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12/2/04_2 <link>
Segregation and racism - a brief and unpleasant interlude

Part racism, part greed lead to failed ban on segregation laws in Alabama Constitution; so-called Christian Coalition shows its true colors once again

Russell Fox has some interesting commentary on this. It doesn't matter how you look at this - there is no escaping the fact that we have large numbers of deeply un-Christian and immoral racists in the country even today (who cloak their bigotry and immorality under a so-called "moral values" bandwagon). The excuse that this ban failed because of the supposed fear of state taxes possibly going up to potentially provide Blacks or poor people education is in itself revealing of racism (not to mention greed) - after disenfranchising, suppressing, exploiting and denying education to African-Americans for a long time, the (admittedly narrow) majority (but a majority nonetheless) in Alabama seems to believe they have no obligation to correct that wrong even today! That they have no obligation to return the wealth they stole from African-Americans via exploitation. The fact that 40% of people in Alabama voted to retain a ban on inter-racial marriage in 2000, only reinforces the fact that racism continues to be quite overt in parts of America and in a big way. More on education/segregation below this extract.

This morning, I read John Brummett's column about the close but likely defeat of Amendment 2 in Alabama, a proposed amendment to the state constitution which would have repealed segregation-era language included in the document back in the 1950s. The strategy of Alabama politicians back then to avoid any potential interference with their racist educational system was to amend the constitution so that it included, besides poll taxes and mandated segregation, language which denied the right to an education at taxpayer expense for any Alabama child. Thanks to federal action, poll taxes and the doctrine of separate-but-equal was rendered moot; but the rejectionist language itself remains in the constitution, and has become a branch which many of those who reject a sense of obligation to the larger (and multiracial) social unit which Alabama in fact is continue to cling to. The push for Amendment 2 was led by Governor Bob Riley, who has bravely fought for a better Alabama before, and done so on explicitly Christian grounds. But once again, the Christian Coalition of Alabama and many of their Republican allies refused to budge on their opposition. Not that they necessarily still harbor segregationist sympathies; Amendment 2's opponents insisted that the racist language in their state constitution is meaningless, and that they would introduce legislation to strip them in particular anyway. But to actually get rid of that specific aspect of the constitution which at one time allowed the white population of the state to avoid obligations to the black population, and which is now embraced as a way to keep taxes low and keep the state from being obliged to actually repair the deeply divided and unequal public education system in the state...well, that's taking things too far. Roy "Ten Commandments" Moore took to the barricades, insisting that Christian schools and home schoolers of all sorts would be forced by itchy trial lawyers, looking for a chance to sue the state, to accept onerous and unfair tax burdens if a right for all citizens to be equally educated were recognized by the constitution. His argument appears to have worked, at least barely.

The discussion about this ugly vote over at James Joyner's blog is revealing. Yes, Alabama does have a terrible constitution, a convolunted mess with over 700 amendments running to 12 times the length of the average state constitution; perhaps it is not unreasonable to believe that a great many voters simply vote against any and all amendments purely out of disgust. And no, of course the tax-via-lawsuit issue isn't a red herring; as a resident of Arkansas, I understand very well the complicated and painful issues which arise when the state constitution's guarantee to educate the children of its residents is forced by legal action to confront terrible disparities in wealth on the one hand and strapped state coffers on the other. I'm not crazy about addressing education inequalities through judicial intervention, and while I think a state education is valuable on its own merits, I'm not unsympathetic to those who wish to preserve a certain independence, for religious or moral reasons, from the public school system. And of course, there are communal concerns which come into play here, which bump up uncomfortably against class issues and more (see Alan Ehrenhalt's article about the reaction of isolated-- and mostly white, though he doesn't mention that--rural communities to Arkansas's school consolidation plan here, and my response here (scroll down for both)). But the fact remains that public education is perhaps the single most extensive and widely supported egalitarian program in the history of the United States; whatever its failures, supporting it (in principle, if not in its every detail) surely ought to be an obvious obligation on the part of everyone who professes to believe that God created us to bear one another's burdens, and to make no distinction between the poor and the rich. Were the opposition to this amendment by many conservatives complemented by an earnest effort to redress the injustices of Alabama's tax code, or at least ask themselves how Alabama can do better in educating all its citizens, then I could understand, if not agree, with their actions. But no such effort was made; leaving aside vague concerns about not making Alabama's messed-up government any messier, this boiled down to a simple refusal on the part of a very slight majority of Alabama voters to see themselves as obligated to those who lack the resources or opportunity to either escape from or improve their own public education. I dislike seeing Southerners tarred with the legacy of segregation, but Brummett is not entirely wrong in referring to many Christian schools as "retro tools of resegregation"--spend much time in the South, particularly the Deep South (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana), and you'll see how many churches and social organizations set up "private" academies in the wake of desegregation, and how the continuing impact of those admittedly often excellent religious schools warps (and depletes) the funding and administrative resources of the local school districts which remain to take care of that portion of the population left behind.

Conservatives who try to wave away talk of racism use words, rather than actions, to falsely declare racism a thing of the past

Via Kevin Drum, here is some noteworthy commentary (from May 04) at Legal Fiction in the context of Brown v. Board of Education (bold text is my emphasis). The point he makes is very important - declaring racism illegal allows people to claim the problem is solved, even if they do little to actually implement the correction to the problem (actions as opposed to mere words). 

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education – the landmark Supreme Court case ruling that “separate but equal” education was unconstitutional. In the popular mind, Brown is one of America’s triumphs – a long overdue recognition of equality by the nation’s highest judicial body. In my opinion, it’s not only the most overrated decision in the Court’s history, it’s actually become an impediment to integration. I have three fundamental problems with Brown: (1) its effect is overrated; (2) it gives the wrong people credit for desegregating American schools; and (3) it is now an obstacle to integration.

Before I review each of these problems, I should direct you to an excellent New Yorker article by Cass Sunstein, which outlines many of the critiques of Brown from both the left and the right (and by whites and blacks). Sunstein anticipated some of the arguments I wanted to make, largely because we are both relying heavily upon the work of Professor Michael Klarman in assessing certain aspects of Brown (Klarman has an excellent new book here). Anyway, I’d urge you to read the New Yorker article too.

Overrated

Many people know that Brown declared segregation unconstitutional in 1954. Most people don’t know that, throughout most of the South, it had zero effect. After Brown, integration did occur in the old “border states” such as Kentucky. As Sunstein pointed out (citing Klarman), in the Deep South states (i.e., AL, MS, SC, LA, GA), exactly zero black children attended integrated schools in 1960. Even in 1964, a full decade later, 98% of black children in the South still attended legally segregated schools. True desegregation only happened when Congress got into the act in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act. It took the grotesque abuses of Alabama police officers in Selma and Birmingham to prick the national conscience to demand action. Even then, Senate leaders had to struggle to get enough votes to overcome a Southern filibuster – a filibuster that included a fourteen-hour address by Senator Byrd (D-WV), the current Ranking Minority member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. The bill was also opposed by the godfather of modern conservatism, Barry Goldwater. In fact, the passage of the Civil Rights Act gave rise to the modern Republican South. From 1964 on, Republican leaders such as Goldwater, Nixon, and Gingrich have all used race to gain the Southern white vote, which had been solidly Democratic. But I digress. . .

As Klarman has explained, Brown is also a lesson on the limits of the ability of the judiciary to bring about social change. Integration (or to be more precise, the attempt at integration) only happened after Congress got into the act. [Though I should add that the Court dropped the ball in Brown II when it allowed states to implement integration slowly. I doubt it would have mattered, however, even if the Court demanded immediate compliance, which it didn’t.]

