BOOKS

...His exploration of judicial archives exposes the origins of the "dirty war...

...He quotes Thomas Sowell, who has said that minority business owners who received set-asides for government contracts had an average net worth of $160,000—higher than that of the average white...

...But it would be a step toward a just future...

...Undoubtedly, too, the State Department also knew—as an unnamed source in the American Embassy in Bogota" admitted recently—that the Colombian armv was "a hive of human-rights abusers...

...Such an approach, he says, is the only way to eliminate what he considers to be the moral weaknesses of race- and gender-based policies...

...Kahlenberg describes the need for diversity—which supporters consider one of the many arguments for affirmative action—as a negligible benefit...

...It keeps the military in the ascendancy...

...influence and monev in Colombia have indeed tended to back the wrong people for the wrong reasons...

...In the cities, they provide intelligence and the anonymous, civilian hit men-death squads that strike at will at the targets of their army "handlers...

...Kahlenberg exaggerates the problems with affirmative action in a variety of ways...

...Yet today, the end of the Cold War and the tardy discovery of the rot at the center of Colombia's political institutions open a space for change...

...A Colombian Jesuit priest, Javier Giraldo is uniquely qualified to document this history...

...it has provided countless non-elite jobs in the construction trades (where affirmative action began), in police and fire departments, in the telephone industry, in government service, and elsewhere...

...Like the militaries of Argentina...

...First of all, it wouldn't help with the problem of the glass ceiling or discrimination in promotions, because he explicitly restricts his class-based preferences in employment to entry-level positions...

...Noam Chomsky, in his introduction, aptly entitled "The Culture of Fear...

...they were systematically mowed down...

...No one on the left will dispute the argument that we ought to have new policies to benefit the victims of the American class system...

...He compares affirmative action as it actually is today—an underfunded policy in a state of siege—with his idealized version of class-based preferences...

...In 1989, the Bush Administration, seeking battles to win in the quagmire of the war on drugs, seized on an opportunity to send billions of dollars of aid and equipment to the Colombian military when the government of President Barco declared war on the Medellin Ca tel...

...There is still a strong case for favoring a combination of class-based and race- and gender-based affirmative action...

...Advocates of diversity do not demand exclusively minority faculties for schools that are made up heavily of minorities: thev ask for some minority faculty, particularly because systematic and state-endorsed discrimination has in the past led to the exclusion of minority educators...

...refers to the name invented by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano to describe a system designed to keep the same dynastic minority in power for the past fifty years...

...There are other problems as well, sometimes attributable to an inappropriate or foolish application of affirmative action...

...Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay before it...

...Trained (at a profit) by the Colombian army, and funded by large landowners (frequently mafia bosses), the paramilitaries are the brawn of state terrorism...

...He rejects the notion that minority teachers could serve as role models for minority students and argues that the same logic would allow a school system that had only white students to insist on hiring only white teachers...

...Yes, the progressive movement has alienated potential allies by pressing for racial justice...

...Kahlenberg would take account not only of income but of net worth, parents' education and occupation, schooling opportunities, neighborhood influence, and family structure...

...Since 1992, the past two presidents— Caesar Gaviria and Ernesto Samper— have declared several "states of internal commotion" and issued more than fifty emergency decrees...

...There are powerful forces that predispose employers to discriminate...

...But this assumes that those who are admitted are selected at random from the bottom 50 percent, rather than on the basis of scores and preparation...

...Even for entry-level jobs, the benefits to African Americans from Kahlenberg's class preferences would be slim...

...Nor does he want to add class-based preferences to affirmative action, which would help poor whites as well as minorities and women...

...Step aside, if you know what's good for you, elected governors, mayors, municipal counselors...

...Everywhere, they provide the smoke screen of anonymity for the army and the government to hide behind, ensuring a 97 percent impunity rate that, in turn, protects and perpetuates the terror...

...But some liberals have also endorsed the notion of class-based affirmative action...

...lawyers, human-rights workers, priests and nuns, banana workers, judges, journalists, and janitors who have fallen since the war escalated in 1986...

...by Ana Carrigan This remarkable little book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what is happening in Colombia...

...Affirmative action does have problems...

...However, even here blacks are not likely to fare so well...

...Kahlenberg cites some studies by Jonathan Leonard and others to show that affirmative action benefits mainly more educated blacks...

