Category: racial issues

The National Academies of Sciences urge affirmative action in med-school admissions

April 26, 2023 • 11:30 am

I present yet another example of a scientific organization engaged in political/ideological advocacy. In this case the organization is the august body of the National Academies of Science, an organization that admits only the most accomplished of America’s scientists. It also publishes the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS), a pretty well respected journal though not of the quality of Science or Nature.

In the latest issue, three authors from Harvard (and Mass General Hospital) argue, well, you can see the claim themselves from the title screenshot below. It’s a political argument, not a scientific one, and is a reaction to the likely dismantling this year of of race-based preferential admission (“affirmative action”) by the Supreme Court. The Justices have already heard a case that began in 2014, arguing that both Harvard and The University of North Carolina violated both the Constitution (the “equal protection clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment) and—for the private university of Harvard—the Title VI provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Private universities can also be sued for discrimination if they receive federal funding.)

There’s little doubt in my mind that PNAS agrees wholly with this op-ed, since it rarely publishes articles like this and also itself has a “progressive” ideological slant. I’m confident in arguing that this is probably the National Academies’ view as well as the authors’ view.

The issue here is that the paper takes an expressly ideological stance by favoring one political outcome (“equity” among doctors) over what is possibly a negative side of that outcome: worsening quality of medical care in America. This is because affirmative action in medical school had led to a substantial gap between the admissions credentials of whites and Asians on the one hand, and Hispanics and blacks on the other. And if admission credentials have ANYTHING to do with the quality of a doctor, then lowering the bar in the way that Aaron et al. suggest—achieving “equity,” or ethnic representation among doctors equal to the proportion of groups in the population—will inevitably result in the decline of the average quality of doctors.

You may, I suppose, suggest that if people have doctors who “look like them”, or if doctors treat patients who “look more like them” better, then increased equity might increase overall health quality. But that is a supposition only, and one with no empirical basis (there’s no need to mention the “dead baby” issue, which has substantial problems). It also doesn’t tell us how far we must lower the bar to achieve equity, and whether lowering the admissions bar that much can counteract any positive effect on healthcare caused by the supposed “looks like me” issue.

As I’ve said, I do favor some form of affirmative action for admission to colleges and medical schools, but more and more it’s taking the form of favoring minority candidates when you’re faced with deciding between candidates who are both qualified and nearly equally qualified. My thinking on this is evolving. But the difference in qualifications among ethnic groups among med-school applicants as well as those who are admitted is sufficiently large that my brand of affirmative action would never come close to producing equity.

Click to read (it’s free):

The paper begins with a flawed argument: that by forcing universities to not discriminate among races, the Supreme Court is practicing unwarranted “judicial intrusion into medicine” (my emphasis)

Given the likelihood that the Supreme Court will end affirmative action, medical institutions must plan how to further diversity without incurring liability. More broadly, the cases follow a pattern of judicial intrusion into the affairs of medicine and health. As with abortion, contraception, health insurance, and COVID-19, the Supreme Court has encroached on the field of medicine, denying expert guidance on what is required in order to achieve a healthy and equitable society. The affirmative action cases are emblematic of a high court intent on opposing racial progress and other forms of social change.

This is bogus. Yes, some Justices may “oppose racial progress”, but what they’ll do if they rule against affirmative action is simply enforce the law and the Constitution.  That is, they will interpret the law as saying that one cannot discriminate among by race, regardless of which races are at issue.  But to say that this denies doctors “expert guidance” to achieve a healthy and equitable society” is mere carping, and beside the point, for you could use the same argument to justify any sort of race-based discrimination, especially if you think feel that “equity” is an outcome more desirable than application of settled law. I find the argument for retaining “expert guidance” risible, for experts are going to differ about what societal outcome is “healthy and equitable”. What they’re really saying is that the Supreme Court is overreaching itself by disallowing discrimination on the basis of race.

Now, about the differences in qualifications of candidates. Here’s what the article says:

As of 2015, there is estimated to be a deficit of about 114,000 Black and 81,000 Hispanic doctors compared to what one would expect from proportions of the US population. This dearth is at least partially historical: Racial and ethnic minorities were excluded from attending medical school and joining medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association (AMA). In 1900, 11.6% of the US population was Black, compared with 1.3% of physicians. In 2018, 12.8% of the population was Black, but only 5.4% of physicians. Over 120 years, then, the fraction of Black physicians has increased by only 4 percentage points. This lack of representation emphasizes why the fate of affirmative action is essential to securing a racially and ethnically diverse physician body in the United States.

Affirmative action helps compensate for systemic inequities throughout childhood and young adulthood that impede the significant steps required to apply to and be admitted to medical school. The current biggest gatekeeper to medical school admission is the Medical College Admission Test® (MCAT®), whose notable racial and ethnic disparities are well documented (5–7). As of 2022, Black and American Indian/Alaska Native medical school applicants have an average MCAT® score of 497.4 and 498.7, respectively, which is about one standard deviation below the average score for White applicants of 507.9. Although these disparities do not mean that the test makers intentionally discriminate by race, they reflect the systematic disadvantage facing racial and ethnic minorities applying to medical school.

Note the claim that there is “systematic disadvantage”, which to many means “structural disadvantage”: something about the tests themselves that give racial and ethnic minorities a disadvantage. If it’s social circumstances: poverty, poor education, and so on, then that’s a different matter, though one that still must be considered. This is symptomatic of the whole failure of the authors to see the dimensionality of the problem.

What holds for MCAT scores (still required for nearly all med school admissions) also holds for grade-point averages. These recent data come from an admissions consulting service, Shemassian, which notes that race certainly does matter when applying for medical school: 

And data on those who matriculate among four racial groups divided by MCAT scores and grade point averages. The differential rates of acceptance among groups is striking.  Asians in particular have a hard time getting in, being accepted at only about 10% the rate of blacks in the leftmost category.

This is from the American Enterprise Institute (couldn’t they use skin-pigment neutral colors for the bars?):

Now one could argue that one standard deviation in MCAT scores doesn’t mean that, on average, a lower-scoring individual is less qualified to be a good doctor than a higher-scoring one. But if that’s the case, why use scores at all for determining who’s qualified? And if qualifications have any correlation with quality of medical care dispensed later in life, then they could have titled the article, invidiously, “Attacks on affirmative action threatens quality in medicine.”

To me, qualifications for medical school are like qualifications for being an airline pilot in one way: once you make it, you’d better be good, as you’ll have a whole lot of lives in your hands over your whole career. If you say we should lower the bar for going to med school, would you say the same thing for pilot training? If not, why not?

