Do African-Americans Really Want Racial Preferences?

National Journal

Now that Trent Lott has suppressed his nostalgia for American apartheid, vowed support for affirmative action "across the board," and thus fed the notion that racial preferences are what African-Americans want and need, let’s look at some countervailing evidence: In public opinion polls that are fairly worded, large majorities of African-Americans sometimes oppose-and lopsided majorities of other Americans always oppose-racial preferences in hiring, promotions, and college admissions.

When Affirmative Action Is Nothing But Discrimination

National Journal

Dennis Worth had been working happily and winning high performance evaluations for 16 years in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s St. Louis office when things started going sour. In 1994, he was turned down for two promotions for which an independent merit-staffing panel had rated him "highly qualified." By 1995, it "kind of hit me," Worth recalls, "that minorities and women were being promoted and advanced, and white males were not."

Legal Affairs – A Racial Quota That Will Be DOA at the High Court

National Journal

In a 5-4, near-party-line decision that gives new meaning to the phrase "bitterly divided," a federal appeals court has teed up for Supreme Court review by next summer what could become the most important case ever on racial affirmative-action preferences. The May 14 decision also dramatizes why so many of the senators now warring over judicial selection proceed on the assumption that in ideologically charged cases, most (or at least many) liberal and conservative judges are driven more by political preference than by legal principle. And it underscores the large impact the next Supreme Court appointment could have on the national agenda.

Legal Affairs – Racial Preferences in the Army: The Problem, the Solution

National Journal

The Army has been a model of successful racial integration. It has promoted large numbers of African-Americans-Colin L. Powell, for one-and other minorities into the once lily-white officer corps. It appears to have done so without much clamor about reverse discrimination by passed-over whites. The white, black, Hispanic, and Asian soldiers now fighting side by side in Afghanistan appear largely free from the racial tensions that alienated many black foot soldiers from their white officers in Vietnam three decades ago and sapped the Army’s effectiveness as a fighting force.

Column – The Case for Using Racial Profiling at Airports

National Journal

With bigots harassing and violently attacking loyal Arab-Americans, it is a bit taboo in some circles to advocate racial or ethnic profiling of any kind, in any place, ever. "I’m against using race as a profiling component," even in screening would-be airline passengers, Attorney General John Ashcroft declared in a September 16 television interview.

Legal Affairs – Finding Racial Bias Where There Was None

National Journal

It started right after the election. The indispensable Jesse Jackson muttered about "a pattern of irregularities and intimidation" in Florida in which "African-American voters were substantially targeted." By December 8, he was claiming that the Bush brothers had "stolen" the election by "schemes of disenfranchisement." Other "leaders" were not far behind. "Police checkpoints were set up in and around polling places to intimidate black men," imagined NAACP Chairman Kweisi Mfume, adding, "it was all part of some grand conspiracy" to keep blacks from the polls. "There was a systematic disenfranchisement of people of color and poor people," hallucinated Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s campaign manager. Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and others put up police roadblocks to stop blacks from voting and "tampered with the results in Florida," oozed Democratic National Committee Chairman (and Clinton moneyman) Terry McAuliffe.

Legal Affairs – Ban Racial Preferences, but Keep Affirmative Action

National Journal

One of the toughest issues ever to face the Supreme Court is back on its doorstep, propelled by a deepening split among lower federal courts, and seemingly destined to produce a climactic ruling by 2003: Does the Constitution, which bars virtually all governmental discrimination against African-Americans and some other minorities, nonetheless permit universities to discriminate in their favor (and against whites and Asians) in order to choose student bodies that look more like America than they did in 1950 or 1960?

Legal Affairs – Paying Reparations for Ancient Wrongs Is Not Right

National Journal

Most Americans have an instinctive (if self-serving) feel for why it would not be a good idea to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves. As victims of one of history’s great crimes, the slaves themselves surely deserved reparations. So, in principle, do the many living victims of the century of legal apartheid that followed slavery. But while the legacy of slavery still plagues us, the passage of 138 years since the Emancipation Proclamation and 37 years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act has changed the landscape utterly, making it impossible to decide with any pretense of fairness which of today’s African-Americans should receive compensation and who should pay.