Credit Where Credit’s Due

My second problem with Brown, which follows logically from the first, is that too many people think that nine old white men were responsible for bringing about integration in America. It’s doubly wrong in that, first, the old men’s ruling didn’t even have that much of an effect. But second, the Civil Rights Act (which got integration going) was the culmination of a generations-long grass-roots struggle by civil rights organizations, churches, students, and community activists. For example, just think about all the effort that was needed just to create talented black lawyers in light of the centuries of slavery and discrimination. Thurgood Marshall’s courage and brilliance would never have been known if, decades earlier, a black law school at Howard University had not been founded (and that itself had its own complex sets of causes). The NAACP only got to the Supreme Court because of its intensive, decades-long efforts within the newly emerging black middle class to create a grass-roots network that would help identify favorable cases and donate funds. Post-Brown, the 1964 Civil Rights Act would never have happened without Dr. King’s organization, along with the black-white student alliance of the early 1960s. In short, integration happened as a result of the blood, sweat, and tears of generations of civil rights activists. Obviously, the Court acted bravely to strike down Plessy, but it borders on profane to give the Justices credit for integration to the exclusion of the churches, activists, and other grass-roots networks that created the necessary conditions for integration to take place.

The credit given to the Supreme Court is actually an example of a much more common error that many people make about history and the nature of historical change. Too many people subscribe to an individual-centric version of historical change. For example, many people think that nine Supreme Court Justices ended segregation. In reality, the Supreme Court was merely riding the wave of the much larger social, economic, and demographic forces (Great Migration, World War II, etc.) that led to Brown. The Court’s action was merely an effect of these greater causes – it was not itself a cause. It’s sort of like saying that a raft on an ocean current caused the current to flow the way it did. This individual-centric error is also common today in discussing terrorism. For example, people think Osama caused 9/11, when a whole host of larger causes were actually responsible.

Impediment to Integration

Probably my biggest gripe about Brown is that it is now an impediment to integration. Much of the 50th anniversary articles on Brown have noted that America is re-segregating. CNN has an article that links to Gary Orfield’s Civil Rights Project, which has some wonderful statistics on this issue. Although you can and should read about re-segregation from more knowledgeable people than myself, I want to focus on the issue from a somewhat different angle.

It’s clear that, despite Brown, America remains very segregated. This is largely a result of residential segregation that itself has a myriad of causes including discriminatory housing policies and white flight to suburbs (For a good discussion, see Thomas Sugrue’s history of modern Detroit - "The Origins of the Urban Crisis."). Most importantly, there is an unwillingness to take the steps necessary to fulfill Brown’s legacy. For example, one of the Court’s worst decisions (not quite up there with Dred Scott and Bush v. Gore, but it’s up there) was a case called Milliken in 1974. In response to white flight, school districts had been drawn up to include suburban whites and inner-city minorities. The Court (5-4) struck this down, finding that suburbs that had not contributed to segregation (i.e., non-Southern suburbs) didn’t have to provide a solution. In other words, the suburbs could stay white. My law professor summed it up as follows, "Brown gave whites a reason to leave, and Milliken gave them somewhere to go."

There has been no public outcry to overturn Milliken, for many reasons. But one important reason, in my opinion, is Brown. Brown validates the American education system for guilty whites. Knowing that nine old men on Court struck down Plessy allows America to sleep easier while its school systems become more and more segregated. Brown puts a stamp of approval on a education regime that should not be approved. Brown helps America forget that we have a problem. There will be no solution to segregation until we realize there’s a problem.. Brown, in 2004, makes that recognition more difficult. People can say, “Hey, we solved this problem in 1954. There’s nothing unfair now. It’s all de facto.” De facto - the magic incantation that supposedly makes the problem disappear. [As I hope to explain in a future post, America has never fully come to terms with the reality of slavery and its effects.]

I am – to say the least – outraged by the unwillingness to follow through with Brown. I’m not only mad at content whites, I’m also very mad at black communities in cities such as Louisville and Nashville who have successfully argued in favor of ending desegregation orders. This NYT article takes a fascinating look at the arguments the black communities made. At first glance, they seem reasonable. It’s racist to assume that all-black schools are inferior; they help create a community; etc. But as the article eventually points out, some are seeing that they made a mistake. And they have. If people think that white state legislators (especially in certain states) are going to fork over extra funding for all black, inner-city schools, they’re crazy. (Sorry, I'm still pessimistic about race relations.) One of the whole points of integration was prevent white majorities from defunding black schools. With re-segregation, black communities will lose funding and legal protection. Thurgood Marshall is no doubt cursing in his grave.

Integration works. In some places, though, it’s been implemented unwisely. If that’s the case, then let’s think about new ways to implement it. But let’s not abandon integration and give in to the David Brooks world where everyone only wants to be with their own race for their entire life. I reject that vision of America.

Talking of racism and segregation, I would like to take a moment to recommend a fantastic, must-read book for anyone who wants to really understand race relations and civil rights history in the United States - Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society, by Michael K. Brown et al. This is truly a remarkable, eye-opening book that everyone who wants to understand the truth about race relations should read - not only does it give you some excellent historical perspective, but it provides you all the ammunition you need to refute or debunk the myriad false claims from the right-wing on race issues in America. 

12/2/04_1 <link>
History of Interracial marriage bans in the United States

AmericaBlog reveals something quite important - which points to how racism is both an overt and covert phenomenon in the United States even today - especially in the George-Bush-worshipping South. He has an extract from this Salon.com interview from 2001, and I am going to quote at some length from Salon (with bold green or red text being my emphasis):

In November 2000, after a statewide vote in a special election, Alabama became the last state to overturn a law that was an ugly reminder of America's past, a ban on interracial marriage. The one-time home of George Wallace and Martin Luther King Jr. had held onto the provision for 33 years after the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. Yet as the election revealed -- 40 percent of Alabamans voted to keep the ban -- many people still see the necessity for a law that prohibits blacks and whites from mixing blood.

Werner Sollors, a professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard, was born in Germany and came to the United States in 1978. He has been studying and writing about the history of American interracial relationships since 1986. Sollors is the editor of the recently published "Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law," a fascinating survey of legal decisions, literary criticism and essays by writers and scholars including Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Randall Kennedy. Salon spoke with Sollors by phone from his office in Cambridge about the mixed-race origins -- and multiracial future -- of the nation.

What took Alabama so long to overturn its anti-miscegenation law?

In the years after the Civil War, most of the Southern states made miscegenation bans part of their constitutions. And part of the constitutional provision was that no legislation should ever change them. These were not just ordinary laws that you could modify with a simple majority; they called for very complicated processes and very large majorities to be overturned.

In 1967, the Supreme Court invalidated these anti-miscegenation provisions with the Loving vs. Virginia case, and the Southern states began to adjust. But not right away. In the first 10 or 15 years, there wasn't a lot of activism or popular support for having the laws changed -- no politician wanted to be caught trying to remove those statutes. I think Mississippi did it in 1987 or 1988 -- 20 years after the Loving vs. Virginia case.

Alabama also had a law -- dating back to the 1833 Pace vs. Alabama case -- that mandated different punishment for a black-white couple who "fornicated" or committed adultery than for a same-race couple.

Isn't that amazing? It reads like Orwell. The federal Supreme Court sanctioned the states' right to mete out different punishment for the same offense depending on whether the people involved were of different races or not.

Another piece of legislation you include in the book is Virginia's Act to Preserve Racial Integrity of 1924.

They actually required people who got married to hand in authenticated racial genealogies. To get a marriage license you had to show that you and your partner were not of different races.

But all states weren't like Virginia. South Carolina took into account someone's reputation and place in society when judging whether that person was black.

Yes, South Carolina defined whiteness in a broader way than North Carolina or Virginia or Mississippi did. The assumption is that they wanted to have as many white people as possible in their community.
...
The essays in your book suggest that fear of miscegenation was the driving force behind all racial classifications and, eventually, segregation.

It's really interesting how much effort had to be undertaken by lawmakers in so many states in order to prohibit something that clearly was going on. A whole apparatus of legislation arose to prohibit it, and in a way that runs so much against the grain of the democratic ethos. The free choice of the person you want to marry seems to be a pretty basic human right.

From that angle, it does indeed seem that the core of the fear of racial integration is miscegenation, and that everything else surrounding it is protecting that core. In the 1950s, even in the argument about school and desegregation, there was always the bottom-line question: Do you want your daughter to marry a Negro? President Truman famously asked that of a reporter.
...
It really struck me how American the anti-miscegenation drive is, and that it's specifically black-white relations that are such a problem here. Is there any other country that compares?

