Criminals at Work¶
“… if the people that are supposedly running the country aren’t actually performing any of the functions of governing, who is?” asks Foseti. Anybody who follows his writing will recognize where this is coming from. It belongs to a consistent (and thus informal) critique of formalist illusion. To confuse government with constitutional structures, legislation, or political offices, is to be blind to the real machinery of power.
Steve Sailor offers a pointed example of this reality in the field of higher educational administration, whose authorities are adamant in the determination to pursue systematic racial discrimination against Asian candidates (in particular). ‘Constraining’ legislation, which explicitly criminalizes these practices, is treated as a formal obstacle course, rather than a prohibition. It complicates anti-meritocratic racial profiling, but is utterly incapable of preventing it.
As Sailer explains:
Back in 1996, Proposition 209 outlawing racial preferences was passed by California voters and became part of the state Constitution. State officials have ever since pursued a strategy of “massive resistance” to this unwelcome demand for equal treatment of the law, such as by switching the evaluation of University of California admissions from a cheap, mechanical system to an expensive, subjective “holistic” system.
The bulk of his post is devoted to a long quotation from Ruth Starkman’s NYT story on the work of an applications reader at Berkeley. This piece is entirely devoid of surprises to anyone with the slightest sensitivity to social reality, since it consists of a reasonably detailed explanation of malicious racial corruption in university admission procedures. Disingenuously, Starkman describes this dirty work as “… an extreme version of the American non-conversation about race,” asking: “Does Proposition 209 serve merely to push race underground?”
I suppose. Do anti-racketeering laws serve merely to push the mafia underground? If people are inflexibly determined to pursue an illegal agenda, laws drive them into the shadows. Perhaps the laws should be relaxed.
Or perhaps crucial public institutions should be ruthlessly purged of leftist criminals. It’s a tough call.