This feisty blog has occasionally talked about issues of discrimination against minority-group members and women, in science, or in academia, or just more broadly. We have also, one must admit, occasionally taken the Bush administration to task for this or that example of egregious malfeasance. Thus, rigorously fair folks that we are, it’s only right that we also mention those instances when the administration takes time off from its busy schedule of intelligence-doctoring, operative-outing, deficit-growing, and hurricane-ignoring to actively fight the pernicious effects of discrimination.
So, here we go: the Justice Department is going to sue Southern Illinois University for discriminating against white males.
No, you can’t make this stuff up. SIU, like almost every university in the country, is seriously under-represented by minority groups among its graduate students; out of 5,500 graduate students, only about 8 percent are Latino or African-American (compared to over 20 percent of Americans). So they have a few fellowship programs that specifically target women and minorities, and help out a tiny number of people — perhaps 40 per year. The Bush administration, tireless warriors for social justice that they are, will stop at nothing to squelch this manifest anti-white bias:
“The University has engaged in a pattern or practice of intentional discrimination against whites, non-preferred minorities and males,” says a Justice Department letter sent to the university last week and obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
The letter demands the university cease the fellowship programs, or the department’s civil rights division will sue SIU by Nov. 18.
I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to discriminate against someone, I would be able to do a much better job than that. You know, like actually having fewer members of the discriminated class at my university than in the surrounding society, rather than significantly more.
Sadly, this is an issue that (even) scientists don’t always think very clearly about. There is a feeling in some circles that perfect fairness consists of taking the tiny part of society’s workings over which you have control, and pretending within that part that there is no such thing as race or gender, everyone should be treated equally. But in the real world, where we are not all born into equal circumstances and presented with equal opportunities, it makes perfect sense to recognize that and account for it when we recruit and train students.
Of course, people will complain that singling out minority-group status forces us to treat people according to some external characteristics rather than as individuals, and amounts to an insidious form of reverse racism, ultimately hurting the people it tries to help. This philosophically appealing position has the downside of being in flagrant contradiction with the evidence. Although it’s true that programs typically aim (small amounts of) resources at people because of minority-group status rather than a detailed understanding of their personal history in overcoming obstacles, the fact is that this clumsy strategy actually works. People gain access to education and training that they otherwise would not, and the result is that the pool of highly-educated and successful people grows more diverse, which helps both the people in those groups and the society as a whole. As crude as it is, the strategy of targeting fellowships at under-represented groups is both cheap and effective.
Deep down, nobody likes affirmative-action type programs. Nobody. We would all much prefer it if universities and other employers could truly ignore the race or gender of applicants and workers, because they were treated completely fairly throughout all of society. But that’s just not reality. And until it is, making a tiny little effort to help out people who have faced systematic bias throughout their lives — even if the efforts are clumsy and imprecise — is the least we can do.
Comments
85 responses to “Fighting discrimination”
I am confused.
ANON has already responded to Lubos’ link (comment 68). But did no-one mention that Haelfix’s link (from comment 32) bears no relationship to his conclusion?
Or was Haelfix choosing to *agree* with Sean? The substantive content of the link certainly seemed to indicate that Sean was right: “clunky, but (seems to) work.”
This would leave Haelfix’s personal taste in students to be just that, and as Sean pointed out, I would be very leery of trusting my grade to an instructor like that.
On a side note, Haelfix: I’ve noticed that many of the “American-speaking” students who have initially struggled in my courses turned out not to be American-educated (or often American) at all, but rather foreign-educated. Seems that learning how to write or do exposition, the coherent expression of ideas, in a foreign country does not necessarily train one to do it well in the United States. I’m just glad that I was able to realize this before I came to the conclusion that they were just ‘incompetent students’ or “AA babies,” who clearly shouldn’t be in the university what with their substandard academic skills and inability to think.
Please use Gricean principles to extrapolate to topic at hand.
I ask that Haelfix don’t feel persecuted simply because others (myself included) think you’re giving off the distinct impression of being both a bigot and a moron, though. I hope Haelfix is being misunderstood — after all, I’d hate to think that a fellow teacher was being so aggressively and proactively blinkered and close-minded.
Belizean,
Thanks for your comments. I think my main point was that for many people in this country, racism is still a “big deal”. And I don’t think it is just coming from Yacht Clubs and neo-Nazis, it is more of a structural problem.
I think the fact that black folks would have to change their name to something more white-sounding in order to compete in the job market is a pretty powerful testament to the harm that racism works in their lives. Just because people have strategies for competing and surviving does not make it OK. I doubt that discrimination in hiring is “readily circumvented”. Getting a callback is only the first step in the process.
