Destroying the ladder
This is the face of a man who climbed the ladder of affirmative action to his present perch of power only to help destroy the very ladder on which he ascended. This is not only the mark of deep ingratitude & disavowal of history, but a withering betrayal of justice & democracy.
The face belongs to Clarence Thomas.
To be fair, I think you can accept a benefit while thinking the benefit is a bad idea, without necessarily being a hypocrite. I also think you can accept a benefit and then over several decades develop views on why the benefit is a bad idea without being a hypocrite.
But I also think Dyson has a point. I’m wishy-washy.
Clarence Thomas is an imbecile. He’s like Candace Owen who got a big pay-off for being the victim of racist abuse and through her own personal insanity and stupidity parlayed it into being a tool of racist oligarchs. Clarence Thomas is so stupid that if you spent a week explaining his ignorance and delusion and corruption to him he’d spend the whole time thinking about the bbq’d ribs at that nice rich white guy’s cottage.
What makes him a hypocrite in my eyes is taking a benefit and then withholding it from other people. Just like the women who protest about the murder of innocent babies outside anywhere that abortions are carried out, but then sneakily have an abortion when they have an unwanted pregnancy, what makes him a hypocrite is behaving as if he has a right to something that other people just like him shouldn’t be allowed to have.
From an article on the Intercept:
‘With the fate of Harvard’s affirmative action lawsuit in the hands of a judge, a new study stemming from that suit has raised more questions about the role of wealth, race and access in college admissions at prestigious universities.
‘The study, published earlier this month in the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard University were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list — applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard.
That number drops dramatically for black, Latino and Asian American students, according to the study, with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories.
‘The study also found that roughly 75 percent of the white students admitted from those four categories, labeled ‘ALDCs’ in the study, “would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs”…
‘Almost 70 percent of all legacy applicants are white, compared with 40 percent of all applicants who do not fall under those categories, the authors found.’
***
One wishes that those who are so vociferous about the injustice of affirmative action would be as eager for justice in other respects. And one wonders why they are not.
Ayn Rand famously took Social Security payments after spending a lifetime calling them an “immoral redistribution of wealth”. Of course, she had no power to terminate them for everyone, so in a sense, Clarence Thomas is a worse person than Ayn Rand. That’s really saying something.
@4: “immoral distribution of wealth” — interesting, I didn’t realize that Ayn Rand had a concept of morality. (No, I’m not being cynical.)
Taking social security payments would have been consistent with her philosophy. Objectivism is a primarily egoistic philosophy, after all
“ingratitude”?
@3 Interesting (and surprising to me) that the percentage of white athletic admissions is so much higher than nonwhite athletic admissions; I’d always thought, and maybe it’s a common myth, that athletics is one way nonwhite people improve their chances of being admitted to elite colleges (that might still be true, though I guess just not in very high numbers). And potentially the sex of the applicants affects these percentages – guessing more male athletes are recruited than female ones.
Guest, I wondered about that also. Maybe our perception of there being lots of black colleague athletes is because in certain popular sports (American football and basketball) they seem to dominate? but then, there are lots of sports that get less TV and less public mindshare where I suspect white athletes dominate. It’s a bit like studies that show people think there are more women at work than there actually are, and that women spend more time speaking in meetings than they actually do.
@guest, Rob,
Those numbers are for Harvard only. I suspect the percentage of black students who are athletes is a lot higher in less-prestigious Division 1 schools.
I confess to being less interested in whether the percentage of black athletes admitted is less than expected than in this:
‘The study also found that roughly 75 percent of the white students admitted from those four categories, labeled ‘ALDCs’ in the study, “would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs”…’
Coupled with: ‘… 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard University were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list — applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard.’
Can we talk about those white students?
What it amounts to, if my mathematics is correct, is that a little over 32 percent of white students admitted to Harvard would not be there if the criterion for admissions were academic excellence.
