Signaled Virtue

The ICJ, despite being a UN organ, is not located in New York City. In fact, it is the only UN organ not located in New York City.

ICJ is located in The Hague, a city which also houses the International Criminal Court and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. It has garnered a reputation for being the place where multiple attempts at defining and enforcing international law failed successively, until the League of Nations established the predecessor to the current ICJ.

It is, in other words, the city where international law happens. Unsurprisingly, it is in Western Europe.

I imagine most people alive today do not truly comprehend how the Allied victory in the Second World War shaped the world we live in. It is a vastly different world than would have been in the opposite case. The rules and norms which would have governed us would have been entirely different, and our lives would also be quite different. I would almost certainly not be alive.

But this is not a simple case of “the good guys won.” Because the “good guys” here — the Allies, or more broadly the West — collaborated with the Nazis in multiple documented instances.

The U.S. rejected a ship full of Jewish refugees, all of whom were sent back to Germany and a third of whom were slaughtered. Even if you know about that incident, which is not common knowledge, you might not know that Canada also turned them away.

You may know about the Vichy France “puppet” government, led by Marshal Petain. What you might not know is that this regime was voluntarily created, and voluntarily elected to collaborate with the Nazis to help exterminate Jews. 70,000+ French Jews were killed this way.

The local Nazi party of the Netherlands rounded up Jews for the Germans, collaborators arrested Norwegian Jews — I could go on but I think you get the point. While there are many instances of Western individuals and nations helping Jews, the Allies and the West (as much as their victory saved Jews from further destruction) did not have clean hands.

What does this have to do with the ICJ? For one, its placement in The Hague clearly states that international law is not only Western in nature, but also European (after all, it could have been placed in NYC, making it similarly Western but not necessarily European). So, despite many nationalities being represented on the Court, it is clear that the role of the Court is to enforce European norms, because those were the ones created in The Hague. Thus, Europe, through the ICJ, has a once in a lifetime opportunity to cleanse its hands of Jewish blood by focusing the world's attention on Israel's “genocide” and far less on their own actual genocide (which happened in the past unlike Israel's “ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people”). The reason they would want to do this comes about from their own political landscape.

A mixture of two things powers the Western political attitude towards Jews: guilt and resentment. In the first case, the West protects the Jews it once damned to the Nazi gas chambers. For as long as the narrative in the West is that the Jews should not have been subject to the Holocaust (an attitude which will disappear within the next 50 years), Westerners must also hold that what the West did to the Jews (namely, send them marching into the Holocaust) was also bad. This guilt is evident from a general lack of education among Westerners about the West’s collaboration with the Nazis. People in school learn about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany’s tyrannical rule, not about Vichy France being a voluntary puppet state or the U.S. and Canada sending back refugee ships full of Jews. That part tends to be understated, if taught at all, yet it is implicitly present whenever a Western country denounces a mass shooting at a synagogue or a particularly vile act of antisemitism.

The second point is resentment. For how long must these Jews demand our support? How much money must we pay them? How much special consideration must they receive? Will our debt to Shylock ever be repaid?

The revitalized right wing parties of various Western countries, including the Die Rechte (“The Right”) party, which came as close to a new Nazi party in Germany as was legally permissible, made resentment of the Jewish people part of their platform — in the avatar of Israel. Jews may have initially dismissed these traits as “just” neo-Nazi parties, not acknowledging that the first Nazi Party rose in a very similar way: by creating resentment against Jews. The difference here is that these modern parties have it easier because Westerners are already resentful of Jews for the guilt we induce.

Guilt breeds resentment — one might even say it’s a natural continuation. The guilty party feels as though their victim, despite all grievances having been in the past, continues to hold them liable for it without any hope of absolution. This is especially true with the Holocaust, for which many reparations have been made, but for which there can be no actual absolution. The resentful Westerner feels cheated thus, for having grieved the Jews their ancestors killed and for being supposedly asked to keep grieving forever, they perceive the existence of a double jeopardy or Catch-22 — an intergenerational grift perpetuated by the Jews. (This is, to my understanding, the premise of The Holocaust Industry, the seminal work of Holocaust denier Norman Finkelstein. I only know this from summaries and descriptions because I have no interest in reading it, so I may be wrong.)

This hypothetical Westerner’s perception is, of course, a delusion. No Jew is telling a Westerner to whip himself for the Holocaust. It is not the Jew who creates this resentment, but the Westerner’s own misplaced guilt: as a member of a nation which helped contribute to Jewish death, he feels somewhat responsible for it (or, alternatively, he feels that this Jewish death business doesn’t mesh well with the national story he was raised with), and finds that being tied to his nationality, he cannot erase this guilt. Resentment is the natural continuation.

So if the European supernation bears enormous guilt towards the Jews, leading to resentment, why wouldn’t they take the opportunity to recharacterize the Jews not as victims, but as oppressors, by charging them with genocide?

The answer is simple: Israel (a.k.a., the Jews) isn't committing genocide. There is no legal definition of genocide which permits the Gaza war (as of writing) to be characterized in this way. (There may be slightly more leeway with Hamas's actions on October 7th, but I am skeptical that a single day's work could ever be called a form of genocide.) If Israel's actions were characterized as genocide despite not coming even close to the legal definition, it would directly conflict with the much older understanding of proportionality in warfare (which Israel, as of writing, is following diligently, although the +972 Magazine article detailing the bombing of propaganda production outlets which do not house combatants is outside of my understanding of international law, and may in fact violate proportionality concerns). This would the landscape of international law stuck in an irreconcilable contradiction: warfare that is expressly legal by the standard of proportionality being considered illegal under a grossly expanded definition of genocide.

Of course, if international law has a contradiction in one of its most fundamental areas, it would stand to reason that judgments in this area could no longer be fairly (i.e., objectively) rendered. If that were to be the case, then in this area, international law would be rendered meaningless. Any military action which has an effect on a civilian population could be rendered simultaneously legal (proportionality) and illegal (genocide) so the Court would probably split by the largest bribes paid. The point of law is to be objective and outside these kinds of influences, in order for every party to be subject to a level playing field, which in the long run is enormously beneficial for everyone.

In the short run, however, this is terrible! For Europe to give up its chance to recontextualize history in the form of “those Jews we genocided ended up genociding other people, too, so was what we did that bad?” would result in a massive short term loss compared to a far more abstract long term gain. If the judges on the ICJ understand that, they will not charge Israel with genocide (assuming that, as is currently the case, Israel is not actually committing genocide). If they do not understand that – or if they do and just don't give a damn about long term consequences (“We won't live long enough to see that!”, they may think) – they will charge Israel in this way.

I had long sworn off any form of social media, but for my own professional development, I have regretfully continued to use LinkedIn.

Across the platform since the war began, I have seen just as much truthful coverage of the war as I have seen false coverage. This is refreshing given that the CCP-owned platform TikTok shows far more lies than truth.

Yet, I have noticed from LinkedIn (and from Instagram through others) a tendency in content moderation to only attack the most egregious and obvious examples of hate speech, misinformation, and deceit. The more subtle examples are routinely protected. In my personal experience reporting every post that former friends and classmates have unfortunately been duped by, all except one have not been removed.

This content includes descriptions of Israel’s actions in Gaza as war crimes (having learned international law as pertains to this issue in my education, this is provably false), obviously-staged videos emerging from the region, and other portrayals of Israel and Jewish people as evil entities who are attempting to exterminate the Palestinian people.

These statements are not taken down. The ones which are taken down are statements to the effect of “Zionism is evil,” and similar less subtle versions of hatred. Yet these statements are precisely the ones that are least likely to have an adverse effect on the lives of Jewish people, and the image of Israel, in the public eye, precisely because it is so obviously biased and hateful.

By allowing the more insidious forms of antisemitism to flourish on the platform, LinkedIn and friends actually make the problem worse by making it seem as if the antisemitism which does remain on the platform cannot be related to the antisemitism which is removed. In other words, LinkedIn is sanitizing the antisemitism of its members and in doing so making it more palatable for the average Joe.

The unevenness of this response may actually increase online radicalization as opposed to decreasing it!

Also, a lot of the language which is sustained on these platforms clouds itself in a veneer of social justice, using terms like “humanitarian” and “indiscriminate” even when not applicable to the situation, whereas the language removed doesn’t conform to those vocabularies. Extremists are taking advantage of the good faith that younger generations placed in social justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter, in order to gain audience with them. Sometimes, the invocation of this language is enough to convert them, at least into the early stages. As they continue to explore it, the radicalization will deepen, and they will become far more traditionally antisemitic.

