It's like the C.D.C. can't get its messaging straight.
At LAT, "CDC recommends masks indoors in U.S. where cases are surging."
And from Mark Tapscott, at Instapundit, "CDC’S NEW MASK GUIDANCE BASED ON FAILED STUDY: Turns out, Just the News reports this morning, that our betters have no problem depending upon a study that failed peer review to justify their new mask guidance."
Oh brother. *Eye-roll.*
Following-up, "Gross Domestic Product, Second Quarter 2021, Grows 6.5 Percent."
Here's the take, at NYT, "Growth Is Strong, but the Obstacles to Full Recovery Are Big."
Plus, "Economy Recovers Pandemic Losses, but Faces New Test":
The U.S. economy climbed out of its pandemic-induced hole in the spring as vaccinations and federal aid fueled a surge in consumer spending at restaurants, resorts and retail stores. The revival brought gross domestic product back to its prepandemic level in the second quarter, adjusted for inflation — a remarkable achievement, exactly a year after the economy’s worst quarterly contraction on record. After the last recession ended in 2009, the G.D.P. took two years to rebound fully. But the rise of the Delta variant of the coronavirus could threaten those gains just as the federal aid programs that helped bolster the recovery are coming to an end. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic output, grew 1.6 percent in the second quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said Thursday, up from 1.5 percent in the first three months of the year. On an annualized basis, second-quarter growth was 6.5 percent. Robust investment in the quarter signaled that businesses were betting on continued growth. But the recovery is far from complete. Output is significantly below where it would be had growth continued on its prepandemic path, and other economic measures remain deeply depressed, particularly for certain groups. The United States has nearly seven million fewer jobs than before the pandemic. The unemployment rate for Black workers in June was 9.2 percent. “The good news is, this is all occurring much more rapidly than after the financial crisis,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist for the accounting firm Grant Thornton. “The bad news is, the pain was much worse.” For Sarah Ladley, the economy’s spring reawakening was a glimmer of hope after a brutal year for her business. Ms. Ladley, 33, started selling banana-based frozen treats out of her Denver food truck nearly a decade ago, just after she graduated from college. The pandemic nearly wiped her out: She made it through last year with the help of a loan through the Paycheck Protection Program, but the business lost money. With pandemic restrictions still in place early this year, she began looking for another job to pay the bills. Instead, the phone began ringing with people looking to hold events. “All of a sudden in May, it was like the floodgates opened,” she said. Now Ms. Ladley has a different set of problems. Business has rebounded, though not all the way, and she is having trouble fulfilling demand. She had to change the cups she uses after a vendor ran out, stores will sometimes be out of the fruit she needs and she has struggled to hire workers amid competition from businesses that can offer higher pay and year-round employment. She says she has had to turn away business to avoid burning out her limited staff. “Things definitely aren’t normal, but even if they were normal, I wouldn’t be able to handle it,” she said.Well, better to have robust growth than horrible shrinkage, I guess. *Shrug.*
Assaulted and robbed, a former U.S. senator, man.
At KPIX CBS News 5 San Francisco, "Update: Former California Senator Barbara Boxer Assaulted, Robbed In Oakland’s Jack London District."
