October 10, 2012

Down the affirmative action rabbit hole at the Supreme Court

From the justices' questions to the U. of Texas's lawyer (Mr. Garre) defending the University of Texas's racial/ethnic preference systems. It gets pretty comic.

(By the way, a couple of days ago the humor/satire site Fark linked to my annotation of a Wall Street Journal article on the the latest kindergarten contortions in New York City. It got 200+ comments on Fark, which get progressively better as more readers start to wrap their heads around it. But, if Fark is looking for humor in the news, they should check out this cross-examination of an affirmative action defender by the Supreme Court's Murderer's Row:]

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Counsel, before -- I 
need to figure out exactly what these numbers mean. 
Should someone who is one-quarter Hispanic check the 
Hispanic box or some different box?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, there is a 
multiracial box. Students check boxes based on their 
own determination. This is true under the Common 
Application -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, I suppose a 
person who is one-quarter percent Hispanic, his own 
determination, would be I'm one-quarter percent 
Hispanic.

 MR. GARRE: Then they would check that box, 
Your Honor, as is true -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: They would check 
that box. What about one-eighth?

[How about one-thirtysecond American Indian?]

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, that was -- they 
would make that self-determination, Your Honor. If
anyone, in any part of the application, violated some 
honor code then that could come out -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Would it violate the 
honor code for someone who is one-eighth Hispanic and 
says, I identify as Hispanic, to check the Hispanic box?

[Honor code? We don't need no steeenking honor code!]

 MR. GARRE: I don't think -- I don't think 
it would, Your Honor. I don't think that that issue 
would be any different than the plan upheld in Grutter 
or the Harvard plan or in Bakke.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: You don't check in 
any way the racial identification?

 MR. GARRE: We do not, Your Honor, and no 
college in America, the Ivy Leagues, the Little Ivy 
Leagues, that I'm aware of.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So how do you know 
you have 15 percent African American -- Hispanic or 
15 percent minority?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, the same way that 
that determination is made in any other situation I'm 
aware of where race is taken into account.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: You say the same 
way. What is that way?

 MR. GARRE: The persons self-identify on 
that form.

[The issue, obviously, is that in a country where the President is half black and chooses to identify on his 2010 Census form as only black, there are no downsides to identifying dubiously as belonging to a Designated Victim Group, other than the individual's own conscience and sense of honor. We should not underestimate the sense of honor among white people, but it's a little much to assume that it will remain wholly intact under long-term assault.

By the way, for the benefit of the Justices, here is the Pew Hispanic Center's intentionally hilarious guide to Who Is Hispanic?]

 JUSTICE SCALIA: Do they have to 
self-identify?

 MR. GARRE: They do not, Your Honor. Every 
year people do not and many of those applicants are 
admitted.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: And how do they decide? 
You know, it's -- they want not just a critical mass in 
the school at large, but class by class? How do they 
figure out that particular classes don't have enough? 
What, somebody walks in the room and looks them over to 
see who looks -- who looks Asian, who looks black, who 
looks Hispanic? Is that how it's done?

 MR. GARRE: No, Your Honor, and let me try 
to be clear on this. The university has never asserted 
a compelling interest in any specific diversity in every 
single classroom. It has simply looked to classroom 
diversity as one dimension of student body diversity.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: I don't know what you are 
talking about. I mean it is either a factor that is 
validly in this case or it isn't. Do they look to 
individual classroom diversity or not? And if so, how 
do they decide when classes are diverse?

 MR. GARRE: This Court in Grutter, Your 
Honor, and maybe the most important thing that was said 
during the first 30 minutes was, when given an 
opportunity to challenge Grutter, I understood my friend 
not to ask this Court to overrule it. This Court in 
Grutter recognized the obvious fact that the classroom 
is one of the most important environments where the 
educational benefits of diversity are realized, and so 
the University of Texas, in determining whether or not 
it had reached a critical mass, looked to the classroom 
along with -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: Fine. I'm asking how. How 
did they look to the classroom?

 MR. GARRE: Well, Your Honor -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: Did they require everybody 
to check a box or they have somebody figure out, oh, 
this person looks 1/32nd Hispanic and that's enough?

 MR. GARRE: They did a study, Your Honor, 
that took into account the same considerations that they 
did in discussing the enrollment categories -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: What kind of a study? What 
kind of a study?

 MR. GARRE: Well, Your Honor, it's in the 
Supplemental Joint Appendix.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: Yes, it doesn't explain to 
me how they go about, classroom by classroom, deciding 
how many minorities there are.

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, there are student 
lists in each classroom. The student lists --

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: There are student 
lists in each classroom that have race identified with 
the students.

 MR. GARRE: No, no, Your Honor. Of course, 
each classroom, the university knows which students are 
taking its classes and one can then, if you want to 
gauge diversity in the classrooms, go back -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh, you go back to 
what they checked on the form.
application form in deciding whether Economics 201 has a 
sufficient number of African Americans or Hispanics?

 MR. GARRE: That is information that is 
available to the university, Your Honor, the race of 
students if they've checked it on the application. But 
I do want to be clear on this classroom diversity study. 
This was only one of many information points that the 
university looked to.

 JUSTICE ALITO: Well, on the classroom 
diversity, how does the non-Top 10 Percent part of the 
plan further classroom diversity? My understanding is 
that the university had over 5,000 classes that 
qualified as small and the total number of African 
Americans and Hispanics who were admitted under the part 
of the plan that is challenged was just a little over 
200.  So how does that -- how does that -- how can that 
possibly do more than a tiny, tiny amount to increase 
classroom diversity?

 MR. GARRE: Well, Your Honor, first I think 
that 200 number is erroneous. There have been many more 
minority candidates -­

JUSTICE ALITO: Per class?

 MR. GARRE: No, not -- not on a per-class 
basis.

 JUSTICE ALITO: Individuals in class.

 MR. GARRE: I think in looking at the 
classrooms, Your Honor, what the university found was 
shocking isolation.

[I am shocked, SHOCKED.]

 JUSTICE ALITO: How many -- how many non-Top 
10 Percent members of the two minorities at issue here 
are admitted in each class?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, we didn't look 
specifically at that determination. What we did -- in 
other words, to try to find whether there were holistic 
admits or percentage admits, we did conclude in 2004 -­
and again this was before -- we did the classroom study 
before the plan at issue was adopted and at that time 
there were no holistic admits taking race into account. 
And what we concluded was that we simply -- if you 
looked at African Americans, for example, in 90 percent 
of the classes of the most common participatory size -­

JUSTICE ALITO: I really don't understand 
your answer. You know the total number of, let's say, 
African Americans in an entering class, right? Yes or 
no?

 MR. GARRE: Yes, Your Honor.

