On Wednesday, staying true to her adored Left, Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC had the gall to say that she didn’t “know if there are cases, even” of white students disadvantaged by affirmative action.
Speaking with her two leftist guests, the Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart, and Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, about the Justice Department’s admission that it will investigate race-based discrimination in college and university admissions, Mitchell said:
And Janai, let’s talk about this, because obviously the counter-point is that white students, claim, perhaps, I don’t know there are cases, even, that this seems to be the Justice Department looking for a problem, and to put resources there, so the claim would be that whites students are being disadvantaged by other students, minority students, getting entrance to the available spots. What about the fact that this takes money away from the pursuit of more pressing civil rights cases that are out there?
Nelson then followed with some idiocy of her own:
That’s a great question. First, just the premise that this is harming white students is wrong on at least two key fronts. There are more white students in college now than ever before. So to suggest that white students are somehow not getting the advantage of higher education is absolutely false.
As Mark Finkelstein of Legal Insurrection points out:
Nelson’s argument was a classic of the straw man genre. No one is claiming that racial discrimination against whites and Asians prevents them from getting some sort of college education. There are plenty of institutions around that will take pretty much anyone with a pulse.
So Nelson’s claim that there are “more white students in college now than ever before” proves nothing. The problem is that white and Asian students are being denied admission to the most selective, prestigious schools in favor of applicants with inferior—at times vastly inferior—academic credentials based on racial discrimination.
Finkelstein cited a study of admissions at top US universities:
Blacks received an admissions boost worth 310 SAT points compared with whites. Hispanics received a 130 point preference, and Asians received a 140 point penalty compared with whites. Taken together, on average, an Asian American student must score a whopping 450 points higher on the combined math and verbal sections of the SAT to have the same chance of being admitted as an African American applicant.
But here’s the real kicker: as WRAL reports, the DOJ initiative was prompted by complaints by Asian-Americans, not whites:
Spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores says a job posting within the Civil Rights Division was related to a complaint filed by a coalition of 64 Asian-American associations in May 2015. They sued Harvard University, saying that school and other Ivy League institutions are using racial quotas to admit students other than high-scoring Asians.
Video below: