But he wasn’t the only one.  A “buffalo jump” was not an athletic event involving leaping over buffalo, some sort of native American rodeo.  It was simply organized mass slaughter of buffalo by native Americans.

Does this sound like they were terribly reluctant about killing animals en masse?

Native Americans also contributed to the collapse of the bison.[28] By the 1830s the Comanche and their allies on the southern plains were killing about 280,000 bison a year, which was near the limit of sustainability for that region. Firearms and horses, along with a growing export market for buffalo robes and bison meat had resulted in larger and larger numbers of bison killed each year.

The common myth of the Native American living in “harmony” with his environment continues to be passed along… but to the extent that it is true, it is because of their lack of the technology to do anything else, not due to some spiritual connection to Gaia.  They were basically stone-age people in most ways until the Europeans arrived.

I suppose the myth of the wise primitive will continue to be promulgated in movies and other media.  But if I had to be captured by someone, I think I would prefer the US Army circa 2010 to the Apaches or Commanches circa 1700.  After all, I also saw A Man Called Horse.

For the most part, primitive people were not/are not wise.  Instead, they were/are typically racist, xenophobic and sexist, not to mention chauvinistic, jingoistic, and ageist.  If you don’t know that, you need to get out more.  Maybe read a book.

This is the ludicrous aspect of multiculturalism.  The people that the multiculturalists would like to lionize are themselves the exact opposite of multiculturalists, by and large. 

I do prefer buffalo to horse meat.  Good ‘ole cornfed black angus beef is even better.

The title should pique your curiosity.  The content should give you serious pause

Please read it all.  It was only a five minute speech.  But it is sobering, to say the least.

In 2001, the mother of an 11-year-old girl spirited her out of Gothenburg, in Sweden, and back to Somalia where she had her brutally genitally mutilated (and without anesthesia). The mother and two other women held her down while a man made sure that she would never experience sexual pleasure and would instead, experience a great deal of pain for the rest of her life.

It’s not hard to understand the silence of the American Left, the multi-cultural Left, and particularly the feminist Left, on the matter of Islamic violence against women, whether perpetrated by other women or by men.  Its existence calls into question all the assumptions at the core of the Left’s belief system, about moral equivalence, about who does violence to whom, about whether there is such a thing as an objective standard of right and wrong, etc.

Just as sex-selection abortion in Asia (and, increasingly, other places) highlights the cognitive dissonance for the Left in supporting easy access to abortion — at any time in the pregnancy, for any reason–, Islamic violence by women on women and men on women highlights the fact that some cultures ARE simply better than others, more free and more just, regardless of the putatively equivalent status of all cultures that lies at the root of multi-culturalism and diversity activism.

But the multi-cultural pieties of the Left, and the absence of a moral center based on absolutes of human dignity flowing from a conception of the imago dei, make it impossible for the Left to speak up consistently about this kind of injustice.  It’s far easier to blame white males and colonialism for everything under the sun than to deal with the hard work of challenging — and changing — cultures.

Read the entire article linked above, and thank God that you live where you do, assuming you live in a western-style liberal democracy of some kind.  And, while you’re at it, reconsider any belief you may hold in cultural equivalence and moral equivalence.

Here’s a book that can help you get started.   The author is not a Christian.  In fact, I think she’s an atheist…  understandably, given what was done to her in the name of religion, or at least under cover of it.  You may speculate about why she is not a constantly invited speaker to American feminist groups.  Maybe it’s because American feminism isn’t fundamentally about protecting women, but about pursuing Leftist agendas with feminism as cover.

In Belgium, a government-funded opera company is presenting a bizarre reworking of the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah. This “updated” version of a nineteenth century Saint-Saens melodrama depicts Samson as a Palestinian “freedom fighter”, not an Israelite, and portrays Delilah as a despicable Israeli agent, not a Philistine temptress.

