speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

Taking Sides
Ninth Circuit rejected a constitutional challenge to reparations for
Japanese Americans by a man interned with his German-born
parents in Texas during World War II, noting that two-thirds of the
120,000 Japanese Americans detained without trial were citizens,
whereas virtually all the 14,426 German and Italian Americans
detained were aliens, each received an individual hearing, and they
constituted only about 10 percent of all European enemy aliens.
Sometimes the equivalences are patently absurd. Representative Ray
McGrath (R-LI) opposed participation by gay Irish-Americans in the
St. Patrick's Day parade "for the same reason I wouldn't want the Ku
Klux Klan in the Martin Luther King Day Parade." 48
Affirmative action is most controversial in employment and education,
with the races splitting along predictable lines. Black youths
are almost 50 per cent more likely to believe that universities should
give "special consideration to minority students for enrollment,"
while whites are two and a half times more likely to feel that they
suffer discrimination in scholarships, jobs, and promotions. 49 When
the Denver Police Department administered a preliminary examination
to select 40 out of 892 applicants, the 86 per cent of whites and
91 per cent of Hispanics who failed were furious that all the black
examinees passed—clearly reflecting the fact that only 6 per cent of
the officers were black. 50 The Bush Administration has outlawed the
practice of ranking candidates taking federal civil service examinations
within each ethnic group in order to equalise representation. 51
It also banned race-exclusive university scholarships and then rescinded
the ban under intense public pressure; but a constitutional
challenge to the practice is pending. 52 A white high school student
wrote to the U.S. Department of Education to denounce "the most
overlooked travesty in our nation's colleges and universities: reverse
racial discrimination" when Duke University rejected her and
accepted a black classmate with what she claimed were lesser
credentials. The black woman responded: "I am so mad right now,
tears are streaming down my face. I'd like to think I was picked
because I was qualified and because I had a little bit more I could
offer to someone else." 53 Conservative faculty are even more vitriolic.
At a University of Michigan conference on "Deconstructing the
Left," David Horowitz pronounced that "affirmative action amounts
to racism pure and simple. It's exactly what's being dismantled in
South Africa." 54 When the Middle States Association of Colleges
and Schools, one of six regional accrediting bodies, deferred
approving Bernard M. Baruch College of CUNY for doing too little to
hire minority faculty and administrators or retain minority students
132