 JUSTICE ALITO: And you know the total 
number who were admitted under the Top 10 Percent Plan?

 MR. GARRE: We do, Your Honor. But again at 
the time -­

JUSTICE ALITO: If you subtract A from B 
you'll get C, right?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, at the time -­

JUSTICE ALITO: And what is the value of C 
per class?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, I don't know the 
answer to that question, and let me try to explain why 
the university didn't look specifically to that. 
Because at the time that the classroom diversity study 
was conducted, it was before the holistic admissions 
process at issue here was adopted in 2003-2004. And so 
that determination wouldn't have been as important as 
just finding out are African Americans or Hispanics, 
underrepresented minorities, present at the university 
in such numbers that we are not experiencing racial 
isolation in the classroom.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: What is that number? 
What is the critical mass of African Americans and 
Hispanics at the university that you are working toward?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, we don't have one. 
And this Court in Grutter -­

[What's going on here is that the 1978 Bakke decision more or less legalized quotas as long as they aren't referred to as quotas. Since then, quota supporters have started to use the term "critical mass" to justify quotas. Now, "critical mass" sounds very scientific and quantitative (if you have a critical mass of plutonium of a certain amount, then BOOM), but if the quota supporters ever let themselves be pinned down to putting a number to it, then it sounds a lot like a quota.

The University of Texas at Austin has 38,400 undergraduates and about 15,000 are nonwhite. A couple of thousand are black. So, keep that in mind in the subsequent gang-ups.]

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So how are we 
supposed to tell whether this plan is narrowly tailored 
to that goal?

 MR. GARRE: To look to the same criteria of 
this Court in Grutter. This Court in Grutter 
specifically rejected the notion that you could come up 
with a fixed percentage. Now -­

JUSTICE ALITO: Does critical mass vary from 
group to group? Does it vary from State to State?

 MR. GARRE: It certainly is contextual. I 
think it could vary, Your Honor. I think -- let me 
first say that my friends have, throughout this 
litigation, not in this Court, asserted 20 percent as a 
critical mass and that's lumping together different 
minority groups.

 JUSTICE ALITO: But could you answer my
question? What does the University of Texas -- the 
University of Texas think about those questions? Is the 
critical mass for the University of Texas dependent on 
the breakdown of the population of Texas?

 MR. GARRE: No, it's not at all.

 JUSTICE ALITO: It's not.

 MR. GARRE: It's not at all. It's looking 
to the educational benefits of diversity on campus, and 
I think we actually agree on what that means and what 
Grutter said it meant in terms of -­

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Mr. Garre, could you 
explain -- I think you were trying to before -- what 
seems to me the critical question in this case: Why 
didn't the 10 percent solution suffice? There were a 
substantial number of minority members admitted as a 
result of the 10 percent solution. Why wasn't that 
enough to achieve diversity?

 MR. GARRE: Let me make a couple of points, 
Your Honor. First, if you just looked at the numbers -­
we don't think it's the numbers, but if you looked at 
the numbers after 7 years, racial diversity among these 
groups at the University of Texas had remained stagnant 
or worse. 2002, African American enrollment had 
actually dropped to 3 percent.

[That's about a thousand blacks among undergraduates.]

That's one part of it.
 The other part of it is if you look at the 
admissions under the top 10 percent plan, taking the top 
10 percent of a racially identifiable high school may 
get you diversity that looks okay on paper, but it 
doesn't guarantee you diversity that produces 
educational benefits on campus. And that's one of the 
considerations that the university took into account as 
well.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: I don't understand that. 
Why? Why doesn't it?

 MR. GARRE: Because, Your Honor, as is true 
for any group, and the Harvard plan that this Court 
approved in Bakke specifically recognized this, you 
would want representatives and different viewpoints from 
individuals within the same -- the same racial group, 
just as you would from individuals outside of that.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: What kind of viewpoints? I 
mean, are they political viewpoints?

 MR. GARRE: Anyone's experiences, where they 
grew up, the situations that they -- that they 
experience in their lives are going to affect their 
viewpoints.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: But this has nothing to do 
with racial diversity. I mean, you're talking about 
something else.

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, I think it direct
impacts the educational benefits of diversity in this 
sense, that the minority candidate who has shown that -­
that he or she has succeeded in an integrated 
environment, has shown leadership, community service, 
the other factors that we looked at in holistic review, 
is precisely the kind of candidate that's going to 
come -- come on campus, help to break down racial 
barriers, work across racial lines, dispel -­
stereotypes -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: Also, the kind that is 
likely to be included within the 10 percent rule.
 And, incidentally, when was the 10 percent 
rule adopted?

 MR. GARRE: 1998, Your Honor.
 But with respect to your factual point, 
that's absolutely wrong, Your Honor. If you look at the 
admissions data that we cite on page 34 of our brief, it 
shows the breakdown of applicants under the holistic 
plan and the percentage plan. And I don't think it's 
been seriously disputed in this case to this point that, 
although the percentage plan certainly helps with 
minority admissions, by and large, the -- the minorities 
who are admitted tend to come from segregated, 
racially-identifiable schools.

 JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I thought that the 
whole purpose of affirmative action was to help students 
who come from underprivileged backgrounds, but you make 
a very different argument that I don't think I've ever 
seen before.
 The top 10 percent plan admits lots of 
African Americans -- lots of Hispanics and a fair number 
of African Americans. But you say, well, it's -- it's 
faulty, because it doesn't admit enough African 
Americans and Hispanics who come from privileged 
backgrounds. And you specifically have the example of 
the child of successful professionals in Dallas.
 Now, that's your argument? If you have -­
you have an applicant whose parents are -- let's say 
they're -- one of them is a partner in your law firm in 
Texas, another one is a part -- is another corporate 
lawyer. They have income that puts them in the top 
1 percent of earners in the country, and they have -­
parents both have graduate degrees. They deserve a 
leg-up against, let's say, an Asian or a white applicant 
whose parents are absolutely average in terms of 
education and income?

 MR. GARRE: No, Your Honor. And let me -­
let me answer the question.
 First of all, the example comes almost word 
for word from the Harvard plan that this Court approved 
in Grutter and that Justice Powell held out in Bakke.

 JUSTICE ALITO: Well, how can the answer to 
that question be no, because being an African American 
or being a Hispanic is a plus factor.

 MR. GARRE: Because, Your Honor, our point 
is, is that we want minorities from different 
backgrounds. We go out of our way to recruit minorities 
from disadvantaged backgrounds.

 JUSTICE KENNEDY: So what you're saying is 
that what counts is race above all.

 MR. GARRE: No, Your Honor, what counts is 
different experiences -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, that's the 
necessary -- that's the necessary response to 
Justice Alito's question.

