“Quoting page 65-66: Race-conscious affirmative action is a familiar term of journalistic convenience. It identifies unambiguously the controversial element of minority preferences in distributing benefits. But it also conflates racially targeted civil rights remedies with affirmative action preferences for groups, such as Hispanics and women, given protected class status irrespective of race. … It includes nonracial as well as racial preferences, and it distinguishes such remedies, available only to officially designated protected classes, from the soft affirmative action … which emphasized special outreach programs for recruiting minorities … within a traditional liberal framework of equal individual rights for all Americans. …
The architects of race-conscious affirmative action, Skrentny observes, developed their remedy in the face of public opinion heavily arrayed against it. Unlike most public policy in America, hard affirmative action was originally adopted without the benefit of any organized lobbying by the major interest groups involved. Instead, government bureaucrats, not benefiting interest groups, provided the main impetus. The race-conscious model of hard affirmative action was developed in trial-and-error fashion by a coalition of mostly white, second-tier civil servants in the social service agencies of the presidency…
To Skrenty’s core irony, we may add three further ironies, first, the key to political survival for hard affirmative action was persistent support from the Republican Party… Second, the theories of compensatory justice supporting minority preference policies were devised only after the adoption of the policies themselves. Finally, affirmative action preferences which supporters rationalized as necessary to compensate African-Americans for historic discrimination, and which for twenty years were successfully defended in federal courts primarily on those grounds, soon benefited millions of immigrants newly arrived from Latin America and Asia.”
Source: Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America
“Quoting page 74-75: The ability of the minority rights interest groups to win control of the new agencies of civil rights enforcement established in the 1960s followed a traditional pattern in the politics of regulation that students of public administration called “clientele capture.” The practice is as old as Jacksonian democracy, which set the American tradition wherein party patronage ruled the civil service and mission agencies were expected to cater to the needs of their organized constituencies: farmers, veterans, laborers, and business interests. By the 1960s, journalists referred to these arrangements as iron triangles.” They were three-way coalitions of mutual back-scratching, operating in Washington and in state and municipal governments throughout America. Three points of the triangle were organized interests which lobbied legislators to establish or expand programs beneficial to their members; legislative committees, which obliged the lobbyists by authorizing and funding programs for the mission agencies to manage; and government bureaucrats, who expanded their empire building service programs to benefit the interest groups. To complete the triangular cycle, interest groups supported the legislators. … because environmental and consumer protection regulation is cross-cutting and horizontal—covering pollution, for example, from all industrial sources, rather than single industry and vertical … it is a difficult target for capture.
The new agencies of civil right regulation, however, were different in ways that made them highly vulnerable to capture. Most important, the cost-benefit structure of civil right regulation is the opposite of that found in environmental and consumer protection regulation. Benefits (jobs, promotions, admissions, contract set-asides) are narrowly concentrated among protected-class clienteles (racial and ethnic minorities, women, the handicapped). Costs, on the other hand, are widely distributed (government and corporate budgets).”
Source: Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America
“Quoting page 85: The OCR [Office for Civil Rights] in the early 1970s in effect experienced an internal capture shift. The black agenda activists who had dominated the office between 1965 and 1970 were joined and to some extend displaced by a new cadre of Latino activists. Not content with the transitional model of bilingual education, which used native-language instruction as a bridge to English language proficiency, the Latino nationalists called for Spanish-based cultural maintenance programs of indefinite duration. La Raza Unida’s 1967 founding statement captured the Chicano spirit of cultural nationalism and linguistic ethnocentrism: “The time of subjugation, exploitation, and abuse of human rights of La Raza in the United States is hereby ended forever,” the manifesto proclaimed. “[We] affirm the magnificence of La Raza, the greatness of our heritage, our history, our language, our traditions, our contributions to humanity and culture.”
Source: Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America
“Page 111: Workplace bullying directly affects one in six U.S. workers. It poses an occupational health hazard. Yet few targeted individuals complain. That is because existing laws either require harassment to be discriminatory or the standard of outrageous conduct is rarely met in the courts. Gender, race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sex, age, or sexual orientation define protected status groups. In order for mistreatment to be discriminatory and illegal, the Target must have “protected status” and the bully cannot be a member. But when the bully also is a member, as in woman-on-woman bullying (over 40 percent of all bullying reported in the Institute survey), the Target cannot file a lawsuit to force the employer to believe her or to punish the perpetrator. Research by the Institute and others shows that two-thirds of all harassment is “status-blind” and therefore legal.”
