IF THERE IS SO MUCH 'SYSTEMIC RACISM' THEN HOW DID BARACK OBAMA GET ELECTED, OPRAH BECOME A BILLIONAIRES AND MICHELLE OBAMA, WHO WAS NOT QUALIFIED TO GET INTO ANY LAW SCHOOL, BE ADMITTED TO HARVARD LAW???
The friend's name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction had taken place about twenty years prior. Sutton described al-Mansour as "the principal adviser to one of the world's richest men." The billionaire in question was Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the same billionaire whose anti-Semitism caused Mayor Rudy Giuliani to reject his $10 million gift to New York City post 9/11.
Malia, Michelle, Barack and the College Admissions Scandal
By Jack Cashill
What shocked even the old timers in my hometown was that Mayor Hugh Addonizio, the man who gave me my Eagle Scout Award, would accept kickbacks in cash right across his desk. They were troubled less by his criminality -- that was expected in Newark -- than by his lack of subtlety. Addonizio paid for his indiscretion with a lengthy prison sentence.
So it is with the current college admissions scandal. People have been scamming their ways into prestige universities for decades, maybe centuries, but in the past they have had the good sense not to put the cash on the table. It seems that in this scandal a few of the bribers and their brokers may well pay for their indiscretion with prison sentences as well.
The media pretend to be shocked. In an editorial on the scandal, the New YorkTimes singled out Harvard University for its “special admissions preferences and back doors for certain applicants.” This is the same New York Times, however, that published an entirely uncritical article three years prior headlined, “Malia Obama Rebels, Sort of, by Choosing Harvard.”
Malia is the fourth member of the Obama family to attend that august university, none of whom, save perhaps for Grandpa Obama, deserved to be there.
Let’s start with Obama Sr., the only member of the extended family to attend college before the affirmative action/diversity era. Obama arrived at Harvard in the early 1960s with the goal of getting a Ph.D. in economics. According to biographer Sally Jacobs, Obama “struggled” with his studies but managed to get a Masters degree.
Alas, the university booted him on moral grounds before he could get his doctorate. An inveterate playboy despite his two ongoing marriages, Obama had an affair with a high-school girl. Denied his Ph.D., says Jacobs, “He goes on to claim the title, nonetheless. He's Dr. Obama. The older he gets, the more he claims it.” As will be seen, intellectual fraud runs in the family.
Michelle was the next to attend Harvard, in her case Harvard Law School. “Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren’t good enough for an Ivy League school,” writes Christopher Andersen in Barack and Michelle, “Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway.”
Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, “Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well.” She did not write well either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community," as “dense and turgid.”
The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observed, “To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language.” Hitchens exaggerated only a little. The following summary statement by Michelle captures her unfamiliarity with many of the rules of grammar and most of logic:
The study inquires about the respondents' motivations to benefit him/herself, and the following social groups: the family, the Black community, the White community, God and church, The U.S. society, the non-White races of the world, and the human species as a whole.
Michelle even typed badly. Still, she was admitted to and graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law. I have been told by those on the inside that there are ways of recognizing affirmative-action admissions. Still, one almost feels sorry for Michelle. She was in so far over her head it is no wonder she projected her angst onto the white people around her. “Regardless of the circumstances underwhich [sic] I interact with whites at Princeton,” she wrote in the opening of her thesis, “it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."
Barack was the smarter and better educated half of the couple. That said, had Obama’s father come from Kentucky not Kenya and been named O’Hara not Obama, there would been no Harvard Law Review, no Harvard, no Columbia.
In his overly friendly biography, The Bridge, David Remnick writes that Obama was an “unspectacular” student in his two years at Columbia and at every stop before that going back to grade school. A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, “I don’t think [Obama] did too well in college.” As to Obama’s LSAT scores, Jimmy Hoffa’s body will be unearthed before those are.
How such an indifferent student got into a law school whose applicants’ LSAT scores typically track between 98 to 99 percentile and whose GPAs range between 3.80 and 4.00 is a subject Remnick avoids.
Obama does too. Although he has admitted that he “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs” during his academic career, he has remained mum about some reported “back door” influence peddling that may have been as useful to him as affirmative action.
In late March 2008 the venerable African-American entrepreneur and politico Percy Sutton appeared on a local New York City show called "Inside City Hall." When asked about Obama by the show’s host, Dominic Carter, the former Manhattan borough president calmly and lucidly explained that he had been “introduced to [Obama] by a friend.”
The friend's name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction had taken place about twenty years prior. Sutton described al-Mansour as "the principal adviser to one of the world's richest men." The billionaire in question was Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the same billionaire whose anti-Semitism caused Mayor Rudy Giuliani to reject his $10 million gift to New York City post 9/11.
According to Sutton, al-Mansour had asked him to "please write a letter in support of [Obama]... a young man that has applied to Harvard." Sutton had friends at Harvard and gladly did so.
