Month: March 2019

WATER POLO: THE NEW AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

Now that we’ve spent a couple of weeks shaking our heads over the college admissions scandal, it is time to reckon with the fact that our system of higher education is seriously broken.  This is about more than a water polo coach on the take.  It’s about affordability, access and equal opportunity. It’s about how the decimation of those qualities has put a generation of young people at risk.

A four-year private college degree now carries an average price tag of a quarter of a million dollars. Even with scholarships and parental assistance, the typical graduate starts adult life $30,500 in the red.   Nationwide, student loan debt exceeds $1.5 trillion.  The insanity of those economics has created a scarcity of opportunity, a Hunger Games-like competition in which 18-year-olds are forced to fight for an educational slot that might give them a shot at the good life and upward mobility.

As a result, high schools throughout the country are experiencing a mental health epidemic. The intense pressure on kids to compete for grades and test scores that could create a path to the “right” college has heaped enormous stress on students. Wrote a high school counselor in Maryland, “Honestly, I’ve had more students this year hospitalized for anxiety, depression and other mental-health issues than ever.”  A February Pew survey showed that 70 percent of teenagers saw anxiety and depression as a “major problem”.  An additional 26 percent said it was a minor problem.  

From a public policy perspective, the fix for this predicament is not exactly rocket science. Rather than treating college education as a scarce resource, it needs to be offered in abundance, free of charge, or at least on an ability-to-pay basis. In addition to academic ability, admission decisions need to reflect a need for racial and ethnic diversity and a leveling of the family income playing field.  What we have now is just the opposite: a college entrance turnstile heavily weighted in favor of the financially advantaged.

The real travesty in the college cheating scandal wasn’t that rich parents bribed their kids’ way into top schools.  Sure, it was sketchy for coaches to take payola for greasing the admission skids of phony athletic recruits who had neither the ability nor desire to play on their teams.   But in terms of applying a moral compass, the repugnancy level of that alleged felony is not that far removed from standard operating procedure on many campuses. This broader ethical quandry is a quiet affirmative action plan favoring well-heeled white kids with a mastery of sports like water polo, sailing, fencing, golf, tennis, lacrosse or hockey.  

According to the recent cheating indictments, all of the elite colleges involved had a set number of admission slots for each sports team.  Coaches identify the kids they want for their teams and, for the most part, they get in.  The National Collegiate Athletic Association estimates that between 61 and 79 percent of student athletes are white. Of the 232 Division I sailing athletes last year, none were black. In the case of lacrosse players, 85 percent were white, as were 90 percent of the hockey players. 

Kirsten Hextrum, a University of Oklahoma professor, told the Atlantic that it is not unusual for parents to spend $10,000 a year or more on equipment, private trainers, summer camps, and travel to tournaments in order to help their kids achieve the level of athletic proficiency needed to secure one of the admission slots reserved for their particular sport. Her research, and that of others, shows that students admitted through the athletic route have substantially lower academic ratings than non-athlete applicants. 

This preference pool of mostly white and privileged water polo stars – and others of that athletic ilk – was constructed with the same architecture as the old affirmative action and quota systems that once promoted ethnic and racial diversity.  For the past 40 years, however, those routes to college enrollment diversity have been battered into near oblivion at both the state and federal level.

Eight states have banned race-conscious admissions. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1979 landmark Bakke case, struck down the use of racial quotas in college admissions, but left the door open to the consideration of race as one of many criteria in student selection.  Through subsequent court decisions, however, that door has been slowly closing, and many legal observers believe it is about to be slammed shut in a case currently before a very conservative Supreme Court. As a result, according to a New York Times analysis, black and Hispanic students are now more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges than they were 35 years ago. 

This leaves us with a startlingly absurd result:  Colleges are prohibited from creating a diverse student body by giving preference to ethnic and racial minority applicants, but it’s perfectly acceptable for them to create admission quotas for a pool of predominately affluent white athletes with less-than-stellar academic records.  Affirmative action isn’t dead. It has simply become a codification of white privilege.

In a TMZ kind of way, it was tantalizing to see television stars and investment brokers doing the perp walk on accusations that they bribed their kids’ way into top schools. But their approach differs only in kind – and legality – from what has become the accepted norm in college admissions. Affluent white families go to the head of the line, and everyone else battles it out for whatever is left.  Delusional defenders of the system call it a meritocracy, but it is far, far closer to being a plutocracy. And it needs to change. 

WHAT DEMS NEED TO WIN IN 2020: A BIG TENT AND A SHIFT TO THE LEFT

Pay no attention to the tortured handwringing over the alleged foibles de jour of the Democratic Party. Yes, it’s lurching to the left. And yes, its internecine squabbles can be a tad unseemly.  The fact of the matter is that you can’t have growth without growing pains.  And without growth and change, we are left with the party of 2016.  In case you forgot, it didn’t end well.