At any rate, the main issue with the article is that it doesn’t even discuss the possible tradeoff between the quality of American healthcare and ethnic equity among American doctors. Perhaps they feel that equity among doctors will, as I said, outweigh any bad effects of lowering the bar for med-school applicants. Or perhaps they feel that equity in a profession even outweighs the concrete benefits that the profession is supposed to confer on society. (That is, equity among doctors is more important for society than the overall quality of healthcare.) One could make both of these arguments, but the problem is the authors don’t. They simply feel that affirmative action is an affront to medical care and to American society, and that equity is a virtue that’s above American law. Indeed, opposing affirmative action is equated, throughout this article, as identical to endorsing white supremacy:

But because the Supreme Court may now deem consideration of race itself to be discrimination—even when it would benefit a racial group and society as a whole—the Supreme Court may stipulate a rule with far-reaching effects across the US healthcare industry. This would not be the first Roberts Court decision to re-interpret civil rights laws as protective of White people, as opposed to the subordinated groups these laws were meant to protect. For example, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District (2007), the Supreme Court held that voluntary school desegregation plans in Seattle, WA, and Louisville, KY, violated the Equal Protection Clause. Although this clause was created to help remedy racial discrimination after the Civil War, the Supreme Court used it to impede efforts to address systemic racism. In this case, Chief Justice Roberts famously quipped, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” thereby imparting a “color-blind” reading on a clause aimed at racial progress. The Roberts Court’s belief that color-blindness will end racism overlooks the more structural and systemic forms of racism that are likely the biggest propagators of disadvantage today. At the same time, the color-blind approach invalidates policies aimed at racial progress like affirmative action, thus entrenching the benefits of Whiteness.

Two more points. First, the authors reply on the deeply flawed Implicit Bias Test, one that’s been rejected by most psychologists as not measuring anything meaningful and even as counterproductive in reducing bias:

Affirmative action’s loss may result in medicine and healthcare that look substantially less diverse. And any loss of diversity could be self-perpetuating. Through their presence and contributions, racial and ethnic minorities help make spaces more accommodating and inclusive to people from differing backgrounds. For example, testing of implicit bias using the well-validated Implicit Association Test has revealed that African-American physicians have far less implicit bias than White physicians  Racial and ethnic prejudice, prolific throughout medicine, impact physician–patient communication, treatment decisions, and patient outcomes. A less racially diverse pool of providers could bring heightened bias toward racial and ethnic minorities, leading to a spiral effect, in which medical spaces become less varied across the board.

That, of course, is purely speculative.  And remember that when affirmative action was first implemented in the Sixties, it was supposed to be a temporary expedient—a few decades at most. In the Grutter v. Bollinger decision in 2003, in which (by a 5-4 vote) the Supreme Court allowed some consideration of race in college admissions, liberal justice Sandra Day O’Connor said this:

“Finally, race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time. The Court takes the Law School at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable. The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

Note that she later clarified that she didn’t mean to set a firm deadline. But I think we know now, from the institutionalization of both affirmative action and DEI programs in colleges, that affirmative action and “racial preferences” will—are intended to—last forever. 

Finally, the authors suggest the obvious: that medical schools should start trying to find ways around the upcoming changes in law to maintain a diverse medical profession:

The affirmative action cases before the Supreme Court raise serious questions about the future of a diverse medical profession and the integrity of healthcare itself. In advance of the decision, medical programs that value diversity and accept federal funds (or are government institutions) would be wise to consider alternative paths to create a racially diverse student body without explicitly considering race. With some strategizing, they can preserve some racial diversity while keeping to the letter of the law.

I’m trying to be charitable here, but it sounds like me that they want to circumvent the law in some way by “strategizing,” but that might not be possible if the Supreme Court rules that you can’t use correlates of race as proxy data for admissions. But the authors don’t like even that strategy!:

Many medical schools will be driven to alternative metrics, or proxies, to attain racial diversity. Such proxies could include family history, experiences of discrimination, socioeconomic status, and geography. However, proxies are limited for at least two reasons. First, they may poorly approximate race. For example, experiences of discrimination may seem to correlate with race, but they have frequently been claimed by White applicants, including in the Supreme Court’s historical affirmative action cases. And, second, the upcoming decision may prohibit not only consideration of race, but also similar metrics.

So what do we do if we want the body of physicians to “look like America”? My view is not to lower standards or devalue merit, but invest in giving minorities and other disadvantaged people equal opportunities to achieve. And, as I always say, that’s a much harder task than just lowering merit bars . Sadly, throwing money at schools doesn’t seem to work. Reducing income inequality might, but we all know that Americans don’t want that. Right now I don’t know what the solution is; perhaps all we can do is call attention to the problem and hope that better minds can create equal opportunities. (Even that won’t work, of course, because so long as there is inherited wealth, there will be inherited privilege.) 

But back to the article. I conclude that it is not a contribution to solving the problem. It neglects important issues, brings up irrelevant ones, makes unstated assumptions, and, above all, injects ideology into science.

Loury and McWhorter on Diversity

April 24, 2023 • 8:30 am

Here’s a short segment from Glenn Loury’s Substack site showing him and John McWhorter discussing the claim that minorities are made uncomfortable by going to institutions, like colleges, where people “don’t look like them.” (This refers, of course, to superficial traits associated with race, though those traits are often taken to be tightly associated with ideological and political views.) If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll go to Loury’s site, which has a transcript, but you can also listen to the 13-minute video embedded below the title. The YouTube notes say this:

In this excerpt from a live event in New York sponsored by the University of Austin’s Mill Institute and moderated by Ilana Redstone, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discuss why seeking out “people who look like you” undermines what college—and indeed the world—has to offer.

Redstone, as expected for someone who encourages this kind of discussion, does have heterodox credentials:

Ilana Redstone is a visiting fellow with the Mercatus Center’s Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange.Dr. Redstone is also an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the founder of Diverse Perspectives Consulting and a co-founder of The Mill Center. She is the co-author of “Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education” and the creator of the “Beyond Bigots and Snowflakes” video series. She is also a faculty fellow at Heterodox Academy

Voilà: the meat of the discussion. Here’s the question posed by Redstone:

One of the questions around affirmative action or one of the arguments has to do with this idea of, well, I guess two things. One is diversity being a good on its own and having a value on its own. And the other idea with representation is that there’s a benefit to people seeing other people in positions of power and authority that look like they do.

And so I’m wondering if you can speak to that idea that people need to see people who look like them in order to feel inspired or accepted or motivated or whatever. How do you think about that?

Loury first takes up the question of “what does ‘looks like me’ really mean?”  He suggests several answers: people of your ethnicity, privileged college students, Americans, and so on. But he gets what the question really means: it’s about race.  Both he and McWhorter are, frankly, baffled at the notion that to be comfortable you must be among people of your own race, or see people of your own race.  I’m baffled that they’re baffled, as this notion is so common, and later Loury tries to take it apart and explain it. But in the end both men agree that he notion is harmful to students and harmful even to racial progress.

