racial preferences – praag.org

Merit must trump race

A war of words erupted at the Judicial Service Commission yesterday after a senior judge argued that merit should trump gender and race as considerations for appointment to the bench.

Eastern Cape High Court judge Clive Plasket, one of three candidates vying for two seats in the Supreme Court of Appeal, crossed swords with commissioners, including Justice Minister Jeff Radebe, who said his approach would set back efforts to transform the judiciary.

Plasket, a human rights lawyer since the 1980s who defended many political detainees, faced a barrage of questions from commissioner Dumisa Ntsebeza over the principle of appointing experienced white male judges over less experienced black women.

Plasket said gender considerations should not be used to sideline experienced white men.

“The fact that the one candidate is female, I would suggest, isn’t good enough to trump merit . It becomes a lot trickier when the merit gap is a lot closer.”

He said in instances in which a white male judge had 70 published judgments while a black female judge had six unpublished judgments, the appointment of the white male would be completely justified.

Plasket’s comments follow a report penned by commissioner Izak Smuts accusing the JSC of interviewing white men only as a formality, with no intention of recommending them as judges.

“If the majority view is that . white male candidates are to be considered for appointment in only exceptional circumstances, the JSC should, at the very least, come clean and say so, so that white male candidates are not put through the charade of an interview before being rejected,” he wrote.

His report was to be discussed by the commission behind closed doors.

[…]

“Once you find yourself with only white male candidates, I can’t see any basis upon which you can refuse to appoint a suitably qualified person,” said Plasket.

Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng interjected, saying appointing only experienced white men to the bench would set back transformation: “When then are we ever going to transform the judiciary, if we are committed to it?”

Plasket retorted by saying failing to fill vacancies simply because “the wrong race” had applied would have a detrimental effect on the administration of justice.

“I can imagine that the imperative of the administration of justice also kicks in.”

[…]

Plasket is contesting Johannesburg High Court Judge Nigel Willis and Judge Halima Salduker, an acting judge in the appeal court.

[…]

The JSC will this week interview hopefuls for positions at the Electoral Court, the Competition Appeal Court and several high courts. – timeslive.co.za

Are Babies Bigoted?

In one of the fastest-growing areas in psychology, researchers are gaining insight into the mental processes of subjects that are barely able to communicate: babies. In recent years, innovative and playful experimental setups have suggested that infants as young as six months old have a sense of morality and fairness, and that 18-month-olds are capable of altruistically helping others.

Some of this research, though, has also shed light on racial preferences. A new study published in Psychological Science suggests that 9- to 14-month-olds exhibit a preference for their own — in watching a puppet show, at least, they seem to prefer their own kind, and support puppets that pick on those who are different from them.

Because babies can’t communicate verbally, J. Kiley Hamlin of the University of British Columbia has pioneered the use of puppet shows to probe their psychology and better understand how they see the world. In this study, her research team put on an show in which 52 infant participants were led to identify themselves as similar to one of the characters in the show and different from the other.

To accomplish this, the researchers started off by asking the infants to pick a food, either graham crackers or green beans (a little surprisingly, a full 42 percent chose the vegetables). Then, the infants were shown a pair of rabbit puppets, one who liked graham crackers and one who liked green beans:

Once they’d solidly demonstrated each rabbit’s choice, one of them — either the one with the same preference as the infant observer, or the one with an opposite preference — would be randomly chosen to encounter a pair of new characters: one dog, termed a “helper,” and another, called a “harmer.” As the rabbit played with a ball and dropped it, the nice “helper” dog threw it back, but the mean “harmer” dog (below) held onto the ball:

After both of the scenes were over, both dogs were presented to the infant, and the particular dog that the baby first reached for was interpreted as the character it preferred.

The results were a bit startling: When the infants had watched a play involving a rabbit with a food choice that matched theirs, 83 percent preferred the “helper” dog. When they’d watched a play with a rabbit who liked a different food, 88 percent chose the “harmer” dog. This held true regardless of the babies’ original food choices — the only thing that mattered was whether the rabbit’s identity, it terms of food choice, matched their own.

