“Race and College Admissions, Facing a New Test by Justices”

Sounds like this case will soon join the ranks of other landmark and highly controversial cases like Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), Hopwood v. University of Texas Law School (1996), & Grutter v. Bollinger (2003)… Hopefully someday everyone will acknowledge how systemic the legacy of white supremacy and privilege is in this country. 

Taken from: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/us/supreme-court-to-hear-case-on-affirmative-action.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&

October 8, 2012

Abigail Fisher is a slight young woman with strawberry blond hair, a smile that needs little prompting, a determined manner and a good academic record. She played soccer in high school, and she is an accomplished cellist.

But the university she had her heart set on, the one her father and sister had attended, rejected her. “I was devastated,” she said, in her first news interview since she was turned down by the University of Texas at Austin four years ago.

Ms. Fisher, 22, who is white and recently graduated from Louisiana State University, says that her race was held against her, and the Supreme Court is to hear her case on Wednesday, bringing new attention to the combustible issue of the constitutionality of racial preferences in admissions decisions by public universities. “I’m hoping,” she said, “that they’ll completely take race out of the issue in terms of admissions and that everyone will be able to get into any school that they want no matter what race they are but solely based on their merit and if they work hard for it.”

The university said Ms. Fisher would not have been admitted even if race had played no role in the process, and it questioned whether she has suffered the sort of injury that gives her standing to sue. But the university’s larger defense is that it must be free to assemble a varied student body as part of its academic and societal mission. The Supreme Court endorsed that view by a 5-to-4 vote in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger.

University officials said that the school’s affirmative action program was needed to build a student body diverse enough to include minority students with a broad range of backgrounds and for the campus to have a “critical mass” of minority students in most classrooms. Interaction among students in class and around campus, said Kedra Ishop, the university’s director of admissions, helps students overcome biases and make contributions to a diverse society. “The role of U.T. Austin,” Dr. Ishop said, “is to provide leadership to the state.”

The majority opinion in the Grutter case, written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, rejected the use of racial quotas in admissions decisions but said that race could be used as one factor among many, as part of a “holistic review.” Justice O’Connor retired in 2006, and her replacement by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. may open the way for a ruling cutting back on such race-conscious admissions policies, or eliminating them.

Admissions officers at colleges and universities almost universally endorse the idea that students from diverse backgrounds learn from each other, overcome stereotypes, and in so doing prepare themselves for leadership positions in society. Many critics of affirmative action say that there is at best a weak correlation between race and having a range of views presented in the classroom.

Others say the Constitution does not permit the government to sort people by race, no matter how worthy its goal. “While racial diversity on college campuses is beneficial, it cannot be attained by racial discrimination,” said Edward Blum, an adviser to Ms. Fisher and a driving force behind the Fisher case.

The competing arguments are hard to test, but a recent visit to a freshman seminar at the University of Texas at Austin suggested that the intellectual life of undergraduates there is varied and vibrant.

The course was called Debates on Democracy in America, and the topic that day was “The Known World,” Edward P. Jones’s novel about a black slave owner. It was only the third week of class, but the 18 students, of all sorts of ethnicities and backgrounds, talked easily and earnestly about contemporary echoes of slavery. An Asian student mentioned cheap labor in China. A Hispanic one talked about the ways employers in the United States take advantage of illegal immigrants.

Other comments ran counter to possible stereotypes. D’wahn Kelley, a black student, said he hesitated to condemn the slave owner in the novel too harshly. “You’re judged on what you know, not what you don’t know,” he said, referring to the limits of the character’s moral imagination. “If you wanted to be successful, you had a right to own slaves.”

In response, Ashley Vasquez, a Hispanic student, said the she rejected “the whole idea that you have to learn right and wrong.” “It’s hard for me to think,” she said, “that you can go about your day thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to own a human being.’ ”

Three-quarters of applicants from Texas are admitted under a program that guarantees admission to the top students in every high school in the state. (Almost everyone calls this the Top Ten program, though the percentage cutoff can vary. Ms. Fisher barely missed the cutoff.) The remaining Texas students and those from elsewhere are considered under standards that take account of academic achievement and other factors, including race and ethnicity. The Top Ten program has produced substantial racial and ethnic diversity. In the fall of last year, freshmen who enrolled under the program were 26 percent Hispanic and 6 percent black. Texas is 38 percent Hispanic and 12 percent black.

