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How social theory has hurt minorities and women

Forget Anita Hill for the moment. What Clarence Thomas has done with his memoir (My Grandfather's Son) is remind Americans that many of the laws and regulations put in place to help minorities, especially blacks, most with good intentions but poorly thought out and burdened by useless guilt, have actually held them back. Now we're in a huge mess because careers, reputations, and entire organizations are built on government regulations, affirmative action and keeping the civil rights pot stirred (like the Jena 6 story, or crack cocaine sentencing).

Even Eugene Robinson, an associate editor of the Washington Post (Oct. 10), updates what Thomas said about liberals putting blacks in a box (although Robinson seems not to have read the book and calls Thomas pugnacious for recording in terrifying detail what was common to many blacks in the 1950s through the 1980s, even if it isn't today) -- "editors, reporters, columnists and tv producers keep only 2 phone numbers on speed-dial for use whenever any news breaks concerning a black person."

He noted, for instance, that it made no sense to bus poor black children to the schools of poor white children where they would get an equally poor education. Another social experiment: Thomas believes that racial preferences actually hurt black kids and place their achievements in doubt even when they excell. That claim really brought out the accusations of "pulling up the ladder" after he got in.

Now there is some research by Richard Sander of UCLA that says the same thing, but you can be sure it will be quashed or it will be called racist. There are people fighting for their livelihoods to say nothing of their legacy.

"The schools involved are dozens of law schools in California and elsewhere, and the program is the system of affirmative action that enables hundreds of minority law students to attend more elite institutions than their credentials alone would allow. Data from across the country suggest to some researchers that when law students attend schools where their credentials (including LSAT scores and college grades) are much lower than the median at the school, they actually learn less, are less likely to graduate and are nearly twice as likely to fail the bar exam than they would have been had they gone to less elite schools. This is known as the "mismatch effect." Not to shock you senseless, but I was an A student at the University of Illinois--at Harvard I probably wouldn't have made it. That definitely would have been a "mismatch."

The problem as Sander sees it, isn't that black students can't make it in law school, but that because of preferences, they aren't attending the right school.

"In general, research shows that 50% of black law students end up in the bottom 10th of their class, and that they are more than twice as likely to drop out as white students. Only one in three black students who start law school graduate and pass the bar on their first attempt; most never become lawyers. How much of this might be attributable to the mismatch effect of affirmative action is still a matter of debate, but the problem cries out for attention."

Good luck getting funding to research that! I heard an interview with Don Dutton on Mike McConnell (700 am radio) this morning--haven't researched it myself--saying domestic violence tougher laws are actually hurting women, especially black women, because if men are hauled off to jail on a first complaint, women are less likely to summon police and after the required anger management (for just the man) instead of couples counseling, the man is more likely to just kill her the next time. I haven't looked into this, but a brief google search brings up only feminist hyped websites and hysteria about how many women are killed every so many seconds, so the unintended consequences of stiffer penalties at the first cry for help wouldn't surprise me.

Another example of failed social theory mention on McConnell's show is the crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing story. Supposedly, it's racist to treat the two drug criminals differently. When it became obvious that crack cocaine was a serious problem in the black community in the mid-1980s, the Congressional Black Caucus lobbied for harsher penalties and got it. It was primarily black on black violence. So now there is a huge discrepancy, some say by race, but studies show it is amount sold, prior history, and weapons used that cause the stiffer penalties, not the type of drug. City Journal

Oh, and it's now called IPV, Intimate Partner Violence, at least in Canada, I suppose so gays and lesbians can be included. Sounds like a feminine hygiene product.