 MR. GARRE: Well, Your Honor, what we want 
is different experiences that are going to -- that are 
going to come on campus -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: You want underprivileged 
of a certain race and privileged of a certain race. So 
that's race.

 MR. GARRE: No, Your Honors, it's -- it's 
not race. It's just the opposite.
 I mean, in the LUAC decision, for example, 
this Court said that failing to take into account 
differences among members of the same race does a 
disservice -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But the reason you're 
reaching for the privileged is so that members of that 
race who are privileged can be representative, and 
that's race. I just -­

MR. GARRE: It's -- it's members of the same 
racial group, Your Honor, bringing different 
experiences. And to say that -- if you took any racial 
group, if you had an admissions process that only tended 
to admit from a -- people from a particular background 
or perspective, you would want people from different 
perspectives.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Counsel -­

MR. GARRE: And that's -- that's the 
interests that we're discussing here. It's the 
interests that the Harvard plan specifically adopts 
and lays out -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I understand my job 
under our precedents to determine if your use of race is 
narrowly tailored to a compelling interest.
 The compelling interest you identify is 
attaining a critical mass of minority students at the 
University of Texas, but you won't tell me what the 
critical mass is. How am I supposed to do the job that 
our precedents say I should do?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, what -- what this 
Court's precedents say is a critical mass is an 
environment in which students of underrepresented -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I know what you say, 
but when will we know that you've reached a critical 
mass?

 MR. GARRE: Well -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Grutter said there 
has to be a logical end point to your use of race. What 
is the logical end point? When will I know that you've 
reached a critical mass?

[What the University of Texas bigshots would say if they could be completely honest, not only with the Supreme Court but inside their own minds is: "Look, we know we've got a good thing going here with all sorts of smart white and Asian students wanting to come here, and we don't intend to screw it all up the way CCNY did in 1969 by letting in so many Hispanics and blacks that we kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Trust us to be cynically self-serving."]

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, this question, of 
course, implicates Grutter itself. And, again, I 
understood my friend not to challenge that. They 
haven't challenged that diversity is a compelling 
interest at all.
 What -- what we look to, and we think that 
courts can review this determination, one, we look to 
feedback directly from students about racial isolation 
that they experience. Do they feel like spokespersons 
for their race.

[This "does not feel like spokesperson for his or her race" test of when a critical mass is big enough is a very weird one since racial preferences are defended by people who are professional spokespeople for their race. The Xochitl Hinojosa-type ethnic spokespersons tend to be ethnic warriors for increasing the number of people of their supposed group in the country so they can make even more money as spokesmodels.]

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So, what, you 
conduct a survey and ask students if they feel racially 
isolated?

[All teenagers feel isolated. I remember watching a Britney Spears video back about 12 years ago where she plays a high school girl who feels so lonely. She really was getting into it.]

MR. GARRE: That's one of the things we 
looked at.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: And that's the basis 
for our Constitutional determination?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, that's one of the 
things that we looked at.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Okay. What are the 
others?

 MR. GARRE: Another is that we did look to 
enrollment data, which showed, for example, among 
African Americans, that African American enrollment at 
the University of Texas dropped to 3 percent in 2002 
under the percentage plan.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: At what level will 
it satisfy the critical mass?

 MR. GARRE: Well, I think we all agree that 
3 percent is not a critical mass. It's well beyond 
that.

[Three percent is about 1,000 black undergraduates on the UT Austin campus.]

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Yes, but at what 
level will it satisfy the requirement of critical mass?

 MR. GARRE: When we have an environment in 
which African Americans do not -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: When -- how am I 
supposed to decide whether you have an environment 
within particular minorities who don't feel isolated?

MR. GARRE: Your Honor, part of this is a -­
is a judgment that the admin -- the educators are going 
to make, but you would look to the same criteria -­

["You'll decide, Mr. Chief Justice, when self-appointed minority spokespersons damn well tell you to decide that minority students no longer feel like minority spokespersons, and not a minute before!]

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So, I see -- when 
you tell me, that's good enough.

[Roberts gets the joke.]

 MR. GARRE: No, Your Honor, not at all. You 
would look to the criteria that we looked at, the 
enrollment data, the feedback from the students. We 
also took into account diversity in the classroom. We 
took into account the racial climate on campus.

 JUSTICE ALITO: But would 3 percent be 
enough in New Mexico, your bordering state, where the 
African American population is around 2 percent?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, I don't think it 
would.

[Perhaps all the black college students in New Mexico should be bussed to Texas in order to benefit from Critical Mass. Hey, it worked in Boston!]

I mean, our concept to critical mass isn't tied 
to demographic. It's undisputed in this case that we 
are not pursuing any demographic goal. That's on page 
138 of the Joint Appendix.
 All of -- I think many key facts are 
undisputed here. It's undisputed that race is only a 
modest factor. It's undisputed that we're taking race 
into account only to consider individuals in their 
totality.

 JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Mr. Garre, I think that 
the issue that my colleagues are asking is, at what 
point and when do we stop deferring to the University's 
judgment that race is still necessary? That's the 
bottom line of this case. And you're saying, and I 
think rightly because of our cases, that you can't set a 
quota, because that's what our cases say you can't do.
 So if we're not going to set a quota, what 
do you think is the standard we apply to make a 
judgment?

 MR. GARRE: I think the standard you would 
apply is the one set forth in Grutter, and it comes from 
Justice Powell's opinion in Bakke, that you would look 
to whether or not the University reached an environment 
in which members of underrepresented minorities, African 
Americans and Hispanics, do not feel like spokespersons 
for their race, members -- an environment where 
cross-racial understanding is promoted, an environment 
where the benefit -- educational benefits of diversity 
are realized.
 And the reason why the University of Texas 
concluded that that environment was not met here, it 
laid out in several different information points that 
this Court can review -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: But that holds for only -­
only another what, 16 years, right? Sixteen more years, 
and you're going to call it all off. ...

 JUSTICE ALITO: Well, in terms of diversity, 
how do you justify lumping together all Asian Americans? 
Do you think -- do you have a critical mass of Filipino 
Americans? Cambodian Americans -­

MR. GARRE: Your Honor -­

JUSTICE ALITO: -- Cambodian Americans?

[This is hardly just theoretical. Lots of Asian spokespersons argue for more finely dividing the Asian category so that Cambodians and Hmongs and the like can be considered Underrepresented Minorities. Indeed, Pacific Islanders used to be lumped with Asians, but in the 1990s they got the Clinton Administration to give them a separate racial category so they can benefit from quotas.]

 MR. GARRE: -- the common form that's used 
has Asian American, but also, next to that, has a form 
that says country of origin where that can be spelled 
out.

