Racist Lions Fan Loses Season Tickets

First off – the report on what the Chumph clown did –

Reaction from the Lions???

Detroit Lions ban racist fan for calling anthem protesters ‘ignorant n**gers’

The Detroit Lions fan who posted an angry racist rant on SnapChat has given up his season tickets after being banned from Ford Field, the Lions’ home stadium, said Detroit’s Fox 2 TV.

The Lions organization announced on Thursday that David Doptis — owner of a restaurant supply company in Pontiac, MI — has been banned from Lions games after calling two black protesters who sat during the U.S. national anthem “ignorant n**gers” and saying that if they don’t love the U.S. then they should leave.

Doptis has denied that he posted the photo and its offensive caption to SnapChat, telling Channel 2, “I didn’t post any pictures, any collages anything… I don’t know where that even came from.”

His business was closed early this week as the controversy mushroomed and went viral.

Stacey Graham — the woman in Doptis’ photo — told WXYZ-TV that she was sitting out the anthem because she objects to the references the lyrics make in verse three that some historians say glorifies the killing emancipated slaves, “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.”

“Everybody has an opinion,” said Graham to WJBK. “He probably could’ve stuck with, ‘he wishes we would’ve stood,’ and I would’ve been like ‘okay’, but to write that under our picture — no words.”

 

The Chumph’s Sig Howl

National magazines are leaving no question of what they think of the Chump’s neo-Nazi and KKK cheering.

 

Add to the Daily List — Yet Another Racist Chumph Supporter Fired

Quick step to the unemployment line.

Not sure why this is difficult for some folks to understand – but your social and political activity can get you fired. Seems a bunch of the alt-right and supremacist trolls didn’t get the message in Charlottesville. Now they are as they lose jobs and respect in their communities.

My first professional job was with IBM. In those days they were pretty clear about their rules of conduct. Any employee who brought negative attention to the company, got their ass terminated. I remember an incident where some fellow employees had a penny Poker game going in a Hotel we stayed in while in training. The local Gendarme raided the game by mistake, looking for a high-stakes illegal game in another room. The players, despite the fact the game was legal, got arrested. Big Blue terminated the two guys whose room the game was in, principally because the raid made the local news. As a group of new hires, we attended a meeting shortly thereafter where we were read the official riot act.

My job posting with IBM was in highly secure locations which required heavy duty Security Clearances. In those day, believe it or not, being a member of the NAACP was cause to be rejected for a clearance (I hid my card), and the NAACP, as well as most Civil Rights Organizations were listed under the category of “Subversive Organization” on the application form. Having friends in foreign countries, including Israel, a strong ally, was considered “risky”. Having spoken at a rally at any of the Civil Rights groups meant your application meant your approval was DOA – especially with the FBI. Fortunately since so little was online in those days you could hide your legal activity.

The neo-nazis and neo-confederates who sparked domestic terrorism in Charlottesville, Va this weekend are learning this lesson. Several have publically been fired – and it appears more are on the way. People have been fired for threatening President Obama and Trump (which is a felony). Being non-politically correct really is no excuse for abusive, sexist, racist, ethnic, illegal, or religious intolerant words designed to hurt other people. I am not sure why some folks don’t get this message, as it seems every day one idiot or another joins the unemployment line for something said on Social Media.

Perhaps in various echo chambers on the left and right people may feel secure by the support they receive for out-of-bounds statements, death threats, or by describing the political opposites in profane or abusive terms. There are sites like Breitbart and the Daily Stormer which allow that. Some of the language on left leaning sites can be pretty raunchy as well.

From the business side, most companies derive revenue from anyone who wants to buy their product. Most are not going to tolerate an employee who expresses opinions indicating either a) the employee is incapable of treating some customers or fellow employees fairly due to bias, of b) the employee’s off job antics makes the company seem unwelcoming to all customers. Companies which don’t do this, are seen as supporting the rabid views of the employee…And may suffer economic consequences.

If you aren’t in Marketing, or just haven’t figured it out yet – Minorities tend to have a much higher level of brand loyalty than the majority population, and are more likely to buy that major brand than an off brand. That means, Minority buyers punch above their population percentage weight in buying name products like Clorox, Coke, and other name brand consumer items.

These companies don’t have active Diversity and outreach projects out of some sort of “misplaced” kindness or “PC”…It is because it is very good for the bottom line.

And the rules get even tougher should you join the executive level.

It is far cheaper, and more profitable to replace your dumb ass than take the hit of a consumer boycott, or loss of corporate image.