To further parse the motivations underlying the infants’ choices, the researchers conducted a similar experiment that involved a neutral dog that neither help nor harmed the rabbit.

In this part of the study, the older infants’ preferences revealed that when watching rabbits who had different favorite foods than them, they not only liked “harmer” dogs more than neutral dogs, but strongly preferred even neutral dogs when compared to “helpers” (this was true among the 14-month-olds, but not the 9-month-olds). In other words, it seemed that they not only wanted to see the rabbit treated poorly, but also would rather see it treated neutrally than get some help.

Of course, when designing experiments for subjects that can’t use words to communicate, the simplest of variables could potentially throw off the results. It’s unclear, for example, if the researchers alternated which side the “helper” and “harmer” puppets appeared on, so the babies could have been influenced by their emerging sense of handedness.

In the past, critics of such puppet show experiments have also charged that a baby merely reaching for one puppet or another might be an impulsive reflex, rather than reflecting an underlying moral judgment.

What’s clear, though, is that this experiment demonstrated a consistent reflex across the babies tested. While extrapolating this to mean that the babies are racist or bigoted is probably a step too far — for one, they were merely considering individual puppets, not groups of puppets with similar characteristics — it does raise interesting questions about the origins of xenophobia in an individual’s lifetime. – Smithsonian.com

Post Racial? Hollywood didn’t get the memo

The movie industry really has me, Roschelle, second guessing this post racial era we’ve been living in since the last presidential election. Hollywood. The industry is viewed by many as the most progressively liberal set of folks (producers, directors, movie stars, etc.) you ever want to meet. But they are not post-racial enough.

What do Robert DeNiro, Ron Perlman, Tyne Daly, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Justin Chambers, George Lucas, Halle Berry, Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones, and Alfre Woodard all have in common? All these Hollywood heavy hitters have husbands/wives/significant others to someone of a different race than their own.

I’ll use the black white dichotomy for this argument. Although, the same applies regarding other races and ethnic groups.

You see the thing is out of every actor or actress I mentioned with the exception of Halle Berry none of these stars have been in a role that would have their love interest, mate or spouse someone of another race.

Sure Sidney Poitier ruffled a few feathers in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It was too much for many people to take in. Taboo. Unthinkable. And I guess that still applies today.

I certainly consider myself a movie buff. So, if my knowledge of movies is too limited and I’ve overlooked a blockbuster that depicted an interracial relationship worthy of mention please let me know. I hardly think Billy Bob banging Halle or Denzel with his part time lover in Training Day (oh, how I hated that movie) make the grade.

I’m not asking to be subjected to another typical racially charged plot. The interracial couple and all the challenges they face in a society that’s, for the most part, completely unaccepting of their relationship and spend the next 120 minutes of the movie making their lives miserable. That’s just more of the same. And with all due respect, we’re past all that stuff anyway. This is post racial America!

It’s as if Hollywood frowns on this reality as much as some of us. Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins could never come home to a woman of color and sit around the dinner table with their biracial children, get a good night’s sleep and wake the next morning to begin a family vacation that ends in disaster…or a wholesome made for TV movie about family life in the Midwest…or be the parents of the next guy who battles the Decepticons along with the Transformers.

Gabrielle Union, Lynn Whitfield, Thandie Newton, and Cicely Tyson would never be viewed as authentic as they kissed their white mate good bye as he went off to foil some terrorist plot, pull off a big jewelry heist, coach a bunch of misfits into the winniest team in high school football history or save the planet from aliens!

I understand that movies have to be seen and gross mega bucks to be considered blockbusters or worthy of the little gold statue by the Academy. Is that the problem? Are the execs fearful that releasing these types of movies might land them in the soup line?

Life isn’t cookie cutter. Love isn’t monochromatic nor are those we choose to love. Black people love white people and brown people love yellow people and yellow people love red people.