 JUSTICE ALITO: But do you have a critical 
mass as to all the subgroups that fall within this 
enormous group of Asian Americans?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, we've looked to 
whether or not we have a critical mass of 
underrepresented minorities, which is precisely what the 
Grutter decision asks us to do.
 I think -- if I can make a quick point on 
jurisdiction -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: If I could, before we get 
to that.

 MR. GARRE: I'm sorry.

 JUSTICE KENNEDY: Suppose we -- that you, in 
your experience identify a numerical category a 
numerical standard, a numerical designation for critical 
mass: It's X percent. During the course of the 
admissions process, can the admissions officers check to 
see how close they are coming to this numerical -­

MR. GARRE: No. No, Your Honor, and we 
don't. On page 389 -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: You -- you cannot do that?

[Mr. Garre must be really sweating now. He needs Kennedy's vote and that's not at all a helpful question that Kennedy just asked.]

 MR. GARRE: We -- we wouldn't be monitoring 
the class. I think one of the problems -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But isn't that what 
happened in Grutter; it allowed that.

 MR. GARRE: It did, Your Honor. It was one 
of the things -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: So are you saying that 
Grutter is incorrect?

 MR. GARRE: No, Your Honor. It was one of 
the things that you pointed out in your dissent. What 
I'm saying is we don't have that problem, because -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: I'm -- I'm asking whether 
or not you could do that. And if -­

MR. GARRE: I don't think so, because the 
Grutter majority didn't understand it to be monitoring 
for the purposes of reaching a specific demographic.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: They don't -- they 
don't monitor, but race is the only one of your holistic 
factors that appears on the cover of every application, 
right?

 MR. GARRE: Well, all the holistic factors 
are taking into account on the application, and they're 
listed at various points on the application.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I'm sorry. The 
question was whether race is the only one of your 
holistic factors that appears on the cover of every 
application.

 MR. GARRE: That -- that is true on the 
cover of the application.

Oral arguments in Fisher: Justice Sotomayor takes this skinny white girl's complaint very personally

Here's the transcript of the oral arguments at the Supreme Court today in Abigail Fisher's lawsuit against the University of Texas's second system of racial preferences. 

Sonia Sotomayor's questioning of Fisher's attorney reminds me of Christopher Caldwell's classic line:
"One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong." 

True diversity

Snapperhead Soup comments:
Why is it that elite whites get to mix with the better kind of blacks like Obama who won't rob them or beat them up whereas poor whites must mix with the likes of Mike Tyson-types (via section 8 and etc)? ... 
As for elite whites, I say let's expose them to non-elite run-of-the-mill blacks. And let's see how long they remain 'progressive' and pro-'diversity'. ... 
And if we want non-elite whites to have a favorable view of blacks, I have a better idea. I say let's expose non-elite whites to elite blacks( who don't commit crime). That way, non-elite whites will have a more favorable view of blacks. 

I think this is an excellent idea. The Obamas should participate in an educational reality TV show in which various meathead white reality stars such as The Situation, Honey Boo Boo and others of that ilk, spend a month each as house guests of the Obamas in the White House.

What the Fisher affirmative action case is actually about

The University of Texas has two main affirmative action programs, only one of which is at issue in the Fisher case now before the Supreme Court.

Everybody appears to be totally A-OK with the first affirmative action method, Texas's Top Tenth plan whereby anybody in the top 10 percent of his or her class in high school, gets in. This plan was publicly designed back in the 1990s, after a Circuit Court decision temporarily banned direct racial preferences, to have disparate impact against whites and Asians.

As you may recall, however, in Judge Nicholas Garaufis's much praised decision in the Vulcan Society case, disparate impact is illegal. The city of New York was discriminating against would-be firemen by asking job applicants to take a test that presented reading selections about how to fight fires and then asking questions about how to fight fires.

For example, one paragraph was about which kind of chainsaw to use to cut through wooden doors and which kind to use to cut through steel doors. There was then a question about which kind of chainsaw to use to cut through steel doors.

Obviously, this kind of test discriminated against blacks and Hispanics because there are two ways to score well on it: either:

- You could be good at comprehending the kind of text found in the technical manuals you will be told to read as a fire cadet so you don't, say, mutilate yourself by using the wrong kind of chainsaw;

- Or, you could study up ahead of time so that you already knew what kind of chainsaw to use.

Judge Garaufis saw right through the obvious racism of hiring firefighters based on their ability to learn how to use the right chainsaw and not rip their own faces to shreds when the wrong kind of chainsaw kicks back on them.

You see, blacks and Hispanics tend to be worse at reading comprehension on average, and they tend to be less interested in learning how to fight fires. So, the NYC hiring test was an illegal subterfuge and must be thrown out!

In contrast, the Texas Top Ten Percent plan was publicly proclaimed by all in favor of it as a way to have disparate impact in favor of blacks and Latinos. So, the Fisher case isn't about that system at all.

No, Fisher is only complaining about a second set of racial/ethnic preferences added on top of the Ten Percent Plan after Justice O'Connor's scintillating opinion in the Grutter/Gratz cases of 2003. O'Connor accepted the "diversity" claim discriminating against whites and Asians is really doing a favor for whites and Asians because it allows them to be exposed to the Vibrancy of Diversity. (That the whites and Asians who get the putative benefit of associating with racial preference beneficiaries aren't, technically, the same individuals as the white and Asian victims of the preferences is one of those minor details that get brushed aside in the quest for Strange New Respect.)

The "critical mass" rationalization dreamed up in Grutter/Gratz is more than taken care of by the Top Ten Percent plan.

But ... the problem with the Top Ten Percent plan, you see, was that not enough affluent, privileged blacks and Hispanics get in under it. For example, say you are a Hispanic student attending Highland Park High School because your father is currently doing a tour as a Senior Vice President at the headquarters of a multinational corporation in downtown Dallas, from whence he hopes to move on to head the South American Division in his native Buenos Aires, before perhaps one day returning to Dallas in triumph as CEO of the whole shebang.

Now, if you were attending high school in, say, Laredo, you'd be in the Top Tenth of the class, no problem. Your 620 math SAT score would make you a prodigy in Laredo. In Highland Park, however, you are just another pretty smart rich kid who is only in the Top Half of the class. So, no taxpayer supported education at UT Austin for you! Your dad will just have to pay for you to go to SMU.

But, you are Hispanic and thus deserve freebies from the taxpayers. Your Conquistador ancestors didn't mow down the Indians to have to pay list price at SMU.

Therefore, UT has added special preferences for privileged blacks and Hispanics, which is what Ms. Fisher is complaining about.

