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The inherent viciousness of race preferences
In a recent appearance on Meet the Press, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice agreed with President Bush’s criticism of the racial point system used in student admissions at the University of Michigan (though she made it clear that, like the president, she supports less direct preferential methods as a means of achieving racial proportionality in student bodies). The next guest on the show was Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who, as was to be expected, defended Michigan’s racial point system. But he didn’t stop there. “[I]t is exactly programs like the Michigan program,” he remarked, “that helped a star like Condi Rice get to where she is today.” As Ruben Navarrette commented at Front Page Magazine:
Stop the tape! Did Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 and now the presumed front-runner for the 2004 Democratic nomination actually say that one of the highest-ranking women in the U.S. government— and a black woman at that—has gotten where she is because of affirmative action? This from the man who wants to lead the party that bills itself as enlightened and sensitive on racial matters.Lieberman’s put-down of Condoleeza Rice as an affirmative action hire raises an interesting question. What would Lieberman have said if the reporter had proceeded to ask him whether some prominent black appointee in a recent Democratic administration—say, Mike Espy or Carol Moseley Braun or Mary Frances Berry—was also a product of affirmative action? No doubt Lieberman, after being brought up short for a moment, would have done everything in his power to avoid suggesting that a black Democrat had substantially benefited from affirmative action. This is obviously because averring that someone got where he is through racial preferences is an insult. The bottom line is that Lieberman is willing to call a manifestly competent and upright Republican appointee like Rice an affirmative action hire, but not a manifestly incompetent and corrupt Democrat like Braun. All of this points to a fatal defect in the very idea of AA. The American liberal order has created a vast class of people who got where they are—or are presumed to have gotten where they are, even though it has not been true in many individual cases—through racial preferences. Now, on one hand, liberals insist on the necessity, efficacy, and justice of advancing an entire class of people by these means. But, on the other hand, as a result of that advancement, there is now in existence this vast class of people about whom something shameful, or at least something embarrassing or delegitimizing, can be said. The twist is that it is only said against them if they are Republicans or conservatives, or are in some way criticizing Democratic orthodoxy. The racial preference system thus hands to the liberal elites who created it a weapon they can use against its presumed beneficiaries if they stray too far from liberal orthodoxy. Such tyrannical doublethink is the inevitable result of erecting—and then of defending as an indispensable prop of racial justice—a system so transparently immoral that its own champions must deny its existence whenever the concrete reality of it is pointed out to them.
There is only one way of ridding ourselves of this inherently vicious system, and that is by eliminating all racial preferences, undisguised or disguised, direct or indirect. But for such a radical reform to become a serious political objective of the conservative movement and not just another rhetorical indulgence, conservatives must be honest with themselves about race, which so far they have not been. If they are to hold firm in rejecting racial preferences, they must be willing to accept the inevitable practical consequence of that position, the very thought of which is literally unbearable to many liberal and conservative elites today: namely that there will be far fewer blacks and Hispanics, at least for the time being, on elite campuses and in prominent academic positions. Comments
I think Lieberman is right. If I’m not mistaken Rice admitted she would not be where she was if it were not for affirmative action. She I think was referring to getting to where she got at Stanford, but I think its fair to say there is no way that she would have becme National Security Advisor and Powell would not have become Secretary of State if it were not for republican self-imposed affirmative action. Mr. Epstein may be partially right. While I don’t know what Rice herself has said about her history, it’s a reasonable assumption that she got some boost in her career because of race. However, she did not have 20 points added to her college admissions as they have at Michigan—and that’s what Lieberman said about her. So, on one hand, blacks and liberals boast of how good AA is, and on the other hand, they use it to silence any black who doesn’t follow the liberal line 100 percent, placing him under the charge of being a person who got where he is because of racial advantage that he now wants to take from others. I am not defending Rice, since she, along with Bush, is also pushing various types of race preferences. But I am pointing to the intrinsic nastiness of such a system. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on January 28, 2003 5:42 PMMessrs. Epstein and Auster are both right. Perhaps Rice would have been admitted to the schools she attended even if she were (stretching the imagination) a white man. Still, to pretend that she became the provost of Stanford, a university committed to discrimination against white Americans - especially men, and Bush the Son’s national security adviser without the two heavy thumbs on the scale of her race and sex is fanciful. Americans committed to preserving what scraps remain of their old country - one founded, and originally built, by white Britons - need to recognize their enemies. What Rice represents - upwardly mobile “preferred minorities” fine-tuning a system that prefers them on a racial basis over the (diminishing) majority of Americans - is one enemy. The greater, and for the present worse, enemy is what George W. Bush represents: the Left/liberal white whose personal circumstances have insulated him from the consequences of affirmative action, “multiculturalism” and mass immigration. For political advantage and media approval such people will always sell out their own, heedless of consequences. HRS Posted by: Howard Sutherland on January 29, 2003 9:31 PM“Americans committed to preserving what scraps remain of their old country … .” — Howard Sutherland What our enemies need to understand is that some of us — me, for instance — are in this for the long haul. We are not going away. We are not going to surrender. They’ve reduced all that we love, all that we recognize, all that we ever held dear, to mere “scraps that remain of [our] old country”? That’s all right — we’ll wait. And we’ll take those scraps and we’ll repair them and raise them up again into what once was — nay, into something even better than what once was. The left cannot win this war in the end, for the simple reason that never since the world began has degenerateness prevailed finally over truth. Posted by: Unadorned on January 31, 2003 10:37 PM |