On this abstract racial principle of "black" and "white," there really is an exceptional situation in the U.S. In virtually every other country, people who in the U.S. would be considered "people of color" have lived together with white people without such prohibitions.

Even in South Africa, the legal prohibition on interracial marriage was short-lived. At the beginning of the last century, when the first prohibitions on interracial sex were enacted, they only affected black men going to white prostitutes -- that was the beginning of apartheid. Only after World War II was interracial marriage prohibited in South Africa, and that lasted 40 years.

Whereas prohibition of interracial marriage in the United States is pretty much the whole history of the country until 1967. That's a very dramatic difference.  

8/16/04 <link>
Learning from History: The Internment of Japanese Americans during World War II
This is perhaps an opportune moment to revisit the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II - a serious mistake and one of the major stains in FDR's legacy and in America's history. The occasion is the publishing of a truly egregious book by Michelle Malkin (a right-wing columnist with a penchant for serial mendacity), titled "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror". A few prominent bloggers/experts have been pointing out how deeply flawed this book is and some of that commentary is reproduced here.

Since there is a vast amount of commentary on the web, that has systematically shredded this racist, lie-ridden book, I will simply link to an extended extract from David Neiwert of Orcinus, who also links to some of the main critiques. To me this extract is also valuable because it provides a window into what really happened at that time and how we can learn from it. 

I have highlighted key parts from Neiwert's post in bold:

Malkin, in keeping with her history here, has produced an ideological work that discards basic standards of truthfulness, accuracy and fairness -- not to mention basic decency -- all in the pursuit of "proving" a thesis whose factual basis is nearly nonexistent. And in the process, she's attempting not just to revise but to falsify history, just like David Irving and the Holocaust deniers, or Steve Wilkins and the slavery deniers. It is a contemptible enterprise.

In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror is not just a deeply flawed book, it is a deeply dishonest one. As Tim Wu (posting at Lawrence Lessig's blog) observes, this text is a case of Orwellian "Blackwhite":

... or "a willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this." In its advanced form it leads to "the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary."

Michelle Malkin, a journalist, has released a book that is does just this: it defends the eviction and incarceration of more than 70,000 American citizens during World War II. Her book "In Defense of Internment," takes the position that the Government was right to round up the Japanese then, and Arab-Americans now. The mainstream position that the internment was wrong (expressed in Ronald Reagan's apology), Malkin attributes to a "conspiracy."

It is true that, on rare occasion, something everything takes for granted is wrong, like, say, the Bohr model of the Atom. But more often, moral sense is restored by rebuttal --- we remember that black is, in fact, black, and regain our senses. This time sense is restored by this week's must-read Volokh Conspiracy which features two historians who destroy the book in every aspect. Malkin, it turns out, is more Ahmad Chalabi than Albert Einstein.

The first of those two historians is Eric Muller of Is That Legal? and the author of Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II, who was guest-blogging at Volokh. He wound up producing seven posts of his own material there:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Joining Muller in the fusillade was Greg Robinson, a highly regarded historian and author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, who contributed four posts' worth of rebuttal as well:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Over at his own blog, Muller continued the argument, responding to Malkin's tepid rejoinders at her blog. These exchanges produced five more posts from Muller:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

And two more from Robinson:

Part 6
Part 7

These posts generally cover most of the flaws in Malkin's text -- as well as her responses to the criticism -- thoroughly and accurately. Indeed, they were so thorough that, having read Malkin's book, there isn't a great deal to add. Certainly, it isn't necessary; Muller and Robinson's critique is devastating and nearly complete. My comments, as such, are only intended to be complementary.

My only difference with their responses (and it is a slight one) lies in how civilized and polite both of them were in responding to Malkin. My own experience in reading Malkin's tome was one of continuously rising outrage at the utter mendaciousness and viciousness of spirit it reveals in the author and those who chose to publish this tract. I have no inclination to remain so constrained.

Undoubtedly, my response is due to having come to know, on a personal level, many of the 25 or so Nisei internees -- and the dozen of their Caucasian contemporaries -- I interviewed in the process of compiling and writing Strawberry Days: The Rise and Fall of a Japanese American Community (due out next spring from Palgrave/Macmillan). I consider many of them my friends (though in the 14 years since I began interviewing them, many of them have passed away), and I still feel somewhat keenly the monstrousness of the injustice they endured. For a self-aggrandizing hack like Malkin to trivialize it as an "inconvenience" -- as she does throughout her text -- frankly makes my blood boil. The callousness of her dishonesty puts her beneath contempt. There is a moral component to Malkin's misbegotten enterprise that cannot and should not be overlooked.

The trifecta

The giveaway, really, comes on the book's flyleaf, which announces:

Everything you've been taught about the World War II 'internment camps' is wrong:
-- They were not created primarily because of racism or wartime hysteria
-- They did not target only those of Japanese descent
-- They were not Nazi-style death camps.

Malkin largely reproduces this argument in the Introduction, and she deploys it throughout; yet a relatively simple examination of these three core points makes clear the fundamental dishonesty of her argument. Malkin -- as is her wont -- examines only a narrow spectrum of facts, embroiders them with speculation and non-facts, and presents them as reality.

Malkin's handling of "facts" throughout her text follows this trend. She refers, for instance, to "thousands of Nisei in the Japanese army," when in fact the American-born Japanese to which she refers actually were Kibei, or returned nationals. She emphasizes frequently that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who opposed the internment, "was not privy to the MAGIC cables" -- and falsely reports that Hoover "occasionally received MAGIC-derived information about Japan's espionage networks attributed to 'highly reliable sources.'" In point of fact, as Greg Robinson points out, Hoover actually received regular, detailed summaries of the MAGIC intelligence and was aware not only of their contents but their source. She also neglects to note that the Office of Naval Intelligence -- which gathered the entirety of the MAGIC cables -- also opposed the internment.

The second point of the three above ("They did not target only those of Japanese descent") is a crystalline example of Malkin's approach to "factuality". She's quite right in pointing out that Italian and German nationals were also placed in internment camps during the war. What is omitted from this point is the fact that only Japanese American citizens were rounded up en masse in what Malkin generically refers to as the "internment" -- which was not the case, of course, for Italian American or German American citizens. But this omission points to an underlying confusion between American citizens and foreign nationals which so proliferates Malkin's text that one must reach the conclusion that it is intentional.

'Ethnic Japanese'

The core of Malkin's thesis, in fact, relies on a rhetorical trick that is rooted in precisely this confusion -- namely, her frequent use of the phrase "ethnic Japanese" to describe her subjects. As Greg Robinson has already observed, this phrase is so broad that allows Malkin to lump American-born citizens in with Japanese-born spies. Which is precisely what she does: After repeatedly referring to American-born Nisei as "ethnic Japanese", she uses the same phrase to describe Japanese spies and operatives working from inside consulates. "Ethnic Japanese" is Malkin's handy umbrella term for erasing the differences between enemy nationals and American citizens. (I haven't been able to count up every use, but my guesstimate is that the phrase appears in her text roughly 100 times.)

This was, of course, exactly the confusion that prevailed in 1942 and which was deliberately spread by racists and hatemongers in arguing for incarcerating Nisei citizens, summed up in the popular phrase, "A Jap's a Jap."

You can see how Malkin dishonestly manipulates the term, for instance, her attempt to rebut the point I raised previously regarding the contents of the MAGIC cables -- namely, that the cables consistently showed that Japan actually distrusted the Nisei and preferred, for a number of reasons, to recruit Caucasians and blacks to do their spy work:

The MAGIC messages do indeed provide definitive evidence that Japan sought or used ethnic non-Japanese for espionage activities -- a fact that was well known to U.S. intelligence agencies at the time. But MAGIC also showed diplomats discussing Nisei and Issei agents by name, asserting that "absolutely reliable" ethnic Japanese agents [ed.: these were spies from Japan working for the consulate] were monitoring shipments of war materiel and airplanes in Southern California, and reporting that "our second generation draftees in the U.S. Army" were collecting intelligence on matters pertaining to the U.S. military. There was no mention of "absolutely reliable" white or black agents; nor was there any mention of white or black agents in the U.S. military.