A few excerpts:

Loury: And I think the reflexive answer [is], it’s a bean count. “I’ve seen enough black lesbian women that I know, as a black lesbian woman, that I’m in a place of belonging” trivializes the great questions of, who are we? Which is what you come to a university to learn how to explore.

McWhorter: I never understood that line. I never got it. That you need to see teachers who look like you, you need to have other students who look like you. I had to be taught that that was the way I was supposed to feel. I know what I look like. I can look in the mirror. I had parents. They were black, too. Had a family, had friends, mostly when I was a kid, black friends. I didn’t need to see black people in my books. You looked at TV and by the 70s there were enough black people. Probably not as many as now. Definitely not. But I didn’t miss it, because if I look somewhere, I don’t wanna see me. I wanna see the world. I wanna see something else. I don’t go on a walk in the woods in order to see blackness. I go in order to see a squirrel or a creek or something. I don’t look at TV thinking I want to see people doing things that I’ve seen my relatives do it. You want to see something else.

. . .Of course, it’s better to have the representation that we have now. But that idea that you’re being deprived by not seeing yourself in your education, in your popular culture.

I’m reading a book right now where there’s this wonderful chapter on Du Bois. He would’ve been horrified. He’s learning German, he’s talking about Kant, et cetera. Nobody told him that he wasn’t black enough. That didn’t come up. The only people who said that to him, frankly, were white people. And yet here in our post-1966 age, you have that line.

. . . Or if we’re that afraid of white people, we can’t be comfortable until we see one of our own? Again, nobody was told to think that way until 1966. Here, Glenn, I think it’s a pose that we’re encouraged to take. “White people make me nervous. I need to see black people.” No white people don’t make you that nervous. In 2023, you’re told that you’re supposed to say that they do, because it gives you a sense of identity. But it’s an act, and it’s a dangerous one because it stanches curiosity, and curiosity is what makes a human being human.

Loury gives one explanation for the “look like me” trope: if you’ve been a victim of mistreatment at the hands of other groups, then seeing people who belong to your group (he uses black lesbian as his example), makes you relax more, makes you more comfortable and able to enjoy college. That can’t, of course, be rejected out of hand.

McWhorter doesn’t pull any punches in his response: if you’re that freaked out by those “who don’t look like you,” , he says, you need “compassionate help”, i.e., therapy of the cognitive behavioral sort:

McWhorter: But if you really are balling up your fist, if you’re really that uncomfortable when you don’t see people like you around you—in our times, as opposed to a distant day—if you’re that uncomfortable, then there’s something dysfunctional going on, and you need to find some kind of compassionate help.

Now these days, we’re supposed to feel that when it comes to race and identity issues, I’m not supposed to say that. I’m not supposed to say that you need to be trained out of that reflexive crouch. But no, I see no exception at all in the twenty-first century, given the sorts of things that you are likely to face, or I should really say not face, I don’t see that you need to be that nervous about not seeing yourself in this setting. And given that you’re going to go out into the world and find that people like you are rare in many settings that you’re going to go into, I think you should be prepared. Life is not always comfortable, and that’s part of what college is for.

So with all compassion, I say, if you’re that nervous, then you need cognitive behavioral therapy that will make you happier. Because you’re not always gonna be surrounded by people like you.

I can imagine how well that will go down with the nervous people! “Upset by not seeing enough people of your ethnicity? You need therapy.”  But, you know, he might be right, at least in extreme cases where a person’s function is inhibited by feeling left out. This is the claim, which I most often reject, that people are “harmed” by not seeing enough people who look like them.

And Loury distills the issue to this:

In other words, bottom line, suppose your goal is to advance the wellbeing of the race of people who look like you. You inhibit yourself from realizing fully your potential to advance that goal by restricting your attention to the doings of people who look like you.

But they both agree that restricting yourself to associating with those of your race, or concentrating on reading or studying only works by those of your race, is a form of intellectual constriction. Yes, that activity might reduce your ability to “advance the wellbeing of the race of people who look like you,” but is that the main point? This kind of constriction prevents you from apprehending the whole of the human condition, reducing that experience only to the “condition” encountered by people who look like you. Even if advancing your race is your goal, don’t you want to know your enemy—your presumed enemy?

McWhorter give his distillation:

McWhorter: And so a modern black person is supposed to only read Alice Walker and Walter Mosley, even though they read Tolstoy. They were old fashioned.

That doesn’t cohere. That doesn’t make sense. The only way that would make sense is if racism is worse. Now, what is it that we know now that Ralph Ellison didn’t? I think only a serious partisan would deny racism is not as bad now as it was in 1950, so we can afford even more than them to read Joyce Carol Oates as well as Gayl Jones, et cetera, not less. And so if W.E.B. Du Bois read all over the place, we can even more. Lynching was legal in the prime of his life. We live in very different times. So we can’t reject those people because the photos are black and white. It’s better now. We have a widened opportunity.

There are those like Kendi who claim that racism now is worse than it’s ever been, but I don’t think you can find any metric showing that.

By all means we should ensure equal opportunity for all Americans, a hard task that will take decades—if it can be done at all—but in the meantime the claim that you’re “harmed” if there aren’t enough people who look like you in your environment doesn’t sit well with most, for it’s an unconvincing claim of victimhood. The harm is not palpable, and is said to be psychological—which is why McWhorter recommends therapy for those crippled by this syndrome.

And of course, the statement can also be taken to mean that you want to be around people who think like you, for people of a given group are supposed to share a homogeneous set of ideas. (McWhorter and Loury are often criticized for not thinking is the way black people are supposed to think.) But how can you learn, or grow as a person, if you surround yourself or seek out only those people who think like you?

One issue that neither man addresses, but I’d love to see addressed, is that of historically black universities (HBUs) like Howard or Spelman College.  Back in the old days, they existed because black students simply couldn’t get into white colleges. Now, however, there’s a land rush in nearly all colleges to snap up qualified minorities, and the rationale for HBUs must now be that these entities are self-segregating because they increase the comfort level of students, as nearly everyone “looks like them,” (I’m just guessing here.) But isn’t that exactly the attitude that McWhorter and Loury find harmful?

McWhorter and Loury on equality vs. equity—and music

March 24, 2023 • 12:45 pm

Below is an hourlong of John McWhorter making his every-other-week appearance on Glenn Loury’s podcast, the “Glenn Show”.  The YouTube notes for this bit are indented (their bolding):

John McWhorter is back, and fresh off an appearance on Bill Maher’s Real Time that provides plenty of fodder for this conversation. It’s always an interesting experience comparing the relatively unrestrained version of John that I record with three times a month and the carefully crafted version of himself he presents on other programs, when he knows he only has a few minutes to make his point. This is something all of us who regularly appear in the media have to grapple with: How do we distill all of the thinking, reading, and writing we do within our areas of expertise into audience-friendly sound bites that will give some sense of our deeper reasoning? John has mastered this art, and I have to say, I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it, too!