In the climax of the production, Samson straps on a suicide vest and blows-up the Israeli “oppressors.” This politically-correct operatic indulgence follows announced plans by La Scala—on of the world’s most prestigious opera-houses—to produce a full-scale musical version of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and by the Shanghai opera to offer a lavish, five hour singing-and-dancing adaptation of Marx’s “Das Kapital.” As the composer Franz Liszt once aptly observed: “All music is an insane asylum, but opera is the wing for incurables.”

Just a couple of observations, and a plug:

It WOULD be a government-funded opera company producing this trash. What private company would do it with the intent of making a profit? Of course, the Saudis will fund nearly anything that puts Israel and Jews in a bad light, and I’m just guessing that, much like Washington D.C., the Belgian government and lobbying apparatus is full of people on the Saudi payroll, who seem to own 1 out of 3 former congress critters and state department drudges.

As far as a Jewish Delilah goes, it would make more sense to cast Tokyo Rose as General MacArthur’s secret lover.

And the plug. The REAL story of Samson and Delilah, a story about sex and violence, and yet rated G.    “God Brings Down The House” is a particular show stopper.  At the link, just click the cover of Samson and Delilah, and then at the linked site you can play excerpts of the tunes.  Eat your heart out, Belgium.

There is nothing new here, of course. Given the history of this subject, the really surprising thing is that as late as 2003 a fire department was still giving formal examinations for promotions. The New York City Police Department was fighting lawsuits over “discriminatory” test results 30 years ago. Police, fire, and other municipal departments all over the country have been similarly affected across an entire generation.

Attempted solutions have included every kind of rigging and “race norming” of results, the dumbing-down of the tests to a point where well-nigh everyone passes (candidates then being promoted by lottery or straightforward race quotas), the hiring of expensive consultants to devise bias-free tests, and just giving up on tests altogether, as New Haven has now done.

None of it helped, though dumbing down the tests has proved fairly effective for litigation avoidance. (In 1991 the New York City Sanitation Department gave a test on which 23,078 applicants out of 24,000 got perfect scores — try spotting a race gap there!) The careful concocting of scrupulously bias-free tests is now a profitable specialty within the management-consulting field. New Haven hired the Houston firm of Jeanneret & Associates, Inc., who called in a contractor named I/O Solutions to devise firefighter tests, and the city spent over $100,000 in fees to these firms.

It did no good, of course. It never does. The New York Police Department spent ten years trying to write tests for promotion to sergeant that would pass court approval. They brought in minority representatives to help design the 1988 tests, and included video portions. It didn’t help: A quarter of the 12,000 police officers who took the test were minorities, but of the 377 test-based promotions, only 20 went to minorities.

The unhappy fact is that different ethnic groups exhibit different profiles of results on tests. Attempts to devise a test on which this does not happen have all failed, across decades of effort, criticism, and analysis.

Nobody knows why this is so; but the fact that it invariably, repeatedly, and intractably is so, makes testing hazardous — and ultimately pointless — under current employment law. Yet still employees must be selected somehow from applicant pools, and there must be some clear, fair criteria for their subsequent promotion. The state of the law now is that almost anything an organization does in this area will open it to litigation.

Ricci v. DeStefano takes place in a time of general public exhaustion over racial inequalities. We’d really rather just not think about it. Fifty years ago it all seemed cut and dried. Just strike down old unjust laws, give the minority a helping hand, give the non-minority some education about civil rights and past disgraces, and in a few years things will come right.

We coasted along under those assumptions for a generation. When it became obvious that things were not coming right in the matter of test results, scholars and jurists got to work on the problem.

Liberals, with their usual coarse stupidity, naturally assumed it was just a matter of spending more money on schools. This theory was tested to destruction in several places, most sensationally in Kansas City from 1985 to 1997. Under a judge’s order, the school district spent $2 billion over twelve years, pretty much rebuilding the school system — and the actual schools themselves — from the ground up. The new, lavish facilities included “an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal.” The experiment was a complete failure. Drop-out rates rose and test scores fell across the entire twelve years. Here are current test scores for the school that got the Olympic-sized swimming pool. (I could not find any published results for achievement in aquatic sports.)

