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Letter to the Editor
theeagle.com
Jan. 13, 2004

The

editorial on Texas A&M’s admissions policy (Eagle, Jan 11) claims that legacy points are race-neutral.

But the numbers don’t add up to that conclusion. The editorial states that in 2003, legacy points went

to 312 white students, 6 black students and 27 Hispanic students. Of 345 students receiving legacy

points, only 9.5 percent were minorities — a rate that is lower than the 18 percent of minorities

attending the university, and much lower than the proportion of minorities in the state as a

whole.

By favoring white students disproportionately, the policy may have been

technically race-neutral in that it didn’t explicitly mention race, but it was not effectively race-

neutral in that it used a criterion that happens to be strongly correlated with race.

At

issue here are two definitions of race-neutral: one which narrowly looks at the description of the

policy, the other which looks at its outcomes.

Legacy points were applied in a narrowly

race-neutral way to relatives of former students.

But that population is not as racially

diverse as the state, or even of the current student body. Consequently, the outcome of the policy

statistically favored white students at a disproportionate rate.

Even though more

minority legacy students accepted the spots they were offered, the overall rate of minority admissions

under the legacy program was less than of the university as whole. This was not a race-neutral policy

as measured by outcomes.

One of the keys to increasing minority enrollment would be to

gain the confidence of the young minority scholars of Texas, who must overcome what they have heard

about the environment and culture of A&M being stacked against them.

The end of the

legacy policy at A&M is a small step in the right direction towards helping to change

that.

COLIN ALLEN
College Station

Published by Counterpunch, Jan. 14,

2004
http://www.counterpunch.com/moses01142004.html
also distributed via

Portside

To Write Off the South
is to Surrender to Bigots

By Greg

Moses

It is the day before Martin Luther King’s birthday, 2004, and I am reading with

great sadness reports of a recent political analysis that says to Democratic candidates for president,

“forget the South, white voters will not be coming back to you.” From my home base in Texas, I

cannot disagree with the report. I have watched the new racism and the new Repulbicanism rise together

in close collaboration for the past twenty years. I have seen it up close.

I was there

in a small Texas town 20 years ago when a rising political star told a frail and elderly black woman to

get herself a new husband. And I was in that room when the room burst into laughter. The paradigm of

racist Republicanism was born that day, and it has been winning votes ever since.

For

me, the culmination of the process was exemplified by December’s announcement that Texas A&M

University would drop its 23-year-old commitment to affirmative action. The major players in the

decision have solid credentials in the Republican establishment, including the corporate leader of

Clear Channel who acts as chairman of the board of regents, the former director of the CIA who serves

as president of the university, and a Republican Governor who quietly sits and watches this experiment

in backlash, without saying anything at all.

Not to mention a president, whose

influence over federal civil rights policy can be palpably felt by the absolute silence from the Office

for Civil Rights. According to promises that George W. Bush himself made in writing, when he was

Governor of Texas in the Summer of 2000, the OCR is supposed to be an active partner in the civil

rights policies of Texas higher education, but OCR looks more like a silent partner these

days.

All this is sad enough for the South that produced the great Civil Rights

revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, but it is doubly sad during these days of national tribute to

King.

There are white voters who have not gone over to Republican racism. For this

reason, we do find some relatively progressive representatives such as Lloyd Doggett or Martin Frost.

But these progressive white voices have been deliberately targeted for removal by a redistricting

battle that proved the Republican Governor could speak quite a lot when he wanted to.

Where white, anti-racist voters are supposed to find a future in this mess is a

question as nasty as the recent political analysis indicates.

Yet, during this

commemoration of King’s birthday, we can review what he said in his chapter about “Racism and the

White Backlash” when he wrote his final book in 1967.

In Where Do We Go from Here:

Chaos or Community? King argued that, “we must turn to the white man’s problem.” That problem,

argued King, could be diagnosed in a contradictory personality that always takes something back for

everything it gives.

The Texas A&M decision would be a classic illustration of this

“strange indecisiveness and ambivalence”. The university president promises to add new resources for

marketing and recruitment. But since something has been given, something else must be taken away.

Gone now is affirmative action in admissions.

