Calpundit has a couple of excellent posts about Jayson Blair, the black New York Times reporter who was caught making up stories and plagerizing. Many folks, both in the media and in the blogosphere, have siezed on this story as a cautionary tale about affirmative action, or diversity, or hiring black folks, or whatever. From Calpundit:
In just the last few weeks, in addition to the Blair meltdown, the LA Times has fired a photographer for digitally enhancing a photograph, two reporters at the Salt Lake City Tribune have been fired for selling made-up rumors to the National Enquirer, and disgraced liar Stephen Glass released his autobiographical novel about his exploits at the New Republic.
Quick, what color were the skins of these reporters?
What’s that, you don’t know? But hasn’t every story about them mentioned it? And run a picture of them? No? That’s odd.
You should also read Kevin’s very practical follow-up.
Atrios, in a post succinctly entitled “Bigots,” writes: “The difference it seems, is that the white people get promoted.”.
Good grief! Some of us need to remind people like this that British “intelligence” plagiarized prior to the war on Iraq and that much of the evidence Powell presented to the UN was shaky fabrications at best. Stuff like this drives me crazy!
When I first wrote my post about Blair, I was unaware of his race. In the course of chasing details, I discovered he was African American, and decided that, in this particular context, it was not relevant: any journalist who repeatedly advances a plausible lie in a venue where it is likely to be taken as truth deserves severe criticism. The political analogies I drew to Blair’s actions were all acts perpetrated by white people, and they are all equally deplorable.
Look… every blogger, every citizen with a grain of involvement in our political process, depends on the accuracy of the NYT… not on its editorial spin, not on any alleged partisan affiliation, not even on its good intentions… but on the accuracy of its news stories. Is Blair being treated more harshly than comparable white offenders? Possibly; it’s a legitimate issue. But if that is so, it nonetheless in no way exonerates Blair for what I perceive as a deep dereliction of journalistic duty: perhaps the white journalists and photographers named by Kevin should be treated more harshly.
And if Blair doesn’t have a book out in the next year, if not less, he’s less enterprising than I think he is.
Your comment ID info seems not to be “sticky” anymore. I’m hoping this second comment fixes matters.
I haven’t seen anyone try to give Blair a pass for what he’s done. What I’ve seen is people try to make or deny a necessary connection between his personal malfeasance and affirmative action programs in general.
The Times hasn’t been accurate since Whitewater. Sadly.
Yes, but that doesn’t count – to conservatives.
Or rather, it counts as Higher Truth.
This case shows the immorality of affirmative action policies; truth was sacrificed in order to meet a racial quota. A society that places racial proportions above merit and truth, will have continually less merit and less truth. It is also unethical that aggression is used to enforce these anti-merit racial policies. Therefore, let us be anti-affirmative action and anti-quota. Further the promotion of racial and ethnic rivalry and hostility is likely to cause evil results.
[snicker] I wonder if John S. thinks that we can blame the disaster in Iraq on affirmative action, too. [nudge] Rice. [wink wink] Powell. What’s that, John S. ? You say that’s different ??
[snort] Of course it is, My Dear. Now go crawl back into your cave like a good little Neanderthal and snuggle up with your copy of The Bell Curve. Somewhere in the world, it’s always dark enough to live your whole life fast asleep, as they say…
I am not a big fan of most affirmative action programs. (Although, I must say, I’m not sure quite *what* to do about the very real problem of unequal access to education.)
Despite my reservations about AA, I hardly think Jayson Blair provides any evidence against it.
When only white men worked as reporters, these transgressions were committed only by white men. Now, we sometimes see other people commit them. Duh!
What the Jayson Blair story did reveal was that:
1) Jayson Blair himself did a bad thing.
2) Fact checking at the NY Times is somewhat imperfect.
The full story also revealed that there was a fair amount of internal dissention at the NY Times.
I am aware that some people will claim Jayson Blair’s story reveals something about AA, but just what would that be?
If A.S. were to become more alert to the possibilities of civilization, she would find that her use of ad hominem is not a legitimate approach to argumentation. I do not like the presidents’ use of affirmative action, or consider it to be such clever politics. It is the same issue; if one is anti-quotas in one area it is only consistent to be against racial quotas in the appointment of top officials. Murray’s writings are achievements of some magnitude; that the envious would deride them is only to be expected. It is especially to be expected with those who are getting what they shouldn’t have out of the anti-merit system’s operation. A pro-merit society can lead us on to great advancement of civilization; but the racial conflict-fomenting policies push the people back towards the tribal warfare of primitive times.
