Progressive Racism. David Horowitz
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assessments of the movement’s success. How much racial progress has been made since the federal government embraced the civil rights agenda? What is the best way to overcome the racial inequalities that still persist? For the anti-209 marchers, little has changed. Whatever gains blacks have made have been limited and have been forced upon recalcitrant whites. Without greater government efforts, existing inequalities will morph into new injustices as bad as before. Making government race-neutral, as the pro-209ers propose, would encourage historic prejudice to reassert itself in all its malignity. Eliminating affirmative action, both Jesse Jackson and President Clinton have warned, is to invite the “re-segregation” of American life.
Yet consider these unruly facts comparing social advances made by African-Americans before and after affirmative action policies were put in place:
In 1940, 87 percent of American blacks lived below the poverty line. By 1960, five years before the Civil Rights acts and 10 years before the first affirmative action policies, the figure was down to 47 percent. That was a greater and more rapid decline than took place over the next 35 years, when the black poverty rate came down to 26 percent. In 1940, only 5 percent of black men and 6.4 percent of black women were in middle-class occupations. By 1970, the figures were 22 percent for black men and 36 percent for black women, larger again than the increases that took place in the 20 years after affirmative action was put in place, when the figures reached 32 percent and 59 percent respectively.
These figures come from a new scholarly work, America in Black and White, by two civil rights veterans, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, who have reconstructed the history of racial progress and conflict in the postwar era and examined the impact of affirmative action solutions. Black poverty, the Thernstroms show, has little to do with race, and its solution will not be affected by affirmative action set-asides. Such policies have had the net effect not of employing greater numbers of blacks or raising their living standards, but of shifting black employment from small businesses to large corporations and to government. A far more effective anti-poverty program would be to promote black marriages. Currently, 85 percent of poor black children live in fatherless families, while the poverty rate for black children without fathers is nearly six times that for black children with two parents.
In higher education, the rate of gain for blacks in college enrollments was greater before the implementation of affirmative action policies. Between 1960 and 1970 enrollments increased from 4 percent to 7 percent of the total college population, greater than in the decades that followed. Enrollments rose from 7 percent to 9.9 percent between 1970 and 1980, and to 10.7 percent between 1980 and 1994. In 1965, before affirmative action, blacks were only about half as likely to actually graduate college as whites. In 1995, the figure was exactly the same.
In 1995, only 1,764 black students nationwide (1.7 percent of all blacks who took the test) scored as high as 600 on the verbal SATs; the math scores were even worse. By comparison, 64,950 white students (9.6 percent of all whites who took the test) scored 600 or higher on the verbal SATs. But under affirmative action guidelines, those same black students have been recruited by Berkeley, Harvard and similar elite schools, where the average white student (and the average Asian) had scores at least 100 points higher. At Berkeley, the gap is nearly 300 points. Predictably, blacks drop out of Berkeley at nearly three times the rate of whites.
This is but one example of the collateral damage—to blacks—of affirmative action policies. African-Americans are being put in college programs that far exceed their abilities and qualifications, a sure prescription for fanning the flames of resentment and prejudice. As the Thernstroms ruefully observe, the college that comes closest to equality in actually graduating its students is Ole Miss, one of the last bastions of segregation in the South. Integrated now, Ole Miss is resistant to the new racial duplicity in admissions standards. The result: 49 percent of freshmen whites graduate, and so do 48 percent of blacks.
On the basis of what actually has happened, increasingly some civil rights supporters on the left have begun to conclude that affirmative action is not only having little or no effect on the income and education gaps, but is actually destructive to the people it is supposed to help. It is creating black failure, while stirring the resentment of other groups that see themselves displaced on the basis of race from their hard-earned places of merit. “Liberalism no longer curbs discrimination. It invites it. It does not expose racism; it recapitulates and, sometimes, reinvents it.” Those are not the words of some Confederate flag-waving demagogue from below the Mason-Dixon line; they are the words of another veteran of the civil rights movement, Jim Sleeper, a columnist with the New York Daily News, and they are taken from his new book, Liberal Racism, which examines the toxic effects of well-intended liberal programs like affirmative action.11
“Why Liberals Can’t Think Straight about Race,” Jim Sleeper, Salon, August 19, 1997, http://www.salon.com/1997/08/19/race970818/.
So does the wheel of history turn.
September 15, 1997, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24389; http://www.salon.com/1997/09/15/horowitz970915/.
1 “Why Liberals Can’t Think Straight about Race,” Jim Sleeper, Salon, August 19, 1997, http://www.salon.com/1997/08/19/race970818/.
Lino Graglia is a 67-year-old Sicilian-born American who was an attorney in the Eisenhower Justice Department and has been teaching constitutional law at the University of Texas in Austin for 33 years. A stiff-necked Catholic conservative, he passionately holds to a belief that some would call fundamentalist: if representatives of the sovereign people choose to enact a law that is not contradicted by the actual text of the Constitution, then that law is constitutional. Period. Without judicial review.
Last week, the president of his university, the chancellor and 51 of his law school colleagues denounced him. State legislators, including the chairman of the Hispanic Caucus, described him variously as a Klan supporter, a racist and “academic riff-raff.” The Houston Chronicle condemned him as an “embarrassment” and the local NAACP and three student groups charged him with “racial harassment.” Jesse Jackson urged 5,000 cheering campus demonstrators to boycott his classes and “turn him into a moral and social pariah.”
Graglia’s crime? As usual in these intellectual auto-da-fés: telling an uncomfortable truth. In Graglia’s case the truth was that affirmative action is an attempt to conceal or wish away the unwelcome fact that currently blacks and Mexican-Americans are not academically competitive with whites and Asians. Graglia made the remarks in a speech to Students for Equal Opportunity, a campus organization for which he was the faculty advisor. The topic of the meeting was the Hopwood case, which recently ended affirmative action at the university.
The views that inspired the attacks were hardly new for Graglia. Twenty years ago he wrote a book called Disaster by Decree: The Supreme Court Decisions on Race and the Schools. In it, he frequently refers to affirmative action programs as a “fungus” and a “fraud.” His latest remarks on the subject were almost tepid by comparison, leaving Graglia totally unprepared for the public hanging that followed them.
Out of a faculty of more than 1,000 professors, only two have been willing to come forward to defend the character of a man who has taught alongside them for three decades, and whose dean, on reviewing his personal file, stated that there were no grounds for disciplinary action. Despite the ferocious claims of the attackers, the dean added, “The record does not justify a charge that he discriminates against his students and others on the basis of race or ethnicity.” Even