How Public Sector Unions Exploit Identity Politics
As the ethnic composition of America changes from mostly white to a kaleidoscope of color within a generation, there is no better way to fracture society than to teach everyone to resent everyone else. Nurturing tribal resentment is a winning strategy for government unions, because a swollen, authoritarian, unionized government becomes the referee. Government union power increases every time another “person of color” becomes convinced that only government redistribution and racial quotas can mitigate their persecution at the hands of a racist white “patriarchy.”
When society fractures, when we face increasing unrest and poverty, government unions win. It is inherently in the interests of government unions for society to fail. If public education fails, hire more teachers and education bureaucrats. If crime goes up, hire more police and build more prisons. If immigrants fail to assimilate, hire more multilingual bureaucrats and social workers. If poverty increases, hire more welfare administrators.
If you don’t think this strategy can work, come to California, America’s most multi-ethnic state, and a place where government unions wield absolute power. Their wholly owned subsidiary, the Democratic party in California, has spent the last 20+ years perfecting the art of convincing the electorate that Republicans are racists. The strategy has been devastatingly effective, especially with people of color.
According to the Public Policy Institute of California, among California’s “likely voters,” slightly more Whites remain registered as Republicans, 39%, than Democrats, 38%. Among Latinos the registered Democrats, 62%, far outnumber Republicans, 17%, and among Blacks the disparity is even greater, 82% Democrat vs. 6% Republican. Among Asians, where the disparity is less, the Democrats still have a nearly two-to-one advantage, 45% to 24%.
All of this racial perseverating comes at tragic cost. Among the fifty states, California has the highest taxes, the highest state and local government debt, the most welfare recipients, the most people living in poverty, and the highest cost-of-living. The roads and bridges are crumbling, and the water and energy infrastructure hasn’t been significantly upgraded in 30 years. But purveyors of identity politics have a strategy that earns votes, so why engage in actual governance? It’s all about race, stupid. Hire more bureaucrats.
The worst consequence of choosing identity politics over actual governance is the slow but relentless destruction of California’s once great system of public education. There has been negligible improvement in educational achievement for members of California’s disadvantaged, despite decades of political control by public sector union funded Democrats who pander incessantly to the voter’s lowest common denominator of resentment, race. Rather than admit that failures of culture, community, and public education are the real reasons some ethnic groups underachieve, the Democrats that run Sacramento attribute every disparity in outcome among races to the pervasiveness of racism. Their solution? Quotas.
Here is an interesting comparison to prove that quotas are being used to discriminate against California’s “privileged” youth. All data is for 2017. The first column shows what percentage of students taking the SAT, by ethnicity, achieved a score at or above the minimum to be considered “college ready.” The second column shows the ethnic breakdown of college age students in California. Column three uses a factor calculated from columns one and two, for each ethnicity, the percent of college ready students is multiplied by that ethnicity’s percent of the total pool of college age Californians. Each factor is then divided by the sum of all four factors, to calculate a crude but significant indicator of what percentage of 2017 college admissions would be offered to students of each ethnicity, if admissions were based on merit as expressed by SAT scores. Column four shows the actual admissions to California’s UC System in 2017 by ethnicity.
California’s UC System – 2017 Admissions – Actual vs. SAT Based
There are a few obvious takeaways from the above chart. Most salient is the fact that white applicants, if SAT scores were the sole basis for admission, are clear victims of discrimination. After all, if based on their college readiness as assessed by their SAT performance combined with their percentage of the population, they should have earned 43% of the admissions to the UC System, why did they only represent 23% of the incoming freshmen in 2017? But there are other disparities that point to an even bigger problem.
Why, for example, do actual Asian admissions, 34%, exceed the merit based admissions percentage, 21%, as indicated based on their percentage of the college age population and the percentage of them achieving the SAT benchmark? Why, for that matter, are the actual Latino admissions, 33%, slightly less than the amount they would theoretically earn, 35%, based that same criteria? The answer in both cases is the same, and can be best summarized in this quote taken from a report released earlier this year by the Brookings Institution:
“Race gaps on the SATs are especially pronounced at the tails of the distribution. In a perfectly equal distribution, the racial breakdown of scores at every point in the distribution would mirror the composition of test-takers as whole i.e. 51 percent white, 21 percent Latino, 14 percent black, and 14 percent Asian. But in fact, among top scorers—those scoring between a 750 and 800—60 percent are Asian and 33 percent are white, compared to 5 percent Latino and 2 percent black. Meanwhile, among those scoring between 300 and 350, 37 percent are Latino, 35 percent are black, 21 percent are white, and 6 percent are Asian.”
