Free Republic

Last year, advocates of racial preferences in California, where they’d been banned since 1996, attempted to change the law so that state colleges and universities could again give admission advantages to certain groups. Despite outspending opponents by about 15-1 and with backing from big business, labor, and other organizations, the effort at repealing racial neutrality failed by 57-43 percent. That result underscores a point that opinion polls have shown for decades—that Americans on the whole oppose racial favoritism. The California result suggests that the case for preferences is on thin ice. A new book is going to help further melt...

The recently enacted Covid-19 relief law and other bills wending their way through Congress openly favor members of certain races or ethnic categories. It’s hard to see how any of this legislation—all part of the Biden-Harris administration’s new focus on racial “equity” at the expense of equality—passes constitutional muster. That doesn’t mean that the courts will strike them down. We have today a new, unwritten constitution—a hodgepodge of executive orders, court decisions, legislation, and conventions. Of course, we already have a written Constitution, drafted in 1787 and amended since. The cognitive dissonance of living under these two constitutional regimes is...

President Biden likes to talk about “healing” and “unity,” but he also keeps pledging to prioritize the supposed interests of certain favored minority groups. When is he going to realize that his goals of racial unification and racial favoritism are at cross-purposes? Last week Mr. Biden signed an executive order on “racial equity.” He said that George Floyd’s death last summer “marked a turning point in this country’s attitude toward racial justice” and is “forcing us to confront systemic racism and white supremacy.” He added that “this nation and this government need to change their whole approach to the issue...

States have many factors to consider when allocating their scarce vaccine doses: the age of recipients, medical conditions that put people at risk, and jobs that put workers in contact with the public, to name a few. A committee in Oregon is considering an unusual recommendation to allocate vaccines by race. The proposal is intended to address inequities but would invite legal challenges to a vaccination program that has already been off to a rocky start. The state's COVID-19 Vaccine Advisory Committee is a group of 27 individuals tasked with devising "a vaccine sequencing plan focused on health equity to...

Five of the largest U.S. banks publicly committed to mandating a diverse slate of applicants when hiring employees, part of a push to diversify an industry whose top ranks remain largely white and male. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp all said they would either adjust policies for considering job candidates or disclose the ones they already have in place. Their policies mirror the so-called Rooney Rule, which started in the National Football League as a way of making sure people of color are considered for coaching jobs. In recent years, the rule...

The biggest banks in the U.S. will give Black-owned businesses advantageous terms on a crucial type of financing that companies use to manage their cash flow, a novel effort to narrow the wealth gap between white and non-white communities. Banks made multibillion-dollar commitments to expand lending to Black consumers and businesses after the wave of protests throughout the U.S sparked by the killing of George Floyd. The targeted lending is meant to correct decades of discrimination in lending whereby banks denied loans to Black borrowers or steered them toward products with high interest rates and other terms many couldn’t afford....

Is California's deep-blue legislature out of control? It sure seems that way to me. Recently, Gov. Newsom approved a clearly unconstitutional bill mandating racial and LGBTQ quotas for boards of directors of private companies. That's pretty brazen. He also signed legislation creating a task force to examine the possibility of slave reparations—even though California was never a slave state. A third example is last month's legislation forcing California State University students to take an ethnic studies course. If a conservative legislature had interfered with a curricular matter like that, the mainstream media would be going bananas. Probably the most consequential...

California voters made a wise decision in 1996 when they adopted Proposition 209, banning state government from favoring some people over others on account of their race. No state should allow officials to treat anyone as more, or less, valuable than others. But the Proposition 16 campaign is underway to repeal Prop. 209 and allow the government to once again act as though, to paraphrase George Orwell in “Animal Farm”, all citizens are equal, but some citizens are more equal than others. This campaign is bolstered by deceptive claims, such as made in a new UC Berkeley study. The study...

Boeing is seeking to increase black US employees throughout the company by 20 percent and mandate benchmarks for hiring people of color, Chief Executive Dave Calhoun told employees in a memo on Friday reviewed by Reuters. US corporations have become more responsive to complaints related to racial equality following a summer of sweeping anti-racism protests over the slaying of black people by police. The changes at Boeing, a stalwart defense contractor with its corporate headquarters in Chicago and largest factories in Washington state and South Carolina, appeared to mark the first concrete steps by the planemaker to address the issue....

On Thursday the Justice Department put Yale University on notice: If by Aug. 27 the school doesn’t agree to stop discriminating by race in admissions, the U.S. “will be prepared to file a lawsuit to enforce Yale’s Title VI obligations.” The notice follows a two-year investigation spurred by a complaint from Asian-American groups. Among the findings is that Yale “uses race at multiple points in its admissions process,” and that race is the “determinative factor in hundreds of admissions decisions each year.” In other words, kids who would otherwise be accepted to Yale are denied solely because of skin color....

