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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

The Great "Diversity" Fraud

The following has received enough attention, lately, that I won't even bother providing links:

"...Participation in such...activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. 'Being an officer or winning awards' for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, 'has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.' Excelling in these activities 'is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.'"

Gotta face it. The powers that be despise my people. They really, truly, despise my people.They spit on us, all day, every day, every chance they get. And then they congratulate themselves for their supposed love of "diversity" - because, from time to time, they deign to patronize a few carefully selected non-Asian minorities - largely at the expense of...

...my people.

Comments (38)

"...my people."

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print

"The Country Class"

My people as well.

… they deign to patronize a few carefully selected non-Asian minorities …
Why, Mr. Burton, do you feel the need to specify “non-Asian”?

Because, 27th, especially in California schools they don't particularly patronize Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, etc., students, because they believe they already have "enough" of those (if not "too many") and because those groups do well on standardized tests. Conservatives have been pointing out for decades the fact that many affirmative action programs penalize far-east Asians as well as whites.

"The following has received enough attention, lately, that I won't even bother providing links:"

Or you could have linked with about the same number of words.

Evaluating marginal cases on a tertiary factor will produce odd results. For example, do we know if 4H presidents are equally likely to be a marginal admission case? Perhaps they are already overrepresented in the accepted student population due to higher GPA and ACT scores.

Thanks

al: I guess it's no surprise that you were unaware of this, even though it's been all over the right hand side of the internet for days, now.

That's kinda sorta part of the problem here.

A quick google of "Espenshade and Radford" would have provided you with many hundreds of links.

M.Z., seriously: do you really think that's what's going on here? Are you just trolling?

DmL - yes, Codevilla's piece is quite interesting. In some ways, it resembles Mencius Moldbug's somewhat cheekier accounts of the same sociological phenomenon.

There's also some affinity with Sam Francis's 'Middle American Radicals' ("MARS") idea too.

Yes, I am serious. You are familiar enough with statistics that this shouldn't be too obtuse for you.

Yes, I am serious. You are familiar enough with statistics that this shouldn't be too obtuse for you.

I am sure the Princeton sociologists are more than familiar with statistics, too, M. Z.

The Chicken

Nietzsche is weeping over this.

The lack of WASPs on the Supreme Court has become easier to explain. No Byron White 2.0 for us.

In 1998 Pat Buchanan wrote that at Harvard College:

Hispanic and black enrollment has reached 7 percent and 8 percent, respectively, slightly less than the 10 percent and 12 percent of the U.S. population that is Hispanic and black.

Nearly 20 percent of the Harvard College student body was Asian-American, and 25 percent to 33 percent was Jewish, though Asian-Americans make up only 3 percent of the U.S. population and Jewish-Americans even less than 3 percent. Thus, 50 percent of Harvard’s student body is drawn from about 5 percent of the U.S. population!

When one adds foreign students, students from our tiny WASP elite and children of graduates, what emerges is a Harvard student body where non-Jewish whites — 75 percent of the U.S. population — get just 25 percent of the slots. Talk about underrepresentation! Now we know who really gets the shaft at Harvard — white Christians

That 25 percent of non-Jewish whites is split between Catholics, non-religious non-Jews, and Protestant whites. And some of the whites are "legacy" admissions. I'd like to see the present-day figures.

Harvard, of course, was founded as a Protestant divinity school. What effect might these cultural changes have on the content of leading Liberal Protestant theology?

OT:

Everytime I try to search your blog I get this error message:

"Error 500 - Internal server error

An internal server error has occured!
Please try again later."

Steve, besides W4 I usually stop by Cowen, Wilkinson, Volokh, and Sanchez. I don't read Douthat unless there is a link from somewhere as he is annoying (IMHO). Links are nice.

Anyway, there is likely a point here as this guy said in 2007,

"I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged." He added, "I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed."

The little guy with wings and a halo who sits on my right shoulder smiles at the discovery by conservatives that class matters and injustices exist based on those class distinctions. Perhaps it will dawn on them that these distinctions carry over into other areas e.g. taxes and abortion, etc. - or not.