At W.S.J., "U.S. Economy Grows Beyond Pre-Pandemic Level":
U.S. gross domestic product grew at a 6.5% annual rate in the second quarter, up slightly from earlier in the year, pushing the economy’s size beyond its pre-pandemic level. The growth came as business reopenings and government aid powered a surge that is expected to gradually slow in coming months, with Covid-19 variants and materials and labor disruptions clouding the outlook. Second-quarter growth fell short of economists’ forecasts. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal estimated that gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services made in the U.S., grew at an 8.4% annual rate in the April-to-June period. Still, the growth propelled GDP beyond pre-pandemic levels, a milestone that underscores the speed of the recovery that began last summer. Widespread business reopenings, vaccinations and a big infusion of government pandemic aid this spring helped propel rapid gains in consumer spending, the economy’s main driver. “The economy has come roaring back faster than people expected,” said Jay Bryson, chief economist at Wells Fargo Corporate and Investment Bank. Economists expect growth to remain strong, fueled by job gains, pent-up savings and continued fiscal support. Still, many say growth likely peaked in the second quarter and will cool as the initial boost from reopenings and fiscal stimulus fades. Rising inflation, continued supply-chain disruptions and a shortage of available workers are additional factors that could restrain growth. The highly contagious Delta variant of Covid-19 also poses an increasing risk to the economic outlook. There are two main ways the spread of Delta could derail the robust recovery, economists say. Some state and local governments could reimpose restrictions on businesses. Second, consumers could curtail spending on travel, dining out and moviegoing out of heightened cautiousness toward the variant’s spread. So far, new restrictions have been limited in scope. They include the reinstatement of indoor-mask rules in some localities such as Los Angeles County. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Tuesday that vaccinated people resume masking indoors in places with high or substantial transmission of coronavirus. Americans don’t appear to be retreating into their homes as the Delta variant spreads. Flight volumes and hotel-occupancy rates continue to rise, according to an analysis of real-time data by Jefferies LLC. Public-transit usage is also gaining ground, though it is down compared with pre-pandemic levels, Jefferies said. The increasing level of vaccinations in the U.S. has made people more likely to keep working and spending money despite the rise in cases. “I really don’t expect anything like we saw in the spring of last year,” said Ben Herzon, executive director at forecasting firm IHS Markit. “Going forward we’ll just see how high the case count gets and how nervous some people get.” Consumer confidence rose in July to the highest level since February 2020, according to the Conference Board. The increase in confidence suggests consumers are positioned to continue driving economic growth this year...
Seems like good news to me.
Still more.
It's V.D.H., at R.C.P., "What Is American Wokeness Really About?":
Most Americans were as indifferent to the U.S. women's soccer team's recent loss to Sweden in the Olympics as they were excited about the team's World Cup win in 2019. In between was the team's nonstop politicking, from whining about compensation to virtue-signaling their disrespect for the United States. The celebrity face of the team, perennial scold Megan Rapinoe, is going the way of teenage grouch Greta Thunberg, becoming more pinched the more she is tuned out. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac used her corporate grifting to buy four homes. The one she bought in California's Topanga Canyon is surrounded by a new $35,000 security fence. Critical race theory guru Ibram X. Kendi offers virtual, one-hour workshops for $20,000 a pop. He is franchising woke re-education kits -- in between bouts of damning capitalism as a catalyst of racism. The woke movement is a slicker, more sophisticated and far more grandiose version of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson's shakedowns of the 1990s. Those, at least, were far more honest in leveraging cash with charges of racism -- and came without the academic gobbledygook of critical race theory. Our freeways are jammed. Airports are crammed. Labor is short. Huge pent-up consumer demand for essentials and entertainment outpaces supply. Yet Major League Baseball's recent All-Star Game saw record low television viewership -- about a quarter of the audience of 40 years ago, when there were 100 million fewer Americans. The Summer Olympic Games are getting anemic TV ratings. The NBA's crashing TV ratings have followed the downward trajectory of the NFL's ratings. Woke sports earn the same public disgust as the accusatory and boring Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards. Cable news networks CNN and MSNBC fueled the story that former President Donald Trump allegedly colluded with Russia. They contextualized (to excuse) the summer looting and rioting of 2020. And they cheered on two impeachments as a prelude to their 24/7 woke drumbeat. Their ratings, too, have now dived. Never has TV been more politicized. Sitcoms, dramas and commercials are designed more to resonate woke messaging than to entertain. So naturally, dismal TV ratings reflect the expected public boredom that ensues when art serves politics. How many times will disingenuous Dr. Anthony Fauci swear that he never sent federal money to the Wuhan virology lab for gain-of-function research, or blame his critics for pointing out his gyrating advice on masks, or offer yet another noble lie on herd immunity? In short, Americans are worn out from elite virtue-signaling and woke performance art from critical race theory capitalists, multimillionaire CEOs, revolving-door Pentagon brass, Malibu celebrities and credentialed elite...
