Payne: Appeals Court civil wrongs

Posted by hpayne on November 15, 2012

It’s 2012 in Michigan. Ethnic minorities are executives with major Michigan corporations. Their children are students at their parents’ Michigan alma maters. And on Election Day they joined a majority of Americans in re-electing a black president to a second term in office. So this week the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that Michigan’s 2006 ban on racial preferences in university admissions is unconstitutional because it denies minorities equal access to the law.

In what century are these judicial dinosaurs living?

By their perverse, Orwellian logic, we need racial preferences for president because there’s no other way to guarantee that a black man can be president. And yet the American electoral process – which, like Michigan’s constitution, guarantees no racial outcome – somehow just re-elected Barack Obama to the White House.

Indeed, Barack Obama is a better representative because America elected him on his merits. He is the realization of MLK’s dream of being judged, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.

The 6th circuit nightmare, meanwhile, seems frozen in another era – before integration, before King’s revolution, before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The logic of the court’s ruling would, incredibly, have the effect of invalidating the ’64 act (Michigan’s constitutional amendment is modeled on its language) banning racial preference in admissions because – the court’s perverse reasoning goes – it does not give minorities the same access under the 14th Amendment to draft legislation discriminating by race. We’re not making this up.

The court’s reasoning would rule Title VII of the federal law illegal because it “prohibits discrimination by covered employers on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin” just as Michigan voters in 2006 affirmed that any “public college or university. . . shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

In a deliberate misreading of federal law, the majority opinion claims that due process is denied because a student seeking to benefit from family alumni connections could lobby the school while a racial minority would have “to amend the Michigan Constitution.” Never mind that the children of minority alumni are also legacy beneficiaries, the Civil Rights Act bans discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex or national origin” – not alumni status.

The ruling poisons today’s youth pool – multi-ethnic, worldly, connected to the planet by social media – by introducing the rigid racial classifications of a half century ago. It also flies in the face of the success of California’s similar, 15-year old, colorblind admissions amendment (passed under Prop 209 in 1996) which has benefited minorities by increasing graduation rates.

At California’s public universities more minorities are getting diplomas than ever before.

Four-year graduation rates for blacks at UC-San Diego, for example, have doubled since 1995 – nearly on par with whites and Asians. Similarly, Mexican-American graduation rates are up by 27 percent. Post-Prop 209 black and Hispanic populations at California’s two most elite universities – Berkeley and UCLA – dropped by nearly half, but the overall population of minority students across the University of California system remained remarkably stable. Why? Because minority students didn’t give up on a higher education – they simply entered colleges for which they were more qualified. Schools like UC Riverside and UC Santa Cruz have seen minority enrollments increase, with Riverside alone reporting a 240 percent increase in black admissions.

“This has produced better students all around,” says Rick Sander, a UCLA law professor and auther of a new book, “Mismatch,” which documents the harm university race preferences have visited on minorities by setting them up for failure.

But elites at Michigan universities and federal courts have a perverse sense of merit – they would rather preen as champions of “diversity” quotas than give students the best path to success.

“What this (6th Circuit ruling) means is that thousands of blacks and Latinos who would not have had a chance to go to our most selective universities will have the chance to become lawyers, doctors and leaders of all fields,” says George Washington, a Detroit attorney for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.

The facts defy that conclusion. The 6th Circuit is a setback for democracy and for ALL students. Indeed, social activists are troglodytes 50 years behind the civil rights revolution. Today, the biggest challenge to minority success is not racism in admissions – it’s the implosion of the two-parent family. It’s time for America’s elites to catch up to the 21st century.

 

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