The entertainment industry owe it to us to be true to the ideology of mixing. Maybe even help make the idea of interracial relationships less foreign by changing the humdrum family dynamics found in just about every movie I’ve ever seen. Or am I being unrealistic?

Affirmative action about to be redefined?

The case for racial preferences in awarding places at US universities is no longer about minorities held back by centuries of discrimination, says Simon Barber.

Rather, it is all about letting educators decide what will be best to prepare the youth for racial diversity. That, at any rate, is how proponents of affirmative action are framing the discussion as the matter is about to be heard by the US Supreme Court.

Solicitor-general Donald Verrilli, the Obama administration’s chief litigator, told the court last week: “The core of our interest is in ensuring that the nation’s universities produce graduates who are going to be effective citizens and effective leaders in an increasingly diverse society and effective competitors in diverse global markets.”

Just over half the Fortune 100 chimed in with an amicus brief. “The only means of obtaining a properly qualified group of employees,” they argued, “is through diversity in institutions of higher education which are allowed to recruit and instruct the best qualified minority candidates and create an environment in which all students can meaningfully expand their horizons.”

The case pits Abigail Fisher against the University of Texas. Ms Fisher, who is white, says her rights under the constitution’s 14th Amendment were violated when she failed to get in. The university says that while it does indeed take race into account in selecting candidates, it does so as part of a “holistic” review fully consistent with the court’s precedents, in particular Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion in the landmark 2003 case, Grutter v Bollinger. Writing for a slim 5-4 majority Justice O’Connor held that the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions strategy passed muster: it was adopted in “good faith”, did not rely on demographically-based quotas and was “narrowly tailored to a compelling interest in attaining a diverse student body (with a) critical mass” of minority students.

Opponents of affirmative action would like to believe that, with Justice O’Connor’s replacement by the far more conservative Justice Samuel Alito, there is now a critical mass on the court for banning race-based preferences altogether. They hope Ms Fisher will persuade a majority if not to reverse Grutter v Bollinger, then at least, in the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor (who will not be part of that majority), “gut it”.

There is a school of progressive thought which would not mind seeing Ms Fisher prevail. In a new study for The Century Foundation, Richard Kahlenberg looks at how universities have been handling diversity in the seven states, including California, where racial preferences have already been banned by referenda, state legislatures or gubernatorial executive order. The news is good.

Responses include partnerships with disadvantaged schools, new race-neutral preferences for students from all difficult environments, no more automatic slots for offspring of alumni, and guaranteed places, regardless of test scores, for a fixed percentage of top students from all in-state public schools. Many of these are terrible, de facto segregated and disproportionately starved of resources.

“For people who care about social equality, all these new measures are intrinsically desirable,” Mr Kahlenberg writes. But they do not come naturally to university administrators because they are harder and more expensive to implement.

“While higher education’s vigorous defence of affirmative action on one level represents a sincere desire for greater racial equality, it has another less virtuous side to it, as racial preferences avoid the hard work of addressing deeply rooted inequalities and instead provide what (one critic) has called ‘racial justice on the cheap’ … recruiting fairly privileged students of colour is far less expensive than including low-income and working class kids of all races.”

Research by Derek Bok, a former Harvard president, found that 86% of African Americans at universities with selective admissions standards were either middle or upper class. At Ivy League schools, 41% of black students were not even African American, but immigrants from relatively advantaged backgrounds.

While it is invidious to invoke the voices of revered figures who can no longer speak for themselves in support of one’s favoured positions, it is interesting to conjecture what Dr Martin Luther King might have said of class, as opposed to race-based affirmative action. He did say, in calling for a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged in 1967, “it is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness should also be rescuing a large strata of the forgotten white poor”. Simon Barber, bdaylive.com

Racial goals for maths and reading

The Florida State Board of Education passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and reading based upon their race.

On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.

The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.

