The View From the Ground

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It is a dicey proposition to bust Colin Powell’s chops. He is a man of enormous integrity, talent and eloquence. He is in many ways a symbol of all that is right with America. But, judging from the speech he gave at the Republican National Convention, he is also a squishy liberal. He is the best sort of liberal, to be sure – a man who cares deeply about his fellow Americans and desperately wants to help them. But, as liberals are wont to do, he completely loses the connection between "caring" and reality. He has apparently bought into the poisonous notion that all it takes to make things better is the right combination of his caring and government coercion. What good is government, after all, if we cannot use it to make all Americans think the enlightened thoughts of General Powell?

The aspect of his speech that I wish to focus on is his defense of "affirmative action". This strikes me as the one issue that most readily defines the differences between conservative and liberal worldviews. As General Powell pointed out (actually, he kind of yelled it out) is it so wrong that a couple of thousand black kids got an education because of affirmative action?

From the philosophical viewpoint, General Powell and those who agree with him must be prepared to honestly answer the following question: Are we prepared to live in a society in which the government is allowed to discriminate on the basis of race and/or ethnicity? This must be a Yes or No answer. If one answers "It Depends", then one is by definition in the "Yes" camp. Although General Powell, and many others like him, would never consider using such discrimination for evil purposes, once the rule is established it will be wielded in the future by whomever is in power, with no guarantee as to the rightness of its application.

This points out the curious myopia of liberals, in which they cannot envision of government run by anyone other than wonderful caring people like themselves. And so they create coercive rules which, in their hands, are usually at worst annoying and counterproductive, never dreaming that some day those very same rules could be applied by an unscrupulous scoundrel to the very opposite of their intended effect. Again, if you favor government sanctioned racial preferences, make good and sure that you are comfortable with the notion of the government being allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, and that you are prepared to deal with the unintended consequences thereof. I am not, and I am saddened that General Powell is.

From a practical, operational viewpoint, one must ask who needs to give way for the black beneficiary of affirmative action? As much as liberals dream that it is upper-crust Ivy League WASPS, the hard reality is that it is Asians, Jews and ethnic Catholics who bear the brunt along with middle class, "generic" white kids. If you have the connections and the legacy, you are getting into Harvard regardless of how many blacks they want to admit. It is those whites and non-preferred minorities who lack connections, and who have struggled to get to the top without them who will be punished. Nowhere is this more clear than in California, where, before Ward Connerly laid waste to the affirmative action charade, university quotas for blacks amounted to de facto quotas against Asians. You know, those privileged Chinese and Japanese who have benefited from historical discrimination against blacks? The cynic would look at this and say that the Asians are being punished for a culture that emphasizes hard work and academic excellence. It would be difficult to argue the point.

The flip side of this question demands that we also ask what kind of black benefits from affirmative action? I venture to guess that it is not the inner-city kid from a single parent home and no discernible academic skills. It is much more likely to be the middle class, or upper middle class black kid, for whom affirmative action serves as an antidote for mediocre grades. We must constantly remind ourselves that the stereotype of poor, deprived inner-city blacks – a stereotype ironically pushed by the media and the "Civil Rights" establishment – is at best a terribly incomplete picture. The American black middle class is huge, and growing by the day. To say that a well-off black kid deserves a place at a prestige university in the place of a poor Asian immigrant is just downright perverse. But this is precisely what happens every day in the presence of affirmative action. It must happen, unless the government engages in an apartheid-like racial grading system. Do any of us want to go there?

Believe it or not, I believe abortion and affirmative action have a lot in common. Abortion was the necessary "escape hatch" for those bent on implementing a sexual revolution in defiance of human nature. It allows the predictable consequences of that revolution to be disposed of quietly. That is why abortion rights folks are so rabid about their cause. If abortion goes, the entire sexual revolution is at risk. Affirmative action is a similar escape hatch for the social tinkering of those who have destroyed our inner cities and our public schools in the name of "compassion". The crime here is that millions and millions of black kids are graduating High School completely unprepared for college and beyond. Affirmative Action allows this crime to be hidden. Wave the magic wand and you can get into Berkeley anyway! This is why - surprise, surprise - the education establishment rabidly supports affirmative action.

General Powell seems to have a firm understanding of the hideous problems that have been caused by the de facto destruction of the social system in most of our cities. He seems to understand that these problems were not caused by "racism" and that government solutions are not the cure-all. So why does he insist in papering over the cracks in our social foundation with affirmative action? It seems out of character for the man. I recommend he sit down with Ward Connerly and have a good, long talk.