Conservatives, thoroughly race-whipped by the liberal media elites, preferred to go along with whatever liberals said, except that they made, and still make, mild throat-clearing noises about school vouchers. It has turned out in practice, however, that the only people keen on school vouchers are the striving poor, a small (and dwindling) demographic with no political weight, and whom nobody in the media or academic elites gives a fig about. The non-striving underclass has zero interest in education; middle-class suburbanites like their schools the way they are, thanks all the same; and teachers’ unions see vouchers as threats to the public-education gravy train their members ride to well-padded retirement.

As test gaps persisted and lawsuits multiplied, the scholars retreated into metaphysics. The word “culture” was wafted around a lot. It seemed to denote a sort of phlogiston or luminiferous aether, pervading and determining everything, but via mechanisms nobody could explain. We heard about self-esteem issues, “the burden of ‘acting white,’ ” “stereotype threat,” and a whole raft of other sunbeams-from-cucumbers hypotheses. Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, two distinguished scholars in the field, produced a much-praised book about test-score gaps with a conclusion in which nothing was concluded. “Choice [of where to live] should not be a class-based privilege.” Where, in a free society, has it ever not been? How will you stop people moving, if they can afford to? “Families must help their children to the best of their ability.” Oh. “Vouchers are a matter of basic equity.” See above. “Big-city superintendents and principals operate in a bureacratic and political straitjacket.” True, no doubt; but test-score gaps are in plain sight even out in the ’burbs. John Ogbu wrote a book about it. Six years ago.

And the test-score gaps just sat there, and sat there, and sat there, grinning back at us impudently.

At last, we just stopped thinking about the whole disagreeable business. Unfortunately, by that time a great body of law had been built on the theories and pseudo-theories of the preceding decades, and couldn’t be wished away. Hence Ricci v. DeStefano.

You can deduce our state of exhaustion from booksellers’ lists. I just spent half an hour trawling through the bibliographies and references in my own modest collection of social-science literature to come up with the following list of 50 published books, most by accredited scholars, relevant to Ricci v. DeStefano and the issues underlying the case. I offer it to the Supremes as a reading list, if they’d like to get up to speed on the necessary sociology.

Derbyshire’s article goes into a very complete recounting of the state of “diversity scholarship” (for lack of a better term).

What he demonstrates, pretty convincingly, is that anyone who has bothered to study all the attempts at “race norming” in testing, at finding ways to make tests “nondiscriminatory,” etc., can’t fail to come away from it believing that it’s essentially impossible to construct a test on which all sectors of society will do equally well, and that includes deliberately TRYING to slant the test in a direction that will be easier for minorities.

What does it mean that we keep on keeping on, pretending that there is any way to make equal outcomes for every sector of society?  Well, it means we’re blind and stupid, maybe.  It means that all cultures are not created equal, will not become equal, and will not produce people of equal ability.  It means that differences between individuals matter HUGELY more than differences between ethnic groups, of whatever description.  It means that our systems of education, certification, hiring and promotion should be “color blind,” and allow excellence to come to the top, from whatever source.  It means that we need to study what is different in the cultures and family lives of the people who succeed more often, of whatever ethnicity, and use that information to teach others how to arrange their lives for the success of their children.

There is a curious phenomena in sociology/global studies departments in universities.  They often have a program of requiring students to spend a semester living in “the inner city” or some minority community so they can get past their “whiteness” and learn how life really is in those communities.  There’s probably nothing wrong with this (absent the inevitable “white bashing”), but imagine the opposite.