I have one point wondered if it would be appropriate to specifically require high school courses in critical thinking for all students. At the time I thought it was useful not only in the age of digital media and extreme political polarization, but because cults tend to take advantage of exactly the weakness which critical thinking diminishes. Now it is too late, and Jews can only rely on these platforms to suppress lies and hate speech from infecting others. It is clear that is failing too.

We live in very interesting times.

Sorry about the long hiatus. You might imagine I've been busy since October 7th.

Freddie deBoer recently published an article which I think summarizes the arguments of the useful idiots in the civil liberties camp right now: essentially, if you don't support the speech of pro-Hamas entities who call openly for the murder of Jews, you don't support free speech.

The sophistry in deBoer's and other's arguments to this effect is marvelous. The core argument here does three things:

  1. It vastly expands the amount of protected speech above and beyond any previous definition, including as would be practiced by the originators of free speech as a politically protected item (i.e., the American founding fathers);
  2. It dismisses the teeny-tiny possibility that statements to the effect of “we will murder Jews” may have a chilling effect on Jews and their speech;
  3. It conflates nonviolent speech by racist people – the kind which was permitted for the Skokie, IL rally that never took place – with violent speech by racist people, and absurdly suggests that both should be equally protected.

deBoer's article is also dishonest with supporting evidence – for every example of Palestinian censorship, I can personally name a minimum of 5 examples where openly genocidal and defamatory speech was upheld by content moderators as “not in violation of Community Guiderulelines” or whatever – and emphasizes the viewpoints of the settler Jews in the West Bank (who are, as a whole, racist and violent towards Arabs and Palestinians) to paint the Jews who might have a few issues with expanding the classes of protected speech to include incitement of violence as secretly trying to annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

I don't think deBoer is an antisemite. I do think whoever planted this idea into the heads of these civil liberties useful idiots is an antisemite and did so to provide a veneer of legitimacy to the whines by genocidal groups in the U.S. of “censorship.” But deBoer should really know better than to make the absurd claim that incitement of violence is protected. (And yes, when his examples include the banning of SJP, which sends its money to Hamas, and the censure of Rep. Tlaib, who called for the murder of Jews “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea,” as instances where free speech was not upheld, it is clear he is advocating for the protection of speech which indues and/or directly causes violence).

Let's read Brandenburg v. Ohio together:

The second film showed six hooded figures one of whom, later identified as the appellant, repeated a speech very similar to that recorded on the first film. The reference to the possibility of “revengeance” was omittted, and one sentence was added: “Personally, I believe the ... should be returned to Africa, th' Jew returned to Israel.”

You might correctly infer this speech came from the KKK. Notable is that it does not call for violence (“revengance”) and instead advocates for discrimination without any mention of violence.

The Court upheld the statute on the ground that, without more, “advocating” violent means to effect political and economic change involves such danger to the security of the State that the State may outlaw it. Cf. Fiske v. Kansas, 274 U. S.380 (1927). But Whitney has been thoroughly discredited by later decisions. See Dennis v. United States, 341 U. S.494, at 507 (1951). These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

You can advocate a political philosophy that includes revolution against corrupt governments, for example, but you can't yourself “incite or produce” imminent lawless action. When groups chant “death to Jews” or the euphemistic variant “from the river to the sea” outside a synagogue, there is no genuine argument – either in law or in philosophy – that can view it as protected speech. When those same groups say, in private or public, that what Hamas did was great and should be encouraged – same thing. The people who today say that these groups are miraculously protected would probably call the police in a blind panic if they received a death threat: the same exact kind of speech we are now dealing with en masse.

As we said in Noto v. United States, 367 U. S. 290,297-298 (1961), “the mere abstract teaching . . . of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.” See also Herndon v. Lowry, 301 U. S. 242, 259-261 (1937); Bond v. Floyd, 385 U. S. 116, 134 (1966). A statute which fails to draw this distinction impermissibly intrudes upon the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments... Measured by this test, Ohio's Criminal Syndicalism Act [under which the KKK member was convicted, leading to this case] cannot be sustained.

I will personally give you $100 in Monopoly money if you can make a serious argument that these rallies are not “preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.”

People and organizations which shield this speech alongside actual protected speech undermine their commitment to the actually protected speech. If they gain enough traction I think it will set back the current push to expand free speech protections by multiple years. Nobody in their right mind will want to protect free speech if it also means protecting murderers from prosecution for telegraphing their intention to murder. I hope people like deBoer remain on the fringe of the free speech movement.

The Pink Peacock was a Jewish anarchist, anti-Zionist, Yiddish-speaking café which opened during the pandemic and closed last month.

It’s tempting to think of this experiment as another silly little eccentric leftist thing, with a bunch of silly little eccentric leftist ideas put into one basket. But closer examination reveals a coherent ideology unifying the common threads.

Much as any Jew’s support for or opposition to Zionism is inextricably linked to their perception of Jewishness and Judaism, so too was the Pink Peacock’s anti-Zionism rooted in its founders perception of Judaism. We can get clues about the owner’s perceptions of Jewish identity from their interviews with the press (they note their opposition to Zionism stems from anarchism and their belief that the Jewish state is an ineffective bolster of Jewish people), but more notably from their extremely pronounced embrace of Yiddish. They even mention that Yiddish anarchists were their main influences.

Yiddish was the language of the Ashkenazim (European Jews) until the establishment of Israel revitalized Hebrew, which coincided with the end of the Holocaust. It continues to be the language of the ultra-Orthodox (an unfortunate term, given how deeply some of these groups deviate from Orthodox Judaism in their repressiveness and cultlike mannerisms) and/or Haredi populations. Why, then, did the authors (who note their dedication to queerness and had a transgender library in their café) embrace the language of the least-representative and most-homophobic section of the Jewish population, in addition to the language’s symbolism of a repressed and witless European Jewish people?

The answer they give is that it is in homage to the Yiddish anarchist tradition. They also note in an interview:

With regards to the Jewish stuff, it’s important to us to be accessible to people who might not feel welcome in other Jewish spaces. We have a big focus on de-assimilation. We’re very welcoming to people who don’t have traditional Jewish educations or haven’t been participating in Jewish life, but are interested now.

Their use of the term “de-assimilation” is a beautiful Freudian irony. There is no larger symbol of assimilation in Jewish culture than the languages Jews adopted at the behest of their host nations. Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, and other languages are the embodiment of Jewish assimilation into host nations. There is no larger symbol of de-assimilation than the assertion of an independent Jewish culture, language, and space that is the modern State. The Pink Peacock wants us to believe it was a force against assimilation, yet it exclusively championed assimilation for its community.

I’m not saying Jewish groups should not accept assimilated Jews. What I am saying is that in order for these groups to de-assimilate Jews, they have to actually de-assimilate them. Encouraging assimilation in multiple ways is a poor job of doing that.

Another gem from the interview:

I think it speaks to a trend towards de-assimilation among Millennials and Zoomers, a recognition that we don’t benefit from assimilation in the way that our parents and grandparents did.

Your grandparents were slaughtered like pigs for assimilating rather than fleeing. Your parents confronted antisemitism more than you ever have. I could probably make a “anarchists are anarchists because they haven’t experienced the real world” joke but that would gloss over the historical irredentism and cultural self-rejection in this sentence. But it does help the founders mentally justify their own assimilation within the modern Western left.

Another irredentist wordbite:

Learning our ancestral language is an act of de-assimilation and antifascism.

Yiddish is not your ancestral language. Yiddish is the German language with extra steps. It is a cousin of the language spoken by the guys who fried your ancestors. Hebrew is your ancestral language; it is literally the language your ancestors created.

Also, while these guys don’t mention it, and while it doesn’t apply to them because they’re already anarchists, Zionism is fundamentally socialist. Social Zionism was the philosophy of Israel until Likud came into power after the Second Intifada. It isn’t surprising or even unexpected that the State has been in decline ever since. Likud and its allies court the ultra-Orthodox in Israel, who overwhelmingly speak Yiddish and cloister themselves in their own neighborhoods. They are the definition of European assimilation; they reject Israeli (self-determined) culture at every turn. It is not surprising that their political clout has damaged Zionism; they aren’t Zionist at all. The most vocal anti-Zionists come from these groups! It’s not a coincidence that their control of government and lack of adherence to the original Social Zionist vision of the founders of the State has weakened it.

