conservative opposition to minimum-wage laws, affirmative action employment policies, and welfare aid to mothers with dependent children. But a deeper cultural dimension to Page’s differences with Republicans is evoked by sentences like this: “Klan membership dropped sharply in the early 1980s, according to researchers for the Anti-Defamation League and other Klan-watching groups, as many found a new, satisfying voice and vehicle in Republican Party politics. Enter David Duke.” But this is almost as far-fetched as recalling the segregated water fountains of a distant past. Duke’s influence, unlike Farrakhan’s, doesn’t reach outside Louisiana or into the chambers of Congress. Duke has been publicly condemned by the Republican Party leadership, including three former Republican presidents, something Page neglects to mention.
This lapse into partisan race-baiting prompts me to show my own color. I am a Jewish Republican, who nearly fifty years ago marched in support of Harry Truman’s civil rights legislation and have been active in civil rights struggles ever since. Moreover, I can produce a personal anecdote of anti-Semitism that, unlike Page’s encounter with segregated facilities as a child, is actually current. My fiancée is a non-Jewish woman who has been confronted by several friends who have said to her, “How can you marry a Jew?” Prejudice exists, but there is no need to make more of it than it deserves.
The level of Jew-hatred in America actually is higher today than it has been in my entire lifetime, thanks not only to the poisonous rants of Louis Farrakhan but also to the collusion of large sections of the black intelligentsia in legitimizing his viewpoint for African-Americans. It is black anti-Semites who have legitimated public anti-Semitism in a way that no other group in America could. Nor does it seem that Jews or other minorities can feel as protected today by the American mainstream as blacks. When Marlon Brando launched an attack on Hollywood Jews on a Larry King show and went on to talk about “kikes,” “chinks,” and “niggers,” it was only the “N-word” that got bleeped by the CNN censors. “Institutional racism,” if we want to grant that mythical construct a modicum of reality, can cut more than one way.
Anti-Semitism has real-world consequences for Jews, just as surely as racism does for blacks. For example, a Jew knows not to seek a career in the auto business without taking into account the fact that Jews are few and far between in the auto industry and almost invisible at executive levels. I have stood in the living rooms of Grosse Pointe mansions and felt the disdain caused by my ethnicity. But this does not lead me or my fellow Jews to call for government-enforced preferences for Jews or to seek the source of this prejudice in the institutional heart of the nation.
For a voting liberal, Page has an unusually broad familiarity with conservative writers, and his readings are mostly respectful. It is not surprising, therefore, that his defense of affirmative action is often shrewd, even if his arguments remain unconvincing. Like other defenders of an indefensible policy, Page begins by denying that affirmative action is what it is: “Despite myths to the contrary, affirmative action is not intended to promote people who are not qualified. It is intended to widen the criteria for those who are chosen out of the pool of the qualified.” Unfortunately for this argument, there are a plethora of examples that prove just the opposite.
Journalist Roger Wilkins was made University Professor of History at George Mason University despite the fact that he had no qualifications as a historian, never having written a scholarly monograph. Wilkins was chosen, it happens, over my friend Ronald Radosh, who at the time had been a history professor for twenty years, had published widely in scholarly journals, and had also written several highly respected books in his field. Nor is Wilkins an isolated case. Julian Bond’s failed political career has led for no apparent reason other than the politics of race to concurrent professorships at two universities (Virginia and Maryland), also in history. Cornel West and Angela Davis hold two of the highest-paid and most prestigious university chairs in America, despite their intellectual mediocrity (in Davis’s case, compounded by her disreputable career as a Communist Party apparatchik and lifelong apologist for Marxist police states). Indeed, the weakness of the affirmative action case is exposed by the very fact that its most intensely contested battlefields are elite universities, which rank among the nation’s most liberal institutions.
Page actually defends the beleaguered affirmative action programs at the University of California with the argument that enrollment levels of blacks are expected to drop when affirmative action is ended. Would Page have us believe that the admissions departments of liberal universities like the University of California are infested with angry whites conspiring to keep black enrollment down? Or with built-in “institutional biases” that exclude blacks? The reality is that since 1957, when the California regents adopted their famous “Master Plan,” every single California resident, regardless of race, who graduates from high school with certain achievements has been guaranteed a place in the university system. Matriculation from various points in the system, starting with community and junior colleges to positions at Berkeley and UCLA (its academic pinnacles), are based on grade-point averages and achievement tests, and these alone.
In defending policies under which racial preferences trump achievements, Page compares them to the “geographical diversity” criteria of the Ivy League schools, commenting, “Americans have always had a wide array of exotic standards for determining ‘merit.’” Page doesn’t seem to realize that “geographical diversity” criteria were introduced to restrict the enrollment of Jews rather than to provide affirmative action programs for students from Wyoming and Utah. Page even quotes, without irony, a friend who said he was convinced he got into Dartmouth because he was the only applicant from Albuquerque: “I’m sure some talented Jewish kid from New York was kept out so I could get in.”
When I was a student at Columbia in the Fifties, the geographical diversity program was in place and the Jewish enrollment was 48 percent. That was the Jewish quota. As Jews we were well aware of the anti-Semitic subtext of the geographical program and talked about it among ourselves. But we did not launch protests or seek government interventions to abolish the program. Once the principle of Jewish admission was accepted, even residual (or “institutional”) anti-Semitism could not keep Jews, who constituted only 3 percent of the population, from flooding the enrollment lists of Ivy League schools. Liberals like Clarence Page support affirmative action because they are in a state of massive denial. The problem of low black enrollment at elite universities is not caused by racist admissions policies. It is caused by poor academic performance among blacks.
In defending affirmative action policies, Page reveals the underlying element in most expressions of “black rage” these days. This is the displacement of personal frustrations, the unwillingness of many blacks to go through the arduous process that other ethnic minorities have followed in their climb up the American ladder. Thus Page opens his chapter on affirmative action with a personal anecdote. As a high school graduate in 1965, he applied for a summer newsroom job but was beaten out by a girl who was less qualified and younger, but white. Shortly after that, the Watts riot occurred and he was hired. Page’s comment: “You might say that my first job in newspapers came as a result of an affirmative action program called ‘urban riots.’” This is a thinly veiled justification for criminal behavior and a familiar cliché of the Left: white people respond fairly to blacks only when they have a gun to their heads. Thus Malcolm X, who scorned the civil rights movement—in a 1963 speech he referred to “the recent ridiculous march on Washington” because he believed, wrongly, that Americans would never give blacks their rights—is seen in retrospect by many black intellectuals as its author because his violent racism scared whites into yielding. But what is immediately striking in Page’s reflection is that he doesn’t pause to consider that this was his first job application and that it was only for a summer position. Perhaps the men doing the hiring wanted to have a girl around the office for a couple of months. This would be an unprofessional rationale for the hiring, but not racist. Nor would it require a riot to remedy.
Page gives no thought to the possibility that he would have been hired eventually anyway. Recognizing that significant changes take time is not the same as saying that they require force to implement. Was it the threat of riots or of affirmative