The practical question in Austin is what eliminating the additional race-conscious admissions program would mean for seminars like the one on democracy, for lecture classes and for interactions in cafeterias and dormitories.

The university said the Top Ten program was a blunt instrument and that classes in many subjects have few or no minority students. It adds that the diversity generated by the Top Ten program is “mostly a product of the fact that Texas high schools remain highly segregated in regions of the state,” which “limits the diversity that can be achieved within racial groups.”

Among the kind of student excluded by the Top Ten program, the university said is “the African-American or Hispanic child of successful professionals in Dallas who has strong SAT scores and has demonstrated leadership ability in extracurricular activities but falls in the second decile of his or her high school class (or attends an elite private school that does not rank).”

Ms. Fisher’s lawyers called that “a newly minted interest in elitism dressed up as ‘intra-racial’ diversity.” They added that the university is making the unseemly pitch for “its preferred kind of minorities” at the expense of white students like Ms. Fisher with similar qualifications.

Talking in the hallway after the seminar, Joao Eloy, who was admitted outside the Top Ten program, said he had mixed feelings about the university’s approach. “My only concern is if diversity becomes a priority above merit,” he said, adding that he was wary of any system that “punishes Asians and poor whites, to name a few.” But Mr. Eloy, who said his heritage was Brazilian (making him Latino but not Hispanic, he said), said classrooms were enriched by a mix of voices. “The different perspectives help a lot,” he said. “It makes it really interesting.”

Nosa Aimuyo, whose parents are Nigerian immigrants and who was also admitted outside the Top Ten program, said race-conscious admissions were needed to address “disparities in opportunity between high schools, which disproportionately affect minorities.”

In an interview in his office in Austin, William C. Powers Jr, the university’s president, said the attributes that the university seeks have many dimensions. “We want diversity in terms of economic background, first generation, geography, inner city, suburban middle class,” he said. Asked what he would say to Ms. Fisher, whose own background is middle class, about her disappointment at being rejected, Mr. Powers paused for a moment. “We look at everyone’s holistic characteristics,” he said.

Last month, Ms. Fisher spent a morning chatting with a reporter at a private club in Washington and then took an impromptu tour of the Supreme Court, where the grandeur of the surroundings seemed to bring home to her the gravity of the question she had presented to the justices. She is working in Austin, where she had wanted to be in the first place, as a financial analyst. She said her college years at Louisiana State had been fine and that she had enjoyed the camaraderie of the bowling team. But she added that she had lost a benefit that her state’s government had decided to distribute on a basis other than merit. “The only thing I missed out on was my post-graduation years,” she said. “Just being in a network of U.T. graduates would have been a really nice thing to be in. And I probably would have gotten a better job offer had I gone to U.T.” She said she was trying to come to terms with her role in a case that could reshape American higher education. Asked if she found it interesting or exciting or scary, she said, “All of the above.” But she did not hesitate to say how she would run an admission system. “I don’t think,” she said, “that we even need to have a race box on the application.”

“Gunman Kills 4 at a Jewish School in France”

Taken from: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/world/europe/gunman-kills-3-at-a-jewish-school-in-france.html?_r=1&hp

March 19, 2012

A man opened fire outside a Jewish school in southwest France on Monday morning, killing four people, three of them children, and wounding another, officials said. It was the third killing of unarmed people in the region in little over a week, and the police said the same gun was used in all three attacks.

Witnesses said that a man fled the scene in Toulouse on a motorbike. Last week, a man on a motorbike killed three French paratroopers and critically wounded another in two separate shootings, police officials said. The soldiers were all Arab or black, but were paratroopers from a unit that fought in Afghanistan. According to the police, the gunman initially used a 9-millimeter weapon, but it jammed, so he switched to a .45-caliber gun as he went into the school. The .45-caliber weapon was the one the police said was used to shoot the paratroopers last week.

There has been no claim of responsibility for any of the murders, which the French police are treating as acts of terrorism.

