Creating Equal/What America Owes to Blacks

...Connerly knows that racism is a reality, and was an activist at college on the Student Committee against Discrimination in Housing...

...All this, Robinson makes clear, is no request for aid, but a demand for what is owed...

...When x4-year-old Ward Connerly was working to keep his grandmother and himself off welfare, he had to run every day from school to meet the bus that would take him to his job...

...So Connerly was sent by his grandmother to the West Coast to be raised by an aunt and uncle...

...His ne'er-do-well father abandoned his mother when Connerly was very young, and she died when he was four...

...Later, in an unsurprising twist, one of his left wing opponents said Connerly married a white woman because he "wants to be white" and "doesn't like being black...

...The bus driver was a white man," writes Connerly, but he taught the author in the early 195o's that "simple human decency doesn't have a color...

...Then, as I was going out the door, the strangest moment of the entire meeting occurred...

...And if the workability of reparations is dubious, the costs are real: aggravated resentment from whites, reinforced victim-mindsets for blacks, additional claims from other minorities, institutionalized government discrimination...

...the point is just that Robinson now knows that all white people are suspect...

...Or so I thought at the time...

...What is really creepy about this incident is how unsurprising it is...

...He succeeded in Washington state and is now trying to get an antipreference measure on the ballot in Florida...

...Robinson's book is 99 parts devoted to demonstrating that blacks have often been inhumanly treated in American history--with whom does he think he is arguing?--to every one part describing how exactly this "debt" is to be repaid...

...Does it turn out that the agent is a ldansman...

...After viewing the carnage there, a Washington Post correspondent visiting Africa was moved to write, "Thank God that I am an American"--even though his ancestor came over on a slaveship...

...It's a compelling story, well told, and it's not finished...

...He has no use for George Washington ("not my ancestor, private or public...

...But he does love brave "little Cuba" and fearless leader Castro (the book's unintentionally best line: "anyone with halfa brain must conclude that their [i.e., the Cubans'] chances of an equal society are infinitely better than ours...

...I looked at the vice president and he stared baek at me with a slight smile as we walked out...

...Not only his life, but perhaps his country...

...Affirmative action is a national issue, and Connerly's part in making it so was driven home in a meeting with President Clinton in 1997 . Criticized for including no conservative voices in his so-called national dialogue on race, Clinton had invited Connerly and some other affirmative-action critics to the White House...

...I would pursue the matter, and this simple decision changed my life...

...That, of course, is exactly what any system of reparations would do...

...Connerly finished high school in Sacramento, entered a nearby junior college, and graduated from Sacramento State...

...t is impossible to figure out which African Americans today have less money than they would have had if slavery had never existed, let alone how much less...

...He wants there to be a "Year of Black Presence," during which a thousand African Americans walk the halls of Congress every day it is in session, making their demands...

...Connerly's Creating Equal is his autobiography...

...He married a ROGF.R CLEGG is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington, D.C...

...We will have to have a bureaucracy to determine whether Tiger Woods is "black...

...80 May ~ o o o _9 The American Spectator...

...He sees American society as "stubbornly, poisonously racist" and its treatment of blacks as a "still-unfolding massive crime...

...He owned my ancestors"), or Abraham Lincoln, or for integration...

...Later, when Connerly was living with his grandmother again, they briefly accepted public assistance...

...The rest is history, still unfolding...

...He stubbornly refused to let the issue go...

...Demanding excellence from yourself and your children is not "acting white...

...He is "shocked" when Al Gore says that racism will always be a problem because evil is "coiled" in us...

...He was soon drawn into politics, his path repeatedly crossing that of an up-and-coming California pol named Pete Wilson, who eventually was elected governor...

...But the bus started arriving at the stop five minutes later when the driver leamed of Connerly's predicament...

...But payments now will notgo toex-slaves and will not come from ex-slaveowners...

...Many blacks did not immigrate here until after the Civil War...

...In 1973 Wilson appointed a reluctant Connerly to the University of California Board of Regents...

...He goes into great detail about ancient African history, which one would think irrelevant to the issue of "What America Owes to Blacks," although to be fair one part of Robinson's program is the reeducation of whites to Afrocentric glories...

...V ice President A1 would like Randall Robinson, another pompous _~ and didactic writer, generally unhumorous and not funny even when he tries to be...

...Connerly discovered what was then a dirty little secret--still dirty but no longer secret-- that the more selective universities have a system of racial and ethnic quotas enforced through a set of double standards, admitting black and Hispanic students with dramatically lower qualifications than white and Asian students who are rejected...

...It's about as clear as anything in politics can be that Ward Connerly is pointing the right way...

...And next time Al Gore wants to shake hands, come equipped with a joy buzzer...

...This is wrong," he decided...

...I felt the eartilage compress and almost cried out in pain...

...Certainly he is speaking for himself...