‘Not racist’ Trump supporter fired from job after sending comedian unhinged rant about ‘warefafe loving n**&$rs’

A fan of President Donald Trump was recently fired from his job after sending racist messages to comedian Gary Owen.

The Trump supporter, Joseph Lanham, went to see Owen’s show Saturday night in North Naples, Florida. He apparently became upset when Owen started making fun of the president.

Owen told local news outlet Fox 4 Now that the drunk white man started heckling him and loudly shouting racial slurs.

“And at one point I was doing a Trump joke, and he said ‘Yeah, there’s more of us than there is of them.’ And he kept talking, so I kicked him out of my show,” Owen said in an Instagram video. “This is what he sent me on Facebook.”

Owen then showed three racist messages from Lanham, the first of which read: “Your at a n*gga living piece of shit and we are paying for you warefafe loving n*ggers [sic].”

“He send this to me as a message on Facebook… Now everybody knows who you are. Hope your boss sees it if you got a job,” Owen said in his video. “But that $40 you spent on a ticket to see me? I’m going to donate that to the NAACP, you racist f*ck.”

According to NBC 2, Lanham was fired from his job as Vice President of Sales for National Roofing of Collier. His wife was also fired from the same company.

His former boss, Ralph Goddard, said the the racist messages angered him. He also said his company was receiving threats over it.

“I was fearful for my employees to even come in this morning because I didn’t know what to expect,” Goddard said.

Lanham told NBC 2 that he’s not a racist. He blamed his racist behavior on alcohol.

 

Add to the List of Chumph’s Cadre Busted – Steve Bannon and “Seinfield”

Apparently the whole Steve Bannon – “Making millions from Seinfeld TV Show” schtick was a lie as well.

Bannon gets busted…Again.

BUSTED: There are no records of Steve Bannon making money off ‘Seinfeld’ and yadda yadda yadda

A key part of the mythos surrounding embattled White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon is that he makes millions of dollar in royalties from a savvy investment that included profit participation in the sitcom “Seinfeld,” but a New Yorker article about Bannon’s years in Hollywood is now casting doubt on that claim.

In an essay titled, “How Hollywood Remembers Steve Bannon,” journalist Connie Bruck dissects a number of Bannon’s key claims about his time in the movie industry and finds that most of them — including the “Seinfeld” story — don’t really hold up under scrutiny.

“Last November, when Bannon was named Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist, many articles highlighted an extraordinary fact about his Hollywood career: that he had negotiated a profit participation in ‘Seinfeld’ in 1993, two years before the show went into syndication,” said Bruck. “Forbes reported that, if Bannon had a one-per-cent share in the profits, ‘he would have made about $32.6 million since 1998,’ and went on to say that ‘Bannon’s steady “Seinfeld” income’ was supporting his career as a conservative propagandist.”

The factoid first surfaced in a 2015 Bloomberg Businessweek profile of Bannon. According to Bannon, Westinghouse Electric hired his firm to sell the corporation’s small share in an entertainment company called Castle Rock.

Media mogul and CNN founder Ted Turner was interested in buying all of Castle Rock including minority shareholders. Bannon said he advised Westinghouse to take the offer. The company’s representatives reportedly told Bannon that if the deal was so great, he should put up some of his own cash for the properties in the Castle Rock portfolio. One of them was “Seinfeld.”

“Some of those who were responsible for ‘Seinfeld’ became agitated by Bannon’s story,” wrote Bruck. “Larry David, the show’s head writer and executive producer, told me, ‘I don’t think I ever heard of him until he surfaced with the Trump campaign and I had no idea that he was profiting from the work of industrious Jews!’”

However, when Bruck scrutinized the deal — which Bannon and Co. reportedly came away from with a small portion of Castle Rock’s TV package — and followed it through a series of acquisitions and mergers until she found that after 1995, Warner Bros. acquired “Seinfeld” and began to send out regular profit participation statements.

“The Castle Rock and the Westinghouse records from the early months of syndication are not readily available,” wrote Brock. “It is possible that Bannon’s deal was capped and paid out at that time. But, since then, neither CBS nor Castle Rock nor Warner Bros. has records of payments to Bannon, if those records are as they were described to me.”

Got a little Blue Eyed Soul just for Steve…Not sure how the dancing girl in a skimpy bikini made it past the TV censors in 1965, but here goes.

 

White Supremacist Gets Shut Down by BLM

In the late 90’s the white right took over the editorial pages of what had once been the most respected business periodical in the world. Now, their audience is largely limited to bigots and the white-right.

