...no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks -- with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas -- to advance black applicants over white applicants.Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.
There's more if you want to dig. It's amazing to me that people actually sit next to this cat, and have the balls to let the word "postracial" pass across their lips.
Props to Gene Robinson for fighting the fight. I guess I feel like words have their limits. Watch at the end where he just totally breaks down and claims "Everyone graduates summa cum laude from Harvard, now."
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I've been mulling over this very thing for weeks now. I really don't know how Pat Buchanan ever wormed his way back into polite company.
His mere presence on the airwaves, in a way, says less than something about MSNBC. He's not trying to elevate the discourse or have an honest conversation about much of anything. That a major cable network continues to keep this guy in its employ ... the mind reels.
It's unfathomable that Pat Buchanan, of all people, thinks himself qualified to stand in judgment of the qualifications of people as accomplished as Obama, Sotomayor, Holder, etc?
Also, Gene was about as animated as I've ever seen him. I wish, somehow, a thought bubble had formed over his head at the end of that segment.
Yeah, I think he was pretty pissed. And I know why. I can't say I owe my career to Affirmative Action, per se. But I know that being black is part of why I'm here at the Atlantic. I know that there are a lot of good bloggers out there, but that my particular experience, and my way of seeing the world is a lot different than there's, liberal or conservative. A lot of that is tied to race, or rather, my view of race.
You could say I caught a break. I think, in life, at some point most of us do. When they come my way, I do my damnedest to run with them. That's always been my approach. I think that's Gene's approach. And Sotomayor's approach. I think people bitching about "advantages" are remarkably un-self-aware. Like they've never caught a break in life. Like being white has never, at any point, benefited them.
It's one thing to have a critique of AA. It's another to act like it is the equivalent of Jim Crow, as Buchanan has maintained. Buchanan wouldn't make one day under Jim Crow. He hasn't the slightest idea. And he doesn't much care that he doesn't.
With respect to how advantages shape our lives, and our successes, Outliers is a great read...
"I really don't know how Pat Buchanan ever wormed his way back into polite company."
It's Chris Matthews. They're both washed up Irish politicos. ;-) The old Irish Old Boy Network, don't you know? They're magically delicious.
It's because he was 1/against the war and 2/against NAFTA and other trade agreements. There is no way anybody will convince me that Buchanan isn't a racist(not just blacks and Hispanics but an anti-semite too).
What I would like to see is when Pat Buchanan has a medical emergency, he ends up having to be treated by a black lesbian muslim wearing traditional clothing who will be the only specialist available for his medical emergency. Then I want the only nurse who is able to insert the IV line to be a Hispanic gay man. Then maybe Pat can ask the doc about her MCAT scores and ask the nurse about how he too like the doc was an affirmative action baby.
I suppose what particularly mystifies me is the fact that Buchanan espouses views which are not merely far-right but would not be out of place in a European facist party. This is what makes his retention by MSNBC, and the tendency of his fellow journalists to make excuses for his outrageous utterances, all the more odious. Let us not forget that this man argues that Churchill ought to have done a deal with Hitler, that his 'error' lay in thinking that Nazi hegemony over Europe was intolerable.
They're magically delicious.
Oh, dude, so much win.
While offensive, "Grandpa Pat" only slightly bothers me. I suspect that Pat Buchanan is just communicating what many whites (and others) have thought for some time. Moreover, his job is quite safe because of MSNBC's current standing as the "liberal" network. Keeping him around allows them to save face and argue that they present both sides. What I don't like is how conservatives like to change the game. Why do Harvard and Princeton credentials signal intelligence in whites yet "everybody graduates with honors" when it comes to others? It is irritating.
Pat is the polite embodiment (check out hate sites for the hard-core racists) of the "racial resentment" movement that rallies around the perceived loss of white privilege. This whole idea of checking people's test scores, transcripts and other documentation (i.e. Obama's birth certificate, grades, etc.) just shows the frustration of bigots that their idea of racial hierachy is tumbling down. Bush was a C student at Yale, and Reagan went to Eureka College (not a super elite college), but no one questioned them.
What bothers Pat and others the most is that they realize that they having to compete with the same groups of people that they used to be able to pass by. Not all white people share that attitude, and this is why the ones that do are desperately trying to find some magic bullet to undermine minorities that gaining senior positions of power. I'm just sitting back and waiting for their implosion.
When is saw this live,t he first thing I did was run to Facebook to vent. After calming down, I just refuse to let Pat get under my skin. As Charlieblazed points out He excelled in a world where he didn't have to compete against the entire country and now towards the end of his life all of that he has worked for is slipping away.It is a beautiful, poignant, painful reminder of where we are now and where we have been. Pat is that old cat on the corner yelling "How the world ain't right" and is complete impotent to do anything about it. There will be no deathbed conversion, no George Wallace moment, Pat is going down fighting. The problem is where once he had a real audience, now people just pass him by and look at him like he is crazy.
