An Exchange of Views on Diversity
LIND, EARL SHORRIS, RODOLFO ACUNA, JIM SLEEPER, MICHAEL
In the July/August issue of The New Leader our "Thinking Aloud" columnist, Michael Lind, took issue with the practice of extending racial preferences to Latinos. The group did not, he argued,...
...This form of affirmative action, which holds that the greater the injustice the greater the need for redress, seems to me the fairest and the most practical...
...Most of the descendants of these Latinos suffered centuries of discrimination...
...During and after World War II, the Federal government gave veterans special preferences, raising the median school age for white Americans from 9.9 to 12.1 years...
...MexicanAmericans have a complex past...
...As I argued in my column, naturalized or legally resident Latino immigrants, like all other U.S...
...At the less prestigious but vital institutions upon whose soundness the country's meritocracy and leadership really do depend, too many kids are hoaxed by being admitted before they are ready...
...for instance, the sones danced by the indigenous people of Oaxaca are based on African rhythms...
...Latinos as part of an Orwellian plot, he simply does not realize American Latinos lack the power to change very much...
...Acuna writes: "Interestingly, Lind covertly attacks the 1965 amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act...
...are either immigrants or have immigrant parents...
...That is false...
...Most Mexican-Americans also have native American blood...
...Yet that is what many of our public and private institutions—perhaps most fatefully, our pedagogical ones—are doing, and for no people more fatefully than those who have been denominated Hispanics, as Michael Lind notes...
...It sets the scene with Vice President Al Gore promising an audience of upper-middle-class Latinos in San Diego that he will, in Lind's words, "fight for racial preference policies that discriminate in favor of American citizens of Latin American descent...
...Gore, says Lind, is pandering to Latinos...
...Should they have applied to Harvard, Macalester, Princeton, Case-Western and the British university system under affirmative action preferences...
...He recounts how liberal Democrats like Gore and President Bill Clinton, who ran against the civil rights establishment in 1992, backtracked toward it to secure a reliable base after the conservative sweep of 1994...
...There are numerous errors of fact in "The Diversity Scam...
...Most people of Mexican descent prefer Latino, but a significant minority would rather be known as Hispanic...
...I follow a rule once suggested by Christopher Hitchens: Never answer insults, always answer lies...
...and Hispanic...
...Even if eliminating the stronger racial preferences did at first reduce radically the number of blacks and Hispanics at élite institutions, which I doubt it would, the public can and should be cavalier about any vision of Harvard as an arbiter of American destiny...
...Look at the writings of Lind's onetime benefactor, William F. Buckley Jr., orthe debates in Congress: Wheneverthe Democrats demonstrate that Republican tax policies favor the rich, the Republicans angrily accuse them of promoting class warfare...
...An Exchange of Views on Diversity Earl Shorris I agree with my friend and former colleague at Harper's magazine that class is the greatest social and political problem today in America...
...And a great many Latinos have some African ancestry...
...It took years for the Texas State Legislature to apply the remedies demanded by the court...
...2) I am a "non-Hispanic white" Texan, and the burden of proof to demonstrate that they are not black-hating and Latino-hating racists lies with non-Hispanic white Texans...
...When deficiencies are exoticized as cultural "differences," the beloved community of the civil-rights movement and a robust, Deweyan American public thin out...
...those for whom poverty has made fairness in access to education impossible...
...Alluding to Acuna among others, Gregory Rodriquez, a leading young journalist of Latino descent, writes that the old school of Chicano "activist historians ingeniously—if not disingenuously— managed to portray contemporary Mexican-Americans as a conquered people, 'an internal colony' whose ancient ethnic homeland, the American Southwest, was being occupied by invading Anglos...
...If we must talk of Hispanics as a political group, we must acknowledge that this group is "up for grabs" between the aspiration to individual self-determination and the impulse to trade on the immediate but dubious advantages of a bureaucratic, colorcoded "identity...
...In his review in the Nation Richard Falk wrote, "Michael Lind has written a wild, dangerous book that pretends to offer a sober, scholarly rethinking of the Vietnam War...