We begin by discussing that Real Time appearance. John is turning into one of Maher’s regular guests, but he wasn’t always such a skilled communicator. He recounts an earlier Bill Maher appearance where he dropped the ball. John was invited on to talk about equity and equality, and we take the opportunity to talk more expansively about the difference between the two. We are both advocates for equality, and we both think that equity is a poor substitute. We also both think that black Americans have the potential to perform at the same level as everyone else, but the test scores tell a different story. So how do we know that potential is real and not just wishful thinking? It’s a tough question. The most zealous DEI advocates come from the ranks of educated middle and upper-middle-class blacks, and I’m reminded of E. Franklin Frazier’s classic critique, Black Bourgeoisie. We move on to the question of standards in the arts, and John says it’s not such a big deal if African Americans don’t have proportional representation in classical orchestras and audiences.

We get a pretty unfiltered version of John in this one. Anybody who catches him only on TV or in the New York Times is missing out!

It’s a wide-ranging conversation, going from equity to music, and is well worth listening to. I’ll highlight just a few landmarks:

10:56: Equality vs. equity. McWhorter, who dominates this hour, argues that there’s a certain arrogance in pretending that “equity” just means “equality”, but it’s okay for the woke because the conflation “battles white power”.  He adds that only under equity is racial “tokenism” seen as okay, but the notion of equity creates a “wormy and arrogant social policy.”

16:57: Loury makes the devil’s advocate case for equity, saying that “equality” avoids the hard questions: how do you assess talent,  opportunity, and the moral obligations of society? What good, he asks, is equal opportunity if people start from different points of advantage and disadvantage? He then describes the cartoon below, which you’ve seen before:

19:30: McWhorter calls that cartoon not only misleading, but deeply insulting to black people, because it implies that people will think “black people are born dumb” (i.e., they start with a shorter box). My response is that the short box isn’t mental difference, but cultural difference that ultimately can be ascribed to slavery, oppression and bigotry and that results in lower performance on test scores.  McWhorter eventually does claim (and I agree) that black people are culturally rather than genetically disadvantaged. But his constant claim is that to overcome racial differences in achievement and test performance, black people must begin setting themselves standards and goals and meeting them—not kvetching that they’re disadvantaged by racism and need the compensations associated with equity.

It becomes clear that both Loury and McWhorter do believe that we should not relax standards of merit for promotion or achievement, but that black people, insofar as they don’t perform as well as whites, should simply work harder.  It sickens McWhorter, he says, to see the call for holding black people to standards different from those to which we hold white people.

McWhorter then mentions the tweet below, which I found on his website. He says he issued it deliberately, not to self-aggrandize but to make the point that “equity” is patronizing toward black people by holding them to different standards.  As he says (or maybe it was Loury), “we cannot exempt people from having to display competency.”

The last part of the discussion turns to classical music, one of McWhorter’s great loves. He deals with whether there should be equity in orchestras (no), whether symphonies should program music that more people of color would want to hear (no), and why classical music is so great.  But he then argues—and here I agree with him—that the only reason that opera is seen as more highbrow than many Broadway musicals is because opera is in a foreign language. He argues that there’s no reason to think Puccini any better than, say, the musical “Showboat,” and at that point I stood up and cheered.

Anyway, the hour is divided into two distinct parts: equity and music, and though they’re connected, it’s worth hearing the show simply because I love the way these guys interact.

 

 

And to show the greatness of musicals, here’s the inimitable Paul Robeson singing a song that always brings tears to my eyes. It’s “Old Man River,” and was written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, two white Jews. This is a scene from the 1936 movie version of “Showboat.”

A black doctor speaks up against implicit bias training (required for all California MDs, including her)

February 23, 2023 • 10:00 am

We all know that data show implicit bias training doesn’t work, and could even be counterproductive by making blacks and whites more suspicious of each other. And yet there’s been no move to ditch implicit bias training; in fact, it seems to be spreading. As physician Marilyn SIngleton, a black doctor in California, reports, it’s required in California as part of “continuing education” for doctors—50 hours of implicit bias training—mostly involving race, but also gender, age, and disability—every two years. That’s a lot of hours for a method that doesn’t work! Its continuance and spread serve only to show that the organizations that mandate the training are doing something. But because the training is useless, this is purely a show of virtue.

You can read Singleton’s Washington Post op-ed by clicking on the screenshot below, and I found it archived here for free. I recommend reading the whole thing because it’s very good. (And it’s in the WaPo!)

Singleton is identified this way:

Marilyn Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist and a visiting fellow at the medical advocacy organization Do No Harm.

She’s also pretty courageous, because I can imagine the social-media opprobrium, not to mention ostracism among her fellow doctors, for speaking the truth:

A few quotes, but really, I’d like to quote the whole thing:

When I graduated with a medical degree in 1973, a Black woman in a class of mostly White men, there was a real sense that the days of obsessing over skin color and making race-based assumptions about our fellow human beings was finally fading — and, hopefully, soon gone for good.

Apparently not. That racial obsession has come rushing back — in academia, politics, business and even in my beloved medical profession. But now it’s coming from the opposite direction. The malignant false assumption that Black people are inherently inferior intellectually has been traded in for the malignant false assumption that White people are inherently racist.

That is the basic message conveyed by “implicit bias training,” which is now mandatory for California physicians; it is a message that I believe is harmful both to physicians and patients. There is a sad irony in all this, because the misguided focus on racism is intended to improve the health and well-being of Black patients in particular.

. . . In California, where I’ve been licensed since 1974, every physician is required by law to participate in this racially regressive practice. Doctors must take implicit bias training not just once but as part of the curriculum of “continuing medical education,” for at least 50 hours every two years, required for their medical license renewal.

The training’s focus is on exactly what the name suggests: Deeply ingrained prejudice toward people of different races. There is no room for debate, for the law states baldly: “Implicit bias, meaning the attitudes or internalized stereotypes that affect our perceptions, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner, exists.”

And the law asserts as fact that implicit bias is responsible for “racial and ethnic disparities in health care,” particularly for Black women.

JAC note added later: It’s not clear exactly how many hours of the continuing education is devoted to implicit bias training, as one reader points out below. However, more than one hour is too much. I’ve been to a class on implicit bias at the U of C, and have also taken implicit bias tests (I was diagnosed as “not biased,” but I can see how easy it would be to game those tests.) I found the class patronizing and almost insulting when they asked us to tell stories about how we may have manifested implicit bias.

Here’s part of what that law says: flat assertions with no evidence to back them up (bolding is mine)

Section 1. 

