I Don't Want A Redheaded Judge; I Want A Fair And Qualified Judge
Wrongheaded idea in the LA Times, in an editorial touting race preferences in judge appointments, headlined "Make the courts look like us":
A society based on the rule of law requires that people respect their courts; but that respect is subject to question when, from county to county and courtroom to courtroom, the judges are primarily of one race or ethnicity and the litigants and defendants are of another.The divide in California courtrooms is not quite that stark, but it is unmistakable. In a state in which about 40% of residents are non-Latino white, the Judicial Council reports that 72.3% of trial judges and appellate justices are white. Fewer than a third of judges and justices are women.
So it is encouraging that Gov. Jerry Brown is, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger before him, appointing jurists that are more reflective of California's composition. Brown, in fact, deserves credit for having placed a new emphasis on diversity in bench appointments during his two terms as governor in the 1970s. But that was three decades ago. Why is there still such a lag?
Governors can only work with the applicant pools they are given. If not enough qualified African American, Latino, Asian and other non-white lawyers are applying to become judges, the best a governor can do is encourage more to try. But even that requires a diverse population of attorneys, which in turn requires a population of law students, college and university students and ultimately high school graduates that reflects the state's people.
Racism in hiring people of the "right" colors is still racism.
As for affirmative action in law school admissions, it often ends up in blacks flunking out. Walter Williams writes on Creators:
Professor Gail Heriot, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights commissioner and member of the University of San Diego law faculty, addresses academic mismatch in her article "Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," in The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues (2008). Citing UCLA law professor Richard Sander's research, Professor Heriot says that at elite law schools 52 percent of black students had first-year grades that put them in the bottom 10 percent of their class as opposed to 7 percent white students. Black students had a higher failing and dropout rate, 19 percent compared to 8 percent for white students. Only 45 percent of blacks passed the bar exam on their first try compared with 78 percent of whites. Even after multiple attempts, only 57 percent of blacks succeeded in passing the bar....It is truly a vicious, mean agenda, where black students, who would be successes at a second- or third-tier law school, have been recruited and admitted to the highly competitive environment of first-tier schools in the name of diversity and turned into failures.
Think of it this way. Suppose you asked, "Williams, would you teach me how to box?" I say yes and the first matchup I arrange for you is against Lennox Lewis. You might have the potential to ultimately be an excellent boxer, but you're going to get your brains beaten out before you learn how to bob and weave. It's the same with any student -- black or white. He is less likely to succeed if he is placed in an academic environment where his credentials don't begin to match those of his peers. He is likely to do much better in a slower paced, less competitive environment where he might receive more personal help.
I have frequently made this argument only to be asked: If top-tier colleges don't have racially different admissions policies, how are they going to have enough black students? My response is that's their problem. Black people can't afford to have our youngsters turned into failures so that in the name of diversity race hustlers and white liberals can feel better.
Susan Goldsmith, a terrific writer I sort of grew up with in Michigan (she's a little older), writes in the East Bay Express, "Rich, Black, Flunking: Cal Professor John Ogbu thinks he knows why rich black kids are failing in school. Nobody wants to hear it":
The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, standardized test scores, and enrollment in advanced-placement courses. On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45. Other indicators were equally dismal. It made no sense....The professor and his research assistant moved to Shaker Heights for nine months in mid-1997. They reviewed data and test scores. The team observed 110 different classes, from kindergarten all the way through high school. They conducted exhaustive interviews with school personnel, black parents, and students. Their project yielded an unexpected conclusion: It wasn't socioeconomics, school funding, or racism, that accounted for the students' poor academic performance; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents.
Ogbu concluded that the average black student in Shaker Heights put little effort into schoolwork and was part of a peer culture that looked down on academic success as "acting white." Although he noted that other factors also play a role, and doesn't deny that there may be antiblack sentiment in the district, he concluded that discrimination alone could not explain the gap.
"The black parents feel it is their role to move to Shaker Heights, pay the higher taxes so their kids could graduate from Shaker, and that's where their role stops," Ogbu says during an interview at his home in the Oakland hills. "They believe the school system should take care of the rest. They didn't supervise their children that much. They didn't make sure their children did their homework. That's not how other ethnic groups think."
Skin colour is so 1990s. We need to have courts of intellectual equals, wherein people with IQ over 130 will be have their cases heard by me, defendants of average IQ will be subjected to the judgement of liberal arts majors and people with IQ under eighty will be judged by editors from the LA Times. "Make the courts think like us."
Storm Saxon's Gall Bladder at March 5, 2012 7:33 AM
What Ogbu describes is a modern cargo cult.
Get the right ZIP Code and academic success will automatically follow.
Build an airfield and cargo-laden planes will begin landing and dispensing goodies.
Conan the Grammarian at March 5, 2012 12:13 PM
the weird thing is, how did the parents make it? Didn't they have the traits required to get ahead and succeed? I thought that was a much larger predictor.
the thing is that the students need to be in an environment where education is a Priority. The whole acting "too white" thing can only be countered within the community that they live in. It isn't only their parents that need to model that. This is seen similarly in many different communities, not just the African one. A similar thing happens to girls in late gradeschool and middle school, when they convince each other that math is too hard and isn't for girls, and they start worrying about who is wearing what. If, as a whole group, that is the norm, they will do that thing generally. Oft times their mothers are complicit in this, astonishingly even if the mother is an engineer herself. I have seen this numerous times in my own daughter's group. Interestingly, now that she is at a STEM school, she has levelled up, because every girl in her class is pushing her.