...One might take the position (which I do and Kahlenberg does not) that in a good society no one would be entitled to more than the average person, but as long as we have a society where the continuing effects of previous discrimination penalize black business owners, remedial action is warranted...

...There are several wars in Colombia...

...Giraldo's most important contribution is the unraveling of secret links between the death squads and a small group of highly placed officers of the army's intelligence and counterintelligence brigade in Bogota...

...Even if such set-asides were politically feasible, and even if the proportion of minorities could be kept close to what it is now, it is hard to see how this would solve the problem of the angry white male...

...Numbered among the dead and missing are the leadership and grassroots members of the country's sole left opposition party—the Union Patriotica...

...Until now, LIS...

...Welcome to the rural headquarters of the "dirty war...

...In addition, customers or other employees may be prejudiced (objecting, for example, to a minority or female supervisor...

...In fact, Leonard concluded that "affirmative action does not appear to have contributed directly to the economic bifurcation of the black community, but rather appears to increase the demand for lowly educated minority males as well as for the highly educated...

...With the help of a gullible media, the state has managed for years to mask its participation in terror behind two powerful images of mayhem: drug lords and guerrillas...

...And, as every Colombian leader who has attempted to end the conflict has discovered, this is one war the Colombian army refuses to permit the civilians to call off...

...He would allow a police department to consider race a factor only when hiring an undercover officer to infiltrate a group made up of members of a particular race...

...But this is a bogus comparison: Minority business owners compete not with the average white but with the average white business owner, whose net worth is far higher than $160,000...

...When he tells us that affirmative action in college admissions leads to high dropout rates and stigmatization, he is describing a danger of any preferential admissions policy, whether race- or class-based...

...In Colombia, recourse to government through states of siege, which grant the military expanded powers, is fundamentally embedded in the political system...

...In the last two years, Washington and the U.S...

...Officially an armed conflict between two armies—one regular, one irregular— the counterinsurgency conflict has evolved into a murderous struggle between the guerrillas and the army's surrogates, the paramilitaries, for control over civilian populations and territory...

...In "public-order zones" the army is in charge...

...Today, these pioneers of the "dirty war"—including the man who created the first terrorist cell— are among the most highly decorated members of the Colombian high command...

...Like the terrible conflicts in Guatemala and El Salvador...

...By whatever name, every Colombian elected official knows that almost fifty years of civilian dependency on the military has made a fiction of both civilian authority and the Colombian constitution...

...In 1978, a young elite group in army intelligence led the planning sessions, discussed strategy, identified targets, and arranged funding and support from political and financial sources for the first acts of state terrorism...

...But this is a false symmetry...

...Kahlenberg begrudgingly admits that the average recipient of affirmative action in college admissions "may be somewhat less well-off economically than the average displaced white male"—but his own figures show that Chicanos and African Americans (not all of whom were admitted under affirmative action) had about half the median income of whites, and the gap is even wider when other indicators of class are included...

...This presents American diplomacy with perhaps its greatest hemispheric challenge to date.b Rectifying Policies The Remedy: Race, Class, and Affirmative Action by Richard D. Kohlenberg New Republic Books...

...But the history of an older, more brutal corruption of the rule of law—the state's "dirty war" against its democratic opposition—remains untold...

...today the Colombian army continues to fight a coun-terinsurgency war inspired by the doctrine of national security...

...Finally, old-boy and friendship networks, word-of-mouth hiring, and the like are ubiquitous in the labor market...

...preferences for promotion are a misguided attempt to push "equality of results...

...As told through the filter of Giraldo's personal knowledge of many of the casualties, his book reveals the evolution, the strategy, the methods, and the protagonists of state terrorism...

...And there is also the on-again-off-again war between the mafias and the state...

...Kahlenberg says that if a university were to set a goal of 40 percent of its seats for students who come from the bottom 50 percent economically, and if blacks got a quarter of those seats, the results wouldn't be so different from what they are now under affirmative action...

...Minorities would still take the places of more highly educated whites who believe they are entitled to admission...

...Richard D. Kahlenberg's book provides the most sophisticated statement of this position...

...The thoughtful concluding chapter of Giraldo's book provides, with chilling clarity, an analysis of how the state encourages the proliferation of paramilitary armies...

...In the process, they have shredded the democratic, constitutional protections and abdicated civilian control in almost 50 percent of the country, now designated "public-order zones...