What if we had a program for bringing entire minority families into the homes of “typical middle class” families of whatever race, with the stipulation that they will live, for a few months, like the host family lives?  If they came to my house, they’d have to make sure their kids did their homework before anything else.  They’d learn that the parents demand, and the kids give, respect, and that the respect flows both ways.  They’d see TWO parents, working hard to teach their children values that will help them succeed.  (This may seem unfair;  what can a single mother do about it NOW?  Answer:  teach your kids not to repeat your mistakes,  show them what raising kids in a two parent home can be like, and build the ambition in them to seek that stability for their own adult lives.)  They would learn that the parents ALWAYS know where their kids are, who they’re with, what they’re doing, and when they’re coming home.  They’d see kids who actually care what their parents opinions are about matters large and small, at least partly because the parents have respected the kids’ abilities to think and reason.  They would rarely hear a raised voice, or out-of-control expression of negative emotion, from parents or children.

They would see people living within their means, not asking the government for anything much, looking over the shoulders of the teachers and schools, going to church and participating in the church’s life, and taking it seriously at home.  They would see parents seriously discussing current events with their children, explaining issues, giving them books to read on various topics, discussing the values underlying what they see on TV and in movies, etc.  They would see parents seriously discussing the future with their children, suggesting possibilities for the kids, based on realistic appraisals of their ability and personality (not fake “esteem building” that isn’t based on anything real in the child), and they would see parents who make sure their kids have plenty of opportunities to discover things at which they can succeed.

In other words, kids and parents of the hosted family would be learning how to be middle class Americans.

Even if this could be done, if the resources and organization existed to put families together, and the minority families were willing to do it, and even if it could be shown to succeed as a method of teaching successful living strategies and child rearing, objections would be raised, woudn’t they?  Let’s see:

Michelle Obama’s advice.

And, of course, we all recall Jeremiah Wright’s ringing condemnation of “middle class values.”

But what I am advocating is exactly an embrace of “middleclassness” as way of life for people who want to BE in the middle class, with middle class options in education, career, etc.  I’m suggesting that we make “learning to be a member of the middle class,” with all that implies, a goal for our entire approach to helping people get out of poverty.

What we shouldn’t do is create a system of testing, evaluation and rewards that pretends that people have achieved things that they have not.  Yet that this is exactly what we’ve already done, and so our problem is even bigger.

I’m not a dreamer.  I know it’s unlikely that we can get large numbers of those now in poverty to take the trouble to learn how to be “middle class” in the broad sense, which is a whole set of values and orientations that are simply different from typical behavior/attitudes among the chronically poor and “disadvantaged.”  But for way too many of them, their disadvantage is being raised by a single mother (or grandmother!) who did not herself make good life decisions, and is unlikely to be able to help her children do differently.  Learning to “be middle class” would be the best thing that could happen to them all.

We won’t be able to do this effectively, as a society, until we get over the multi-cultural pieties that have made it impossible for enough people to say that one way of life is better than another.

Speech codes limit campus freedom

Millions of high school seniors have started the process of deciding which college or university to attend in the next academic year. Prospective students will take into consideration cost, academics, social life, and location. And while many students will also look at schools that reflect their interests and values, virtually none will be thinking about the school’s speech codes or free speech zones. They should. Students at colleges and universities who articulate conservative and traditional views are at particular risk of bullying and indoctrination by campus administrators and faculty who are zealous ideologues.

On college campuses during the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was students who embodied campus radicalism. Today some administrators practice a brand of radicalism intent on punishing students who dissent from the ideology of the campus power structure. In their book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, authors Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate declare, “In a nation whose future depends upon an education in freedom, colleges and universities are teaching the values of censorship, self-censorship, and self-righteous abuse of power.”

Limits on free speech is uniquely troubling for the future health of a free society. Students become accustomed to having their rights limited, and will be more lethargic in countering possible oppression from a growing and intrusive state. Perhaps even worse, some students might be unaware that their rights have been violated because they often lack the critical thinking skills needed to challenge punishment and oppression. Educational systems where students are encouraged to memorize and regurgitate information have not properly prepared them for healthy and constructive dissent.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has cited a list of speech codes from several universities, some later modified thanks to FIRE’s own efforts. The University of Connecticut outlawed “inconsiderate jokes,” “stereotyping,” and even “inappropriate directed laughter.” Some schools put limits on speech using phrases like any words that result in a loss of “self esteem,” or cause “embarrassment” or “psychological discomfort.”