P.S. Sure, I made this Highland Park kid up, but I was actually talking last night to the father of a former classmate of one of my sons. The father of this official Hispanic is an American-born Chinese architect, who is chief partner of a practice of about 30 architects. They mostly design hospitals. His wife is a white lady whose mother was born in Spain, so their kid was honored at their high school graduation in the College Board's National Hispanic Recognition Program.

Why top universities must use racial and ethnic preferences

C. Van Carter of Across Difficult Country explains:
It's necessary for elite institutions to discriminate against non-elite whites in order to expose elites to diversity, because if elites are not exposed to diversity it would undermine their ability to attack non-elite whites for being racist.

Supreme Court affirmative action oral arguments open thread

I'm sometimes asked:

Q. How do you come up with so many analyses of the latest issues by the time I get up in the morning?

A. By sleeping through most of the Eastern/Midwestern day. 

I hope to sleep dreamlessly through Wednesday's oral arguments at the Supreme Court over the U. of Texas's affirmative action plan, so if you are paying attention, please feel free to submit a comment to this post. 

I am particularly interested if, in regard to Texas, where Hispanic youths outnumber black youths vastly, 100% of the legal and pundit discussion will continue to be about blacks. Or by now in 2012, have we advanced to such a level of sophistication that only 95% of the debate about Texas's indirect quota system will be about blacks?

iSteve Panhandling Drive Rumbles Onward

Dear Readers:

Thanks to all of you who contributed so generously during the highly encouraging first full day of my first fundraising drive since August 2011.

I did two panhandling stretches in 2011: I let May 2011 go on for many days as generous contributions continued to flow in. I called off August 2011 rather quickly after one very generous commitment arrived. We'll see how this one plays out, but we're off to a good start. Unfortunately, I also need to make a whole lot of money, so you can expect to see more requests like this.

There are a few ways to support my work:

First: You can send me money via Amazon (not tax-deductible). Click here and then click on the button for the amount you want to pay. It's especially quick if you already have an Amazon account, but any major credit card will work fine. (I want to thank all the generous folks who helped me work out the kinks in this method, using their own real money.)

Second: You can make a tax deductible contribution to me via VDARE by clicking here.

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91617-4142

Thanks.

Bryan Caplan's exquisite moral sensitivities are all that stand between us and the horrors of an America v. Canada war of conquest and enslavement

Economist Bryan Caplan is outraged by having to listen to (what must be a tiny handful of) citizenist economists without being able to shout the Open Borders moral revelations of Julian Simon into their thick skulls:
I was just at a conference where several eminent economists embraced the following principle: 
The United States should adopt whatever policies maximize the per-capita GDP of the existing population of the United States, and their descendants.
It was frustrating to listen.  On the one hand, any philosophy professor could instantly produce devastating counter-examples to this principle of national egoism.  For starters: 
1. If conquering and enslaving Canada would increase American per-capita GDP, should we therefore conquer and enslave Canada?
2. If we could forever end world poverty by reducing American per-capita GDP by a penny, should we refuse to end world poverty?
3. If we could costlessly exterminate all Americans who produce a below-average quantity of GDP, should we exterminate them?

Uh ...

1. No.

(Unless, of course, the Canadians really piss us off. So, just watch your step, Canadians. You know what we're talking about. Oh, where was I?)

2. Whatever.

3. I suspect reducing the income of 49.99% of Americans to zero would not, on the whole, be Good for the Economy -- it would certainly be bad for the 49.99% -- although I must admit that I don't keep up with the latest fashions in economic thought, which seem to be moving in that direction.

Seriously, Caplan's excursion into the fever swamps of why Godwin's Law exists means he completely misses the point of "The United States should adopt whatever policies maximize the per-capita GDP of the existing population of the United States, and their descendants." 

The citizenist economists who so outrage poor Dr. Caplan are drawing an obvious analogy to the principle pounded into my head while getting my MBA in finance three decades ago that the board of directors of corporations should adopt whatever policies maximize the wealth of the existing shareholders of the corporation.

That doesn't mean that the board of directors should conquer and enslave Canada. All ethical principles come with endless grown-up qualifications to fantasies hatched by childish minds.

No, the most important word in that principle of financial economics is not "whatever," it is "existing." When corporate directors forget the distinction between current and potential shareholders, corruption ensues. As I pointed out in VDARE in 2005:
By "citizenism," I mean that I believe Americans should be biased in favor of the welfare of our current fellow citizens over that of the six billion foreigners. 
Let me describe citizenism using a business analogy. When I was getting an MBA many years ago, I was the favorite of an acerbic old Corporate Finance professor because I could be counted on to blurt out in class all the stupid misconceptions to which students are prone. 
One day he asked: "If you were running a publicly traded company, would it be acceptable for you to create new stock and sell it for less than it was worth?" 
"Sure," I confidently announced. "Our duty is to maximize our stockholders' wealth, and while selling the stock for less than its worth would harm our current shareholders, it would benefit our new shareholders who buy the underpriced stock, so it all comes out in the wash. Right?" 
"Wrong!" He thundered. "Your obligation is to your current stockholders, not to somebody who might buy the stock in the future." 
That same logic applies to the valuable right of being an American citizen and living in America. Just as the managers of a public company have a fiduciary duty to the current stockholders not to diminish the value of their shares by selling new ones too cheaply to outsiders, our leaders have a duty to the current citizens and their descendants.

October 9, 2012

The War Between the Sexes and the GOP: Too much fraternizing with the enemy for there to be a final victory, but not enough formal allying with the enemy for a Romney win?

Foseti points to John Derbyshires's summary of various points made about the much discussed women's vote by me, Whiskey, and Heartiste. Here's the latter's extract from a recent poll:
Married men: for Romney by 54-35, Romney's margin 19.
Married women: for Romney, 49-42, Romney's margin 7.
Single men: for Obama, 47-38, Obama's margin 9.
Single women: for Obama, 60-31, Obama's margin 29.

Of course, it helps to remove the effects of race and so forth, but the effect of marriage is still very much there. One way to sum up the demographics of the American party system is that the Republicans are the party of married white people, and the more different somebody is from that norm, the more likely they are to vote Democratic.

Or you could look at it on a continuum: the Republicans are the party of married white fathers and the Democrats are the party of single black mothers.

From the Man from Mars' naive perspective, the party of married white fathers really ought to be able to beat the party single black mothers. But, perhaps the former has such an obvious advantage that it gets hijacked by special interests more? Or, perhaps the cultural industry is so bored and disgruntled with the natural ruling party that it makes vast efforts to make people feel that voting for the party of black single mothers is cool.