When I watched this, I immediately thought of that Chappelle clip TNC recently posted about fried chicken. Chapelle says, "Have you ever had something happen that was so racist that you didn't even get mad, that you were just, 'Goddamn, that was racist!'".
If there was ever a person not to get worked up over, it's Pat.
I thought that exact thing.
Although I do think he should be fired. It would help keep me from getting worked up. Did he ever ask about Robert's LSAT scores? I don't think so.
As a fan of classic American movies, I've always wondered what "would have been" if Elizabeth Taylor had to compete with Dorothy Dandridge for acting roles, including Ms. Taylor's first Oscar winning part in "Butterfield 8."
That was truly hysterical.
Do people not realize that Affirmative Action might get one into an Ivy, but what happens then is up to the individual? I remember my freshman year at college (GO Tigers!!), and I remember there being both regular Affirmative Action babies and legacies (the other Affirmative Action) in the frosh dorm. Not everyone could hack it. A few of the affirmative action kids and a few of the legacies did not return for sophomore year.
I was good friends with one young woman who was there via Affirmative Action, a bright young math major. Today she is a tenured math prof at UC Davis. Affirmative Action got her enrolled in college, but it was her hard work and her native talents that got her where she is today.
Again, I believe in the James Brown version of affirmative action "I don't want you to give me nothin', JUST OPEN UP THE DOOR, I'LL DO IT MYSELF!" That's exactly what Judge Sotomayor (and apparently TNC, Gene Robinson and so many others have done, myself included. In my case it was Barbara Bush, among others who opened the door.)
My favorite part of Uncle Pat's rant was how at the Ivy League schools, "everyone graduates cum laude today." First it's not true; second, didn't Judge Sotomayor graduate from Princeton and Yale (wait for it) in the 1970's, at about the same time that an exclusive male only club at Princeton was advocating a quota system that would restrict admission of female and minority undergrads, a club that Justice Roberts bragged about belonging to on his White House job application?
Another "Margaret (who are you going to believe, me or your lyin' eyes) Dumont" moment brought to you by what passes today for the Republican party.
I remember during my freshman year of college, we ended up discussing affirmative action in an English 101 class, and of course, someone brought up the tired "This one minority I know got into the school that a white person didn't , and I just know it had to be affirmative action" argument. Me and other people in the class brought of the idea of schools looking at activities, volunteer work, etc., and the person became silent. And yet, with all of this alledged affirmative action and preferences going on, blacks and latinos are still underrepresented in higher education and there is still a wage gap between minorities and women versus white males. At what point do we tell the racially resentful like Buchanan, "Sorry, you just suck. You just couldn't make the cut, so improve yourself"?
"there is still a wage gap between minorities and women versus white males"
Now, see, that's what I don't get about all this opposition to Sotomayor. You'd think the Republicans would at least appreciate the fact that we won't have to pay her as much.
Thank you, I'm here all week.
I think we have a "violent agreement." Sorry if I gave the impression that I disagreed with you.
Good point about legacies. I was bitching to my old boss when I was applying to law schools that I hated the fact that some of the schools sent me material about the black students association along with applications or acceptances or whatever because I was like if they only want me because I'm black, the least they could do was not throw it in my face. My boss, a white dude, was like listen rich kids use legacies and some people use personal connections don't lose sleep over it. I suppose I could have avoided all of it by not checking the box, but that's a different conversation.
Unintended moment of comedy came when ER said he was a proud affirmative action baby and he thought it was a good thing, PB replied "You're not Frank Ricci" which is hilarious considering Ricci got hired by pressing a discrimination lawsuit based on his dyslexia. It seems he scored "okay" on the entrance exam but not well enough to get hired so he claimed the test was unfair because of his disability. Since 4 Nov 08, the right wing has been like Charlie Brown trying to kick that damned football and they keep ending up flat on their backs.
I agree that Pat is pretty much buying into the same racial grievances he decries in others, and Robinson was absolutely right to call him on it, but I'd like to offer a limited defense of him, unrelated to his opinions on race.
Buchanan has been one of the few people on the right who has refused to snap to attention every time the war drums start beating. He's also been willing to break with conservative orthodoxy on free-market worship, particularly with respect to trade. He also helped get an opinion journal (The American Conservative) off the ground that gave an outlet to thinkers on the right who thought the Bush administration was a disaster. Though the mag didn't endorse Obama (or McCain), its dissection of the establishment right was probably a reason that I voted for him.
If there's going to be a revival of responsible conservatism in this country (which I understand many people here might not want), those contributions will likely be part of the reason for it.
A very interesting point... and it's interesting too, I seem to recall -- very early on in the 08 campaign -- a few moments where Buchanan seemed ahead of the curve in understanding Obama's political attractiveness, and then choking on his own insights.
If pundits were actually rewarded for getting things right, it would have been one of his lost opportunities.
American Conservative is a very problematic rag with some very screwy cranks writing for it, but I subscribed for a while because they (and The Nation) were publishing Andrew Bacevich (and a couple of others who occasionally wrote very perceptive stuff on the war and the Middle East.)