...Race and class are so intertwined, however, that affirmative action based on racial preference is a just and efficient way to alleviate at least a small part of the problem...
...According to him, it exacerbated the racial preferences mess...
...I confess my debt to him for his generosity in informing me of the correct placement of the accent in Querétaro...
...After attempting to set African-Americans against Latinos, he seems to say the blacks are also abusing preferential treatment because their middle class is benefiting from it, not the poor...
...Not surprisingly my attention was drawn to the paragraph that reads: "In the early 1990s it was briefly permissible to debate the merits of race-conscious vs...
...Even this summer, I have had no trouble making similar arguments against racial color-coding, more or less in passing, in Los Angeles Times and Washington Post book reviews and in a National Public Radio commentary about Senator Joe Lieberman on All Things Considered...
...and to the extent that it has, the important question is, Why...
...Indeed they have, and, in some cases, still do—as my journalism and fiction alike make clear...
...Rodolfo Acuna Like most articles about Latinos, Michael Lind's "The Diversity Scam" strings together myths and half-truths that have been repeated so often people believe them...
...According to him, it exacerbated the racial preference mess...
...Another example of Lind's tendency to manipulate the facts is his championing of the "multiracial" category in the U.S...
...In a sense the course is a form of affirmative action as I think it should be carried out...
...Acuna proves he is out of touch when he defends the government's recent extension of the "one-drop" rule, traditionally associated with black Americans, to Asian-Americans and Latino-Americans...
...But for most of the Ivy League, upper-middle-class people who run the journals in question, the short-run rewards of accommodating to racialist brokering so outweigh its social costs that, out of their own insecurities and guilts (their senior staff are virtually all white), they have given up contesting the subtly poisonous, debilitating lies about the relationship between color and culture...
...At the élite colleges affirmative action is a cheap enough way to do that, since it poses no threat to their prestige...
...Relative poverty is greater in America than in any other major industrialized nation...
...in 2000 or 2010...
...Go online and read my critique of Al Gore's pandering to the race industry and his moralistic, almost Manichaean misconstruals of racial differences in the March 2,1998 New Republic...
...Most find the question difficult because, when push comes to shove, they do not value their ethnic affinities as much as they do a venerable American yearning for self-determination—the freedom to recast one's interests and memberships, and even to leave ethnic labels and hyphens behind...
...In my opinion, the heavy investment in education from 1944 to 1960 paid off, and we should make a similar investment today...
...Does affirmative action help less affluent Latinos and blacks...
...A year later he double-dipped, publishing an essay in the prestigious Wilson Quarterly entitled "The Death of David Crockett...
...and second, that the Democratic Party supports Latino preferences for reasons of electoral strategy...
...If it's okay to emphasize ethnic and cultural differences, why isn't it okay to emphasize this one...
...I happen not to be a fan of the Democratic Presidential standard bearer, but any scholar would have to point out that from the beginning of the republic politicians have promised and delivered programs to special interest groups—from European immigrants to African-Americans to GIs to (more often) corporations...
...The claim of present-day Mexico on the U.S...
...He was given access to the liberal media that knighted him, even while excluding minority voices...
...The California state colleges charged $6.50 a semester then...
...Lind also maintains that those whom he characterizes as intellectuals speak in private differently than they do in public about affirmative action...
...The difference between me and my critics is that Shorris and Acuna want public and private policy to grant every Latino, whether disadvantaged or affluent, special educational, economic and political privileges that are denied to disadvantaged whites solely on the basis of their race...
...Early on Lind writes, "racial preferences were extended to 'Hispanics,' now called 'Latinos.' (That Orwellian Newspeak term was invented by white Federal bureaucrats...
...Lind could easily have checked the origin of the term in my book, Latinos: A Biography of the People, or in an Op-Ed piece I published in the New York Times in defense of the term...
...Some have been in what is now the United States for hundreds of years, others are more recent arrivals...