How George W. Bush's Bushllit Economy drove up illegitimacy rates

From my new column in Taki's Magazine on the quantity and quality of births in America:
Yet most articles about birthrates assume intellectual underpinnings that could be based upon talking points from, say, the Toilet Paper Manufacturers Association: As with opinions, everybody’s got one, so the more the better. More toilet-paper consumption is Good for the Economy, and that’s all you need to know. 
One irony is that the quality of births has perhaps been improving during Barack Obama’s tenure. At minimum, quality has not been in a free fall as it was during George W. Bush’s disastrous second administration. But not only can’t Obama mention this on the campaign trail, he probably can’t even formulate the idea without his head exploding.
And yet, illegitimate births are bad for the GOP in the short and long runs.

Read the whole thing there.

2012 iSteve Fundraising Drive

Dear Readers:

I want to thank you for all the support you've given me over the years. I hope I've provided in good measure. Looking at some stats, I see:

I'm currently at 10,010 unique visits per day.

7,200 posts at this site alone.

234,000 published comments.

29,000,000 page views

Now, though, I have some sizable bills to pay and I need to turn to you again for financial assistance. Thus, I'm kicking off my first fund-raising drive since 14 months ago in August 2011. 

There are a few ways to support my work:

First: You can send me money via Amazon (not tax-deductible). Click here and then click on the button for the amount you want to pay. It's especially quick if you already have an Amazon account, but any major credit card will work fine. (I want to thank all the generous folks who helped me work out the kinks in this method, using their own real money.)

Second: You can make a tax deductible contribution to me via VDARE by clicking here.

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91617-4142

Thanks.

New NYC Gifted test expected to be easier for African Americans because it emphasizes "abstract spatial thinking and largely eliminates language"

Any news story about New York kindergartens is guaranteed to be pure comedy gold. Here's a tragically hilarious article in the WSJ about an expensive new test that New York City has signed up for to get more blacks into Gifted kindergartens. Yet, judging from the description, this new test is just going to demolish poor African-American kids.

In New York, the smart, ruthless people always win in the end. Especially when it comes to kindergarten.
Big Change in Gifted and Talented Testing

By SOPHIA HOLLANDER 
A new test for admission into New York City's gifted and talented program will account for the bulk of a student's score, upending a testing regime that a growing number of children had appeared to master. 
In a broader overhaul than previously announced, the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, also known as the NNAT, will count for two-thirds of a student's score, said city officials, who signed a three-year, $5.5 million contract with the testing company Pearson earlier this year.

Man, there's money to be made in the test racket! Nothing new is being invented, but there's constant lucrative churn from one testing company to another as institutions thrash about blindly trying to buy their way to racial equality of results.
The Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or OLSAT, which increasing numbers of children had prepared for intensely, will drop to a third of the total from 75%.

City officials hailed the new test as a vast improvement. It relies on abstract spatial thinking and largely eliminates language, even from the instructions, an approach that officials said better captures intelligence, is more appropriate for the city's multilingual population and is less vulnerable to test preparation.

Oh, great, this new test will work out swell for African-Americans.

As everybody seems to know lately, African-Americans aren't very good with language (the Word Gap), but they're aces with "abstract spatial thinking." Hart and Risley proved it! Plus, African-Americans don't speak English, so how can they compete with people from China on a test in English?
As a result, they expressed the hope that it would "improve the diversity of students that are recognized as gifted and talented," said Adina Lopatin, the deputy chief academic officer for the city's Department of Education. City officials said they were currently compiling data on the program's racial breakdown but students who qualified tended to be concentrated in wealthier districts. Areas such as the South Bronx produced few candidates. 
Some experts have raised doubts about the NNAT's ability to create a racially balanced class. Several studies show the test produces significant scoring gaps between wealthier white and Asian children and their poor, minority counterparts.

Really? You think?
... The shift marks the latest attempt by city officials to address a seemingly intractable problem: How to create equity in the admissions process for its gifted and talented program, which begins in kindergarten and goes through third grade. .... 
The abstract nature of the exam actually makes it more susceptible to test preparation, some argue. On the NNAT, often students "don't understand what they're supposed to do," said David Lohman, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Iowa and the co-author of a rival test, called the CogAT.

Well, give Lohman $5 million, too. That should fix the problem.
The NNAT is significantly harder than the tests city has previously used, with some questions confusing even for adults, tutoring companies reported. "We've known for some time that, on these sorts of tests, understanding what to do is half the battle," Mr. Lohman said. "You solve one problem and create another." Mr. Naglieri dismissed the idea that preparation could unduly reward students on his test.
"You're not going to be able to solve a really hard question on my test because you know how it works," he said. "You have to intellectually manage the demands of the task."

Yup, that's been the problem with previous tests: not enough intellectually managing the demands of the task for poor black kids to shine.
Tutoring companies across the city have reported a frenzy since the NNAT was announced, with families signing children up for private tutoring sessions, enrolling them in multiweek boot camp classes, and buying test preparation booklets in droves—even though the test won't be administered until January.
... Bige Doruk, the founder of Bright Kids NYC, another tutoring company, said she had no trouble selling NNAT Boot Camp packages—eight to 10 sessions, plus preparation materials—which start at more than $1,000.
Some educators said that as long as standardized tests remained the sole criteria for admissions, little would change.

I think Who You Know, not What You Know, should be the criteria.
"They can keep switching tests from now until doomsday and it's not going to make a difference," said James Borland, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University. "The rationale behind the process is fatally flawed." Others said that even if they maintained testing, the city could still address other barriers for disadvantaged children. Currently, parents must sign up their children to take the test, screening out those whose families are less engaged or savvy. ... Others said the city isn't doing enough to promote diversity in the gifted program.  "You have to believe that what they're doing is a failure or you have to believe that African-American and Latino kids are less gifted," Mr. Borland said. "One of those has to be true."

October 8, 2012

The black hole of American comedy (continued)

One of the secrets of Saturday Night Live's long-running success is that its boss Lorne Michael's run-of-the-mill liberalism is offset by SNL's main political writer Jim Downey's Republicanism. Downey has been especially good at making sure loser Republicans like Bob Dole into crotchety minor heroes. 

But, Obama is off limits. Last month, Michaels announced that he hadn't been able to figure out anything funny about Obama yet. But, don't worry, he's still working on it and will probably come up with something in two or three months.

Now, you might think that last week's bomb by Obama in the Presidential debate would offer a comic gold mine. But, you're forgetting the Prime Directive: satire of The One We've Been Waiting For is off-limits.

So, here's a tick-tock of the agonies Downey had to go through to come up with a Presidential debate sketch that (unmentioned premise) wouldn't violate the Prime Directive.

Which section of the Sunday newspaper would the candidates turn to first?

It's the Sunday between Christmas and New Year's Day and not much is going on. Which section of the Sunday newspaper would various famous politicians turn to first because it's most personally interesting?