(The little guy with horns and a tail who sits on my left shoulder whispered something into my ear about the irony of some of the offspring of lynchers suffering a marginal disadvantage relative to some of the offspring of lynchees, but we don't listen to him.)

"Gotta face it. The powers that be despise my people..."

A bit over wrought, no? This sort of emoting probably sounds ok in German but just sounds like playing the victim in English. "My people" is really a weird concept in a nation built on an idea. Since president Obama basically agrees with the point here and it does appear to be a case, why not try a less volkish way to make the point?

I take M.Z. to be referring to the possibility of double counting which seems entirely reasonable given the referent populations.

al, how'd the sanctimonious partisan jerk wind up with a halo? At least the guy who refers to "the offspring of lynchers" is honest about what he is.

Just found this interesting take over at MOJ,

"Douthat’s lack of evidence that the white Christian poor are uniquely disenfranchised raises the crucial question: why stretch to Christianize this point? Why not simply let the data speak for itself and talk about the struggles of the rural poor in America? Because that would ruin Douthat’s partisan objectives. If the struggles of the rural poor are a problem of poverty and the shortcomings of our meritocracy in dealing with issues of poverty, particular rural poverty, then the solution is plainly redistributive. Or, put another way, if the problems of the rural poor are framed in economic terms, rather than religious/cultural ones, then Douthat’s column — and the data it highlights — would raise the question of what either party has been doing for the rural poor. This would be a particularly interesting question to address in light of recent stories about rural counties tearing up paved roads because they can’t afford to maintain them at precisely the moment the Senate GOP is filibustering federal aid to state and local governments."
"But that conversation would be far too messy for Douthat, so, despite the pesky lack of evidence, he has to turn the story from one of class bias into one of religious bias in order to fit it within the tidy red-state, blue-state framework. Add the label “Christian” to the group being excluded, and, voila! class struggle becomes culture war. The enemy is not the elite, which resides in both parties (though we could have a nice discussion about which party’s policies better serve the rural poor). The enemy is the liberal, urban, secular elite out to keep you from finding Jesus (as a Republican congressional candidate from Missouri put it the other day). Pay no attention to the GOP agenda of tax cuts and deregulation, which will do nothing for the rural poor, white or black or brown. This is just pure hackery. I should have stuck to my normal policy of ignoring Douthat’s columns."

http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/07/douthats-tribalism.html#comments

Both parties reek in terms of their treatment of the middle class, so I'll let that one go. Re: the poor -- I'm no great fan of the GOP, generally speaking, but at least they don't endeavor to keep blacks on the dole as perpetual voting booth fodder. The last thing the Dems want is for the inner city poor to rise from poverty -- they'd lose too many votes.

As long as the poor are forever maneuvered into sucking on the tit of gummint, they can be counted on to always try and vote themselves a bigger tit. The Great Society and the war on poverty are huge shams.

This has nothing to do with poverty, alone. If it did, then Blacks or Hispanics at the same poverty level would be getting into elite private schools in only slightly larger numbers (to account for whatever biases there may have been in the past)than other populations. In the ideally representative "diverse" population, the percents of groups should mirror the surrounding country. They do not in the elite private schools. That there is bias is without question. That it is merely a problem of the poverty of rural Americans cannot be supported. That specific markers are being used as de-selectors and these markers show neither a lack of intelligence or socio-pathology, suggests that some aspects of the markers raise a flag for the colleges. What aspects could that be? Given the de-select of 4H and FFOA, it seems likely that agriculture, animals, or conservative values would be the attributes being se-selected. Given the addition of the ROTC, this eliminates all but the latter.

Simply put, the admission data looks pathological. Interestingly, this effect seems to go away for graduate students. In fact, there aren't enough English-speaking students, let alone WASPs or rural students to admit that departments can even find. Graduate departments don't care about diversity. They care about performance. Certainly, this should be about the only criteria that undergraduate departments should care about, also (for the most part). I, personally, am for a color-blind admissions policy to colleges. I think the training to bring all students equal and eliminate bias should be done earlier. It hasn't been. Public education (K - 12) is a political joke. The fact that quality cannot be the criteria for college admission is a simple testament to this fact. If all races could compete equally, perhaps any bias could be seen more clearly. College is not the place to make up the inequity.