The backlash is building, with a vengeance. My view, once again, is that issues involving C.R.T in education should be taken up at the local level, where parents and communities have the power to elect and remove members of local school boards. Education historically is local function and this is problem for the local communities to decide.
In any case, still more.
At Amazon, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.
At Law and Liberty, "How the Grassroots Are Resisting CRT":
The popular revolt against Critical Race Theory has shocked the woke establishment. We can see in its schizophrenic and unsteady reaction just how spooked it is. Consider, for example, how teachers’ unions have gone from denying that CRT is used in classrooms, to vowing in their next breath to promote it among the country’s 14,000 school districts, and threatening to do “oppo research” or sue anyone who opposes CRT. You can’t have it both ways, guys...
RTWT.
Satellite photos revealed a second site of completely new missile installations. China could be gearing up to challenge the U.S. in a balance of power in nuclear deterrent.
At NYT, "A 2nd New Nuclear Missile Base for China, and Many Questions About Strategy":In the barren desert 1,200 miles west of Beijing, the Chinese government is digging a new field of what appears to be 110 silos for launching nuclear missiles. It is the second such field discovered by analysts studying commercial satellite images in recent weeks. It may signify a vast expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal — the cravings of an economic and technological superpower to show that, after decades of restraint, it is ready to wield an arsenal the size of Washington’s, or Moscow’s. Or, it may simply be a creative, if costly, negotiating ploy. The new silos are clearly being built to be discovered. The most recent silo field, on which construction began in March, is in the eastern part of the Xinjiang region, not far from one of China’s notorious “re-education” camps in the city of Hami. It was identified late last week by nuclear experts at the Federation of American Scientists, using images from a fleet of Planet Labs satellites, and shared with The New York Times. For decades, since its first successful nuclear test in the 1960s, China has maintained a “minimum deterrent,” which most outside experts judge at around 300 nuclear weapons. (The Chinese will not say, and the U.S. government assessments are classified.) If accurate, that is less than a fifth of the number deployed by the United States and Russia, and in the nuclear world, China has always cast itself as occupying something of a moral high ground, avoiding expensive and dangerous arms races. But that appears to be changing under President Xi Jinping. At the same time that China is cracking down on dissent at home, asserting new control over Hong Kong, threatening Taiwan and making far more aggressive use of cyberweapons, it is also headed into new territory with nuclear weapons. “The silo construction at Yumen and Hami constitutes the most significant expansion of the Chinese nuclear arsenal ever,” Matt Korda and Hans M. Kristensen wrote in a study of the new silo field. For decades, they noted, China has operated about 20 silos for big, liquid-fuel missiles, called the DF-5. But the newly discovered field, combined with one hundreds of miles away in Yumen, in northeast China, that was discovered by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., will give the country roughly 230 new silos. The existence of that first field, of about 120 silos, was reported earlier by The Washington Post. The mystery is why China’s strategy has changed. There are several theories. The simplest is that China now views itself as a full-spectrum economic, technological and military superpower — and wants an arsenal to match that status. Another possibility is that China is concerned about American missile defenses, which are increasingly effective, and India’s nuclear buildup, which has been rapid. Then there is the announcement of new hypersonic and autonomous weapons by Russia, and the possibility that Beijing wants a more effective deterrent. A third is that China is worried that its few ground-based missiles are vulnerable to attack — and by building more than 200 silos, spread out in two locations, they can play a shell game, moving 20 or more missiles around and making the United States guess where they are. That technique is as old as the nuclear arms race. “Just because you build the silos doesn’t mean you have to fill them all with missiles,” said Vipin Narang, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who specializes in nuclear strategy. “They can move them around.” And, of course, they can trade them away. China may believe that sooner or later it will be drawn into arms control negotiations with the United States and Russia — something President Donald J. Trump tried to force during his last year in office, when he said he would not renew the New START treaty with Russia unless China, which has never participated in nuclear arms control, was included...