For some people, their core group pushes them in a direction, and for others, they know what they want and go their own way. this isn't unusual, humans are made like that. This is a just case where we can see the negative aspects of this culturalization.
SwissArmyD at March 5, 2012 1:27 PM
"It wasn't socioeconomics, school funding, or racism, that accounted for the students' poor academic performance; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents."
Duh.
Yet another case of someone having to do a study to come to the conclusion that most people who actually pay attention to the world around them realized ages ago.
Miguelitosd at March 5, 2012 3:02 PM
It may be one of those things in which they don't really know, themselves, how they (or their parents) reached the middle class.
And, for that reason, they cannot adequately distill the lessons from their own success to pass down to their children.
Conan the Grammarian at March 5, 2012 4:02 PM
It's sad to say that it ceases to be a stereotype when it is a repeated, observable behavior.
Black people not applying themselves, white people saying it's because they're black, etc.
DrCos at March 5, 2012 4:04 PM
"he weird thing is, how did the parents make it?"
I was wondering that too. Are their parents just so busy that they don't have time to get involved in their children's lives? Or has their entire lives been one big affirmative-action parade?
I'll be charitable and discard that second theory in the general case, and say this: We're on our fourth generation of blacks (and our second generation of rural whites) who have been conditioned to think that it's the government's job to raise their children for them.
Cousin Dave at March 5, 2012 4:55 PM
Actually, Cousin Dave, it's our FIFTH generation. The 4th generation's babies are having their OWN babies now.
Frankly, I'm sick and tired of it. AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) is supposed to be a temporary help. That the government keeps on giving them money because they keep on having babies isn't their fault. The government wants to keep those people on the dole; and they like being there. But I'm sick of the middle class white people who are footing the bill getting blamed for the lack of motivation of the recipients. THE recipeints are the ones who need to get some motivation.
Flynne at March 5, 2012 5:24 PM
I can't remember exactly, but I think in the 1999/2000 time frame Texas had a case that the TX state colleges/universities changed the admission policy so that the top 10% of every school's graduating class automatically qualified for admission regardless of the GPA.
So if you went to a school that the valedictorian had a 3.2 GPA and you had a 3.1 GPA you automatically qualified for the state colleges. But if you had a high school that has a 4.1 valedictorian, 50 4.0 GPA's and you were a 3.9 student you were/are hosed, as far as automatic admission.
So there is no automatic answer to solve this. Part of the problem is that the system doesn't get rid of bad teachers. Another part of the problem is that it is hard to get rid of bad students.
The biggest problem is that society is shifting from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome.
It is not my responsibility, or the responsibility of society, to guarantee that you will pass the Bar, the medical boards, or any general standards to be considered competent in your field. It is my responsibility, and the responsibility of society, to ensure that if you go take whatever class, course, etc. that you have equal assistance in succeeding in whatever endeavor you undertake.
A paraphrase of an old idiom explains this easily:
Jim P. at March 5, 2012 7:53 PM
Your title is going to put people off. You make good points, but your title is absurd. Being red-headed isn't comparable to being a different race, there are cultural and social factors that go into being a member of a different race that don't go into having a different hair color.
In an ideal world, things like skin color, nose shape, eye shape, hair texture, etc. would be just like eye color and hair color differences among white people. In reality, they aren't.
People are going to brush off your article with a title like that, which is a pity, because you are a good writer.
You are a better writer than your title!
NicoleK at March 5, 2012 11:20 PM
Amy Alkon
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2012/03/05/i_dont_want_a_r.html#comment-3032809">comment from NicoleKNobody mentions being "put off" yet!
(I think people get the point just fine.)
Amy Alkon at March 5, 2012 11:29 PM
So we are to ignore the unequal application of standards and assume all professionals are equally competent, regardless of race, why?
Stupid, demeaning, and ultimately self-defeating.
MarkD at March 6, 2012 5:44 AM
"Being red-headed isn't comparable to being a different race, there are cultural and social factors that go into being a member of a different race that don't go into having a different hair color."
Historically, that's not true. Redheads and other people of obvious Irish descent were widely discriminated against in the 19th century. So were Eastern Europeans, and they still face a certain amount of discrimination in Western Europe. The concept of all white people as sharing a common ancestry is a post-WWII thing.
There's nothing qualitatively different about skin color as a distinguishing physical characteristic of humans.
Cousin Dave at March 6, 2012 6:33 PM
The point being that he or she had an opportunity as established by the person's current and future peers to be tested, advised and pass the exams and standards as currently established.
Now if the standards, etc. that are established have a racial component to them (i.e. if a white person with 10 grams of powdered coke is given probation, a black person is given six months) then you have have a cause. If both people get the same sentence then you have no cause. So there are more white judges? Who cares? Are the sentences equal? That is what matters.
Again, it is not equality of outcome, it is equality of opportunity.
Jim P. at March 6, 2012 8:35 PM
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