This is, of course, a lot of thrashing about logically in hopes of evading the main point, which is that if we were to follow Malkin's logic and use ethnic profiling for those most likely to be committing espionage and sabotage for Japan, based on the MAGIC cables, Caucasians and blacks would have been the first groups chosen. Malkin never does get around to addressing this issue.

This is, by extension, one of the main logical flaws in Malkin's larger argument in favor of racial profiling. The reality is that -- as I've argued previously (several times) -- over the past 10 years, there have been many more acts of real terrorism planned and committed on American soil by white fundamentalist Christians than by radical Islamists of Arab extraction. If we're going to commit to racial profiling based on known terrorist threats, then whites, once again, would be the first logical choice.

Trashing the scholars

This flaw characterizes the entirety of Malkin's approach to history: Whatever evidence that exists which might undermine or even militate against her conclusions is hastily and summarily discarded. This includes nearly the entirety of the past half-century's scholarly work regarding the internment, which Malkin airily disregards as the product of a liberal acadame. So, rather than engage their evidence, Malkin simply dismisses a whole host of serious historians with the kind of smear-laden rhetoric we've grown accustomed to from the likes of Fox News (where Malkin, of course, is a contributing pundit).

Tetsuden Kashima is dismissed as using "recycled" and "crafty" arguments. Malkin complains that Kashima only devotes a brief section to the MAGIC cables; but ignores the fact that Kashima's work is based on a thorough review of all the available prewar intelligence, of which MAGIC was only a small and relatively insignificant part. She dismisses Greg Robinson on similarly shaky grounds. Eric Muller is relegated to a footnote, and likewise ignored because he evidently was too sympathetic to Nisei draft resisters.

Even historical figures who provided counter-evidence are trashed. Hoover is accused of being motivated by turf consciousness. Curtis Munson, who conducted a prewar investigation of the Japanese American communities and mostly exonerated them, is smeared as a "blowhard."

Perhaps her worst treatment is reserved for a real lion among historians of the internment, Roger Daniels, whose works are widely considered landmarks in Asian American studies. Malkin attacks Daniels in the process of trying to prove that critics of the internment -- a la the third of the bullet points on her flyleaf -- regularly compare the Japanese American "relocation centers" to Nazi death camps. She cites (on p. 96 and on her Web site) a passage from Daniels' Prisoners Without Trial as proof of this:

The American camps were not death camps, but they were surrounded by barbed wire and by troops whose guns were pointed at the inmates. Almost all the 1,862 Japanese Americans who died in them died of natural causes, and they were outnumbered by the 5,918 American citizens who were born in the concentration camps. But the few Japanese Americans who were killed "accidentally" by their American guards were just as dead as the millions of Jews and others who were killed deliberately by their German, Soviet, or Japanese guards.

Daniels' meaning -- Malkin's purposeful misreading notwithstanding -- could not be more clear: No, the Japanese camps were not death camps. But they were not all that different from the Nazi camps, either.

They were, in fact, concentration camps, no matter how much Malkin may dislike the term. The American government herded entire populations of people by the thousands into barbed-wire enclosures with the guns pointed inward, and forced them to dwell in degrading and miserable circumstances -- tarpaper shacks with no privacy, unclean living conditions, horrendous climates in godforsaken locales -- for years on end.

The Nazi camps are properly called "death camps," because that was their purpose. A "concentration camp," in contrast, is primarily for the purpose of incarcerating large numbers of people. That certainly describes the Japanese American camps as well. If confusion exists, it's mostly in the minds of sloppy thinkers like Malkin.

More to the point, there is not a single serious scholar extant who argues anywhere that the Japanese American camps "were Nazi-style death camps." Malkin can't cite any, either, resorting instead to cites like Daniels' above. She later explained this at her Web site thus:

No, I did not quote anyone making a specific comparison of “Manzanar to Auschwitz” or "Manzanar to Buchenwald." The analogizers are a little more slippery than that. Those who use modern "concentration camp" rhetoric when discussing the evacuation/relocation/internment measures meekly disavow a direct moral equivalence between relocation camps and death camps, but then proceed to indulge in the offensive moral equivalence that they say they reject.

Of course, she fails to find any instances in which such equivalence appears -- the Daniels cite being her foremost example. And as anyone can see, his meaning cannot be more straightforward: the fact that they were not death camps does not exonerate the government morally.

Of course, Malkin's whole purpose is exactly such exoneration. But the best she can hope for is vindication by propaganda; for her entire method is to narrowly select evidence and embroider it, while distorting and ignoring serious scholarship. It will never be taken seriously outside the realm of blinkered conservative-movement dogmatists -- a bloc of the population, unfortunately, that appears to be growing.

It's about racism

But Daniels is right. The American concentration camps, relatively benign as they were, represent the darkest side of the national psyche. Because it is ultimately impossible to explain the existence of the camps without coming face to face with racism and bigotry in its ugliest guises.

And it is in dealing with this aspect of the matter that Malkin's work -- in attempting to claim that the internment was "not created primarily because of racism or wartime hysteria" -- is at its shoddiest, both scholastically and morally.

I have posted on several occasions -- notably here here and here -- on the many cultural antecedents that led to the internment, particularly the half-century's worth of anti-Japanese agitation that laid the foundation for white Americans' paranoid attitudes toward Japanese Americans, including the belief that they were innately loyal to Japan and were secretly in cahoots with a plot to invade the Pacific Coast. I've also discussed the wartime hysteria that was unmistakably a direct product of this bigotry (as well as how it's manifesting itself again today).

The event that truly seals the case for racism as an ineluctable and decisive factor in the internment, in fact, is one that Eric Muller explores in depth with Free to Die For Your Country: the decision by the Western governors (notably Idaho's Chase Clark) to refuse to accept the "relocation centers" in their territories unless the government could guarantee that the camp residents would remain confined within the camps and under armed guard at all times. Their pronouncements in this matter, of course, were rife with the whole litany of "Yellow Peril" stereotypes and the white-supremacist beliefs that were commonplace back then (insisting, for instance, that the Japanese and whites could never successfully intermingle socially or sexually).

Prior to that point, War Relocation Authority officials held out the vague hope that the "relocation centers" could truly be just that -- a stopping-off point for Japanese Americans en route to new lives elsewhere in the interior. Instead, the decision transformed the enterprise into one of forced and prolonged confinement, and transformed the term "relocation center" into bureaucratese for "concentration camp."

And of course, that same bigotry was a constant throughout the entire internment experience, including the return at war's end. Malkin makes a great show of explaining how the conditions at the camps were "uncomfortable" but in the end only an "inconvenience."

Yet what she omits from this picture is another harsh reality: the camps were only run humanely because of wisdom and restraint by the people running them (especially WRA directors Milton Eisenhower and Dillon Myer). Outside the camps, there was considerable political agitation precisely because conditions in the camps weren't harsh enough. If many Americans had had their way, we'd have had little ground for boasting that the conditions in our camps were superior.

I describe this in Chapter 6 of Strawberry Days. Among other things, the chapter previously features an anecdote about one of my interviewees -- a 442nd Battallion veteran named Joe Matsuzawa -- visiting some friends in rural Bellevue in his uniform. (Matsuzawa, who died only two years ago, was in between actions, having been part of the Lost Battalion rescue in the Vosges; he was to return to action in the Po Valley campaign in Italy.) Evidently his visit raised eyebrows around town, and wound up playing a role in a mini-panic ("The Japs are coming back!") that followed in Bellevue.

It's an amusing story, really, but there was a serious side to all this:

The absence of the Japanese from their longtime communities during the war had not necessarily made hearts grow fonder for them. Indeed, though the frequency of the hysteria was certainly lessened by the fact the Japanese were no longer present and visible, the war-born hatred of all things "Jap" had transformed them into demon-things in the popular mind, and the dearth of daily, real-life examples to the contrary only made things worse.

Headlines reporting on the war front regularly referred to the enemy "Japs" -- as did headlines reporting on events in the WRA's relocation centers. Consistent with popular sentiments prior to the war and during the evacuation debate, letters to the editor as well as political pronouncements made no differentiation between the citizens who once had been their neighbors and the foreign enemies their sons were fighting.