Honestly, this woman's psycho.
At Fox News:
AOC says she wants 'to abolish our carceral system'https://t.co/yOdMRNKjpm
— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 26, 2021
With Larry Elder leading among replacement candidates, it's going to be an interesting race.
At LAT, "Likely California voters now almost evenly split on Newsom recall, poll finds":
SACRAMENTO — Californians who say they expect to vote in the September recall election are almost evenly divided over whether to remove Gov. Gavin Newsom from office, evidence of how pivotal voter turnout will be in deciding the governor’s political fate, according to a new UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. The findings dispel the notion that California’s solid Democratic voter majority will provide an impenetrable shield for Newsom, and reveal a vulnerability created by a recall effort that has energized Republicans and been met with indifference by many Democrats and independent voters. The poll found that 47% of likely California voters supported recalling the Democratic governor, compared with 50% who opposed removing Newsom from office — a difference just shy of the survey’s margin of error. Conservative talk radio host Larry Elder, who last week won a court battle to appear on the Sept. 14 recall ballot, leads in the race to replace Newsom among the dozens of candidates in the running, while support for reality television star Caitlyn Jenner remains low, the survey found. Forty percent of likely voters remain undecided on a replacement candidate, providing ample opportunity for other gubernatorial hopefuls to rise in the ranks before the Sept. 14 special election. Even though Democratic voters far outnumber Republicans in California, the GOP’s enthusiasm over the recall promises to inflate the potency of the anti-Newsom vote in September, said Mark DiCamillo, director of the poll. Nearly 90% of Republicans expressed a high level of interest in the recall election while just 58% of Democrats and 53% of independent voters were as interested, the poll found. “Democrats, at least in the middle of July, almost unanimously believed that Newsom will defeat the recall. I think that may be contributing to some complacency among those voters. Republicans, on the other hand, are confident that they can turn out the governor,” DiCamillo said. “I think the Newsom campaign really has to light a fire among the Democrats and say, ‘Look, the outcome is in jeopardy unless you get out there and vote.’” Though Republicans account for only about a quarter of all registered voters in California, the poll found that they account for 33% of those most likely to cast ballots in the recall election. Democrats make up 46% of the state’s 22 million voters and “no party preference” voters 24%, but their share of the likely recall voters drops to 42% and 18% respectively, DiCamillo said. “Gavin Newsom is in serious trouble at this time because his base of voters is not motivated to come out and support him,” said Dave Gilliard, one of the political strategists leading the effort to oust Newsom...
Still more.
I refuse to call it an "insurrection."
At Amazon, David Simon and Edward Burns, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood.
