Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (10 page)

Indeed, the weakness of the affirmative action case is exposed by the fact that its most intensely contested battlefields are elite universities. Page defends the (now eliminated) affirmative action programs at the University of California with the argument that enrollment levels of blacks would drop if affirmative action were ended. Would Page have us believe that the admissions departments of liberal universities are infested with angry white males conspiring to keep black enrollment down? Or with built-in "institutional biases" excluding blacks? In fact, since 1957, when the California regents adopted the "Master Plan," every single California resident
regardless of race
who graduated high school was guaranteed a place in the higher education system. On the other hand, matriculation from various points in the system, starting with community and junior colleges to positions at Berkeley and UCLA (its academic pinnacles) were based-until the advent of racial preferences — on grade point averages and meritocratic tests. What is wrong with that?

In defending racial preference policies that trump grades and test scores, Page invokes the "geographical diversity" criteria of the Ivy League schools in the 1950s: "Americans have always had a wide array of exotic standards for determining 'merit.'" Page doesn't seem to realize that "geographical diversity" criteria were introduced to
restrict
the enrollment of Jews. Page even quotes, without irony, a "friend" who said he was convinced he got into Dartmouth because he was the only applicant from Albuquerque: 'Tm sure some talented Jewish kid from New York was kept out so I could get in."

What has the "civil rights" argument come to, when it cites discriminatory policies of the past to justify discriminatory policies in the present?

When I went to Columbia in the 1950s, Jewish enrollment
with
the geographical diversity program in place, was 48 percent. That was the Jewish quota. We Jews were well aware of the anti-Semitic subtext of the geographical diversity program, and talked about it openly. But we did not launch protests or seek government intervention to abolish the program. The opportunity that
was
offered to us was an improvement over the exclusionary policies of the pre-

Dealing with Racism 77 war years. Once the principle of Jewish admission was accepted by the Ivy League, even residual (or "institutional") anti-Semitism could not keep Jews, who constituted only 3 percent of the population, from flooding the enrollment lists. It was the academic performance of Jewish students in an environment that emphasized merit that ensured their place. Supporters of affirmative action are in a state of massive denial. The problem of black enrollment at elite universities is not the result of racist admissions policies. It is the result of poor black academic performance.

This denial has costly social consequences that Page and others like him are willing to overlook. The emphasis on nonexistent racism diverts attention from the real problem, which is the poor preparation of black students and the poor performance of public schools. Rigging academic standards, on the other hand, has resulted in dropout rates for affirmative action students that are dramatically higher than for students who do not have the standards rigged for them. These dropout rates are more than 50 percent, and sometimes as high as 70 percent. As Thomas Sowell points out, these are unnecessary failures produced by liberals who would rather feel good about recruiting unqualified black students to make their elite institutions "diverse," than sending them to middle-range (but perfectly adequate) schools, where they would have a chance of success. Looked at another way, affirmative action supporters would rather recruit minority achievers to institutions where they will feel inferior, than place them in settings where they are appropriately skilled and where they would have a chance to feel academically adequate and possibly superior.

Page opens his chapter on affirmative action with an anecdote about being passed over in his first attempt to get hired as a journalist. As a high school graduate in 1965, he applied for a summer newsroom job but was beaten out by a girl less qualified and younger, but white. Then came the Watts riot, after which Page was hired. Page's comment: "You might say that my first job in newspapers came as a result of an affirmative action program called 'urban riots.'"

This is a familiar cliche of the left. White people only respond fairly to blacks when they have a gun to their heads. Malcolm X scorned the civil rights movement, referring in a 1963 speech to "the recent ridiculous march on Washington" because he believed, wrongly, that Americans would never give blacks their rights. But in retrospect many black intellectuals see him as a force behind the civil rights movement, because his violent racism scared whites, who reasoned: "Better King than a 'crazy nigger' like Malcolm X." What is striking about Page's reflection on his experience is that he does not pause to consider that this was his first job application out of high school, or that it was only for a summer position. Perhaps the men doing the hiring, for example, merely wanted to have a girl around the office, an unprofessional but not implausible reason for the choice.

More importantly, Page gives no thought to the possibility that he would have been hired eventually, even without the riots. Recognizing that changes like integration take time is not the same as saying that they require force. Was it the threat of riots or of affirmative action laws that eventually made black athletes dominant in sports leagues whose owners (Marge Schott comes to mind) hardly rank among the socially enlightened? Or was it affirmative action that allowed black cultural artists to achieve an equally dominant position in the popular music industry? How did Oprah Winfrey, a black sharecropper's daughter from Mississippi, become mother confessor to millions of lower middle-class white women (and worth 550 million dollars in the process)
without
affirmative action? Page has no answer.

The principal reason conservatives oppose affirmative action is one that is given almost no attention by progressives eager to attribute base motives to their opponents: racial preference is an offense in
principle
to the core value of American pluralism-the neutrality of American government towards all its diverse communities. Affirmative action is a threat to inclusiveness, since privilege (and therefore exclusion) is established under affirmative action policies, not by achievement, but by law. The principle of affirmative action, which is inevitably a principle of racial preference, is a threat to what Felix Frankfurter identified as "the ultimate foundation of a free society . . . the binding tie of cohesive sentiment." Affirmative action based on principles like geographical diversity constitutes no such threat, but policies based on race do.

Another reason for opposing affirmative action is its social corrosiveness. Every time a black leader refers to the paucity of blacks on academic faculties or in the upper reaches of corporate life, the automatic presumption is that white racism is responsible. The legal concept of "racial disparity" embodies the same assumption. The idea that government must
compel
its white citizens to be fair to its minority citizens presumes that white America is so racist it cannot be fair on its own account. But this involves supporters of affirmative action in illogic so insurmountable it cannot be addressed. If America's white majority needs to be forced by government to be fair, how is it possible that this same majority (led by a Republican president, Richard Nixon) created affirmative action policies in the first place?