I'll make a defense of Buchanan's presence on the airwaves on two counts - one is that he's not hypocritical about his racism and I think it's good, in a putrid sort of way, to get his arguments out on the table because they are more common than many would like to believe. On that score I find him less noxious than the typical GOPer Gasbag doing the Race CYA - maybe even less than a Juan Williams who plays into the rightwing's frame.
The other thing about Buchanan that I often find makes him an interesting commentator on politics is that he genuinely loves the game and he's been around it for about 45 years. He's walking history - even though a lot of it is history of shit like the Nixon debacle. Buchanan just about came in his Depends when he was analysing Obama's convention speech - seemed to genuinely love the speech's craft. On balance, I know this Devil and he's more revealing of himself and less disingenuous than 95% of the commentators on cable - especially those on the Right.
You know? If affirmative action got Sotomayor into Princeton and Yale, then affirmative action is an absolutely wonderful thing. Especially for Princeton and Yale.
If Princeton wouldn't have otherwise taken her (and she was valedictorian of her high school, so it wasn't a terribly deep reach) and then she graduated summa cum laude and got the Pyne Prize, then Princeton admissions did itself a big solid they day they took her.
If Summa at Princeton wasn't enough for Yale Law (!) and affirmative action made up for whatever happened with the no. 2 pencils, and then Sotomayor made Yale Law Review, then Yale Law did itself a favor when it took her.
The "you only got in because of affirmative action" whine, which can clearly be made in the absence of any evidence at all, is a lot less effective when it's "You only got in because of affirmative action, and now you're completely kicking ass ." But it's the completely-kicking-ass part that bothers the Buchanans.
If affirmative action worked the way anti-affirmative action types said it did, letting in people who weren't qualified, then they actually wouldn't have a problem with it. Because those unqualified people would not be equipped to succeed, and whites would have no trouble competing with them. What makes Buchanan mad is when affirmative action works the way it should, identifying talented people who might otherwise be ignored and giving society full use of their talents.
It might be useful to actually take a look at what the LSAT and SAT are. They're predictors of how well you will do in school. It's been over 20 years since my exposure to the LSAT, but back then it was mostly logic questions and a quasi-essay to see how well you can organize your thoughts. It was a test of reasoning ability because studying law puts a big emphasis on ones ability to reason.
So Pat is getting hung up on a diagnostic test that had a meaningful use at the time Sotomayor was applying to law schools, but which is infinitesimally less meaningful now in comparison to her actual career and professional accomplishments. It's trivial.
Absolutely. (And in any case, it's not clear that there is anything weak about her scores, and no one would have ever asked Alito or Roberts for theirs.)
One of the rules of Buchanan's anti-affirmative-action paradigm, in which nonwhites never get to win anyway, is:
Success at a job is not a sign of qualifications for the job.
The fact that you're doing a job well doesn't mean you're qualified to do it. What matters more is a test that tries to guess whether or not you'd do a good job.
In other news, Tom Brady is not qualified to quarterback the Patriots. He was such a low draft pick! He never got the starter's job at Michigan! How can you say that guy's ready for Drew Bledsoe's job?
FAIL. MAJOR FAIL. I did not score very well on the LSAT had a high GPA and went off to a Top 25 law school. I graduated in the top 10% of my class.
I am sick and tired of hearing this argument because if it were all about test scores, I and many other people of color would not have been able to attend law school.
Do not get me started
You're right, it's not *all* about test scores, but in my case I'm glad they were in the mix. I had one really bad year as an undergrad that pulled my GPA down to a 2.7, but since I was able to get a 1350 on the GRE, I just barely squeaked into grad school. They should always consider the totality of the record. No one piece tells the whole story.
But Marcos' original point stands. Sotomayor's LSAT scores are essentially meaningless now. Her body of work, as an attorney and as a judge, means far more. Or at least it *would*, in a sane world.
Regrettably, Buchanan doesn't live in a sane world. Listening to him sometimes, he sounds like he could fit seamlessly into that "Looney Party Political Broadcast" skit John Cleese and Eric Idle used to do.
The thing is, most of us aren't really qualified to judge Sotomayor on her understanding of the law as demonstrated in her decisions. I mean, people who've studied law in some depth probably get something useful out of that, but most of us haven't ever studied the law.
That means our judgment comes down to stuff like positions on political/moral issues (abortion, gun control), datamined damning quotes (the "wise latina" comment that keeps coming up), or (for nonwhites) claims of her having benefitted from AA. The real issue there isn't about intelligence--a fraction of a percent of voters are bright enough to have done what she's done in her life. This is all about resentment--the whole idea that "she's not any better than me, she just got all her breaks because she's brown." This is silly, of course; the average person dropped into Yale Law School would sink like a stone, because they just wouldn't be smart enough to keep up.