An excellent, in-depth report, from Nicolas Lemann, at New York, "Can Affirmative Action Survive?":
1. The History In June, 2016, Justice Samuel Alito took the unusual step of reading aloud from the bench a version of his lengthy dissent in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas. A white applicant who had been denied admission had sued, saying that she’d been discriminated against because of her race. The Supreme Court, by the narrowest of margins and on the narrowest of grounds, upheld Texas’s admissions policy. Alito, with steely indignation, picked apart the logic of U.T.’s arguments and of his colleagues’ majority opinion. “This is affirmative action gone berserk,” he declared. The civil-rights revolution ended the Jim Crow system of legally mandated racial segregation in the South. Its success made it obvious that much of the rest of the country was segregated, too, in fact if not always explicitly by law. In the years after the passage of the major civil-rights legislation, many colleges and universities made a concerted effort to become more racially integrated. Alito was complaining about U.T.’s version of this effort, but affirmative action has been controversial from the beginning, because more Black students usually means fewer students of other ethnicities. Students who weren’t Black used the laws banning racial discrimination to claim that universities were now discriminating in favor of Black people, and against them. Alito concluded his dissent with an impassioned statement: “What is at stake is whether university administrators may justify systematic racial discrimination simply by asserting that such discrimination is necessary to achieve ‘the educational benefits of diversity,’ without explaining—much less proving—why the discrimination is needed or how the discriminatory plan is well crafted to serve its objectives.” In his view, the University of Texas, once the target of a civil-rights lawsuit charging it with discriminating against Black people, was now discriminating, just as unacceptably, against others. He went on, “Even though U.T. has never provided any coherent explanation for its asserted need to discriminate on the basis of race, and even though U.T.’s position relies on a series of unsupported and noxious racial assumptions, the majority concludes that U.T. has met its heavy burden. This conclusion is remarkable—and remarkably wrong.” Affirmative action is one of many policies—not just in admissions but also in employment, contracting, education, and voting—that take race into account, as a way of reversing the effects of many more policies, lasting for many more years, that openly discriminated against Black people. The Supreme Court has been ruling on these policies for half a century. In 1954, the Court joined the civil-rights revolution in a unanimous decision declaring legally segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. Since then, it has had a much harder time making up its mind in cases involving race. The Court has considered affirmative action in university admissions six times. The first time, the Justices wound up declaring the case moot. The second time, they voted 5–4 against an explicit, numerical version of affirmative action, and 5–4 in favor of a less explicit version. The third and fourth times involved two lawsuits against the University of Michigan, which the Court decided simultaneously. In one, it ruled against another explicit, numerical version of affirmative action by a 6–3 vote, and in the other it once again voted 5–4 in favor of a less explicit version. The fifth time was the University of Texas case; the Court sent it back to a lower court for reconsideration. That led to the sixth time, in 2016. It decided, by a one-vote margin, in favor of keeping a soft-edged kind of affirmative action that relies on the judgment of an admissions office to use race appropriately when considering an applicant. Is there any issue on which the Supreme Court has produced less clarity? But one thing has been true every time the Court has upheld a form of affirmative action in admissions: the swing vote in the decisions came from a moderate Justice appointed by a Republican President—a breed that no longer exists. The nine Justices are now considering whether to hear Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which accuses Harvard of discriminating against Asian American candidates. The case was organized by Edward Blum, a financial adviser who for more than twenty-five years has been bringing lawsuits against various efforts to take race explicitly into account with the aim of helping people of color—including the Texas case. Another of Blum’s cases, which accuses the University of North Carolina of rejecting white and Asian American applicants because of their race, is currently moving through the lower courts. The country appears to be embarking on a great racial reckoning. A year ago, the murder of George Floyd by the white police officer Derek Chauvin set off some of the largest public demonstrations in American history, and prompted forceful official statements of opposition to racism by just about every prominent institution in America. Joe Biden has repeatedly called for racial equity, using unusually strong language. Many organizations have issued public pledges to recommit themselves to racial diversity, to more fully acknowledge Black history, and to more extensively represent Black perspectives. And a conservative resistance to all these changes is under way, in Congress and state legislatures, in the media, and in the courts, where there are new legal challenges to race-conscious Biden Administration programs. It’s distinctly