...How does Gore's action differ from that of his rival Presidential candidate, Texas Governor George W. Bush, standing before a Chamber of Commerce and vowing to repeal the capital gains tax...
...The author of A Darker Shade of Crimson is a young Mexican-American who attended Harvard on the basis of his grades and SAT scores, not ethnicity...
...Lind whispers, in the slightly furtive style usually reserved for "outing" homosexuals, that "one third of black Americans remain mired in poverty," a figure he says we will never find in the mainstream media...
...Of course, since the "diversity scam" rolls on in many institutions, impervious to what has been revealed and discredited in it, there remains a mighty stream of absurdities and injustices to expose...
...As the founder and chair of the advisory board of the demente Course in the Humanities— which teaches the humanities at the university level to poor young adults, many of whom have not completed high school —I have accepted and acted upon the problem of class injustice in America...
...There are other factors closer to these worthies' daily and—dare one say it?—more intimate interests...
...Rodolfo Acuna, a new contributor to these pages, is chair of the Chicane Studies Department at California State University...
...citizens...
...I would further argue that because these journals lack race-conscious policies, they allow people like Lind to make false assumptions about U.S...
...Equating racism with slavery, he wrongly declares that Mexican Americans and other Latinos are recent arrivals, and therefore did not share in those injustices...
...If, as seems likely, Latinos make up the majority of U.S...
...It seems obvious to me that affirmative action should be for individuals who have suffered the wounds of race, ethnic and class discrimination...
...The ethical answer as well as the practical answer to Lind's attack on blacks and Latinos is not less affirmative action, but more, not justice for fewer of those who have been cheated through discrimination or poverty, but justice for all, and the sooner the better...
...In talking about campus racial preference programs, I often give students pause by asking a diversity champion, "Name three specific things you'd want me to presume I know about you if I know only your race or ethnicity...
...Michael Lind replies: I thank Jim Sleeper for his civil response...
...I can testify that the courts have overwhelmingly concluded Chicanos and Latinos have historically suffered discrimination...
...His position on diversity and immigration is considerably to the right of both the Republican Party's platform and its Presidential candidate...
...Conservatives generally prefer Hispanic, while liberals prefer Latino...
...They do so less out of conviction than because such assumptions are in the air they breathe and the water they drink...
...race-neutral policies in liberal and Leftist journals like the New Republic, American Prospect, Dissent, and Mother Jones...
...The country needs desperately to find a way out of the ethical slough of unfairness...
...Immigrants who came after 1848 were similarly subjected to discrimination...
...Instead of addressing either of these points in a serious way, Earl Shorris and Rodolfo Acuita have chosen to accuse me more or less directly of racism...
...The overwhelming number attend community colleges that are the least well-endowed...
...On the contrary, only racialist liberals and far-Right racists think that Earl Shorris' children, with their "non-Hispanic white" father and their "Latino" mother, should be classified as "Latinos" along with their children and grandchildren to the nth generation...
...My own family has been here since 1750, while my wife comes from Durango, Mexico...
...As Lind reports, politicians like Vice President Al Gore are telling Hispanics, in effect, "You can have it both ways: You can experience the liberations of American citizenship by treating your citizenship first and foremost in terms of your ethnic identity...
...His books include Occupied America: A History of Chicanos...
...I do not deny that Latinos as a group are statistically underperforming...
...I am a Russian Jew...
...Our goal is to make public persons, in the Athenian sense, of poor people by teaching them to think reflectively through the study of the humanities...
...They thought that would be unfair, because they had attended fine private preparatory schools, and they were not the only Latinos who chose not to use the advantage of affirmative action...
...I think it is a bit of all three...
...The point is not that there aren't cultural differences worth respecting...
...It is the classic racist assumption, and I fear that Lind has based much of his case on it...
...As those "white Federal bureaucrats" knew but Lind does not acknowledge, "Hispanics may be of any race...
...In 1997 he published The Alamo: An Epic...
...In my column I made two arguments: first, that there is no plausible justification for racial preferences for Latino immigrants and their descendants...