An article the Atlantic ran on the front page of its app for a few days claims that the elimination of legalized racism in America is actually the same as the “separate but equal” doctrine. A pretty easy thing to disprove. But there's so much bullshit in this one that it merits a more detailed breakdown and deconstruction.

Opening Story

I'll skip over most of the opening section, which tokenizes a Chinese-American's story of racial discrimination in order to make the authors appear to be champions of Asian anti-racism. The nature of that illusion is made clear later, when the authors become explicitly racist against Asian people. There's only one part worth discussing in depth here:

Gong Lum sued, appealing to the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. All nine justices ruled in favor of school segregation, citing the “separate but equal” doctrine from 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

“A child of Chinese blood, born in and a citizen of the United States, is not denied the equal protection of the law by being classed by the state among the colored races who are assigned to public schools separate from those provided for the whites when equal facilities for education are afforded to both classes,” the Court summarized in Gong Lum v. Rice on November 21, 1927.

A century from now, scholars of racism will look back at today’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action the way we now look back at Gong Lum v. Rice—as a judicial decision based in legal fantasy. Then, the fantasy was that separate facilities for education afforded to the races were equal and that actions to desegregate them were unnecessary, if not harmful. Today, the fantasy is that regular college-admissions metrics are race-neutral and that affirmative action is unnecessary, if not harmful.

The bogus legal argument in Gong Lum v. Rice and in Plessy v. Ferguson – that “separate but equal” was an acceptable standard to apply – was wonderfully destroyed by a single phrase in Brown v. Board of Education: “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Yet the authors don't quote Brown. They instead note correctly that these facilities were never equal in practice. But the choice to shun the poetic language in Brown lays the groundwork for what they will do in the rest of this article: portray the legal system and its language as evil tools for racists, instead of a stalwart bastion of rights which only bent its knee when pressed from all sides. If they had quoted Brown, they would need to give credit to a system they want the readers to view as irredeemably evil.

Later, the authors will attempt to preempt a form of criticism which couches itself in the same court case they quote earlier: in Justice Harlan's dissent for Plessy v. Ferguson, he writes,

Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law... In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.

The weakness of their attack on Justice Harlan's opinion will be detailed when I come to that part of the article. But it is worth pointing out the irony of the authors glossing over initially, and later actively attempting to discredit, the ultimate rebuttal to legal racism which was uttered at the same time as the story they cite in order to advance their own new form of racism.

Establishing the Strawmen

(Note: emphasis is from the original article.)

The Supreme Court has effectively outlawed affirmative action using two court cases brought on by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Organized by a legal strategist named Edward Blum, SFFA filed suit on behalf of Asian American applicants to Harvard as well as white and Asian applicants to UNC to claim that their equal-protection rights were violated by affirmative action. Asian and white Americans are overrepresented in the student body at selective private and public colleges and universities that are well funded and have high graduation rates, but they are the victims?

I was shocked, first reading this, to see the authors resort to explicit racism in their argument. I thought they were smarter than to allow people to see them for who they really are. But they must've read the polls and realized most people already see through them, so they figured it was about time they stopped hiding their true feelings.

The pure indignation dripping from that sentence – “[Asian Americans] are overrepresented in the student body at selective private and public colleges and universities that are well funded and have high graduation rates, but they are the victims?” – how dare those uppity Asians wish to participate at the level of elite institutions, how dare so many of them try to, how dare they think themselves entitled to a chance made on the basis of effort – is beautiful. I couldn't have written a better parody of Dr. Kendi myself (I am not familiar enough with Dr. Jayakumar to say if it fits her as well).

If I have to tell you why there's something fucked-up about saying that Asians aren't victims of racial discrimination, you're part of the problem and this blog post won't change that anyway. It's just worth pointing out in case you missed it.

This is indicative of a larger fantasy percolating throughout society: that white Americans, who, on average, stand at the more advantageous end of nearly every racial inequity, are the primary victims of racism.

Huh, now the Asians are gone. That's weird. It's almost like if they were in this part it would fall apart completely.

The authors here bring up an entirely different discussion which has nothing to do with anti-Asian racism. There may indeed be a fantasy gaining credence among some circles of American society. It has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation around affirmative action, and the authors know it, which is why they specifically exclude the plaintiffs and primary victims – Asians – from this sentence.

This fantasy is fueling the grievance campaigns of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Americans who oppose affirmative action have been misled into believing that the regular admissions metrics are fair for everyone—and that affirmative action is unfair for white and Asian American applicants.

I can believe the first sentence. I've seen enough YouTube videos of crazy motherfuckers saying shit like “whites are the victims of racism” wearing MAGA gear that I can believe it. It also has nothing to do with the second sentence which follows it. Literally nothing. We went from the MAGA hat wearing crowd to people who think discriminating by race (a.k.a. racism) is bad. Either this is a rough draft they accidentally published, or the authors are intending to subtly smear anti-racist advocates as Trump supporters. You decide.

The authors also make an impressive claim: “Americans who oppose affirmative action have been misled into believing that the regular admissions metrics are fair...” Bullshit. Nobody thinks college admissions, especially into this kind of college, are fair – even without the affirmative action. Legacy admissions are pretty widely known, and everyone knows that enough money gets you anywhere. Was there anyone who was seriously surprised that people were paying to get into USC? I was surprised it was technically illegal! Legal versions of this shit are how admissions works everywhere else!

On that subject, people were really pissed at the parents and students who got in from the USC scandal. It strikes me now that the anger was wholly misplaced. The one and only subject of their rage should have been USC (no, not even Rick Singer. USC made the game; Rick just helped people play along). As I said in my previous post, there is not one person who can argue in good faith that these bougie schools can't admit more than they already do. USC has an endowment of $7 billion but we're expected to believe they only have enough room for 21,000 undergrads. ASU, which enrolls 100,000 undergrads on a $2 billion endowment (and $4 billion budget, slightly more than half of USC's entire endowment) must be cooking the books.

It is a fantasy that race is considered as an admissions factor only through affirmative action. But the Court endorsed SFFA’s call for “race neutral” admissions in higher education—effectively prohibiting a minor admissions metric such as affirmative action, which closes racial inequities in college admissions, while effectively permitting the major admissions metrics that have long led to racial inequities in college admissions. Against all evidence to the contrary, the Court claimed: “Race-neutral policies may thus achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without … affirmative action policies.” The result of the Court’s decision: a normality of racial inequity. Again.

With our interlude about USC complete, we return to the authors' strawmen. The authors falsely portray race as a minor admissions metric when the measurable* effects it's had on Asian Americans suggests it is quite major. They are also glib when they state that affirmative action “closes racial inequities in college admissions.” As many before me have noted, Harvard and Friends have intentionally and repeatedly declined to release information about the kinds of people within races being admitted to these schools (which would answer questions such as: “What is the proportion of black immigrants being admitted versus black descendants of the enslaved? What are the average and median income levels of those you admit from each race?” A much better article from the Atlantic about affirmative action laid it out:

...Harvard picks classes that look like today’s racially diverse America; indeed, most undergraduates are students of color. But the school does not actually reflect America. Research... shows that Harvard has 15 times as many students from the richest fifth of the population as the poorest fifth. About as many students come from the top 1 percent by income as the bottom 60 percent... Likewise, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill claims to be “the University of the people.” Yet students in the top income quintile are 16 times as numerous on campus as those in the bottom fifth.

When people hear “closes racial inequities in college admissions” they think “working- and middle-class black Americans are being admitted at populationally-proportional rates,” which isn't true and was never going to be.

*(It is worth noting that the specific manner which Harvard demoted Asians in its applications process – through “personality” – is identical to how they implemented their demotion of Jews in the quota era.)

The authors state a good point in a bad way with “...while effectively permitting the major admissions metrics that have long led to racial inequities in college admissions.” The lawsuit was about affirmative action, not legacy admissions or the “affirmative action for whites” that is collegiate athletics recruiting. A lawsuit was just filed challenging the legacy part; in a fair, just, color-blind society (apologies for the redundant statements) that lawsuit will be upheld and legacy admissions struck down. But the whole thing is a ratrace for elitist kooks and nothing short of a forced acknowledgment from the Ivy Leagues that they could admit students who need good education but choose not to will cause the situation to change. The problem is the very existence of selectivity in college admissions; the affirmative action, legacy admissions, and other conversations are all distractions.