Washington's congressional delegation had a particular propensity in this regard. In addition to the damage already wrought by Democratic Senator Mon Wallgren, who had chaired one of the early congressional committees recommending evacuation in 1942, then-Rep. Henry Jackson, a respected Everett Democrat, took up the anti-Japanese cause with particular relish for the war's duration. Not only was he an enthusiast of the evacuation, he was a stern advocate of the campaign to keep the Japanese from returning to the Pacific Coast—both during and after the war. He was often seconded in this regard by his Seattle colleague, then-Rep. Warren Magnuson, who had a habit of raising groundless alarms about an imminent invasion of the Pacific Coast by the Japanese.

But it was otherwise anonymous men like Joe Matsuzawa who spurred Jackson to headline-grabbing action. In May 1943, Jackson began protesting in Congress against the Army's policy of allowing Japanese-American soldiers to visit the Pacific Coast on furlough; apparently, wearing an American uniform wasn't assurance enough of Nisei loyalty. Jackson sponsored a resolution calling for a complete investigation of "the Japanese situation," and his congressional colleagues were critical of the use of any Japanese-Americans in combat. Rep. John Costello of California sounded the familiar refrain that "you can't tell a good Jap from a bad Jap."

Jackson penned a speech that he never delivered on the subject, but it was clear he was opposed to Japanese-Americans ever returning to his home district:

What is to be the eventual disposition of the Japanese alien and native ... is the second aspect of this problem of the Pacific. Are we to return them to their former homes and businesses on the Pacific Coast to face the active antagonism of their neighbors? Shall they again, as happened in World War I, compete economically for jobs and businesses with returning war veterans?

The House Committee On Un-American Activities chaired by Texas Democrat Martin Dies also joined in on the action, partly at the urging of Jackson and others. A New Jersey Republican named J. Parnell Thomas flew out to Los Angeles and, without visiting a camp, declared that the WRA was pampering the internees. Thomas also demanded the agency halt its policy of "releasing disloyal Japs" -- that is, end its policy of relocating evacuees in jobs outside the camps.
...
The interest groups chimed in as well. The American Legion joined in on the rising anti-Japanese sentiments with its denunciation of the WRA’s policy of "coddling the Japs," and longtime anti-Asian groups like the Native Sons of the Golden West (whose demeanor historically suggested vigilantism) became active in agitating alongside newer groups like the Pearl Harbor League. Some of these groups distributed signs proclaiming: "We don't want any Japs back here -- EVER!" These signs gained prominence in places like Kent, in the heart of what had been a thriving Japanese community in the White River Valley; the town's mayor, a barber, displayed the warning prominently in his shop, and earned a Time magazine appearance for it, pointing at the sign.

One of Michelle Malkin's major themes -- her chief claim on the flyleaf -- is that racism was an insignificant factor in the decisions that led to the internment. (Her trump card is the MAGIC cables, the significance of which Robinson thoroughly debunks; but even then it seems to have eluded her that racism might have played a role in how government officials interpreted that intelligence.) And as you can see, there is an abundance -- an overabundance, really -- of evidence that racism played a decisive role in the internment drama at nearly every step of its unfolding.

How does Malkin deal with this evidence? By ignoring it, of course.

As Muller points out:

What does Michelle offer to discredit the copiously documented influences of nativism, economic jealousy, racial stereotyping, rumor-mongering, and hysteria on the series of decisions that constituted the program Michelle defends?

Nothing. Literally not one single thing. Not a sentence.

Greg Robinson likewise sums up her response to this criticism:

[I]n response to my point that Malkin does not address the role of the long history of anti-Japanese American racism on the West Coast in events, she responds dismissively:

"As I explain above and in the book, there have been hundreds of books and dissertations on this topic. Why repeat what has already been said hundreds of times?"

It is ridiculous to say, as the author does, that because there is a preponderance of evidence of hysteria racial hostility towards Japanese Americans on the West Coast -- and that the pressure from West Coast political figures and commercial groups in Washington pushed the Executive branch in important ways -- that this need not be factored into the decision. It is for this reason that I stated, and I repeat, that Malkin's work is based in bad faith.

The case against 'racial profiling'

If Malkin hoped, in the end, to justify racial profiling by "debunking" the broadly accepted history of the internment, she failed miserably. Indeed, the internment episode remains stark evidence of the utter failure of racial profiling as a policy. The internment of Japanese Americans was, as I've noted previously, an unfathomable waste that is unlikely to have prevented a single case of sabotage or espionage:

It demonstrably undermined the war effort, and proved not to be worth a penny of the billions of taxpayer dollars it wasted.

In addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars the actual enterprise itself cost -- rounding up 120,000 people by rail car and shipping them first to "assembly centers"; building ten "relocation centers" in remote locales, and then shipping the evacuees into them; maintaining and administering the centers for another three years, which included overseeing programs to help internees find work outside the camps; feeding the entire population of internees during this time; and then helping them to relocate near their former homes once the camps closed -- there were millions more in initial reparations costs, and then hundreds of millions more in the later reparations approved by Congress in the 1980s.

At the same time, the Japanese population on the Pacific Coast actually was responsible for the production of nearly half of all the fresh produce that was grown for consumption on the Coast (the Japanese also shipped out a great deal of produce to the Midwest and East). Indeed, Nikkei farms held virtual monopolies in a number of crops, including peas, green beans and strawberries, and a nearly 80 percent of the lettuce market.

When these farmers were rounded up and interned, a handful of enterprising whites decided to try running their farms with the hope of making a killing from the crops. But labor was so short that not one of these enterprises lasted beyond about five weeks, and none of them had a successful harvest. Nearly all of these farms lay fallow for the next four years. This major loss of production of fresh vegetables clearly harmed the national war effort, and played an important role in triggering the rationing that came during the war years.

Would racial profiling of Muslims and Arabs really gain us anything, security-wise, in the long run? And would any of it be worth the price?

Michelle Malkin would have us think it would. Her case, though, is built on faulty method, faulty logic, faulty "facts", and an obviously faulty moral compass. Her book is best left shunned, untouched, and eventually, ignored.

Unfortunately, it will not be, at least as far as the "conservative movement" is concerned. Even if utterly discredited, Malkin's meme will continue to recirculate among the Fox News right, as well as more extremist elements. At some point it will become "received wisdom" as a talking point for right-wing pundits and radio talk-show hosts.

It is all, of course, yet another step -- following, you might say, in the footsteps of Ann Coulter's defense of McCarthyism in her screed Treason -- in the growing radicalization of the American mainstream right. I've written about this trend previously, and I hope to return to the subject again soon.

6/25/03 <link>
The Supreme Court Affirmative Action decision
FindLaw's Michael Dorf has a very good summary of the recent Supreme Court decisions on the University of Michigan's Affirmative Action programs - both Undergraduate and Law School. I feature here some of his comments on the implications of these decisions [bold green text is my emphasis], with my comments included in brown font:

This week, the Supreme Court upheld the use of race in admissions decisions by the University of Michigan Law School. But at the same time, it struck down as unconstitutional that same university's affirmative action program at the undergraduate level...

Some Background: The Bakke Case and Its Legacy
The famous 1978 case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke was the precedent on affirmative action in education with which the Court had to reckon when it decided the Michigan cases.
There, the Court invalidated the U.C. Davis Medical School's admission program--under which sixteen out of one hundred seats in the entering class were reserved for members of designated racial and ethnic minority groups. But it also reversed an injunction by the California Supreme Court that had barred all use of race in university admissions.
That led to an important question: If universities could not set aside specific seats for minorities as U.C. Davis had done, in what ways could they use race in admissions?
According to Justice Powell, who announced the Court's judgment in Bakke, universities could take account of race as a "plus factor" in evaluating a candidate as an individual whole. However, they could not insulate minority candidates from competition with non-minority candidates, as U.C. Davis had done by designating special minority seats.
Justice Powell wrote only on his own behalf in Bakke; no other Justice joined his opinion. As a result, over the succeeding twenty-five years, there has been some uncertainty over whether his views were binding.
Most lower courts treated them as dispositive. However, in recent years a number of courts had ruled that Powell's views either were never controlling, or if they were, that they had been superseded by subsequent Supreme Court cases. Nevertheless, there has been general agreement, among universities and lower courts, as to what Powell's opinion means if it is binding: numerical quotas are forbidden; flexible targets based on pluses are permissible. 