...Black...
...And as I also made clear, I favor using public policy to help poor Latino immigrants—along with all other immigrant and native poor—join the middle class as quickly as possible...
...Jim Sleeper Many long discussions with college students have convinced me that the vast majority accept as beyond question the odd notion that there is some kind of causal relationship between color and "culture...
...That way of looking at race is an age-old view of American society," he writes...
...If they want fresh perspectives, why not, in the very spirit of recognizing and celebrating "diversity," publish something on the fact that so many of the writers who have been preoccupied with the freeze Lind describes in the country's most prominent opinionjournals—Nicholas Lemann, Jacob Weisberg, James Traub, Jeffrey Rosen, Richard Kahlenberg, Ronald Brownstein, David Frum, David Brooks —are Ivy League Jewish males under 50...
...it's that such differences can't be concocted or officially promulgated to command respect...
...By engraving one's ethnic designation on the tablets of the law, the latter outdoes what urban ethnic machines did wrong...
...Constitution and focus on persons rather than citizens or citizens of many generations standing...
...I published that before lever heard of Earl Shorris...
...Although the syntax in my column was unclear, in The Next American Nation (1995) I wrote: "[In the 1970s] the FICE [Federal Interagency Committee on Education] came up with five races: American Indian or Alaskan Native...
...The Ku Klux Klan is not forcing Mexican-American high school students to do relatively poorly on college entrance exams," he writes...
...The very people who support affirmative action for Latinos are the biggest defenders of homosexuals' rights...
...Since Lind's arguments against the idea of justice as fairness (see John Rawls' Theory of Justice) pertaining to Latinos are based on ignorance or denial of history, there is not much left to his case other than old-fashioned immigrant bashing...
...Are Lind's omissions a product of historical amnesia, or of his bias, or of just plain manipulation...
...Unlike Mexicans, he says, they are making it: "Despite the history of harsh anti-Asian discrimination in the United States, Asian-American students do better than Latinos—and better on the average than old-stock white Americans...
...The pitting of Latinos against blacks presents a problem for Lind: Many blacks are Latinos...
...My wife's first language was Spanish, so our children are 50 per cent Latino...
...He accuses the civilrights lobby of a conspiracy to make anybody with one drop of African or Latino blood members of a minority group...
...Worse, Lind says "it is not the children of Bedford Stuyvesant or rural Sonora who are applying...
...Generations of MexicanAmericans have suffered from AngloAmerican Protestant bigotry (as have blacks, Asians, Irish Catholics, GermanAmericans, Mormons, and other minorities, all with varying degrees of severity)· But the descendants of old-stock Mexican-Americans who lived in the U. S. before the Civil Rights Era are a rapidly shrinking minority within the Latino population...
...If affirmative action, like the Clemente Course, leads more poor people, especially people who are the victims of an unfortunate tendency toward racial discrimination, to the public lives of citizens, then both the society and the individual benefit...
...For example, Joaquin Avila Jr., born of immigrant parents in South Central Los Angeles, was one of the first MexicanAmericans to attend Yale College...
...Not content with playing blacks off against Latinos, Lind then brings in Asians...
...For the reality is that poverty in this country follows racial and gender lines...
...The fact that the 1965 amendement unwittingly created a new political constituency for the misguided racial quota system created a decade later does not detract in any way from its great achievement in eliminating the last vestiges of the old "White America" policy...
...Earl Shorris, a longtime NL contributor, is the author most recently of a novel...
...The legitimacy of American democracy has not depended all that much on "the Harvards, the Berkeleys and the Amhersts...
...rather, they do not trust born-again conservatives like Lind...
...Cubans prefer Hispanic, Puerto Ricans prefer Latino...
...Instead of bothering to read my books, Acuna has lazily relied on screeds by far-Left reviewers like Richard Falk...
...No matter that there were only an estimated 75,000 Spanish speakers in all of California and the Southwest at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848...
...In the face of Lind's tactics it needs to be reiterated that Latinos have historically suffered discrimination...