While the idea that it’s hypocritical to decry or destroy something from which you’ve benefitted has intuitive pull, I don’t think it holds up under cursory scrutiny. As Ophelia notes, one can accept a benefit while thinking it a bad idea. For instance, suppose a first-term politician tries to eliminate gerrymandering. Would that politician be a hypocrite if elected in a district drawn to favor his or her party? Or would that be an example of principle? If someone who has benefitted from a racist system works to make that system egalitarian, is that hypocrisy? If a man works to make society less sexist, is that hypocrisy? Literature is replete with characters who are members of an unjustly privileged class and work against that privilege. We usually don’t call them hypocrites. The word we use for them starts with an ‘h’, but it isn’t ‘hypocrite’.
I think Dyson’s trying to pull a rhetorical fast one here.
(Not that I think Clarence Thomas is such an ‘h’. I’m just pointing out that the entailment doesn’t hold.)
@GW #5
Yes, she did. She decried the tendency to equate ethics with altruism.
OK, people, by “benefitting from affirmative action” are you referring to his berth on the Supreme Court? If so, then, ok, fair enough, he wouldn’t have got that if he were not black.
Or are you referring to his places at university and Yale law school? If so, what are you basing that on? Are you just assuming that it’s impossible for a black kid to score well in exams and deserve a place on merit?
From wikipedia, we have: “Thomas graduated in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, ranked ninth in his class”. Sounds like he was good enough.
From there he went to Harvard Law school and “graduated with a Juris Doctor degree “somewhere in the middle of his class”.”
But then: “He has said that the law firms he applied to after graduating from Yale did not take his J.D. seriously, assuming he obtained it because of affirmative action. According to Thomas, the law firms also “asked pointed questions, unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated”.”
And from one of the links: “With rejection letters piling up, he feared he would not be able to support his wife and young son. The problem, Mr. Thomas concluded, was affirmative action. Whites would not hire him, he concluded, because no one believed he had attended Yale on his own merits.”
So, if he had the academic ability to succeed on merit (and it seems he did), and if he really did think he suffered from the presumption that he hadn’t (and maybe he is right on that?), then it doesn’t seem at all hypocritical for him to disfavour affirmative action.
A last point: this was 1971, 50 years ago now. Wiki again: “He was one of the college’s first Black students …”. American treatment of blacks has changed hugely over that time. Likely back then blacks were indeed being unfairly treated, in a way that today’s black students are not. Surely it is possible to hold that affirmative action was perhaps justified in 1971, but is not now in 2023, without being a hypocrite?
@guest, Rob, Maroon
The impression that sports is a way that some minority students improve their chance of admission to college is valid, but that happens mostly because of sports scholarships, which the Ivy League prohibits. Sports can help a kid get in, but they won’t get paid for it.
At a non-Ivy school, the presence of a cohort of minority students recruited to play sports may be obvious. You might notice, for example, the men’s basketball team stand out at UConn for being 80% Black, whereas the university at a whole is 5% Black. They stand out, and not just vertically.
The athletes admitted to a place like Harvard, however, do not tend to be poor or minority, both because of the lack of scholarships and the many niche sports supported. So you might also notice Harvard’s basketball players when you see them, but you won’t likely notice Harvard’s, say, water polo team (Harvard has 20 men’s sports teams, UConn has 7).
https://gocrimson.com/sports/mens-water-polo/roster
I’m sure if Harvard could recruit a top Black water polo talent with the grades and scores to succeed at Harvard, they would. But they’re rare as hen’s teeth.
https://usawaterpolo.org/sports/mens-water-polo/roster/max-irving/424
I agree with that and would also add that you can accept a benefit that was initially proposed as a temporary solution and then later feel its time has passed.
(Although in Thomas’s case, as Coel details, he already wasn’t a fan at the time he may have received it, feeling it cast a pall over his accomplishments.)
This has no bearing on the Court’s decision, but affirmative action is not popular:
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2023/06/21/what-role-should-race-play-college-admissions-poll
For sure. It’s been unpopular for a long time – probably as long as it’s existed in fact.
Re Clarence Thomas
I had a (now deceased) relative (a Black man) who was a close personal friend of Clarence Thomas for many years, and spoke highly of him. I was told stories of great deeds Thomas performed, fighting racism. My relative was reluctant to hear anything bad about Thomas. As time went on, and the problems mounted, my relative got at least to the point of saying “I don’t know what happened with Clarence Thomas”. People change.
