Obama wants to grant preferential treatment based on race: (FAQ: The difference between Racial Preferences and Affirmative Action?)

• Obama and racial preferences

1. Obama's divisive view of race consistent with liberal record
2. Liberal Stealth Candidate; affirmative action, abortion,
3. Obama wants to grant preferential treatment based on race: (FAQ:The difference between Racial Preferences and Affirmative Action?)
4. Obama's strong support for racial preferences may well cost him key battleground states
5. Angry Michelle is weighed down by boulder-size chips on each of her shoulders; admits scores too low for Princeton, Harvard
6. Obama concedes he “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action” ; what a surprise
7. Michelle says "If my future was determined by SAT's I wouldn't be here"
8. Obama accused of raising millions & putting most into White community; power struggle within BHO's special interest coalition
9. Canadian worries US Whites are ignoring red flags about Obama's socialism & shady associates to relieve feeling of guilt over slavery

1. 
   

1 Obama supports Racial Preferences.
This issue is likely to come to a head in the next few days. Why? The State of Arizona has an initiative on the ballot to eliminate Racial Preferences.

The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

2 Obama v McCain

McCain supports the initiative to ban Racial Preferences. The State of California passed a similar initiative a few years ago

Obama's response, on Sunday, July 27 2008

Obama said he was disappointed that McCain has endorsed a ballot initiative in Arizona that would ban preferences based on race and gender in that state

3 Whats the difference between Racial Preferences and Affirmative Action?

Affirmative Action and racial preferences are not the same
The following extract comes from University of Maryland School of Public Affairs's comprehensive paper on this complex topic

3a) Nonpreferential Affirmative Action

The basic idea of affirmative action was simple: motivate firms to carry on continuous, conscious appraisal of their procedures and rules to detect and eliminate those that excluded minorities and women without appropriate justification. The mechanism to embody this idea was the ubiquitous affirmative action plan, imposed on all federal contractors by Executive Order 11246. Make a plan, the government told firms in 1972, that includes these steps:

Step 1. Take action to make sure your selection pool is expansive.

Step 2. Given the racial composition of the expanded pool, predict the results over time of your selecting nondiscriminatorily from it. Your prediction constitutes your affirmative action "goals." They give you a benchmark against which to compare actual outcomes.

Step 3. At intervals, compare your actual selections with your "goals." If you are not meeting your goals, then reexamine your rules and procedures to see what is causing the problem.

If your selections match your "goals," the government went on to say, we are not going to look your way. But if your selections fall short of your "goals," we will come to inquire why. If the inquiry shows that your firm has made "good faith" efforts to carry out your affirmative action plan, you will suffer no penalties. After all, your requirement under the law is not to select the predicted number of blacks, but to select without discrimination. Since the predictions are often based on crude assumptions, there can be many legitimate reasons why the actual outcome wasn't the predicted outcome. But still, we will ask some hard questions: you had better have some very good answers.

This was nonpreferential affirmative action. Nonpreferential affirmative action was a color-conscious, self-monitoring device to aid firms and institutions in achieving nondiscrimination. And it was also a device enforcers of the law could use to measure compliance.

3b) Racial preferences

By contrast Racial Preferences involves deliberately favoring one race over another in for example recruitment hiring. In the seventies, in some cases this was blessed by the Courts to overcome deeply ingrained racism. California has passed an initiative banning any form of racial or gender preferences.

4) Why Senator Obama supports the continuation of Racial Preferences.

Obama supports Racial Preferences
Friday June 13, 2008

posted by Michele McGinty
Source

How is that post-racial? If Obama believes that race doesn't matter, then why make it a factor when an applicant applies for a job or college? Ward Connerly looks at Obama's position on preferences and is disappointed because he was hoping that he really was post-racial:

Mr. Wickham, who had interviewed the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, wrote that "Obama believes America can keep its promise to women and blacks without dashing the hopes of working-class whites. He doesn't think opportunity guarantees made to one group must come at the expense of another." Then he went on to quote Obama campaign spokeswoman Candice Toliver, who said that "Senator Obama believes in a country in which opportunity is available to all Americans, regardless of race, gender or economic status. That's why he opposes these ballot initiatives, which would roll back opportunity for millions of Americans and cripple efforts to break down historic barriers to the progress of qualified women and minorities."

[...]

The rationale for using race preferences to "eliminate historic barriers," upon which Mr. Obama relies as his primary justification, has been rejected consistently by the Supreme Court since the Bakke decision in 1978. Only the pursuit of "diversity" by higher education meets the strict constitutional test for race preferences. As a lawyer, I am sure that Mr. Obama must know this.

He must also know that blacks and whites are not the only racial groups in America. Every year there are more than 48,000 applicants for one of the 4,500 seats at the University of California campus at Berkeley. Before the passage of the initiative in that state to outlaw race preferences, thousands of Asian students were denied admission so that a greater number of "underrepresented minorities" could be admitted.

Similar circumstances exist across the nation, because college admissions, public jobs and government contracts are the ultimate "zero-sum" game, and race and gender should not be the determining factors in picking winners and losers. It simply stretches credulity to argue that an "opportunity" given to one, on the basis of race, is not discrimination against another for the same reason.

The issue that troubled many Americans about the widely publicized sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright was his view that America is an "institutionally racist" society. This view lies at the heart of the defense advocates of race preferences make for "affirmative action." It is also at the core of Black Liberation Theology.

By supporting race preferences, Mr. Obama is unmistakably attaching himself to despicable ideas like Rev. Wright's. And, if he believes in those precepts, how does he reconcile his impressive political success and that of Mrs. Clinton with this perspective? Thirty-six million Americans didn't vote for the two of them because the majority of the American people are racist and sexist.

Post-racial means we get beyond the issue of race and unite together. Connerly's right, Obama's candidacy shows that we are not a racist nation and we need to stop institutionalizing racism in our colleges and government jobs by denying an application because of race.

5 Obama and his media friends will try to confuse the public on this issue

Powerline Blog warns

The MSM can be counted on (1) to ignore the issue as much as possible (2) when discussing it, to obfuscate by casting the matter in terms of "Affirmative Action," not Racial Preferences and (3) if all else fails, to accuse McCain of playing the race card. Thus, McCain must focus on the wording of the specific proposition that Obama won't support: "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting."

.