Heather McDonald is a white supremacists/nationalist who regulary publishes in this sewer, given scant cover by professional Lawn Jockey Jason Riley.

I really can’t see why any person of color would read this vile rag, or continue to support the advertisers therein.

A little history on Scientific racism and white-wing think tanks, and here relative to current conservative racist thinking.

She wanted to criticize Black Lives Matter in a college speech. A protest shut her down.

The Facebook event invitation left little doubt about the protesters’ feelings toward pro-police speaker Heather Mac Donald.

They accused her of “neglecting the state sponsored genocide committed against black people” and said she represented “white supremacist and fascist ideologies.”

And just in case people didn’t get the point, organizers photo-shopped devil horns onto her picture.

The last words on the invite, which has since been deleted, offered instructions to like-minded Claremont McKenna College students and others: Show up wearing black and “bring your comrades, because we’re shutting this down.”

They were true to their word. On Thursday evening, about 250 protesters chanted “black lives matter” and other, more choice phrases at the entrance to the Athenaeum, a campus building where Mac Donald was slated to speak, according to a YouTube video of the demonstration. (Warning, it contains strong language.)

Blocking buildings on the California campus is an arrest-able offense, but seeing the sizable crowd, campus officials decided not to force the issue and instead live-streamed Mac Donald’s event.

“We jointly concluded that any forced interventions or arrests would have created unsafe conditions for students, faculty, staff, and guests,” Claremont McKenna College President Hiram E. Chodosh said Friday in a statement. “I take full responsibility for the decision to err on the side of these overriding safety considerations.”

The demonstration was the second time this year that a large-scale protest has targeted a conservative speaker on a college campus.

In February, a planned speech by conservative writer Milo Yiannopoulos was canceled at University of California at Berkeley because of virulent protests.

The protests at the two colleges illustrate a potent challenge for college administrators, who want to expose their students to a wide variety of opinions, but take heat when those efforts backfire.

“The breach of our freedoms to listen to views that challenge us and to engage in dialogue about matters of controversy is a serious, ongoing concern we must address effectively,” Chodosh said in the statement to students.

[Milo Yiannopoulos resigns from Breitbart, proving his free ride on free speech is over]

In an extensive interview with the campus newspaper, the Forum, Dean Peter Uvin said the university thought that a group of students might protest or even try to disrupt the speech, but campus police weren’t prepared for the hundreds that showed up. Video from the scene showed a heated but peaceful protest, and there were no reports of arrests.

As the nation has been entrenched in a heated conversation about whether officers are too quick to use fatal force on blacks and other minorities, Mac Donald has emerged as a strong conservative voice speaking against what she called “phantom police racism.”

In her book “The War on Cops” and in her live-streamed speech Thursday, she said black-on-black crime is a bigger threat to African Americans than police violence. A disproportionate amount of crime happens in black communities, she told students at Claremont McKenna, and modern policing is driven by data, not racism.

She also argues that an outsize focus on police brutality has caused police to back off on proactive policing measures that brought huge crime drops across the nation. “Criminals,” a synopsis of the book says, “are being emboldened.”

“There is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police,” she said in a speech last year at Hillsdale College that has been viewed on YouTube nearly 25,000 times. “We have been talking obsessively about alleged police racism over the last 20 years in order to not talk about a far larger problem: black on black crime.”

Mac Donald didn’t respond to requests for comment made by The Washington Post.

 

Racism Makes You Stupid: Datapoint – Trumpazoid Jackass # 2,322,001, Bank VP Fired

On the subject of “poor career decisions”. Some of the Trumpazoids apparently believe the “White Reich” is already here. Leading to some really, really stupid career ending decisions.

Alabama bank VP canned over racist Facebook post bragging Trump could ‘buy and sell’ Obamas

Racist Trump Jackass of the Week…Now Unemployed

An Alabama woman lost her job after her bigoted, inaccurate and grossly misspelled Facebook rant earned her the title of “racist of the week.”

June Pridmore, a senior-level employee with Regions Bank, welcomed the election of Donald Trump in a social media post that alluded to slavery and suggested President Barack Obama was Muslim, reported AL.com.

“I voted him in,” Pridmore wrote. “I like him. He has a beautiful wife unlike the ugly and embarrassing woman (for lack of a better word), in the White House now. Ms. Trump’s face would make Michele (sic) O’Bama (sic) a Sunday face.”