Richard Nixon: Reports from foreign capitals, followed by the NFL news.

Ronald Reagan: The op-eds

Adlai Stevenson: The society page.

Bill Clinton: The movie news. (Maybe there's an Air Force One sequel in the works! Air Force One IIAir Force Two? Hmmmhmm ... needs work.)

George W. Bush: The sports page to catch up on the baseball Hot Stove League news.

Lyndon Johnson: Politics

Mitt Romney: The business section

Barack Obama: The book reviews, especially new upper middle-brow fiction. Obama has good taste in novels (better than mine), such as David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. (That's a Shogun-like story of the Dutch trading outpost in Japan on an island in Nagasaki harbor in 1799. It really takes off toward end when a British navy ship arrives, as in the Nagasaki Harbor Incident of 1808 when an improvising British captain almost conquered the Dutch entrepot. Mitchell is tremendous at explaining the real-time decision making of an Age of Nelson captain. Mitchell would make a good successor to C.S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian as a writer of sea stories.)

2012 iSteve Panhandling Drive

Dear Readers:

I want to thank you for all the support you've given me over the years. I hope I've provided in good measure. Looking at some stats, I see:

7,200 posts at this site alone.

234,000 published comments.

29,000,000 page views

Now, though, I have some sizable bills to pay and I need to turn to you again for financial assistance. Thus, I'm kicking off my first fund-raising drive since 14 months ago in August 2011. 

There are a few ways to support my work:

First: You can send me money via Amazon (not tax-deductible). Click here and then click on the button for the amount you want to pay. It's especially quick if you already have an Amazon account, but any major credit card will work fine. (I want to thank all the generous folks who helped me work out the kinks in this method, using their own real money.)

Second: You can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here.

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91617-4142

Thank you.

Why elite college presidents love racial preferences

With affirmative action back in the news, it's worthy recycling my 2005 explanation in The American Conservative of why elite college presidents always proclaim the necessity of preferences for politically powerful organized victim groups. Writing about the Larry Summers Brouhaha at Harvard, I noted:
[Larry] Summers' job is partly to enhance, but mostly to protect, one of the world's most valuable brand names. "Harvard" stands for "intelligence," extreme far right edge of the IQ Bell Curve smarts. America is increasingly stratified by IQ, and the resulting class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless means that having Harvard's endorsement of your brainpower is ever more desirable. Thus, applications and SAT scores have skyrocketed over the last half century. 
Yet, Harvard's IQ elitism sharply contradicts its professed egalitarianism. The typical Harvard professor or student considers himself superior to ordinary folks for two conflicting reasons: first, he constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don't; and second, he has a high IQ, but they don't. 
Further, he believes his brains weren't the luck of his genes. No, he earned them. Which in turn means he feels that dumb people deserve to be dumb. 
Ivy League presidents aren't much worried that the left half of the Bell Curve will get themselves well enough organized to challenge the hegemony of the IQ overclass. No, what they fear is opposition to their use of IQ sorting mechanisms, such as the politically incorrect but crucial SAT, from those identity politics pressure groups who perform below average in a pure meritocracy, such as women, blacks, and Hispanics. But, they each boast enough high IQ activists, like Nancy Hopkins, to make trouble for prestige universities. 
So, Harvard, like virtually all famous universities, buys off females and minorities with "a commitment to diversity" -- in other words, quotas. By boosting less competent women, blacks and Hispanics at the expense of the more marginal men, whites, and Asians, Harvard preserves most of its freedom to continue to discriminate ruthlessly on IQ. 
What is obviously in the best interest of Harvard, and of the IQ aristocracy in general, is for everybody just to shut up about group differences in intelligence. Stifling arguments allows the IQ upper class to quietly push its interests at the expense of everyone else. So, Summers bought peace fast.

Of course, the $50 million Larry handed to Drew Gilpin Faust as reparations didn't save his job, but it did help Dr. Faust acquire the presidency of Harvard. (By the way, you've got to hand it to Ms. Gilpin Faust: she can play the feminist resentment card or she can play the feminine wiles card. Her early career at Penn was, let's just say, not hurt when, as a young woman, she divorced her first husband and married the chairman of her department.)

What terrifies elite universities is the kind of anti-discrimination solution imposed on many fire departments, such as in Chicago where the hiring test has been made so easy that about 96% of white applicants pass, after which fire cadets are chosen at random.

In New Republic, Nicholas Lemann calls Obama "The Cipher"

"The Cipher" is the print title of The New Republic's review (by veteran liberal Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism) of the massive biography of Barack Obama by David Maraniss. Lemann's review confirms, from a different political standpoint, much of my recent review of Maraniss's biography in VDARE. 

Lemann writes:
... If you belong to an extended family that gets together for holiday dinners, most of whose members are not active participants in the national political conversation, you surely can’t make it through a single gathering without some uncle or cousin saying something that, if it came out of the mouth of a member of Congress, would be treated as an instantly career-ending mistake. And if—less likely—you actually know a member of Congress well, you may have seen that even many of them, when feeling relaxed, haven’t fit the entirety of their views inside the acceptable range of the moment. 
It isn’t so easy or natural to stay eternally within the white lines. Some people may be so naturally conventional that the project takes no effort. But what about the rest? Do they do it by calculation? By control? By willing themselves, like actors, into character? Questions like these come to mind especially in the case of Barack Obama, who spent his early life in circumstances where he was unlikely to imbibe and absorb standard-issue American politics from the people around him. “First black president” doesn’t begin to capture the improbability of Obama’s getting where he has gotten. The son of a teenage mother and an almost completely absent father, raised off the American mainland and in Indonesia, with relatives all over the cultural, geographic, and political map, wanting for any real homestead or hometown....