Perhaps none are as striking as the University of Deleware’s 2007 “Diversity Facilitation Training,” where resident advisers were trained with definitions that described racist as applying “to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class gender, religion, culture, or sexuality,” and reverse racism as “a term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege.” Resident Advisers after their training then peppered new students with questions like “When did you discover your sexuality?,” and in one training session students were called upon to announce their views on same sex marriage, and pressured to alter their position if it fell outside the political orthodoxy of the overseers.

These examples are just a smidgen of the outlandish practices performed by the Office of Residential Life at Delaware for the purpose of reeducating incoming freshmen. Overseers of this indoctrination actually called the program a form of “treatment” for students.

You may think that this sort of thing only happens at secular universities, but the exact opposite is the case. A great many Christian universities (and some colleges) have administrative positions with names like Director of Diversity, Associate Provost for Diversity, Director of Intercultural Affairs, Special Assistant to the President for Diversity, and so on. These are not mere “human resources” staff positions, they are high level administrative positions, and they seem to exist for the purpose of promoting a combination of Left-leaning initiatives that includes controlling the vocabulary that is allowed to be used on campus, and doing so from a position superior to any faculty member, a position of real power, all the while claiming to be in the role of “speaking truth to power”.  Mr. Orwell, where are you when we need you?

And in addition to all the usual rhetorical devices used by diversity activists elsewhere, Christian institutions add one more, by claiming it is a divine mandate to be “diverse” as institutions, and to love “diversity” as individuals IN institutions.  Never mind the fact that no theologian identified such a mandate before the secular Left piggy backed on Justice Powell’s use of the word “diversity” in the Bakke case, as a way to pursue their agendas while masking the quota-based nature of them.   Sometimes the church just has to be led to divine truth by the secular Left, don’t you know?  One wonders what new revelations await us in the scriptures, planted there by God, to be identified at some future point when the secular Left leads us to yet another hermeneutically novel promised land.

So the bad news is this:  students attending Christian colleges and universities may be among those “at particular risk of bullying and indoctrination by campus administrators and faculty who are zealous ideologues”.  Faculty who do not agree with the agenda may be deemed racist, and that word may well be used in public descriptions and “faculty round-tables” to describe those who simply don’t buy into the entire concept of diversity.  The added bite: faculty who don’t sign on to the entire diversity agenda are racists who are going to hell!  It is actually said in faculty meetings at some Christian universities and colleges.  Not all agree, of course, but they are likely to feel too intimidated to speak up.

How very, very far we have come from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of a color-blind society.  How much I wish he had lived, to fight the perversion of his movement into victimology-mongering.  But the content of your character is the last thing that matters these days.

The next post in this series is here.

At Pepperdine, students aren’t allowed to post signs announcing meetings that might be critical of Obama. And they have a “Director of Intercultural Affairs” to enforce the rule on 18 yr old freshman Republicans, too. After describing the de facto censorship of the the College Republicans at Pepperdine, Mike Adams delivers this assessment of one of the players:

Any university that decides to hire a Director of Intercultural Affairs is a university that will soon find itself in rapid decline. Put simply, it is a decision that the university is beginning to take seriously the notion of multi-culturalism. The advancement of multiculturalism, by the way, promotes tolerance of all ideas. Of course, the idea that there is something special about Western civilization in general or American culture in particular is an exception to the rule.

Ironically, those who work as Directors of Intercultural Affairs are all cut from the same cloth. They are Democrats, self-described liberals, and, in 2008, they voted for Barack Obama. In other words, they aren’t a very diverse bunch of people.The multiculturalists also envision a world without borders. They want open-ended immigration. And they think it’s really neat that U.S. Supreme Court justices are starting to interpret our constitution by relying on the laws of other nations and the so-called “international community.”