Excuse me, I’d respond to John S Bolton but I feel like I must shower to get all of his mental ejaculate off of me.
[2 hours of constant scrubbing later]
Okay, now that that’s done, a quick question for John – why is it that every time a black is hired it’s “affirmative action”? Are blacks just naturally less able than whites? Just wondering.
And, please, save me your bs pseudo-anthropology.
Geeze Raznor. How dense can you be?
Look, Bush is white. Obviously, it’s only natural for him to hire qualified people of his social group. None of whom are black. Therefore, any non-white hire/appointment that he makes is because of a quota system. When I vote for a rich, white man for president I expect him to appoint rich white men to all cabinet positions. Quotas, feh!
If being inside of raznor’s brain is such ecstasy, which I doubt, let there be more and more ritual cleansing. It is not true that every time a black is hired that we have a case of affirmative action. Yet if an all-merit society were to put all the unemployment on to one race, then that is what the ability rankings have given out. It is not conspiracy; that one poulation has more than another. True justice is anti-egalitarian; and so is freedom.
To go back to the start of this discussion briefly: Is there any evidence that the reporter was hired due to an Affirmative Action policy?
Um, John, what about Stephen Glass? The white guy who was caught making stuff up (some of it very damaging) when he worked for the New Republic? No hand-wringing over affirmative action then.
The greed and imcompetence of the white CEOs who ripped shareholders, employees, and their companies off blind? Those CEOs and executives who got bonuses despite the fact their companies were losing money? Those CEOs and executives who cooked the books and then pleaded ignorance (read: incompetence) as a defense? No complaints about affirmative action for whites, how the crony system keeps overly entitled, greedy, and hideously incompetent white guys in positions of power. If one of those executives were black, though, we’d hear high-pitched whining about how affirmative action wreaked corporate America.
A scandal with a white guy (or even a bunch of them) is just an isolated case; a scandal with a black guy indicts the whole race.
If a caucasian male abuses a position of importance, he is not there on a racial-quota, enforced by official acts of aggression. That would be the difference, unless he is in on a quota for the handicapped or whatever official aggression may pick next, as the object of ethnic privilege-granting. Power needs the people divided up in this exact way; but a lot of people won’t realize it until the officials have got open warfare started on a scale where they can gain the additional power that they crave.
Actually, if a caucasian male has a job, chances are he has it because he is white. He’s got the connections, he’s got the same cultural/racial background as his interviewers/recruiters and management, and chances are, he’s got a head start economically. It’s niaeve to think that we all start out equal.
I do find it interesting, however, that you assume that all of the able-bodied white guys with jobs are qualified.
And why do you assume that Blair was chosen for his job just because of his race? Why not apply the same concern and indignation to Stephen Glass?
If a caucasian male abuses a position, he’s not there because of quotas. He is there because he WORKED for it. He had NO help from anybody. He pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. It works this way for all caucasian males. All others achieve their positions via quotas. How much more obvious does John S Bolton need to make it?
Delusions are so much more comfortable than reality.
Another point would be that no one would feel that they have to cover up for a non-minority for racial reasons, because the government could be on their case for it. Yet with a quota place-holder, managers fear lawsuits or negative attention, as from officials, if they crack down on someone who is misbehaving. Even to investigate for malfeasance, can be presented as persecution of minorities. I say these are more good reasons to be anti-quotas. Deviation from an all-merit system makes it harder and harder to enforce standards of performance, the further one strays from an all-merit system.
Mr. Bolton, could you explain to me the existance of nepotism, cronyism, fraternalism, old-boys networks, selective mentoring and interlocking directorates in regards to hiring and promotion of whites?
A curious mind would like to explore why these concepts are worse than Affirmative Action.
–Cobra
John S..
Not that you don’t deserve an argument, but don’t you find trite personal insults and metaphorically scatological retorts a rather juvenile way to go about attempting to give you a persuasive one?
I’m not crazy about some forms of AA. At my university, minority students in the College of Civil Engineering received automatic .5 grade point boosts. Writing this now it sounds like maybe it was an urban legend, but I remember a debate about it in the student paper. There was/ is a very high minority student drop out rate, but any reasonable person could see that false grade boost was pointless, unfair and counterproductive. Didn’t I read somewhere recently that some author has posited that that type of AA dooms some students to failure in grad school or the workplace when they would have been better served taking community college to make up for lost ground in high school?