Three months before the election it should have mattered that a respected black political figure had publicly announced that an unapologetic anti-Semite like al-Mansour, backed by an equally anti-Semitic Saudi billionaire, had been guiding Obama’s career perhaps for the last twenty years, but the story died a quick and unnatural death.
As for Malia, whose grades and scores are as much a state secret as her father’s, the old man damns with the faint praise of “capable” and “conscientious.” But hell, Bill’s daughter Chelsea got into Stanford and George’s daughter Barbara got into Yale, so this particular path to the back door was well worn.
Barack Obama’s back door, however, was unique to him. Before prosecutors send some of the dimmer Hollywood stars to the slammer for their dimness, they might want to ask just how much influence a Saudi billionaire peddled to get Obama into Harvard.
Harvard virtue-signals: DoJ brief finds that 45% of its black and Latino admissions got in on race
Imagine being a talented black or Latino applicant who got into Harvard University. Now there's news that 45% of the blacks and Latinos have been found to have been admitted on race over merit, according to a new Justice department brief, which credibly argues that Harvard engaged in illegal "race-balancing."
According to J. Christian Adams at PJMedia:
Almost half of all blacks and Hispanics who attend Harvard were admitted because of illegal racial preferences in admissions according to a brief just filed by the Department of Justice.
The Department of Justice filed the brief in a federal lawsuit filed by Students For Fair Admissions. It says Harvard's race-based admissions process violates federal law.
Every employer is going to be looking at your diploma and wondering if you were part of the 45%.
Which is a pretty nasty burden to throw onto the talented 55% who got in on merit alone. Everywhere they go, they'll be suspected of not being Harvard material but for the color of their skin. Make a mistake at work? It's because of the Harvard affirmative-action advantage. What an ugly thing to have to worry about for the rest of your life, solely because you are black or Latino. It's the typically lefty good intentions and virtue-signaling that in the real world does blacks and Latinos absolutely no favors.
According to the DoJ brief:
The school considers applicants’ race at virtually every step, from rating applicants to winnowing the field of applicants when attempting to avoid an oversubscribed class. And its inclusion of race in the analysis frequently makes a dispositive difference. The district court found that Harvard’s use of race was “determinative” for “approximately 45% of all admitted African American and Hispanic applicants.” ADD84. Moreover, Harvard meticulously tracks and shapes the racial makeup of its emerging incoming class throughout the process, continuously comparing the new class’s racial composition with that of the previous year.
The DoJ brief argued that the funnily consistent number of admissions among minorities proved there was some intense "racial balancing" going on, which it notes, is explicitly unconstitutional in a university that takes massive federal funding:
These numbers speak for themselves. The minimal variation, including in the percentages of underrepresented minorities that Harvard seeks to benefit, over a multi-year period is much narrower than the 6.6-percentage-point range in underrepresented minorities the Supreme Court sustained in Grutter.
Asian-Americans, of course, were the ones knocked out on the old subjective 'personality' factor, with Harvard apparently claiming most have bad ones:
Second, Harvard’s process imposes a racial penalty by systematically disfavoring Asian-American applicants. It does so in part through the subjective personal rating that admissions officers apply with minimal guidance or supervision. That rating produces consistently poorer scores for Asian Americans. Harvard did not prove that the personal rating is race-neutral.
The DoJ brief notes that the personality rating is a big one in determining who gets admitted - applicants who got 1's and 2's, the highest ratings, were 80% of the incoming class:
With the personal rating excluded, both experts’ models show Harvard’s program inflicts a statistically significant penalty against Asian-American applicants.
So what is there to unpack here?
Minorities are getting shortchanged on the values of their diplomas, now that news is out that their admission, unlike those of the others, was disproportionately based on race over other more qualified applicants. That's the impact of Harvard's white leadership looking to virtue-signal at the top instead of confront failing black schools and poor cultural outcomes in Great Society-poisoned black and brown cultures.
We see a lot of the effects of this affirmative-action shortchanging in lower-tier schools, which often feature huge dropout rates of minority students who as admitted minorities, cannot keep up with the other kids in the classes.
We don't see that pattern at Harvard - the 2019 statistics show that 99.04% of black students, or, 103 out of 104 graduate (presumably within the 6-year time period noted), and 98.68% of Hispanics -- 150 out of 152 -- do the same. Whites, by contrast, have a 97.6%, or 733/751 rate, and Asians have a 97.73%, or 733/751 rate. Students of mixed race have a 96.19%, or 101 out of 105 graduation rate.
All pretty hunky dory, but it's still possible this may be manipulated to keep the virtue-signal going.
The DoJ charges that racial bean-counting is continuous at Harvard. It's also noteworthy that the school has a gargantuan "diversity" staff -- which needs to somehow keep busy. Might it be that these students are expressly guided to be graduates over other students? That's one possibility.
Another way the graduation rate can be manipulated is through grade inflation and gut majors. Are these ultra-high black and Latino graduation rates the result of the students taking easy majors? Such as a major that ends in '-studies'? Well, to take one benchmark, about half the student section of Harvard's African-American Studies department, based on appearances, is African or African-American, or about 13 out of 27 students. That would be about 10% of the black student body, a rather disproportionate enrollment.
