of speech”. Singing such songs were part of “black culture”.

It may be, therefore, that calls for white genocide in South Africa are examples of the “free speech” that Marcus and many other leftists and liberals would argue are “harmless” and “not to be taken literally”. In the words of the young black tweeter from Natal, Sfiso “Mabhiza” Mbatha, it is “just a joke at the end of the day”.

It is also true that black Africans often joke about killing. “I’m going to kill you,” is quite an everyday saying. Also, killing is invoked many a time as a universal method of meting out justice for all sorts of crimes and misdemeanours.

However, as the saying goes, “many a true word is spoken in jest”. Robert Mugabe is one of the most admired black leaders in South Africa and there is no doubt that his “final solution to the white problem” by simply confiscating their assets and expelling most of the white population, would also be wildly popular in this country. There not being another country south of South Africa towards which whites could flee, a broad desire “to get rid of whites once and for all” could lead to widespread killing, massacres or even systemic genocide of the kind hinted at in “jocular” black tweets.

How then should we answer my initial question in the title above: “How should we respond to calls for white genocide?” I think there would be at least two approaches. The one would be a kind of laissez faire approach in line with leftist white responses of “not taking it literally”. That would also constitute the most typical reaction of Horowitz’s “advanced group” that sees its salvation not in mass mobilisation and ethnic agitation, but in avoiding conflict – or at worst, moving away from it. The most common reaction of whites after escaping from an armed robbery, farm attack or other form of black-on-white violence is not to join the local chapter of the AWB’s Ystergarde (Iron Guard), but to call an Australian immigration consultant.

I have just had a visit from a friend who had recently emigrated to Australia. He misses South Africa, family and friends, especially the warmth and hospitality of Afrikaners. But he does not contemplate ever returning to South Africa, because, as he put it: “I feel safe in Australia. I would be scared to live in South Africa again.”

Many whites simply ignore ethnic slogans directed at them. I once listened to a talk show on the Afrikaans radio RSG where many of the callers stated quite frankly that they had adopted a kind of ostrich-like, head-in-the-sand approach. They would simply avoid reading newspapers and websites or even listening to the news on radio because it upsets them. They choose not to know. The average white professional woman or housewife shopping at Woolworths does not care either that the chain has an anti-white employment policy. She buys the fantasy of eating well, dressing well and decorating her home in the latest mix of white and earthy, African colours.

Ever since my Afrikaans high school days, I have often heard the typical injunction from teachers and many others: “Don’t be so negative!” Within the Afrikaner mind, every problem has a solution and “being negative” is a cardinal sin. In that sense, what can be more “negative” than imputing genocidal urges to South Africa’s black majority? Or even responding to a call for white genocide that is made every so often by some tweeter or black politician?

Among my many criticisms of the Afrikaans schooling system, although one of the best in the world for churning out straight-A students in maths and science, or good writers, artists, actors and so on, is that it does not teach one the art of critical thinking. Disagreeing with someone, especially publicly, is often seen as “bad manners” or even worse, as displaying that nefarious “negative” attitude. Often I have sat in meetings with especially elderly Afrikaners who used to occupy positions of authority in the old system and, upon voicing my disagreement on some point, they would simply ignore me as if they had not heard me!

Similarly, many Afrikaners out there, including the editors of newspapers, radio stations and pay-TV channels, are “simply not hearing” any call for white genocide. Call it denial or what you will, but just as their culture predisposes blacks to easily talking about killing, local white culture tends to make them hard of hearing.

We have been educated and programmed to be decent, cooperative, “positive” in Afrikaans parlance, so behave like a typical “advanced” ethnic group, eschewing ethnic solidarity in the face of danger.

However, there is one “advanced” group, probably due to past experience, that does not take calls for genocide lying down. Here I am referring, of course, to Jews. South African Jews enjoy arguably the highest standard of living of any ethnic group in the world and a perusal of the weekly South African Jewish Report will tell you about their huge socio-economic success, as well as media and political influence.