I’ve discussed all this before.  The main point:  “diversity” is not politically neutral.  It always favors the Left, in a fairly radical way.  Calling for more “diversity” on campus is equivalent to saying, “Let’s all move Left.”  I wish it wasn’t that simple.  But it is.

Challenge question:  does anyone know of a professional college/university diversity/intercultural worker who is Republican, and votes that way?  Who has a history of supporting center-Right perspectives on many issues?  If you can find one, can you find two?

UPDATE:  Part 7 of this series is here.

In 1996, Californians overwhelmingly approved Proposition 209 that prohibited all state agencies from using anyone’s race, ethnicity, or gender to discriminate against them or give them preference in university admissions, public employment, or competition for a state contract.

Those who opposed Proposition 209 predicted that ending racial or gender favoritism would result in sharp declines in black and Hispanic college enrollments, setbacks for women in public employment, reduced funds for cancer detection centers and domestic violence shelters, or other alarmingly negative effects.

This article compares such dire predictions with documentary evidence provided by the State Personnel Board, the Department of Finance, the University of California (UC), and California State University (CSU). It relies on data concerning admissions, retention, and graduation of undergraduates from the CSU system and the UC and reviews faculty hiring patterns within both systems. Other tables compare the numbers of white, black, Hispanic, males and females employed in a variety of California state agencies in 1997, after Proposition 209 was approved, and then in 2006, nine years later.

These statistics document the progress made towards social justice under Proposition 209 and may encourage voters in other states who want to assure that preferential treatment (regardless of whatever else it may euphemistically be called) becomes a thing of the past in the operation of their respective state governments.

These data offer many uncomfortable truths to defenders of racial preferences and gender double standards whose unscrupulous attacks on voter initiatives are likely to persist, regardless of the facts from California. Defenders of double standards and group preferences insinuate that American voters in 2008 cannot understand the simple, straightforward language of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. So immersed in the doubletalk of diversity and obsessed with achieving proportional representation in all walks of life, diversity crusaders ignore or dismiss any good news, repeating their tiresome mantra that without racial preferences or gender double standards a chilly climate for diversity will envelope the workplace and campuses.

This article demonstrates the dishonesty of such claims.

Read the whole thing.  Don’t expect to read about this work in the LATimes, or hear about it on the evening news, but the “old guard” civil rights activists are going to have to get used to changing times, and the growing understanding in the general public and academia that “affirmative action” and “diversity” are themselves discriminatory and hurtful in very many of their common appearances, and the riddance of them is often followed by progress in “social justice” goals.

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them “lazy,” “violent,” responsible for their own troubles.  The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points.

Of course, “deep seated racisl misgivings” on the part of blacks will cause 90+% of blacks to vote FOR him, with a total margin greater than 2 1/2% of the vote.

More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can’t win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don’t have such views.

There is no foundation established here to conclude that a voter will not select a particular individual just because the voter makes generalized observations about a demographic group. And the huge piece of missing information here: how would blacks respond to the same survey? We all know the stories of black cab drivers who won’t pick up young, male blacks at night. Are they bigots, too?

“There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean there’s only a few bigots,” said Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey.

This is risible. Does this political “scientist” think we aren’t smart enough to see the difference between a bigot and someone who makes specific observations about specific demographic groups? Is this supposed to mean that if a person sees any difference, on average, between various demographic groups, then that person is automatically a bigot? Let me invite Professor Sniderman to spend the night walking the street in some neighborhoods he may not frequent, and see what his experience is, and what he sees. Then we’ll give him this survey, and see what the result is. I’ll say this: he could walk back and forth all night in MY neighborhood, and not even get a curious glance.

The pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. President Bush’s unpopularity, the Iraq war and a national sense of economic hard times cut against GOP candidates, as does that fact that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.

After all, it couldn’t be that the Left has simply fielded a weak, hothouse candidate, who can’t stand up to serious voter scrutiny, could it?

