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Detroit \u2014<\/em>\u00a0Jennifer Gratz is a model of diversity. The daughter of a policeman and a secretary in Southfield, Mich., she was the first person in her family to apply to college, sporting a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 that included a 3.8 grade point average, 25 ACT score, and membership in the National Honor Society and student council. She was class vice president. Yet she was denied admission to the University of Michigan because racial preferences stacked the deck against her and her white, Asian, Indian, and Jewish peers by granting 20 points to black or Latino students, on an 80-point scale; a perfect standardized test score, by comparison, was worth 12 points.<\/p>\n To end this injustice, Gratz\u00a0led an ultimately successful ballot initiative<\/a>\u00a0in 2006 that wrote into Michigan\u2019s constitution the words of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: \u201c[Public 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.\u201d No one in recent years has done more than Gratz (and her black colleague Ward Connerly) to advance Martin Luther King\u2019s dream of a racially blind society where students are judged not \u201cby the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.\u201d<\/p>\n On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Courtupheld Gratz\u2019s achievement<\/a>, and yet this civil-rights pioneer is vilified by Democrats and their media allies as an enemy of civil rights. Such is the intellectual poverty of the modern Left, which\u00a0argues, in defiance of all evidence, that minorities cannot advance without racial discrimination.<\/p>\n ACLU attorney Mark Rosenbaum, who argued before the Supreme Court in favor of racial preferences, said Tuesday that \u201cthe big losers are the citizens and the students of the state of Michigan. It\u2019s going to put true educational diversity out of reach.\u201d<\/p>\n Rosenbaum\u2019s objection ignores reality. In truth, as Michigan admissions officers will attest, U-M,\u00a0Michigan State, and other elite Michigan universities have historically benefited minority children of privilege in order to meet their racial quotas, because not enough qualified minorities from the awful inner-city public schools of Detroit, Pontiac, etc. apply to higher ed.<\/p>\n What is more diverse? A black private-high-school grad and daughter of a GM executive going to class with a white private-high-school grad and son of a GM executive? Or either of the above attending school with a peer, like Gratz, from a very different socioeconomic background?<\/p>\n The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0in its coverage (echoing the AP and other news outlets) also chided the decision for allegedly harming minorities: \u201cStates that forbid affirmative action in higher education, like Florida and California, as well as Michigan, have seen a significant drop in the enrollment of black and Hispanic students in their most selective colleges and universities.\u201d<\/p>\n The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u2019 \u201creporting\u201d ignores the real picture. In truth, racially blind admissions have helped minorities gain that most significant of collegiate rewards: a diploma.<\/p>\n Since Michigan banned discrimination in college admissions, the\u00a0black graduation rate<\/a>\u00a0at U-M Ann Arbor has risen from 71 to 78 percent \u2014 though it is still short of the\u00a0white and Asian graduation rates\u00a0<\/a>of 90 percent. Students with diplomas are more marketable than dropouts. According to the extensive research of UCLA law professor Rick Sander, the\u00a0effect of Prop 209<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a similar ban on race preferences passed by California voters in 1996 \u2014 has been to increase the number of minority graduates overall despite reduced numbers of minority entrants at elite Berkeley and UCLA. Minority students have entered colleges for which they were better matched \u2014 with the result that four-year graduation rates for blacks at UC San Diego, for example, have doubled from 26 percent to 52 percent. That\u2019s a rate nearly on par with the rates for whites and Asians.<\/p>\n Prop 209 \u201chas produced better students all around,\u201d notes Sander. Yet the mainstream media ignore this good news because it does not fit their narrative.<\/p>\n \u201cThe way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,\u201d says Justice John Roberts. That was the promise of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That\u2019s the promise of the 2006 Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. Thank you, MLK, and Jen Gratz.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Detroit \u2014\u00a0Jennifer Gratz is a model of diversity. The daughter of a policeman and a secretary in Southfield, Mich., she was the first person in her family to apply to college, sporting a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 that included a 3.8 grade point average, 25 ACT score, and membership in the National Honor Society and student council. She […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14724"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14724"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14725,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14724\/revisions\/14725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}