Berkeley’s “White Initiative” | Center for Equal Opportunity

The University of California–Berkeley has announced a new “White Initiative,” designed to increase the number of whites at the school. Those numbers have gone down since voters in California passed a ballot initiative that forbids discrimination and preference in, among other things, public universities, including admissions. The new initiative aims to reverse this trend by increasing white applications and enrollment through, for example, encouraging white-only scholarship programs, to be funded by private donors. The university apparently believes that, by proceeding in this way, it is not discriminating or granting preferential treatment on the basis of “race” or “color” or “ethnicity” or “national origin,” as the law forbids. Yes, the program has a racial aim and the public university is obviously involved in it, but since the actual money for the scholarships themselves will come from non-public sources, there cannot be said to be any racial discrimination by the school.

Outrageous discrimination? Bogus legal justification? Yes, indeed — and all true, if you just change the word “white” to “African-American” in the above paragraph, as this Fox News story explains.

This just in: The law school there is assigning students to classrooms on the basis of race, too.

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Now Is Not Then for Civil-Rights Protests — The Washington Post’s “Outlook” section had a long op-ed recently by one of its editors, Simone Sebastian, the thesis of which is that the violence resulting from Black Lives Matter is unobjectionable, because Martin Luther King Jr.’s protests also resulted in predictable violence.

The comment I immediately posted on the article was: “Two points: (1) There’s a difference between creating a situation where it’s foreseeable that racists will use violence (then) and creating a situation where it’s foreseeable that the protestors will use violence (now); and (2) there’s a world of difference, too, between the degree of racism that was being protested then and the degree of racism that is being protested now.” Thus, it is risible when Ms. Sebastian writes that Black Lives Matter “fights the same injustices [as the civil-rights movement] and encounters the same resistance.” Finally, I would add that the ’60s non-King riots — which the BLM-inspired riots more closely resemble — were not justified either, and many could not be said to have accomplished anything anyhow, coming after the major civil-rights advances.

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Jeb Bush Making Sense on Voting Rights — It’s pretty clear in this video, which is making the rounds on the left, that Jeb Bush is talking about efforts to resurrect Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and he’s quite right that no new legislation is needed. The Supreme Court struck down only one part of the Voting Rights Act — the part that singled out some jurisdictions, mostly in the South, to “preclear” any voting changes with the federal government — and that part was indeed unconstitutional and was never a permanent part of the Act anyway. There are plenty of other voting-rights laws available, federal and state alike, to ensure that the right to vote is not violated.
Mr. Bush might have added that the principal bill that has been drafted is bad legislation. For example, it does not protect all races equally from discrimination; it contains much that has nothing to do with the Supreme Court’s decision; and it itself violates the Constitution by prohibiting practices that are not actually racially discriminatory but only have racially disproportionate effects. The bill is also hopelessly partisan; at Senate hearings last year, it was clear that no Republican would favor it, because it is designed to give a partisan advantage to the Left.

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Lack of Racial Preference Transparency — Last week there was an important article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about two amicus briefs filed in the Fisher II case, which challenges the use of racial admission preferences at the University of Texas.

The common theme in the two briefs — one of which, by the way, was filed by Pacific Legal Foundation and joined by, among others, our organization, the Center for Equal Opportunity — is that universities are stonewalling when it comes to providing information relevant to their use of racial preferences. I might add that another common theme in the two briefs is that, when information is provided, it shows that schools are not following the limits on such discrimination set out by the Supreme Court.

The conclusion, of course, is that universities cannot be trusted to use race only a little bit, and that the time has come for the Court to rule that they can’t use race at all.

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Finally, and just to show that I can take issue with conservatives as well as liberals, here’s my response to an argument posted on National Review Online that Republicans should reach out for black support by “us[ing] their political capital to end the war on drugs once and for all”:

Sorry, but I don’t think that a War on the War on Drugs is a good pitch for Republicans to make to African Americans. As Jason Riley [has noted], “Blacks are about 37.5 percent of the population in state prisons, which house nearly 90 percent of the nation’s inmates. Remove drug offenders from that population and the percentage of black prisoners only drops to 37 percent.” And federal prisons? Well, according to the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys, “virtually all of those [in federal prison for drug crimes] were convicted of major drug trafficking crimes” and “only a tiny fraction … were convicted of possession of drugs for personal use” and “many of those charges were the result of plea bargaining.”

Reasonable people can differ about the wisdom of the War on Drugs and how and whether to continue it, but it’s a mistake to buy into the now-fashionable claim that it was a new Jim Crow, a racist criminal justice policy aimed at the mass incarceration of African Americans. To the contrary, law-abiding and self-respecting African Americans have generally backed the police, and there has never been anything racist about recognizing the misery and destruction caused by addictive drugs. The problems in the African American communities at issue are simply not caused by the police, whose arrests merely reflect a dysfunctional culture in those communities characterized above all by catastrophic out-of-wedlock birthrates.

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