Backlash in America, King reminds us, is

the norm rather than the exception. The Civil Rights Movement was the exception in American history,

so far as white America is concerned.

Not all white America, of course. But white

America as a whole has a predictable pattern of behaving as if white America as a whole were the most

important people in history.

King’s frankness about white racism is eloquent. “Racism

is a philosophy based on a contempt for life…. Racism is total estrangement…. Inevitably it

descends to inflicting spiritual or physical homicide upon the out-group.”

Today, you

can hear the pain of Texas leaders who stand bewildered before the Texas A&M decision. Leaders who

were never consulted, advised, or warned about the surprising turn of policy, because why? Because

they were not enough respected. And in the aftermath of their well-organized and collective complaint,

they are greeted with an implacable silence. The voices that THEY represent need not be heard by the

rulers who now run Texas A&M.

In light of President Bush’s recent declarations that we

must return to outer space with gusto, we may note what King wrote in 1967, that the nation’s

enthusiasm for solving great problems was curiously selective. No problem is too great for NASA to

solve. Yet, “No such fervor or exhilaration attends the war on poverty.”

Or in light

of the billions that have been budgeted for global war, we might again attend to King’s observations,

“In the wasteland of war, the expenditure of resources knows no restraints; here our abundance is

fully recognized and enthusiastically squandered.” King was talking about war budget that amounted to

a mere $10 billion per year.

As we drift in the direction of Republican racism, outer

space enthusiasm, and big bucks for war, it would serve us well to consider what our great national

philosopher counseled us in 1967. American progress has always been in the hands of dedicated

minorities who resisted that drift.

“That creative minority of whites absolutely

committed to civil rights can make it clear to the larger society that vacillation and procrastination

on the question of racial justice can no longer be tolerated.” What we can do is never give up,

especially if we’re white and Southern.

Racism 101 All Over Again

By Greg

Moses

The spectre of race in Texas higher education was raised inside and outside the

state as soon as the King holiday weekend was over. A campus task force at the University of Texas at

Austin found new reasons to take race seriously. And a long-term study from Princeton dismissed highly

racialized suspicions that have swirled around the Texas “ten percent plan.”

As

quoted by the Houston Chronicle’s Todd Ackerman, the task force at the Austin campus, found that,

“people from various racial and ethnic backgrounds don’t understand each other.”

Therefore, according to the chair of the committee, “Rather than just providing

stopgap measures when issues arise, we hope to integrate racial respect and fairness throughout the UT

community.”

[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2363406]

The bureaucratic neutrality of the findings, of course, fail to convey the fact that

one must understand white folk as a survival skill in American today (can you say Iowa caucus?), so if

different people are having trouble understanding each other, the problem is more likely to belong on

the side of white folks who still think they have so little to learn about people of color.

The Houston Chronicle report also neglects the stormy history of past attempts to

inaugurate “multiculturalism across the board” at the Austin campus. The English Department, once

upon a time, tried to require a textbook for freshman writing that included critical theory in race and

gender.

Hunter Thompson invented the term shithammer for the kind of politics that

came down during the “Texas Comp. Controversy” of 1990. It is shamefully amusing today to re-read

the complaints of stolid scholars complaining fourteen years ago about that, “highly politicized

faction of radical literary theorists” who dared to make race everybody’s business.

[http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v04/0372.html]

And yet, some of the consequences of ongoing white ignorance about race could be read

between the lines of this week’s Princeton report, which found that careful scientific analysis did

not support popular prejudices, fed by media reports, that the state’s admissions laws were driving

better qualified, white students, out of state.

The prejudicial suspicions were never

quite uttered publicly as racist, but the demographics leave little question about the racialized

nature of the allegations.

The “popular complaint” goes like this: since the

state’s best universities have to admit the top ten percent of high school graduates under the “top

ten plan”, students from the worst high schools are taking places that ought to go to more students

from “better” high schools.

As the complaint continues, many students from the high

quality high schools, or so-called “feeder schools,” are therefore having to leave the state,

contributing to a Texas brain drain.

The racialized nature of the complaint may be found

in the history of the top ten plan, which was explicitly devised to substitute for affirmative action

during the Hopwood period in Texas history. In fact, to illustrate just how racialized the “ten

percent plan” was, professors Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres argued at the time that the ten percent

plan illustrated a brand new theory of race.