Oh, but wait, Dr. Kendi has previously gone on record claiming that the SAT, the exam which eliminated racial barriers to entry for college** (see further below), is racist. Whoops. I'm guessing that's what they meant by “major criteria.”

This is what the Court considers to be fair admissions for students, because the judges consider the major admissions metrics to be “race-neutral”—just as a century ago, the Court considered Mississippi public schools to be “separate but equal.”

I see what you did there, guys! You think parallel sentence structures connected by the phrase “just as” are going to force me to view two wildly different things in a similar way! That's so funny. But just phrasing things similarly doesn't make them the same. They have to actually be similar for that to work. I know, shocking, but true!

The inherently self-contradictory “separate but equal” mentality – which actively denied black Americans the right to simply exist in the same spaces as white Americans – is not the same thing as anti-racism (in the authors' lingo, “race-neutrality” or “color-blindness”), which actively provides the right to be considered equal under the law.

The Constitution always guaranteed equality under the law. The Constitution is also just a scrap of paper – the fact that its principal authors owned slaves shows just how little it has been respected since its inception. Nowhere is this more clear than in the Dred Scott majority decision:

[The Constitution] proceeds to say: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among them is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.'

The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included...

The incredible distortion and double-think wielded by those who joined this decision is emblematic of the early treatment of the Constitution's radical ideas. Yet the abolitionists correctly recognized that the Constitution prohibited slavery, regardless of how the self-interested slaveowners in the United States chose to distort it.

That the authors characterize the Constitutionally-faithful decision in the affirmative-action Supreme Court case, the case which was decided in favor of equality under the law, in the same terms as the bastardized cases which dismantled the Constitution's guarantee of legal equality, would be hilarious if it wasn't so lacking in self-awareness.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion, recognized “the inherent folly of that approach” but doesn’t recognize the inherent folly of his “race neutral” approach.

History repeats sometimes without rhyming. “Race neutral” is the new “separate but equal.”

It isn't clear what the authors mean by “inherent folly,” but given that they remark this about the “race neutral” approach, it seems likely they are making an argument I’ve heard elsewhere: colorblindness is actually the same thing as ignoring racism. (See this WaPo article's tagline: “Pretending that racism doesn't exist only delays real change.”)

As I said in a previous post: do the authors think we're all going to just accept that the principle of not being a racist fuckhead when you interact with people is actually a form of ignoring racism altogether? Do the people making this argument think that telling anti-racists that they're actually pretending racism doesn't exist is a logically coherent argument? Do they think that they can successfully portray doing an incredibly powerful thing – actually effecting anti-racism by practicing it – as an ineffective action?

It makes sense why the authors here have become so unguarded with their language, allowing their anger to turn their writing into nonsensical hyperbole. I mean, if I made arguments as ironclad as these and had polls telling me the vast majority thought I was a moron, I'd be pissed too! OK, maybe I wouldn't become racist towards Asians, but Karens become racist all the time when they're angry, so clearly this is common behavior.

The Court today claimed, “Twenty years have passed since Grutter, with no end to race- based college admissions in sight.” In actuality, twenty years have passed, with no end to racial inequity in sight.

Let's assume that the authors here mean institutional/systemic inequity, and not racism perpetuated at the individual level. (I won't even speculate that the authors could possibly mean the latter because then it would become far too easy to ridicule them.) The next paragraph makes it clear that they view inequity through the lends of representation levels. This idea has been promoted by Dr. Kendi before: if students at colleges do not represent their underlying populations to the same proportions, racism is afoot. If the percentage of black students at University A does not closely equate the percentage of black students in the country at large, it can't possibly be anything but the system.

Of course, if there is a large discrepancy for any group's representation, the sources should be investigated. But Dr. Kendi never said he was in favor of an investigation. He instead would pronounce your school guilty without trial; judge, jury, and executioner of racism (and statistical randomness, and the differences attributable to the fact that individuals do not behave in neat group patterns 100% of the time, but clearly all that was complicit in the racism part).

In addition to ignoring Stats 101, this absolutism fundamentally negates black (and everyone else's) individuality. In demanding we derive this specific conclusion – again, without investigation! – from proportionality differences, the students who choose trade school over college, go to college later than others usually do, and otherwise follow “nontraditional” paths in life have their stories erased. In the authors' wonderland, the individuals making these decisions are actually perpetrators/victims (it's sometimes hard to tell) of racism. In the real world where the rest of us live, these individuals have a leg up on the students who attend college early because they increase their control over their lives (doesn't it seem oppressive to you that we should all go to college at 18, work a 9-5 for the next 50 something years, and retire at the predefined age?), they gain real work experience without the sheltered and unrealistic collegiate environment, and they will almost certainly save money.

Black, Latino, and Indigenous students continue to be underrepresented at the top 100 selective public universities. After affirmative action was outlawed at public universities in California and Michigan in the 1990s, Black enrollment at the most selective schools dropped roughly 50 percent, in some years approaching early-1970s numbers. This lack of diversity harms both students of color and white students.

A lack of diversity does indeed harm everyone in the cohort. It's also the direct result of being a selective school. The obvious case is that the students who attend these elite institutions have no exposure to those the school deemed unworthy of admission by some arbitrary, albeit anti-racist metric (i.e., SAT cutoff of 1400).

**(Sidebar about the anti-racist nature of standardized testing:

In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation…

…that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms…

This is from a review of Jerome Karabel’s book “The Chosen.”

Blind admissions – the practice of assessing only a candidate’s material and potential contribution – was/is such an effectively anti-racist measure that the racists had to/are currently trying to reduce its influence.)

The deeper case is made effortlessly in this Socratic dialogue:

“Let’s return to those elite colleges, Glaucon. What does it mean to say that a college is ‘elite’?”

“It means that they accept only those students who have the most impressive academic credentials, Socrates.”

“In other words, it is difficult to gain entry to those colleges.”

“Indeed it is.”

“Is that incidental to their appeal, or are they pursued so ardently precisely because of that difficulty?”

“I must admit, exclusivity is indeed core to their appeal. We are impressed by someone’s college in inverse proportion to that college’s accessibility.”

“And thus is not the quest to make elite college attendance more accessible a charade as well, my dear Glaucon? Would achieving that goal not degrade the very goods that elite college educations are meant to provide?”

The lack of diversity (not just racial) in these schools is the product of selectivity. The only way to actually fix this is to eliminate selectivity. But these elite schools' profitability (or “surplus in budgets” given that most of them are grifting off the IRS with a bullshit non-profit designation) depends on the ability for them to place its students into a sort of “caste.” Affirmative action recipients are rarely people without money and as a group form a tiny percentage of the student body. Affirmative action is a smokescreen.

Note that a similar statement made elsewhere (incl. the Wall Street Journal – paywalled link not included here) – that the California affirmative action ban led to reduced black college enrollment across the board – is just plain false, although politically convenient. From here:

The question need not be posed hypothetically. California actually did ban affirmative action in its state-funded colleges in 1996. And this ban did not hurt students of color. It didn’t reduce college enrollment for black and Hispanic students; it simply re-shuffled them throughout both the University of California and Cal State systems. Many of them did end up at less prestigious schools, but those schools better matched their incoming academic credentials.

There's a link to a research article in this paragraph, and this is from that article's abstract:

Comparing the pre- and post-Proposition 209 statistics by race and gender demonstrates that women and minorities have not lost any ground in employment, education, or public contracting as a result of Proposition 209's prohibition of discrimination and preferential treatment.

In its reply brief in the UNC case, SFFA argued that the University of California system enrolls “more underrepresented minorities today than they did under racial preferences,” referencing the increase of Latino students at UC campuses from 1997 to 2019. But accounting for the increase in Latino students graduating from high school, those gains should be even larger. There’s a 23-point difference between the percentage of high-school graduates in California who are Latino and the percentage of those enrolled in the UC system.

This is a repeat of the proportionality argument; the authors unintentionally reinforce the argument I made regarding the previous paragraph.

Declines in racial representation and associated harms extend to graduate and professional programs. The UC system produced more Black and Latino medical doctors than the national average in the two decades before affirmative action was banned, and dropped well below the national average in the two decades after.

This, despite the fact that the system claimed it is near pre-AA ban levels of racially-diverse enrollment? It merits more investigation – two decades is a long time – but isn't really a point in the authors' favor. Especially when there is another factor which has exploded in prevalence over the last two decades: tuition inflation.