The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

  • Implicit bias, meaning the attitudes or internalized stereotypes that affect our perceptions, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner, exists, and often contributes to unequal treatment of people based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, and other characteristics.
  • Implicit bias contributes to health disparities by affecting the behavior of physicians and surgeons, nurses, physician assistants, and other healing arts licensees.
  • Evidence of racial and ethnic disparities in health care is remarkably consistent across a range of illnesses and health care services. Racial and ethnic disparities remain even after adjusting for socioeconomic differences, insurance status, and other factors influencing access to health care.
  • African American women are three to four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes nationwide. African American patients often are prescribed less pain medication than white patients who present the same complaints, and African American patients with signs of heart problems are not referred for advanced cardiovascular procedures as often as white patients with the same symptoms.
  • Implicit gender bias also impacts treatment decisions and outcomes. Women are less likely to survive a heart attack when they are treated by a male physician and surgeon. LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming patients are less likely to seek timely medical care because they experience disrespect and discrimination from health care staff, with one out of five transgender patients nationwide reporting that they were outright denied medical care due to bias.

More from Dr. Singleton:

. . . I reject the unscientific accusation that people are defined by their race, not by their individual beliefs and choices. It is little consolation that studies are finding implicit bias training has no effect on its intended targets, and might even make matters worse.

Think about the message this mandate sends to Black physicians. It suggests that I should be wary of my White colleagues because, after all, they’re biased against people like me. Sure, they can undergo frequent training, but their bias is always going to be there, beneath the surface, threatening to rear its ugly, racist head. Collegiality and collaboration — two essential components of high-quality medical care — are targeted by this mandate. Call that an implicit bias.

Since I became a physician, I have seen exactly one instance of racism in health care — and it was from a patient, not a fellow physician. As for my colleagues, I have been consistently impressed with the conscientious, individualized care they have provided to patients of every race and culture. When we all took our oath to “first, do no harm,” we meant it, and we live it. I can’t imagine spending my entire career thinking my peers can’t uphold that oath without constant racial reeducation.

Now of course you can dismiss Singleton’s claims because they are her “lived experience”, but you could just as well dismiss the claims of all the medical schools and the proclamations by medical associations that the whole profession is rife with systemic racism. In fact, at least Singleton has some evidence or her claims, but med schools and medical associations have only the “evidence” that there are disproportionately few black doctors compared to their proportion in the general population. But as we know, inequity is not prima facie evidence for racism—systemic or otherwise.

Singleton notes that black patients get an even worse message, which is that white doctors could hurt their health. And that message is injurious to the health of black people.

She finishes her piece this way:

The whole point of implicit bias training is to create better health outcomes for Black patients and others who might be the target of discrimination, but the opposite seems more likely. It fosters a climate of distrust and resentment that threatens to undermine the medical and moral progress I’ve seen over the decades. When I graduated from medical school, we were moving past the era of racial obsession and anger. Why are we going back to the days when race defined so many lives and dimmed so many futures?

If you want to see evidence compiled by Lee Jussim that the concept of implicit bias is flawed and that training to eliminate it is useless, go here or see the video here.

Here are the three steps that are skipped when organizations mandate implicit bias training:

a.) Ascertaining that inequities are the result of racism

b.) Assuming that the racism is expressed unconsciously, via “implicit bias”

c.) Assuming that implicit bias training actually works in eliminating racist attitudes

All three assumptions have no evidence behind them, ergo implicit bias training is unscientific. As ever, I’m not denying that some white people in the medical establishment are racist. I’m raising doubts, as does Dr. Singleton, that the medical establishment itself has inbuilt racism, and it is that which not only leads to inequities among physicians, but also harms healthcare for minorities.

*****************

Singleton, from her Linked In page:

h/t: Tm

CNN article seemingly exists only to widen racial divisions in America

February 21, 2023 • 10:40 am

Reader Bill Boecklen sent me this CNN Business article with a headline and content that, it appears, exist only to stoke the flames of animus between black and white people in America. Or so Bill thought (I give his quote at the bottom), and I think he’s right. Read it for yourself by clicking on the headline:

The headline clearly implies some kind of racism or bias in the tax code that penalizes black people more than whites. In other words, income taxes are structurally racist. (The end of the article implies that as well.)

But in fact that’s not a scintilla of racism involved, structural or otherwise. The higher on-average taxes levied on married black couples than on married white couples result purely from their differences in work situations. Remember, race is not specified or requested on your income tax forms.

So what is causing the difference here? To use the condescending trope we see above: “Here’s what”:

First to reiterate absence of any racism (my bolding throughout):

Generally speaking, when US tax filers of any race get married, they can get hit with either a “marriage penalty” or a “marriage bonus,” meaning they pay more or less in taxes as a married couple than they would as two singles.

Penalties are more likely when both spouses in a couple work than among one-earner couples. And they are higher when two spouses each make about the same amount of money. Penalties are also more likely when a couple has children.

If the financial facts of a Black married couple were identical to those of a White married couple, there would be no difference in their tax burdens, said William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center and a coauthor of its marriage study.

But here’s the “here’s why” (my bolding):

But the economic facts of Blacks and Whites on average are different.

For example, Black married couples are more likely to live in a two-earner household; each spouse is more likely to earn about the same amount as the other; and they are more likely to have dependents.

“We find that Black couples are more likely than White couples to experience an income tax penalty from marriage and to face higher penalties. We show that these patterns arise because, controlling for income, Black spouses have more equal earnings than white spouses … and because Black couples are more likely to have dependents,” the authors of the report write.

Researchers found that among couples hit with a marriage penalty, Black couples paid less in dollars ($1,804 versus $2,091) but more as a share of their income than White couples (1.8% versus 1.4%).

When researchers specifically focused on households with adjusted gross income between $50,000 and $100,000 under the tax law in effect for 2018, they found 59% of Black couples faced a marriage penalty versus 51% of White couples. Black couples paid about $150 more on average.

Only 33% of Black couples got a marriage bonus compared to 44% of Whites, and those bonuses were roughly $170 smaller on average.

Note first that there is no racism going on here; the government decided that there would be a marriage penalty and it would be higher with more equality of income among spouses. Note as well that the average tax difference is small—$150 in penalties or $170 in bonuses—a relative pittance and nothing to get worked up about.

Now I’m no tax expert, so I don’t know why the government decided to levy a higher penalty for married couples having more equal incomes (readers?). But what I do know is that this small difference in taxes paid has absolutely nothing to do with racism: it is purely the result of a decision the government made a while back to produce a tax code they saw as fair for everyone. It is ridiculous to think that the government knew about income differences in black and white married couples in advance, and then wrote the tax code to penalize African Americans!

Why, then, did CNN think this story was worth publishing? Because they wanted to sell it as an example of bias that disadvantages blacks. This becomes clear when you read the end of the article, which sees this disparity in tax penalties as a racial issue. For example:

It’s still early days when it comes to detailing how tax and other federal policies affect racial equity and how differences can be cured, said Gale. “We’re maybe in the second inning. There is so much work to be done.”

