Pat, the Sons of Confederate Veterans member and jovial face of the white power movement, has written a new piece for Human Events (the desperate right wing magazine that keeps filling my in-box with pleas for money and conspiracy theories about how the U.S. Postal Service is out to destroy them.) And this one goes right after the heart of the Angry White Man, with arguments that are straight out of the 1980s. In short: Pat Buchanan believes that Judge Sonia Sotomayor didn't really graduate first in her class ... anywhere. She stole the first place finishes of some downtrodden white guy. Read on:
Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that, to get up to speed on her English skills at Princeton, Sotomayor was advised to read children's classics and study basic grammar books during her summers. How do you graduate first in your class at Princeton if your summer reading consists of "Chicken Little" and "The Troll Under the Bridge"? After ridiculing Sotomayor's English speaking ability, Pat gets to his real point:
In video clips dating back 25 years, and now provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sotomayor, according to the Times, even calls herself an "affirmative action product." "The clips include lengthy remarks about her experiences as an 'affirmative action baby,' whose lower test scores were overlooked by admissions committees at Princeton University and Yale Law School because, she said, she is Hispanic and had grown up in poor circumstance." "If we had gone through the traditional numbers route of those institutions," says Sotomayor, "it would have been highly questionable if I would have been accepted. ... My test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates." Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review -- all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity. This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.
Pat concludes with the following bit of irony: Lay out the Sotomayor record -- SAT scores, LSAT scores, bar exam score, law review articles and her opinions -- so that we can see up close what those who eviscerated Robert Bork regard as academic and judicial excellence. No need for name-calling.
Well, no need for name calling after we give Pat a Mulligan for calling Sotomayor "Miss Affirmative Action..." The NYT article in question contains the following: ... Judge Sotomayor insisted that her test scores were sub-par — “though not so far off the mark that I wasn’t able to succeed at those institutions.” Her scores have not been made public. “With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates,” she said. “And that’s been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that. There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action to try to balance out those effects.” ... which Pat takes to mean that she scored lower than the required minimums to get into those colleges.
Well, as a former 4.0 high school student who scored in the 95th percentile nationally on the SAT (and the 98th percentile on the PSAT), and who then was admitted to Harvard, probably in part because they wanted the diversity of having a Black first generation American from the West (Colorado) on campus (in fact, we were told that they balanced our dorm assignments based in part on achieving such diversity...) let me assure you, Pat, that Ivy League colleges DO have a minimum test score requirement (at least for those whose parents and grandparents didn't attend the schoolo.) And as this issue of whether or not we belonged at the school came up almost immediately, in the first class I took at Harvard ("Ec-10," the Martin Feldstein economics course...) we did some checking around the Yard. And it turned out the Black and Hispanic students I went to school with had equal or even HIGHER average test scores than the white students. In fact, I went to school with more than one white student who had not only sub-par high school grades, but also sub-par high school test scores. What those students DID have going for them was a family name -- one that dated back generations at the institution. Hell, I knew one girl whose last name was the same as one of our freshmen dorms in Harvard Yard ... literally. But Pat has no problem with the form of affirmative action known as "legacy," because it benefits people like George W. Bush -- he of the sub-par grades all throughout his young adult life, which led him to be admitted, not just Yale, but also Harvard Business School, where he still managed to emerge dumb as a post. As Slate's Michael Kinsley once pointed out: Sure, a C student can become president. It helps if his father was president first and his grandfather was a senator and he was born into a family that straddles the Northeast WASP aristocracy and the Sun Belt business establishment. And a C student at prep school can get into Yale by adopting a similar action plan of strategic birth control. (That is, controlling whom you're born to.) Nor, apparently, does Pat have a problem with affirmative action as applied to Black conservatives. He fails, interestingly enough, to mention another sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his Jeremiad, despite the fact that Thomas has admitted, just as Sotomayor has, to being a "product of affirmative action": Indeed, Thomas' rise from his dirt-poor upbringing in rural Georgia into an elite Ivy League law school is an affirmative action success story. But don't take our word for it. Take his. In a November 1983 speech to his staff at the federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, Thomas called affirmative action ''critical to minorities and women in this society.'' Then, his remarks got personal: ''But for them (affirmative action laws), God only knows where I would be today. These laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17 years.'' As an undergraduate at Holy Cross College, Thomas received a scholarship set aside for racial minorities. He was admitted to Yale Law School in 1971 as part of an aggressive (and successful) affirmative action program with a clear goal: 10 percent minority enrollment. Yale offered him generous financial aid. Affirmative action can't guarantee success, but it can open doors previously closed to women and people of color. The rest is up to those who walk through the doors.
Indeed, once Sonia Sotomayor "walked through the doors" of Princeton and Yale, the grades she earned were a product of her own hard work. Even on the famous Ivy curve, it's not common to get so many As that you wind up at the top of your class, unless of course Pat believes the professors at Yale were engaged in a "racist" conspiracy to give automatic As to any Hispanic woman who showed up. (If that particular brand of affirmative action existed at Harvard, I want a re-do ... or my money back.) BTW Clarence apparently only turned on affirmative action when he graduated from Yale Law and says he couldn't find a job at a "major law firm." (Hell, I graduated during the Bush I recession. Cry me a river, man.) And retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor faced precisely the same problem as Thomas did when she graduated from Stanford Law School. Thomas isn't special, he's just especially whiney. By the way, Thomas' trouble getting immediate employment may have had more to do with Clarence Thomas than with affirmative action... In particular, the African-American justice has blamed Yale's affirmative action program for stigmatizing black graduates, and contends his law degree is worth only "15 cents" because of it. However, that just isn't true, in their experience, fellow African-American graduates of the law school say. Although Thomas has complained that he couldn't get a job as a starting associate at a major law firm because of the devaluation of his law degree by Yale's affirmative action program, classmates suggest other factors may have been the issue, reports American Lawyer in a lengthy article. Possibilities include Thomas' grades (they aren't publicly known), his then-counterculture persona and his apparent lack of knowledge and interest in networking effectively in the corporate world. ... not to mention the fact that Thomas' complaints are belied by the fact that his mediocre backside is now SITTING ON THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT... thanks to both actual affirmative action, and the kind George H.W. Bush employed when he nominated him.
Meanwhile, Sonia Sotomayor was clearly an outstanding student. And you get voted to lead the law review, not by some touchy-feely faculty, but by your peers. Clearly, they knew something Pat -- who went to Georgetown and Columbia School of Journalism, but still seems to be suffering from something like envy of Sotomayor's academic resume -- doesn't. Maybe we should open up the records of which undergraduate schools Pat applied to back in the day. Were Princeton and Yale on the list?
Labels: affirmative action, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Pat Buchanan, race and politics |