The Harvard physics department, by contrast, doesn't feature faces of its students as the African-American Studies department does. The site features a gigantic eight-person committee on 'diversion and inclusivity' though, but no student facebook listings, quite unlike the African-American Studies page. A jaunt to the Harvard 'Women in Physics' section, though, features 22 female faces, nearly all students, it appears, and none apparently African-American or Latina, in the two pictoral line-up photos showing 22 faces and 25 faces. They all appear to be white, South Asian, or East Asian. Since I couldn't find any information about what black and Latino students are majoring in, the photos serve as a suggestion, particularly since the physics page has a 'diversity and inclusion' link that the African American Studies section does not, suggesting the school thinks someone might notice.
But something probably even more significant was brought up by Henry Louis Gates of all people: It's not the ghetto kids getting into Harvard under the checkbox of 'black' - it's the rich and upper middle class black kids -- and the children of African or Caribbean immigrants, who have a significant work ethic and sense of excellence, probably putting a lot of them in the 55%.
The race-balancing going on at Harvard seems to be primarily a subsidy to the rich black and Latino kids who enroll when admitted, as this academic sums up.
University of Illinois professor Walter Benn Michaels put the question most bluntly when he said, “When students and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids have.”
And that does seem to be going on with the Harvard race-balancing, using the richer kids. That is supported by the fact that only 76% of blacks admitted to Harvard actually go to the school. Harvard itself attributes that to the appeal of historically black colleges such as Howard University and full scholarships offered by other ivy league schools. The Journal of Black Higher Education thinks it's black kids going to high-grade selective state schools, which serve their needs better. The admissions committee, it seems, is throwing things at black kids that a lot of them might not really want. Some may see themselves as more successful at Howard University, or U.C. Santa Barbara, and meet more people in the same boat as themselves.
Meanwhile, over at Harvard, a combination of gut majors, grade inflation, and admitting the rich kids with the requisite background to at least minimally sudceed at Harvard seems to be what keeps the Asian-American kid with poor immigrant parents from the Flushing or Jackson Heights neighborhoods in Queens from getting in - which is fundamentally discriminatory, and a nasty surprise to their American dreams. All because of those supposed bad personalities.
The DoJ fundamentally shows how kids of all races are getting shortchanged by Harvard's racial bean counting, which far from serving kids, serves as a sop to the whites who run these programs -- to virtue-signal to other whites. It's nonsense. Racialism by any other name is still racism. The black and Latino kids get shortchanged, and so do the Asians. The case shows that Harvard needs to scrap that whole thing and move to race-blind admissions more than anything else, or else go without federal funding. Better still, they might just start speaking out on why ordinary African-Americans are condemned to such bad union-run schools that keep them from out of the competition at Harvard as richer kids with the same skin color glide right in.
Image credit: Original art by Monica Showalter, shareable Instagram
Michelle Obama: ‘Systemic Racism’ Is Coming from the White House
Former first lady Michelle Obama claimed Thursday that so-called “systemic racism” is coming from the Trump White House in the wake of the shooting of Jacob Blake.
“These past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about what our kids are seeing every day in this country — the lack of empathy, the division stoked in times of crisis, the age-old and systemic racism that’s been so prominent this summer,” said Obama. “Sometimes they see it on the news. Sometimes they see it from the White House Rose Garden. And sometimes they see it from the back seat of a car.”
I’m just devastated by the shootings in Kenosha. And I can’t stop thinking about what our kids are seeing every day—and our obligations to them going forward.
To find out how you can take action, check out the @ObamaFoundation's resources at https://t.co/gyOVs4Nxyb. pic.twitter.com/0CWfNj2ncL
— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) August 28, 2020
On Sunday, Blake, a 29-year-old black man, was shot multiple times by Kenosha police when officers responded to a domestic incident. Before being shot, Blake admitted to officers that he had a knife in his possession, which was recovered from the floorboard of his vehicle, the Wisconsin Department of Justice said Wednesday.
Obama’s statement comes after a 17-year-old male was arrested Wednesday in connection to the fatal shooting of two people during a third straight night of riots in Kenosha, sparked by Blake’s shooting.
Kyle Rittenhouse, of Antioch, Illinois, about 15 miles from Kenosha, was taken into custody in Illinois on suspicion of first-degree intentional homicide in the attack Tuesday that was largely captured on cellphone video. The shooting left a third person wounded.
“I just killed somebody,” the gunman, carrying a semi-automatic rifle, could be heard saying at one point during the rampage that erupted just before midnight in the city of 100,000 people midway between Milwaukee and Chicago.
In the wake of the killings, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers authorized the deployment of 500 members of the National Guard to Kenosha, doubling the number of troops. The governor’s office said he is working with other states to bring in additional National Guard members and law officers.
The AP contributed to this report.