“I’m certainly glad [Trump] he has a lot of money because she he (sic) won’t be bought out like Barack (sic), socialist Muslim O’Bama (sic) or his wife or all those host of relatives they have in the whitehouse (sic) for US to support.”

Pridmore inaccurately claimed the Obama family had flown their dog to vacations in a separate plane and invited several relatives to live with them at taxpayer expense.

“If any idiot out there thinks that is justified, you deserved him as president,” Pridmore wrote. “I prefer a man who can buy Michele (sic) and Barack and sell them several times over.”

The post was widely shared on Facebook, under the label “racist of the week,” and Pridmore’s employer launched an investigation — which resulted in her termination.

“We appreciate the concerns shared about offensive social media comments that were made through an associate’s personal Facebook account,” said Jeremy King, a spokesman for the bank. “We want you to know that we share those concerns. Those comments do not reflect our values as a company or the way we do business. The associate is no longer an employee of the company.”

The spokesman said Pridmore, whose LinkedIn profile showed she had served as senior vice president of loan operations since 2008, was not in a position where she could approve or deny loans.

Pridmore has deleted her social media profiles since her racist post cost her job.

 

Trump Appoints KKK to Attorney General

There goes the Department of Justice…

 

The Whites Only House – Another Chumph Appointee…Another Bigot

 

 

Bank Led By Donald Trump’s Top Treasury Contender Accused Of Racist Lending

OneWest allegedly avoided lending to communities of color.

A California bank led by Donald Trump’s reported likely treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, is facing new allegations of racist lending practices.

OneWest failed to locate bank branches in minority neighborhoods, loaned money to “very few or no” people of color, and did a better job maintaining and marketing foreclosed homes in mostly white neighborhoods, according to a complaint filed by two housing advocacy groups Wednesday with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The discrimination, called “redlining,” keeps communities of color in poverty by making it harder to buy homes. It was banned in 1968 under the Fair Housing Act.

The complaint was filed against CIT Group, the commercial lending giant that owns OneWest. Mnuchin, who led the investor group that bought OneWest in 2009 and served as its chairman, joined the board of CIT after the acquisition was completed in August 2015.

“Our analysis of OneWest suggests the bank has no significant branch presence in communities of color,” Kevin Stein, deputy director of California Reinvestment Coalition, one of the two nonprofits that filed the complaint, said in a statement. “[N]ot surprisingly, its home loans to borrowers and communities of color are low in absolute terms, low compared to its peer banks, and low when compared to what one would expect, given the size of the Asian American, African American, and Latino populations in California.”

Dune Capital, the hedge fund where Mnuchin works, did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

“CIT is committed to fair-lending and works hard to meet the credit needs of all communities and neighborhoods we serve,” a spokesman for CIT said in a statement emailed to The Huffington Post on Thursday evening. 

In the Los Angeles area in which OneWest operates, black borrowers last year received just 1.7 percent of its mortgages ― 2.1 percentage points below the industry average. Asian Americans made up 8.4 percent of the bank’s borrowers ― 3 percentage points below the industry average. Latinos comprised an additional 8.4 percent of borrowers ― 14 percentage points below the industry average. Meanwhile, the bank awarded 82.4 percent of its loans to white people ― 14.6 percentage points above the industry average.

One-hundred percent of foreclosed homes ― also known as real estate-owned properties ― in neighborhoods of color had five or more maintenance or marketing failures, including trash strewn in the front yard, overgrown grass and shrubbery, and boarded up or broken doors and windows. By contrast, 33.3 percent of foreclosed properties in white neighborhoods sustained the same blight.

The complaints cast an ugly light over the man Trump officials have floated as the leading candidate to lead the Department of Treasury.

Mnuchin led the group of investors that bought OneWest, then called IndyMac Bank, from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in 2009 after the company had collapsed under the weight of bad home loans it made during the housing bubble. As part of the deal, the FDIC agreed to take the hit for the vast majority of loan losses, an arrangement the agency made with buyers of other banks after the crash. OneWest then went to work foreclosing on homeowners, using the fraudulent, corner-cutting technique known as robosigning. In the years that followed, it paid billions of dollars in profits to its investors.

The investor group included private equity financial institutions specialist J.C. Flowers; hedge fund billionaire John Paulson, who later became famous for his massive bet against the U.S. housing market; and progressive philanthropist George Soros.

OneWest was not the only bank to make bad loans during the housing bubble and push people out of their homes once things soured. However, in an industry we now know was filled with fraud, “OneWest stood out,” wrote David Dayen, the author of a book on the foreclosure crisis published this year. “It routinely jumped to foreclosure rather than pursue options to keep borrowers in their homes; used fabricated and ‘robo-signed’ documents to secure the evictions; and had a particular talent for dispossessing the homes of senior citizens and people of color.”

