a precise translation of Marx’s classless society into politically palatable terms. According to those who hold this view, the Civil Rights Acts failed to achieve “real” equality, meaning an equality of results—which is the communist ideal. Previous civil rights reforms had focused on making institutional processes fair, and eliminating legal barriers to political power, education and jobs—in other words, to providing individual opportunity. For Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement he led, leveling the playing field meant extending to blacks the constitutional protections accorded to all Americans; making all citizens, regardless of color, equal before the law. It meant creating neutral rules that rendered color or ethnicity irrelevant to the competitions of civic and economic life. This was King’s idea of a “color-blind” society. Color would no longer affect individual outcomes, certainly not through the agency of the state. In King’s vision, the playing field would be level once government ceased to play racial favorites, as was the practice in the segregated South.
But the elimination of racial barriers through the passage of the Civil Rights Acts did not lead to equal results. To the left, whose collectivist vision discounted individual achievement and individual failure, this could only be explained by the persistence of covert prejudice—“institutional racism,” which is the contemporary left’s version of Marx’s alien power. According to the left, procedural fairness, the original goal of civil rights reforms, was actually a mask for an “institutional bias” that preserved an unequal status quo. Just as Marx had derided “bourgeois democracy” as a political smokescreen to preserve the power of a ruling class, so the post-King civil rights left dismissed equality of opportunity as a smokescreen to preserve the superior position of a dominant race. The term “white supremacy,” favored by racist demagogues like Louis Farrakhan, now became a term loosely applied by broad sectors of the left.
According to the new ideologues, educational admissions tests, for example, are culturally rigged to appear neutral while in practice they favor applicants of the dominant color. If facts alone were the issue, this claim would be easily refuted. Asian immigrants, who struggle with both a foreign language and an alien culture, consistently score in the highest ranges on standardized tests, surpassing whites and gaining admission to the best schools available. In fact, affirmative action measures in education are designed by the left to limit opportunities for Asian minorities, while favoring low-scoring Hispanics and blacks.33 But where ideology is concerned, facts do not matter. Within the ideology, only one explanation is possible for persistent inequalities: the hierarchies of race, class and gender, and their system of oppression.
“Pacific Islanders” are the one Asian group defined as an “under-represented minority,” not coincidently because they are the one Asian group that was the subject of American colonialism.
When the left demands a level playing field, it is not interested in neutral rules and equitable standards. It is interested in combating the alien powers of the race-class-gender hierarchy and their alleged oppression of blacks and other designated minorities—the new stand-ins for Marx’s proletarians. The left is oblivious to the experience of persecuted minorities who have been successful, such as Asians, Armenians, and Jews. It is not interested in the cultural factors that shape individual choices. It is not interested in individuals and their freedom, and therefore in securing an equitable process. It is only rhetorically interested even in equal results. What drives the left is its quest for the power to fundamentally reshape the social order by state fiat, to enforce its own prejudices and preferences, which it calls “social justice.”
If the left actually set out to achieve an equality of results, it would have to invade and then control every inch of the private sphere. Consider what it would mean to implement this demand. It is true that 40 percent of America’s African-American children are poor, a condition that handicaps them in any educational competition. The left accounts for the resultant disparities by its mythical construct, “institutional racism,” which allegedly blocks their way. Since the fault is “institutional” rather than individual, the remedy is institutional reform: rigging educational and performance standards to force an equality that doesn’t currently exist.
But the primary reason that African-American children are poor is cultural, not institutional or racial. If it were racial, there would be no (or only a small) black middle class, whereas the black middle class is now the majority of the black population. Statistically speaking, a child born into a single-parent family is five times more likely to be poor than a child born into a family with two parents, regardless of race.44 Eighty-five percent of African-American children in living in poverty grow up in single-parent households.55 It is that circumstance—and not “institutional racism”—which actually handicaps a portion of the African-American population and denies them opportunity. By the time such children are ready to compete, they may suffer from dysfunctional behaviors, or have developed disabling habits, or have internalized attitudes hostile to academic achievement, or simply lack the supportive environment that a middle-class, two-parent home provides. The excessive dropout rates among students who take advantage of racial preferences to overcome these inequalities are the statistical indicators that these parenting handicaps are real, and that no rigging of institutional standards can make up for them.66
“Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty,” Robert Rector, Heritage Foundation, September 5, 2012, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/09/marriage-americas-greatest-weapon-against-child-poverty.Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 237.Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It, Basic Books, 2012.
In the face of such realities, what can “leveling the playing field” mean? How can the state make up for the irresponsible behaviors and mistakes of the biological parents? By forcing them to get married? By compelling them to look after their children? By requiring them to teach their offspring to study hard and not be self-abusive? Is this even practical? Is it wise? Should the state become a Big Brother for those who fall behind, taking over their lives and curtailing their individual freedom? Yet that is the logical inference of the proposals of the left.
To achieve the benevolent outcomes that progressives promise would require a government both omniscient and wise, a utopia that has never existed. Such a state would have to mandate comprehensive transfers of opportunity and wealth, and would conduct a relentless battle against human nature to overcome the resistance to its impositions by those unwilling to give up their liberty or the fruits of their labor. The call to level the playing field, pushed to its unavoidable conclusion, is a call for the systematic subversion of American individualism and democracy, the destruction of individual freedom and the creation of a totalitarian state. The level playing field requires a totalitarian state to eliminate the disparities resulting from human nature and private circumstance. Yet the totalitarian state is itself a hierarchy of forbidding dimensions.
In the aftermath of communism’s collapse, such a prospect may seem remote, which is why the dangers inherent in these progressive reforms are often discounted. But the efforts to undermine the system of individual rights are already well advanced. Moreover, it is the nihilistic ambition behind the radical assault that presents the most immediate threat. For it is possible to destroy the foundations of social trust without establishing a socially viable alternative. Underlying the idea of racial preferences is a corrosive premise that the white majority is fundamentally racist and cannot be fair. For those who embrace the idea, the institutions, traditions, rules and standards that white majorities have arrived at over the course of centuries merit no respect. Affirmative action race preferences are an assault on the very system of economic and legal neutrality that underpins a pluralistic democracy. By denigrating the rule of law as a mask for injustice and oppression, the left undermines the very system that makes democracy—and racial equality—possible.
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