This interpretation of Powell's opinion seems pretty reasonable and fair as a legal standard.

The Reason the Undergraduate Program Was Struck Down: Quantification
In this week's University of Michigan cases the Court, somewhat surprisingly, adopted Justice Powell's views, including the plus/quota distinction. In the law school case, the Court found no quota. Each year, the law school sought a "critical mass" of disadvantaged minority students - instructing admissions officers that, in considering each file in its entirety, they should be on the lookout for generally qualified applicants who would contribute to that critical mass. The plaintiffs demonstrated that, at the law school, other things being equal, disadvantaged minority applicants had a substantially better chance of being admitted than non-minority students. But that fact, the majority said, was consistent with a permissible plus-factor approach.
In the college case, the Court disapproved of the fact that admissions officers gave the same twenty-point bonus to all disadvantaged minority applicants. To process its large volume of applications, the undergraduate admissions office assigned points for various categories--such as high school grades, test scores, athletic prowess, and membership in a disadvantaged minority group. That's not exactly a quota in the sense that Bakke condemned. No seats were designated as minority-only. And all applicants competed with one another, albeit on not exactly the same terms: a non-minority applicant who garnered twenty-one extra points elsewhere in the application could gain a seat in the class in preference to a minority applicant.
Nevertheless, the rigidity of the numerical approach, six Justices thought, denied the kind of individualized treatment that Powell's opinion in Bakke required of a permissible affirmative action program.

This is clearly an idiotic decision by the majority. Using points for a variety of characteristics, talents or disadvantages that applicants have is clearly not a quota system and allows colleges to select a student body by promoting various attributes.

Does Focusing On Quantification Make Sense?
The result: attorneys for universities across the country will be advising their admissions offices that they can continue to use race as a plus factor. But what they must not do is to expressly quantify it. Linguistic benchmarks such as "critical mass" are acceptable. Point systems that give extra points for race are not. Is that a sensible distinction? On the surface, it appears not to be...
The evidence in the law school case showed that disadvantaged minority applicants received a substantial boost--they were predictably more likely, due to race, to get the fat envelope. Yet, under the logic of the Court's rulings, even a very small but fixed numerical constant boost for minority status is worse than a much larger flexible boost that is never formally quantified by admissions personnel.
Furthermore, as Justices Souter and Ginsburg argued in Gratz, a fixed numerical score for racial minority status has the virtue of honesty. These two Justices thought the law school program permissible. But interestingly, they actually preferred quantification, given the choice: If one were to distinguish between giving varying and fixed weights to race as a factor in admissions, they thought fixed weights are more objective and transparent, and thus a better idea.
Nonetheless, there is something to be said for the idea that calculations which are permissible if performed implicitly are impermissible when made explicit. For example, expressly putting a dollar figure on human life seems to many far worse than taking actions that are in some sense equivalent to doing so.

Quantification by making the rationale of decisions explicit clearly increases objectivity and visibility - and reduces the likelihood of arbitrariness and pay-for-play scenarios. This move away from quantification is unsound.

Is Diversity a "Compelling Interest"? Six or Seven Justices Say Yes.
There is another issue that has dogged the lower courts since Bakke: Do universities serve a "compelling interest" (the kind of interest necessary to permit a racial classification) when they attempt to assemble a racially diverse student body? And if so, what exactly is that interest?
In Bakke, Justice Powell said they did--and the interest was the First Amendment interest in promoting the expression of diverse viewpoints on campus. He reasoned that such expression in a university was part of academic freedom; that academic freedom is itself a constitutional value under the First Amendment; that viewpoint and background are connected (though not perfectly so); and thus that universities could use race as one factor among others in their efforts to compose a diverse student body. But controversy remained as to whether Powell's individual view was also that of the current Court.
In her majority opinion on the law school's program, Justice O'Connor formally and unambiguously endorsed Justice Powell's position. Justice Kennedy also agreed that diversity is a compelling interest. (Kennedy thought the law school program was not properly limited, but he indicated that he would be willing to uphold a different sort of affirmative action program, favorably citing an amicus brief filed by Amherst College and others.)
Meanwhile, even Chief Justice Rehnquist at least did not deny that diversity is a compelling interest. Instead, he simply acknowledged that the Court had deemed diversity compelling, and cagily declined to offer his own view.
That left only Justices Scalia and Thomas expressing the view that diversity is not a compelling interest. Six Justices--possibly seven, since Rehnquist did not touch on the question - believe it is.

Excluding the known extremists Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist, it is at least reassuring to know that the Supreme Court still has some respect for the need for diversity in public life.

Defining Diversity Even More Broadly Than Justice Powell Did In Bakke
Perhaps most intriguingly, Justice O'Connor advanced a conception of diversity that is more encompassing than the view taken by Justice Powell in Bakke.
To see why, it's necessary to first explore the subtleties of Justice Powell's opinion. At the same time that he embraced an interest in diversity, Justice Powell also rejected other arguments U.C. Davis made to justify its program. Specifically, Davis argued that the medical school had an interest in remedying societal discrimination. Justice Powell did not deny that societal discrimination contributed to the disparities in numerical measures of qualifications. But he thought it unfair for non-minority applicants (who were not themselves responsible for societal discrimination) to have to bear the cost of the remedy, by foregoing the chance to compete for specific seats in the medical school class.
U.C. Davis also argued that it had an interest in educating minority doctors who presumably would be more likely to practice in under-served minority communities. But Justice Powell found insufficient evidence that this supposition was true.
Broadly speaking, Powell's Bakke opinion had come to be read for the proposition that a voluntary university affirmative action program cannot be justified by the external impact of the university's graduates. Rather, it must be sustained on the basis of the internal effect of the student body's composition.
That may not have been quite what Powell originally meant. In any case, this contention was easily mocked: Was the real reason for affirmative action, critics asked, so that the minority students could enhance the educational experience of the non-minority students? Were minority students merely there to provide a kind of cultural exchange program for the non-minorities?
To her credit, Justice O'Connor rejected the requirement that an affirmative action program be justified only by its internal effects. Citing briefs filed by business leaders, retired military officers and educators, she explained that universities could rightly be concerned about the racial composition of the highest ranks of business, the armed services, and government in composing their classes. Education, she recognized, is not an end in itself; it is preparation for the future, and universities could consider that fact.

This is worth applauding for its common sense.

...

Is Affirmative Action Forever? No, Just Another Twenty-Five Years.
Finally, the court's opinions offered one odd twist on prior law. The Court had previously made clear that affirmative action could not last forever. But now some believe--incorrectly, in my view--that it has added a specific sunset provision to such programs.
Justice O'Connor noted that the number of minority applicants with high grades and scores had increased in the twenty-five years since Bakke was decided. And she predicted that in another twenty-five years, racial preferences would no longer be necessary.
Legislatures occasionally include sunset provisions in the statutes they enact, but it is highly unusual for a court to do so. Moreover, the period of twenty-five years is completely arbitrary, seemingly drawn only from the fact that Grutter and Gratz came to the Court twenty-five years after Bakke. Accordingly, Justice O'Connor probably meant her reference to what would happen in twenty-five years as an aspiration or a rhetorical point.
Nonetheless, the dissenters took her to be expressing a rule of law: When racial preferences are no longer necessary, they will be unconstitutional (because they will not be "narrowly tailored" as required by strict scrutiny), and that will happen in twenty-five years.
Only time will tell if the Court truly believes that affirmative actions program have a twenty-five-year sunset provision. In the dissenters' opinion, the Michigan rulings will expire on June 23, 2028. We'll have to wait and see.

Obviously, setting arbitrary sunsets has become a game of the GOP of late and it is distressing that Justice O'Connor had to express this opinion.