I understand the anxiety. If Democrats blow it in 2020, we’re stuck with the worst Groundhog Day of our lives: four more years of Trumpian nuclear winter.  So our blood pressure soars when we see a headline like the one in the Washington Post the other day:  “Pelosi struggles to unify Democrats after painful fight over anti-Semitism”.  Ditto for the almost daily prognostications that “socialist” concepts will assure defeat on election day (here, here and here). 

Best to take a collective deep breath and recognize three basic truths:  The election is more than 18 months away; the depth and breadth of our current problems transcend the reach of centrist ideology and Clintonian triangulation; and, the occasional chaos in the House Democratic Caucus is the very positive result of expanding the party tent to include more than white men. 

For sure, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have preferred to have spent the past week doing something other than mediating an internal party battle between the comparative evils of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.  It’s safe to say that no other House speaker has faced that challenge.  That’s because the new Democratic House majority looks substantially different than its predecessors of either party.  There are record numbers of women, people of color and millennials. Of the 43 non-white women elected for the first time, 22 are African American, six are Asian Pacific Islanders, 12 are Latina, two are Native American and one is Middle Eastern/North African. 

In the good old boys’ club days of Congress, freshmen were to be seen but not heard.  With this new big tent group, however, social media savvy has chipped away at the seniority system for determining prominence in Washington.  At 29, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York became a super star months before her election to Congress, a fete fueled largely by her Twitter following. Falling closely behind her is Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American from Minnesota, who was at the center of last week’s flap.  Omar has frequently criticized Israel with language that borrows heavily on anti-Semitic tropes, setting off a furor that remained at the top of the news feed for the past week. 

As an old white guy, judging linguistic nuances of Jewish and Muslim criticism is beyond my pay grade and life experience. It strikes me, however, that the conflict hardly diminishes Democrats. Instead, it is a byproduct of their vision of diversity and inclusiveness.  If you want a big-tent party, expect and accept some rambunctiousness. If you are more comfortable with politicians who look, act and think alike, vote Republican. 

The other inane anxiety attack that some Democrats are having ( to name a few: Ed Rendell, Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown) is that the party is swinging too far to the left. They are quaking in their centrist boots over selective red-baiting by a president who owes his election to Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin troll farm.  It is beyond absurd to label proposals for single payer health insurance, free college tuition, meaningful climate change precautions and higher taxes on the mega rich as the destruction of capitalism.  Although it is highly unlikely that any of those goals will be fully adopted anytime soon, the Democratic Party would be indulging in malpractice if it failed to push strongly in a leftward direction right now. 

Our government has spent the past several decades helping the rich at the expense of everyone else, resulting in a level of economic inequality not seen since the late 19th century.  That is the observation of the New York Times’ David Leonhardt who went on to note that the really radical approach would be to do nothing, or to make inequality worse, as Trump’s policies have.

Peter Beinart, a political science professor at the City University of New York, writing for The Atlantic, observed that the left has not traditionally had much influence on the Democrats. Yet, he said, there were two critical times when it was able to push its programs onto the table: the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s.  Both occasions involved circumstances very similar to what we are now facing. 

Franklin Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal legislation was the result of intense agitation on the left from forces like Huey Long and Francis Townsend. Their populist movement, according to Beinart, drew support from millions of people who demanded labor rights, easy credit and nationalization of banks and industries. As those very non-centrist aspirations won mass appeal, Roosevelt and many Congressional Democrats moved leftward, producing one of the most liberal legislative programs in history:  a pro-labor law, higher taxes on the rich, Social Security, unemployment insurance and aid for low income families.  Most historians have observed that those sweeping changes would not have happened without a mobilized left wing.

A similar dynamic played out in the 1960s.  Julian E. Zelizer, in his book The Fierce Urgency of Now, writes that John Kennedy had no intention of taking up the cause of racial inequality and the plight of the poor.  He was focused on tax cuts and, according to Zelizer, did not want to waste political capital on social justice issues that he thought had no traction in Congress.  His thinking changed dramatically, however, after two years of intense civil rights struggles and sustained pressure from the left.  After his death, Lyndon Johnson picked up Kennedy’s progressive agenda, resulting in the eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act, federal aid for education, food stamps, job training, Head Start, Medicare and Medicaid. 

There has not been anything even remotely close to that kind of progressive legislative reach since. Clearly, now is the time for a third wave of bold, sweeping changes to address profound social problems.  But that will not come from a Democratic Party beholden to Wall Street and the status quo. Polling shows significant public support for so-called socialist concepts like single payer health insurance, free college tuition, tax increases for the rich and sweeping steps to combat climate change.  

Just as in the ‘30s and ‘60s, the left is unlikely to capture the entirety of its agenda.  But without forcefully pushing it and agitating for it, none of it will see the light of day.  In this moment, the center of the road is an unproductive and lonely place to be.      