I was also going to comment on athletes, but I see Papito has covered it well.
I find it curious, and even amusing, that nobody, it seems, wants to address the issue of what amounts to affirmative action for white students at Harvard (which is helped, I suspect, by a quota imposed on Asian-American students). It seems that it is only when black students are seen to benefit unfairly that passions are aroused.
I would also say that, contrary to what appears to be the libertarian assumption that the individual is somehow independent of any social context, and that therefore if someone from a disadvantaged background can be ‘successful’, then anyone from a disadvantaged background can be, and should be, is wholly untrue. One might read the work of James Baldwin or Edward Bond, to discover that people from disadvantaged backgrounds who are, by any measure ‘successful’ do not believe it. Or one might examine statistics about how well people from privileged backgrounds do in comparison to people from backgrounds that are not privileged.
I recommend reading the Economic Policy Institute’s report, ‘Public education funding in the U.S. needs an overhaul’, in which it is pointed out that:
‘Most analyses of the primary school finance metrics—equity, adequacy, effort, and sufficiency—raise serious questions about whether the existing system is living up to the ideal of providing a sound education equitably to all children at all times. Districts in high-poverty areas, which serve larger shares of students of color, get less funding per student than districts in low-poverty areas, which predominantly serve white students, highlighting the system’s inequity. School districts in general—but especially those in high-poverty areas—are not spending enough to achieve national average test scores, which is an established benchmark for assessing adequacy.’
In Britain, ‘State schools in England have suffered their worst decline in funding since the 1980s, with secondary schools and those in the most deprived areas the worst affected by the era of austerity, according to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The decline that began after the Conservative-led coalition government took office in 2010 is so deep, the additional £7bn pledged by the current government will not be enough to reverse the cuts by 2023, leaving school spending 1% lower than in 2009-10, the IFS notes.’ (The Guardian)
What is needed in both the US & the UK is serious attention to public education, and not peripheral disputes over race and representation, and the satisfactions that such disputes afford.
This is the default left-wing assumption that the only really important thing is money spent. It’s not true. You can compare different schools, different states, different countries, and it’s not true that the prime factor in different outcomes is money spent.
Indeed, this idea has been repeatedly tested to destruction in the US, with people throwing money at the problem of trying to reduce achievement gaps. It doesn’t work.
Asian-American success (for example) is not the result of better-funded schools, nor the result of coming from better-off backgrounds — neither of those things are the case, and are, indeed, the easiest things to control for in studies, since they are readily quantified.
The fact is that (this can be regarded as good news or bad news, depending on viewpoint) within countries such as the US or UK, most schools are generally well-enough funded (and in-line with international norms) that differences have only a marginal effect.
And if you’re going to do that, be sure to control for the effect of genetics.
Kids in privileged circumstances generally have parents who can attain large salaries and are generally capable people, and pass on genes for being capable people to their kids. Kids in deprived circumstances generally have parents who are less successful and who pass on genes for being less capable.
The left, with its ideological blank-slateism, just ignores and rejects such facts, which is why much social science on such topics is invalid. You can do this properly, controlling for genetics, such as with twin studies, and the results generally run counter to left-wing orthodoxy.
Ah, the ‘default left-wing assumption’. And the Pinkeresque cliché about ‘ideological blank slateism’, which is certainly nothing I have ever believed in. What an easy and banal way out. Why doesn’t Coel take such matters up with the Economic Policy Institute or the Institute of Fiscal Policy, who, I suggest, know far more about the problems than he does and are far more responsible? In Britain, public schooling, like the hospitals and just about everything else, is in a mess as a result of cuts. It is not a matter of ‘throwing money’ at education and assuming that things will magically get better. It is a matter of having reasonably sized classes, sufficient funds to buy the kind of equipment that is needed, and not having underpaid and exhausted teachers leaving in droves because they can’t take any more.