And so on. . .

It’s time for people to realize that finding scents of racism everywhere, even when it does not exist, only exacerbates divisions between blacks and whites. I believe that they’ve found that antiracist bias training in schools, for example, can actually exacerbate racial animus because, by concentrating on racial differences, it can produce resentment among white people who are told they’re racist and therefore guilty.

This article instantiates a related situation: the implication of racism when it does not exist—and in this case the nonexistence is clear. To me, dividing the data by race, and finding a difference that penalizes blacks, was deemed a “story” for the paper. Had the results shown a tax penalty for whites, it would not have been printed. And I bet you can find some tax data in other areas that would give that result.

This kind of article serves not to create equality among the races, but to gin up animus between them, and to give ammunition to those like Kendi who think that every aspect of every policy in the government is either racist or antiracist, with nearly all policies falling in the former class. If a policy disadvantages blacks, it’s racist. But only in the most ludicrous construal of “racism” (i.e. Kendi’s) can you decide that a demographic difference having nothing to do with bias is an example of racism.

Bill, who called this piece to my attention, certainly was upset about it, and he sent me the following along with the link (I have his permission to use his name and his words):

This is an unctuous example of race baiting geared to generate more clicks. As such, it must be view as a callous marketing strategy designed to take advantage of the country’s (or the MSM’s) obsession with race.

The article states, “If the financial facts of a Black married couple were identical to those of a White married couple, there would be no difference in their tax burdens, said William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center and a coauthor of its marriage study.”

So, what’s the problem?

All this achieves is to increase the level of animus in the country.

Yep. It’s time to start reading the media taking account of this possibility. It’s not that they deliberately want to inflame racial divisions—I am sure that’s not true—but by finding racism everywhere, they get a good story and more clicks. Stories of racism are what sells. And the click-mania of the media leads to the kind of distortion generated by this article.

Are National Parks racist?

February 20, 2023 • 11:15 am

Of course they are! For that’s the implication of “inequities” in the proportion groups that visit parks—the explicit conclusion of ABC News in this long and misguided article about how the inequities, and the racism that’s supposed to cause them, are an “existential crisis” for America’s national parks. For those of you who think that the Biden administration isn’t using inequities as marker of ongoing racism, read below:

The data are these:

New government data, shared first with ABC News, shows the country’s premier outdoor spaces — the 419 national parks — remain overwhelmingly white. Just 23% of visitors to the parks were people of color, the National Park Service found in its most recent 10-year survey; 77% were white. Minorities make up 42% of the U.S. population.

There are more Hispanics than blacks visiting the park (only 6% of visitors are African-American), but still strong inequity.  The conclusion, of course, is that national parks, and the great outdoors itself, is racist. It’s not just that some people’s racism is said to keep minorities away from the parks in droves (an assertion that’s doubtful at the outset), but that the racism is systemic, somehow built into the National Park System, and these inequities must be erased through antiracist action. (The assumption here is that without racism, there would be perfect equity among park visitors.)

The repeated claim of systemic racism (all quotes from the piece are indented, bolding below is mine):

“The outdoors and public lands suffer from the same systemic racism that the rest of our society does,” said Joel Pannell, associate director of the Sierra Club, which is leading an effort to boost diversity in the wilderness and access to natural spaces.

. . . Advocates like Williams and Tariq say they hope the moment since George Floyd’s death in police custody brings attention to systemic racism in the outdoors as well as other parts of society and translates into a long-term change in attitudes and behavior.

. . . National parks and the conservation movement were created as a way for people to escape cities during the industrial revolution, which Pannell said is one example of systemic racism in the outdoors that hasn’t been confronted.

. . . Americans of all races in the new Park Service study said they value the nation’s iconic parks and landmarks as important to America’s national identity and think they should be protected. And advocates say they hope the current moment leads to future change and more attention to combating systemic racism in national parks and the outdoors industry and culture.”

Now the definition of systemic racism in the first link includes past laws and customs that might no longer apply but still exert an effect, but that’s not the tenor of the article, which assumes that the racism is an ongoing practice. It’s important to distinguish the two, because getting rid of current racism requires an entirely different agenda from dismantling the historical effects of racism. If they’re conflating the two, then the word “systemic” is no longer needed.

Why is this an “existential crisis”? One would think that if few minorities are going to the parks, and the parks are still doing big business (which they are), they’re in no danger of going out of existence. But the article says that more than half of America will be nonwhite by 2044, and that extra 8%, deterred from visiting by structural racism, poses a huge threat to the parks’ existence. I don’t buy it:

In national parks, the most prominent and famous natural spaces in the country, Black Americans are consistently the most underrepresented. In 2018, only 6% of visitors identified as Black, according to the new report, a slight decline from the previous year.

“We need to communicate that national parks, one, are part of your birthright,” Vela told ABC News Live in an exclusive interview.

This would be worrisome if we knew the cause was racism. Note that throughout this article, the assumption is that all groups have an equal desire to go to parks, but we don’t even know that. In fact, the data say the opposite:

Twice as many black and Hispanic Americans said they don’t know what to do in national parks than whites. When asked if they share the same interests as people who visit national parks, 34% of Black respondents and 27% of Hispanics said no, compared with only 11% of whites.

Well, if so many blacks and Hispanics don’t share the interests of people who do visit national parks, then the assumption of equal interests may be far off. On the other hand, I do love parks, and if the lack of interest comes from a lack of information, well, perhaps the government should advertise the parks more widely.

Now the sole evidence for racism in the article, besides the usual one or two “lived experience” anecdotes, is the inequity in proportions of ethnic groups visiting the park. But there are many possible explanations for this, and the last one I’d think of is racism. The first one I’d guess would be culture: that minorities have no tradition of hiking or camping, not because of racism encountered by doing that, but for other reasons. Living in cities is one: urban dwellers may be less likely to want to go to Parks. Or poverty (a residuum of historical racism) is another, and one that the article actually admits is a possible cause. But current, ongoing, systemic racism? I can’t imagine how that would keep minorities away from parks, but let’s see what evidence ABC adduces.

Ambreen Tariq, creator of the “Brown People Camping” social media campaign, says this:

Still, racial profiling and stereotyping remain a big concern for Tariq and many people of color in the outdoors.

“When I was a child, I felt like an outsider trying to gain entrance, except now I am American and this is my country,” she said.

However, when she camps or hikes as an adult, Tariq said she still faces assumptions that she doesn’t belong and a sense of “imposter syndrome” and fear — even facing questions from rangers about whether she has followed park rules when she doesn’t see white visitors asked the same questions.

. . .Combined with attitudes that people do outdoor activities to relieve stress has made it difficult to have tough conversations about race.