Underrepresentation of Black, Latino, and Indigenous students at the most coveted universities isn’t a new phenomenon, it isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t because there is something deficient about those students or their parents or their cultures. Admissions metrics both historically and currently value qualities that say more about access to inherited resources and wealth— computers and counselors, coaches and tutors, college preparatory courses and test prep—than they do about students’ potential. And gaping racial inequities persist in access to each of those elements—as gaping as funding for those so-called equal schools in the segregated Mississippi Delta a century ago.

The “it isn't a coincidence” point is once again the “disproportionality-is-racism” argument, previously addressed. Everything else said here is generally correct, but the authors' examples of inherited wealth fall short. Namely, test prep in of itself is worthless. Controlling for all confounding factors finds that “studying” for the supposedly-unstudiable SAT raises your score by... no more than 20 points. As that article notes, part of the confounding factors is wealth and other factors that don't actually relate to the SAT, so the truth is nuanced: richer kids who get test prep do do better on the SAT... because they're better educated in general, not because of test prep (which, again, does nothing).

Ironically, the authors make the clearest case yet (both here implicitly, and in the next paragraph explicitly) for class-based action over and above affirmative action. Also note that incredible strawman “it isn’t because there is something deficient about [them]” – the people making that argument are actual racists, and the authors are writing this article for a very different crowd, so this sentence seems like a slam dunk win when it’s actually just something everyone reasonable already agreed with.

So what about class? Class-based or income-based interventions disproportionately help white students too, because their family’s low income is least likely to extend to their community and schools. Which is to say that low-income white Americans are far and away less likely than low-income Black and Latino Americans to live in densely impoverished neighborhoods and send their kids to poorly resourced public schools. Researchers find that 80 percent of low-income Black people and 75 percent of low-income Latino people reside in low-income communities, which tend to have lesser-resourced schools, compared with less than 50 percent of low-income white people. (Some Asian American ethnic groups are likely to be concentrated in low-income communities, while others are not; the data are not disaggregated to explore this.) Predominately white school districts, on average, receive $23 billion more than those serving the same number of students of color.

The authors note that class-based interventions are bad because they are too good for white students. Remind me again how the American college should strive to be more equitable – except not really because then too many white students benefit? The authors' statistics look impressive so long as we ignore the fact that most poor people are Native American, black, and Hispanic and that their $23 billion figure is across all white districts, poor and rich, and as just stated there are far more poor black people than white people. The funding gap is a massive problem, but doesn't reveal any deleterious effect of class-based affirmative action. Again, the smokescreen gets in our eyes. These schools can and are able to admit low income students of multiple racial groups. They don't because then their “not-for-profit” margins would be slightly diminished.

When admissions metrics value SAT, ACT, or other standardized-test scores, they predict not success in college or graduate school, but the wealth or income of the parents of the test takers. This affects applicants along racial lines, but in complex ways. Asian Americans, for example, have higher incomes than African Americans on average, but Asian Americans as a group have the highest income inequality of any racial group. So standardized tests advantage more affluent white Americans and Asian ethnic groups such as Chinese and Indian Americans while disadvantaging Black Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans, and poorer Asian ethnic groups such as Burmese and Hmong Americans. But standardized tests, like these other admissions metrics, are “race neutral”?

Most of this paragraph was previously rebutted with my discussions on standardized testing, dispersed throughout this post. But it’s good to see acknowledge that Asian-Americans are a large group with different constituents. They almost come close to acknowledging nuance – but they miss the slam dunk. They fail to mention that there’s nowhere on that copy-and-paste racial disclosure form that allows you to say you’re a Hmong American. Hmong Americans are treated as all other Asian Americans for the purposes of race, and as the evidence gathered for the Supreme Court case demonstrated, Asian Americans were discriminated against as a group. In other words, while it should affect these groups in complex ways in the authors’ world, in the real world Harvard is racist in very predictable ways.

Standardized tests mostly favor students with access to score-boosting test prep. A multibillion-dollar test-prep and tutoring industry was built on this widespread understanding. Companies that openly sell their ability to boost students’ scores are concentrated in immigrant and Asian American communities. But some Asian American ethnic groups, having lower incomes, have less access to high-priced test-prep courses.

The snake oil industry is very profitable, yet I’ve never seen anyone base their argument for the effectiveness of snake oil on the profitability of the industry. I already quoted an article which brings together all the scientific research disproving the notion that the test-prep industry has any effectiveness – I'd just like to point out that the authors clearly view the readers of this article as a bunch of suckers who can't do Google searches on their own. The sad part is they're right. Googling to disprove your own ideas crashes against the weight of most people's cognitive biases.

Besides all of this, the tests themselves have racist origins. Eugenicists introduced standardized tests a century ago in the United States to prove the genetic intellectual superiority of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon men. These “experimental” tests would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture,” the Stanford University psychologist and eugenicist Lewis Terman wrote in his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence. Another eugenicist, the Princeton University psychologist Carl C. Brigham, created the SAT test in 1926. SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” aptitude meaning “natural ability to do something.”

Again, previously rebutted (this one almost entirely in the sidebar on the anti-racist origins of standardized testing in education).

Some selective colleges that went test-optional during the pandemic welcomed some of their most racially and economically diverse classes, after receiving more applications than normal from students of color. For many students of color, standardized tests have been a barrier to applying, even before being a barrier to acceptance. Then again, even where colleges and universities, especially post-pandemic, have gone test-optional, we can reasonably assume or suspect that students who submit their scores are viewed more favorably.

They could have done that before by admitting more students. Instead they abandoned the shackles of fairness to engage in the creation of their own favored class composition. Again, smokescreen.

When admissions committees at selective institutions value students whose parents and grandparents attended that institution, this legacy metric ends up giving preferential treatment to white applicants. Almost 70 percent of all legacy applicants for the classes of 2014–19 at Harvard were white.

College athletes are mostly white and wealthy—because most collegiate sports require resources to play at a high level. White college athletes make up 70 to 85 percent of athletes in most non-revenue-generating sports (with the only revenue-generating sports usually being men’s basketball and football). And student athletes, even ones who are not gaming the system, receive immense advantages in the admissions process, thus giving white applicants yet another metric by which they are the most likely to receive preferential treatment. Even Harvard explained as part of its defense that athletes had an advantage in admissions over nonathletes, which conferred a much greater advantage to white students over Asian American students than any supposed disadvantage that affirmative action might create. And white students benefit from their relatives being more likely to have the wealth to make major donations to highly selective institutions. And white students benefit from their parents being overrepresented on the faculty and staff at colleges and universities. Relatives of donors and children of college employees normally receive an admissions boost.

How funny that the metrics that don’t consider academic aptitude end up being racially exclusive. It’s almost like that’s why the standardized test was so effective at eliminating racial barriers to entry for education – and I’ve gone ahead and repeated myself from earlier. The authors’ complete inability to self-reflect is making their arguments repetitive, so my rebuttals naturally become repetitive as well.

Putting this all together, one study found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard were recruited athletes, legacy students, the children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (as relatives of donors)—compared with only 16 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian American students. About 75 percent of white admitted students “would have been rejected” if they hadn’t been in those four categories, the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found.

No shit.

While private and public universities tout “diversity” recruitment efforts, their standard recruitment strategies concentrate on high-income students who are predominantly white and Asian, at highly resourced schools, positioned to have higher grade point averages and test scores that raise college rankings. Public colleges and universities facing declines in state and federal funding actively recruit white and wealthy out-of-state students who pay higher fees. At many institutions, including a UC campus, “admission by exception,” a practice originally promoted as a means of expanding opportunities for disadvantaged groups, has been used to enroll international students with the resources to pay U.S. tuition fees.

We wouldn't want that “not-for-profit” margin to suffer, after all.

Targeting international students of color to achieve greater diversity on campus disadvantages American students of color. Targeting students from families who can pay exorbitant out-of-state fees benefits white families, who have, on average, 10 times the household net worth of Black families.

Previously acknowledged in this post.

Affirmative action attempted to compensate not just for these metrics that give preferential treatment to white students, but also for the legacy of racism in society. This legacy is so deep and wide that affirmative action has rightly been criticized as a superficial, Band-Aid solution. Still, it has been the only admissions policy that pushes against the deep advantages that white Americans receive in the other admissions metrics under the cover of “race neutral.”

For all the reasons previously outlined in this post, the response to this paragraph is: nope.