...Giraldo's courageous testimony has ripped away these masks...

...He correctly notes that a family's income in a single year is a rather inaccurate measure of the cumulative burdens of class...

...Moreover, if blacks were, say, 50 percent of the poor applicants for a job, this doesn't mean that they would get 50 percent of the preferences, because blacks are not spread randomly among the poor...

...Carter actually said that, for poor blacks, "affirmative action and entry to the professions are stunningly irrelevant...

...Kahlenberg claims to be an advocate of political realism, but he is seriously deluded if he thinks blacks will join a progressive coalition that doesn't care about such things as whether a police force or a teaching staff is all white or whether minorities get promoted...

...The chief beneficiaries of class-based preferences will be those poor people with the best job qualifications, which means those who were least disadvantaged in education and previous opportunities—and these will disproportionately tend to be white...

...Or they may believe it's cheaper to generalize by race than to learn enough about applicants to treat them as individuals...

...At last count, some 3,000 Union Patriotica activists had been killed, and Colombia's short-lived experiment in multiparty, pluralistic democracy was over...

...Colombia's shows no signs of winding down without international help...

...Kahlenberg quotes Stephen Carter of Yale Law School as saying that, for "millions of struggling black Americans," affirmative action is "stunningly irrelevant...

...Noam Chomsky lays much of the blame for Colombia's infamous condition on the United States...

...Just train all police to be less brutal, he advises, disregarding the specifically racial aspects of police brutality...

...But the war that counts is the coun-terinsurgency war...

...Preferences for entry-level jobs...

...Javier Giraldo's Colombia: The Genoci-dal Democracy provides American readers with an all-important context for today's headlines...

...Galeano called Colombia a "democra-tatorship...

...His book makes available in this country a solidly documented...

...There is the official "war on drugs," financed by the United States, which in 1989 sent billions of dollars, helicopters, trucks, and outdated military equipment to the Colombian army, hoping to fight the Medellin Cartel...

...This more elaborate definition of class, he claims, would assure that African Americans would be prominent among the beneficiaries of class-based preferences...

...And to expect that universities will set aside two-fifths of their seats for preferential admissions seems the height of political naivete...

...Such a combination would not solve all problems...

...beyond this, he sees no virtue in an integrated police force...

...Down the years, while Washington embraced the Colombian establishment, the Pentagon trained the nation's murderous armed forces...

...Trying to subsume one problem into the other is analytically unsound and politically misguided...

...It hasn't needed to...

...However, one can't build a progressive movement by pretending that racism is not a problem in its own right...

...It feeds state terror...

...But discrimination blocks the promotion of minorities and women, just as it blocks the hiring...

...In these "testimonies of death," stored in a special data bank in Bogota, the names of el prominente—senators and congressmen, ministers of state, and presidential candidates—can be found beside the names of thousands of peasants, trade unionists, teachers, grassroots activists, Ana Carrigan is the author of "The Palace of Justice: A Colombian Tragedy...

...With some 400 criminal paramilitary armies now operating in more than 50 percent of the nation, the word "devour" evokes a powerful image...

...Colombian society is a sophisticated, complex mix of the modern and the feudal, the democratic and the totalitarian...

...The country's political leaders have developed their own unique political system, and democracy has very little to do with it...

...Giraldo's data bank offers the only comprehensive record of the assassinations, massacres, and disappearances that have given Colombia one of the worst human-rights records worldwide...

...but in fact diversity is an essential component of justice whenever discrimination has caused the lack of diversity in the first place...

...Kahlenberg's system of class-based preferences would not make up for the loss of affirmative action...

...inherited the privileges of a middle-class background...

...The employers may be blatantly prejudiced...

...Integrating Ole Miss didn't do anything directly to help the black poor, but no one thinks we shouldn't have struck down that institution's policy of segregation...

...Founded by former guerrillas who, in 1984, availed themselves of an amnesty offered by President Belisario Betancur, the Union Patriotica had a short life and a bloody demise...

...For example, if a child grows up in abject poverty for seventeen years and her mother finally gets a middle-class job, it would be extremely misleading to consider this child as having Stephen R. Shalom teaches political science at William Paterson College in Wayne, New Jersey...

...He calls this phenomenon "the state which devours the country...

...It is also the only way to build an interracial progressive coalition, he says...