“When I’m walking to work with park rangers or with other campers and hikers who treat me in some sort of way that make me feel unwelcome, that make me feel unsafe, that is startling,” Tariq said. “And that goes unchecked because there’s, there’s just no channel for us to be able to challenge that in such remote places.”

“Unsafe” is a red flag here. In what sense does Tariq feel unsafe? Does she think the rangers will attack her? Exactly what form does the “unwelcome behavior” take? I’m not doubting it, but remember that this is a sample of one person.

Such behavior is of course possible, and if it happens often it must be based on racist assumptions of rangers. But where are the surveys? I’d also like a statement  about structural racism from the Park Service itself, but there’s just this:

“That tells me that we’ve got a lot of work to do,” said David Vela, acting director of the National Park Service.

What does he mean? Is he admitting structural racism? Or just saying that we have to have more equity in visitors? Remember, a lot of visitors to parks are Europeans (that’s all you see in Death Valley in summer, when the Germans come to scorch themselves red in 120-degree heat), and Europeans are mostly white.

But forgive me if I can’t take as dispositive evidence a statement about how one person like Tariq feels. Does she know that white visitors aren’t asked the same questions. Remember, “lived experience” is not evidence for a proposition like this one, though if it were repeated many times, we’d get more suspicious.

It’s true that many of the parks were created at a time of de facto segregation, and it’s barely conceivable that somehow that has led to a tradition of minorities not going to parks. But the claim is that the racism is systemic and ongoing, and that’s a different claim. Speaking of history, the article does claim this:

Lack of transportation to national parks and the cost of visiting were cited as the top reasons people — especially Black and Hispanic Americans — don’t visit them more often, according to the study.

So it’s not bias but money and access! That is not systemic racism under any construal, though it may be the historical result of racism, and doesn’t jibe with the claims of “racist treatment” of minority visitors. Which is it?

Another claim is that minorities don’t come to parks because some of the parks’ founders were bigots. But is it believable that that fact, known only to those with a deep knowledge of park history, would keep people from going to parks now?:

Carolyn Finney, a storyteller and cultural geographer whose book “Black Faces, White Spaces” focuses on African Americans’ relationship to the outdoors said the dominant narrative around national parks doesn’t include that they were considered primarily with white visitors in mind.

She said that despite the value of the ideas that conceptualized the National Park Service and laid the groundwork for the modern environmental movement in the early 1900s, figures like John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt did not consider how those spaces would include people of color because they were actively segregated at the time. And some figures close to the conservation movement like Madison Grant, who founded organizations like the Bronx Zoo, espoused actively racist ideologies.

Well, Roosevelt’s and Muir’s racism is something that few Americans even know about, while what on earth does Madison Grant have to do with inequities in Park attendance? Before you claim that the history of the parks’ foundations are what’s causing inequities among visitors, find out why.  How many Hispanics say, “Well, I’d go to Yellowstone but that Muir was such a bigot”?  One would think that this would be the first thing to investigate. But it never is. The cause goes hand in hand with the observation of disproportionality, and that is the classical instance of begging the question.

Two more reasons are given for attendance inequity:

Many people of color say that history of the parks is another psychological barrier white Americans don’t have to face.

“Historically, in the South, in particular, many atrocious things that happened to Black people were in the woods,” said Frank Peterman, an outdoors enthusiast who began visiting the national parks with his wife Audrey 25 years ago.

Where are the surveys of “many people of color” showing that? The only one quoted is Peterman, and he’s surely not been put off: he’s been to many parks. To me, this sounds like a made-up reason. Where are the data? You can’t use phrases like “many people of color say that the history of the parks is a psychological barrier” unless you document it. “Many” has to be “more than one.”

And this:

Many advocates say public information about parks and outdoor activities are not tailored to communities of color. Posted signs, for example, are mostly in English rather than Spanish. Park ranger uniforms that resemble what is worn by law enforcement are intimidating to some immigrants and minorities in light of documented cases of profiling.

Given that America is becoming almost bilingual with Spanish, it would be nice to have signs in Spanish in parks, especially in the Southwest. But I’m not down with changing the ranger uniforms. They don’t look like military uniforms (look at the hats!), and they have to look somewhat official so that they have authority and people will recognize them easily.  When you’re looking for help in a park, as I’ve done many times in Death Valley, you have to be able to recognize the rangers. What do people want, for crying out loud: Hawaiian shirts and shorts and a ranger hat?

The lessons of this dire piece are ones we’ve learned before:

a.) With enough effort, you can find structural racism everywhere. If you can find it (and people have) in yoga, pumpkins, lattes, and glaciology, you can find it anywhere. I challenge someone to come up with an institution that can’t be accused of structural racism, except, perhaps, the NBA or other sports. But, I believe, even the NFL has been accused of structural racism despite the high percentage of black players (58%).

b.) Structural racism is always taken to be the prima facie cause of unequal representation of groups. For several reasons, including different preferences, different cultures, and an overrepresentation of marginalized groups in some areas, this cannot always be the case.

c.) If you’re going to make such accusations of ongoing, current racism, you need to document them, because. . . .

d.) . . . if you think that unequal representation needs to be made perfectly equitable (which it needn’t), you must find out the reasons for the inequities. It’s wrong to assume structural racism from the get-go, and that’s why this ABC article is so terribly off the mark.

A court case against DEI and discriminatory hiring

February 13, 2023 • 9:15 am

Although I’ve always said I’m in favor of some affirmative action in college admissions and hiring (but haven’t figured out exactly it should be implemented), I’ve never been in favor of mandatory DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) statements as required parts applications for admission to colleges, graduate schools, or especially academic jobs.

It should not be part of a job application to show how you can engage in social engineering. Further, DEI statements constitute compelled speech, similar to the loyalty oaths that California academics used to take, and thus is unconstitutional.

These mandatory statements also change the purpose of a university—normally to teach, to learn, to learn to think, and to do research—into a form of social activism that must adhere to specific tenets of DEI. The statements are judged on how closely they adhere to a school’s construal of Critical Race Theory, and are often read and rated before one’s academic credentials are assessed. If you don’t meet the right “rubric” for your statement, your application can be trashed.  Woe unto the applicant who says they “will treat all students equally” or “will adhere to Dr. King’s view that people should be judged by the content of their character [in this case, their academic achievement] and not the color of their skin”. Such candidates are considered unenlightened, and accrue the lowest ratings.

And if you don’t have a philosophy of DEI, a history of past DEI efforts, and a plan about how you can implement DEI in your university, then you stand little chance of getting a job. (There are usually three aspects to a DEI statement.)

Now not all schools require such statements. The University of Chicago, for instance, explicitly forbids them as per our Shils Report (full document here), which mandates that the criteria for academic appointments and promotion must comprise only research, teaching and training (grad students), contributions to the intellectual community, and service (this includes service to the University and your academic field, like giving seminars, editing academic journals, and so on.) The U of C has mandated that DEI statements are not included in this, and it’s forbidden for academic departments to require them for hiring and promoting faculty. I know of no other school that has such a prohibition, although there may be some.