If anti-affirmative-action litigants and judges were really supportive of “race neutrality”—if they were really against “racial preferences”—then they would be going after regular admissions practices. But they are not, because the regular admissions metrics benefit white and wealthy students.

They are, in fact, going after the regular admissions practices.

“Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?” said Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, the group's executive director. “Your family's last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.”

A good rule of thumb when making claims following the format “if they were ackthually against X, they'd be doing Y also” is to make sure they're not doing Y also. It is unlikely that the suckers who pick up what the authors put down will connect the dots between this paragraph and the headlines in mainstream outlets describing Espinoza-Madrigal's lawsuit.

Litigants and judges continue to use Asian Americans as political footballs to maintain these racial preferences for white and wealthy students. Particularly in the Harvard case, SFFA’s Edward Blum used Asian plaintiffs to argue that affirmative action harms Asian American applicants. No evidence of such racist discrimination was found in the lower courts.

It was. Reference previously provided. Argument previously rebutted.

According to an amicus brief filed by 1,241 social scientists, the so-called race-neutral admissions policy SFFA advocated for (which was just adopted by the highest Court) would actually harm Asian American applicants. It denies Asian American students the ability to express their full self in their applications, including experiences with racism, which can contextualize their academic achievements or struggles and counter racist ideas. This is especially the case with Hmong and Cambodian Americans, who have rates of poverty similar to or higher than those of Black Americans. Pacific Islander Americans have a higher rate of poverty than the average American.

To summarize this paragraph: “Actually, if Asians just played along better in this racist system we designed to keep them out, they’d do way better! Never mind the fact that their experiences don’t matter to us when we can ascribe a metric of 'personality' to them that summarily ends their chances of admission!”

Pitting Asian and Black Americans against each other is an age-old tactic. Martha Lum’s parents didn’t want to send their daughter to a “colored” school, because they knew that more resources could be found in the segregated white schools. Jim Crow in the Mississippi Delta a century ago motivated the Lums to reinforce anti-Black racism—just as some wealthy Asian American families bought into Blum’s argument for “race neutral” admissions to protect their own status. Yet “separate but equal” closed the school door on the Lums. “Race neutral” is doing the same. Which is why 38 Asian American organizations jointly filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of affirmative action at Harvard and UNC.

Protect what status? The discriminated one?

We also know that those 38 amici briefs are definitely representative of the Asian populations the authoring organizations represent, because that’s what all of the major polls show. Oh wait, they show the opposite? Whoops.

A century ago, around the time the Court stated that equal facilities for education were being afforded to both races, Mississippi spent $57.95 per white student compared with $8.86 per Black student in its segregated schools. This racial inequity in funding existed in states across the South: Alabama ($47.28 and $13.32), Florida ($61.29 and $18.58), Georgia ($42.12 and $9.95), North Carolina ($50.26 and $22.34), and South Carolina ($68.76 and $11.27). “Separate but equal” was a legal fantasy, meant to uphold racist efforts to maintain these racial inequities and strike down anti-racist efforts to close them.

The racist Supreme Court that created the racist “separate but equal” doctrine also lied about something to uphold racism? :surprisedpikachuface:

The last sentence in this paragraph is exactly correct and a good summary of the doctrine.

Homer Plessy had sued for being kicked off the “whites only” train car in New Orleans in 1892. About four years later, the Court deployed the “separate but equal” doctrine to work around the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause to defend the clearly unequal train cars and the exclusion of Black Americans like Plessy from better-equipped “whites only” cars. Later, the Court used the same doctrine to exclude Asian Americans like Martha Lum from better-equipped “whites only” schools.

The “separate but equal” doctrine was the Court’s stamp to defend the structure of racism. Just as Plessy v. Ferguson’s influence reached far beyond the railway industry more than a century ago, the fantasy of “race neutral” alternatives to affirmative action defends racism well beyond higher education. Evoking “race neutrality,” Justice Clarence Thomas recently dissented from the Supreme Court decision upholding a provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that prohibits racist gerrymandering.

Just because Clarence Thomas makes shitty arguments that Constitutional anti-racism precludes the enforcement of anti-racism in law doesn’t mean the rest of us have to. But cherry-picking the proponents of an idea which has nothing to do with the one at hand, but shares a similar name, is a very effective tactic at silencing legitimate decent. It’s not a strawman; it’s an entire goddamn field.

It is nice to see the authors mention the 14th Amendment as an anti-racist work of law. Although it’s unclear if they actually meant to do so. I half-expected them to declare that law racist, too. After all, it further enshrines race-neutrality in the Constitution.

Now that “racial neutrality” is the doctrine of the land, as “separate but equal” was a century ago, we need a new legal movement to expose its fantastical nature. It was nearly a century ago that civil-rights activists in the NAACP and other organizations were gearing up for a legal movement to expose the fantasy of “separate but equal.” In this new legal movement, defenders of affirmative action can no longer use the false framing of affirmative action as “race conscious” and the regular admissions metrics as “race neutral”—a framing that has been used at least since the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978, which limited the use of affirmative action. Racist and anti-racist is a more accurate framing than “race neutral” and “race conscious.”

Affirmative-action policies are anti-racist because they have been proved to reduce racial inequities, while many of the regular admissions metrics are racist because they maintain racial inequities. To frame policies as “race neutral” or “not racist” or “race blind” because they don’t have racial language—or because the policy makers deny a racist intent—is akin to framing Jim Crow’s grandfather clauses and poll taxes and literacy tests as “race neutral” and “not racist,” even as these policies systematically disenfranchised southern Black voters. Then again, the Supreme Court allowed these Jim Crow policies for decades on the basis that they were, to use today’s term, “race neutral.” Voter-suppression policies today that target Black, Latino, and Indigenous voters have been allowed by a Supreme Court that deems them “race neutral.” Jim Crow lives in the guise of “racial neutrality.”

For literally all of the reasons previously discussed here, affirmative-action did not reduce racial inequities, it redistributed them. Many of the regular metrics are indeed racist for the reason the authors give. The racial elements of the Jim Crow laws were openly discussed at the time and black populations were studied in order to understand what laws would most effectively target them; race is stamped on those laws even if the language was removed from the final revision. Unlike the race-neutrality of the Constitution, which espoused radical ideas of human freedom (both in the context of its discussion and in the words of the document itself) that even the Framers were not radical enough to entirely embrace, the Jim Crow laws were always meant to be racist. So it is rather odd to call them “race-neutral.”

I also notice that nobody who writes about the Jim Crow laws notes that they were illegal (according to the Constitution, that evil thing!) even without the racist elements because they prevented citizens from voting. Even a similar law which had been designed to be equitable in denying voting rights to both white and black citizens would have been illegal.

Jim Crow indeed lived in the guise of “racial neutrality” not because it provided a veneer of acceptability but because it provided plausible deniability. If Jim Crow had actually been race-neutral instead of covering itself in that appearance, it wouldn’t have been Jim Crow because it would have been race-neutral, protective of all equally under the law.

Everyone should know that the regular admission metrics are the racial problem, not affirmative action. Everyone knew that racial separation in New Orleans and later Rosedale, Mississippi, was not merely separation; it was segregation. And segregation, by definition, cannot be equal. Segregationist policies are racist policies. Racial inequities proved that then.

Separation was inherently unequal. Racial inequities weren’t an ex post facto justification for getting rid of segregation. Segregation wasn't OK until it led to the unequal nature of facilities. Segregation was always unequal, and you didn’t need racial inequities to prove that. It was self-evident.

The Court stated in today’s ruling, “By 1950, the inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment had thus begun to reemerge: Separate cannot be equal.” But it still does not want to acknowledge another inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment that has emerged today: Race cannot be neutral.

Race cannot be neutral in much the same way that bottles cannot be neutral and the sky cannot be neutral: none of these things are moral things and so cannot have a moral term ascribed to them. The word “neutral” doesn’t make sense in any of those clauses because it implies a different word – “good”, or perhaps “bad” – could be substituted to describe the concept. There are some skies which are described negatively (“bad weather”) but nobody says that weather as a concept is overall negative, because they'd be asserting that the world would be better off without weather. Maybe we would be better off without weather, but the question is relevant because it's not going anywhere. Neither is race.

Today, racial inequities prove that policies proclaimed to be “race neutral” are hardly neutral. Race, by definition, has never been neutral. In a multiracial United States with widespread racial inequities in wealth, health, and higher education, policies are not “race neutral.” Policies either expand or close existing racial inequities in college admissions and employment. The “race neutral” doctrine is upholding racist efforts to maintain racial inequities and striking down anti-racist efforts to close racial inequities.