2/16/03 <link>
President Bush's appointees and their past history on civil rights (among other things)
Check out the eRiposte survey.

ASIDE: A quick take on the modern GOP on civil rights - is covered here.

1/21/03 <link> (UPDATED SINCE)
The Whitewashing of Affirmative Action - by the White House
So much nonsense has been perpetrated in the name of pushing "diversity" that it is time to review what the facts are (bold text is eRiposte emphasis).

President Bush's claimed position

Mr. Bush claimed in his speech that (bold is our emphasis):
I strongly support diversity of all kinds, including racial diversity, in higher education, but the method used by the University of Michigan to achieve this important goal is fundamentally flawed. At their core, the Michigan policies amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students based solely on their race. So tomorrow my administration will file a brief with the court arguing that the University of Michigan's admissions policies, which award students a significant number of extra points based solely on their race and establishes numerical targets for incoming minority students, are unconstitutional...
In the program under review by the Supreme Court, the University of Michigan has established an admissions process based on race. At the undergraduate level, African-American students and some Hispanic students and Native American students receive 20 points out of a maximum of 150, not because of any academic achievement or life experience, but solely because they are African-American, Hispanic or Native American. To put this in perspective, a perfect SAT score is worth only 12 points in the Michigan system. Students who accumulate 100 points are generally admitted, so those 20 points that are awarded solely based on race are often the decisive factor. At the Law School some minority students are admitted to meet percentage targets, while other applicants with higher grades and better scores are passed over.

THE TRUTH

President of U. Mich:

Mary Sue Coleman says the university has a "complex" admissions process that "takes many factors into the account," not just race. Coleman says the university does not have and never has had quotas or numerical targets in either its undergraduate or law school admissions programs.

Derrick Jackson in the Boston Globe (through Atrios):

Bush blasted Michigan's program, which awards bonus points to African-American, Native American, and some Latino students in order to account for historical disadvantages. Bush called it a ''quota system.'' He said: ''students are being selected or rejected primarily on the color of their skin. The motivation for such an admissions policy may be very good, but its result is discrimination, and that discrimination is wrong.'' Bush lied. Yes, Michigan gives bonus points. But the school has no quotas. The school, even with affirmative action, is not yet close to racial parity. The state's population is 14 percent African-American. The undergraduate college and the law school, the two targets of the lawsuit, are currently 8.4 percent and 6.7 percent African-American. The law school says that without affirmative action the percentage of African-Americans and Latinos would drop to 4 percent each. At best, affirmative action was keeping Michigan, one of the nation's top public universities, from becoming lily white. Bush's claim that students of color are being selected ''primarily on the color of their skin'' is as divisive as the explosive 1990 Jesse Helms ad that said, ''You needed that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.'' By using the word ''primarily,'' Bush implies that illiterate applicants of color are trampling over white geniuses....Bush decries bonus points for black people, but in the two years of his presidency he has said nothing about bonus points for white people. Just this week The Wall Street Journal did a feature on ''legacy'' admissions to colleges, which disproportionately benefit the children of alumni. The acceptance rate of children of alumni - alumni who are assumed to be more likely to give money to colleges where their children are accepted - towers over other applicants. The rate of acceptance of ''legacies'' is twice as high as it is for other students at Penn, three times as high at Princeton, and four times as high at Harvard.
Bush has said nothing about bonus points for white people in job interviews. Studies show over and over again that African-Americans and Latinos with the same resume as white applicants are rejected far more often than white applicants. The silent bonus point system is so pernicious that a recent study by researchers at the University of Chicago and MIT found that job applicants in Chicago and Boston with ''white sounding'' names received 50 percent more callbacks than ''black sounding'' names. Under the white bonus point system, too many people of color are rejected primarily on the color of their skin. By standing with three white women to take bonus points away from black and brown folks while white Americans continue to collect points for simply being white, the party of Lincoln has come a long way in civil rights. Lincoln was called the Great Emancipator. President Bush has become the Great Eraser...."

Joe Conason on Bush's legacy admission as stated by Bush in his autobiography

[Bush] "...I was a solid student but not a top student. I did well in the courses I liked, such as history, math, and Spanish, and not so well in others, such as English. When I met with the dean to discuss different college options, I told him I would like to go to Yale. Many in my family had gone there; they loved the school and their love was infectious. On several weekends I had visited Yale to watch football games, and I was impressed by the campus. The dean tactfully suggested that I might think of other universities as well. I told him that if I did not get into Yale, there was only one other option for me, the University of Texas. I was not sure what would happen. I looked forward to either alternative. It was chaos in the mailroom the day the college acceptance letters arrived. The fat envelopes brought good news, the skinny ones rejection letters. I received a fat envelope from Yale and so did thirty-eight of my Andover classmates."
...
Why was the Andover dean so concerned about Bush's prospects at Yale? Perhaps he glanced at Bush's SAT score of 1206, above average but nowhere near the level needed for acceptance at an Ivy League school. (According to Cecil Adams, who writes the Straight Dope column, Bush's score was almost 200 points lower than the average for Yale freshmen circa 1970.) Bush's middling SAT score, incidentally, is roughly the same as that for most of the black students admitted to selective schools in a major Mellon Foundation study that began in 1976.
...
Back then, "affirmative action" for the sons and daughters of alumni was a major factor in admissions at Yale and other selective colleges -- and continues to be an important factor today. The children of alumni are about twice as likely to be accepted by Yale as other applicants. Whether their qualifications are twice as good, nobody seems to know. In the class of 2004, according to this interesting essay in the Yale Herald, the largest identifiable group of matriculates is from "families with some kind of Yale affiliation."

eRiposte Note: Additional information on legacy admission percentages is cited here.

CalPundit catalogs U. Mich. 's actual policy:

This, of course, is exactly what the University of Michigan does: it considers race as one factor out of many. Here's the whole dreary list:

• 80 points — GPA

• 12 points — SAT scores

• 10 points — Academic strength of high school

• 8 points — Strength of high school curriculum

• 10 points — Michigan resident

• 6 points — Underrepresented Michigan county

• 2 points — Underrepresented state

• 4 points — Legacy admission

• 3 points — Essay

• 5 points — Personal achievement

• 5 points — Leadership and service

• 20 points — Socio-economic disadvantage

• 20 points — Underrepresented racial-ethnic minority

• 5 points — Men in nursing

• 20 points — Scholarship athlete

• 20 points — Provost's discretion

As the University of Michigan puts it:

While students with very low grades and test scores typically are denied admission, and students with very high grades and test scores typically are admitted, most applicants do not fall into either of these categories. For that large pool of qualified applicants in the middle range, many other factors -- including, but not limited to, race and ethnicity -- can make a difference in admissions decisions.

So: it's not a quota. It doesn't allow unqualified kids to enter. And race is not a "deciding factor" — at least no more so than any of the other 15 factors on the list.

Daily Howler on the 20/12 points spin: (for updates see 1, 2):

Pinkerton’s central claim is blatantly false; UM’s admissions policy does not “award more points for your skin color than for your academic achievement” (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/17/03). In point of fact, it’s not even close; the UM policy awards 110 points for academic achievement compared to 20 points for race (or for socioeconomic disadvantage among white students). UM applicants can get 80 points for their grade point average; 12 more points for their SATs; 10 points if they went to a rigorous high school; and 8 points if they took advanced courses. Should Michigan dish that 20 for race? That remains a matter of judgment. But Pinkerton’s statement was howlingly false. And needless to say, neither of his hapless hosts corrected his blatant misstatement. Assuming that Pinkerton’s statement was made in good faith, where did he get his gross misconception? As we noted last Friday, spinners had peddled the “20/12” spin-point for a week by the time Pinkerton spoke. Indeed, in his Wednesday speech on the UM matter, President Bush himself compared the 20 points for an applicant’s race to the 12 points for SAT scores. This comparison uses accurate facts but is meant to mislead...