 

By Any Means Necessary

It is time to take back America…Or destroy it.

Welcome to Trump’s America: 87 reports of people bullied by emboldened bigots — and the list is growing

First Lady-elect Melania Trump wants to stop bullying, but children all over America are being bullied today because of her husband.

“We must find better ways to honor and support the basic goodness of our children, especially in social media,” Mrs. Trump said at a Pennsylvania rally last week. “It will be one of the main focuses of my work, if I am privileged enough to become your first lady.”

Ironically, the International Bullying Prevention Association conference took place during the first part of this week and during Election Day.

“We know that traditional bullying results in higher rates of anxiety and depression and even higher risks of suicidal ideation and lower self-esteem and the research shows that we’re seeing similar impacts from cyber-bullying as well. It’s most likely to be harmful when there is that mixed harassment of bullying and cyber-bullying that occur together,” IBPA president Patricia Agatston said.

In a single day, Raw Story has reported on three cases of pro-Trump related bullying of students. The first occurred when students in Minnesota were greeted with “F*ck n*ggers” written on their door. A Michigan middle school had a small group of childrenchanting “build that wall,” while their fellow students, who are Latino, were crying. Another school, this one in Pennsylvania, had students marching with Donald Trump signs while chanting “white power.” We also covered a story of Trump supporters, who filmed themselves driving through Wellesley College, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater and harassing black students. George Zimmerman was also kicked out of a bar for calling someone a “n*gger lover,” though he wasn’t embolden by Trump. That’s just who he is.

Yesterday, we covered a south Philly neighborhood subjected to Nazi graffiti. A Utah man told a neighbor boy, “get out of here n*gger” — then attacked the boy’s dad with stun cane.

While there have not been many of these, there are incidents of anti-Trump violence. In the case of a Los Angeles school, Trump supporters were attacked and one principal is on leave after anti-Trump attacks. Another with anti-Trump protesters in College Park. Another man was also robbed and assaulted.

Thus far Melania Trump has not commented on any of these incidents.

Unfortunately, there have been so many of these stories we decided to begin compiling a list of them here:

Here’s a tweet from a young black student who captured a white boy calling him “a n*gger” and said that he “should be pickin’ cotton.”

The Texas Statesman reports vigilante squads that are being organized at Texas State University….More…

 

Most Improved Bigot Ribbon

 

Trump Bankrolled Racist Ads to Stop Mohawk Casino

Trump has no compunction in playing the race card – in business or politics…

Artist rendering of planned St. Regis Mohawk Casino

REVEALED: Trump bankrolled a racist ad campaign against Native Americans to protect his casino biz

Donald Trump has shown no reluctance to do bigoted things during his presidential campaign, whether it’s supporting a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. or attacking a “Mexican” judge as being unfit to rule on the Trump University case.

Because of this, it’s not surprising to learn that Trump once bankrolled a racist ad campaign against Native Americans who had just proposed building a casino in upstate New York.

The Los Angeles Times reports that when the St. Regis Mohawk tribe announced plans to build a casino near a racetrack in the Catskills, Trump decided to bankroll an ad campaign aimed at convincing local communities to kill the project.

Trump plunged $1 million into a purported “grassroots” anti-gambling organization called the New York Institute for Law and Society that warned the casino would bring “increased crime, broken families, bankruptcies and, in the case of the Mohawks, violence.”

But that’s not all: Documents obtained by The Los Angeles Times show that Trump personally signed off on a strategy devised by longtime ally Roger Stone to depict the Mohawks as a violent people who would bring ruin to everyone else in the area.

“Roger, do it!” Trump scrawled on a proposed flier that said the Mohawk tribe was well known for being a violent group that sold drugs and smuggled undocumented immigrants into the country.

Trump and his associates were ordered by the New York Temporary State Commission on Lobbying to pay $250,000 for deceptive advertising by not disclosing the fact that Trump almost single handedly funded the New York Institute for Law and Society, despite the fact that the organization falsely boasted it had raised funds from more than 12,000 donors.

 

ANOTHER Trump Delegate Indicted for Guns and Child Porn!

The Drumph may well lose the Primary because all his Delegates are in prison!

