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Authors: David Horowitz
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percent of all blacks.
On the basis of the actual results, it is clear that affirmative action based on racial preference is unnecessary to racial progress, damaging to its supposed beneficiaries, and ineffective in terms of closing the income and education gaps between blacks and whites. While it may create additional privilege for some members of an already privileged black elite — 86 percent of the affirmative action students at elite schools are from upper middle-class or wealthy backgrounds — its more durable effect is to create failure that is unnecessary. In addition, it aggrieves those whose achievements are real, but who become suspect because of the circumvention of standards. Finally, racial preferences incite the resentment of other groups, not only whites but also Asians, who see themselves displaced on the basis of race from their hard-won places of merit. In his book, Liberal Racism , veteran civil rights activist Jim Sleeper addresses the toxic effect of these good intentions. "Liberalism no longer curbs discrimination," he writes. "It invites it. It does not expose racism; it recapitulates and, sometimes, reinvents it."
Thus does the Cold War between the children of Martin Luther King beget ironies without end.
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* For an account of these battles, see Lydia Chavez, The Color Bind: Cahfornia's Battle to End Affirmative Action (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998).
5
Amen Corner
A REVEALING ASPECT of the White House crisis that engulfed President Clinton in 1998 was the racial gap in public opinion polls, which was almost as wide as after the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder case. When the world discovered in January that the president was having sex with a twenty-two-year-old intern, a New York Times poll found that 81 percent of blacks (as compared to 58 percent of whites) nonetheless approved the way the president was doing his job. When asked whether the president shared the moral values of most Americans, fully 77 percent of blacks (in contrast to less than half that fraction of whites) said yes. Nine months later, after the discovery of the stained dress and the release of the Starr report, 63 percent of blacks still thought the president-now a proven liar and philanderer — shared the nation's morality. It was three times the number of whites (22 percent) who did.
These are striking statistics, reflecting a unique community support of the president (even feminists were more ambivalent), and prompting attempts to explain it. According to a widely quoted comment by comedian Chris Rock, Clinton's African-American 56 support was inspired by the fact that he is "the first black president." Explained Rock: "It's very simple. Black people are used to being persecuted. Hence, they relate to Clinton." The comedian was not alone in these thoughts. In an article exploring African-American reactions to the Clinton investigation, New York Times reporter Kevin Sack quoted NAACP head Julian Bond saying "You just can't help but think that some of this [investigation of Clinton] is race based," while Harvard Professor Alvin Poussaint reported that rumors were circulating in the African-American community to the effect that "[Clinton] must have had black ancestry."
A full-blown expression of these attitudes was on display in the New Yorker , where Nobel laureate Toni Morrison wrote of the crisis: "African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetimes. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."
Perhaps one has to be a lapsed leftist like myself to react to the loopy anti-white attitudes laced into
On the basis of the actual results, it is clear that affirmative action based on racial preference is unnecessary to racial progress, damaging to its supposed beneficiaries, and ineffective in terms of closing the income and education gaps between blacks and whites. While it may create additional privilege for some members of an already privileged black elite — 86 percent of the affirmative action students at elite schools are from upper middle-class or wealthy backgrounds — its more durable effect is to create failure that is unnecessary. In addition, it aggrieves those whose achievements are real, but who become suspect because of the circumvention of standards. Finally, racial preferences incite the resentment of other groups, not only whites but also Asians, who see themselves displaced on the basis of race from their hard-won places of merit. In his book, Liberal Racism , veteran civil rights activist Jim Sleeper addresses the toxic effect of these good intentions. "Liberalism no longer curbs discrimination," he writes. "It invites it. It does not expose racism; it recapitulates and, sometimes, reinvents it."
Thus does the Cold War between the children of Martin Luther King beget ironies without end.
----
* For an account of these battles, see Lydia Chavez, The Color Bind: Cahfornia's Battle to End Affirmative Action (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998).
5
Amen Corner
A REVEALING ASPECT of the White House crisis that engulfed President Clinton in 1998 was the racial gap in public opinion polls, which was almost as wide as after the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder case. When the world discovered in January that the president was having sex with a twenty-two-year-old intern, a New York Times poll found that 81 percent of blacks (as compared to 58 percent of whites) nonetheless approved the way the president was doing his job. When asked whether the president shared the moral values of most Americans, fully 77 percent of blacks (in contrast to less than half that fraction of whites) said yes. Nine months later, after the discovery of the stained dress and the release of the Starr report, 63 percent of blacks still thought the president-now a proven liar and philanderer — shared the nation's morality. It was three times the number of whites (22 percent) who did.
These are striking statistics, reflecting a unique community support of the president (even feminists were more ambivalent), and prompting attempts to explain it. According to a widely quoted comment by comedian Chris Rock, Clinton's African-American 56 support was inspired by the fact that he is "the first black president." Explained Rock: "It's very simple. Black people are used to being persecuted. Hence, they relate to Clinton." The comedian was not alone in these thoughts. In an article exploring African-American reactions to the Clinton investigation, New York Times reporter Kevin Sack quoted NAACP head Julian Bond saying "You just can't help but think that some of this [investigation of Clinton] is race based," while Harvard Professor Alvin Poussaint reported that rumors were circulating in the African-American community to the effect that "[Clinton] must have had black ancestry."
A full-blown expression of these attitudes was on display in the New Yorker , where Nobel laureate Toni Morrison wrote of the crisis: "African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetimes. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."
Perhaps one has to be a lapsed leftist like myself to react to the loopy anti-white attitudes laced into
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