...This violence by the state has been responsible for most of the nearly 40,000 civilian deaths or disappearances during the last fifteen years of the "dirty war"—more than all the victims of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile...

...But affirmative action applies to far more than the professions...

...There are drug wars between the mafias over control of distribution networks and markets...

...Giraldo initiated a project to assemble, analyze, store, and circulate the casualty lists from the hundreds of fronts of the "dirty war...

...Kahlenberg claims, promote equal opportunity...

...In 1986, when these former combatants put down their guns, came in from the cold, went out on the hustings, and immediately won leadership positions through the ballot box...

...This doctrine justifies the repression of an internal, civilian enemy—broadly defined as all those men and women whose opposition to the establishment renders them, in military eyes, "subversives...

...English-language introduction to the story of the Colombian state's unofficial war against its own citizens...

...If Kahlenberg exaggerates the problems with affirmative action, he minimizes the harm an exclusively class-based approach would do to minorities and women...

...Affirmative action, Kahlenberg says, benefits the undeserving middle-class black at the expense of the poor white...

...350 pages...

...Its fate demonstrates the true goal of the "dirty war...

...Entry into the professions is obviously only an issue for those who go to college, and does not directly apply to the very poor...

...Only for college admissions would Kahlenberg use his full, sophisticated definition of class—because colleges already collect the relevant data anyway...

...Undoubtedly Washington knew then, as it has since admitted, that the Colombian army was corrupt, that many highly placed commanders were in an unholy alliance with the drug mafia, that much of the equipment and money would go to fight not the drug war but the guerrillas...

...The Colombian coun-terinsurgency war between the army and the paramilitaries on the one side, and the guerrillas on the other—all three linked, in their different ways, to drug monies—is the longest and bloodiest counterinsur-gency campaign in the hemisphere...

...Leaving aside the fact that the black poor might have a stake in more black doctors—who disproportionately practice in underserved areas—it is Carter's point that is irrelevant...

...Rather, blacks tend to be the poorest of the poor, with the most disadvantaged backgrounds...

...However, such discrimination remains rampant...

...Only affirmative action with teeth—with goals and timetables—can counter these tendencies...

...But Kahlenberg does not want to reform affirmative action...

...Despite his demonstration that net worth needs to be counted for a true measure of class, Kahlenberg states that, for entry-level positions, net worth should not be considered...

...Kahlenberg criticizes those who value "diversity over justice...

...Ten years ago, using the resources of the Commission of Peace and Justice, an umbrella organization representing more than fifty-five Catholic religious orders all over the country...

...That other policies are needed to help the impoverished is surely true, but the need for more policies is not an argument against affirmative action...

...Kahlenberg argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1991 is sufficient for combating employment discrimination...

...While society has an obligation to the victims of past discrimination, sometimes affirmative-action policies have placed too much of the burden on a few individual whites (who missed out on chances to be hired or promoted), rather than on society as a whole...

...If this is the case today, when employers are under some pressure to consider race and gender, one can imagine how prevalent it would be after affirmative action is wiped off the books, as Kahlenberg urges...

...25.00...

...But unlike the militaries of Chile or the other countries of the Southern cone, the Colombian military has not overtly seized power...

...What we have now is neither equality of results nor equality of opportunity...

...In the rural areas, they savagely "cleanse" the land of recalcitrant, small peasant owners, and create feudal enclaves where the subdued populations that remain work as serfs for the new landowners...

...by Stephen R. Shalom When some conservatives propose that affirmative action be replaced with class-based preferences, their hypocrisy is palpable, given the unrelenting rightwing assault on the poor and the working class...

...And the more complex the definition of class employed, the more it will appear to be a gimmick hiding racial preferences...

...His argument, however, depends on a considerable overstatement of the problems with affirmative action and an overly optimistic view of the benefits of his exclusively class-based policy...

...Since 1948, not one president has governed without invoking a state of siege...

...People have been hurt in America by class and by caste, and we need to remedy both...

...However, Kahlenberg insists that class-based policies should supplant, not supplement, affirmative action...

...Instead, he wants to replace affirmative action with his class-based approach...

...media have belatedly woken up to one aspect of Colombian official corruption: the infiltration of drug monies and mafias at the highest levels of government...

...She is working w a sequel to that book...

...Kahlenberg believes his approach would better achieve the goals of affirmative action, without the serious costs of race-based policies...