Full employment for utopian social engineers could be just around the bend. Or is it these preachers of the "equal outcomes" gospel who've gone around the bend?

The standard liberal arts cant is by now familiar and tiresome to any informed thinker, but is still being spread on our nation's campuses with alarming regularity, and to great effect. Differing levels of education and income, even different rates of computer owership and diabetes, are de facto evidence of an absent "social justice," and a pernicious bias against U.S. minorities. Graduates come out of major state universities fully convinced the "isms" (i.e. racism, sexism, gender-ism) are the reason some individuals don't achieve as much as others. The role of individual choices and decisions is relegated to the background.

Here's a typically broad-brushed, condemnatory example. Writing in the online version of the campus newspaper, admiring student commentator Brian Morin describes Arizona State University history professor Matthew C. Whittaker's perspectives, conveyed in a public lecture last week in Tempe. Whittaker belives our society is bedeviled by:

..."practical racists," because they promote interracial unity with their words, but then denounce its value through their apathy and inaction. If we allow ourselves to become "practical racists" and not stand up against the racial status quo, then we are no better than the overt racists who commit hate crimes.

Always a good start. Practice what I preach, or you are a racist. Unfortunately, the "racial status quo" to which Whittaker's acolyte Morin refers, is neither "racial," nor the "status quo." The commentary on the lecture continues:

....One of the major and most positive aspects of the lecture was when Whitaker moved into what we can do to promote interracial unity. The most important thing we can do is step out of our comfort zones and have productive dialogues about the issues of racial injustice and inequality. We must educate ourselves about others' cultures and the lens through which they view society.

This path, of course, offers immediate absolution to guilty white liberals. By participating in "productive dialogues" (mostly involving other whites, mostly in academic settings) about racism, they shed the hideous skin of what Whittaker terms "practical racism."

Somewhat more specific in his concerns is University of California-Santa Cruz economics professor Robert Fairlie, who implies social injustice is at the root of lower rates of business ownership by blacks and Latinos versus whites and Asians. UCSC's online magazine reports today on a recent school-sponsored diversity series lecture Fairlie gave on the topic.

Economist Robert Fairlie knows that business ownership can be an escape route out of poverty, so he is bothered by an African American self-employment rate that's less than half the national average. Only 3.8 percent of blacks own their own business, compared with 6 percent of Latinos and 11.6 percent of whites and Asian Americans, according to the most recent data. Moreover, black-owned businesses generate dramatically lower annual sales than firms owned by whites and Asian Americans, and they are more likely to close....Fairlie has uncovered the primary factors that account for the differences, including striking inequality in levels of startup capital, as well as differences in work experience and educational achievement. "Wealth inequality leads to these low levels of capital, which is a huge factor in determining the outcome of a business," said Fairlie...

The article states Fairlie and a study co-author recommend several remedies, including:

...improving bank lending laws to further protect African Americans from discrimination, addressing wealth inequality, and creating apprenticeships that would help make up for the lack of work experience in family-owned businesses available to blacks.

Banks discriminate, rightly, based on collateral and net worth; and set-aside apprenticeships for low-income blacks could be some help, but are no substitute for family values stressing education, hard work, thrift and planning. As for "wealth inequality," Fairlie himself notes in the above-linked article that net worth is a huge factor, and that of blacks and Latinos is much lower than whites and Asians.

Where inherited wealth is not a major determinant, then net worth - as we may recall - is built through enterprise, earnings, savings and investment. I think we've heard enough from white liberals. The next diversity lecture on business success should feature the Korean owner of a mini-mart and dry cleaners in Van Nuys, whose two children are undergraduates majoring in chemistry and computer science, respectively, in California's state university system. For good measure, his wife could give a supplemental presentation on how the kids were raised. There'd be some more business insight, for all.

These days in the United States, opportunity is abundant, which is why so many keeping migrating to our nation, legally and illegally. Individuals get just about what's coming to them in return for their investment of thought, planning, time and energy in their education, career, health and personal relationships.

The ongoing "disparities" and "disproportionality" scams perpetrated by the not-so-cloaked Marxists of academe, and their eager publicists in media, serve to paper over the paramount role of free actors in determining their own economic and social outcomes in the United States today.

TECHNORATI TAGS: DISPARITIES, RACISM, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY, TEMPE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ, WEALTH, BUSINESS OWNERSHIP, WHITE GUILT

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at April 24, 2006 10:38 AM