“To expect less from one demographic and more from another is just a little off-base,” Juan Lopez, magnet coordinator at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Riviera Beach, told the Palm Beach Post.

JFK Middle has a black student population of about 88 percent.

“Our kids, although they come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, they still have the ability to learn,” Lopez said. “To dumb down the expectations for one group, that seems a little unfair.”

Others in the community agreed with Lopez’s assessment. But the Florida Department of Education said the goals recognize that not every group is starting from the same point and are meant to be ambitious but realistic.

As an example, the percentage of white students scoring at or above grade level (as measured by whether they scored a 3 or higher on the reading FCAT) was 69 percent in 2011-2012, according to the state. For black students, it was 38 percent, and for Hispanics, it was 53 percent.

In addition, State Board of Education Chairwoman Kathleen Shanahan said that setting goals for different subgroups was needed to comply with terms of a waiver that Florida and 32 other states have from some provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. These waivers were used to make the states independent from some federal regulations.

“We have set a very high goal for all students to reach in Florida,” Shanahan said.

But Palm Beach County School Board vice-chairwoman Debra Robinson isn’t buying the rationale.

“I’m somewhere between complete and utter disgust and anger and disappointment with humanity,” Robinson told the Post. She said she has been receiving complaints from upset black and Hispanic parents since the state board took its action this week.

Robinson called the state board’s actions essentially “proclaiming racism” and said she wants Palm Beach County to continue to educate every child with the same expectations, regardless of race. – CBS

Blacks show blind loyalty to Barack

African Americans show blind loyalty to President Barack Obama.

Are black people supporting Obama mainly because he’s black? If race is just one factor in blacks’ support of Obama, does that make them racist? Can blacks’ support for Obama be compared with white voters who may favor his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, because he’s white?

These questions have long animated conservatives who are frustrated by claims that white people who oppose Obama’s policies are racist. This week, when a black actress who tweeted an endorsement of Romney was subjected to a stream of abuse from other African-Americans, the politics of racial accusation came full circle once again.

Stacey Dash, who also has Mexican heritage, is best known for the 1995 film “Clueless” and the recent cable-TV drama “Single Ladies.” On Twitter, she was called “jigaboo,” “traitor,” “house nigger” and worse after posting, “Vote for Romney. The only choice for your future.”

The theme of the insults: A black woman would have to be stupid, subservient or both to choose a white Republican over the first black president.

Russell Simmons, the hip-hop mogul and Obama backer, called Dash’s experience “racism.” Said Barbara Walters on “The View”: “If she were white, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Twitter users are by no means representative of America, and many black Obama supporters quickly denounced the attacks. But the reason Dash was attacked is simple: She is a black woman supporting a white candidate over a black one.

There is racial bias amongst whites, and there is racial bias amongst blacks. But as far as the press is concerned, it only goes one way, says a white critic.

When people speak out against a symbol of black progress like Obama, African-Americans tend to feel hurt.

“We still have a civil rights (era) mentality, but we’re not living in a civil rights-based world anymore,” says a black man. “We want to say, `You’re black, you need to stand behind black people.'”

He said one reason he voted for Obama in the 2008 primary against Hillary Clinton was because Obama is black: “Yes, I will admit that.”

Is that racism? Not in his mind. “It’s voting for someone who would understand your side of the coin a lot better.”

Such logic runs into trouble when applied to a white person voting for Romney because he understands whiteness better. Ron Christie, a black conservative who worked for former President George W. Bush, finds both sides of that coin unacceptable.

“It’s not the vision that our leaders in the civil rights movement would have envisioned and be proud of in the era of the first African-American president,” Christie said.

Martin Luther King Jr. fought Jim Crow laws, which deprived blacks of political rights after Reconstruction, upheld by Southern Democrats. But black voters switched after Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the 1960s civil rights legislation and Republicans successfully pursued the votes of white people who disliked the civil rights agenda.

Since then, Democrats have persistently wooed black voters with programs and platforms that African-Americans favor, and the party has been rewarded every four years.