A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.  -Theodore Roosevelt

“A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.” ― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

Maryland Trump delegate indicted after ATF agents find explosives, machine gun and child porn

A delegate for Donald Trump from Charles County, Maryland was indicted this week on charges related to illegal transport of explosives, possession of a machine gun and child pornography.

In a press release on Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice said that ATF agents began investigating 30-year-old Caleb Andrew Bailey after postal inspectors discovered a package with .50 caliber cartridges with M48A1 incendiary projectiles and other ammunition with explosive projectiles.

On May 5, law enforcement executed a search warrant “at adjoining properties associated with Bailey, including his residence, and seized a machine gun,” according to the statement.

Court documents allege that Bailey also used a minor to produce child pornography, and that child pornography was found in his possession.

Bailey faces over 50 years in prison if found guilty of all charges.

The Maryland Board of Election currently lists Bailey as a delegate for Donald Trump.

 

Republican Peter King Uses Racial Slur on Air

Another Republican…Another racist asshole.

Really? Congressman Peter King Uses Anti-Asian Slur On TV

King used a derogatory term for Japanese-Americans on “Morning Joe” and refused to apologize.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), appearing on live television Friday, dredged up a racial slur from the annals of wartime history.

In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” King used the term “Japs” in a criticism of likely Republican nominee Donald Trump’s approach to national security. King compared the candidate to a hypothetical trigger-happy “guy at the end of the bar” who is oblivious to the consequences of actions like dropping a nuclear bomb.

“There’s real issues with him, real problems with his views,” King said of Trump. “I don’t know if he’s thought them through, or if it’s just like the guy at the end of the bar that says, ‘Oh screw them, bomb them, kill them, pull out, bring them home. You know, why pay for the Japs, why pay for the Koreans?’”

The derogatory term was used for Japanese people and Japanese-Americans during and after World War II, particularly after the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Speaking with The Hill on Friday, King refused to apologize.

“I stand by the merits of what I said. I was quoting the guy at the end of the bar who needlessly offends, who makes snaps decisions and doesn’t care, who suddenly says, ‘The hell with them, the Japs and Koreans,’” King told the outlet.

 

The Most Racist News Has a Racist Cop

Faux News’ frequent guest, Mark Furhman a racist POS.

 

SCUMUS 5 Set to Re-segregate Schools

Supreme Court Justice and member of the conservative Scumbag 5 Thugs in Robes on the Supreme Court certainly had no problem letting his racist flag fly.

Justice Scalia Thinks Black Students Belong In ‘Slower-Track’ Schools

Do black students matter to Justice Antonin Scalia?

During oral arguments on Wednesday in Fisher v. University of Texas, acontentious affirmative action case, the conservative justice seemed to call their abilities into question.

“There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well,” Scalia said, “as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school … a slower-track school where they do well.”

Scalia was engaging former U.S. Solicitor General Gregory Garre, who is now representing the University of Texas at Austin as the school defends its ongoing consideration of race as one of many factors in its admissions program.

Pointing to a brief the court received before oral arguments, Scalia noted “most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas.”

Garre tried to interject, but the justice continued. “They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that … they’re being pushed ahead­­ in classes that are too fast for them,” Scalia said.

Again, Garre tried to respond as Scalia added that he was “just not impressed” by arguments that UT Austin suffers from lower minority enrollment. “I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible,” the justice said.

By then, Garre’s time at the podium was almost up, but he closed his rebuttal to the justice by emphasizing the importance of diversity on campus.

“Frankly, I don’t think the solution to the problems with student body diversity can be to set up a system in which not only are minorities going to separate schools, they’re going to inferior schools,” Garre said. “I think what experience shows — at Texas, California and Michigan — is that now is not the time and this is not the case to roll back student body diversity in America.”

Scalia’s argument is duplicitous for a number of reasons. First UT Austin is hardly an “elite” school. It’s a state university, with a charter of educating the students in Texas, and is part of a state-wide system similar to that of any of the more advanced state such as California, Virginia. It is no MIT or Harvard. Which doesn’t mean it is a bad school, and is generally ranked in the top 10 or so State Universities. Second, UT Austin’s graduation rate is 20% lower than that of comparable state schools for all students (UVa is over 70%). Lastly, graduation rate more closely follows income than race. What Texas found was that there was no difference between high income students and low in terms of abilities – and that they could impact the difference in performance though lower class sizes and coaching for the first two years to bring grades and graduation rate in line. At least 9 Universities have graduation rates of 90%, in today’s world, having a graduation rate of only 50% is the school’s failure – not a failure of the students. UT Austin knows that and has put programs in place to try and fix it.