As I was reading Miss Iannone’s article, I thought, what if Michael Greve had been an activist, not against affirmative action, but against homosexual marriage? In that case, her article might have begun something like this:

PERSPECTIVES
Getting Beyond Homosexual Marriage
Carol Iannone

“Gay Marriage Is on the Rocks” read the title of an op-ed piece in the New York Times last week. Any hopes this headline might have raised were soon dashed, however. The author’s point was not to denounce the attempt to include homosexual couples in the age-old institution of marriage, but to assure the public that homosexual marriage is no longer needed in order to obtain full sexual-orientation equality, since the institution of marriage is itself unnecessary for sexual and emotional fulfillment. Instead, all people who happen to be living together would be declared to be “partners” …

The slimy, dishonest bag of procedural tricks described above is exactly what the leftists who run California’s universities have implemented following the passage of Ward Connerly’s Prop. 209. “Diversity” and multiculturalism are basically religious dogmas. The ruling elite are determined to enforce these dogmas - the majority of voters be damned.

It is not news to any regulars here, but after 35 years of it, I still do not quite get it. Affirmative action is racial prejudice in action, pure and simple. It is, overwhelmingly, discrimination against white Americans. What I still find hard to understand is that this regime was dreamed up and, even today, is mostly administered by white Americans against the interests of their own.

There are two special cases I can think of that partly explain why some white Americans put up with it or encourage it, but both might only explain the motivations of a few.

The first is what we can now call the Bush syndrome. People like Bush are happy to endorse race prejudice against whites (in his case suitably obfuscated to con his voter base) because legacy preferences and plenty of donation potential ensure that their children will never be shoved aside for a less qualified preferred minority applicant. The second is more controversial, but having been through university admission procedures a few times I believe there is something to it. The older American universities, especially the ivy league schools, were venerable WASP foundations. There was a time when they limited the numbers of Jewish students they would allow to matriculate. Today (and for the last 30 years or so), a critical mass of IL admissions officers are themselves Jewish - and it’s payback time.

Perhaps I am wrong about the latter (I know I am right about the first), but I do believe malice animates much of affirmative action. What I cannot understand is how intelligent white Americans can possibly support such a system. Perhaps some of the postdoctoral students of liberalism here at VFR can enlighten me. HRS

There is a need to create a new school, which I want to call the Institute for the Study of Liberalism. For the present, though, the Institute is a university without walls. :-)

On the white surrender, there have been many explanations, and they keep getting better and better, but it still remains, at bottom, a mystery.

I was just thinking today how easy it is for people to blame the Jews, or the Jewish neoconservatives, or whatever, for the white collapse. But what about, say, the evangelical Protestants? They’re supposed to be the most conservative group in America, and there’s a many times more of them than Jews, and they are absolutely race-unconscious or else actively liberal in their race views, on immigration and so on. They’re “right-wing” on some issues, yes, but on immigration, on race preferences, they’re barely aware of these things. Yet they, becuase of their numbers and political clout, are the one group that could turn these issues around. Now, is anyone seriously going to blame the racial liberalism of conservative Christians on the Jews—other than Buchanan and Duke? So the idea of making the Jews the key factor in the undoing of the white West is tempting to some people, but wrong in multiple ways.

This racial surrender is a conception, a sense of the world, that has taken over the souls and minds of whites. That is ultimately what’s killing us. We’d like to be able to turn it around, but considering the size of the phenomenon we’re dealing with, sometimes that just seems impossible.

I don’t think this disease is limited to white gentiles. Several Jewish writers have commented on the phenomenom of the “self-hating Jew.” There even seems to be a small group of left/liberal activists operating within Israel itself who advocate a Palestinian right of return, for example. Then there is the amazing Noam Chomsky, who would likely cheer if the Muslims wiped Israel off the map. I haven’t noticed this particular disease, or more accurately, symptom of liberalism, present among Blacks, “Hispanics” and Asians.

Paul Craig Roberts had a very informative article on VDARE a couple of months ago that presented the detailed history of AA - which was the brainchild of a federal bureaucrat who now teaches law at Rutgers. The first case of reverse discrimination went before the Supreme Court in the early to mid-70s (long before Bakke). The court essentially ruled that this evil bureaucrat’s rule was the law of the land - completely twisting the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Hubert Humphrey didn’t eat any paper after the ruling, as I recall.

