For women:

The High Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that local authorities must provide women's sports teams with 150 percent higher budgets than municipal men's teams receive in an precedent-setting affirmative action move.

The High Court obligated the Ramat Hasharon Local Council, together with all local councils across the country who fund local sports teams, to adopt criterion set by the Ministry of Science and Sport that say women's teams must receive additional budgets in an act of affirmative action.

MK Ahmad Tibi (Hadash) is demanding affirmative action for Arabs at Bank of Israel and other public sector institutions.
....
"Bank of Israel hires according to criteria of merit, and ignores differences in religion, sex, race or nationality," wrote [Bank of Israel Governor David] Klein.

Tibi said he would not be placated by Klein s promises. "I want a systematic change in employment policy," he said.

I think it is becoming increasingly clear that "diversity" often obscures and even obstructs needed efforts to eliminate discrimination. A good example of what I mean can be seen in this article about a racial incident in a suburban hospital near Philadelphia (thanks to Dave Huber).

A number of months ago the husband of a maternity patient prevailed upon hospital administrators to keep blacks out of his wife's room.

For several days in September, supervisors told African American employees to keep out of a woman's room because her husband, who was white, insisted that only white employees assist in the delivery of his child.

Staffers said they were only trying to prevent a confrontation with the man. But the decision violated the hospital's antidiscrimination policy and prompted outrage among employees and community groups.

It seems to me that the only cultural incompetence on display here is the hospital administrators' inability to recognize that what they need to do is simple, not complicated. They do not need to worry about such politically correct gaseous euphemisms as "cultural competence" or even "diversity." Instead, they should simply enforce their already existing non-discrimination policy.

Indeed, trying to solve a discrimination problem by insisting on "diversity" is rather like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. If the hospital followed the "diversity" solution that is now an article of faith in higher education, it would have to ensure that all patients are served by a racially representative group of doctors, nurses, and attendants.

Mickey Kaus, on the liberal objection to hiring or promoting friends:

So the idea is that all treatment is to be meted out according to what? Merit? Isn't that the argument made by the anti-affirmative-action Bakke crowd--that college admissions should be done strictly by grades and test scores, etc? Isn't the smart, liberal pro-preference position that you can't really rank everyone by an objective "merit" scale--that all sorts of arbitrary factors are at play so race might as well be another one?

Is the liberal position really that you can't refuse to promote a white employee because you don't know and trust him, but you can refuse to promote him because he's white?

... I suppose others have already made these points.

Being exposed to blacks is good for the white mind, says a group of psychologists.

The study took groups of three White students with similar views on one of two issues –either child labor or capital punishment – and matched them with a White or Black collaborator acting under the instructions of the researchers. The students would discuss their issue, and the collaborator would argue along carefully prescribed guidelines either in agreement with or opposed to the group opinion.

The study found that when the collaborator was Black, the other students rated his or her ideas as more novel, even when the collaborator held the same opinion as the rest of the group. In two of the three experimental conditions, students also demonstrated more complex reasoning when the collaborator was Black. Furthermore, students who had more racially diverse friends and classmates tended to show even higher levels of thinking, suggesting that long-term exposure to racial diversity may be even more beneficial to higher-order thought than is immediate immersion in a diverse environment.

In light of these results, we can glean that the mixing pot of cultures and ideas that American colleges strive to become does more than just look good; it promotes complex thinking. Diversity of ethnicities really does promote diversity of thought.

Howell Raines (yes, the Howell Raines) poor-mouths John Kerry. (Link via InstaPundit)

According to Raines, Kerry has moved from "ponderous" to "pompous." He "radiates the feeling that he is entitled to his sense of entitlement ... and is so accustomed to privilege that he doesn't have to worry about looking goofy."

Lucky for Kerry that Raines likes and supports him.

No less noteworthy is the characteristic depth and perception Raines demonstrates when he turns to political analysis:

The difference between [Kerry] and Bush is that Kerry represents the liberal, charitable wing of the Privilege party and George W represents the conservative, greedy wing of the Privilege party.