CalPundit catalogs President Bush's recent acts relating to race and diversity:

...
December 5, 2002: Trent Lott suggests the country would have been better off if segregationist Strom Thurmond had won the 1948 presidential election. George Bush condemns his words but does not call for his resignation.
January 7, 2003: Bush renominates Charles Pickering, a man reviled by blacks for his record in civil rights cases, to a federal judgeship.
January 15, 2003: Bush chooses Martin Luther King's birthday to announce his opposition to the University of Michigan's affirmative action program.
January 17, 2003: The White House leaks a story saying that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice agreed with Bush's opposition to affirmative action. This turns out to be a lie and Rice repudiates the leak the next day...

Thinking it Through reporting on Chicago Tribune article on the legal brief:

...Administration officials emphasized that the government's friend-of-the-court briefs would focus on the Michigan policies and not make the bold argument, as pushed by conservatives at the Justice Department, that affirmative action is unconstitutional. But the briefs tell a different story. Although they do not explicitly say affirmative action is unconstitutional, their reasoning would force colleges and universities across the country to abandon their affirmative-action policies in favor of race-neutral approaches...administration believes colleges and universities cannot consider race, because they could achieve diversity in other ways. Sprinkled throughout both briefs are hints and clues--a sentence here, a footnote there--which support the point that such considerations would violate the Constitution...

Washington Post reporting on broad support for U. Mich.'s affirmative action program from business, education and labor groups

...As the Supreme Court faces its biggest showdown over a racial issue in 25 years, America's business, education and labor leaders are throwing their weight behind the University of Michigan's bid to preserve race-conscious college and university admissions. Among the organizations and individuals who are planning to submit friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the university are several dozen Fortune 500 companies, the nation's elite private universities and colleges, the AFL-CIO, the American Bar Association -- and a list of former high-ranking military officers and civilian defense officials, according to attorneys involved in the case. Though its ultimate impact on the court is difficult to gauge, this impending flood of briefs shows the degree to which the American establishment has embraced the pursuit of diversity through race-conscious means since the court's 1978 decision in the Bakke case. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the court's last major ruling on race-based admissions, has been interpreted to mean that race may be a "plus factor" in admissions as long as there are no strict numerical quotas. These pillars of U.S. society have lined up behind Michigan less to defend the particulars of its admissions programs, which award extra points to minority applicants, than to defend an array of race-conscious policies and practices they have come to believe in and rely on -- and which could be threatened if the case goes against the Ann Arbor school..."

CNN reporting on broad support for U. Mich. from military officials, former Pentagon officials and Fortune 500 companies

...Former Army undersecretary Joe Reeder, announcing the legal action, said Monday that service academies and ROTC programs need affirmative action to maintain a highly diversified officer corps. "It is absolutely essential to our fighting force," Reeder said. "You can't get there yet without taking race into consideration."More than two dozen officials will support the brief including Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander in the first Persian Gulf War; Adm. William Crowe, Gen. Hugh Shelton and Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, all former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of the U.S. Central Command. Also joining the brief, Reeder said, are former Defense Secretaries William Perry and William Cohen...Many large companies have also broken with Bush on the affirmative action case, including General Motors Corp., Microsoft, Steelcase, Procter & Gamble, Intel and Banc One. Those companies have filed supporting briefs. More than 100 U.S. House Democrats filed a supporting brief February 13.

MSNBC: Thousands...file briefs in support of Michigan

...HUNDREDS OF GROUPS and individuals filed their views on the use of race in college admissions policies before the Wednesday midnight deadline. By the time the friend-of-the-court briefs are processed, the court will have mounds of paperwork to review in addition to the fat file in the long-running University of Michigan case. The list is a who’s who in many fields — an unlikely combination of doctors, politicians, social workers, and makers of cereal, ships, tennis shoes, prescription drugs, shampoo, soft drinks and other products. One brief alone was signed by nearly 14,000 college students...“It is necessary to ensure that members of all segments of our society receive the education and training they need to become the leaders of tomorrow,” argued companies including 3M, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nike, Reebok, American Airlines, United Airlines, ChevronTexaco, Shell Oil, Northrop Grumman, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Schering-Plough, General Mills, Kellogg Co., and Johnson and Johnson. Among the last-minute filers was a group of Democratic senators, including presidential hopefuls John Edwards and John Kerry, Minority Leader Tom Daschle, and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ted Kennedy...       The former military leaders who argued that affirmative action is needed for a diverse officer corps include two former defense secretaries, William Perry and William Cohen; Schwarzkopf, who commanded the first Persian Gulf War; and Adm. William Crowe, Gen. Hugh Shelton and Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, all former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...Briefs supporting the college outnumbered those supporting the students by more than 3-to-1. The students were backed by Florida, a group of law professors, and organizations including the Cato Institute...

New York Times cited by TAPPED - on President Bush's proposal that top 10% of candidates from each high school in each state should be favored in admissions: 

...Whatever the numbers, both supporters and critics of affirmative action say that the plan has badly damaged admissions decisions. "It doesn't make any sense for colleges to pretend that all high schools are equal or that all high schools have student bodies that are equally qualified," said Roger Clegg, the general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a group opposed to affirmative action that filed a brief opposing the Michigan plans. "And it doesn't make any sense for colleges to ignore everything in a student's file except high school rank. It makes no sense to ignore SAT's, to ignore extracurricular activities, to ignore teachers' recommendations or, for that matter, to ignore G.P.A.'s." Mr. [Douglas] Laycock agrees. "You throw out everything about these kids except for one thing," he said. "The 10 percent plan does much more damage to your admissions standards than considering race alone."...

Washington Post reporting on Harvard study that says that the above "percent" plans (which is Mr. Bush's legacy in Texas) may not really help in bringing more diversity in top colleges/universities

...College admissions plans that admit a specific percentage of top high school graduates to state universities are not effective in achieving racial diversity -- particularly at highly selective schools, according to two new reports by Harvard University researchers. The "percent" plans adopted by public universities in Texas, California and Florida after their race-conscious admissions plans were outlawed in recent years have allowed some colleges to maintain a substantial level of racial diversity. But minority enrollment tends to be lower at the most selective schools, the reports said, while, overall, public universities have not kept pace with the burgeoning racial diversity in those states...
...Harvard Civil Rights Project also found that percent plans, which President Bush has touted as a legally acceptable form of "race-neutral" affirmative action, are most effective when linked with race-conscious recruitment, financial aid and support programs. Also, the reports said, the percent plans do not address admissions to graduate and professional schools or selective private colleges. "To suggest that these percent plans offer a good alternative to race-conscious admissions programs, to our mind, is very dangerous," said Patricia Marin, a Harvard researcher and co-author of one of the reports...
After race-conscious affirmative action was outlawed in California in 1996, the percentage of black and Hispanic freshmen enrolling in the state university system initially dropped before recovering to previous levels. But the number of black and Hispanic students has declined sharply at the state's premier universities, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1995, for example, blacks made up 6.7 percent of Berkeley's freshman class while Hispanics accounted for 16.9 percent; by last school year, 3.9 percent of the freshmen were black, while Hispanics accounted for 10.8 percent of Berkeley's freshman class. The declines have been less precipitous at the premier schools in Texas and Florida, which are far less selective than Berkeley and UCLA. "In all of these states, the numbers are not even a close approximation of the populations these public institutions were intended to serve," said Catherine L. Horn, a Harvard researcher and co-author of one of the studies..."

1/12/03 <link>
Affirmative action issue viewed from another angle - LEGACY ADMISSIONS
Legacy admissions in top colleges/universities in the U.S. is significant, as pointed out in this post by Atrios. He cites InstaPundit's data (unverified independently):
Princeton: 12.4%; 11.6% (different years)
Yale: 13.4%
U. of Penn.: 10%
Brown: 7%; "about 10%" (different years)
Columbia: 6%
Cornell: 13%
U. of Chicago: "just over 5 percent"
Bucknell: 5.6%
Boston College: 12.1%
Holy Cross: 10.7%
Wake Forest: "about 8%"
Johns Hopkins: 12.4%
Notre Dame: 23%; 22% (different years)
Ithaca College: 1.8%
U. of Virginia: 12.6%
U. of Rochester: 5.4%
Amherst: 10%
Middlebury: 5%
Colby: 4%
Villanova: 7%

So much for the hue and cry over affirmative action.