On the other hand, I remember reading that before AA in the 70’s, GM refused to allow women on their assembly plant floors because they’s get PMS and all hell would break loose. Yes, a meritocracy would be great.
ad hominem…. ad nauseum…sometimes not much difference
But the question remains: how could a true meritocracy be instituted when so many personality factors other than competency are considered in hiring and even in retention? Highly competent persons in many fields can be abrasive, impatient and obnoxious; charming persons can be very well liked and even respected but totally incompetent. Not, saying here that meritocracy is not a laudable ideal…..
What university is that, please?
I’m not crazy about some forms of AA.
Legacies, for example. Legacies are the lowest and most useless variety of affirmative action.
Ampersand:
Michigan State, circa 1991.
Elena, I’ve been searching, and I can’t find any evidence to suggest that Michigan State ever had a policy of automatic .5 grade point boosts for minority students.
Do you think it’s possible that either your memory was wrong, or that the student newspaper was mistaken or misreported somehow? I find it hard to believe that such a policy would exist but not be written about frequently and well-documented by AA opponents.
Anyone on here black? Hispanic? Homosexual? Female?
Am I the only one who sometimes feels pressure not to screw up, because if I do, its an indication of my WHOLE FREAKING SUBCULTURE (women, and low income in this case)?
Antigone: Yes. I work as a tech writer with male engineers in a small office, and I sometimes feel like I should be careful to not “make us look bad.”
These are Fox News-watching, Ted Kennedy-hating conservative men, too. Fun times ;-)
You know, not that it really matters, because when I am better than my male counterparts and some things, it’s because I’m “Not really a girl”. Grr.
Assumedly, the missing context lost in the haze of memory is that incoming minority students had an average GPA of 0.5 less than incoming white students. The “automatic grade boost” would be performed by the admissions committee, not to the school’s professors.
White men are individuals. Everyone else represents a group. Some things never change.
If this weren’t true, the whole affirmative action issue would not have been raised. Or only partly raised, because FTMP, there’s hush-hush silence on “good old white boy” networks, legacies and cronyism, otherwise known as white men’s affirmative action. Certainly not from Mr. Bolton here.
The whole issue on Affirmative Action is stupid, because it’s on its way to elimination. FTMP, it has benefitted mostly white women, then enough of them got on the “it’s racist” bandwagon with white men to vote it out of several states including California. Not to mention all the practices beginning in elementary schools which are so damaging to the development of Hispanic and Black students.
Affirmative Action programs aren’t and haven’t been nearly as beneficial to men and women of color. They probably never will have an opportunity to do what they were intended to do, which is even the playing field, or as MLK, jr. (who despite conservatives’ misuse of the only line from the only speech of his they know, supported AA programs) put the starting blocks of all people on the same starting line.
Ampersand: It’s entirely possible that I have forgotten details. I remember it as the college of engineering, and as a grade boost post-admissions. I have an unusually good memory, but I know how things get muddled. I do very clearly remember a letter from a Japanese American woman majoring in the college that gave the boost stating on the opinon page that at first she didn’t like having the boost as a minority, but then realized that it was fair as her grandfather had been in an internment camp in WWII. A subsequent letter by a white woman enumerated her own grandfather’s troubles, and concluded that the Japanese woman’s grade boost didn’t help either one of their grandfathers.
So it was debated, whether or not the facts of the debate were correct, who knows? If it was incorrect, it was people’s perception of AA back then, right or wrong. But I can say that I doubt that this is something kept on an open record for the public, especially if it was discontinued. 1991 was pre-internet, barely.
MSU now has a very cool program, acronym CAMP or CAMPO (?) that helps children of migrant workers prepare for regular college work through ESL classes, writing classes and heavy academic counseling
all while living on campus. I’m guessing there are grants and loans involved for the kids too.
Oh, please. You’re telling me that students of color were automatically given higher grades at a public university in the state that was ground-zero for the affirmative action debate, and nobody knew about it because the internet hadn’t been invented yet? The fact that you could believe such a thing reveals the stupidity and paranoia of the anti-affirmative-action camp.
So it was debated, whether or not the facts of the debate were correct, who knows? If it was incorrect, it was people’s perception of AA back then, right or wrong.