The findings suggest that Obama’s problem is close to home — among his fellow Democrats, particularly non-Hispanic white voters. Just seven in 10 people who call themselves Democrats support Obama, compared to the 85 percent of self-identified Republicans who back McCain.

When that same phenomenon was observed in the Reagan-Carter election, was it bigotry against blacks, too? Or was it just clear eyed voters seeing that their party had taken perspectives with which they could not agree?

Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren’t voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn’t vote for any Democrat for president — white, black or brown.

It’s nice to be noticed.

Not all whites are prejudiced. Indeed, more whites say good things about blacks than say bad things, the poll shows. And many whites who see blacks in a negative light are still willing or even eager to vote for Obama.

Finally, deep in the story, we come to the line that undercuts the entire point of the report. No one really knows the numbers about what percentage of whites may have some negative opinion about blacks as a group, and will still vote for a black individual. It’s only speculation to assume the number who won’t is large enough to affect the election.

On the other side of the racial question, the Illinois Democrat is drawing almost unanimous support from blacks, the poll shows, though that probably wouldn’t be enough to counter the negative effect of some whites’ views.

Of course, the fact the blacks will vote “almost unanimously” for Obama isn’t evidence of any kind of racism.

Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that.

And even deeper into the story, another admission that the entire thrust of it is flawed. Of course, if this paragraph came first, there wouldn’t be a point in the inflammatory headline, would there?

Three in 10 of those Democrats who don’t trust Obama’s change-making credentials say they plan to vote for McCain.

Still, the effects of whites’ racial views are apparent in the polling.

Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama’s support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.

Hmmm… I wonder what it would be if there were no black racial prejudice?

But in an election without precedent, it’s hard to know if such models take into account all the possible factors at play.

Again, there is no real point to this report, as it continually admits… just down deep in the text, far enough from the headline that many people won’t have read this far.

The AP-Yahoo News poll used the unique methodology of Knowledge Networks, a Menlo Park, Calif., firm that interviews people online after randomly selecting and screening them over telephone. Numerous studies have shown that people are more likely to report embarrassing behavior and unpopular opinions when answering questions on a computer rather than talking to a stranger.

Other techniques used in the poll included recording people’s responses to black or white faces flashed on a computer screen, asking participants to rate how well certain adjectives apply to blacks, measuring whether people believe blacks’ troubles are their own fault, and simply asking people how much they like or dislike blacks.

“We still don’t like black people,” said John Clouse, 57, reflecting the sentiments of his pals gathered at a coffee shop in Somerset, Ohio.

This is ridiculous.  No foundation is given for who John Clouse is, how representative he may be, even what his race is, what experiences he has had with other races, none of it.  The story simply includes one random quote from a person no one knows.  What journalistic acumen!  I don’t suppose there is a restaurant that is mostly frequented by black people where someone could be found to say, “We still don’t like white people,” is there?  Nah.

Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word “violent” strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with “boastful,” 29 percent “complaining,” 13 percent “lazy” and 11 percent “irresponsible.” When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

Among white Democrats, one third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

And, of course, the rest must be racists.  It couldn’t possibly be that they’ve evaluated Obama as an individual, and come to the conclusion he is a poor candidate, could it?

The poll sought to measure latent prejudices among whites by asking about factors contributing to the state of black America. One finding: More than a quarter of white Democrats agree that “if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.”

Oh, my, if you believe blacks would be better off if they tried harder, on average, then you are surely a racist pig bigot.

Those who agreed with that statement were much less likely to back Obama than those who didn’t.

Those who don’t think blacks would be better off if they tried harder may or may not be bigots, of a different sort…  but they are certainly idiots.

Among white independents, racial stereotyping is not uncommon. For example, while about 20 percent of independent voters called blacks “intelligent” or “smart,” more than one third latched on the adjective “complaining” and 24 percent said blacks were “violent.”

Nearly four in 10 white independents agreed that blacks would be better off if they “try harder.”