Unlike such dreadful appeals directed against Afrikaners and Boers, no-one in South Africa has ever called for the extermination of Jews. In fact, South Africa’s much-maligned National Party government was probably responsible for the good relations not only between Jews and the rest of the white population, but also between Jews and South African Muslims.

To my surprise, I recently discovered the construction site of Johannesburg’s Holocaust Centre, with another one having been in existence in Cape Town for some years already. These centres, apart from educating the public about the history of Jewish persecution, tend to preach tolerance towards Jews and between ethnic groups generally.

There is also the international Anti-Defamation League which, according to one of its own documents, “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects civil rights for all,” doing so through “information, education, legislation, and advocacy”.

I can only imagine the international outcry, notably from Germany, that would ensue if any South African black leader had to start singing “freedom songs” about “Kill a Jew, kill a plutocrat”. Charges of hate speech would immediately be laid against the offender and he would become persona non grata in many quarters. I doubt very much whether anyone at the Johannesburg Bar, least of all Gilbert Marcus SC, would defend his “freedom of speech” and colourful metaphors.

The so-called South African Human Rights Commission is a suspect body, in itself prone to anti-white sentiment. It was created to harass whites, not to uphold their rights. As far as I know, it has never responded to complaints about anti-white hate speech, apart from acknowledging the receipt of such a complaint. For that reason, many Afrikaner groups do not even comtemplate complaining to the SAHRC about calls for white genocide.

But if we are looking for models to deal with the growing chorus calling for a white genocide in South Africa, we could do worse than to imitate the Jewish community. Either one lets these comments and invocations to kill whites slide, like the ostriches that we are, or one should draw a line and respond to each and every one of them. Even if the SA Human Rights Commission will do nothing to stop hate speech against whites, the mere fact of documenting such complaints might come in handy at some later point when our struggle for survival gets even more intense than it already is.

The current mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, made a bizarre statement in 1992 when he said: “Gays are the next Jews of fundraising.” Many people have recently quoted this.phrase to point out the vast support for Obama’s Democrats among US gays.

But in a more fundamental sense, I think we could say that Afrikaners – and by extension white South Africans – are “the next Jews”. We are already subject to vicious propaganda campaigns, vilification, hostile media reports, legal and official discrimination, stereotyping and random ethnic attacks, even pogroms.

Our famous Afrikaner poet, N.P. van Wyk Louw, once wrote: “If the Afrikaner had to lose political power in South Africa, he would be as helpless as the Jew in Nazi Germany.”

Recent history has vindicated Louw. It is high time that, while we are being treated like Jews in Czarist Russia, we should respond like modern Jews who not only react vehemently against any suggestion of genocide, but also preempt it through, in the words of the Anti-Defamation League: “information, education, legislation, and advocacy”.

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A pre-racial conception of humanity?

by Justin E. H. Smith

In 1734, Anton Wilhelm Amo, a West African student and former chamber slave of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, defended a philosophy dissertation at the University of Halle in Saxony, written in Latin and entitled “On the Impassivity of the Human Mind.” A dedicatory letter was appended from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried Kraus, who praised “the natural genius” of Africa, its “appreciation for learning,” and its “inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs” and of “divine things.” Kraus placed Amo in a lineage that includes many North African Latin authors of antiquity, such as Terence, Tertullian and St. Augustine.

Why have we chosen to go with Hume and Kant, rather than with the pre-racial conception of humanity?

In the following decade, the Scottish philosopher David Hume would write: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complection than white, nor even any individual eminent in action or speculation.”

Hume had not heard of Amo, that much is clear. But we can also detect a tremendous difference between Hume’s understanding of human capacities and that of Kraus: the author of Amo’s dedicatory letter doesn’t even consider the possibility of anchoring what individual human beings are capable of doing to something as arbitrary as “complection.” For Kraus, Amo represents a continent and its long and distinguished history; he does not represent a “race.”

Another two decades on, Immanuel Kant, considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the modern period, would manage to let slip what is surely the greatest non-sequitur in the history of philosophy: describing a report of something seemingly intelligent that had once been said by an African, Kant dismisses it on the grounds that “this fellow was quite black from head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.”