...He supports affirmative action, needless to say, but to him this is a "thin dime" or, just a page later, a "penny due when a fortune is owed...

...No, we never hear any more about him...

...Businesses and bureaucrats need to get rid of the silly little boxes we have to check...

...He talks a lot about a trip he made to Cuba, which is irrelevant, too, except for what it tells the reader about Robinson...

...At Connerly's initiative, the board banned this discrimination, and then in 1996 Connerly chaired a statewide constitutional referendum, Proposition 209, that outlawed the use of government preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex in contracting, employment, and education...

...The imbalance suggests that what he really likes to do is complain...

...The Color of the Future Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences Ward Connerly Encounter Books / 286pages / $24.95 The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks Randall Robinson Dutton / 262 pages / $23.95 REVIEWED BY Roger Clegg B oth Ward Connerly and Randall Robinson are Southem-bom African 'Americans who rose from modest circumstances to positions of fame and influence and are now writing about how to deal with early :,ast-century race relations in America...

...Different parts of the country and different professions have treated blacks differently at different times...

...His lineage "has more or less equal elements of French Canadian, Choctaw, African, and Irish American...

...white woman he met at college-"no easy decision in a962"-but overcame the predictable resistance from his wife's family and his own with stubborn dignity...

...He also wants "individuals" and "families" who profited from slave labor or discrimination to be identified and coerced to pay over and above the amount the rest of the country is paying...

...Vice President Gore was also there, playing bad cop to Clinton the Conciliator...

...Connerly worked first as a bureaucrat in a redevelopment agency, a typical safe government job for an aspiring middleclass African American, but then broke the mold and started a consulting business of his own...

...And even these proposals "do not comprise anything near a comprehensive package...

...Many others have made bad choices in life that may or may not have been a result of discrimination...

...And we liked him for it...

...I never initiate discussion with white strangers out of a kind of psychic protectionism," he confides...

...He doesn't like the Cleveland Indians' logo or the tomahawk chop, and he doesn't think much of private property or capitalism either...

...As Connerly later writes, Gore is "hard-edged and humorless, a hatchet-faced true believer," and "God help the racial situation in America if this man ever gets to the Oval Office...

...Plus he wants the Afrocentric reeducation of white Americans mentioned above...

...But then Robinson must end the vignette portentously: "It was as simple as that...

...This meant mffering scurrilous and racist personal attacks, crossing swords with demagogues like Jesse Jackson (who called Connerly a "strange fruit") and Maxine Waters ("personally one of the most obnoxious politicians in the country"), and, perhaps worst of all, having to deal with moderate Republicans...

...For these two authors the difference in policy prescriptions coincides with a completely different attitude toward their fellow man...

...He does not believe in objective truth...

...Born in Leesville, Louisiana, Connerly writes that he is "black in the same way that Tiger Woods and so many other Americans are black," which is to say only under a one-drop rule...

...Robinson identifies himself not as an American but as belonging to "It]he Mandinka people...

...AI Gore grabbed my hand too, but instead of shaking it, he ground my palm and fingers in his grip as hard as he could...

...He wants lots of money paid out to African Americans, but he won't say how much or over what period (apparently "billions" over "at least" 34 years...

...But the conclusions they come to could not be more different...

...But he warns that, while black people should not deny that the scar of race still exists, they "should also resist all of those, black and white, who want to rip open that scar and make race a raw and angry wound that continues to define and divide us...

...Many blacks-- most, perhaps, though I can't be sure--don't like America," says Robinson as he makes love to Castro...

...Atthe end of the discussion, Connerly recounts, The president held my arm warmly with his left hand as we shook...

...Connerly, Robinson, and millions of other blacks have thrived...

...They will go to people who happen to share, to a degree, the melanin content of slaves now dead, and will be paid by all American taxpayers, none of whom have ever owned slaves, most of whom are not descended from slaveowners, and many of whom are themselves descended from slaves...

...Slavery was evil, and perhaps the freed slaves should have been given 4o acres and a mule, preferably from the slaveowners and slavetraders themselves...

...Race relations in America are long overdue for some benign neglect...

...R obinson's counterpart is a polite white insurance agent who always treated his mother with respect and "smiled at us...

...Connerly has taken his crusade to other states...

...Robinson's book has no organization to it and thus no logic to its o The American Spectator - May 2 o o o 79 presentation...

...Uncle James was "the hardest working" man Connerly ever knew, and in many respects "the best," instilling a spirit of selfreliance and toughness in his nephew...

...So humiliated was the a 4year-old boy that he soon told the social worker to stop sending the checks and took an after-school job instead...

...All Americans should be held to the same standards...

...Robert E. Lee is not selling heroin or crack, and George Wallace isn't fathering the 69 percent of blacks now born out of wedlock, but Robinson resolutely denies any black responsibility for their socioeconomic status...

...Connerly, on the other hand, loves America and believes in the fundamental goodness of Americans...