If my previous post gave the impression that I am blaming Jews for affirmative action, I misled. The reason affirmative action survives and thrives is the fecklessness of white Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom are not Jewish. My own kind, old Americans of British colonial origin, yield to no one in utter fecklessness (I offer again the fate of their foundations, the ivy league schools and other older colleges, as evidence).

Nevertheless, as activist liberals, a remarkable number of Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of foisting affirmative action on us (among them Alfred Blumrosen of EEOC and Rutgers, to whom Carl refers). Whether their motivation is liberal “compassion” for the underdog or a semi-conscious desire to fracture the majority society, as Kevin MacDonald might aver, doesn’t really matter. There is a powerful Jewish influence in these matters which almost always works to the detriment of the American majority.

All that said, I want to be clear in saying that American Jews do not push this agenda all alone, by any means. John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon do not strike me as Jewish names; neither do Sandra Day O’Connor and George W. Bush - to name only a few white gentile preference-mongers. If we are going to engage in collective guilt-mongering about affirmative action, let’s spread the blame fairly: all white Americans who acquiesce in their own dispossession are blameworthy. (En passant: as Michelle Malkin noted recently in a column about the idiotic Oriental Michigan co-eds seen on page one of the Washington Post cheering the Grutter decision, there are high-IQ Asians in America now who are every bit as stupid as the natives!)

My Jewish admissions officer speculation derives largely from my own and others’ experiences of IL admissions officers in the mid-1970s, who made very obvious their contempt for the sort of people who had founded and used to attend the colleges whose gates they were guarding. Nothing has happened since to make me think my impressions were mistaken. I cited it because a desire among some Jews to stick it to WASPs who they believe had snubbed their people is an understandable, if not admirable, reason to go along with the affirmative action charade. My point, poorly made, is that such resentment is one of a very few instances where there is a quasi-rational explanation for white American support of affirmative action.

Please forgive this clarification’s length. This is a delicate topic! HRS

I remember back in the late 1960’s when the term “limousine liberal” was coined, unfortunately not used now. It described wealthy liberals who clamored for racial integration, often through all-out busing, while sending their own children to nearly all-white expensive private schools. Well, the limousine liberals have won. They rule the country. Now these same people give “affirmative action” to people who cross the border today.

The basic fact is that for nearly 40 years, the liberal ruling class forces changes down the throats of Middle Americans, while exempting themselves from them. I saw a news report a few months ago, than one of Mr. Bush’s children is enrolled at Yale. Do you think Mr. Bush would take her out and give the spot to a “minority?” Does the Secret Service allow illegal aliens to cross Mr. Bush’s ranch in Texas?

Yes, it is mainly white Americans who designed and administer this whole process. But, they can take these “moral” positions at no cost to themselves or their families.

It has to be remembered that if you adopt the principle that we should be creatures of our own individual will and reason then it will seem offensive that one group of people should be either advantaged or disadvantaged by an inherited quality like race.

In other words, some form of removing the disadvantage becomes, quite logically, the right thing to do. Left liberals seem happy to do it openly with quotas, whereas right liberals seems to want to preserve a veneer of procedural equality and usually reject formal quotas. (You see the same distinction occurring when formal quotas are suggested to increase the numbers of women in parliament or on boards of companies).

What’s sad is that it is not only “self-hating” white gentiles who are led along this path, but even those who consider themselves conservatives and who have a personal sense of connection to their own tradition. Because they hold the underlying liberal principle, they are still led to support liberal measures as the right thing to do.

What’s needed is to make a section of the white political class see the destructive effects of the underlying principle they hold.