Kraus, the rector of Wittenberg, had been expressing an understanding of the nature of human diversity that was, in 1734, already in decline, soon to be thoroughly drowned out by the fundamentally racist view of human populations as dividing into a fixed set of supposedly natural, species-like kinds. This is the view lazily echoed by Hume, Kant, and so many of their contemporaries.

In his lifetime, Amo was principally known as a legal theorist. His first publication, in 1729, which has since been lost (or, one might suspect, intentionally purged), was a jurisprudential treatise, “On the Right of Moors in Europe.” Here he argues, on the basis of a reading of Roman history and law, that in antiquity “the kings of the Moors were enfeoffed by the Roman Emperor” Justinian, and that “every one of them had to obtain a royal patent from him.” This meant, in Amo’s view, that African kingdoms were all recognized under Roman law, and therefore all Africans in Europe have the status of visiting royal subjects with a legal protection that precludes their enslavement.

Historically, this is highly implausible, since much of the continent of Africa was unknown to Europeans at the time of Justinian. Still, Amo’s understanding is remarkably different from, say, Kant’s account of global history, on which black Africans stood, from the very beginning and as if by definition, beyond the pale of history, and therefore led lives of no intrinsic value, lives that could only be given value through absorption into a global system dominated by Europe.

Scholars have been aware for a long time of the curious paradox of Enlightenment thought, that the supposedly universal aspiration to liberty, equality and fraternity in fact only operated within a very circumscribed universe. Equality was only ever conceived as equality among people presumed in advance to be equal, and if some person or group fell by definition outside of the circle of equality, then it was no failure to live up to this political ideal to treat them as unequal.

It would take explicitly counter-Enlightenment thinkers in the 18th century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder, to formulate anti-racist views of human diversity. In response to Kant and other contemporaries who were positively obsessed with finding a scientific explanation for the causes of black skin, Herder pointed out that there is nothing inherently more in need of explanation here than in the case of white skin: it is an analytic mistake to presume that whiteness amounts to the default setting, so to speak, of the human species.

The category of race continues to be deployed, not just by racists, but by anti-racists as well.

The question for us today is why we have chosen to stick with categories inherited from the 18th century, the century of the so-called Enlightenment, which witnessed the development of the slave trade into the very foundation of the global economy, and at the same time saw racial classifications congeal into pseudo-biological kinds, piggy-backing on the divisions folk science had always made across the natural world of plants and animals. Why, that is, have we chosen to go with Hume and Kant, rather than with the pre-racial conception of humanity espoused by Kraus, or the anti-racial picture that Herder offered in opposition to his contemporaries?

Many who are fully prepared to acknowledge that there are no significant natural differences between races nonetheless argue that there are certain respects in which it is worth retaining the concept of race: for instance in talking about issues like social inequality or access to health care. There is, they argue, a certain pragmatic utility in retaining it, even if they acknowledge that racial categories result from social and historical legacies, rather than being dictated by nature. In this respect “race” has turned out to be a very different sort of social construction than, say, “witch” or “lunatic.” While generally there is a presumption that to catch out some entity or category as socially constructed is at the same time to condemn it, many thinkers are prepared to simultaneously acknowledge both the non-naturalness of race as well as a certain pragmatic utility in retaining it.

Since the mid-20th century no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category; no scientist believes any longer that “negroid,” “caucasoid” and so on represent real natural kinds or categories. [1] For several decades it has been well established that there is as much genetic variation between two members of any supposed race, as between two members of supposedly distinct races. This is not to say that there are no real differences, some of which are externally observable, between different human populations. It is only to say, as Lawrence Hirschfeld wrote in his 1996 book, “Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds,” that “races as socially defined do not (even loosely) capture interesting clusters of these differences.”

Yet the category of race continues to be deployed in a vast number of contexts, and certainly not just by racists, but by ardent anti-racists as well, and by everyone in between. The history of race, then, is not like the history of, say, witches: a group that is shown not to exist and that accordingly proceeds to go away. Why is this?