possible that the Supreme Court, as early as next year, could signal that it considers efforts aimed explicitly at helping Black people to be unconstitutional. In June, the Court asked the Biden Administration to give its views on the Harvard case. If the Court decides to take it, that would be seen as good news by the plaintiffs and bad news by Harvard, which has won in the lower courts. It would be the Court’s first affirmative-action case involving a private university, although Harvard, like all major research universities, receives a great deal of government funding. Given the current makeup of the Court, it’s hard to imagine that it would be inclined to build a bigger, friendlier space for race-conscious policies. There is no reason to believe that Justice Alito has changed his mind in the five years since his dissent in the U.T. case. Two other conservative Justices who have been consistently hostile to affirmative action—Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts—signed on to Alito’s dissent. Roberts has referred to race-conscious policies as “a sordid business.” Anthony Kennedy, the now retired, moderate Republican-appointed Justice who wrote the majority opinion in the Texas case, had in the past been inclined to vote against affirmative action. Joan Biskupic revealed in her recent biography of Justice Sonia Sotomayor that when the case first came before the Court, in 2012, Sotomayor had initially drafted a “heated opinion,” offering “a fierce defense of affirmative action.” When she sensed that Kennedy was moving away from his former position, she decided not to issue it and instead wound up voting for his opinion, in 2016, when the case came back to the Court. Now there are six Republican-appointed Justices on the Court, three of them—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—appointed in the past four years, by Donald Trump. A particularly firm conservative decision would amount to an invitation to further lawsuits challenging state and local measures designed to increase Black employment, electoral power, and economic resources. On race, it’s by no means clear that the Supreme Court has shared in the resurgence of passion for racial-justice issues that has swept through many other leading American institutions. This could be one of those Court decisions which set off not just private legal readjustments but public demonstrations, and years of political organizing. There is little common ground between people who see explicitly racial remedies as justifiable and necessary and people who see them as morally indistinguishable from the Jim Crow laws. It will be fitting if the Court takes the Harvard case. The long-running battles over affirmative action involve a clash between two opposing principles, both arguably invented at Harvard: meritocracy and diversity. At large universities, it is possible to employ both principles at once, since the institutions have to balance many goals that sometimes seem at odds. But in the national debate, because people tend to choose either meritocracy or diversity, it’s important to understand where the ideas came from. In 1933, James Bryant Conant, a chemist, became the president of Harvard. Unlike his immediate predecessors, who were Boston Brahmins, Conant grew up in middle-class Dorchester, not one of Boston’s patrician precincts. During Harvard’s almost four-hundred-year history, it has organized itself along a number of different principles, beginning with its founding mission to train ministers. Conant’s predecessor, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, had overseen an institution dominated by students from wealthy families in the Northeast who had been educated at New England boarding schools. Lowell had introduced a quota restricting the number of Jewish students and a policy of residential segregation for Harvard’s few Black students. Conant wanted to make Harvard more purely academic, like the great research universities in Europe, so the clubby atmosphere of the place struck him as something that had to change. Conant became entranced with the idea of using standardized intelligence tests as a way to attract academically outstanding public-school graduates from all over the country, regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds. He decided that the best test available was the SAT, a multiple-choice test adapted from an I.Q. test given to Army inductees during the First World War. Immensely influential in the world of education, Conant led a successful effort to make the SAT a critical part of the admissions process for millions of college applicants, and to make other I.Q.-like tests a key screening device for graduate and professional schools. This consequential policy was established with no legislative action and little or no public debate. During the nineteen-forties, Conant wrote a series of manifestos proposing a vast remaking of American society. The best known of these, titled “Wanted: American Radicals,” was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Conant hoped to create a Cold War version of Plato’s Republic, with a new class of brainy, selfless, superbly educated men leading the competition with the Soviet Union. As he perceived it, standardized tests would bring to the best universities the most talented students, who would go on to become highly influential public servants. This position wasn’t completely wrong. One of the first SAT-selected scholarship students to attend Harvard, which was all-male at the time, was James Tobin, the son of a sports-information director at the University of Illinois, who distinguished himself as a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a