It's A Start

Merit, not Equity

The Supreme Court just ruled that affirmative action at colleges was unconstitutional. This is a fabulous decision. It is a start. Perhaps we can start to dismantle the whole affirmative action industry. This decision is a big deal.

It is an entrenched industry. Let’s hope it gets upended. That’s not because we want to discriminate and deny people opportunity, but because the industry itself actively discriminates and denies people opportunity while casting doubt on the people who benefit from it.

Affirmative action has done zero, absolutely zero, to solve any racism problems and in fact, exacerbated them. It also furthered the divide between political parties because in general, Republicans didn’t favor affirmative action and Democrats put it on a pedestal and worshipped it. Affirmative action is in fact an excuse to practice racism/discrimination.

Held: Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pp. 6-40

No doubt, the Grievance/Victimhood/Affirmative Action Industrial Complex will spring into action with marches that trash city centers. Get ready for a full-on gourmet dinner of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton with a side of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Van Jones. Dessert will be Barack Obama and his sidekick, Michelle. It’s worth noting Michelle’s entire career has been about the race-related grievance industry. When you get off that topic, she is incoherent. That’s why people like her bring everything back to race and see injustice in everything down to labels on soup cans.

Would President Obama have risen as he did if he didn’t identify as Black?

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

— Joe Biden, describing fellow candidate Barack Obama. The remark was made the same day Biden filed the official paperwork to launch his presidential campaign. Biden later apologized and said the remark was taken out of context.

Joe Biden’s comment is so offensive if he said it about me I might punch him in the mouth. By the way, it wasn’t taken out of context. Joe stereotypes everyone.

Obama was smart, and a damn good politician. He looked past Joe’s racism and made him VP in order to get the Democratic Establishment voting block.

Might I suggest an alternative dinner idea, dine at the 1776 Project.

I don’t care about the number of justices that favored or dissented. It was a bad law and it was abused by institutions, corporations, and the public to change what was meant to stop discrimination into ramping up discrimination and hiding under the law to do it.

Here is a link to the 14th Amendment. It starts:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Prior to Affirmative Action, we had state and local governments, almost unilaterally run by Democrats, enforcing Jim Crow laws. If you know your history, you know that post-Civil War, no Republican in the old Confederacy could get elected dog catcher. In northern states and cities, governments used more discreet ways to discriminate. Oh, and those cities were generally run by Democrats too.

Human beings will find a way around bad laws, especially when economic incentives are powerful. An entire Affirmative Action industry cropped up as a result of the act being written into law and bureaucracies.

Here are a few examples.

1. Because many federal/state/local contracts for businesses had set-asides for affirmative action, some business owners set up shell companies that were fronted by the right “victim” group in order to get that business.

2. Corporate boards, management teams, and other institutional management organizations are graded on their “affirmative action” and “diversity”. They will plug and play someone just to game that score. When I see corporate boards, I wonder if those people really have the stones to be in the room or are they “feel good look good” positions. Affirmative action casts shade on the merits for anyone who takes advantage of it.

3. All the statues that are being torn down across the US have roots in Affirmative Action.

4. The George Floyd riots that destroyed cities and looted stores have roots in Affirmative Action.

5. University admissions, especially to elite graduate schools are totally gamed due to affirmative action. Many business/law schools will admit a high percentage of minority students knowing full well that many of them will drop out. However, because the system only gives a score on admittance, not graduation, they get a pass. When those students drop out, they are replaced immediately with students who aren’t on scholarship and aren’t ethnically diverse.

6. The entire unionized and government-run school system indoctrinated children into the affirmative action industry. Many independent and private schools did the same.

7. An entire industry has been developed in high school and lower grades. Pre-standardized testing tutor industry thrives as wealthy and upper middle-class white kids try to do better on tests to get into top schools. Many pay for diagnoses from psychologists who are in on the game to get tagged with some sort of made-up learning disorder (hurting children who have a real learning disorder) so they get extra time on standardized tests, and tests in school. This tag follows them through college.

8. Wealthy parents will do all kinds of things to obfuscate the admissions process. They will buy run-down cheap condos in terrible city neighborhoods and use that zip code to make admissions officers think they live in a poor neighborhood. In Chicago, I knew of people that did this to get their kids into selective public schools like Walter Payton or Northside Prep.