The Chicken

al writes:

(The little guy with horns and a tail who sits on my left shoulder whispered something into my ear about the irony of some of the offspring of lynchers suffering a marginal disadvantage relative to some of the offspring of lynchees, but we don't listen to him.)

This from footnote 315 on page 92 of Jared Taylor's Paved with Good Intentions:

It has been all but forgotten that whites were lynched as well as blacks. Between the years 1882 and 1962, a total of 3,442 blacks and 1,294 whites were lynched. The last white was lynched in 1957, and the last black in 1961. From 1947 to 1961, blacks were lynched at a rate of fewer than one a year. Harry Ploski and James Williams, eds., The Negro Almanac, 4th ed. (Bronxville, N.Y.: Bellwether Publishing, 1983), p. 348.

Meanwhile:

According to the FBI's latest National Crime Victimization Survey, blacks were over 50 times more likely to commit a crime against whites than vice versa. There were over 14,000 black on white rapes and the number of white on black rapes was so small, it did not show up on FBI's statistical samples. That same year, the FBI did not report a single anti-black rape hate crime.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37697

Oh al? Paging al? Where is your righteous indignation directed at the mass cover up of the realities of violent crime in the US? When can we expect you to radically correct your narrative of oppression and exploitation in light of the truth? How do you know that victims of rape or children of victims are not being disadvantaged in favor of children of rapists? After all, the statistics clearly show that there are more rapists walking around than there ever were lynchers. Disgusting.

Given the de-select of 4H and FFOA, it seems likely that agriculture, animals, or conservative values would be the attributes being se-selected. Given the addition of the ROTC, this eliminates all but the latter.

I'm not convinced that the agriculture and veterinary sciences are related to the ROTC. In other words, these colleges don't "diversify" to include the majority of applicants with apparent interests in fields that the schools have little or no reputation for teaching. For the ROTC, I can only speculate, but I would guess that one factor is that there is an expectation that anyone sufficiently qualified for a top tier college is also likely to be admitted to one of the top military colleges. They shouldn't rely too much on that expectation, if that is what they are in fact doing, but it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable either.

Graduate departments don't care about diversity. They care about performance.

Chicken, would that it were so. You're a scientist, right? And a musician? Not in all fields, that's for sure.

One of my best college profs recognized how diversity ignored class problems in favor of a shallow racial/sexual potpourri. He was also an ethnic Pole from Chicago, which probably helped him arrive at that conclusion. That kind of ethnicity doesn't count anymore in gaining establishment patrons, if it ever did.

I am curious whose people Steve Burton says he belongs to. WASP? Scots-Irish? Old American? Just plain white?

The MOJ take is typical professorial defense of privilege and dismissal of white ethnic and cultural grievances. How dare Douthat cite his personal experience at Harvard and as an alumnus to claim that poor Christians are marginalized!

Douthat wrote a whole book on Harvard.

Douthat's also a pretty poor fiscal Republican. Wasn't his Grand New Party the apogee of big government conservatism? Hasn't he bucked some of the GOP tax cut fundamentalism, as his belief that abolishing Roe would require a temporary expansion of the welfare state?

The GOP isn't even much fighting back in the culture war, and many Republicans are in fact on the other side. It's amazing how some Catholic academics are in denial about what is going on in this country -- or maybe they're just on the other side, too.

"One of my best college profs recognized how diversity ignored class problems..."

No, "diversity" was, in effect, an attempt to deal with some class problems which wound up ignoring others due to problems inherent in any mode of analysis that under weights class. Those pushing a right analysis of the issue under discussion might try to explain how inserting religious and volkish memes doesn't merely continue this analytical deficiency.

Those of us employing a left analysis to these matters understand well that we should always be open to correcting injustice and perfecting the union.

