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Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 00:19:17 -0400 (EDT)
To: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: James W Mickens <jmickens &AElig eecs.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: MCRI
Status: O

If you care about diversity, I think that you should vote against MCRI. 
Prior experience with similar measures suggests that if MCRI passes, the 
diversity levels in our schools and workplaces will suffer. For example, 
in the year after California passed a similar measure (Proposition 209), 
minority admissions dropped by 61% at Berkeley and 36% at UCLA, and they 
still have not returned to pre-209 levels. A study from Princeton found 
that affirmative action plays a crucial national role in promoting diverse 
classrooms, finding that "without affirmative action the acceptance rate 
for African-American candidates likely would fall nearly two-thirds, from 
33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, while the acceptance rate for Hispanic 
applicants likely would be cut in half, from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent 
. . . removing consideration of race would have little effect on white 
students [as] their acceptance rate would rise by merely 0.5 percentage 
points . . . but Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five 
places in the admitted class not taken by African-American and Hispanic 
students" [1]. A report from the University of Michigan [2] says the 
following about MCRI and Proposition 209:

"Although described by its supporters as a civil rights effort, the MCRI, 
like Prop. 209, appears to confer no additional civil rights on the basis 
of race, gender, ethnicity or national origin. Prop. 209 has resulted in 
the elimination of services such as college preparation programs for 
students of color, summer science programs for girls, outreach to notify 
minority and women-owned businesses of government contracting 
opportunities, and funding for training of minority doctors and nurses. It 
has ended the requirement that state boards reflect the population of the 
state and resulted in the end of numerous voluntary K-12 school 
integration efforts. It has also led to significant decreases in:
    -government contracts awarded to minority
     and women-owned businesses
    -the percentage of women working in the
      construction trades
    -hiring of minority and female university
     professors in the University of California
     system . . ." [2]
When you think about voting for MCRI, ask yourself, "are these the things 
that I want to happen in Michigan?"

After California, Florida, and Texas banned affirmative action, they 
turned to "Top 10%" or "Top 20%" programs to bolster drops in diversity. 
These programs guarantee all high school students in the top N% of their 
graduating classes automatic admission to a state university. 
Unfortunately, as described in this article:
    http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0212/p03s01-usgn.html
these programs have not been successful in returning diversity levels to 
their previous levels. According to a law professor quoted in the article, 
a percentage program is "better than nothing, but it's much worse than 
considering race . . . everybody wants a magic bullet that increases 
diversity without considering race. Well, there isn't any magic bullet."

I do believe that socioeconomic status should be a primary determinant of 
preferential treatment. However, as the University of Michigan report 
states, "socioeconomic status is a highly problematic proxy for race 
[since] even those who are affluent may still experience bias and 
discrimination. Socioeconomic status is [also] ineffective as a proxy for 
gender" [2]. Thus, effective diversity policies cannot be totally blind to 
race and gender. Improving diversity is not just about helping people who 
grew up poor or went to bad schools. It's about helping people who have 
encountered or will encounter difficulties to personal success that will 
not be based on their intrinsic merit.


> My work on Yootles is turning me into a
> libertarian and for the sake of consistency,
> if nothing else, I think I'm going to go
> with Yes on MCRI. (I suppose a hardcore
> libertarian would say No -- no legislation
> concerning race at all.  But since I think 
> anti-discrimination laws are important I'd
> prefer the simplest, fairest, most consistent 
> form of such laws possible, ie, "no racial
> discrimination for any reason ever".)

What exactly do you mean by discrimination? When you say "no racial 
discrimination for any reason," you seem to invoke a pejorative sense of 
discrimination, i.e., you are against discrimination because it represents 
an intrinsically unfair bias against a racial or gender group. But do you 
really think that eliminating affirmative action will result in a net 
*decrease* in unfair discrimination? To correct social inequalities, don't 
we have to accept that the inequalities exist and then take positive 
discriminative actions to address them?

Without affirmative action, do you think that people in male-dominated 
fields will become *more* inclined to admit women? If the answer is no, 
does it bother you that female representation will suffer without 
affirmative action?

You are against "racial discrimination." But isn't it racial 
discrimination to tell a black kid who attends a crappy inner-city school 
and can't afford Kaplan classes that we won't take these priors into 
account? Isn't it discriminatory to tell that black kid that even 
though he may have equivalent raw intelligence to a privileged white kid 
who went to private school, we'll evaluate their SAT scores in the same 
way? Isn't it discriminatory to reward the white kid and punish the black 
kid for the accidental circumstances of their birth?

Affirmative action based solely on race is not optimal. However, 
race-based metrics do serve as a crude approximation of one's 
disenfranchisement. The Princeton study indicates that banning affirmative 
action will do little to help whites but a lot to hurt ethnic minorities. 
Banning affirmative action will also hurt gender integration. So, if 
you're in favor of diversity, and the Michigan ballot contains no 
alternative diversity plan to affirmative action, why would you vote for 
MCRI?

~j


[1] This quote is taken from a summary of the actual report:
     http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S11/80/77I23/index.xml
The report itself can be found here:
     http://opr.princeton.edu/faculty/Tje/EspenshadeSSQPtII.pdf


[2] An executive summary of the report can be found here:
     http://www.cew.umich.edu/PDFs/MCRIresearchsummary.pdf
This is the full thing:
     http://www.cew.umich.edu/PDFs/MCRIecon6-25.pdf