I generally agree with your point and had a similar experience re: my law school applications. High undergrad GPA from a respected school, decent LSAT score (but only 3 points higher than US News and World Report indicated was the bottom of my school's range), good essay (if i do say so myself) and a good resume. I also got my applications in so early i was getting acceptances before the application deadline passed. I checked the box. What galls me is that the sum total of my application was enough to get me into the places I got into and cover the less than stellar LSAT score. It also could have been affirmative action. That galls me to no end. And it fucking haunts me that I don't know even though I was always a good standardized test taker prior to that. And I did really well on the MBE. I still can't shake that nagging doubt, largely because of this fucking argument about AA.
Even a friend who I worked with is all "well i only scored 2 points higher than you but i didn't get into where you did." He conveniently overlooked the fact that he applied to school the year after I did which was a much harder year to get into grad school(2002-2003) and didn't go to an undergrad as prestigious as the one I did and didn't work for a year in between. When you're friends are saying shit like this...
Forgot to finish my post. Sorry.
Unlike Jamilah I did not hit the top 10%. I was a 3.4 student (we didn't rank at my law school). Does that mean I was unqualified? Did I take a spot I didn't deserve? No white kid with a 3.4 will ever be asked that question.
But my disagreement with Jamilah is only this. The anti-affirmative action argument in my view really isn't about test scores. The Buchanan's of the world would be saying the same shit about Sotomayor if she'd graduated from Princeton with a B+ and a perfect 180 on the LSAT. Or if she had a perfect application but a Pass on one 1st year class instead of all High Passes but wrote a brilliant writing sample, these assholes would be going on and on about the white kid who had that extra high pass and ignore the fact that said WK might have been less qualified for law review based on the totality of grades and writing sample.
I think you need to look up the meaning of "prediction" and then note that I did not say they are 100% accurate predictors. Nor did I say that they are the only predictor that a college's admissions would use. (That would obviously be not a fact.)
I think you need to reread my comment. It is a generalization about one qualification for admission to law school. Nowhere did I suggest it's the only one or the best one. I think it is you that fails (in reading comprehension). Seriously, nothing I wrote would suggest that I am saying that your experience and that of others that benefitted from affirmative action is to be dismissed because it doesn't fit that generality. Indeed, I am saying the opposite: That while the LSAT is a predictor, the proof is in the pudding.
Buchanan is a problem. He is one of the few mainstream pundits/journalists who critcizes Israel and its American supporters. "The American Conservative" is a valuable journal as Jive Turkey points out. (Aren't you dating yourself with name?) Nevertheless, Patrick does seem to have problems with race.
Someone should ask him, if he is so opposed to affirmative action, does he feel that Clarence Thomas should resign from the court.
Of course his problems with Israel are easily dismissed as related to personal problems with Jews.
I keep hoping "jive turkey" will make a resurgence in slang. Can we start here?
Pat sounds better when you listen to him in the original German.
I could rant on about Pat, but he is a slightly less butch version of Ann Coulter. Although in fairness his tits are probably larger.
He was raised in a confederate loving, right wing Catholic family in a segregated Washington DC and has never been able to transcend his upbringing.
His perfect America would likely be a right wing Catholic Francoite dictatorship where there were few if any minorities and anyone who offended his very specific sensibilities would be sent off somewhere as punishment or to die. Francoism or a Catholic corporate dictatorship that opposed free trade would send PB into a paroxysm of joy that he would be unlikely to recover from.
Interestingly, while Herr Buchanan praises recent Popes for their views on abortion, pre-marital sex, birth control, etc he finds fault with the Catholic Church's position on the death penalty.
He is very pro death penalty. Which always struck me as "ironic" in the case of someone who claims to worship Jesus Christ. I guess that makes Patrick a "cafeteria Catholic". He picks and chooses what to believe.
I won't venture a guess as to which groups of people would be subjected to "old Sparky" in a Buchananite America, but if he allowed any non whites or non Christians to stay I imagine they might feel a bit put upon.
As for PB opposing the war he was right on the issue, but for the wrong reasons. Methinks his seeming problems with Jews and Israel MIGHT have played a small role in him opposing the Iraq invasion.
"Pat sounds better when you listen to him in the original German."
Winnah!
Yeah, but I liked it better when Molly Ivins said it after his GOP convention speech in 1992.
Ok, that's likely where I got it from. I knew I heard it before somewhere; although, I wasn't sure it was in reference to Pat Buchanan.
Well, if you're going to steal material, steal from the best I always say. My hat is still off to you.
I don't quite see the connection. Invading Iraq had little more relevance for Israel's security than for ours. Saddam's Iraq was a really awful place to live, but it was also dirt poor and beaten down, and not really any kind of threat to Israel.
Albatross,
logically Iraq wasn't much of a threat to Israel.
That doesn't mean that Buchanan doesn't see "the Jews" as being behind the war.
Logic and facts don't necessarily enter his worldview.
Sotomayor graduated Phi Beta Kappa, you racist pig.
Period.
But, let him speak. Seriously.
But, I'm tired of milquetoast Black folks being on with him, though.
I thought Gene Robinson did well. Especially since he comes across as a guy with twenty or twenty-five IQ points on Buchanan.
Rikyrah,
I love it when you get all righteous and "uppity".
Come on over to my place tonight and spank me. I've been very naughty!
