Does Anyone Think This Is a Good Idea?
One provision of the president's jobs plan seems stunningly impractical.
Post Tagged with: "Discrimination"
Weighing In: Class-Based Affirmative Action Good, But Arguments Against Race-Based Affirmative Action Still Bad
Peter Bozzo has posted a very thorough reply to my reply to his column which argued that we should replace race-based affirmative action with class-based affirmative action. (Got that?) Peter cites three studies, but only one of them seems to have analyzed the socioeconomic backgrounds of African-American college students, as opposed to the socioeconomic backgrounds of college students of all [...]
The Uselessness of “Public Opinion” on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
One point that stands out to me about the failure to repeal “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is the irrelevance of public opinion on this issue. Polls have consistently shown that DADT is extremely unpopular—clear majorities of the American people support repeal. Since DADT was introduced in 1993, it has become consistently more unpopular. Now, 57 senators voted for repeal and [...]
Re: Class-Based Affirmative Action Again
Peter Bozzo writes in today’s Crimson in favor of switching from race-based to class-based affirmative action. He makes a very strong case, but I think he ultimately goes wrong. First, his interpretation of Brown v. Board as a decision rooted in the principle of color-blindness is implausible to me. The heart of the ruling was this passage: “To separate [black [...]
An Open Letter to Senator Scott Brown
Dear Senator Brown, The Harvard Crimson today reported that you have begun a petition asking Harvard to allow ROTC, The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, back on campus. Your petition is misguided, Senator. The only person who can bring ROTC back to Harvard is you. Harvard University has a standing non-discrimination policy. No group that discriminates on the basis of race, [...]
A better case for affirmative action
Liberals often try to defend affirmative action as fair compensation for historical injustice. To put their argument crudely and briefly, they say that whites got ahead unfairly for centuries, and now it’s time to help blacks get ahead. Regardless of its philosophical merits or demerits, this argument is incredibly controversial. On its face, it allows an analogy to be drawn [...]
Response to Sam on Racism and Rand Paul
Sam, I agree with you that Rand Paul is off base in his remarks about the Civil Rights Act, but I have a few quibbles about the way you make your argument. (I see that when you aren’t going after Ayn, you are going after Rand with equal intensity. Young libertarians seem to love the Rands as much as young collectivists seem to despise them!) Now I [...]
Rand Paul a Racist? I Think Not.
Sam Barr’s most recent post makes the rather shocking claim that Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky being vacated by the retiring Jim Bunning, is a racist, or at least that he is not a non-racist. Sam deduces this from the fact that Mr. Paul is not a “consistent libertarian,” that he “picks and [...]
Rand Paul: Against the Civil Rights Act
As I said yesterday, the Kentucky Senate race between Rand Paul and Jack Conway should be a real battle. Paul is probably not helping himself by insisting, as many libertarian ideologues but few Senate hopefuls do, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was wrong to ban racial discrimination in private establishments like restaurants and movie theaters. INTERVIEWER: Would you have [...]
Good and Bad Arguments for “Discrimination” against Muslims
HPR staff writer Eli Martin has a piece in today’s Crimson criticizing European “Islamophobia.” I don’t want to baldly disagree with Eli that “outright discrimination toward Muslims in Europe is becoming a reality.” But I do want to complicate things a bit. Eli implies that burqa bans and the like could only be products of Geert Wilders-esque prejudice, neglecting a [...]
Half the Sky
Last week was slavery week on the HPRgument (apparently!). We talked about “intern slavery,” twice, and then American slavery. But what about today? Slavery of course is still a very real problem; in absolute terms, by every estimate, there are more slaves today than there ever were in history, and the trade of human lives is more active and more hazardous [...]
Final Clubs and Gender Relations
In today’s Harvard Crimson, Daniel Herz-Roiphe has written an unusually articulate, well-argued entry in the perennial “Why Final Clubs Are Still Really Bad” essay contest. I’m glad he focused on gender discrimination and inequality, rather than also trying to tackle racial, hetero-normative, and class-based elitism. Those other forms of discrimination are equally important, but I think they’re pretty low-hanging fruit. [...]
Weighing In: Are Interns Slaves?
In dueling editorials, two sets of Crimson editors opined today on the federal crack-down on unpaid internships. I’m with the pro-payment crowd, but I think that both the sides made the same conceptual error by assuming that this is a straightforward case of equality versus opportunity. The majority view was that, even though stricter regulation “might result in fewer internship [...]
Are Interns SLAVES?
No — that would be a tasteless joke. But they do perform a lot of work for free! As The New York Times explains in a piece that should have been, in retrospect, pretty obvious: Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say “If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going [...]