I don’t know what types of names “most blacks” do or don’t have, but I would suspect that most blacks would disagree with your statement about “easily living their whole lives without personally detecting racial discrimination.” I believe polls have consistently shown that many black people say racial discrimination is still powerful in this country. Here’s a recent (although Katrina-specific) poll, if you’re interested.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-09-12-katrina-poll_x.htm
Obviously, class factors into all of this, but IMHO racism still has an impact in this country. The hiring study doesn’t even address the racial disparities in the criminal justice system or in basic educational funding, both of which are considerable, systematic and destructive.
Tim D/Belezian:
“Systematic” is the key word here. When Belezian compares the (very real) discrimination that short, fat, or ugly people face to the discrimination that blacks face, he’s comparing apples and oranges. There are no public schools in the US where there are no playgrounds, where the bathrooms don’t work, where there is no air-conditioning in the summer or heat in the winter, where the classrooms are overcrowded but there are no textbooks, where a majority of the teachers are relatively inexperienced and are teaching on emergency credentials–and where 95% of the students are short. There are tens of thousands of public schools in the US where these conditions apply–and where an overwhelming majority of the students are black.
Please read Jonathan Kozol, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid,” Harper’s, September 2005 (41-54).
“…IMHO racism still has an impact in this country.”
Sure. But is it a greater impact than that of anti-fat prejudice and the other common forms of discrimination? It isn’t.
Re: polls — It helps to remember that a majority also believe in angels or astrology.
Maybe we should take our own poll:
1. You’re looking for a job. Which of the following would in general hurt your chance the least?
a) being old
b) being fat
c) being ugly
d) being stupid
e) being short
f) being black
2. You’re trying to get a date. Which of the following would in general hurt your chance the least?
a) being old
b) being fat
c) being ugly
d) being stupid
e) being short
f) being black
You can’t discriminate against white men, they’re the oppressor-race according to popular media. And all white men have greater power than minorities, irregardless of their economic situation, social background, finances, etc.
So what if less qualified members of minorities are given certain advantages just because they’re a different ethnicity? Many people agree it’s a healthy double-standard since minorities are at an inherent disadvantage due to the color of their skin. I mean, it’s because more talented minority wouldn’t get the job because the racist white boss (because all white people are racist and only white people hold positions of power) would prefer one of his own kind, right?
And of course, all white people are just one race. There can’t be any discrimination between those ethnicities. Let’s just ignore that problem altogether.
Belizean,
I think Phillip’s post said it best. Racism is systematic in a way that being fat/ugly/etc just isn’t. I could give a list of questions about which is the best predictor of going to an underfunded school, of getting a harsher sentence for a first-time drug offense, or of being stopped by a cop for no apparent reason. The answer to all of those questions would be “f) being black.”
It’s unfair and it sucks, and the first step in fixing the problem is admitting that we (as a society) have one.
Scapegoat:
How did George W. get into Yale?
Philip,
Under funded schools occur in poor school districts that are inhabited by poor people, many of whom are black. The conditions that you attribute to systematic racism are actually due merely to poverty.
Unfortunately, the minds of a significant fraction of the population of American blacks are running a poverty-inducing program, which I’ll call the Under-Class Program, or UCP for short. When you’re running UCP, the idea that you will escape poverty and become bourgeois by adopting traditional bourgeois virtues — industriousness, perseverance, punctuality, courtesy, studiousness, ambition, articulation, abstemiousness, decorum, delayed gratification, honesty, chastity, diligence, etc. — strikes you as absurd and undesirable.
While I think there is negligible discrimination against people for being black, I also think that there is widespread discrimination against those who are UCP hosts. Because there’s a large intersection between these groups, anti-UCP bias is often confused with racism. White UCP hosts — evidenced by, say, tattoos from head to toe — are also heavily discriminated against.
Discrimination against -and affirmative action programs aimed at- women (and gays, the physically disabled, and the elderly) shouldn’t be lumped together with their race-based equivalents. Women’s lib tends to (overwhelmingly) be a good thing, and a sign of positive social developments, while ethnic minority lib tends to be a rather mixed blessing, and is often a sign of runaway multiculturalism and political correctness; of a culture that is (and will be!) at war with itself. The former (WL) should be embraced and stimulated, the latter (EML) approached with due caution. It’s important to keep in mind that if & when the multicultural experiment fails, it will fail hard. It is highly doubtful, to put it mildly, that liberal achievements such as women’s and gay’s lib will survive the collapse of the Western world.
So Philip, you think a rich black alumnus couldn’t pull some strings for his son?