Affirmative Action
Rodriguez, Richard
President Bill Clinton is a Southerner. That fact alone may explain why, given the opportunity to rethink the logic and effect of affirmative action, he failed. In his July speech at the...
...When race became the sole metaphor for social division, American leftists forgot all about the poor...
...The political left is in disarray today...
...They insist that by creating a female or a nonwhite leadership class at Harvard or Citibank, people at the bottom will be changed...
...Future historians, I think, will find it significant that affirmative action began during the administration of a Southern president (Johnson...
...For affirmative action has depended on an understanding of racism and integration appropriate to the American South...
...Reform education from the bottom up...
...Affirmative action will unravel during the administration of our current president, from Little Rock...
...In the South, in the fifties and sixties, one black child could change the predicament of an entire race...
...And worse: those on the inside gained their label of "minority" because of their supposed relationship to a larger number of people on the outside...
...Now the left is preoccupied with power—its own— and with visions of social change that run from the top down...
...Several weeks earlier, I was talking to a roomful of black teenagers, most of them street kids or kids from the projects...
...Who among these distinguished representatives could tell Mr...
...In the early years of affirmative action at Harvard or Berkeley, one heard blather about "role models" and "returning to help your people...
...White women became minorities...
...Despite his years at Yale and Georgetown, or perhaps because of them, he has never been able to see America in terms larger than those he first gleaned as a boy in the segregationist South...
...And Hispanics—who are an ethnic group—began to impersonate a racial group, a new brown race...
...Save poor children in those first years of school, when so many otherwise get lost...
...Which meant, in the end, that the only group that didn't qualify was the white male heterosexual...
...In the late 1960s, when the civil rights movement turned north, its strategy was unchanged, despite the fact that Northern segregation was de facto and, consequently, very different from the legally enforced segregation of the South...
...Who was a minority...
...474 • DISSENT...
...Middle-class undergraduates knew that they were gaining on the backs of the poor...
...But many leftists today have their own domino theory...
...Reform our public schools—or else support school vouchers...
...And save poor whites along with poor blacks...
...Forget Harvard...
...Where segregation was legally enforced against the entire race, as FALL • 1995 • 473 Affirmative Action at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, one black child could walk through the school door and change things for her entire race...
...Dear President Clinton: If I were a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and had your ear, I would urge you to declare the year 1996 the "Year of the First Grade...
...Already, California presents a linguistic nightmare to affirmative action bureaucrats because a majority of us can now claim to be minorities...
...California in the 1990s in no way resembles Alabama in the 1960s...
...If your group was numerically underrepresented, then you qualified...
...Lyndon Johnson is notorious for his "domino theory" in Vietnam...
...The embarrassing fact was that the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action were mainly middle class...
...He has nothing new to tell us about affirmative action...
...And Asians...
...Forty or fifty years ago, in the segregationist South, the strategy of the civil rights movement was clear and it was noble...
...President Clinton strikes me as a novice in domestic matters...
...Which led to guilt...
...But in the North, how did three or four hundred undergraduates admitted to Harvard through affirmative action change conditions for black kids in Roxbury...
...Jesse Jackson was in San Francisco in July comparing the effort to salvage affirmative action at the University of California to the "racial struggles of the 1960s...
...In his July speech at the National Archives before a largely black audience, the president floated old platitudes...
...And then one saw the odd parade that continues today, the parade of middle-class Americans demanding to be included among "minorities...
...Like Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton is often described as a novice in international affairs— "more interested in domestic issues...
...First in line to shake hands with the president after his speech were members of the Congressional Black Caucus...
...The white poor, especially, got written out of the liberal agenda...
...Jackson, alas, remains in a time warp...
...Only one of them in a room of thirteen had ever heard of anything called affirmative action...
...The left in America used to be centered on the concern for economic disparity...
...Why, despite affirmative action, are black teenagers killing each other a few blocks from the Capitol...
...The old ideals have turned to soggy cake...
...Clinton why, after three decades, affirmative action has had so little effect on the lives of the black poor...
...In the North, however, one merely heard the familiar call for "integrating" Harvard and Berkeley...
...I disagree...
...It was easy for any bureaucrat to tell you...
...Forget Citibank...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