Also we should not lose sight of the fact that affirmative action couldn't take from lower class whites that which they didn't have in the first place. It did result in some injustices being ignored. That is more an argument for viewing these matters as issues of class, i.e. an affirmation of a left viewpoint, then anything else.

Absent more information perhaps we should consider 4H and FFA as placeholders for rural and lower to lower middle class. Junior ROTC also possibly has those elements. Here are the rough school stats for Army Junior ROTC:

2nd Brigade
(CT, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT, Germany, Italy)
Schools = 110

3rd Brigade
(IA, IL, KS, MN, MO, ND, NE, SD, WI)
Schools= 116

4th Brigade
(DC, DE, MD, NC, SC, VA, WV)
Schools = 315

5th Brigade
(AR, AZ, CO, NM, OK, TX, UT, WY)
Schools = 306

6th Brigade
(AL, FL, GA, LA, MS, PR, VI)
Schools = 451

7th Brigade
(IN, KY, MI, OH, TN)
Schools = 214

8th Brigade
(AK, AS, CA, GU, HI, ID, MP, MT, NV, OR, WA, Korea, Japan)
Schools = 163

Steve, just to elaborate a bit, the reason why I don't regularly frequent conservative blogs and columns, as opposed to liberal and libertarian ones, is clearly demonstrated by the current blowup over Shirley Sherrod. There is simply too much deliberate misinformation, disregard for the truth, and an almost total lack of journalistic and intellectual rigor with news sources on the right.

Al, a number of major right-wing sites were already defending Sherrod and saying she got railroaded while the NAACP was still (for the second time in ten days) going off half-cocked to smear innocent people.

al, you're now going to attribute to the left the very analysis that conservatives and libertarians have been making with regards to affirmative action for over a decade? Awfully convenient little tautology you've got going there--any analysis which involves class is automatically a "left" analysis, even if the left has been steadfastly opposing it--and, indeed, calling the people who actually were using it racists--the entire time.

The first time I heard the argument that affirmative action was unjust because it essentially targeted for discrimination people whose only sin was to be the offspring of lynchers (to use a language with which you might be familiar), was back in 1985 or so. The right has used it ever since, and have been smeared as disingenuous racists ever since. I suggest you read the arguments and study the actors involved in Connerly's Civil Rights Initiatives.

And incidentally, I have personally known a poor--and I do mean desperately poor--white Oklahoma girl who was told to her face by a black admissions officer, "Of course you can't get no help. You're white--isn't that enough?" That response is the real "left analysis" that's been going on in America for the last two generations, including in your own head, Mr. Offspring of Lynchers. So don't pretend now that the civil libertarian view of the matter is more faithfully leftist, in any real way, than conservative. And don't pretend that the "little men sitting on your shoulders" are anyone other than your very self, or that their words are not your own thoughts.

And Paul they are largely doing what you are which is attempting to make this about the NAACP and the Administration while conveniently ignoring the role of Brietbart and Fox News (O'Reilley, Hannity, F&Friends) where it got started.

In the past I have often pointed out on this blog that the right/Republicans are too often evil and mendacious in dealing with facts and that the left/Democrats are too often cowardly and reactive in confronting that evil and mendacity. That is what happened here. Brietbart posted an edited video without any attempt to vet it and several Fox venues pushed it until it became obvious it was a lie. Shepard Smith refused to run it on his program because he has journalistic ethics, the rest of Fox, not so much. Hopefully the Dems stop shaking in fear every time some wing nut tells a new lie.

Sage, identity politics have been criticized on the left since at least the 1960s, when they began seriously poisoning liberalism. Your point would have more force if Douthat and Steve hadn't gone straight to the culture wars with the "Christian" and "my people" cards which are the right version of identity politics.

1985? Pshaw! We had this down in 1848; "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".

"the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".

Hyperbolize much?

Al, I don't have cable and wouldn't watch news channels if I did, so I'll have to just go on your report that Fox pushed this so stridently it made the administration, just left them no other choice but to call this woman and fire her on the spot while she drove across Georgia.