I need to be punished.
I feel so dirty and right wing Republican right now. I need to shower.
IP,
Either you make me wanna say stuff that would get me banned..
or, you make me laugh.
Well they are not mutually exclusive. You can laugh and be banned.
Come on get it out.
You know you want to call me a "cracker ass cracker".
Just channel your inner Chris Rock.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeEwFhZWO_c
IP made me laugh my ass off tonight.
I may be fooling myself on this -- I am always open to that as a possibility -- but I think that Gene Robinson comes across as sane and gracious, whereas Pat Buchanan comes across as off-his-nut and lacking in all social graces (and even Chris Matthews comes across as reasonable! If lacking in social graces).
Why does this matter? Because Pat Buchanan is not winning new believers with this racist, sexist ("that lady up there is a Scalia?!"), utterly repugnant behavior, he is only convincing those who already agree with him that they are right. Sane people, who seem like they might be pleasant to have coffee with, are the people who win over the unsure, the waffling, the I-was-raised-a-certain-way-but-this-other-way-might-make-more-sense folks. Also, and not for nothing, but I cannot believe that anyone under the age of 30 gives a flying fuck what Pat Buchanan has to say -- and they are, to paraphrase, the future. This is where I'm taking my comfort. That and from the fact that unlike some who feel as he does, Pat Buchanan does not actually sit in Congress.... Uncle Pat, my ass.
Finally, God bless Gene Robinson. "Oh Pat, come one!" God bless him. If I could send him some fresh-baked cookies, I would.
Of course, I meant "Oh Pat, come on!" ...
It was nice it didn't devolve into a shouting contest. Robinson didn't need to shout, his good natured laughter spoke volumes
Actually, apparently the new, nearly forty head of the Young Republicans (Atwater's and Rove's spawning ground) does give a flying fuck, if her tweet train is any indication. Sad but true.
So Pat is a known racist and maybe I wouldn't go so far as to say Nazi apologist, but he is pretty soft of Nazism. However, traditionally he was pretty much a straightfoward racist.
Here is classic Pat:
"white rule of a black majority is inherently wrong. Where did we get that idea? The Founding Fathers did not believe this." (syndicated column, 2/7/90)
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2553
Deleted and banned.
I don't know about you guys, but I spent a couple precious hours of my day - literally, hours - marvelling at the mere audacity of the racism displayed by the commenters at Human Events, forced into the public view like the private parts of a derelict. The whole time I kept telling myself, "this is a car crash," "ZOMG someone's wrong on the internet.
you're just procrastinating," and yet I could not turn away. What that man represents and what he foments is horrific. In my book he is, in terms of the public sphere, a leper.
/Buckling down and turning off the internet tomorrow.
Pat gave Gene such a huge hole to run through with the Palin analogy, how she is someone who made it on her own merits. This has been noted many times on this blog before, but Good Grief, if there is any better example of how whiteness is still more advantageous than affirmative action at this point in our history, it is Palin Power. As if any minority candidate for president could have walked onstage with that many kids with that many problems and received anything but scorn...Ah, Gene...shoulda pounced. Said reference occured right when the conversation was getting dicey, though, so he was still probably adjusting from being merely bemused to flabbergasted.
Eugene Robinson is usually Mr. Reasonable with Measured Tones and Mild Amusement. He musta been reaaaally pissed to let some frustration show like he did tonight.
Pat's cruising on his anti-war creds with Chris Matthews. I wonder how long it will last? I wouldn't put it past CM to get sick of Pat. Matthews says some really stupid and inappropriate things, but he doesn't strike me as a bigot at his core, which is so obviously what Pat is.
Well, now no one can call him a crytpo-racist.
Buchanan's rant called to mind Geoffrey Colvin's great book "Talent is Overrated", which argues that high achievement is entirely a function of quantity of effort - inherent intelligence is a far smaller factor in achievement.
If it were possible to set aside the emotional minefield of race relations, a good question for Buchanan might be why we would focus on a test score from several decades ago rather than a person's efforts and accomplishments in the many years since.
I mean why stop at the LSAT? Are we sure Sotomayor deserved her spot in the pre-school she attended?
Further, as a white male, and one who may have been on the business end of AA once or twice, my frustration with Buchanan and others is that their opposition to AA seems disingenuous.
Look, if you score 10% higher than Sonia Sotomayor on the LSAT, and she is admitted to Princeton while you are stuck at the New Jersey School of Auto Repair and Law, its probably true that your dreams of being a Supreme Court Justice are over. But claiming that a law school admission prevented your reaching the ultimate heights of your profession is like claiming you are not a major leaguer because you ate too many Big Macs. Each fact might be true, but one surely doesn't follow from the other.
The perception of insincerity arises since prestige educations historically opened doors for patrician lives of gentlemanly ease. One is never fully convinced that it is the lack of easy access to the patrician life that motivates many opponents of AA.
Which is terrible. Frankly, whether you go to the NJ School of Auto Repair and Law or Princeton or wherever, you really ought to come out of there working your a** off, and per Colvin's book, you'll be a success. Anyone who doesn't put in the effort should receive a minimum of dispensation.