Michel Valet, the local prosecutor, said a rabbi, his two children and another child were killed in the attack and a 17-year-old boy was seriously wounded. The killer “shot at everything he could see, children and adults, and some children were chased into the school,” Mr. Valet said.

The attack is the worst on Jews in France since 1982, when the Chez Jo Goldenberg restaurant in Paris was bombed at lunchtime, killing six people and wounding 22. In 1980, a terrorist group threw a bomb at a Jewish synagogue on Rue Copernic in Paris, killing four people and wounding about 40.

Monday’s shooting brought a climate of fear to the region, with the French state ordering increased surveillance of all religious schools. It also brought immediate condemnations from President Nicolas Sarkozy and from his main rival for the French presidency, François Hollande, both of whom broke off their political campaigns to rush to the scene.

Uniformed police officers were seen leading away stunned survivors after the early morning attack. Other officers set up barricades and sealed off the entrance to the school, located behind high white walls with security cameras at the entrance.

Mr. Sarkozy arrived in Toulouse late Monday morning with officials and Jewish leaders. He called the shooting a “national tragedy” and ordered a minute’s silence to be observed across France on Tuesday at 11 a.m.

The Israeli press identified Monday’s victims as Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and two of his sons, Arye, 6, and Gabriel, 3. The fourth person killed was Miriam Monsonego, 8, who is the daughter of the school principal, Yaacov Monsonego. Rabbi Sandler came to Toulouse from Jerusalem with his family last September to teach religious studies at the school. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said the rabbi was a French citizen but that his wife was Israeli and that their children had dual nationality.

Another student, 17, a boy, was said to be wounded and in critical condition at a local hospital.

The French minister of the interior, Claude Guéant, said he was “submerged with emotion” over this “act of anti-Semitism” and ordered the police to intensify security around Jewish schools, according to a press spokesman. France has some 300 Jewish schools, news reports said.

Later, Prime Minister François Fillon was quoted as saying the enhanced security measures would be broadened to include all schools and religious buildings.

The Interior Ministry spokesman, Pierre-Henry Brandet, said the shootings occurred outside the Jewish school Ozar Hatorah. Ozar Hatorah is a Jewish society promoting religious education among young people, especially in the Middle East, northern Africa and among the Sephardic Jewish community in France, which has the largest number of Jews in Europe, estimated to be at least 550,000. A promotional video posted in 2010 showed students engaged in academic and religious studies.

The authorities have been hunting for the gunman who killed the soldiers since last week, and the military has told soldiers not to wear their uniforms in public.

The wave of killings has stunned France, prompting tense speculation about its cause. Even before the shooting on Monday, there was discussion about a possible racial or ethnic component to the attacks. “There is a common point to all the victims of this dark series of cold-blooded murders: they are all related to communities,” including both Muslims and Jews, wrote Pierre Haski in a posting Monday on the Rue89 news Web site. “Whether they wore the uniform of the French Army or were children, their ‘difference’ made them targets.”

Speculation over the motives for the killings ranged from anger at Muslims fighting in Afghanistan and anti-Semitism to a hatred of immigrants.

Condemnation of the killings was general. In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel condemned the “despicable murder of Jews, including small children,” as “a savage crime.” Speaking to his Likud party, he said: “It is too early to determine exactly what the background to the murderous act was, but we certainly cannot rule out the option that it was motivated by violent and murderous anti-Semitism.”

“Racial tensions high in Riverside after slaying of ROTC student”

Taken from: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/03/riverside-police-seek-publics-help-in-shooting-death-of-rotc-high-school-student.html

March 5, 2012

Relatives of a Riverside high school freshman who was shot and killed near his grandmother’s house pleaded on Monday for the public’s help to solve the seemingly random murder.

Lareanz Simmons, 14, was killed on the evening of Feb. 23 by a young Latino gunman who stepped out of a car, walked up to him and opened fire. The shooting breaks years of relative calm in an area of Riverside that has a history of violent clashes between rival black and Latino gangs.

Racial tensions have escalated sharply since the shooting occurred in Riverside’s eastside neighborhood, where police have responded to an apparent uptick in shootings and confiscated an increasing number of firearms being stockpiled by parolees and crime suspects, authorities said.