Again: the sky, by definition, has never been neutral. This r/im14andthisisdeep nonsense gets old after the first time.

The authors attempt sleight of hand: they write, in different words, “policies are not anti-racist. They either expand or close existing racial inequities… the ‘anti-racist’ doctrine upholds racism.” Race-neutrality is anti-racism. Racism, regardless of the Orwellian misuse of the term “anti-racism” to describe racist practices, is still just racism.

Race, by definition, has never been blind. Even Justice John Harlan, who proclaimed, “Our Constitution is color-blind” in his dissent of Plessy v. Ferguson, prefaced that with this declaration: “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country” and “it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.”

Regardless of what Harlan actually meant when he wrote that sentence, it cannot even come close to competing with the fact that Harlan’s color-blind Constitution was and is an airtight argument denouncing state racism. Justice Thurgood Marshall recognized this; he considered Justice Harlan's dissent “his 'bible'.” Many similar comments by anti-racists have been claimed by people in the authors’ sphere of influence as evidence against anti-racism: a notable example is that Abe Lincoln favored returning all freed slaves to Africa because he thought white America would never be able to make up for the sin of slavery. Some cite this as a mark to discredit Abe Lincoln’s anti-racism despite being quite possibly the single most effective anti-racist in American history (he literally ended slavery!). A similar tactic is used to discredit Justice Harlan despite the fact that if his opinion had prevailed it would have ended segregation around 50 years early. In both cases these anti-racists are slandered for the same reason: they would have disagreed with the authors’ vision for America, and that is evident from their written words and their actions.

In the actual world, the “color-blind” often see their color as superior, as Harlan did. In the actual world, an equal-protection clause in a constitution can be transfigured by legal fantasy yet again to protect racial inequity.

I request the authors conduct a survey of those who advocate color blindness to determine if they actually think this way.

Oh wait, the survey has already been conducted. It’s the same survey they conducted asking Americans about affirmative action. We must have a real racial supremacy problem if the “color-blind” (majorities of every racial group) “often” see themselves as superior.

“Separate but equal” then. “Race neutral” now.

We got it the first time, guys. Cool the jets. I’m not gonna believe it just because you said it 3 times. There’s only so much Orwellian idea hammering you can channel in one essay before the normal people start to get uncomfortable. You have to make it just a bit more difficult to make comparisons between your rhetoric and 1984.

When I was 18 years old, a senior in high school, I applied to a smattering of colleges which I thought would for-sure accept me (“safety schools”) and one college I wasn't sure about (“target school”). I was accepted to the target school, much to my delight. I wasn't a phenomenal student – I was never able to break into the upper echelon of the academically gifted, and my extracurriculars were never quite as cool as some other folks – but I was happy with what I had done and confident that it reflected my best work. So to be admitted to my target school, which was an esteemed university ranked #10 in the undergraduate major I sought, felt like a resounding acknowledgment that all my hard work paid off.

Should have felt. My enthusiasm was tempered. I wasn't sure by what then, and I attributed it falsely to the relative peace I felt after having “made it”. But many years later when my thoughts returned to that school, and how eager I had been to leave permanently after a few short months, I realized that the reason I didn't feel like I had earned my place at the school because I hadn't, and it was expected of me that I wouldn't.

My school guidance counselor heard all my stories, took a look at my so-so high school resume, and made recommendations for me about what I could do to get into my target school. Chief among them, that I make ample use of my intellectual disability in the essay portion. From the way they spoke about it you'd think I wouldn't even need to submit my grades. My SAT was nice, sure, but the real kicker was how severely autistic I was growing up. The bullying I went through. The grueling therapy sessions with dozens of trained professionals. My triumphant entry into the world of normal people with normal brains (taking great pain to mention how I'm still not normal!). And how my journey in life would be just right if it could continue it at [INSERT UNIVERSITY HERE]'s doorstep. So the essay was repeated ad nauseum, two or three details changed to fit the particular university better.

Of course I was accepted to my target school. So what if I was outside their “typically” accepted SAT range for the program I applied to? Only later did I realize that meant they didn't care about my score (because, of course, if they had cared, they would have denied me). I had done such a good job of suckering those damn college essay readers into thinking they and their school would be my next savior to lift me out of disabled oppression that my substandard SAT score didn't matter (if anything my score would be further proof of my oppression!). They'd hate to use those terms in public but their subconscious minds are probably even cruder than me.

Essentially, my high school counselor had one job: make my mediocre (from the university's perspective) grades and SAT score irrelevant by having me cynically exploit my own disability for maximum personal gain. I was meant to weaponize my own identity in order to gain the most access to the greatest number of places. I was meant to collapse my identity into the singularity of my adverse experiences. I was meant to invalidate my own victories against disability and adversity, to purposefully de-emphasize the progress I made and hyper-exaggerate the challenges I still faced, in order to beg. I was meant to beg for admission, to degrade myself by essentially admitting that I didn't deserve admission and that I was unworthy. And from this, evoke the God Complex of the admissions officer and get in anyway. The fact that this was in diametric opposition to the idea that institutions of higher education were meant to reward academic achievement never consciously crossed my mind. But my self-exploitation and undeserved admission did have a substantial toll on my self-image, and I was never happy at that school.

By the time my first semester was halfway over, my conviction to attend this institution had entirely reversed itself. I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. My classes felt like torture, my exams further confirmation of my unbelonging. So I applied to a local school, and provided only my grades from high school and college. I was admitted 3 days later. The euphoria I felt in that moment stood in stark contrast to the unease I felt being admitted to my “target” school. When I saw that all I needed to apply was my grades, the word that came to my mind was freedom. I was liberated from the expectation that I would portray myself as a broken man who needed so desperately to be saved. At this local school, I knew, I would be able to exist freely, on the warrant of my own efforts. I would not be defined by factors which I had no control over. I started attending the local school the next semester. It was the best time of my life thus far.

The name for the process I described – self-exploitation and self-degradation to portray yourself to college admissions as an abandoned puppy needing rescue – is called “holistic admissions”, of which race-based admissions (“affirmative action”) is a factor. The racial component was eliminated by the Supreme Court because it quite obviously violated the words inscribed in the court's own building: “Equal Protection Under Law”. The holistic components won't go away, though, because the whole enterprise of college admissions and selective schools is a scam.

Does anyone actually believe that Harvard is so strapped for cash that it can't simultaneously admit both qualified and unqualified students? That it can't develop an intensive-education program for those with little-to-no high school education to bring them to the same level as a legacy-admission underclassman? And why are we so convinced that the criteria for attending school should be academic achievement? Nobody required me to take a form of the SATs before going to high school; I did it anyway to get a scholarship. But I could have had entry without it. Isn't the point of going to school to learn? Why are we expected to know already when a school's job is to provide knowledge?

The fact that these elite institutions got away with saying they had made their admissions processes more “equitable” is astounding. Look at the incomes of their attendees/their parents. Financial aid is nothing at these institutions. All the money goes... somewhere else. Never-mind the arbitrary nature of these place's pricing plans. My local college charges $500 a credit hour for what ended up being a comparable quality of education to my target school, which charged $1,500 for the same. I found publicly the salaries of each of their presidents: one made $400,000 annually, and the other $150,000 (still too much!!). Guess who leads each school.

These institutions don't care if they cost a lot of money. The vast majority of their students are paying via loan, which means they're not paying... yet. But the fact that they're not paying right away means they don't behave like they're spending $20,000 a semester on an English degree; they behave like they're spending their monthly repayment on the degree. Friedman's 4 ways to spend money comes in handy to conceptualize this (see item #3). The schools have no incentive to reduce costs for their students because very few are paying out-of-pocket and the rest don't know how to watch their loaned-out wallets because they're 18 years old.

Yet cost is the number one barrier to entry for this slop. Student loans are deeply debilitating financially to Americans. They're part of the reason why Millenials don't really own houses compared to previous generations. Z will be worse. Wouldn't equitability start when barriers to entry for disadvantaged groups are removed?

All this is to say that the minority/disadvantaged student who gets into an elite school like my reject-alma-mater on holistic admission is the least disadvantaged on that spectrum. I did not take out a loan to go to my school, thank god. I would've needed to work two jobs to make it happen after a year, but I would've afforded it. Most people, let alone actually disadvantaged people, can't do that. Maybe even most wouldn't have qualified for the loan.