Having been named , by carl I think, as one of the Jews responsible for the sad state of employment opportunity in the united states, I would like to make two points. First, the white majority still rules firmly. evidence, the inheritance tax laws passed by bush for the benefit of who? Secondly, most if not all of my positions in the 1960’s have been confirmed by either the Supreme Court (GRIGGS) lower courts, or the Congress of the United States. none of these insitutions has been under my sway during the past 40 years, nor have my co-religionists dominated them. I think that what has happened is that the American people have come to understand that there have been historic injustices to minority groups for which they are not personally responsible, but for which they do sense a responsibility to change because to continue them would be unfair by our present day standards, even if they did not seem unfair by the standards of earlier years. This is not personal guilt, but is the acceptance of a responsibility to continue to improve our system of life as we continue to increase our understand of how we should relate to each other. The roots of that understanding lie within all of us, and are recognized by most, including the majority. Personally it is a joy to live in that kind of society, and perhaps to have played a small role in its evolution.

Mr. Blumrosen writes,

“Having been named, by Carl I think, as one of the Jews responsible for the sad state of employment opportunity in the United States, I would like to make two points.”

But I can’t tell who it is you are saying that you are, sir. Do you mean you are “the [former] federal bureaucrat who [now] teaches law at Rutgers” who came up the the “brainchild” known as affirmative action, according to Carl’s post of July 18, 30:30 AM? (By the way, correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think Carl says or implies that that bureaucrat was Jewish.)

In any event, Mr. Blumrosen (or Professor Blumrosen), can you see how some might feel that the way to end past injustices is to end them without instituting new ones that go in the opposite direction?

I would like to ask Mr. Blumrosen:

Does he feel that it is a “joy” to live in a society in which the principle of racial proportionality in college admissions—i.e. mandated equality of results according to race—has been made a part of the U.S. Constitution?

Does he feel it is a “joy” to live in a society in which blacks and Hispanics whose academic abilities are vastly lower than whites and Asians are admitted to elite institutions solely because they are black or Hispanic, and where whites who are far more qualified than the admitted blacks and Hispanics are rejected solely because of their race?

Could Mr. Blumrosen explain why it is “fair” that people who, except for their race, would not admitted to elite institutitons, are admitted to them, because of their race?

Could he explain the source of these “present day standards” which tell us that the only “fair” organization of society is a system of racial socialism?

Could he tell us where he gets the idea that “the American people” support this racial socialism, when in fact, the great majority of the American people oppose it and it has been imposed on the society through judicial fiat because no legislative majority has EVER passed a statute permitting racial proportionality as the standard in school admissions and employment. (The only exception is the 1991 Civil Rights Act, which restricted employers from giving employment tests that resulted in a racially disparate impact.)

A couple of other points in response to Prof. Blumrosen’s comment:

1) The inheritance tax bill was said by an enormous number of commentators to benefit the middle class (and all levels of the middle class, not just the “upper”) as much as the rich, and furthermore, even if it did benefit just rich whites, who says rich whites have any scruples whatsoever about allying themselves with the lower-class non-whites against the predominantly white middle classes? On the contrary, that appears to be exactly what they’ve been up to these thirty-five or forty years or so;

2) Where you say, “the white majority still rules firmly,” did someone say they shouldn’t? Correct me if I’m wrong, but you sound as if you feel that situation needs to be remedied by taking power away from whites and transferring it to non-whites, in order to equalize things. I don’t want to live in a country in which a non-white majority rules or has equal power to whites, and the white majority in this country doesn’t either but the feds are trying to ram such a situation down its throat. Do you agree with Bill & Hillary Clinton that it is desirable that this country pass from majority white to majority non-white rule, a situation in which whites would be a minority? I rather suspect, sir, that in such a situation you would suddenly become extremely nostalgic for “the good old days.”

Excuse me: I just went back over the entire thread and saw that a comment (Mr. Sutherland’s of 10:55 AM, not Carl’s) does mention Prof. Blumrosen.

Racial quotas are not an American invention, but have been used most commonly as part of a process of decolonization of expatriates. They have tended to be followed within a few years by the partition of the polity which institutes them, and these partitions are not always peaceful. The anti-culture of the aggression in the field of ideas, or the government schools, is the place where , for decades now, racial hatred and calls for war against the caucasians have been the keynote. The officials want power, and the race-baiting professoriate wants a chance to dream of, or implement, a radical dystopia. The class war having not happened, in spite of a century of fierce propagandization, what now may nourish the hopes of these power-seekers, but the chances for racial and ethnic war? Yet without public money, these anti-culture participants would find no support.