Investigators said Simmons, who was African American, was a good student and had no gang ties. The freshman was a member of the Junior ROTC program at Riverside’s Poly High School, and had dreams of joining the military or becoming a police officer, said his grandmother Bernice Hobdy. ”Whoever did this, they don’t know what they’ve done. They’ve hurt the whole family. You can’t describe the pain,” Hobdy said. “It could happen to you. It could happen to your son. Whoever did this, I don’t know how you just could just jump out of a car and shoot someone that you don’t even know, that’s never hurt anyone.”

Riverside Police Chief Sergio Diaz during a Monday morning press conference asked for the public’s help to identify the suspects in the shooting, saying there was a $50,000 reward for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of the killer.

Diaz said the department’s gang unit, patrol officers and SWAT team have saturated the neighborhood, searching the homes of parolees and interviewing known gang members. Solving the murder is a priority not only because Simmons’ family deserves justice, Diaz said, but also to calm the rising tensions in the neighborhood.  ”We don’t know why Lareanz was killed,” Diaz said. “As long as we don’t know, and the community doesn’t know, there are a lot of community tensions out there … We are seeing what appears to be an increasing number of suspects carrying weapons and stockpiling weapons and ammunitions in their homes.”

Woodie Rucker-Hughes, head of the local NAACP chapter, said violence and gang activity in Riverside’s eastside neighborhood had been on the decline in the past few years, with black and Latino community leaders working together to address any lingering racial animosities. ”It had reached a point where there was a calm, which we enjoyed. But we were always cognizant that there would be some out there -– I call them knuckleheads –- who wanted to keep a schism between black and brown,” Rucker-Hughes said. “It’s tense now. There are more shootings in the neighborhood. Something is brewing.”

Simmons was shot as he was walking down Georgia Street to his grandmother’s house around dusk, heading back home after borrowing a video game from a friend. When he was about a half-block away, a midsized tan, gray or bronze car drove up beside him and the suspect jumped out of a passenger-side door. He walked up to Simmons, who witnesses said backed away from the assailant, raised a handgun and fired five or six shoots, police said.

Simmons managed to stagger back to his grandmother’s driveway, where he collapsed. He remained on life support for several days before he died.

Det. Ron Sanfilippo said investigators are pursuing several leads in the case but at this point have no suspects. Detectives are trying to determine if the shooting may have been related to a gang initiation or retaliation for another incident, but all the evidence gathered thus far indicates that Simmons was a random target, he said. ”We know somebody knows who did this. They just need to come forward and let the police know and get this person off the street,” said Sanfilippo. “A shooter like that who takes out a 14-year-old who is not involved in gangs is more of a coward than anything else.”

Police are urging anyone with information to contact the police at (951) 353-7105 or, for those who wish to remain anonymous, to contact the We Tip hotline at (800) 782-7463.

“Why Microsoft’s So-Called ‘Avoid Ghetto’ App Is Really American”

Taken from: http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/01/why_microsofts_so-called_avoid_ghetto_app_is_really_american.html

January 31, 2012

Microsoft has recently been at the center of a whirlwind of controversy over a new app that critics allege is downright racist. On January 3, the company was granted a patent for technology related to its “Pedestrian Route Production” application, a tool that that the company says would navigate the user “safely through neighborhoods with violent crime statistics below a certain threshold.”

While the patent makes no explicit references to race, the project has been unofficially dubbed the “Avoid Ghetto App” by various online news sites. Microsoft, for its part, has been silent throughout the ordeal, and declined to comment on the matter to Colorlines.com. But intentions aside, the fact that the app was so quickly racialized begs the larger question of how and why technology perpetuates systemic racism, and why consumers should care.

“Almost the moment this patent got granted, [this app] got racialized so that ‘violent crime’ became ‘mugging’, which became ‘black and Latino people’, which became ‘ghetto,’ ” says Sarah Chinn, a professor of English at the City University of New York and author of the book “Technology and the Logic of American Racism.” Chinn has been among Microsoft’s most vocal critics.

