U-M racial preferences vs. MLK’s dream

Posted by hpayne on August 28, 2013

Fifty years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a Lincoln Memorial crowd about his dream that his children not be judged by their color, civil rights groups are trying to overturn Michigan's ban on racial preferences. Photo by Francis Miller/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Fifty years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a Lincoln Memorial crowd about his dream that his children not be judged by their color, civil rights groups are trying to overturn Michigan’s ban on racial preferences. Photo by Francis Miller/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images (Francis Miller)

Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and dreamed of a day his children would live “in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Today his dream is being realized in states like Michigan and California, where voter initiatives have banned racial discrimination in college admissions.

Now, if only King’s dream can overcome the civil rights establishment.

Ironically, as America celebrates MLK’s vision this week, the ACLU and civil rights groups have filed briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court demanding that Michigan reverse Proposal 2, the state’s ban on racial preferences, and discriminate by the color of a student’s skin. In so doing, King’s successors threaten to set back progress for minorities.

“Dr. King was making a case for race neutrality. He wanted equality of opportunity, not racial preferences,” says Joe Hicks, 71, veteran civil rights activist, former communications director of Southern California’s ACLU and an African-American. He has seen California’s preferences ban deliver increased degrees and jobs for blacks.

Following California’s successful passage of Prop 209 in 1996, Michigan voters adopted the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in its constitution in 2006, declaring that universities “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

But in an Oct. 15 hearing before the Supreme Court, the left hopes to turn back the clock in Michigan and five other states. The civil rights establishment would promote a legal norm where “diversity” trumps equality.

“The University of Michigan considers everything from economic status to parental educational background…in its admissions policies. The only thing they can’t consider is the racial inequality in secondary education,” writes Mark Rosenbaum, an ACLU attorney representing students and faculty in a brief filed Friday with the Supreme Court. “Proposal 2 turns the court’s principles upside down by making race the determinative factor.”

“Rosenbaum’s argument is the definition of insanity,” says civil rights pioneer Jennifer Gratz, who spearheaded Michigan’s affirmative action ban in 2006. “No amount of mental gymnastics could make a sane person believe that eliminating race as a factor makes race the determinative factor.”

“The ACLU’s case is Orwellian,” adds ex-ACLU spokesman Hicks.

The ACLU suit threatens the progress of minorities under California’s Prop 209. Since its passage, the overall population of students in the California system has remained remarkably stable, even as they were reapportioned to colleges for which they were more qualified. As racial quotas were ended, schools like UC-Riverside saw black enrollment increase by 240 percent while UC-Berkeley dropped by half.

“The draconian predictions the left made haven’t happened,” says Hicks who campaigned against Prop 209 in 1996 but has since been won over by its success. “Minorities have gone where their opportunities are better. Their grad rates are up across the board.”

Indeed, Prop 209 has delivered a sharp increase in minority graduation rates, a story I first reported in 2006 with the Reason Foundation’s Shikha Dalmia. At UC-San Diego, for example, graduation rates doubled from 26 percent in 1995 to 52 percent in 2001 — nearly on par with whites and Asians — thus increasing the pool of minorities available to employers.

“(Prop 209) has produced better students all around,” says UCLA scholar Rick Sander, whose 2012 book, “Mismatch,” catalogs California’s success.

Another benefit of Prop 209 has been its positive effect on academic outreach to the poor. One of the dirty secrets of race preferences is that elite colleges like U-M and UC-Berkeley chase a small pool of applicants from upper-income households. Now recruiting without consideration of race, the California system has broadened its outreach programs to all income groups. A study by The Pacific Legal Foundation’s Eryn Hadley found that elite schools have refocused resources on “K-12 students…who are disadvantaged or attend low performing schools.”

Consequently, students on Pell Grants — scholarships awarded to low income students — at Berkeley and UCLA today make up nearly 40 percent of their student bodies. At U-M, by contrast, just 16 percent of students are on Pell grants.

Similar changes would be expected in Michigan’s system where black students graduate from U-M at 16 percent lower rates that whites and Asians (at Michigan State, the gap is 22 percent). Racial preferences have the unintended consequence of discriminating against Asian students while stigmatizing blacks as, in Hicks’ words, “needing a protective umbrella to succeed.”

“Large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively — even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools,” writes Sander in The Atlantic.

Fifty years later, Dr. King’s legacy is under attack by his own allies. In pursuing diversity over equality, Hicks argues they have put too many black students on “a slippery slope to oblivion.”

Comments are closed.