Author: mopress

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.

Narrow

application
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

January 11, 2004
Bowen believes Gates made right decision
By JOHN

LeBAS
Eagle Staff Writer

Former Texas A&M University President Ray Bowen said his

administration considered dropping the school’s legacy program after the 1996 Hopwood court decision

took race out of admissions decisions. But officials eventually concluded that doing so could

actually harm the university’s efforts to increase the ethnic diversity of its students, he

said.

The current president, Robert Gates, on Friday ended a 14-year-old practice that

gave an edge to freshman applicants with relatives who attended the once all-white university. The

legacy program had been blasted recently by minority lawmakers and civil rights groups who argued it

discriminated against applicants of color.

“We studied it after Hopwood and determined

legacy was helping minorities in a small way,” said Bowen, who was president from 1994 to 2002. “But

nobody believes that.”

Still, he said Gates made the right decision in light of the

recent uproar.

Legacy critics have said the program’s end is a small step toward a more

diverse student body, which is 82 percent white. While Hispanics have been at the 127-year-old

university throughout its history, blacks were not allowed until 1963.

A&M officials

have blamed a slide on minority enrollment over the past seven years on the Hopwood decision. But Bowen

said his administration calculated that dropping legacy probably would have decreased the number of

minorities who enrolled by three or four a year.

While figures from the late 1990s

weren’t available late last week, legacy statistics from the current freshman class seem to support

that assertion.

For fall 2003, 878 applicants who weren’t eligible for automatic

acceptance but met academic standards earned legacy points during A&M’s review process. Seven were

African-American and six of those were admitted (85.7 percent).

Of 800 whites with

legacy, 312 got in (39 percent). Twenty-seven of 52 Hispanics were admitted (51.9 percent), as were

eight of 19 others (42.1 percent).

In all, 353 of the 878 legacy candidates (40.2

percent) won admission.

Bowen joined current A&M officials in arguing that legacy —

which counted for up to four of 100 points in the review process — was not the deciding factor for most

applicants. More points could be earned in other areas, such as leadership, extracurricular activities,

class rank and SAT or ACT score.

“It’s the danger, I think, of playing the statistics

too close,” he said. “You need to look at the big issues. I think the big issue here is perception, and

I think Dr. Gates addressed that through his decision. … If the public perceives this is unfair,

you’re wasting your time going through an exercise trying to convince people it’s not unfair.”

Many critics said the practice was especially unfair in light of a U.S. Supreme Court

decision last year that overturned Hopwood and allowed limited consideration of race in admissions.

Despite that, Gates said in December that A&M would stay away from using race and move to a totally

“merit-based” policy.

While lawmakers and activists still called for Gates to go beyond

ending legacy and reinstate affirmative action, one Texas-based group applauded his decision

Saturday.

“This is another step forward towards a truly merit-based system with equal

opportunity for all Texans,” Texas Civil Rights Initiative spokesman Austin Kinghorn said in a

statement. The group’s chairman is former Hopwood plaintiff David Rogers.

A&M’s legacy

program started in 1989 as part of an enrollment management effort at the burgeoning university. It was

the only formal legacy practice among the state’s public universities.

But legacy hadn’t

been heavily scrutinized until recent weeks, when minority activists threatened legal action to end the

program. Had such pressure been applied in the late 1990s, A&M would have stopped using legacy in

admissions, Bowen said.

“It’s a perception issue,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to

have any effect on minority enrollment at all.”

A Poor Legacy:

A&M admissions policy

smacks of

unfairness
EDITORIAL-Dallas Morning News
12:04 AM CST on Wednesday, January 7, 2004

Texas A&M last year admitted 312 white freshmen from families of A&M graduates –

freshmen who wouldn’t have gotten in otherwise. It’s a nod to a long-standing program that gives

additional consideration to the children, grandchildren or siblings of former A&M students.
But

this is the same public university that announced last month it wouldn’t consider the race of

applicants in its admission process, even though many schools, public and private, take race into

account among other academic and non-academic factors.

As state Rep. Garnet Coleman of

Houston put it, “If you want to go to A&M, it pays to be a legacy applicant rather than

black.”

While that isn’t the message A&M officials intend, it certainly is the message

they have delivered.

In abolishing race as an admissions consideration, A&M vowed to

increase minority outreach and to focus on attracting low-income and first-generation college students.

But to our mind, it is wildly inconsistent for the university to reject race as an admissions factor

and then to consider family DNA to be perfectly acceptable.

A&M officials say minority

applicants with ties to the A&M family are admitted at about the same rate as white applicants with

family ties to the school. But while that seems fair on paper, there is a disparate impact. Last year,

six blacks and 27 Hispanics – students who wouldn’t have been admitted if family members hadn’t

preceded them at A&M – got in under the legacy program. In contrast, family ties provided enough points

on the school’s admissions scale for nine times as many white candidates to be admitted who otherwise

wouldn’t have been accepted.

Universities that regard an applicant’s race as one of

many factors for admission would be justified to include family ties as well in their basket of

considerations. But now that A&M has removed race from its selection process, the school also should

jettison its legacy program, as other Texas public universities have done. If, as A&M officials

contend, most applicants don’t need legacy consideration to be admitted, then that’s yet another

reason to ditch the program.

Perception matters, and the legacy program at A&M leaves

the impression that the university isn’t serious about increasing its minority enrollment. It’s time

for the antiquated system to become history.