Clinton got 83 percent of the black vote in 1992 and 84 percent in 1996; the third-party candidate Ross Perot probably sliced away some of Clinton’s black support. Al Gore got 90 percent in 2000; John Kerry got 88 percent in 2004. Obama captured 95 percent in 2008, and 2 million more black people voted than in the previous election.

Christie says he, too, shares the sense of pride in Obama smashing what for blacks is the ultimate glass ceiling. He understands that black pride springs from a shared history of being treated as less than human, while the history of pride in whiteness has a racist context.

Christie says black men shifted from calling candidate Obama “half-white” and “not one of us” to demanding that Christie stop opposing the first black president.

He sees it in the comments of radio host Tom Joyner, who told his millions of listeners a year ago, “Let’s not even deal with facts right now. Let’s deal with our blackness and pride – and loyalty. . I’m not afraid or ashamed to say that as black people, we should do it because he’s a black man.”

The actor Samuel L. Jackson said much the same thing: “I voted for Barack because he was black,” he told Ebony magazine. “Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people – because they look like them.”

In 2011, as black unemployment continued to rise, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus said that if Clinton was still president, “we probably would be still marching on the White House . (but) nobody wants to do anything that would empower the people who hate the president.”

And just last week, the rapper Snoop Dogg posted a list of voting reasons, written by someone else, on a social media account. No. 1 on his pro-Obama list: He’s black. Snoop’s top reason to not vote for Romney: He’s white.

Black voters feel like white people are attacking their dignity whwn they say negative things about Obama, and they are closing ranks around him.

There should not be this resistance to pride over the first black president, says many blacks. The USA should only elect blacks to that position in the future to eradicate racism. The GOP probably agrees, but would prefer an Uncle Tom. – AP

‘We don’t need a race box’

: Abigail Fisher

Abigail Fisher is a slight young woman with strawberry blond hair, a smile that needs little prompting, a determined manner and a good academic record. She played soccer in high school, and she is an accomplished cellist.

But the university she had her heart set on, the one her father and sister had attended, rejected her. “I was devastated,” she said, in her first news interview since she was turned down by the University of Texas at Austin four years ago.

Ms. Fisher, 22, who is white and recently graduated from Louisiana State University, says that her race was held against her, and the Supreme Court is to hear her case on Wednesday, bringing new attention to the combustible issue of the constitutionality of racial preferences in admissions decisions by public universities.

“I’m hoping,” she said, “that they’ll completely take race out of the issue in terms of admissions and that everyone will be able to get into any school that they want no matter what race they are but solely based on their merit and if they work hard for it.”

The university said Ms. Fisher would not have been admitted even if race had played no role in the process, and it questioned whether she has suffered the sort of injury that gives her standing to sue. But the university’s larger defense is that it must be free to assemble a varied student body as part of its academic and societal mission. The Supreme Court endorsed that view by a 5-to-4 vote in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger.

University officials said that the school’s affirmative action program was needed to build a student body diverse enough to include minority students with a broad range of backgrounds and for the campus to have a “critical mass” of minority students in most classrooms. Interaction among students in class and around campus, said Kedra Ishop, the university’s director of admissions, helps students overcome biases and make contributions to a diverse society. “The role of U.T. Austin,” Dr. Ishop said, “is to provide leadership to the state.”

The majority opinion in the Grutter case, written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, rejected the use of racial quotas in admissions decisions but said that race could be used as one factor among many, as part of a “holistic review.” Justice O’Connor retired in 2006, and her replacement by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. may open the way for a ruling cutting back on such race-conscious admissions policies, or eliminating them.

The Constitution does not permit the government to sort people by race, no matter how worthy its goal. “While racial diversity on college campuses is beneficial, it cannot be attained by racial discrimination,” said Edward Blum, an adviser to Ms. Fisher and a driving force behind the Fisher case.

Three-quarters of applicants from Texas are admitted under a program that guarantees admission to the top students in every high school in the state. The remaining Texas students and those from elsewhere are considered under standards that take account of academic achievement and other factors, including race and ethnicity.

