The Trojan horse of "diversity": scamsters win, racialized people lose

Not so long ago, many law schools would not admit racialized people at all. Texas Southern University was hastily founded in 1946 as the "Texas State University for Negroes" so as to create a pretense of a "separate but equal" university for Black people alongside the white University of Texas (see Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950)). The Supreme Court unanimously saw through the ruse and refused to countenance it. (Today, incidentally, Texas Southern still has not strayed far from its Jim Crow roots: most of the class is Black, only 10% is white, the median LSAT score for last year's entering class was an appalling 144, and for the past two years the law school has been subject to the ABA's censure and directives for remedial action.)

Long after formal segregation was abolished, many law schools showed little interest in racialized people. But the spate of toilet law schools over the past decade has changed that. Nowadays scamsters from toilet law schools today portray themselves as champions of "diversity". They would have us believe that the toilet schools' abysmal, if not non-existent, standards of admission afford racialized people an opportunity to enter the legal profession. That so-called opportunity, however, comes with a poor chance of passing the bar exams, dreadfully low rates of employment, and a whopping price tag.

A Black lawyer with a JD from Michigan lifts the lid on the scamsters' invocation of "diversity" as grounds for lowering the passing score on California's bar exam. As he says, any sincere effort to increase the diversity of the legal profession must start with analysis of the causes of the problem and the best ways to address it, not with scam-fostering proposals such as "Let's lower the passing score!".

It's true that the bar is insufficiently diverse in terms of race and certain other criteria. But that does not imply that the passing score is too high. The whiteness of the bar stems from systemic inequalities and racial injustice—the same factors that have led to the monstrous racialization of the prisons and many other manifestations of racial oppression. Address it by correcting those inequalities, not by persuading the authorities in California to license more toileteers of whatsoever race.

Nor is it appropriate to lower the passing score on the test just because few people taking the test are passing. The score should be set at an appropriate level, and anyone arguing to lower it bears the burden of giving sound reasons. The scamsters seem to "argue" that the various Black people upon whom they have been preying should be admitted to the bar just because they are there. But that's no argument at all. The very purpose of the bar exam is to protect the public by ensuring a minimum level of competence. There may be nothing wrong with the passing score even if every single candidate fails.

Nor should California be played against other states. That's the child's tactic of going to Daddy in hope of a "yes" after Mommy said "no". Why should it matter that West Virginia or Missouri has a lower score? Perhaps California is the only state with a proper standard. Or perhaps even California's score is too low.

White scamsters are cynically perverting "diversity" for their own profit (figurative and literal). Racialized people, don't fall for their ploy.