...The charge is ridiculous...
...Consequently, statements such as "Lowering or abandoning measures of academic merit would be a catastrophe...
...He wrote that whites in the central valley of California, where he went to high school, assumed he had used racial preference to enter Harvard College...
...To stigmatize all who defendjustice as hypocrites requires a curious turn of mind...
...Since nothing in my work or my life can substantiate such a charge, they base it on two assertions: (1) Although I support Federal antidiscrimination laws, I oppose racial preferences based on group membership, and any "non-Hispanic white" who rejects racial preferences (a category that includes liberals like Jim Sleeper) can be presumed to be a racist...
...A new Edition of his Latinos: A Biography of the People is due out next spring...
...Indeed, racism ismuchmore complex thanLind's reductive model would have us believe...
...In selecting our prospective students, we follow the example of the U.S...
...Unlike the children of the powerful, average Latino students are not admitted to places like Harvard...
...The increasing number of Americans who define themselves as "multiracial," symbolized by Tiger Woods, who eschews the onedrop rule and calls himself a "Cablinasian"(Caucasian-black-Indian-Asian), is evidence of the emerging norm in 21 st century America...
...Shorris, as part of his clumsy attempt to argue that I am ignorant about the subject, claims I mistakenly believe that "Latino" rather than "Hispanic" was the term adopted by Federal bureaucrats in the 1970s...
...Lind is correct in saying that Latinos generally define themselves first by the country in which they or more often their ancestors lived, but he fails to note that these divisions have weakened their impact...
...His biases lead him to ignore even the preponderance of research mdicatingthat teacher perceptions of social skills and academic ability play an important role in influencing development...
...Shorris, who knows better and who should be ashamed of himself, engages in some old-fashioned Northern Leftist Texan-baiting by trying to link me with "old-style Texas racebaiting...
...It is surprising that Lind, a sixth-generation Texan, fails to mention a record of conflict that includes a goodly number of lynchings...
...Moreover, he ignores the Texas War (1836) and the Mexican War (1846-48), which facilitated the seizure of over 50 per cent of Mexico's land and perpetuated racial stereotypes that to this day affect Latin American immigrants, who are all presumed Mexican until proven innocent...
...Close to 90 per cent of teachers at white Los Angeles schools are state certified, while as few as 3 8 per cent of teachers in the inner city schools are certified...
...One is protecting their self-esteem...
...Falk further observed that the book has a "perverse tone" and expresses its predilections in "a most manipulative manner...
...Obviously these ad hominem attacks on my character and motives are rhetorical diversions...
...Lind answers that the freeze is "not a product of new evidence supporting the defenders of racial preferences...
...I have served as an expert witness in several civil rights suits and been a plaintiff myself...
...Over 90 per cent are from working-class families...
...We should probably define Latinos as those who primarily speak Spanish or are descended from people whose first language was Spanish...
...Southwest has as much weight as France's claim on Canada and Spain's claim on Mexico...
...and the other leaders of the Civil Rights Revolution had in mind...
...all in the courses in the Yup'ik, Cherokee, Kiowa, and Maya languages...
...personally offend me...
...The debate about color-coding has been won both intellectually and empirically by its critics and by scrupulous reporters such as James Traub (who showed, in the New York Times Magazine, that the heavens of racial justice didn't fall with the passage of California's Proposition 209, as liberals had predicted they would...
...That is a lie...
...And Lind is right about the term "Latino" being confusing...
...Over 85 per cent of my students are first generation college students, and most are themselves immigrants...
...We have not kept records by race in the Clemente Course, but it is fair to say that the majority of our students have been people of color—fewer in Anchorage or Vancouver or Port Hadlock, Washington...
...Students' aspirations soared beyond parochialism to fulfill America's promise that "We are free not because of what we statically are, but in as far as we are becoming different from what we have been," as John Dewey put it...
...But my epistemological skepticism leads me to ask about this country's underperforming institutions...
...Below we present responses to Lind's column and his reply...
...Lind asked...