Can never shake the impression that opponents of AA are often just bringing dispensation for lost lives of ease in through the backdoor of apparent opposition to inequality. I hate that.
Nobody seems to be suing about AA at private universities. They are private and can do whatever they want, although of course their actions will affect their reputations.
It's no accident that the big law school AA suit was in Michigan, which has one really, really good public law school and some other public ones that aren't so good. If you are a bright, working class student (of any race) in Michigan who wants to be a lawyer, you REALLY need to get into that one top public school. It's not like California, where the next notch down is still pretty good. And it's not like the situation for rich kids in Michigan, who can go out of state or pay private tuition.
When the stakes are structured like, with a zero-sum situation and a very steep cliff between the best option and all the others, of course there will be fights about access. But it's perfectly absurd to have the stakes structured that way in the first place. A big, complicated society has a lot of different options and a lot of different levels of outcome, so there should be room enough for everyone. Unless you go out of your way to structure a peculiar situation like the one in Michigan.
But Buchanan isn't talking about Michigan. He's talking about the private schools, Sotomayor attended.
But as everyone agrees, he's a nut.
Just don't start thinking that his nuttiness is the only thing going on out there. He's a sideshow, whereas the Michigan lawsuits before the Supreme Court were the real thing.
If Sotomayor hadn't gone to Princeton and Yale, she probably could have gone to Cornell and done fine. Like Ruth Bader Ginsberg did. Where such options exist, it's absurd to fight. It's where they don't that you get substantive disagreements.
Right...but I think it was made clear, in the original post, that it's fine to have a critique of AA. Moreover we've discussed those critiques on this blog.
The point is that it's fine to have a principled critique of AA. But demanding someone's LSAT scores, and claiming that everyone who goes to an Ivy League is a Summa Cum Laude, isn't it. Pete's point is that bringing that into the discussion makes the critic look insincere. That doesn't mean it makes all critics look insincere.
MC's "fight for access" argument isn't bad, though it relies on the premise that priviledged access is essential to success. Wayne State Law's wikipedia site claims that "a quarter of all sitting judges in the Michigan judiciary" come from their school. Not U of M to be sure, but hardly a death sentence to a successful legal career.
Getting back to Buchanan, whenever a commenter raises the spectre of LSAT scores or other essentially irrelevant drivers of success, one wonders if the commenter is trying to hold onto a world of the past; perhaps the world of whites-only country clubs where gentlemen went to relax and relax and relax while their underlings did the heavy lifting back at the office.
There's a relevant line in David Bowie's underrated song 'Cygnet Committee': "We broke the ruptured structure built of age..." One wonders if Buchanan-type commenters are trying to retain ruptured structures built of age, if the ruptured structure in question is a world of courtly priviledge for relaxed country club gentleman.
If so, Buchanan should just come out and say that he wants to prop up those ruptured structures built of age, rather than hiding behind arguments for test scores and other irrelevancies. This is a sensitive issue for me, because I'm all for breaking ruptured structures, but I'm a white guy, so I'm somewhat stuck in this structure, particularly since no one has the courage to admit they defend it.
I am glad Pat Buchanan is the face of conservatism on MSNBC. He's like a caricatured right wing fascist minstrel. "Those darn Jews still trying to prosecute Nazi war criminals like Demjanjuk! That was the same attitude they used to crucify Jesus!" With all the overembellished charges of anti-semitism, its strange to see a real live anti-semite nationally broadcast on a major network every day.
Conservatives can relive the culture wars of the 70s all they want, stumping to their ever-shrinking "Real America", and regressing to Pat's brand of paleoconservatism. It only hurts them. The rest of us moved on a long time ago.
So, I made a quick run over to the Census Bureau site and looked up a report they had on who is participating in welfare programs (means-tested programs, that is). The report is here:
Dynamics of Economic Well-Being: Participation in Government Programs, 2001 Through 2003 Who Gets Assistance? (P70-108) at http://www.census.gov/sipp/p70s/p70-108.pdf
At any rate, not bothering to negotiate the statistics myself, I did pay attention to the summary text provided in the report. Here is the salient point about nearly ALL of these social programs, you may argue that they were put in place for the benefit of blacks, but EVERYBODY (including Mr. Charlie) takes advantage of them. Here's the money quote from the report:
While Blacks and Hispanics had
higher program participation rates
than non-Hispanic Whites, the
number of non-Hispanic Whites
receiving means-tested assistance
exceeded the separate numbers of
Blacks and Hispanics. In 2003,
about 15 million Blacks and 14 million
Hispanics participated in a
program for at least 1 month, compared
with 25 million non-Hispanic
Whites.
And, as TLC rightfully states, since black folk are paying for these programs too, shouldn't we get a measure of recognition and gratitude? But, then again, it's not like we gave white folk the "gift" of Christian salvation... my bad.
Coates - sorry for mistyping initials above... I got a bit too animated while writing!
