demands that government abandon the principle of “color-blindness” and equal protection under the laws. It does so in the name of opening doors that allegedly remain closed, since it claims that minorities are still “excluded” or “locked out.” But its only evidence for this is statistics that show disparities between minority representation in certain jobs or educational institutions and their representation in the population at large. The villain, according to the left, is the invisible power called “institutional racism.” (It has to be invisible because actual discrimination against minorities is already outlawed.)
No one seriously contends that admissions officers at America’s elite colleges are racists. In fact, college admissions offices are normally desperate to recruit as many eligible minority applicants as they can, offering them large financial rewards for being “under-represented.” As a result of California ballot Proposition 209, the University of California system is one of the few institutions legally required to eliminate the racial preferences it put in place for minorities. Yet the UC system is still spending $160 million annually on outreach programs designed to increase minority enrollments.77 Since this is the case, it is hard not to conclude that any deficiencies in minority admissions are the result of individual failures to meet academic standards.
“Increasing Minority Enrollment at the University of California Post Proposition 209: UCLA’s Center for Community College Partnerships,” Ramona Barrio-Sotillo, 2007, p. 57, http://udini.proquest.com/view/increasing-minority-enrollment-at-goid:304826328/.
The idea that America is a country ruled by racist precepts and powers, as leftists claim, is absurd. If African-Americans are oppressed, what would explain the desire of so many blacks to come to America’s shores and—in the case of Haitians—to risk their lives in doing so? Are they longing to subject themselves to a master race? In fact, the reason they want so desperately to immigrate is that in America they have more rights, more opportunities, more cultural privileges, and more social power than they do in countries like Haiti, which has been independent and run by black governments for more than two hundred years. This difference is attributable to America’s pluralistic democracy. Because culture and not race is the determinant factor, Haitian-Americans are freer and more privileged in America than they would be in any black-run country in the world.
The civil rights movement was supported by the vast majority of the American people, including federal law enforcement and the military, and by ninety-percent pluralities in both congressional parties. Since those victories were achieved, public-opinion surveys have shown a dramatic increase in the goodwill of whites generally towards the African-American minority, and an equally precipitous decline in attitudes that could reasonably be called bigoted. Large increases in the number of black officials elected by majority white constituencies, and huge income transfers authorized by a predominantly white electorate to black communities, provide solid empirical evidence of these attitudinal changes. There would be no affirmative action preferences at all if not for the support of white officials elected by white voters seeking racial fairness.
The justification advanced for racial preferences is illogical on its face. The white majority that allegedly cannot be fair in the society at large is also a white majority in government. If government programs are required to compel whites to be fair, how can whites have designed and instituted those same programs? If the white majority is racist, how can the government it dominates be relied on to redress racial grievances? The question is absurd because the premise is absurd. In fact, it is America’s white racial majority that ended slavery, outlawed discrimination, funded massive welfare programs that benefited inner-city blacks, and created the very affirmative action policies that are allegedly necessary to force them to be fair.
The end result of racial-preference policies masquerading as affirmative action is also perverse. In the long run, subverting the state’s neutrality by eliminating the principle of color-blindness will work against minorities like African-Americans. Groups that are numerically larger are bound to benefit more from political redistribution schemes than smaller ones. Over time, as the displacement of blacks by Latinos in urban centers like Los Angeles already makes clear, the racial spoils system will transform itself into a system that locks blacks out.
Civil rights is just one battlefield in the left’s war against America. The big guns of this war are directed from the centers of intellect in the university, where tenured radicals have created an anti-American culture and used the academic curriculum to indoctrinate broad sections of the nation’s youth. The thrust of this curriculum was summarized in a text by a constitutional law professor at Georgetown, one of America’s elite universities: “The political history of the United States . . . is in large measure a history of almost unthinkable brutality toward slaves, genocidal hatred of Native Americans, racist devaluation of nonwhites and nonwhite cultures, sexist devaluation of women, and a less than admirable attitude of submissiveness to the authority of unworthy leaders in all spheres of government and public life.”88
Robin West, Progressive Constitutionalism: Reconstructing the Fourteenth Amendment, Duke University Press, 1994.
Of course, the political history of the United States is exactly the reverse. It is in large measure the history of a nation that led the world in eliminating slavery, in accommodating peoples it had previously defeated, in elevating nonwhites to a position of dignity and respect, in promoting opportunities and rights for women, and in fostering a healthy skepticism towards unworthy leaders and towards the dangers inherent in government itself. This view of American history is now called “conservative,” but only because leftists currently shape the political language of liberalism and have been able to redefine the terms of the political debate. There is nothing “liberal” about people who deny the American narrative as a narrative of freedom, or who promote class, race, and gender war in the name of social progress. But leftists have successfully created a political vocabulary in which “racist” describes those who defend the constitutional framework of individual rights, and attempt to guard it against the nihilistic advocates of a political bad faith.
May 20, 1999, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24277.
1 Since this was written, the situation has changed fairly dramatically. A Pew poll taken in 2011 reported that 49 percent of 18–29 year olds had a positive opinion of socialism. This change had already taken place a few years earlier. See “Little Change in Public’s Response to ‘Capitalism,’ ‘Socialism,’” Pew Research Center, December 28, 2011. http://www.people-press.org/2011/12/28/little-change-in-publics-response-to-capitalism-socialism/.
2 Kenneth Minogue, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, 2008.
3 “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.
4 “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.
5 Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 237.
6 Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., Mismatch: How Affirmative