Microsoft’s app has stirred so much discussion, Chinn says, because the United States is a “very racist country. When you say the words ‘violent crime’, in the public imagination that turns into ‘dangerous urban black man or Latino man.’ “

Others disagree. Industry analyst Rob Enderline told NPR last week that Microsoft’s project is just a matter of technology trying to make life easier for users. “It’s part of an overall effort to make navigation systems more intelligent so they keep you out of danger, whether you’re driving or you’re on foot,” Enderle told NPR.

Yet even if that’s the case, it’s based on the widely held misconception that violent crime is more likely to hit random strangers. In fact, the opposite is true. The vast majority of violent crime happens to people who know each other. For instance, 75 percent of rapes are committed by someone the survivor already knows, according to statistics provided by San Francisco Women Against Rape. The majority of murders are committed by members of ones own racial group. Missouri has the nation’s highest black homicide rate, and when the Violent Prevention Center looked at statistics from 2009, it found that—whenever the relationship could be identified—76 percent of black murder victims were killed by someone they knew.

In Washington, D.C. and New York City, robberies are on the decline.

Huffington Post’s Black Voices points out that the FBI’s 2010 crime report revealed that whites were arrested more often for violent crimes that year than any other race. But, according to Chinn, the myth that black men in particular are more likely to perpetrate violent crime against white strangers resonates so strongly because it’s become an indelible part of America’s racial identity.

“This is a myth that’s been with us since the days of Reconstruction,” Chinn told Colorlines.com, calling the period an era of “terrorism against black people.” Chinn noted that whites unconsciously knew that they were the perpetrators of violence against black people, particularly sexual violence against black women. Thus the myth of dangerous black men evolved as way to justify racist violence against black communities. The logic, Chinn says, was “you’re violent so we have to criminalize you, we have to put you in jail, we have to stop-and-frisk you, and we have to move out of your neighborhoods.”

Microsoft’s new technology is just the latest in a series of scientific parallels with the past.

The problem isn’t the technology itself, but what people imagine the technology will do. So while DNA and finger printing may on the surface be seemingly race-neutral technologies that only offer specific information about someone’s body, they’re quickly used to reinforce people’s preconceived ideas about race. “Once they enter the public discourse in the United States it’s all about how can we identify [people of color] and prove that they are not as good as white people, or prove that segregation is justified,” says Chinn.

Chinn does not expect that Microsoft will market the app as it is now, but will fold it into its next generation of mapping technology. ”It’s really about why we should be afraid of certain neighborhoods and certain kinds of people. People take these technologies and they use them to ‘prove’ things that they actually already believe about people of various racialized groups.”

“Perceptions of discrimination a black and white story”

Taken from: http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/12/perceptions-of-discrimination-a-black-and-white-story/?hpt=us_bn1

December 12, 2011

(CNN) - A study that examines three years of opinion survey data says that black and white Americans are still miles apart regarding their perceptions of equality or inequality among blacks and whites. It identifies racial bias among whites as a potential reason for that difference in perception.

“Post-Racial? Americans and Race in the Age of Obama,” released Monday by the nonprofit Greenlining Institute, found a link between white survey respondents’ perception of blacks and whether they believed discrimination to be a major problem in today’s society.

When asked how much discrimination currently exists in America, 56.4% of black respondents said there was “a lot.” Among Latinos, 26.9% gave that answer. About the same amount – 26% – of respondents who reported their race as “other” said that. But only 16% of white respondents said they thought “a lot” of discrimination existed in today’s America. The majority of white respondents said there was either “some” (44.4%) or “a little” (39.5%) discrimination.

White people who said there was “some” or “a little” discrimination were more likely to agree with statements such as “Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors,” and, “It’s really just a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.”

The Greenlining Institute study analyzed data from the American National Election Panel Survey (ANES) conducted by the University of Michigan and Stanford University, as well as census data. The ANES researchers spoke with a representative sample of about 1,800 Americans on 12 occasions between January 2008 and July 2010. Greenlining is a nonprofit policy and leadership institute whose stated goal is to work for economic and racial equality. ”Americans are diversifying and if we want to keep ahead and keep America going forward, we have to acknowledge these disparities. If we don’t, it makes it hard to tackle them,” said Dr. Daniel Byrd, the Greenlining Institute’s research director and the study’s primary author.