What this means in plain English is that in the UC System, where supposedly only the most elite high school graduates are granted admission, you will find the distribution of the higher SAT scores by ethnicity skewed even more in favor of Asian and White students than you find when evaluating how many students merely achieve the “benchmark” SAT score. This is why Asian admissions, which are arguably the only UC admissions in 2017 that were based truly on merit, skew higher than you would otherwise expect. That is also the reason that Latino admissions skew somewhat lower. And it also indicates that White applicants are discriminated against even more than shown on the table.
Such is the landscape of California’s public system of higher education, considered among the best in the world.
To further investigate this evidence, I talked someone who spent over a decade serving on the Board of Regents at the University of California. They did not mince words. Here are a few of the things they had to say:
– SAT scores have become less important because the university has gone to “holistic admissions” instead of SAT based admissions – the SAT is also watered down with a subjective 3rd “essay” section. The subjectivity of the admissions criteria makes it harder to prove discrimination.
– For years now, the UC System has diversified the faculty by taking more professors to fill positions in African American and Latino studies and shielded itself from discrimination because they can say the person hired had strength in the discipline they needed to fill.
– Ethnic studies departments are academically weak and don’t provide graduates with anything they can use. Most ethnic studies departments are growing because people are being hired and enrolled in order to fulfill de facto diversity quotas both for faculty and students. The alternative would be to destroy the integrity of the hard sciences with unqualified faculty and students.
– After the passage of Prop. 209, the admission of Asians rose to about 35% because you could not suppress their achievement without admitting you’re breaking the law. Latino and Black admissions track at 29% and 6%, respectively, more consistent with their percentage within California’s population. To accommodate the Asian over-enrollment and the Black and Latino quotas, qualified White applicants are the victims – Whites represented less than 25% of admissions to the UC system last year.
– California’s legislature is controlled by the Latino Caucus, which makes sure that 25% Latino admissions are maintained. Whites don’t go out and protest and make noise because that is politically incorrect and the media doesn’t report the data anyway.
Readers are invited to challenge the accuracy of any of the above statements, made by an informed observer. And what is the result of all this mediocrity that hides behind diversity, this discrimination that hides behind achieving quota-driven equality of outcome? A fracturing of society into identity groups, each of them, whether via propaganda or via reality, encouraged to harbor resentment towards every other group.
If one were to identify which of California’s public sector unions is the most guilty of fomenting racial disharmony, it would certainly be the ones representing K-12 public school teachers and the ones representing college faculty. Their outlook, which is reflected in their policies, their curricula, and only somewhat camouflaged on their websites, is to blame the academic achievement gap on anything but their own poor performance as the most influential determinant of educational policy in California. Blame the rich. Blame capitalism. Blame Western Civilization. Blame “white privilege.” Blame racist Republicans. But don’t look in the mirror.
A rising trope among these neo-racialist purveyors of separatist identity politics is that white people should engage in “allyship,” which to them means for well behaved white people to do whatever they’re told by the high priests of the disadvantaged, no matter how disingenuous or ridiculous. But a true ally would provide tough, genuine love, and tell the truth. Which is if you want to achieve in America, the most inclusive and tolerant nation in the history of the world, you have to work hard, stay sober, stay out of jail, keep your families intact, be thrifty, and hit the books.
That truth would unify and enrich this nation. And a unified and prosperous nation would mean less government, less government employees, and weaker public employee unions. We can’t have that now, can we?
REFERENCES
Race and voting in California: Public Policy Institute of California
http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/jtf/JTF_RaceandVotingJTF.pdf
Class of 2017 SAT Results, College Board
https://reports.collegeboard.org/sat-suite-program-results/class-2017-results
California Demographics by Age and Ethnicity – University of California
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/ca-demographics
Percentage of 2017 UC Admissions by Ethnicity – EdSource
Race gaps in SAT scores highlight inequality and hinder upward mobility – Brookings Institution
Even With Affirmative Action, Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago – New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmative-action.html
Are We All Unconscious Racists? – City Journal
https://www.city-journal.org/html/are-we-all-unconscious-racists-15487.html