In my school system, every Associate's degree holder is guaranteed entry into a school. No application necessary. You come to learn, and assuming you actually put in the work you'll get a degree. The associates is free from a community college and then plenty of night school options exist to accommodate the jobs that'll pay for $500 per credit hour for a Bachelor's. Isn't that the ideal? That everyone, regardless of previous experience, can come learn if they want to? Isn't that emblematic of an institution dedicated to education and learning? Doesn't any degree of selectivity in college admissions defeat the purpose of college?

Yes, I'm quite angry about having been sold a lie as an impressionable 18 year old and made to play a game that always ends with me as the loser, but it didn't really matter because I got out in time. I never really drank the Kool-Aid. Some of these affirmative-action defenders did though, and it shows. Dr. Kendi wrote an article in The Atlantic where not only does he compare color-blindness to the “separate but equal” doctrine (he argues that to “not see color” is to not see racism, as if we're all going to just accept that the principle of not being a racist fuckhead when you interact with people is actually a form of ignoring racism altogether) but where he is also just straight up racist against Asian people (accusing them of playing the victim card). If you pay attention to the people he pays attention to (the folks who say things like “Asians are not People of Color” and “Asians are not an oppressed minority”) you ought not be surprised. He actually starts making good points, like how legacy admissions and the athletics loophole (a much better Atlantic article called it “affirmative action for white people”) were left intact and how the college admissions process isn't fair even when race isn't considered. Then he veers off the deep end when he says that because test prep is a multi million dollar industry, it clearly must work to increase test scores. Nevermind that the tests are designed to make them impossible to actually study for. Then he also dismisses the Asian American claims of discrimination which are directly substantiated by evidence... a more substantive response will come soon.

And then there's Justice Jackson's dissent. “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” What a marvelous revelation. I had no idea. It's almost like despite the Equal Protection Clause guaranteeing equal protection, racial discrimination still exists. The solution was never to give up and legalize it for colleges. Justice Jackson would like us to believe that in this case, and this case alone, making racism illegal is worthless because racism will still exist. Alright.

In reading an impressively emotive, nonspecific and fundamentally schizophrenic article about Miley Cyrus’s twerking and how the use of unconventionally-appearing Black women in her performances is actually an elaborate conspiracy to further degrade Black woman as a currency for use in capitalistic systems (https://tressiemc.com/uncategorized/when-your-brown-body-is-a-white-wonderland/) I came to wonder again about the marvelously precarious place we Jews occupy in the minds of racial mass-attributers (the folks for whom everything has a racial element).

To them I have most often heard myself described as White. On the face of it describing myself racially in the same terms as Mr. Mayflower or Mr. Jesuit seems absurd but I can just as easily hear the rebuttal: “Your skin color has afforded you opportunities that nobody else has.” Yet challenged outside this context on the components of race these persons would not hesitate to describe race in terms besides skin color (although they would surely describe it as the predominant characteristic).

There is something more here. To place me on the same plane as the slaveholders of old America is to entirely eradicate Jews as a racial entity. We may perhaps be ethnic but not racial. In which case antisemitism cannot be racism (as we aren’t a race to be discriminated against). In which case events such as the Holocaust may be termed, as Whoopi Goldberg (the esteemed racial scholar) said best, “white on white” violence. The word which describes the inherent, explicit, and proud discrimination employed by the Nazis in order to denigrate, discriminate, and eradicate the Jews on racial grounds is, according to Mrs. Goldberg, nothing because that never happened.

Jews occupy a very unique position as the fatal rebuttal to oppressor-oppressed thought systems. Our collective refusal to remain oppressed by embracing a victim mentality in the wake of the Holocaust, instead transforming pain into action (for reference, protest, awareness-gathering, and other activities which can be performed at a desk or on a couch are not genuine action) has made us Public Enemy #1 to those who would rather perennially embrace squealing over doing. The expressions of this mentality (embodied by the article's allegations of a vast conspiracy enacted by Miley Cyrus to oppress Black women through song and dance) betray themselves increasingly as nothing more than things they’d wish were true. The blanket vague statements made by people enraptured by this theology (e.g., from the article, “Capitalism is a gendered enterprise” – disprovable by the fact that capitalism is not only not an enterprise, but the sum total of all economic action in a voluntary society, and also by the fact that voluntary systems like capitalism provide the same total freedom to all genders) serve as meager substitutes for genuine oppression once experienced. The fact that these statements aren’t true (or more accurately, unverifiable, as I cannot deny that there is a 0.000000001% chance that Miley Cyrus is the leader of the Klu Klux Klan) is besides the point because the point is to be, internally, the victim at all costs. It was a mentality that I remember embracing as a deeply autistic young man and exploiting it for personal comfort in the form of self pity. It didn’t get me very far and I am grateful to have had a mother and father who readily analyzed my own behavior back at me and forced me to continue working even when the math problems got a bit complicated.

Yet another manner in which the Jews are eliminated as a race and demoted, in this false hierarchy, to the status of Whites is in the destruction of the concept of discrete nationhood. Why should us Whites get a separate nation from all the other Whites? The natural conclusion is that Israel, whose Jewish population is 70% Middle Eastern Jewish origin (as opposed to Ashkenazi/European Jewish origin), is a white settler colonial project. It is unique among nations described as such in that the Jews are indeed from Israel (the “Rhodesians” never claimed to have been from Zimbabwe). But unlike the racial-attributers, who aim to maintain the illusion of their oppression as equivalent to the oppression of their ancestors, the new antisemites simply hate Jews and want them dead. A wonderful illustration appears in the Times of Israel when a pro-Palestinian (a term which has unfortunately become a dog-whistle) group made plans to beat Jews but ordered its members to always refer to them as Zionists (https://www.timesofisrael.com/nycs-public-law-school-releases-video-of-antisemitic-commencement-speech/). Anti-Zionism takes its place as our second dog whistle, mainly because the Zionist is always a Jew, and the Jew almost always a Zionist. There is no significant or genuine distinction that can be drawn in good faith. Plenty of distinctions can be made in bad faith by, for example, pointing to extremist Haredi sects (the same ones which advocate wife beating, complete seclusion from society and Gentiles, and the total excommunication of “heretics” – cults by another name) which interpret Torah to say that Messiah must come before, not during the establishment of Israel as a state. Or to those Jews who have been so supremely secularized that they actively reject Jewish history as a fabrication.

Even using “Jewish history” as a term is actively ahistorical because it suggests that there is somehow a “Jewish” version of events which holds credence. Obviously there is a single version of events which is true and did happen as opposed to every other version which, in some aspects at a minimum, didn’t happen. It’s in our interests to emphasize that over sectional histories because the reality is that we’re from Israel. If we embrace historical relativism we give the same people who banned the teaching of the Jewish building of Jerusalem in schools the leverage to claim that we actually never came from Israel (which we can call “Palestinian history”). And we lend credence to versions of history which have woven into them as essential parts antisemitic commentary (“Nation of Islam history”). This is the only consequence that can come from embracing multiple “truths” about history.

This is represented readily by the characterization of Israel as a white settler colonial project, which is so entirely at odds with actual historical events that it can only be justified by the propagandist if these events did not happen (or, in a return of the prior mentality, they wish they did not happen). In order for Israel to be a colony it must be inhabited by people who are not its indigenous peoples, and they must inhabit it by force. The latter statement is indeed how modern Israel continues to exist – by force. The former statement is where the rejection of history lies. Jews are the indigenous people of Israel, so they by-definition cannot be colonists unless you “disagree” that Jews are indigenous to Israel (Maybe read https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/De-Judaizing-the-Homeland%3A-Academic-Politics-in-the-TROEN/89693e447dd2297e90a01d3641e9be61ce07aad5). Of course, it is settled historical fact that the Jews came from Israel, so the only way to “disagree” is to construct an internal narrative where the Jews didn’t come from Israel and give it priority over external reality. At which point your version of events becomes arbitrary and can include anything from “World Zionist Organization creating a New World Order” to “Flat Earth”. The supreme irony is that in describing Israel as a settler colonial project the post-colonial academics have subverted their entire field and mission, since they have explicitly chosen to disenfranchise the indigenous population. It entirely explains why they have made excellent comrades for modern Nazis, given that Nazis also hate indigenous peoples (i.e., pan-Germanism under Hitler).