Affirmative action diehards put the Eveready
battery to shame.
They simply won’t go away.
The newest gimmick? The governor of California
is considering a proposal to admit into the UC system the top 4%
of the state’s high school grads. That’s the top 4% from any school,
irrespective of standardized test scores and of the quality of courses
taken.
This emotional embrace of affirmative action
continues the "big bang theory" of black economic progress.
But data shows black social, political, and economic progress owes
very little to affirmative action. Indeed, all things considered,
affirmative action has been a negative for blacks.
In their book, America in Black and White:
One Nation, Indivisible, Harvard’s Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom
demonstrate that greater black income growth occurred before
affirmative action than after! It’s a heavily researched book, some
700 pages long, and it contains charts, graphs, and other data to
make the case. (People like Jesse Jackson hate data.)
In its review of the Thernstroms’ book, "Time"
magazine says, "[given the pre-affirmative action economic
progress] the book argues the law should have gone no further than
the Civil Rights Acts of l964 and l965 and the Supreme Court’s Brown
versus Board of Education Case. Had the forum ended there, the Thernstroms
say, the American people would have done away with de facto segregation
themselves, in the natural course of events and without racial animosity.
Instead, Congress and the Court were swayed by the slow progress
of school desegregation and the alarms of the Kerner report. Forced
busing and affirmative action were mandated, accelerating not just
white flight, but a whole raft of policies that didn’t help blacks,
and sometimes hurt."
By the way, the Thernstroms once called themselves
liberal Democrats. They now see the damage done by feel-good, fight
the good fight policies, however well-intended. Call them recovering
liberals.
Again, the book simply confirms arguments and
data offered for years by the likes of black economics professors
Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, both of whom continue to sustain
vicious attacks by the civil rights establishment. Traitors, you
know.
Traitorous? What an insult to say that, but
for affirmative action, generations of black men and women could
not have raised families, gotten jobs, started businesses, and purchased
homes.
Traitorous? My father and mother, both from
the South, have now been married fifty years. My father, having
taken a series of tough, low-paying, Dickensian jobs, saved enough
to start a restaurant at age 47. He and my mother raised three boys,
and now own three pieces of property. Of course, they could have
stood around, waiting for affirmative action, but they had mouths
to feed and bills to pay.
Jesse Jackson likened former California governor
Pete Wilson, an affirmative action foe, to former segregationist
governor George Wallace. Sure, the connection makes sense. After
all, Wilson suggests that the same standards apply to everybody.
If you close your eyes, you can almost hear the California governor
thundering, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation
forever." Yeah.
Jackson once conducted a march across the
Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to protest the demise of affirmative
action. The march attracted some 9,000. If this were an election,
pundits would call it a low turnout. See, Jesse has a problem. Nearly
3 in 10 black voters voted in favor of California’s Proposition
209 to eliminate race and gender preferences in college and university
admissions, government contracting, and government jobs.
Will the Thernstroms’ book matter? Well, has
study after study dispelling the "Big Bang theory" of
affirmative action mattered? Consider Claude Steele, the Stanford
social psychologist. Writing in the "L. A. Times" on August
25, 1997, he said, "Because of affirmative action (emphasis
added), minority groups and women have made educational and vocational
progress. These policies have gradually created a conscionably diverse
professional class without major displacement of other groups."
And, "We have made progress [since 1962], in significant part,
due to affirmative action. I do not believe we should drop it without
a compelling alternative." A compelling alternative? How about
affirmative homework? How about affirmative nondestructive behavior?
How about affirmative education to make one’s self viable in the
marketplace?
Days later, the "L. A. Times" had
yet another opinion piece, this time by Jim Sleeper, author of the
new book Liberal Racism. In discussing the Thernstroms’ book,
Sleeper writes, "The Thernstroms show that the rates of black
advance in education and income were as substantial between 1940
and 1960 as they have been under affirmative action, and there is
no reason whatever to believe that, without it, those rates would
have slowed...Without affirmative action, blacks’ advancement strategies
would have been different—more small businesses and fewer government
jobs, for example—and, arguably, more productive."
Well, both Steele and Sleeper cannot be right.
Somebody is wrong. And the evidence shows that it ain’t Mr. Sleeper.
Too bad someone didn’t tell Jesse. He might
have been spared a buck or two for hiking boots.