‘Kids in privileged circumstances generally have parents who can attain large salaries’ (well, they would, wouldn’t they, otherwise they wouldn’t be in privileged circumstances?) and who ‘pass on genes for being capable people to their kids’. So here we are, back in the 18th or 19th century with Coel (who must be very proud of his own genetic inheritance), when the working classes were regarded as being genetically inferior to their social superiors and therefore deserving of their low status and disgraceful treatment; as, of course, were, in particular, black people, and non-white people in general. I suggest that Coel should look into the post-World War II educational reforms and the benefits they brought to people like Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney (whose work I introduced in seminars when he first came to Japan), Seamus Deane, Alan Garner, and many others, who were of course not only writers – despite their coming from what Coel would no doubt despise as ‘humble backgrounds’. He might also try reading the work of Pierre Bourdieu.
I find Coel’s admiration for the rich and his belief that people who attain ‘large salaries’ are necessarily superior in intelligence almost touching in its naiveté. Trump, Boris Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Liz Truss? Is a large salary the only important thing in life? It seems to be the only important thing in Coel’s life.
And then there are Coel’s references to genetic studies and ‘facts’, which he expects us to take on trust. I am sure that genetics has a lot to do with what one is capable of, but so does having the chance in life, not merely to get a good salary, but to achieve something worthwhile, which many, if not Coel, would think is more important than just getting paid a lot of dosh.
I notice that Coel seems to have no problem at all with ‘legacy admissions’ allowing white thickos from rich families into Harvard. Why does he have such an obsession with black people?
@23:
I doubt if they do actually. I bet I know more about science, biology, the results of twin studies, etc, than typical researchers in those institutes. One of the problems of society today is that people educated in arts, humanities, politics, economics, etc, can know very little science. They get educated into a blank-slateist presumption because that’s what their teachers generally have.
And plenty of people do indeed make these critiques of public policy, and get ignored for exactly these reasons.
Exactly. What I’m saying is not rocket science, is it?
See? This is a typical example of how left-wing science denialism works. They respond with indignation, sneers, personal attacks and misrepresentation*, but nothing of any substance.
Can’t you do any better?
*An example of misrepresentation would be: “… his belief that people who attain ‘large salaries’ are necessarily superior in intelligence …”, when what I’d said was: “… who can attain large salaries and are generally capable people”.
Note the altering of “generally” to “necessarily” and the more-general “capable” to the narrower attribute “intelligence”.
As just one example, a footballer can be highly paid without being particularly intelligent.
You will also note the need to include personal-attack barbs, such as:
Now I’m interested, what have I said that could fairly (the word “fairly” there being important) be interpreted as me thinking that only salary matters?
Of course there isn’t anything. Such replies are not about being fair, they’re just about personally attacking anyone who disagrees. Can’t argue the subtance? Attack the person. How woke.
I can give you lots of citations if you’re at all interested. Here’s one: Top 10 Replicated Findings from Behavioral Genetics by Robert Plomin etal.
It’s a review article that covers a lot of the literature. Everyone who considers themselves educated should know about such stuff.
I shall merely repeat my last points in response to this, since Coel so sedulously avoids them:
! notice that Coel seems to have no problem at all with ‘legacy admissions’ allowing white thickos from rich families into Harvard. Why does he have such an obsession with black people?
Without comment; from AP:
BY COLLIN BINKLEY
Published 10:08 PM GMT+9, July 3, 2023
WASHINGTON (AP) —’A civil rights group is challenging legacy admissions at Harvard University, saying the practice discriminates against students of color by giving an unfair boost to the mostly white children of alumni.
‘The practice of giving priority to the children of alumni has faced growing pushback in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action in higher education. The NAACP added its weight behind the effort on Monday, asking more than 1,500 colleges and universities to even the playing field in admissions, including by ending legacy admissions.
‘The civil rights complaint was filed Monday by Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit based in Boston, on behalf of Black and Latino community groups in New England, alleging that Harvard’s admissions system violates the Civil Rights Act.’
