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February 22, 2005

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Some Blacks Are More Equal Than Others
Buried in a New York Times story on the massive increase in black immigration to America may lie the undoing of racial preferences in higher education:

"African-born and Caribbean-born brothers and sisters have realized that the police don't discriminate on the basis of nationality--ask Amadou Diallo [an immigrant from Guinea who was accidentally shot by police in 1999]," said Professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr., who teaches at Harvard Law School and has warned colleges and universities that admitting mostly foreign-born blacks to meet the goals of affirmative action is insufficient.

"Whether you are from Brazil or from Cuba, you are still products of slavery," he continued. "But the threshold is that people of African descent who were born and raised and suffered in America have to be the first among equals."

Ogletree seems to be arguing that American-born blacks deserve preferential treatment vis-à-vis foreign-born ones, at least if the latter do better than the former absent such preferences. In other words, in the name of "affirmative action," he is calling for discrimination against black people who were born outside the U.S.

The trouble with this is that the argument the Supreme Court has used to justify racial preferences in university admissions is "diversity." Favoring someone from the Bronx over an African-American from Burkina Faso is hardly a way to achieve that goal.

Posted by Nathan at 04:31 PM | Comments (0)
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