As bad as the New York Times can be right now, that will be nothing compared to how truly miserable it can become if it institutes the asinine race quotas and other demands that the paper's worker union is demanding. In a series of tweets on Friday, the News Guild of New York, representing the New York Times editorial staff, laid out several race-based items for the paper's leadership to start working on. Among them were for the company's workforce demographics to reflect that of New York City (race quotas); for each stage of the hiring process for a new...

No excerpt allowed from Bloomberg, story here.

Even though Harvard won the first round in its battle with Students for Fair Admissions, a case challenging the university’s affirmative action policy, the judge did not address the deep and difficult issues that racial preferences involve. For lawyers and judges who will grapple with this issue in the future, we would like to advance some new ideas based on empirical research on the evaluation process. The Supreme Court has said repeatedly that racial discrimination by the government is permissible only to meet a “compelling state interest.” Beginning with the Bakke case in 1978, the Court said that the educational...

Last November, the voters of Washington State shocked their betters in board rooms, editorial offices, university administrations, and the leadership of both parties by rejecting Referendum 88, an attempt by state Democrats to bring back affirmative action, which had been prohibited in a 1998 referendum. This new, revived affirmative action, they claimed, would not permit quotas or preferential treatment. Referendum 88 disingenuously defined preferential treatment as using race, sex, or ethnicity “as the sole qualifying factor to select a less qualified applicant over a more qualified applicant” in public education, employment, or contracting. This would have offered an open door...

The University of California has been requiring prospective faculty members to affirm that they support diversity. This was Orwellian in its own right—reminiscent of the university system's 1950s loyalty oaths, which required faculty to attest that they were not members of the Communist Party. It now appears that at one campus, UC-Berkeley, the diversity initiative goes much further than previously understood. Whether a candidate has proposed a specific, concrete plan to advance diversity is now being used as a litmus test for some positions. No candidate who fails the test can even be considered for employment. Abigail Thompson, a UC-Davis...

Probably everyone in the academy knows that affirmative action is widely practiced: racial minorities (except Asians) and women are commonly given preference in hiring and admission decisions at American universities. I would guess, however, that some academics — and many more non-academics — are unaware that typical university hiring practices are blatantly illegal. So I’m going to talk about that for a while, in case you find that interesting. Job advertisements commonly say things like that the university rejects discrimination, supports equal employment opportunity, and considers all applicants “without regard to” race, sex, religion, etc. What they actually mean by...

... The most recent occasion for progressive grievance [against Asian-Americans] comes courtesy of the state of Washington. There, Asian-Americans proved instrumental in killing a law that would have overturned a two-decade-old ban on racial preferences in public education, employment and contracting. To do this, Asian-Americans successfully rallied to force the law onto the ballot—and then defeated it. It’s a staggering achievement in a state that ranks among America’s bluest, and in a contest where the pro-affirmative-action side enjoyed more resources plus the support of the political establishment, including an Asian-American former governor. The ballot referendum in Washington isn’t the first...

By a slim margin, Washington state voters appear to have rejected the legislature’s attempt to reinstate racial preferences. (The result is still unofficial.) Both Heather Mac Donald and Peter Kirsanow summarized the history of this issue for NR last month. Essentially, a 1998 voter referendum outlawed the use of racial preferences by the state of Washington, but this year the legislature passed Initiative 1000 that would reverse that referendum. Opponents of preferences, led in large part by Asian Americans, then put a new referendum on the ballot that would allow voters to reject I-1000 and keep the 1998 ban on...

The college admissions scandal mom who falsely claimed her son was African-American and Hispanic to increase his chances of getting into a top college was sentenced to three weeks in prison on Wednesday. Marjorie Klapper, 51, copped to paying $15,000 to fudge her son’s ACT exam score in May as part of the nationwide scandal. She also agreed to portray him as a racial minority and a first-generation student on his applications — though both she and her husband graduated from college, prosecutors said. Prosecutors had sought four months behind bars and a fine of $20,000 for Klapper, arguing that...

In a long-awaited decision, federal trial judge Allison Burroughs has ruled that, while Harvard does consider a student’s race in determining who gets in and who doesn’t (“the use of race in and of itself is admitted”), nonetheless Harvard is not breaking the law. That outcome was not surprising, and the judge’s opinion is unlikely to change many minds or alter the case’s expected trajectory to the Supreme Court. Judge Burroughs found that “Race is only intentionally considered as a positive attribute.” But if race is a positive attribute for favored groups, then does it not follow that it is...