I guess that, furthermore, all this excuses the NAACP for its own shockingly strident first statement on the matter. Meanwhile, I suppose you will ask me to believe that the previous strident statement by said organization, concerning the Tea Party, was surely done with great care and investigation and personal interview, hmm?

I note that on the very same day this story really blew up, we had the revelation from that Left-wing email list (which included as participants a ton of regular old journalists, not commentators) that "just call them racists!" is a ready and unapologetic rhetorical weapon reached for by the oh-so-virtuous Left.

Spare me your morality tale.

If everyone learned a lesson from this about imputing malice and ill-intent based on the barest scraps of evidence, it would be a good thing. Somehow I doubt it will happen.

"In the past I have often pointed out on this blog that the right/Republicans are too often evil and mendacious in dealing with facts and that the left/Democrats are too often cowardly and reactive in confronting that evil and mendacity."

If any thing the opposite is true. Especially when you consider that the mainstream media is the Left's willing ally, and hardly questions the Dems talking points at all. Remember little stories about how conservatives wanted to end school lunches for poor kids, take away social security, raise the retirement age to 70, etc., etc., ad nauseam? This goes on daily.

The entire MSM equates to the Left's Fox (which, btw, I don't watch--far too much neocon influence.)

BTW, I hope we'll get a post on this from someone:

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/541131/201007211841/The-Tax-Tsunami-On-The-Horizon.aspx

This is where redistributionist tax policy leads -- to all of us getting hosed.

al,

Sometimes the Left is just plain paranoid:

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/07/21/shep-smith-on-sherrod-obama-sure-does-pay-close-attention-to-fox-news-huh/

Also, I noticed that Robert George writes for the Mirror of Justice blog, which is a shame because his fellow blogger is a goof and a fool.

"Also, I noticed that Robert George writes for the Mirror of Justice blog, which is a shame because his fellow blogger is a goof and a fool."

Jeff, MOJ is a Catholic legal blog that encompasses a range of views in a usually civilized discussion. There are other conservatives (e.g.Rick Garnett) as well as liberals. Most are academics, none, so far as i can tell can be fairly characterized as goofs and fools.

And while are here, i would point out that your reaction to an honest difference of opinion is telling. There are possibilities that go beyond the "friend/enemy" distinctions so beloved by too many on the right. I may characterize some on the right like Andrew Breitbart as sociopathic and racist (because they obviously are) but the fact that I merely disagree with folks like George and Garnett and they are on the right and I am on the left doesn't allow me to insult them. One may disagree with Prof. Penalver's take on the matter but there is nothing there that allows one to fairly characterize him as a goof or fool.

To determine if admission policies are really fair, one must know what percentage of qualified applicants from each "bean" pool is accepted by the "elite" universities. Assuming the admission criteria is the same, and the percentage of accepted applicants for each group is reasonably similar, the fact that WASPs are so underrepresented at Ivy League colleges may be because qualified WASP's (especially of the Southern variety) do not apply to Ivy League schools to the same extent that other beans do. For one thing, most Southerners don't blindly worship the Ivy League the way North Easterners do, and many of us regard it as the Devil's training ground. I, for one, would no more send my child to be indoctrinated by Ivy League left-wingers than I would hand them over to a Muslim or Jewish academy. It would be like sending lambs unto wolves. Conservative youth, far from home and immersed in a hostile social milieu, will almost inevitably convert to the enemy's camp just to survive psychologically, a la the Stockholm syndrome. One need only look at Hillary Clinton to see what happens when the left-wing "elite" gets hold of an impressionable, eager-to-please young conservative. No thanks! I can't stop my kids from applying to these intellectually and morally corrupt institutions, but they'll have to get somebody besides me to fund their indoctrination once they are accepted.

Paul, you may be interested in this as Klein started Journolist,

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/07/first_time_as_tragedy_second_t_1.html

As this information is educational so this site has been added to my RSS feed for later browsing.
[ run a marathon in under 4 hours ]

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