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Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 01:40:11 -0400 (EDT)
To: James W Mickens <jmickens &AElig eecs.umich.edu>
cc: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: Daniel Reeves <dreeves &AElig umich.edu>
Subject: Re: MCRI
Status: O

Thanks James.  You changed my mind.  My stance is now No on MCRI.

Speaking my malleable mind, Eugene changed my mind about abusing Focus on 
the Family's trusting donation system [1].  I rescind my recommendation to 
order stuff from them for a donation of $0.  Let's not pursue, as Eugene 
put it, justice by unjust means.  And really it's just not a tactic that 
reflects well on us to stoop to.  But Focus on the Family are still 
dangerous, small-minded bigots.

Btw, I hear the movie Jesus Camp is a must-see.  The clips I've seen are 
pretty mind-blowing.

Danny

[1] Maybe not so trusting -- I never received my books on how to force my 
children to not be gay.


--- \/   FROM James W Mickens AT 06.10.12 00:19 (Today)   \/ ---

> 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
>

-- 
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves  - -  search://"Daniel Reeves"

    "In the last 10 years, we have come to realize that humans are more
    like worms than we ever imagined."  -- Bruce Alberts, president of
      the National Academy of Sciences, after mapping the DNA of a
      microscopic roundworm.