In the fall of last year, freshmen who enrolled under the program were 26 percent Hispanic and 6 percent black. Texas is 38 percent Hispanic and 12 percent black.

The university said the Top Ten program was a blunt instrument and that classes in many subjects have few or no minority students. It adds that the diversity generated by the Top Ten program is “mostly a product of the fact that Texas high schools remain highly segregated in regions of the state,” which “limits the diversity that can be achieved within racial groups.”

Among the kind of student excluded by the Top Ten program, the university said is “the African-American or Hispanic child of successful professionals in Dallas who has strong SAT scores and has demonstrated leadership ability in extracurricular activities but falls in the second decile of his or her high school class (or attends an elite private school that does not rank).”

Ms. Fisher’s lawyers called that “a newly minted interest in elitism dressed up as ‘intra-racial’ diversity.” They added that the university is making the unseemly pitch for “its preferred kind of minorities” at the expense of white students like Ms. Fisher with similar qualifications.

Talking in the hallway after the seminar, Joao Eloy, who was admitted outside the Top Ten program, said he had mixed feelings about the university’s approach. “My only concern is if diversity becomes a priority above merit,” he said, adding that he was wary of any system that “punishes Asians and poor whites, to name a few.”

Nosa Aimuyo, whose parents are Nigerian immigrants and who was also admitted outside the Top Ten program, said race-conscious admissions were needed to address “disparities in opportunity between high schools, which disproportionately affect minorities.”

In an interview in his office in Austin, William C. Powers Jr, the university’s president, said the attributes that the university seeks have many dimensions. “We want diversity in terms of economic background, first generation, geography, inner city, suburban middle class,” he said.

Asked what he would say to Ms. Fisher, whose own background is middle class, about her disappointment at being rejected, Mr. Powers paused for a moment.

“We look at everyone’s holistic characteristics,” he said.

Last month, Ms. Fisher spent a morning chatting with a reporter at a private club in Washington and then took an impromptu tour of the Supreme Court, where the grandeur of the surroundings seemed to bring home to her the gravity of the question she had presented to the justices.

She is working in Austin, where she had wanted to be in the first place, as a financial analyst. She said her college years at Louisiana State had been fine and that she had enjoyed the camaraderie of the bowling team.

But she added that she had lost a benefit that her state’s government had decided to distribute on a basis other than merit.

“The only thing I missed out on was my post-graduation years,” she said. “Just being in a network of U.T. graduates would have been a really nice thing to be in. And I probably would have gotten a better job offer had I gone to U.T.” She said she was trying to come to terms with her role in a case that could reshape American higher education. Asked if she found it interesting or exciting or scary, she said, “All of the above.”

But she did not hesitate to say how she would run an admission system. “I don’t think,” she said, “that we even need to have a race box on the application.”

What happened to race-neutral admissions?

Nine years after the Supreme Court said colleges and universities can use race in their quest for diverse student bodies, the justices have put this divisive social issue back on their agenda in the middle of a presidential election campaign.

Nine years is a blink of the eye on a court where justices can look back two centuries for legal precedents. But with an ascendant conservative majority, the high court in arguments Wednesday will weigh whether to limit or even rule out taking race into account in college admissions.

The justices will be looking at the University of Texas program that is used to help fill the last quarter or so of its incoming freshman classes. Race is one of many factors considered by admissions officers. The rest of the roughly 7,100 freshman spots automatically go to Texans who graduated in the top 8 percent of their high school classes.

A white Texan, Abigail Fisher, sued the university after she was denied a spot in 2008.

The simplest explanation for why affirmative action is back on the court’s calendar so soon after its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger is that the author of that opinion, Sandra Day O’Connor, has retired. Her successor, Justice Samuel Alito, has been highly skeptical of any use of racial preference.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, a dissenter in the 2003 decision, probably holds the deciding vote, and he, too, has never voted in favor of racial preference.