Obama didn’t start striking people as a future president until he was at Harvard Law School. Here he is a sensitive, searching, occasionally mesmerizing young man—as he was in Dreams from My Father. How and when did the big transition happen? We’ll have to wait for Maraniss’s next volume to find out.  
... The many details that Maraniss has unearthed about Obama fall into two main categories: first, Obama’s childhood circumstances were more emotionally difficult than he has made them out to be; second, his narrative of finding a comfortable, lasting cultural identity by embracing his African Americanness seems too pat. ... 
Obama’s mother was a remarkably determined and independent person who, under difficult circumstances, built a significant life for herself as an anthropologist in Indonesia, but Maraniss insistently points out what Obama himself was too diplomatic to say outright in Dreams from My Father: she consistently decided, from the time he was about ten, to structure her life so that she spent almost no time with him, and there is some evidence that he sensed this and resented it deeply. The current, therapeutically driven assumptions governing American upper-middle-class culture would surely lead to a prediction, from the evidence we have, that the adult Obama would be a complete basket case. He cannot possibly be as imperturbable as he appears to be, but it is still remarkable and unexplained how he wound up with both an unstoppable drive to power and complete self-control, a rare combination even in successful politicians. 
... MARANISS HAS carefully established the true identities of the pseudonymous composite characters in Dreams from My Father, and found, in a couple of cases, that people whom Obama presented as crucial guides on his journey to blackness were actually not black. One can’t gainsay the genuineness of the feeling of homecoming Obama got from finding his way into the heart of the African American experience, most notably through his marriage, from a point completely outside it. But it is also a sign of the weirdness of America’s racial customs—most whites assume that anybody who has dark skin also has a set of identical, deeply ingrained experiences and attitudes that just weren’t part of Obama’s life growing up—that Obama has been able to sell this version of himself so successfully. As Maraniss puts it, “It does not diminish the importance of race to note that the formation of his persona began not with the color of his skin but the circumstances of his family—all of his family, on both sides, not just the absent father, as the title of his memoir suggests. All of his family—leaving and being left.” Being black serves in part as an effective cover for something else that is as deeply, or perhaps more deeply, part of him—a fundamental guardedness and unknowability. 

So, who is the President really on the inside? The Muslim Manchurian candidate? An Alinskyite socialist? The committed follower of Rev. Wright, as he portrayed himself in his first autobiography? A U. of Chicago academic slightly to the left of Richard Epstein? A WASPish golfer?  Or maybe there's not much there there ... 
... [Girlfriend] Genevieve Cook’s diary brims over with frustration about her inability to breach the defenses Obama had erected around himself. “[A] wall—the veil,” she calls it at one point; “[b]ut he is so wary, wary ... resents extra weight,” she says at another.  
... In his resistance to being pinned down in any way, there is a lot of his mother. As Maraniss puts it: “Ann had the will to avoid the traps life set for her, and she infused that same will in her son.” 
THIS CAMPAIGN hasn’t cleared up the fundamental mysteriousness of Obama very much. He has been uncannily successful at making Mitt Romney, not himself, the main subject of the campaign. Ask yourself: what portion of your personal campaign conversational time this season has been devoted to Romney, and what portion has been devoted to the man who is far more likely to be our president for the next four years? On Election Day 2008, would you have predicted that Obama would soon move his whole stack of chips onto the venerable liberal cause of universal health care? How clear a sense do you have now of what Obama’s second term will look like? 
The portion of Obama’s life story we get here gives us full satisfaction if the question is how he was able to give his celebrated and career-launching keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in which he proposed that there could be a way of bridging all political and cultural divisions.

The way: Elect me President!
Otherwise, Obama as president—what drives him, how he makes choices—is fundamentally mysterious, and neither Maraniss’s book nor this presidential campaign has done much to clear it up. If there is a politically applicable impression that emerges from the great mass of material, it is how much Obama is a child of the postcolonial era. Hawaii, Kenya, and Indonesia were all former colonies or possessions of the West, one of which was absorbed into a larger democratic nation, the other two of which became independent. The careers of Obama’s grandparents, his parents, and his stepfather all can be seen as workings out of the ways in which post-colonialism plays itself out in individual lives.

 So, I guess Dinesh D'Souza isn't totally crazy like everybody said he was.
And though the term “post-colonial” reads as “left,” both of Obama’s parents, though they probably would have been comfortable with that equation as applying to them politically, chose to work not as lifelong rebels but in the sorts of establishment roles that the end of colonialism opened up: his mother, in Indonesia, at the Ford Foundation; his father, in Kenya, at Shell Oil and then in a government bureau meant to promote the tourist business.  

Right. Obama's roots are in America's Cold War strategy to co-opt the Third World left by giving jobs and influence to people just to the right of the KGB.
... After the election, the chance that Obama will feel that he has finally been set free to let the world see who he really is and what he really believes is nil. 
But it’s also a safe bet that his core convictions are not those of the old Democratic Leadership Council. Romney palpably wishes to restore American hegemony in the world; Obama (drone attacks and dead Osama bin Laden or not) does not. Romney believes in business as the core institution in society in a way that Obama does not. We will surely find out something more about Obama’s convictions and his priorities in the six months after Election Day—not before.

Indeed.
As to what that will be, it’s hard to think of any politician running for reelection about whom the question is more difficult to answer.  
Nicholas Lemann is dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and is the author, most recently, of Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This article appeared in the October 25, 2012 issue of the magazine under the headline "The Cipher."

One possibility is that Obama is intermittently worn down by the phoniness of his life. Here he is pretending to be the Heroic Man of Action when he's really a passive observer, an elegant writer undermined by his inability to come up with anything original to write in that prose-poetry style of his. He wrote a vast autobiography at age 33 to claim the advantages of being black in modern America, but by upbringing he doesn't feel black at all on the inside, and thus only associates with a tiny stratum of the most bourgeois blacks. 

The main stereotypically black aspect about Obama is his vast self-esteem, which greatly enjoys the acclaim of being President. But he also has a skeptical underside -- he doesn't like to flat out lie if there is some lawyerly language with which to trick the vast majority of his listeners and readers. And that part, the best part of him, perhaps finds his absurd career to be kind of depressing. 

Japanese win another Nobel

Back in 1999, I got into a discussion of Japanese creativity. For 20 years, I'd been hearing, often from the Japanese themselves, that they weren't creative. On the other hand, I owned a lot of cool gadgets that had at least been improved upon by the Japanese. On the other other hand, it was pointed out to me that the Japanese sure didn't win many hard science Nobel Prizes: only five Japanese winners up through 1999. 

Beginning in 2000, however, there have been 11 Japanese hard science Nobel Laureates. The latest is Shinya Yamanaka, age 50, for coming up in 2006 with a much less creepy way to use stem cells. (He shared it with John B. Gurdon of Britain, who was the first to clone an animal way back in 1962.)

Nicholas Wade reports in the NYT:
In a brief interview today, Dr. Yamanaka, who was born in 1962 in Higashiosaka, Japan, said that he had trained as surgeon but “gave it up because I learned I was not talented.” Having seen how little the best surgeons could do to help some patients, he decided to go into basic research and did postdoctoral training at the Gladstone Institutes in California. 
“When I came back to Japan in the 90s I suffered from a disease which I called PAD — post-America depression,” he said. Another Japanese Nobel prizewinner, Susumu Tonegawa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has criticized the lack of research freedom given to scientists in Japan. Dr. Yamanaka said that there were still some problems, but that conditions had become much better since Dr. Tonegawa moved from Japan. Dr. Tonegawa won an unshared Nobel Prize in 1987 for discovering the basis of antibody diversity.