Free Republic

SACRAMENTO -- A legislative push to permit California's public universities to once again consider race and ethnicity in admissions appears to be on life support after an intense backlash from Asian-American parents who fear it will make it harder for their children to get into good schools. :snip: A planned referendum sailed through the state Senate in January without fanfare on a party-line vote, but three Asian-American Democrats who initially backed the measure are now calling for it to be "tabled" before the state Assembly has a chance to vote on it -- a highly unusual move. And it seems...

The rise of Asian-Americans and their dominance in academia may be exemplified by the extraordinary performance of Asian-American students in New York City. How A Chinese Solar Giant Was Snared In An Italian Fraud Scandal According to recent media reports, Asian-American students account for almost three-fourths of the enrollment at Stuyvesant High School, one of the city's eight specialized, elite public schools that strictly use test scores for admission. Asians represent less than 14 percent of the city's entire public school student body, meaning they are disproportionately represented at Stuyvesant by a magnitude of about five. (In 1970, Asians accounted...

Are our boys and girls wrongIn expecting you who make your livingExclusively off the white raceTo stop patronizing Jap laundries.And thereby assist your fellow men and womenIn maintaining the white man’s standard in a white man’s country? — Placards belonging to the Anti-Jap Laundry League, Calif., 1908 California has a long and ugly history of discriminating against Asian Americans. From the Anti-Jap Laundry League, the Anti-Chinese League, the Asiatic Exclusion League, the alien land laws, the Anti-Coolie Act . . . the list is long. Much of that discrimination had its origins on the left, with the Ant-Jap Laundry Act,...

One man endured a night in jail and a criminal case hanging over his head for year, only to have prosecutors say they don’t think he was even guilty of a crime... A voluntary breath test showed he hadn't had too much to drink. He blew a 0.00 on the breath test. "I told them I would take a blood sample as well, just to prove that I didn't have anything in my system," Davis said. That test looked for seven types of drugs in his system, and Davis tested negative for all of them.

Anyone who has still not yet understood the utter cynicism of the Obama administration in general, and Attorney General Eric Holder in particular, should look at the Justice Department's latest interventions in education. If there is one thing that people all across the ideological spectrum should be able to agree on, it is that better education is desperately needed by black youngsters, especially in the ghettoes. For most, it is their one chance for a better life. Among the few bright spots in a generally dismal picture of the education of black students are those successful charter schools or voucher...

There are three different types of ideas: good ideas, bad ideas, and ideas so horrifically stupid that they will be mocked and scorned by our descendants for centuries to come. Modern left-wingers typically trade in the second sort of idea, while occasionally conjuring up something that unquestionably falls into the third category. Speaking of which, there’s this. After discovering that half of the female Marines can’t meet the minimum physical fitness requirements, usually failing to do three pull-ups, the Corps has decided to delay the standards. This is all part of the process of “equalizing” physical requirements so as to...

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A new study by the University of Central Florida's Diversity and Ethics in Sport released Thursday shows that the top leadership positions at Football Bowl Subdivision schools and conferences remain mostly white and male. [...] Study author Richard Lapchick called those numbers "unacceptable" and said part of the problem with getting more diversity throughout the system falls on the lack of penalties or sanctions for institutions that aren't more diverse.

But Justice Antonin Scalia balked at that interpretation. “My goodness, I thought we’ve held that the 14th Amendment protects all races,” he said. “I mean, that was the argument in the early years, that it protected only the blacks. But I thought we rejected that.” He challenged Ms. Driver to cite one Supreme Court precedent that agreed the Equal Protection Clause was designed only to apply to blacks. She said she could not. The amendment in Michigan, known as ballot Proposal 2, targeted policies adopted by the governing boards and faculty at state schools including the University of Michigan, Michigan...

As the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech approaches,Brad Plumer points out that the ratio of black to white unemployment rate has hardly budged. Washington Post: ”Many of the most overt forms of racial discrimination and bias have faded, but yawning economic gaps have persisted since 1963, and there has been essentially no narrowing of the unemployment gap between blacks and whites. The financial crisis and recession scarred minorities more than any one else.”