Source: The Bully at Work: What You Can Do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity on the Job
“Quoting page 144: Organized minority groups competing for official recognition were quick to punish government officials for treating their group less favorably than others. In 1978, when Congress in the Small Business Investment Act provided a statutory basis for the SBA’s 8(a) program, the law omitted Asian-Americans from the list of minorities (blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans) considered presumptively “socially and economically disadvantaged.” Responding to this omission, Asian-American groups hammered the SBA, which within a year reinstated them among the presumptively eligible groups. Yet there was something bizarre about awarding taxpayer-subsidized business grants and loans to members of the country’s top income strata on the grounds that all members of the groups were presumed to be socially disadvantaged.”
Source: Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America
“Quoting page 148: … the SBA [Small Business Administration] next, in 1982, considered a petition [for inclusion in the 8(a) program] on behalf of Asian Indians. SBA guidelines required petitioners to provide evidence of several factors, including “evidence of long-term prejudice and discrimination in American society suffered by an overwhelming majority” of the petitioning group, and evidence of “past and present effects of discriminatory practices” that together “have resulted and continue to result in substantial economic deprivation for an overwhelming majority” of the group, including “substantial impediments in the business world.” This would seem to be a tall order for Asian-Indian Americans. … In 1980, the percentage of college graduates and managers or professionals among Asian Indians was 52 and 49 percent, respectively, while for all Americans it was 16 and 23 percent. In 1989, Asian Indians had the highest median household income ($48,320 in 1989 dollars) of all immigrant groups in the country. … The SBA, avoiding socioeconomic data and comparisons, added India to the presumptively eligible list in February 1982.”
Source: Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America
“Quoting page 150-151: Political camouflage, needed by legislators eager to please civil rights and minority organizations while avoiding punishment by voters for supporting racial quotas, was provided by the bureaucratic obscurity of the government’s procurement process. Voters did not understand the complexities of government contracting and agency regulation. …
The weaknesses of minority set-asides were chiefly two. First, they were indubitably racial and ethnic quotas, and hence were politically controversial. As government benefits tied to ancestry, they violated the classic liberal creed that Americans possessed equal individual rights. … Nonminority contractors were barred by their ancestry or their skin color from even bidding on contracts paid for by taxpayer dollars, including their own.
Second, and less obviously, set-aside programs produced a common set of flaws in implementation. The most severe problem was the concentration of set-aside contracts on a few successful firms. Agency officials, needing to spend a large amount of money on minority procurement contractors every fiscal year, found very few minority contractors able to do the job. Four-fifths of all certified minority firms had no employees, their personnel roster consisting solely of the owner of the enterprise. As a consequence, agency set-aside contracts were typically concentrated on only a few firms large enough and sufficiently experienced to meet the terms of the contracts, providing constructing, street paving, computer services, military uniforms, or other goods and services. In 1990, for example, only fifty firms, representing less than 2 percent of the certified minority firms in the 8(a) program, accounted for 40 percent of the $4 billion awarded. … such firms never seemed to “graduate” from the set-aside program, weaned from the incubator and ready to compete in the normal marketplace of competitive government contracting. … Almost all the contracts were awarded on a no-bid or “sole source” basis; in fiscal 1991, for example, only 1.9 percent of the 4,576 contracts in the 8(a) program were awarded on a competitive basis.”
Source: Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America
“Wikipedia: The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy
The role of genetics in the black-white IQ gap has been particularly controversial. The question regarding this in the survey asked "Which of the following best characterizes your opinion of the heritability of black-white differences in IQ?" Amongst the 661 returned questionnaires, 14% declined to answer the question, 24% said that there was insufficient evidence to give an answer, 1% said that the gap was "due entirely to genetic variation", 15% voted that it was "due entirely to environmental variation" and 45% said that it was a "product of genetic and environmental variation". According to Snyderman and Rothman, this contrasts greatly with the coverage of these views as represented in the media, where the reader is led to draw the conclusion that "only a few maverick 'experts' support the view that genetic variation plays a significant role in individual or group difference, while the vast majority of experts believe that such differences are purely the result of environmental factors.”
Source: The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy
“What I really love about them... is the fact that they contain someone's personal history...I find myself wondering about their lives. I can never look at a garment... without thinking about the woman who owned it. How old was she? Did she work? Was she married? Was she happy?... I look at these exquisite shoes, and I imagine the woman who owned them rising out of them or kissing someone...I look at a little hat like this, I lift up the veil, and I try to imagine the face beneath it... When you buy a piece of vintage clothing you're not just buying the fabric and thread - you're buying a piece of someone's past.”
Source: A Vintage Affair
“Better to be called fool by the world and wise by God than wise by the world and fool by God.”
Source: Trains and Tulips