Philosophers disagree. Anthony Appiah identifies himself as a racial skeptic to the extent that the biological categories to which racial terms refer have been shown not to exist. Yet at the same time he acknowledges that the adoption of “racial identities” may often be socially expedient, and even unavoidable, for members of perceived racial minorities. Ron Mallon has in turn distinguished between metaphysical views of race on the one hand, which make it out to describe really existent kinds, and normative views on the other, which take race to be useful in some way or other, but not real. Malon divides the latter into “eliminativist” and “conservationist” camps, supposing, variously, that the concept can only be put to bad uses, and must be got rid of, or that some of its uses are worth holding onto. On his scheme, one may very well coherently remain metaphysically anti-realist about race but still defend the conservation of the concept on normative grounds.

But given that we now know that the identity groups in modern multicultural states are plainly constituted on ethno-linguistic and cultural grounds, rather than on biological-essential grounds, it remains unclear why we should not allow a concept such as “culture” or “ethnie” to do the semantic work for us that until now we have allowed the historically tainted and misleading concept of “race” to do. We have alternative ways of speaking of human diversity available to us, some of which are on vivid display in Amo’s early life and work, and which focus on rather more interesting features of different human groups than their superficial phenotypic traits.

It is American culture that is principally responsible for the perpetuation of the concept of race well after its loss of scientific respectability by the mid-20th century. Even the most well-meaning attempts to grapple with the persistence of inequality between “blacks” and “whites” in American society take it for granted at the outset that racial categories adequately capture the relevant differences under investigation (see, for example: Thomas B. Edsall’s recent column, “The Persistence of Racial Resentment“) . This may have something to do with the fact that the two broad cultural-historical groupings of people in this country, which we call “white” and “black” and which have been constituted through the complicated histories of slavery, immigration, assimilation, and exclusion, tend at their extremes to correlate with noticeably different phenotypic traits.

An African-American is likely to look more different from an American of exclusively European descent than, say, an Orthodox Serb is likely to look from a Bosnian Muslim. This creates the illusion that it is the phenotypic difference that is causing the perception of cultural-historical distinctness, along with the injustice and inequality that has gone along with this distinctness. This also creates the illusion of American uniqueness: that our history of ethnic conflict cannot be understood comparatively or in a global context, because it, unlike conflict between Serbs and Bosnian Muslims or between Tutsi and Hutu, is supposedly based on “race” rather than history, politics, and culture. But where people are living with a different historical legacy, as in much of European history prior to the high modern period hailed in by Hume and Kant, the supposedly manifest phenotypic differences between “blacks” and “whites” can easily recede into the background as irrelevant.

Amo did not meet a happy end in Germany. His original manumission and education appear to have been a strategy on the part of Duke Anton Ulrich to impress Tsar Peter the Great of Russia, who had recently adopted his own chamber slave, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, as his own son. Gannibal would go on to a career as a brilliant engineer, military strategist, and politician; Amo, for his part, would be largely abandoned by his sponsors when the geopolitical winds shifted, and Russia fell off the duke’s list of priorities.

For a while the African philosopher eked out a living as a tutor in Jena and Wittenberg, and in 1747, after being made the butt of a libelous broadside accusing him of falling in love with a woman beyond his station, he returned to West Africa in disgrace. A French seafarer, David-Henri Gallandat, finds him there a few years later, and writes of meeting a man who “was very learned in astrology and astronomy, and was a great philosopher. At that time he was around 50 years old… He had a brother who was a slave in the colony of Suriname.”

The hopefulness of the 1734 dissertation was now long behind him. It is not known when Amo died, or under what circumstances. What we can say for certain is that he would not spend his final years as a successor to Augustine and Terence, but rather in the degraded position where someone like Kant supposed he belonged: outside of history, philosophically disenfranchised and entirely defined by something as trivial as skin color.

