Posts Tagged affirmative action

8 results.
May23

The Unpopular Apartheid Governments

by tdaxp on May 23, 2010 at 3:26 am
Posted In: Africa, History

FiveThirtyEight has a really fascinating post of how Apartheid was an unpopular policy among the whites of South Africa. Some excerpts:

Compared to this, the National Party offered the promise of ending English dominance of the civil service and the economy as well ending the competition that African laborers moving to the urban areas posed to poor Afrikaner workers. When the votes were counted the United Party had won a large popular vote victory, 547,437 (50.9%) for the United Party to 443,278 (41.2%) for the National Party. But when the seats were declared, the National party and its allies had won 79, compared to 71 for the United Party and its allies.

…

Secondly, the National Party had the advantage of being an ethnic party in a country in which the ethnic balance favored them. Afrikaners, to whom they focused their appeal, made up 57% of the population, and were furthermore, better distributed for electoral purposes, making up the majority in 98 out of 150 seats. The redistricting that followed the Nationalist victory in 1948 only increased this discrepancy by adding six seats for Namibia, which was annexed in violation of UN resolutions calling for its independence.

Therefore, the results in the next two elections were even more disproportionate. In 1953, the opposition had united into the United Front, and had high hopes of victory, and with the unified support the South African business community and economic elite, they outspent the National party by nearly 4-1. Nevertheless, when the votes were counted the pattern of 1948 was repeated, only to an even greater extent than in 1948. In Cape Town the United Front won 73%; in Cape Elizabeth 65%. But in the rest of Cape Province, the National Party won 57% of the vote, and 29 out of 33 seats. The pattern was repeated nationwide. By 1958, the Opposition had all but given up serious hope of winning despite the fact that the results indicated that they still held the support of a majority of the electorate.

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The greatest threat to the system was always naked demographics, and by giving no option to young whites for political change, it drove many of South Africa’s best and brightest towards emigration. By the 1970s it was not just English speakers who were leaving the country, but also young Afrikaners who wanted an opportunity to escape an Afrikaans-only educational system that the National party seemed determined to force them into.

By the end of the 1970s, the white population was actually falling by nearly 20,000 a year, a pace that would more than double by the beginnings of the 1980s. While the electoral system may have made it increasingly difficult for South Africans to oust the National government with their votes, it in many cases led them to vote against its system of Apartheid with their feet.

Like the Republic of South Africa, the United States of America also imposes unpopular, racially discriminatory laws which harm its competitiveness.

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Sep30

Smoking gun: The Affirmative Action Financial Crisis

by tdaxp on September 30, 2008 at 8:24 am
Posted In: Natural Liberty

It’s really sickening how big-government liberals can create a problem, and then demand a big-government solution like the Bush-Pelosi bailout:

Half Sigma: Smoking gun article: liberals, Democrats, poor people and non-Asian minorities caused financial crisis
A conservative warns of the problem, but he is ignored by Democrats because Democrats and liberals know that the conservative is motivated by racism.

The change in policy also comes at the same time that HUD is investigating allegations of racial discrimination in the automated underwriting systems used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to determine the credit-worthiness of credit applicants.

It’s all clear…

Banks should have been smart enough to recognize that pro-”diversity” laws, rules, regulations, Congressional hearings, and the like were going to lead to the liquidity crisis, and tried to lobby against it as hard as they could.

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Jul31

Obama Cries Racism

by tdaxp on July 31, 2008 at 3:19 am
Posted In: 2008 Presidential Election

The video is at ABC News. The words:

“Nobody thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face. So what they are going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama warned, “You know he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all of those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

Like a child who has learned to make a scene, Obama has long since learned that people will go easy on him if he complains about racism while speaking standard American English. Having likely received every position he ever held because of his race, a world without affirmative action is a world inconceivable to Barack Obama. Whenever things do not go well for him, Obama has learned to complain of racism.

What a cry baby.

Hat-tip to the Weekly Standard.