In other words, when you can’t provide evidence, you shift the terms of the debate to “this was true” to “let’s talk about people’s perceptions even if they were inaccurate.”
MSU currently has an anti-legacy stance. I can’t say if that was true in 1991. It certainly wasn’t true of MSU rival U of M.
On the University of Michigan question, the dates and the magnitude of the “grade boost” being discussed lead me to believe that what was being argued at the University was the magnitude of the “bump” that AA candidates received from the admissions office. Such policies are very difficult to exactly articulate; one very common shortcut used by opponents of quota systems and the like is to shortcut the advantage as being equivalent to a certain amount of GPA, or a certain amount of standardized test score.
For example, a white student with a 3.5 undergrad GPA might have a 70% chance of being admitted to the law school, and a black student of similar background and accomplishments might need to have a 3.2 GPA to have the same 70% chance of admission. In such a case, it would have been common to talk about the “0.3 GPA points that they give to black students”, as a useful shorthand for the actual tinkering that was taking place. I remember, dimly, having such conversations at the time – but it was 15 years ago.
And with that in mind, Sally, you might want to exercise prudence in throwing around the “stupid” and “paranoid” slams. Elena is trying in good faith to recall details of intellectual arguments from a decade and a half ago, and her memory of the facts, while not verified as exactly correct, does jibe fairly well with a reasonable interpretation of the facts that we know to be true.
She wasn’t trying to recall details of intellectual arguments: she stated as fact something that anyone with half a functioning brain cell would realize was not true. And she used that “evidence” to argue about contemporary policy. That is stupid, and I don’t see any merit in pretending otherwise.
I do, but I’m not sure if we want to have that discussion here.
Let’s just say that on threads I start (Pseudo-Adrienne makes her own policy for her own threads, of course), I’d prefer that other posters not be told that their position reveals the “stupidity and paranoia” of their camp. I’d rather people try to act as if the feelings of the other people posting here mattered to them.
Ok, sorry. But I wonder if you’ve considered the feelings (or job prospects, because this discussion isn’t about “feelings”) of students of color whose academic achievements Elena has invalidated. What she’s saying is that her classmates who were people of color didn’t earn their grades. That’s a pretty horrifying accusation to make.
It is the programs that invalidate the achievements, not that someone notices this fact.
Such policies are very difficult to exactly articulate
The admissions offices themselves have pretty clear policies for particular tiers of students. They don’t have time to deal with the volume of applications by saying “Oh, what the heck, let’s give this guy a .5 boost.” U of Michigan uses (or at least until recently used) a ‘point system,’ not a straight GPA.
Elena wasn’t able to provide any evidence at all that minorities got an entire .5 bonus to their GPA simply by virtue of being minorities, other than student rumors.
And funnily, nobody “invalidates the achievements” of students who got in because Daddy and Grandpa went to their school before them. Assuming that minority students are lame-os who only got in through AA is a cover-up for racism and offended white privilege. Nobody bitches that a white student only got in because his daddy went to the same college.
A study on affirmative action at California schools finds ethnicity is not much of a help.
Here’s a nice little article from Diversity, Inc. :
Imposing uniform standards against a non-uniform population lowers quality.
That’s right, lowers quality.
Recently, the University of California (UC) Board of Regents issued a report showing that the prestigious UC Berkeley admitted 378 students who scored less than 1,000 points on the SAT, rejecting more than 600 others with SAT scores surpassing 1,500.
After this disclosure generated considerable controversy, UC Berkeley then released 41 brief biographies of some of the students with low SAT scores, which are reproduced here for your reference.
Now, I suggest following that link and reading those brief biographies. Then, come back and try to explain to me why those students should have been denied admission to UC Berkeley because their SAT scores weren’t high enough. Explain to me how their lives, and the obstacles they have overcome, prove that they don’t have what it takes to do college work.
Whoops! Mea culpa! I screwed up the links!
Here is the first one, with the article, and here is the second one, with the short bios.
Sorry ’bout that!
Didn’t you know? Berkeley’s not a school for Black and Latino students. That’s what UC San Diego, UC Riverside, Davis(except the professional schools) and the new UC school are for!
That’s why the UCs banned AA, to create a two-tier state university system. Berkeley and UCLA are for White students and Asian, or Asian-American students(who they haven’t gotten around to restricting yet, but don’t worry, they’re probably working on it) only.