As long as we go on speaking as if racial categories captured something real about human diversity, we are allowing the 18th-century legacy of Kant and Hume, which was never really anything more than an ad hoc rationalization of slavery, to define our terms for us. We are turning our back on the legacy of Anton Wilhelm Amo, and of his European contemporaries who were prepared to judge him on his merits.

FOOTNOTES

[1] This is not to deny that there are limited contexts in which self-reporting of “racial” identity may be informative in a local or regional context. It is indeed helpful for a doctor to know, within the context of the American health-care system, the “race” of a patient. What it does mean to say that race is no longer a legitimate scientific category is that this limited, contextual helpfulness tells us nothing about a natural kind or real subdivision of the human species. The category of “race” can be useful in a local, medical context to the extent that it often correlates with other, useful information about tendencies within a given population. But this population need not be conceptualized in terms of race. Race is a dummy variable here, but not of interest as such.

Justin E. H. Smith teaches philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal.This piece appeared in the New York Times

When does affirmative action reach ‘critical mass’?

University of Texas Austin — The University of Texas at Austin

AUSTIN, Texas — Walking across the South Mall, or scanning the football stadium’s 100,000 seats on game day, University of Texas admissions Director Kedra Ishop sees how much has changed since the 1990s, when she was a black student at what was an inordinately white school.

This giant flagship campus — once so slow to integrate — is now awash in color, among the most diverse in the country. The student body, like Texas, is majority-minority.

At the dining hall, minority students no longer cluster together. Actually, it’s more a high-end food court now, and many tables are racial mosaics — white, black, Latino, Asian.

So is this the “critical mass” of minority students that the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly endorsed in 2003 as an educational goal important enough to allow colleges to factor the race of applicants into admissions decisions?

That question will be front and center Wednesday when a more conservative Supreme Court revisits affirmative action for the first time since that landmark case nine years ago involving the University of Michigan.

This time, it’s Texas defending the use of race in admissions, fighting a discrimination lawsuit from Abigail Fisher, a rejected white applicant. As it happens, the court’s decision will affect relatively few students at Texas, which admits most students through a system that doesn’t factor in race.

But a broad ruling rolling back affirmative action could be an earthquake at other campuses across the country that make more use of race, potentially changing the educational trajectories of millions of students.

For all the wrenching debates about opportunity and fairness the affirmative action debate evokes, the outcome will likely come down to how the current justices fill out the answer to questions they began to answer in 2003: What is critical mass, and how far can a university go to achieve it?

Generally, it’s the point where there’s enough diversity on campus to provide a rich educational environment. But beyond that, it’s a concept critics call maddeningly vague and supporters necessarily so. Is it enough for the student body to be diverse overall, or must all groups be well represented? What if there’s diversity in the student body, but not in most individual classrooms?

Texas will swallow its pride and argue that for all its progress, it’s still short of critical mass. Under state law, most UT students are admitted automatically based on their high school GPA, with race playing no role. But for the smaller remainder of its class where it enjoys more leeway, Texas argues it should be able to use race as a factor.

The reason: Some groups, especially blacks, remain underrepresented compared to Texas’ population. And minority students clump together academically, leaving most classes with no more than a single black or Latino voice.

But the university won’t give a target number, something the court would likely call an unconstitutional quota.

“There’s never been a discussion of ‘this is the target, this is what it looks like, this is where we’re trying to go,'” Ishop said. “We know what it doesn’t look like. And we know without the ability to examine students in their completeness that we can get back there very quickly.”

Such arguments sound mushy to UT’s opponents, who call the school’s goals for critical mass a quota in disguise. They say the university has gone too far using race in admissions, abusing the discretion the court granted colleges to define critical mass for themselves.

“It is a squishy concept that’s being manipulated,” said Terence Pell, president of the Center for Individual Rights, which argued against affirmative action in the Michigan case and has filed a brief against Texas in the current one. “It’s just sort of diversity for its own sake,” he added, “with no end and no limit.”