9. People would do detective work to find out if they had the right percentage of minority blood in their family tree in order to check a box on a form. That made it easier to thread the needle.

10. People would do an expanding list of ever more “stuff” to differentiate themselves. off-brand athletics like fencing, non-profits, run a bake sale all encouraged, cajoled, and funded by parents. It was never-ending. No wonder kids are so stressed out. Their resumes were collated and presented by professional people. The “college consulting” business where someone gets paid thousands of dollars to present your child and get them into a top school is large.

11. Some people lied about their ethnicity and stole spots from deserving people. Senator Elizabeth “Big Chief” Warren is a case and point but there are plenty of others.

12. Affirmative action has created an ever-expanding plethora of victim classes. It wasn’t enough just to be a minority. Then it was female. Then it was gay. Then it was handicapped. Then it was if you were from a minority religion in the US. Now it is transexual. The golden ticket was to be a minority, handicapped, gay, and female. If you were Muslim, even better!

Justice Roberts cites a prior case in his opinion. It says, “One of the principal reasons race is treated as a forbidden classification is that it demeans the dignity and worth of a person to be judged by ancestry instead of by his or her own merit and essential qualities. Rice 528 U.S., at 517

Roberts also says there is no logical endpoint to these programs.

I have noticed that they persist forever, spread, and get bigger. In doing so, they divide people and create more racial strife which they were designed to end. In short, they suck.

When you work for a company and someone gets a promotion over you, do you think it was merit or do you look for other reasons like skin color, gender, sex preference ad infinitum?

The Chief takes dissenters to task. Their dissents are not complete and only cite pieces of cases to make their point, and not the whole case. It is a flimsy thing to do as a judge and tries to thread a lot of needles. Judges need to write opinions that are solid and create certainty. Affirmative Action created lots of uncertainty.

The WSJ writes:

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. “The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite,” he wrote.

It’s worth noting that in another case with the majority opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor that she opined in 25 years, there will be no need for affirmative action. That was far more than 25 years ago.

Data shows that going to college means you will make more money. Kids that graduate from college do better. In the segmentation of colleges, generally, kids that go to elite top 20 schools do better than other kids. The established human networks associated with those schools do a great job of lifting the alumni up. Demand to get into those networks is inelastic, which is proven by the pricing power those colleges have.

I subscribe to a lot of venture capital focused newsletters from various sources. Each week I am inundated with all sorts of victim-class virtue signaling when it comes to who gets funded and which funds get launched. If you are a white conservative male with a great track record that didn’t go to Stanford, Cal, or an Ivy, don’t go out and raise money from institutions for a fund. You are persona non grata.

It’s laughable until you realize that they are actively discriminating against you and you want or need to do business with them.

It’s macabre. I know one top fund that worked to hire the right new minority partner. Partnerships are very sensitive, but they were explicitly not hiring a white male. Instead, they hired a white female and of course, she went to the right Ivy/elite schools.

Once I went to raise money from the state of Illinois. My partner was female and Hispanic. The person on the opposite side of the table told us “She wasn’t Hispanic enough” because she was Cuban. The wrong flavor of Hispanic! Turns out, the State Senator in charge was Puerto Rican. When fund managers showed up in her committee meetings to talk about their funds, she never asked about performance only if they were investing in minority managers.

The entire ESG investment thesis has some of its roots in affirmative action. ESG is a horrible way to invest money and a terrifically terrible idea. Corporations have made terrible decisions because of it. Just look at Disney’s stock price or Bud Light sales for two examples but over the years we can cite many many more.

When we were trading on the floor, no one gave two whits about any of the Affirmative Action Industrial Complex. It was “Are you honest”, and “Can we do this trade together”? Can we work together? Success was determined by merit. Trade well, make money. Trade poorly, lose money, and find another line of work. 90% didn’t make it. It was a tremendous place to make a living if you could survive.

One thing that many independent contractors have woken up to over the past fifty years is they are losing business only due to the color of their skin, not due to their ability. They don’t have the right “necessities” so they don’t get the job.

It is trite to quote MLK’s speech that said “judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This ruling is a very small step in that direction.