professor at Yale, and a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. One of Tobin’s students was Janet Yellen, the daughter of a Brooklyn family doctor, who is now the Secretary of the Treasury. But Conant was mistaken in believing that he could use the SAT as a way to create a classless society. He liked to predict that, in the postwar world, inherited privilege would be abolished. In 1958, Michael Young, a British sociologist, introduced the word “meritocracy,” warning that the widespread use of I.Q. tests as a sorting device would result in a new and deeply resented kind of hereditary class system. But that’s not how people came to understand the term. To many, it denoted an almost sacred principle: that tickets to success, formerly handed out by inheritance or luck, were now given to the deserving. Inevitably, the system became widely understood not as an entry point into public service but as a promise of financial reward and social prestige. And fortunate parents learned how to manipulate the system, insuring that their children received every possible advantage—or even, in extreme cases, bribing their children’s way into élite universities. White establishment liberals of Conant’s generation almost never considered race when they thought about the American future. In the summer of 1948, Henry Chauncey, an assistant dean under Conant who became the first president of the Educational Testing Service, was stunned to read an article co-written by one of the most prominent Black academics in the country, the anthropologist Allison Davis, who argued that intelligence tests were a fraud—a way of wrapping the privileged children of the middle and upper classes in a mantle of scientifically demonstrated superiority. The tests, he and his co-author, Robert J. Havighurst, pointed out, measured only “a very narrow range of mental activities,” and carried “a strong cultural handicap for pupils of lower socioeconomic groups.” Chauncey, who was convinced that standardized tests represented a wondrous scientific advance, wrote in his diary about Davis and Havighurst, “They take the extreme and, I believe, radical point of view that any test items showing different difficulties for different socioeconomic groups are inappropriate.” And: “If ability has any relation to success in life parents in upper socioeconomic groups should have more ability than those in lower socioeconomic groups.” But that thought contradicted Conant’s assurance that the American radical he wanted to put in charge of the country would be “a fanatical believer in equality,” committed to “wielding the axe against the root of inherited privilege.” As the civil-rights movement grew, universities wanted to integrate more seriously, and standardized tests complicated their commitment. Testing made it possible to create a numerical ranking of all applicants, which helped enormously in handling the crush at the gates of selective institutions. Yet there had always been substantial average Black-white gaps in test scores—a reflection of the divergent quality of education and other resources in the lives of Black and white Americans. Conant’s efforts had resulted in greatly increasing the importance of tests, but the enhanced integration, beginning in the nineteen-sixties, of Harvard and other colleges and universities required decreasing their importance. By the early nineteen-seventies, rejected white applicants at a number of universities were beginning to sue—charging that the schools had engaged in reverse discrimination. The plaintiffs based their legal arguments on two landmarks in the country’s historic quest for racial justice, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, both of which forbade racial discrimination. Those measures were aimed at helping Black people, but, the plaintiffs argued, they applied equally to white people who had been rejected even though their test scores were higher than those of admitted Black applicants. In these lawsuits, admissions based on standardized test scores had risen to the level of a constitutional right. The first celebrated white litigant against an affirmative-action program was Marco DeFunis, who had been turned down by the University of Washington’s law school. In 1974, the Supreme Court declared DeFunis’s case moot because a lower court had ordered that he be admitted to the law school, and by the time the Court ruled he was close to graduating. Supporters of affirmative action were worried. Mainstream Jewish organizations, seeing affirmative action as a possible harbinger of a return of Jewish quotas at universities, took DeFunis’s side. Alexander Bickel, of Yale Law School, one of the country’s most prominent legal scholars, co-wrote an anti-affirmative- action friend-of-the-court brief for the Anti-Defamation League. The sociologist Nathan Glazer wrote a book called “Affirmative Discrimination.” The Supreme Court’s most theatrically liberal white member, William O. Douglas, wrote a solo opinion that treated affirmative action as unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment, he wrote, “commands the elimination of racial barriers, not their creation in order to satisfy our theory as to how society ought to be organized.” The feeling that issues involving race had obvious solutions, which had prevailed at the Court in 1954, had evaporated. Justices were predisposed to see affirmative action as presenting a bewildering conflict between two competing values: the impulse to integrate universities and the impulse to organize admission as an open competition in which each individual applicant would be judged solely on the basis of grades and test scores...
Still more.