History’s role

History isn’t central to the legal issues in the affirmative action debate, but it’s an issue at UT-Austin. The football team didn’t integrate until 1970, and even as minority enrollment expanded, UT little resembled increasingly diverse Texas, leaving minority students feeling isolated.

“It was very seldom three or more were gathered,” said Machree Gibson, who arrived on campus in 1978, earned two degrees and later became the first black female president of the Texas Exes, the university’s powerful alumni group. “We used to joke, ‘Three in a room, we’re a gang.'”

Today, even a short drive through campus leaves Gibson amazed how things have changed.

But UT still doesn’t look like Texas. Of its 52,000 students, 5 percent are black (compared to 12 percent of the state population). Latinos make up 18 percent at UT (38 percent statewide) and Asians 15 percent (4 percent statewide).

Greek life and off-campus housing for upperclassmen remain mostly segregated — the West Campus neighborhood is mostly white, Riverside more black and Latino, and the Far West neighborhood Asian, limiting interactions. Academically, many departments have few non-white faces. Senior Kristin Thompson says she’s one of just two black female civil engineers in her class, despite aggressive recruiting. She’s found her community outside class, but her academic experience has been lonely.

“At UT we talk about what starts here changes the world, but I think we’re doing a disservice to students by not preparing them for a world that doesn’t have these demographics,” she said.

In the Michigan case nine years ago, psychologists, educators and, most influentially, the military flooded the court with briefs arguing a diverse learning environment helped prepare students —- whites and minorities —- for jobs and citizenship. Many also argued it takes a critical mass of minorities

How many? There was no magic number. But enough for minorities not to feel isolated in the classroom, and non-minorities to realize minorities’ views weren’t one-size-fits-all.

Those arguments persuaded Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the court’s key swing vote. In her majority opinion in the 5-4 case, she gave Michigan and other universities leeway to define critical mass in terms of their own educational goals, and to use race as a plus-factor in admissions to get there (O’Connor has since been replaced by Justice Samuel Alito, a strong affirmative action skeptic).

In Texas, a 1996 federal appeals court ruling had prohibited UT from using race in admissions, and black enrollment had plummeted. A year later, the Texas Legislature passed a “Top 10 percent” law, guaranteeing UT admission to any student at the top of his or her Texas high school.

The law was race-neutral, but it boosted the number of minorities — by some measures, close to current figures. To UT’s opponents, that proves UT can reach ample diversity — even “critical mass” — without resorting to racial preferences.

But UT says the diversity produced by the 10 percent law was stilted. Ninety percent of smaller classes had one or zero blacks, and 43 percent no more than one Latino. A student survey found minorities felt isolated, and a majority of all students felt there weren’t enough minorities for “the full benefits of diversity to occur.”

The university wanted leeway to recruit more minorities with different interests, to ensure fields such as geosciences, architecture and Thompson’s civil engineering had a critical mass, not just the campus overall.

So for the relatively small portion of its class — currently about one-quarter — not admitted automatically by their high school performance, UT designed a system to mimic what the court had allowed in the Michigan case. In that second system UT emphasizes race is a small factor, among many “special circumstances” that may be considered. It’s also not automatic, and could benefit any applicant, even a white one in some cases.

Both sides acknowledge the effect of race in UT’s system is modest (Fisher contends race is decisive for just 33 additional minority enrollees per year). To UT, that shows race is used along the limited lines the court has allowed. To Fisher, it shows that UT doesn’t need to use race at all.

On campus, critical mass evokes a range of responses. Jesse Hernandez, a senior who attended a virtually all-Latino high school in the Rio Grande Valley, says its benefits include generating a vibrant multicultural social life. Latino cultural groups, and fraternities and sororities, help minorities find a community at a huge school, but also benefit the broader student body by sharing their culture on campus.

Thompson, the civil engineering student, says she’ll recognize critical mass “when there are less racial incidents on campus, when students feel like they can go anywhere on campus and feel welcome, can go anywhere and speak their mind and not feel like they’re going to be chastised for it, ridiculed for it, looked at crazy,” she said. She loves UT, but says it’s not there yet.