I believe public assistance works rather like prison, in that more whites end up there than blacks in total, but the proportion of blacks (and hispanics) is much higher. But obviously, anti-poverty programs exist to help the poor, not the nonwhite, in the same way that prisons exist to lock up criminals, not the nonwhite.
And yeah, they're society-wide mechanisms; we all pay in, and we all benefit when we need them. (Well, if you get sent to prison, you don't benefit, exactly, but I guess the rest of society benefits from having you behind bars.) The only programs I can think of that are designed as a transfer of wealth (opportunities and business and jobs) from the whole society to nonwhites are affirmative action programs. (Not the kind that involve making an honest effort to recruit nonwhites for the job, the kind that amounts to a finger on the scales in admissions or hiring, or that sets aside a certain fraction of government contracts for minority-owned businesses.) You can argue those, but I think the total impact turns out to be quite small.
I think we need to be very careful in how we assess the impact of affirmative action programs, which, like welfare, benefit a much broader population than just African-Americans.
In my view, the admissions process, just like the contracting process, has always been hidden from plain view. I doubt any of us who has not worked in an admissions office could, with any validity, speak to how an applicant's various qualifications/attributes are weighed. Even then, it would only apply to that single particular institution. The fact is, with acceptance rates as small as they typically are at the most popular colleges and universities, clearly test scores and grades do not provide enough information to allow these admissions counselors to make a determination. Very quickly you talk about "soft" attributes like leadership, and reputation of the high school - things like that. The assumption that a person who has served as an officer of his class is thus equipped with leadership skills that will be of value to the college is as full of assumptions as any assumption regarding the value of diversity.
On a broader scale, this notion of "transfer of wealth" is a strawman constructed to appeal to the liberalist underpinnings of our society. But providing an opportunity for some individual to either succeed or fail is not a transfer of wealth or opportunity. It is only what it says it is. Giving an individual an opportunity. How this becomes, in the calculus of many whites, an act of oppression, racism, or a theft of their own opportunities, escapes me. Unless, of course, we presume that these same whites truly believe that the true America is white America, and everyone else is just a visitor...
yeah, I made this point before in a thread about Sotomayor.
What no one is willing to admit is that there is basically a whole lot of luck in anyone's success. College admissions are hardly some perfect system. It isn't like we can perfectly rank every high school senior in America on some absolute scale and give student #1 first choice of school and then student #2 their choice and so on down the list. The truth is there is a whole lot of luck, happenstance, being in the right place at the right time, having the particular set of extra curricular activities that they happened to be looking for at that moment, and so on in pretty much all admissions. Adding AA as another criteria is as a way to broaden the pool of who gets into the consideration set may not be perfect but given the imperfect world we live in I've yet to see a better idea.
to eric k
Yep. I went to a top engineering school during their "return to nerdliness" phase when they were hyping diversity and, by chance, I happened to write an essay for that school only on the positive impact of diversity. I'm convinced the essay made the difference to my acceptance there because it was the attitude they were recruiting at that time. And while I was a Mathlete :) I was only fair to midlin in their other metrics compared to my classmates. (For the record, I got a B+ average and graduated)
On the other hand, my friend (from said school) had an older brother - arguably smarter in math/science than I - who had been rejected from my institution 2 years previously. We think it was because he was too focused on nerdly persuits and not "well rounded" enough during their (short lived) phase of recruiting "well rounded" geeks. He wound up double majoring at the other big engineering school. There's no question he could have done well at our school, but through the luck of the draw, he was not what they were looking for that year. (To go back to someone's concern about the U of Mich having only one good option and the rest being bad, clearly my friend's brother had more than one excellent opportunity.)
Pat Buchanan is a trifling idiot. There is no lengths he will attempt to try to make a point that so clearly cannot be made. Sotomayor was the valedictorian of her high school. She later went to two Ivy League schools and graduated at the top of her class. If a point is to be made, at this point it can only be made in her rulings. Arguing that she was unqualified, not smart enough, is beyond ridiculousness and is at this point an example of high class foolishness.
I think people bitching about "advantages" are remarkably un-self-aware. Like they've never caught a break in life. Like being white has never, at any point, benefited them.
I once watched a Cornell prof on Fox Financial explain how his research showed that being talented and working hard is neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure big success, you have to be lucky too. The news guy interviewing him would have none of it, and took it personally.
"You're saying I didn't work hard?"
"No, I'm saying that you were lucky, too."
"I worked really hard to get her ever since I came here from England. That's how I got this job."
"Well, how did you get your first interview."
"I took a big risk coming here from England, and I've been working really hard ever since to get here." [Yes, he gave evidence against the side of the debate he was taking, without realizing it]
"Umm, I think you're kind of proving my point."
So, yes, I think you're right.
Yeah some people are really caught up in the idea that admitting luck plays a factor discounts their hard work.
The point is success generally comes from a combination of hard work and luck. The world is full of people who worked just as hard as that news anchor and didn't succeed.