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Jun12

Discrimination and how to pay for it

by tdaxp on June 12, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Posted In: 2008 Presidential Election

While it has a bewildering number of defenses, one of the primary functions of affirmative action is to assist blacks in resource competitions against hispanics. Both groups are disproportionatedly uneducated, but political organization among blacks far outpaces that among hispanics. Therefore, rationally, blacks political activists attempt to reward their supporters by supporting laws, rules, and regulations which assist blacks in getting jobs, contracts, and admissions, while making it harder for hispanics to do so.

It’s thus not surprising that many hispanics are skeptical of Barack Obama:

The Weekly Standard
Napolitano, who describes herself as a “dyed in the wool” Democrat, said she will vote for and support the Democratic nominee in the fall. But she has not seen the type of commitment to Latino issues from Obama that she says she saw in Clinton.

“Unless I see something inherently helpful to our community, I’m going to sit back and see what happens,” Napolitano said. Napolitano and some of her Hispanic colleagues are informally boycotting Obama campaign events aimed at reaching out to Clinton supporters because the candidate himself has not asked for their help.

Obama has stated that he supports affirmative action. This helped him racially polarize the election in which he defeated Hillary Clinton, but has harmed him among latinos. So far, Obama has only vaguely hinted that he might modify the system, from prevent the marginal number of black millionaires from benefiting to shifting some the costs (in terms of unrewarded merit, lost opportunities, discrimination, etc.) to middle-class whites, jews, and asians.

However, Obama has only hinted as a recalibration of affirmative action’s costs. Further, it’s obviously more difficult to change a whole system than to continue a policy of rewarding supporters and punishing their rivals.

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Mar05

Barack Obama Should Denounce Affirmative Action and Race-Based Politics

by tdaxp on March 5, 2008 at 7:53 am and modified on March 5, 2008. at 7:54 am
Posted In: 2008 Presidential Election

Does Obama Have an Asian Problem? – TIME

In California, where Asian-Americans make up 8% of the electorate, a CNN exit poll found they voted three to one in her favor. In New York, the Asian American Legal Defense Fund’s exit poll concluded that 87% of Asian-American Democrats backed their state’s Senator. In New Jersey, it was 73%. From no other group did Clinton command that kind of loyalty; she won 69% of Latino voters in California, for example, compared to 75% of Asians. Publications including some local editions of ethnic newspapers like Sing Tao have endorsed her, as have prominent politicians including former Gov. Gary Locke of Washington and Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii.

In 2 Battlegrounds, Voters Say, Not Yet – New York Times

Clinton advisers said her decisive victory in Ohio and her narrow one in Texas — where exit polls showed her winning the votes of women, whites and Hispanics in an extremely close race — were more than enough to argue that she should go forward to the April 22 primary in the Ohio-esque Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, even if Mr. Obama has more delegates after Tuesday night.

The identity politics in the Democratic primaries certainly is strange. The mixed-race descendent of slaveholder who spent some of his childhood in Asia somehow is being positioned as the African-American candidate, and thus is gaining very strong levels of support from that racial group. Yet Obama’s hold is strong only in that third largest group, with whites, hispanics, and asians largely skeptical from the Illinois Senator. Why?

It seems reasonable that Affirmative Action and other race-based programs may be at fault. The only racial group that Obama consistently wins has done very well through rentier politics, redirecting public and private goods to themselves through a deft combination of institutional organization, turn-out, and violence. The groups that Obama has trouble with (whites) or typically loses (hispanics and asians) either presently suffer greatly, presently suffer significantly, or will soon suffer from Affirmative Action and its concept of privileged blood.

While denouncing Affirmative Action certainly would hurt him among his only racial consistency, it probably would be a none-issue among his other supporters (high-income whites and the young), while doing much to reconcile him to electoral blocs that fear ancestry-based confiscatory government policies. Even better, denouncing affirmative action would go a long way to ending racism in the country.

I like Barack Obama, but on policy he is either weaker than John McCain (the Surge, free trade), Hillary Clinton (Health Care), or both the war). Denouncing Affirmative Action would not only be the right thing for Barack Obama to do morally and politically — it also would make him the best candidate on an actual issue.

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Apr22

Askhanazim Jewry, g, and Higher Education

by tdaxp on April 22, 2007 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Academia

Askhanazim Jewry, g, and Higher Education

Jaschik, S. 2007. ‘The Power of Privilege.’ Inside Higher Ed. April 11, 2007. Available online: http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/11/soares.