Say it isn’t so.  Those pigs.

The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.

Be careful of that phrase “the survey broke ground”.  That means it used untried techniques, techniques not yet validated by corroborating social science methods, or even duplicate results applying the very same technique to other populations.  One HAS to wonder what results the same methods would turn up if they were applied to black voters, about white people.  Of course, that isn’t done, because it is not politically interesting to the “social scientists”, who in the USA are about 95% from the Left, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Researchers used mathematical modeling to sort out the relative impact of a huge swath of variables that might have an impact on people’s votes — including race, ideology, party identification, the hunger for change and the sentiments of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s backers.

Just 59 percent of her white Democratic supporters said they wanted Obama to be president. Nearly 17 percent of Clinton’s white backers plan to vote for McCain.

Among white Democrats, Clinton supporters were nearly twice as likely as Obama backers to say at least one negative adjective described blacks well, a finding that suggests many of her supporters in the primaries — particularly whites with high school education or less — were motivated in part by racial attitudes.

The survey of 2,227 adults was conducted Aug. 27 to Sept. 5. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.

No word here about the margin of “interpretation error” in this story…  but it is enormous.

In his 19 years as a law professor at UCLA, Richard Sander has pondered a nagging question: Does affirmative action help or hinder black people who want to become lawyers?

Two years ago, he published research suggesting that racial preferences at law firms might be responsible for black lawyers’ high rate of attrition and difficulty making partner. He hypothesized that, in the interest of promoting diversity, law firms sometimes hire black lawyers that are under-qualified, and that when there is a “credentials gap” between black and white lawyers at a firm, black lawyers often fail.

The research stirred debate throughout the legal community, and Sander said he was surprised at the vehemence with which people attacked his motives. A former Vista volunteer, fair-housing activist and campaigner for Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, Sander insisted he was simply trying to examine an important question.

Now the law professor has waded into another controversy. Sander says his goal this time is to examine whether law schools set up many affirmative action beneficiaries for failure by admitting them into rigorous academic environments in which they are ill-prepared to compete. He proposes to study almost 30 years of data on California Bar Association exam-takers. In the end, he hopes to explain why, as reported in a Law School Admission Council study in the 1990s, blacks are four times as likely as whites to fail the bar exam on the first try.

To no one’s particular surprise, the bar association is refusing to release the records to Sander, for very thin reasons.
The great touchiness and defensiveness of diversity mavens and affirmative action activists notwithstanding, one would think that the bar association would be concerned about appearing to be afraid of the results of Sander’s proposed study.

Apparently not. With a press friendly to affirmative action, an academia dedicated to the religion of diversity, and a bar association that virtually always tilts Left on any issue, who will blow the whistle loud enough to get anyone’s attention?

The article linked above is a case in point.

Despite the fact that Richard Sander could certainly have provided many supporters for the press to interview, who would have agreed with him that the study should be done, the article quotes exactly nine words from Sander,  and a bit from one first amendment activist and one economics professor from “University of the South in Tennessee”. Let’s see: why would the writer of the article want to give that particular supporter some attention? Could it be that the reader is to infer that southerners (with that history of white racism) are the ones who want to knock down affirmative action, without actually coming out and saying that anti-affirmative action people are all racists?

If they actually interviewed Sander, I’m sure he said much more than those nine words, and I’m sure he could give them names of reputable people from California who agree with him.

On the other hand, those against Sander ( and against him even having an opportunity to do his study) are quoted more extensively, there are more of them, and they just get more words in the story, both in quote and in paraphrase.

This is one of those reporting jobs that’s there just so they can say they did it, but it’s not a serious attempt to help the reader understand the issue.

UPDATE:  To give credit where it’s due, LATimes has published an editorial in favor of Sander getting to do his research.  As much as I criticize the leftist tilt of the media, and especially the Times organization, I’m happy to acknowledge when they make sense.

UPDATE:  And it seems to be pretty obvious even to the ABA Journal that this is all about the politics.