... This time at the New Yorker.

The New York Times ran an interesting article on Tuesday about the senior thesis of Princeton student, and recent graduate, Katherine Milkman, who used sophisticated mathematical models to analyze New Yorker fiction between October 1992 and September 2001.

She was concerned, among other things, with the gender and race of both the authors of and the characters in the stories that appeared during those years. Whether or not her findings are important, or even interesting, is open to some debate, but I found the following comment in the NYT article to be significant mainly because of the lack of debate about it:

In a conclusion that will probably cause few readers to spill their evening tea, she states that "quantitative analyses revealed that New Yorker characters are not representative of Americans or New York State residents in terms of their race."

Is there any reason why New Yorker fiction editors should receive less criticism than Ivy League admissions officers or Hollywood producers when, in the exercise of their unregulated discretion, their notion of "merit" leads them to publish an ethnically unrepresentative collection of authors who populate their stories with an ethnically unrepresentative cast of characters?

Today's Washington Post has a long page one article arguing (much more than reporting) that Bush's campaign ads represent "unprecedented negativity."

You'll need to look at the whole thing to determine whether you think the case is made. I certainly make no claim myself to having scrutinized all these ads and compared their charges to Kerry's record, but it does seem to me that in several cases the article's charges are not supported by the evidence it presents.

Take, for example, the charge of "unprecedented negativity."

Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising.

In terms of the magnitude of the distortions, those who study political discourse say Bush's are no worse than those that have been done since, as Stanford University professor Shanto Iyengar put it, "the beginning of time."

Or look at a typical example of what the article easily and often refers to as as "distortion" or "untruth":

The campaign ads, which are most scrutinized, have produced a torrent of misstatements. On March 11, the Bush team released a spot saying that in his first 100 days in office Kerry would "raise taxes by at least $900 billion." Kerry has said no such thing; the number was developed by the Bush campaign's calculations of Kerry's proposals.

If that analysis was wrong, incorrect, untrue, then the article should have shown how and why.

Read the whole thing.

The St. Petersburg Times has a long article today asking whether the NAACP is "still relevant as it nears 100"?

The article is worth a look, but I believe the most serious problem of the NAACP, and the civil rights movement today in general, was unintentionally revealed in statements by a local leader quoted in the article.

Talmadge Rutledge, who was president of the Clearwater NAACP and led the fight against school segregation in Pinellas County, said:

We thought if we got the schools desegregated, that would take care of education. We have the same problems we had in 1950s. The problems were more blatant then. Now they are more subtle.

Interestingly, Randy Cohen, the New York Times Magazine Sunday "Ethicist," thinks not. Replying to a query from Malik Raymond Singleton, who asks whether it is wrong to drop his "ethnically identifying first name" on job applications, Ethicist Cohen replies:

This name change is a reasonable response to racial bias. It would be unethical -- and often illegal -- to change your name to commit or cover up fraud. But a potential employer has no right, ethically or legally, to refuse an interview because of an applicant's race. Thus you are not withholding information that is even remotely relevant.

If racially identifying information is not "even remotely relevant," are employers ever justified in asking for it?

What if Malik Raymond Singleton, for reasons having nothing to do with race, had always used "Ray" or "Raymond" as his first name. Would it be "wrong" for him to use "Malik" as his first name when applying for a job if he thought the employer would prefer him because of his race? (Of course, if race is not "even remotely relevant," then it goes without saying that it would be wrong for an employer to employ racial preferences. In any event, that certainly wasn't said here.)

Since it is "reasonable" for one person to withhold racially identifying information, would it be reasonable for minorities always to withhold racially identifying information from potential employers? If they did, how would employers ensure sufficient "diversity"?

Ethicist Cohen asserts that it is both unethical and illegal for a potential employer "to refuse an interview because of an applicant's race." He thus must believe that, say, a university department that refuses to interview a male applicant for a women's history position or a white applicant for a black history position (not uncommon behavior in academia these days) is acting both illegally and immorally. If so, that has gone without saying as well.