I also think to take the political positions that I'm assuming a Fox News Anchor does (could be wrong, but I;d say the odds are at least 95% that I'm not! there aren't many Shep Smith's there) requires that you believe people who don't succeed failed from a lack of effort. If you acknowledge that people can work hard and do all the right things and still fail a lot of right wing policies look downright obscene.
I'm late to this thread, but I'm really interested in this discussion about luck. To me, it's really infuriating that people take an acknowledgment of luck as an insult to their hard work. To me it shows a lack of humility, a lack of perspective, a lack of gratitude. It's just a recognition that you may be fortunate. It also, I think, masks a lot of insecurity.
Maybe for some people luck is scary because it seems like if luck played a role in their accomplishments, luck could just as easily take it away. But then, wouldn't that explain why some people fail?
I'm not enough of a philosopher to explain why I feel this sense of gratitude and perspective is so important, and why it actually comforts me (and it's not a religious thing, in my case, though it may be for others). I guess I feel that every time I thought I was hot shit, something cooled it off. So I learned to keep a little cooler.
Along with "Outliers", check out "The Drunkard's Walk", and "Predictably Irrational" for ruther readin on the topic of how luck intesects with hard work. TDW points out that only 300 or so years ago, normal measurement error (in astronomy, for instance) was taken as a sign of moral weakness rather than the fact that measurements are generally only repeatable within a certain normal distribution. And people like to think they have more control than that.
And once again to eric k, thanks for your last sentence. "If you acknowledge that people can work hard and do all the right things and still fail a lot of right wing policies look downright obscene." I think this should be repeated at every opportunity.
Achk. That would be "further reading" not ruther readin.
To Pat Robertson and like minded white Christian males everywhere: your day is past. Live with it. Learn how; it will build your character. Every one else has had to live with you lording it over them for the past millenium and a half. George W. Bush had to have been affirmative actioned in to Yale--the old fashioned way--family and $; the man can't enunciate a sentence in his first language, yet the populace of the United States elected him President on two occasions, and the ones nattering away the loudest about Sotomayor were the same folks who could find no fault with their Supreme Court affirmative action hire into the White House.
Yeah for real. I wonder how well Sotomayor would have faired if she got gentleman's C's like our beloved ex-prez W.
All I know is that I laughed out loud three times during that clip, though the first was at Matthews complaint that the hearings lack substance. I hope Gene Robinson gets paid for these gigs.
If I were Princeton or Harvard or any student there for that matter - I would start getting really mad at the GOP. Nobody wants to hear that their best product, summa cum laude, is inadequate and yet they can't raise their voice because it would imply that somebody is taking the current GOP seriously? It does not matter - Sotomayor had been confirmed. If it had not been for Affirmative Action and Harvard - Obama would have never been elected by white people to be their president and he would not have chosen Sotomayor.
I am sure the GOP has pleased a part of their voters and has alienated an even larger part of the swing vote. I am talking about whites with degrees and all blue collar workers who hope that their children... Who is behind this public suicide?
Why the vast left-wing conspiracy funded by major league baseball of course. :)
Seriously, I don't know but I feel you. This is painfull to watch. Comical, but painfull all the same.
It's Dave Letterman's fault. Clearly, he's walking point in the attack on REAL AMERICA™, if not the guy orchestrating the attack. Steele's comments the other day about luring black voters to the GOP with fried chicken and potato salad have Letterman's fingerprints all over it.
But seriously, you should check out this article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article6710646.ece
It gives a good explanation of what is happening to the GOP.
I fear that there are quite a few Americans who agree with Buchanan's views. My experience after President Obama's election has not been "post-racial". I have heard a great deal of racist bile come out of people's mouths that never would have been expressed if a white man was sitting in the Oval office. Some white Americans fear, as demographics change, finally getting a comeuppance for current and past wrongs. Every racial group and culture has perpetrated evil and injustice at some time in history, but unfortunately peoples of European ancestry have built up a great deal of "bad karma" for centuries. Buchanan's comments are a classic example of trying to discredit "the other" and make yourself look benevolent in order to ignore creditable examples of persecution and injustice.
I think a reason that Sotomayor has the Buchanan's of the world so upset is she is a poster child for showing how Affirmative Action works. An obviously talented student scores a little low on her SATs but everything else about her high school career says she will likely be an asset to Princeton so they admit her, and sure enough she thrives, what do you know her 13 prior years of performance in school is more telling than a single test.
They really need her to be an over-promoted, unqualified hack, it is what their world view requires.
Isn't Clarence Thomas, his protestations notwithstanding, a perfect example of this? The only reason he isn't tarred as an unworthy spawn of Affirmative Action is because of his neanderthal right wing politics.
That rascist MF makes me want to throw up in my mouth. And the people who allow him a prominent platform rather that allowing him to be covered by the National Enquirer and other forums for the whack-job lunatics who actually should be actively marginalized for being irrelevant and actively working against people because they can.
Buchanan should never be barred
From spewing his racist canard;
Do not disavow him:
Let Maddow allow him
To hoist himself on his petard.
News Short n' Sweet by JFD8
http://twitter.com/JFD8