In contrast, many schools not only require DEI statements, which can be and are used in race-based hiring—an attempt to secure equity among faculty—but even designate certain jobs only for candidates of certain ethnicities. Like DEI statements, hiring on the basis of ethnicity is against the law. But as the article below notes, schools know about this illegality but flout it anyway, because nobody ever penalizes them for doing so.  Lawsuits against such discrimination are nonexistent for three reasons:

a.) They’re bloody expensive.

b.) You have to have “standing” to sue: to prove that discriminatory hiring based on race injured you.  It’s hard to prove that.

c.) As the article below notes, if you sue a school because you were not hired or not considered because, say, you were Asian or white, you become academically radioactive: no liberal school (i.e. nearly all schools) will want to hire such a notorious person.

This is not a conservative point of view but a liberal one, as it is anti-discrimination and anti-compelled speech. The push to get rid of DEI statements is supported by all academic freedom organizations I can think of, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE notes that while the Constitutional prohibition applies only at public schools and colleges, it should apply more widely than that. As they say:

The First Amendment prohibits public universities from compelling faculty to assent to specific ideological views or to embed those views in academic activities. While private universities are not bound by the First Amendment, they generally make commitments to free speech and academic freedom that similarly preclude enforcement of any political, moral, or ideological dogma. Such colleges and universities educate and employ the overwhelming majority of America’s students and faculty members, and this document is intended to address DEI policies at those institutions.

But one person—Richard Lowery, an associate professor of business and finance at the University of Texas—has filed such a lawsuit against Texas A&M University.  In his case, the “injury” consisted of the fact that (although he apparently has no interest in a job at Texas A&M, which isn’t as good as UT in his field), Lowery wouldn’t even be considered for a job because it was advertised as being open only to members of underrepresented minorities. Texas A&M is a public school, and thus violated the law by advertising a job open only to candidates of certain ethnic backgrounds.

Lowery’s gambit is a clever way to get standing, and apparently it’s worked so far (it also allowed other people to join in on a class action suit). Several law faculty at other schools are quoted as saying this is a pretty solid suit with a good chance of winning.

Click below to read:

Here’s the basis of the case as described above (remember, as a state school, Texas A&M must adhere to the First Amendment):

. . . the law may finally be coming for the overt employment discrimination practiced on most campuses today. The form of the destructor may be a test case filed on September 10: Lowery v. Texas A&M University System.

As described in the complaint:

8. The Texas A&M University System, along with nearly every university in the United States, discriminates on account of race and sex when hiring its faculty, by giving discriminatory preferences to female or non-Asian minorities at the expense of white and Asian men. This practice, popularly known as “affirmative action,” has led universities to hire and promote inferior faculty candidates over individuals with better scholarship, better credentials, and better teaching ability.

9. These race and sex preferences are patently illegal under Title VI and Title IX, which prohibit all forms of race and sex discrimination at universities that receive federal funds. But university administrators think they can flout these federal statutes with impunity because no one ever sues them over their discriminatory faculty-hiring practices and the Department of Education looks the other way.

10. These discriminatory, illegal, and anti-meritocratic practices have been egged on by woke ideologues who populate the so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion offices at public and private universities throughout the United States. The existence of these offices is subverting meritocracy and encouraging wholesale violations of civil-rights laws throughout our nation’s university system.

Specifically, the complaint avers that in July 2022, Texas A&M’s “office for diversity” announced a program for hiring professors that was limited to members of “underrepresented groups,” which it defined as “African Americans, Hispanic/Latino Americans, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians.” In other words, like many DEI initiatives that pervade most university campuses today, white and Asian men need not apply for this program. Texas A&M justified the program with the goal of establishing a faculty whose racial composition attains “parity with that of the State of Texas”—despite the fact that even Grutter recognized that such racial balancing was “patently unconstitutional.”

Part of Texas A&M’s efforts to achieve such racial balancing has also been to establish faculty hiring lines open only to members of “underrepresented groups.” One such hiring line was in the Department of Finance, where the head of the recruiting committee confirmed in writing that the position was indeed “reserved” for non-white, non-Asian candidates.

Richard Lowery is a finance professor at the University of Texas and is a vocal critic of DEI programs. (Disclosure: I know Rich and have written about him in the past, but I am not involved in his case and did not know of it until after it was filed.) There should be no serious question that he would be qualified for a teaching position in the finance department at Texas A&M; indeed, his qualifications easily exceed those of many current Texas A&M finance professors. Yet despite being “able and ready” to apply for the position, Texas A&M’s “reserving” the position for non-white, non-Asian candidates means that he is ineligible for it.

Lowery’s lawsuit sues Texas A&M and various officials for violations of Title VI and Title IX, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief prohibiting the university from discriminating on the basis of race and sex in hiring decisions. It also seeks redress for violations of 42 U.S.C. § 1981(a), which guarantees individuals the same right to make and enforce contracts without regard to race, and for violation of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The lawsuit also has another twist: it seeks certification as a class action, for the benefit of all white and Asian candidates who have been discriminated against by Texas A&M’s DEI employment initiatives.

Lowery is of course an opponent of DEI initiatives; why else would he put himself through the trouble of this lawsuit?

Given that the job was limited only to certain ethnic groups, it seems palpably unconstitutional, and I suspect Lowery’s suit will win—unless he is found not to have standing. But, to be sure, any Asian and white person who could have or would have applied for the job could in principle claim injury. Whether that’s upheld or dismissed solely on the grounds of standing, it’s only a matter of time before some brave soul brings a lawsuit on civil rights grounds and does have standing; and that person will win. That will bring the whole DEI-statement mishigas crashing down, and that’s to the good.

The article quotes three law professors who say Lowery’s case is strong. They may be conservatives (I don’t know), but they’re also at good schools: UC Berkeley, Cornell, and UC San Diego. I’ll give two of the statements, one from someone on the US Commission on Civil rights.

How does the case shape up legally? Asked for comment, University of California, Berkeley law professor John Yoo says:

This seems like a strong case. The Supreme Court’s diversity rationale for the use of race in university admissions for students is a limited exception to the general rule that the Constitution prohibits government from using skin color in its decisions and policies. Here, Texas A&M is flatly using race in considering the hiring and compensation of faculty. It is flatly unconstitutional and the university should lose in court.

. . . University of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot, who is also a commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights, observes:

For a long time, faculty members and aspiring faculty members who have been discriminated against have been reluctant to sue—mainly out of fear that they will be ostracized. As a result, college and universities have gotten bolder and bolder in the ways they flout the law. But the tide appears to be turning. There will likely be more lawsuits of this type in the near future.”

I’m sure there will be. It’s only a matter of time.