RACISM RUNS FAR DEEPER THAN BLACKFACE & THE N-WORD

You would almost think we are smack in the middle of the biggest racial reckoning since the end of the Civil War.  Sheepish white pols are throwing out their blackface kits. A Maryland legislator is on political life support after having uttered the n-word in a cigar bar.  A member of Congress lost his committee assignments because he defended white supremacy.   We may never have another Black History Month as provocative as the one that just ended, nor as shallow.

Sadly, this spectacle of superficiality shows no signs of abating. We are now into a four-day international story over whether Virginia’s first lady, Pam Northam, committed a racist act by handing raw cotton to black students during presentations on slavery. She insists she gave the cotton to students of all color.  The BBC ran a piece headlined “Virginia’s First Lady in Cotton-picking Race Row.” This was only weeks after she mitigated her husband’s (Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam) self-inflicted wounds by stopping him from doing the moonwalk at a news conference where he confessed to having used blackface in a 1984 Michael Jackson dance contest.

Now comes Michael Cohen, former Trump attorney and consigliere, – and soon-to-be federal prison inmate – with scathing Congressional testimony about his former boss. Cohen said of Trump: “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.”  In a day-long committee hearing, House Republicans made no attempt to defend their president on the conman and cheat charges.  But Trump loyalist Rep. Mark Meadows pulled out all stops on the racist label.  He had a black woman stand next to him during his televised questioning. Meadows pointed to her and said, in the tone of a Perry Mason gotcha moment, that she is a long time Trump family friend, so how could the president possibly be racist?  He proudly rested his case, but not for long.

It went quickly downhill from there.  A number of committee members said Meadows’s use of the woman as a prop was, in itself, racist.  That sent the Congressman into an intensely emotional diatribe, protesting that he can’t be racist because he has black nieces and nephews and is very good friends with the committee chair who is black.  As a child of the 1960s, I naively thought that old racist trope about “some of my best friends are black,” had gone the way of the hula hoop and segregated lunch counters.

There are two takeaways in all of this early 2019 racial news.  One is that America’s infectious goiter of racism is every bit as malignant as it was 50 years ago.  Regardless of how offending politicians try to frame the issue, white guys corking up in blackface is not just an ancient taboo.  It’s always been wrong, but prominent white folks seem hell bent on doing it, despite the ensuing furor. A Google search for blackface produces millions of hits, a virtual who’s who  of entertainers and political figures who keep right on smearing the burned cork over their white privilege (here, here and here).  

Yes, there is a slightly higher risk now for politicians who partake in racist symbols, whether by blackface, use of the n-word or similar bigotry.   When the Virginia blackface story first broke, there was a stampede of Democratic leaders and presidential candidates issuing calls for Northam’s resignation.  A few days later, however, the situation changed dramatically.  The state’s lieutenant governor, a black Democrat, was accused of sexual assault by two women.  Then the attorney general, second in the line of succession for governor, also a Democrat, revealed that he, too, had done the blackface bit.  If all three of them quit, the new Virginia governor would be the current speaker of the house, a Republican.  Suddenly public pressure on Northam to resign all but disappeared.  Polling data show that 58 percent of the state’s African Americans want him to remain in office.

Therein lies the second – and most important – object lesson.  While elected leaders donning blackface or spewing blatantly racist speech are inexcusably despicable, their behavior is but a symptom of a much larger problem, one that gets far less attention than the deplorable antics that have captured recent headlines.  Here’s the deal:  Institutional racism is deeply baked into our culture and government, putting non-whites at an inherent  structural disadvantage when it comes to virtually every aspect of life. That will change only through new laws and public policy. For the past 100 years, that aspirational transformation has been an anathema to the Republican Party. 

It’s not difficult to understand why most African Americans in Virginia want to retain a Democratic governor with a penchant for blackface.  The alternative is control by a party of white faces totally oblivious to their needs.  And those needs cut deeply into this country’s soul, inflicting far more pain than the racist buffoonery of ignorant politicians.

Here is the real problem with America’s racism in 2019:  Black households have only 10 cents in wealth for every dollar held by white households. Only 43 percent of African Americans own a home, a figure that has fallen almost every year since 2004. Young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than young white men.  Blacks are incarcerated in state prisons at more than five times the rate of whites. Overwhelmingly white school districts receive $23 billion more than predominantly black districts, despite serving roughly the same number of children. Black people face a greater risk of death than white people at every stage of life. One study found that racial segregation caused 176,000 deaths in a year, about as many as were caused by strokes.

As depressing and distressing as it is to relive the racist tropes of the 1960s, it is far worse to assume that our deep racial divide will be healed by simply getting rid of politicians who dabbled in blackface or used the n-word.  I’d like to think such a purge would be a start to dealing with the underlying evil of structural racism.  But I fear it is a superficial diversion, one that may create the illusion of doing the right thing, while leaving a diabolically broken system still very broken.