A treasured friend & trusted reader sent this article in, which discusses possibly antisemitic reasons for the introduction of the SAT test in Yale University. The piece spends a lot of time on the quirks of the New Haven, Connecticut school, so I’ll just quote one part of it and talk in more general terms:

If colleges more closely understand their histories, Soares said, they might be more likely to adopt truly progressive policies today. His book ends with a series of recommendations along those lines, not just for Yale, but for other elite colleges. He calls for affirmative action policies based on socioeconomic status, a de-emphasis on standardized testing, and the elimination of preferences that defy true meritocracy (such as those for legacies and athletes).

Favoring athletes, he said, makes very little sense if talking about the social mission of higher education. Even at top universities, this has become “the doorway in,” and counter to the images many people have of athletics as a pro-diversity force on campuses, most of the beneficiaries are white. “What is it that athletics contributes to higher education? Why is it a part of higher education?” Perhaps showing the impact of his Oxford history, Soares noted that the admissions preferences offered by top American colleges make no sense to educators anywhere else in the world. “At Oxford and Cambridge, you are not going to be admitted just because you are good on the rugby field.”

Trying to discriminate against Jews by factoring in g (general intelligence would be odd, as Ashkenazim (“northern European”) Jews apparently have higher average g than most other races. This seems to be a result of intense selection pressure on Jews in the past thousand years, as cruel and mean regimes adopted policy after policy to limit Jewish mobility, wealth, and reproductive success. Average- and below-average Jews were selected against, while above-average Jews were selected for, by the European environment relative to other Europeans.

Thus, institutions of higher education used a variety of methods to keep Jews out, by defining merit as something other than general intelligence. From a century ago, Eastern universities used the idea of the “whole man” to discriminate against Jews. Because Jewish cultural traditional is relatively unathletic, Jewish history in Europe kept them seperated from the land and much physical exertion, and relatively higher rates of historical inbreeding (owing to ghetto living conditions), Jews were at a disadvantage under the “whole man” criteria. Likewise, modern affirmative action is a method of limiting the success of Jews and other market-oriented minorities.

See also: My series on feminism, leftism, and cash, covering the SAT and computer science.

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Apr17

Leftism, Feminism, and Cash, Reloaded

by tdaxp on April 17, 2007 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Academia, Women

Dean, C. 2007. Computer science takes steps to bring women to the fold. New York Times. April 17, 2007. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/science/17comp.html?8dpc (from Slashdot).

Standards too high? Just lower them:

Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science. At one time, she said, admission to the program depended on high overall achievement and programming experience. The criteria now, she said, are high overall achievement and broad interests, diverse perspectives and whether applicants seem to have potential to be future leaders.

See also: “Leftism, Feminism, and Cash,” about the aborted political corrected of the GRE.

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Nov11

Say Yes! to Michigan!

by tdaxp on November 11, 2006 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Law

Michigan Votes to Ban Affirmative Action,” Feminist Daily News Wire, 9 November 2006, http://www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=9999.

In one of the few pieces of unambiguously good news, the people of Michigan voted to end Affirmative Action in state government.

Michigan voters approved a state-wide ban on affirmative action in public education, public employment, and state contracts on Tuesday

The vote was a symptom fo wider problems, as the Republican candidate opposed the measure and was on the side of racism

The referendum was opposed by many prominent leaders in the political, business, and academic worlds, including both major gubernatorial candidates, Governor Jennifer Granholm (D) – who was reelected on Tuesday – and Dick DeVos (R).

This is why the Republicans had to lose and the Democrats had to win. The GOP had abandoned the Right, and abandoned the People:

Roughly 58 percent of voters across the state, however, came out in favor of the ban

Predictably, the Left seeks to overturn democracy through the courts:

Hours after Michigan voters eliminated affirmative action in college admissions and government hiring, the lawsuits hit the courts. While most educators remain unsure what the ban will do, some students are worried.

The measure does little to stop informal affirmative racism and its quiet racism by hiring boards, tenure boards, etc., but is a good step forward.

Thank you Michigan!

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