Do police officers write tickets because of quotas? Most law-enforcement agencies will deny that any exist, but the police department in the college town of Auburn, Alabama will find that difficult. One of their officers secretly recorded briefings in which quotas were explicitly demanded for traffic citations, arrests, and other “contacts,” which if enforced would have meant nearly 1.5 police contacts per resident each year. Reason TV highlights the efforts of Justin Hanners, who lost his job after blowing the whistle:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Auburn, Alabama is home to sprawling plains, Auburn University, and a troubling police force....

The federal government recommends that yellow lights at intersections last for at least three seconds before turning red. So why are so many yellows being timed at 2.5 seconds? And why are those fleeting yellows often located at intersections where red-light cameras are installed? The mandarins tell us that red-light cameras are for our own safety, and that we need more of them than the 150 already in New York City. “While we wait,” city transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said last month, “New Yorkers are dying on our streets.” So why increase the mayhem by cutting the duration of the...

If there is ever a contest for words that substitute for thought, "diversity" should be recognized as the undisputed world champion. You don't need a speck of evidence, or a single step of logic, when you rhapsodize about the supposed benefits of diversity. The very idea of testing this wonderful, magical word against something as ugly as reality seems almost sordid. To ask whether institutions that promote diversity 24/7 end up with better or worse relations between the races than institutions that pay no attention to it is only to get yourself regarded as a bad person. To cite hard...

THE Supreme Court has frequently handed down judgments that have shaken America to its core. Now, it has turned its attention to the raisin. A group of farmers has brought a complaint about the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, under which the government confiscates part of the annual national raisin crop. The Court is considering whether the arrangement is constitutional. But why is a country that generally celebrates red-blooded capitalism regulating the raisin trade in the first place?Since the 1940s a government agency called the Raisin Administrative Committee has confiscated a portion of the annual raisin crop: 47% in 2003 and...

After noticing that most of the lifeguards at the public pools used by Latino and African-American kids were white, the Phoenix aquatics department decided to try to recruit minorities. More than 90 percent of the students at Alhambra High are black, Latino or Asian. On a recruiting effort there over the winter, the city's Melissa Boyle tells students she's not looking for strong swimmers. Like many under-resourced schools, Alhambra doesn't have a swim team. "We will work with you in your swimming abilities," Boyle says. Boyle's colleague Kelly Martinez takes on the delicate task of explaining the scenario the city...

...President Obama intends to close "persistent gaps" between whites and minorities in everything from credit scores and homeownership to test scores and graduation rates. His remedy — short of new affirmative-action legislation — is to sue financial companies, schools and employers based on "disparate impact" complaints — a stealthy way to achieve racial preferences, opposed 2 to 1 by Americans. Under this broad interpretation of civil-rights law, virtually any organization can be held liable for race bias if it maintains a policy that negatively impacts one racial group more than another — even if it has no racist motive and...

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...

Palm Beach, Fla. (CBS TAMPA) – 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...

OAKLAND -- The Oakland school board on Thursday night unanimously approved an agreement with the Office for Civil Rights to reduce the number of out-of-school suspensions of its African-American students. Parents, community organizers, district staff members and other leaders spoke passionately about the need to pass -- and to fully realize -- the plan, and to involve students, families and teachers in the push for change. "We're here today to ante up and reclaim our children," said Chris Chatmon, director of the district's African American Male Achievement initiative. Chatmon said the resolution will give the system the sense of urgency...

The NAACP has filed a bombshell complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, alleging discriminatory admission practices at the city’s elite high schools. In a blistering document delivered to the feds Thursday morning, the NAACP accused the city of barring black and Latino students from eight of its “best public schools,” including Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, where only 1% of students are black. “Black and Latino students don’t see opportunity at places like Stuyvesant because of the admissions process,” said NAACP attorney Rachel Kleinman. “It’s not fair and it’s bad policy.” The city’s Specialized High Schools Admissions Test is...

The University of California, San Diego has done it again. Last year, it announced the creation of a new diversity sinecure: a vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion. Campus leaders established this post even as state budget cuts resulted in the loss of star scientists to competing universities, as humanities classes and degree programs were eliminated to save money, and as tuition continued its nearly 75 percent, five-year rise. The new vice chancellorship was wildly redundant with UCSD’s already-existing diversity infrastructure. As the campus itself acknowledges: “UC San Diego currently has many active diversity programs and initiatives.” No kidding....