Saturday, September 08, 2007

"The fact that the longest piece of literature an incoming professor may get to prepare him for his job is the guidelines on sexual harassment, as I have heard from one incoming professor, suggests imbalance at the least...

At the University of California, Berkeley, when multiculturalists demanded that students should take a required course dealing with a number of major American ethnic and racial groups, the opponents of the required course riposted, 'And what about Europeans?' The advocates of the requirement had to reluctantly concede. Europeans were added...

Class has certainly come in third, if it is evident at all, in the revision of curricula. The poor get into the new curriculum only if their poverty is associated with being female or nonwhite...

Women's studies is part of multiculturalism, so large a part that it often outweighs all the rest. In the canon of received outrages perpetrated by multiculturalists... a hefty segment deals with offenses to the sensitivities of women."

- We Are All Multiculturalists Now, Nathan Glazer

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[On UC Regents v. Bakke which ruled affirmative action alright only on the basis of 'diversity'] "Students don't have to read Supreme Court opinions to get the diversity message... The number of references to cultural difference in a small sample of personal statements penned by successful applicants to Harvard Law School would make one think she was looking at applications to star in Disneyland's attraction 'It's a Small World'...

Post-Bakke universities want to know all about the unique culture of the ancestors of their minority applicants, but ignore the discrimination suffered by the applicants themselves. 'Diversity' allows that the enslavement of a black applicant's great-grandmother over 150 years ago is relevant to her application, but implies that the racism suffered by the applicant herself at the hands of high school teachers and administrators a few years or even months ago is not... 'Diversity' is popular with [everyone] becuse it hints at racism (mollifying the activists) without being so impolitic as to name it (to the relief of the elites)...

The simplest claim is that practices that 'correlate' with group identity should receive rights protection. For instance law professor Barbara Flagg argues for the protection of 'racially correlated' traits,' while law professor Kenji Yoshino argues for an approach to anti-discrimination law that 'observe[s] correlations between behavior and identity that exist in the world.'
Ed: So what will they do when they find out that criminality, lack of education and laziness are racially correlated traits?...

We can never say 'black identity is X'. Instead... 'The concept of black identity has, at a certain time and place and under certain circumstances suggested to certain people X commitments or entailments.'... I'm sure this strikes some readers as so much needlessly obscure postmodernism, something to ignore and hope I get to the real argument soon, or maybe a reason to toss the book into an active fireplace...

Some cultural traits may be 'better suited' to certain tasks or institutions than others, some cultural traits may be less valuable in general than others and some cultural traits may be downright destructive of a society or enterprise. This seemingly harsh conclusion is unavoidable if we think that cultural traits matter.

There's more than the writings of Dr. Seuss to recommend my position (although he is quite a persuasive authority on ethical questions)...

I must confess that, in the course of what has been for the most part a fairly conventional heterosexual sex life, I have regularly committed sodomy as defined by the Georgia statute, and regularly enjoyed 'deviate sexual intercourse' as defined by the Texas statute (though never, to the best of my recollection, in the states of Georgia or Texas).

As an actively practicing heterosexual sodomite, I feel duty-bound to refute the presumption that sodomy is the exclusive domain of homosexuals...

The racial portion of the census was designed to produce a necessarily stylized set of statistical data in order to further a specific set of governmental objectives, such as monitoring racial discrimination. As William Spriggs, Research and Policy Director of the Urban League asserts: 'The data... is not used in some biological sense, and it's not used in some sort of touchy-feely sense of who are your parents and who do you want to recognize. It's related to the persistence of gaps born of legal segregation.' Given its objectives, the old census appropriately asked individuals to check the one box that 'best described' their race, relying on common sense identifications to generate the 'correct' response most of the time...

By allowing individuals to mark multiple boxes, the census may now less accurately reflect the socially understood racial identity of the responders...

Brian Barry notes that at least one account of the 'oppressed groups' in American society includes 'women, Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and other Spanish speaking Americans, American Indians, Jews, lesbians, gay men, Arabs, Asians, old people, working class people, and the physically and mentally disabled. This implies that about 90 percent of Americans are oppressed.'"

- racial culture, A Critique, Richard T. Ford