Finally, I have read ‘Top 10 Replicated Findings from Behavioral Genetics’ by Robert Plomin et al, which Coel provides a link to. Thank you, Coel. It struck me as a very interesting & responsible paper, and one that rightly eschews drawing far-reaching conclusions of the kind that are drawn by those who see things through the distorted lens of Herrnstein & Murray’s ‘The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life’.
@Tim:
Good. So do you now accept that genetics has a bigger effect than either childhood SES or choice of school? (That’s clear from the paper.)
And thus (to pick the example that you reacted very badly to), if one were going to “examine statistics about how well people from privileged backgrounds do in comparison to people from backgrounds that are not privileged” then the comparison would be meaningless unless one controlled for genetics, which would be the biggest single factor, wouldn’t it?
And hence any social science that doesn’t do this is not valid, which means that vast swathes of social science are invalid. Do you want to discuss that issue on the actual science, or stick to denialism backed up by sneers?
Your attempts to attribute attitudes to me are invariably badly wrong (and your resort to them is because you can’t argue).
But I note that word “thickos”.
Well, let’s see re Harvard: “… Legacy students also had a higher average SAT score than non-legacy students, at 1523 for legacy students and 1491 for non-legacy students.” (link) Note that word “higher”.
[Note: low-scoring applicants from rich legacy familes usually don’t get admitted despite being from rich legacy familes.]
In contrast to that, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade (regarding 7 elite schools) concluded that being black amounted to a 310-point bonus on the SAT, compared to being white, and a 450-point bonus on the SAT compared to being Asian-American. Note how *huge* those numbers are.
So, which group betters deserves the label “thickos”? Legacy admits? Go on, I dare you, use the word “thickos” about affirmative-action admits to the Ivy League. I bet you won’t, will you?
See, that’s why I can’t be bothered to post about legacy admits. No-one will sack you for discussing that issue. You can argue either side of the case, and nothing bad will happen. You can use disparaging language like “thicko” for legacy admits and nothing bad will happen.
In contrast, merely suggesting that an affirmative-action admit might be an affirmative-action admit (never mind using a word like “thicko”) is utterly taboo. Any suggestion that those admitted with vastly lower scores might then do less well is also taboo. Saying that can get you fired. Literally.
So you go right ahead and discuss the issue of legacy admits if you wish. There are no taboos there! No-one will react like you do, with insults and smears and freaking out, at any attempt to discuss it. It’s not an issue surrounded by dishonesty and taboos.
See the difference?
Here’s Wilfred Reilly, with his usual good-sense summation: “The US Supreme Court has put an end to a genuine form of ‘systemic racism'”.
It’s a pity that too much of the mainstream looks to such as Ibram Kendi for commentary about race, instead of people like Wilfred Reilly. His Twitter feed is one of the best on-going commentaries on the topic.
In response to Coel’s latest: I have never supposed that genetics does not have an important effect on a number of important factors. He should not suppose that because I do not share his political views, I automatically assume that the mind is a ‘blank state’. I do not, and, as I have said, have never done.
@Tim:
Then why react so ridiculously to my entirely correct statement that, if you’re trying to assess the effect of environment by examining statistics on kids from privileged backgrounds versus non-privileged backgrounds, one would need to control for genetics?
The evidence is that genetics would have a larger effect on that comparison than the privilege of the background, so why react with hostility and misrepresentation to someone saying that?
And I note that, as expected, you decline the challenge over the word “thicko”.
The fact is, Coel, that the postwar educational reforms in the UK allowed intelligent working-class children to go on far more readily into higher education than was the case before those reforms were made. The policies of the present British government have damaged public education in Britain enormously, as have policies with respect to public education in the USA. It is no good being merely intelligent if you do not have policies that allow that intelligence to flower. Over-large classes, lack of equipment, a shortage of teachers, and teachers leaving the profession because of the unbearable situation as well as the contempt shown by politicians for them are not conducive to a good education, however intelligent you are.
I thought Reilly’s article good and responsible in general, though marred by the predictable claim that ‘affirmative action’ was an example of ‘genuine systemic racism’, the implication being that claims of ‘systemic racism’ in other areas were false. So thank you both for that article as well as for the article about genetic factors.