There is no answer to the question because affirmative action was not created in response to white racism. It was created because of the widespread failure of blacks to take advantage of the opportunities that became available when legal segregation was ended. Since liberals believe that social institutions are responsible for what happens to people, this failure had to be the result of
institutional
rather than individual factors.

The corrosive effect of thirty years of affirmative action policies has been to convince black Americans that whites are indeed so racist that some external force must compel their respect and, secondarily, that blacks need affirmative action in order to gain equal access to the American dream. The further consequence of this misguided "remedy" has been to foster a racial paranoia in the black community that is so pervasive that even the thinking of blacks who have benefited from America's racial generosity has been significantly affected. How significantly is revealed in the almost casual way the paranoia surfaces: "'Black is beautiful' was the slogan which made many white people nervous, as any show of positive black racial identification tends to do."
Does it really?
The television mini-series
Roots
, after all, was one of the most significant milestones of positive black racial identification-an epic of black nobility and white evil purporting to represent the entire history of American race relations. It was not only produced and made possible by whites, but also voluntarily watched by more whites than any previous television show in history. Conversely, most of the negative stereotypes of blacks in today's popular culture are the work of black stars and directors like Martin Lawrence and Spike Lee, not to mention the infamous gangsta rap industry, which celebrates black sociopathic behavior, and whose most profitable labels are owned and operated by blacks.

In gauging the size of the chip ominously perched on black America's shoulders, few measures can be so choice or familiar as the following passage:

Black people may read dictionaries, but many see them as instruments of white supremacy. They have a point. Dictionaries define what is acceptable and unacceptable in the language we use as defined by the ruling class (
sic
). . . . The dictionary's pleasant synonyms for 'white' ('free from moral impurity . . .
innocent . . . favorable, fortunate
. . .') and unpleasant synonyms for 'black' ('. . . thoroughly sinister or evil . . .
wicked
. . . condemnation or discredit . . . the devil . . . sad, gloomy or calamitous . . .
sullen
. . .') are alone enough to remind black people of their subordinate position to white people in Anglo-European traditions and fact.

This is the standard racial canard repeated by Camille Cosby and others. But white Americans (dictionary-makers included) had nothing to do with identifying Clarence Page and his racial kindred as "black" in modern times. When Page and I were young, blacks were called "Negroes" or "coloreds." The words "Negro" and "colored" have no such negative connotations, moral or otherwise. It was Malcolm X who first embraced "black" as a term of pride, interpreting "Negro" as a term to connote a pliant black or "Uncle Tom." After Malcolm X's death, Stokely Carmichael and the new radical civil rights leadership aggressively promoted the new label with the slogan "Black Power" and demanded that the identification "black" be employed as a sign of respect. The white liberal cultural establishment — including the nation's principal press institutions, the universities and other legitimating agencies-swiftly obliged. It was then acquiesced in by the majority of white Americans who, for more than a generation now, have ardently wished that black America would finally get what it wanted from them and be satisfied.

When the layers are peeled from Page's discussion of "racism," what we are left with is a disappointing marxist residue: "Modern capitalist society puts racism to work, wittingly or unwittingly. It populates a surplus labor pool of last-hired, first-fired workers whose easy employability when economic times are good and easy disposability when times go bad helps keep all workers' wages low and owners' profits high. . . . Racism is one of many non-class issues, such as busing, affirmative action, or flag burning, that diverts attention from pocketbook issues that might unite voters across racial lines."

This is simple-minded, sorry stuff, but not unusual for liberals, black and white. The problem with the black underclass is not that it is underemployed, but that it is unemployable. Blacks who have fallen through society's cracks do not even get to the point of being "last-hired." The flood of illegal Hispanic immigrants into areas like south central Los Angeles, where they are rapidly displacing the indigenous blacks, shows that the jobs exist but that the resident black population either will not or cannot take advantage of these opportunities. The fact that one in three young black males in America is a convicted felon-a reality that Page does not begin to confront-does not help their employability. Once again, the specter of racism provides a convenient shield for the massive denial of problems that actually have very little to do with race.

In fact, the racial conflict in America is not driven by economics or even white prejudice. Rather, it is driven by radical political agendas-by Clarence Page's friends on the left like Manning Marable, Ronald Takaki, and Michael Lerner (names lifted from the back jacket blurbs for his book)-who keep up the drum beat of complaint about American racism and "oppression."

The very phrase "institutional racism" is, of course, of leftist provenance. Like "ruling class" it refers to an abstraction. It is a totalitarian term. It does not specify particular, accountable individuals. You are a class enemy (or, in this case, a race enemy) not because of anything you actually think or do, but "objectively" — because you are situated in a structure of power that provides you (white skin) privilege. Page is astute enough to see that if racism is defined as an
institutional
flaw, "it does not matter what you think as an individual" and therefore such a definition offers "instant innocence" to the oppressor. But he is not candid enough to acknowledge that the definition imputes instant culpability as well. While absolving individual whites of guilt, it makes all whites guilty.

The belief in the power of "institutional racism" allows black civil rights leaders to denounce America as a "racist" society, when it is the only society on earth-black, white, brown, or yellow whose defining public creed is
anti
-racist, a society to which black refugees from black-ruled nations regularly flee in search of refuge and freedom. The phantom of institutional racism allows black leaders to avoid the encounter with real problems
within
their own communities, which are neither caused by whites nor soluble by the actions of whites, but which cry out for attention.