As a result, said Supreme Court lawyer Thomas Goldstein, “No matter what the court does, it is quite likely that the UT program is going to be in big trouble.”

The challenge to the Texas plan has gained traction in part because the university has produced significant diversity by automatically offering about three-quarters of its spots to graduates in the top 10 percent of their Texas high schools, under a 1990s state law signed by then-Gov. George W. Bush. The admissions program has been changed so that now only the top 8 percent gain automatic admission.

More than eight in ten African-American and Latino students who enrolled at the flagship campus in Austin last year were automatically admitted, according to university statistics. Both sides acknowledge that the use of race is present.

In all, black and Hispanic students made up more than a quarter of the incoming freshmen class. White students constituted less than half the entering class when students with Asian backgrounds and other minorites were added in.

“For decades, the defense of racial preferences was, `We’d love to find a way to get diversity without using race, but it’s just not possible. There’s just no other way.’ And Texas found another way,” said Richard Kahlenburg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and prominent advocate of class-based affirmative action.

The university says the extra measure of diversity it gets from the slots outside automatic admission is crucial because too many of its classrooms have only token minority representation, at best. At the same time, Texas argues that race is one of many factors considered and that it “is impossible to tell whether an applicant’s race was a tipping factor.”

The Obama administration, 57 of the Fortune 100 companies and large numbers of public and private colleges that could be affected by the outcome are backing the Texas program. Among the benefits of affirmative action, the administration argues, is that it creates a pipeline for a diverse officer corps that it called “essential to the military’s operational readiness.” In 2003, the court cited the importance of a similar message from military leaders.

But lawyers for Fisher, of Sugar Land, Texas, said the race-blind method under which the university automatically admits most of its students has been successful. They say Fisher, who has since graduated from Louisiana State University, was excluded because of her race, and they point to a handful of African-American and Latino students who were admitted with lower scores than hers.

“If any state action should respect racial equality, it is university admission,” Fisher’s lawyers said in their written submission to the court.

The university says that a fuller picture of the process shows that white students with lower scores also were admitted, while many more minority students with higher scores than Fisher also were not offered admission.

The case also raises several contentious side issues, including whether affirmative-action programs hurt the very people they are supposed to be helping. A new book by law professor Richard Sander and journalist Stuart Taylor argues that “large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively, even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools.”

Their book, “Mismatch,” says these students are set up to fail, getting lower grades and dropping out more often than white students with similar backgrounds.

Taylor and Sander, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, point to statistics in California to support their argument. After voters changed the state constitution to outlaw racial preferences, UCLA saw significant declines in enrollment by black and Hispanic students.

But the number of African-American and Latino graduates was unchanged for the five classes after the ban when compared to the five years before the change in state law, they said.

The dozens of legal briefs in the Texas case also highlight a debate over whether racial preference programs actually limit the number of students from Asian backgrounds, who are disproportionately represented in student bodies relative to their share of the population.

The university says Asian-American enrollment has increased under the policy that is being challenged. The numbers would be even higher if Texas stopped factoring in race, Fisher and others say. – AP

South African Airways no longer wants white pilots

Cadet pilot training course applications from white men are no longer being accepted by the SA Airways (SAA), it was reported on Friday.

SAA spokesman Kabelo Ledwaba told Beeld that the cadet programme was being advertised online as an initiative to bring pilot demographics in line with the country’s broader demographics.

“Only 15 percent of SAA’s pilots are currently black, and this includes Indians and coloureds. The rest are white, and 91 percent of them are men.”

Ledwaba said the airline would appoint male, white pilots when there were vacant posts for which applicants of other races could not be found.

Beeld had asked why white applicants were being rejected across the board.

An irate father had called the newspaper to complain that his son, who had a commercial pilot’s licence and met the educational and physical criteria, had been rejected on the grounds of race.

By filling out several dummy applications, Beeld established that the online form had been programmed to reject any white applicants. – Sapa