As the Princeton report points out, if

the ten percent plan works as a sort of semi-substitute for affirmative action, it is because Texas

high schools are still segregated.

In the words of Princeton authors Marta Tienda

and Sunny Niu:

“The Texas school segregation patterns that enabled H.B.588 [the ten

percent law] to restore some diversity at college campuses after 1996 imply disproportionate

representation of blacks and Hispanics at high schools where large shares of students are economically

disadvantaged. In fact, over 30 percent of black seniors and nearly half of Hispanic seniors graduated

from a high school designated as poor, but only 2.5 and 3.9 percent, respectively, attended one of the

“feeder” high schools. By contrast nearly 13 percent of non-Hispanic white students graduated from

feeder high schools, as did 18 percent of Asian-origin students.”

[http://www.texastop10.princeton.edu/publications/tienda011504.pdf]

Between schools that

are “feeders” and schools that are “starved” is a demographic of class and race, where vestiges of

separate and unequal remain.

But as Dallas Morning News reporter Kent Fischer tells us

in his Tuesday report, the results of the ten percent plan have not yielded much in the way of

diversity as far as Texas A&M University is concerned.

Fischer introduced Texas A&M near

the end of his story about the Princeton report, only to forget it precipitously as we shall soon see.

By interviewing thousands of students, the Princeton report is able to show us that

more Texas youth would prefer to leave the state. It’s not the ten percent plan that’s “forcing”

students out, rather it’s the rest of the country that’s attracting students away from the Lone Star

State. If truth be told, more students would have gone out of state for higher education had they been

more successful in meeting their goals.

As for the suspicion that the “poor” high

schools were producing poorly qualified candidates, the Princeton report notes that many of these

students landed some of the most competitive out-of-state offers.

And considering the

number of “feeder” school students who eventually won admission to college, the Princeton report

tells us that they do better than most students in the nation in terms of landing the schools they

want.

Not surprisingly, the Princeton report suggests that black students from Texas

tend to be more likely to set their sights out of state in the first place, and secondly are less

likely to want to go to Texas A&M at all. These are problems well known in College Station, even if

the Aggie solutions look more often like bad jokes.

Tienda and Niu raise questions about

the purpose of public higher education, which still has a sort of populist legacy in Texas. The

question of allocating seats is a serious public question, and they contribute to a tone of seriousness

about it.

And so the Princeton researchers conclude that, “a modified percent plan

combined with a narrowly tailored consideration of race would yield the optimal solution for

Texas.”

“That, in fact, has happened,” reports the Dallas Morning News. Say that

again? What has in fact happened. The Morning News, which had reminded us a few paragraphs back about

the predicament of Texas A&M admissions, now completely moves on.

[http://www.dallasnews.com/latestnews/stories/012004dntextop10percent.5e2c9.html]

Ignoring its own recently published reports about Texas A&M’s decision last month to

abolish its narrowly tailored considerations of race, the Morning News closes only with the example of

the University of Texas at Austin, which will employ a constitutionally refurbished affirmative action

plan. And never mind that the Austin campus still needs a fifteen member committee of presumably non-

radical literary theorists to soberly recommend systematic racial understanding.

In

their consideration of the Texas ten percent plan, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres argued that a new

theory of race was in the making, one that superseded old paradigms of affirmative action. Yet, the

Princeton report and the outcry during the last month from Texas civil rights community indicates that

old lessons may still have legs. Affirmative action by any other name, is, after everything has
been

carefully considered, “the optimal solution.”

In light of these fresh reports, The

Texas Civil Rights Review is especially ea
ger to share with you the documentary evidence that Texas A&M

used to adopt its anti-affirmative action policy… as soon as the Texas Open Records Law is obeyed.

Please stay tuned.

Congratulations to the Austin-American Statesman for its scholarship

and initiative in the Jan. 25, 2004 report by Erik Rodriguez and Andy Alford that shows Austin TX

police are 100 percent more likely to use force against African-Americans than

whites.

The report is a rare and laudible example of careful analysis done independently

by journalists; not simply reporting what others have found. Well done!–gm