“To me that’s the end goal: a welcoming campus, not a quantity of students.”

Senior Jordan Grenadier’s experience has been different.

“I don’t ever feel like I walk on campus or walk into a classroom and only see one particular type of people,” said Grenadier, who leads the campus chapter of the group Young Conservatives of Texas. On West Mall, where student groups set up tables, “it’s so diverse whenever you walk down there, it’s almost hard to imagine the university saying ‘that’s not good enough.'”

The question isn’t “whether or not (diversity) is important,” she said. “It’s, ‘Is it justified? Can someone who is qualified to attend the university not get accepted because someone who is maybe not as qualified gets in because of racial preferences?'”

UT-Austin’s president, Bill Powers, who agrees critical mass is the “central question” in the case, says UT isn’t just saying “we’ll know it when we see it.” He says “analytics,” such as classroom diversity surveys, will show UT if it’s successfully preparing students to live and work in a diverse world.

“Right now, African-Americans and Hispanics are underrepresented,” Powers said in an interview in his library-like office on campus. “We’ll reach a critical mass when you can (see it) both in the campus atmosphere and the milieu in individual classes. Not 100 percent, but where a sufficient number of individual classes bring this cross-cultural environment.”

“It really is going to hinge on what lens the court looks at the campus through,” said Gerald Torres, who says diversity is key to meaningful conversations about environmental justice in his law school courses. “Is it the lens of the classroom or is it the lens of the campus? If it’s the lens of the campus, then (the court) is likely to say the percentage increase of students of color under the 10 percent plan is sufficient. If they look at the classroom, I think they’ll say it’s not.”

Attorneys for Fisher, who sued Texas after she was denied admission to UT-Austin in 2008, contend that by even referencing the state’s demographics in its critical mass goals, UT is acknowledging a quota. They also argue the Supreme Court never intended to make diversity in every classroom the benchmark for critical mass.

“As long as you have a critical mass in the school as a whole, you’re going to bump into people in the dorms, in the all-night bull sessions,” Pell said. “That’s what’s going to give you the benefits of diversity. Now Texas says that’s not good enough, you have to have diversity in every corner of the university, in every classroom, every major.” – Associated Press

A look at Maine, where Mitt Romney and Ron Paul are vying for victory

Lighthouse in Maine — A lighthouse in Maine

A profile of Maine, site of the Republican caucus on Feb. 11:

NUMBERS

Population: 1,328,361

AGE

Median age: 42.7

Percentage of population 65 and over: 15.9 percent

RACE AND ETHNICITY

95.2 percent white, 1.3 percent Hispanic or Latino origin, 1.2 percent black, 1 percent Asian

LANGUAGE

Language other than English spoken at home: 7.1 percent

EDUCATION

High school graduate or higher: 89.8 percent

Bachelor’s degree or higher: 26.5 percent

MONEY

Median household income: $46,933

People below poverty level: 12.6 percent

Home ownership rate: 73.1 percent

2008 PRESIDENTIAL RESULTS:

Barack Obama, 57.6 percent; John McCain, 40.4 percent; Ralph Nader, 1.4 percent.

REGISTERED VOTERS (as of 11/2/11):

Republican: 275,978

Democratic: 324,435

Undeclared: 355,037

Green Independent: 34,435.

MAINE QUICK FACTS:

— Maine is the nation’s most heavily forested state.

— Maine has 3,500 miles of coastline and 6,000 lakes and ponds.

— Maine fishermen harvested more than 100 million pounds of lobster in 2011.

— Hannibal Hamlin of Paris, Maine, served as vice president under Abraham Lincoln.

— Writer Stephen King was raised in Maine and lives in Bangor.

— Maine is nearly as large as the other five New England states combined.

— Maine is home to Mount Katahdin, the northern end of the Appalachian Trail and the state’s highest mountain at 5,268 feet

— Maine has the nation’s oldest median age.

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Sources: 2010 U.S. Census data; Maine Office of the Secretary of State; State of Maine website. – Associated Press