In my last post I pointed out that "diversity" is often defended by reference to values or goals that have nothing to do with diversity as traditionally understood, and in fact that have been specifically barred by previous Supreme Court opinions.

Now let me propose a hypocrisy test, one that, appropriately enough, has to do with testing. Some of the most ardent defenders of "diversity" today have been among the most vociferous critics of testing -- admissions, aptitude, and even achievement tests, but especially of testing in the employment arena. They have insisted, for example, that any test that has a "disparate impact" on minorities must be abandoned unless it can meet very strict validation standards, i.e., unless it can be proven that its measurements are accurate and that scoring high on the test correlates very closely with success on the job. Since that sort of proof is hard to come by, many employers have simply abandoned employment tests that they had used in the past.

What if all those institutions who claim near magical properties for "diversity," and who justify racial discrimination because it is necessary to achieve sufficient levels of it, had to meet the same burden of proof that test critics have insisted upon? What if, in short, they had to prove that "diversity" actually produces the benefits they claim for it? The University of Michigan attempted to provide some evidence for its claims, but that evidence fell far short of the standard test critics demand of employers.

Given the enormity of the loophole created by Grutter it is difficult to remember that it is a loophole. Earlier, the Supremes had banned racial preferences for the purposes of correcting racial imbalance, even racial imbalances caused by earlier generations of discrimination, or to provide compensation for past discrimination (except to individuals who could prove that they themselsves were actual victims). Grutter, at least in theory, did not reverse these prior rulings, but it did allow a "diversity" exception for institutions of higher learning.

One of the reasons that it is difficult to remember that racial preferences are the exception rather than the rule is that "diversity" is regularly described and defended as a limitless justification for preferences, including preferences for purposes that have clearly been banned.

The Texas A&M; University system, for example, has just decided to consider the race of applicants to its Health Science Center. By way of explanation and justification, Nancy W. Dickey, the center's president, stated that "We know that there are health disparities between minorities and nonminorities, and diversity will help us reduce those disparities."

She did not say exactly how "diversity" will help reduce health disparities. The goal of Erle Nye, vice chairman of the board, was not so extravagant. "We need bigger numbers," he said.

State rep. Garnet Coleman (D, Houston) also defended the new diversity policy as a simple correction for racial disadvantage. "This is an acknowledgment that we don't live in a meritocracy and that race can be a detriment," he said.

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has also just launched a new diversity program, the Vivien Thomas Fund to Increase Diversity, and it too was defended in terms that have nothing to do with diversity as traditionally defined (Thomas was a black medical pioneer at Hopkins.)

According to Edward D. Miller, dean of the Hopkins medical school, "We can best honor Vivien Thomas by removing for others the economic and racial barriers that often stood in his way." "Diversity," in other words, here is equated with simple removal of racial barriers, which is the same thing an anti-discrimination policy would do.

On Wednesday the California state assembly passed a bill, by a vote of 45 - 30 with no debate, that would allow the University of California and California State University systems to consider race in admissions.

But, you must be wondering, as I did, wouldn't such a law kick sand in the face of Prop. 209, which bans the consideration of race? Good question, but Ricardo Lara, communications director for Marco Firebaugh, principal [not "principle," as originally mis-typed!] author of the bill, says no.

Lara said the bill does not violate Proposition 209 because it "does not allow for any preferential treatment," and merely advocates the consideration of more than academic factors.

Discriminating minds want to know, and so we turn to Rev. Jesse Jackson for enlightenment.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson supports the ideas in the bill because he said the consideration of race is necessary to achieve the ideals of equality American culture has traditionally resisted.

"Using race as a factor is a good and necessary idea to make crooked ways straight," Jackson said.

In a speech commemorating black veterans, John Kerry said in a speech on Friday that there are still

people in this country who don't understand. We still have people in this country who are willing to stand in the way. We still have some who call themselves leaders who appoint people to courts who challenge affirmative action and take on the ability of people to live truly equal.