Tim Wise is anti-racist essayist and activist whose work often deals with white responses to racism.  He says that white disbelief in black claims of discrimination is nothing new – and that white people need to take a closer look at why so many people of color believe they are subject to prejudice.

“I think they need to reflect on why there’s such a division,” said Wise, who is white. “There’s only two ways you can interpret it: You can either interpret that [black people] are insane and borderline neurotic, that they don’t know their own life; or you could look at it and say maybe black people do know their own life, and maybe it’s worth listening to them about it.”

Among the study’s other findings:

• Although 62% of white people questioned in the survey believed that blacks’  level of health was about the same as their own, only 43.8% of blacks agreed. But according to statistical data from the National Center for Health Statistics and the Office of Minority Health, there are definite disparities in health and health care.  As of 2007, white life expectancy at birth was 4.8 years higher than for blacks.  The infant mortality rate among black women was almost two and a half times higher than for white women. The asthma rate among black children is double that of white children.
• More than two-thirds of black people surveyed (67%) believed that black people in general make less money than whites. But the majority of whites (59%) believed that they made about the same. According to U.S. Department of Labor statistics, blacks’ median weekly earnings were as much as $500 less than the median earnings of whites between 2009 and 2011.
• Another question asked who the U.S. government treated better: blacks or whites. Twenty-eight percent of whites believed that blacks were treated better, and 63% thought the races were treated about equally. But only 1 percent of blacks thought they were treated better, and most blacks believed that whites either received better treatment  (56.4%) or were treated about the same by the federal government (42.5%).

Why is there such a gap between how much discrimination is reported by blacks versus how much is believed to exist by whites? Wise says that the reason why whites don’t know or don’t acknowledge the racism or discrimination experienced by blacks and other people of color is because they don’t have to know or acknowledge it.

“No matter what I want to do with my life, to demonstrate that I know the reality of people of color is not going to be on the test,” Wise said. “But for people of color to get a job, any job, they’re going to have to know the things that white folks in those fields think are valuable pieces of information. People of color have to know white knowledge, white wisdom, and what their experience is, but white people don’t have to know the experiences of people of color.”

“Civil Rights Groups Claim Racial Discrimination At University Of New Mexico”

Taken from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/23/civil-rights-groups-claim_n_1109308.html

November 23, 2011

Black faculty, students and employees at the University of New Mexico are speaking out about alleged unfair treatment some say has been going on for years. The Albuquerque NAACP chapter and a group of African American pastors have filed a complaint with the Justice Department and the Federal Department of Education, claiming that black employees at the university and its hospital are subject to racial discrimination, KOB.com reports. ”We’re finally bringing it to light,” NAACP chapter president, Darnell Smith told the news network. “It’s been going on for years.”

The complaint asserts that University of New Mexico exhibits “rampant discrimination” and has “created a culture of discrimination and a racially hostile environment,” by failing to promote black employees to administrative positions and salary disparities between black staff and their peers. According to The New York Times, the groups also allege that 80 percent of black doctors who left the university’s medical school did so because of these conditions and “adverse employment action.”

Bishop David Cooper, senior pastor at New Hope Full Gospel Baptist Church and head of the black clergy organization, said he approached the university several times with various concerns on behalf of educators and employees with no action from the administration. ”We basically got to a place where we felt the administration was not willing to even consider making changes,” he told The New York Times. “Even though they themselves conceded there were disparities.”

As of last year, only 2.4 percent of students at the University of New Mexico are black, and fewer than 20 of black faculty members are tenured. This, however, is not out of the ordinary for many colleges. According to the most recent 2007 U.S. Department of Education only 5.4 percent of full-time faculty members in the nation’s university and colleges were African American, less than one half the black student enrollment figure.

Nevertheless, the university released a statement adamantly denying the claims issued in the complaint.

We do not discriminate against African Americans. We do not discriminate against any individual or group based on race, religion, sexual orientation, age, gender or ability. The university has very clear policies in place which prohibit discrimination and we train our employees to comply with the law and our policies.