...These institutions have become, for better or worse, the gateways to prominence, privilege, wealth, and power in American society...
...Latino/Hispanic has a function far beyond mere demography, though...
...Earlier in this century, a more astringent meritocracy sanctioned by Progressives and the Left—not at Harvard, but at Glazer's own City College and then at Brandeis, at Howard and Tuskegee, atHoly Cross andNotre Dame and at the better state universities—became and remains the real gateway "to prominence, privilege, wealth, and power...
...If it is the former, we must surely learn to consider hypocrisy in a new light...
...Or President Richard M. Nixon cultivating the Latino middle class by expanding access to Small Business Administration loans for minority businesspeople...
...The influence of Africa both culturally and genetically was and remains strong...
...So there really isn't much new to say in defense of racial preferences in journals whose primary purpose is to stimulate debate (and boost sales by offering arguments and perspectives that seem fresh...
...Is he implying that hypocrisy leads to the public defense of justice or vice versa...
...The difference between Lind and his early 20th-century predecessors is that he directs his attacks against a single group or race rather than all "greenhorns...
...When Texas seceded from Mexico in 1836, the Anglo and European settlers who were there outnumbered native Mexican-Texans by threeto-one...
...The Texas State Supreme Court found that funding for Texas schools based on income receipts for the district provided far more money per capita for the children in rich districts...
...more in the inner cities of New York or Philadelphia or Tampa...
...The amendment replaced them with a more equitable system based on uniting families...
...Actually, the 1965 amendment took privileges away from Latinos, who previously were not subj ected to quotas...
...In other words, we are following the trajectory of Athenian history in the development of democracy...
...it is so broad that it includes many who do not need special treatment...
...Lind further says that the "historic injustice" rationale for Latino racial preference, if indeed Latinos are a race, is absurd...
...The group did not, he argued, suffer the injustice of slavery, and making them the beneficiaries of "affirmative action " is merely a case of political pandering to a significant and growing voting bloc...
...Hispanic and Latino are social constructs of politicians like President Nixon, who shrewdly devised his "Hispanic Strategy...
...This conveniently overlooks dramatic differences within the Asian and Latino communities...
...Among the people (mainly between the ages of 17 and 35) we have accepted are a few immigrants (white as well as Latino and black) and many children of immigrants—20 per cent of all the children in the U.S...
...It's as if liberals have chosen guilt over guts because they feel morally uneasy about their own accomplishments in a system they don't wholly defend yet cannot quite bring themselves to oppose...
...Harvard and other élite institutions that can harvest the most accomplished blacks and Hispanics need not fear being "whitened" much by stricter scrutiny of their own racial preferences...
...In The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (1995), he described himself as a "liberal nationalist" and argued that the United States is rapidly losing its identity to the cult of multiculturalism...
...In 1995, when Lind allegedly renounced his conservative past, he was embraced by Leftists...
...Furthermore, Lind is simply being nasty when he insinuates that civil-rights lobbyists oppose bringing gays and lesbians under the Civil Rights Act for fear of abolishing "preferences for blacks and Latinos...
...Despite Lind's belief that Latino and black middle class youths are the sole beneficiaries of affirmative action, he does not appear to have been curious about how they are faring...
...Today, most Latino students continue to go to the state colleges, but tuition now approaches $2,000 a year...
...No one would deny that we have a twotiered civic culture, in which people may be raised and nourished in a distinctive ethnic community but "graduate" proudly into a larger one that guarantees subcultural as well as individual rights...
...They were denied access to education beyond the early grades in such cities as El Paso, Texas...
...In at least some cases that is not true...
...They received their secondary education at cesspools masquerading as schools, separate but hardly equal...
...But it was Hispanic, not Latino, that the Federal government chose...
...That is a notion based on a muddle of self-important, insulated and unexamined misreadings of the country's strengths and prospects...
...We define our pool of possible applicants as those who have been cheated...
...As for Lind's suggestion that "Hispanic," the originally preferred term, was sidelined by U.S...
...Instead of being guided by recent revisionist works like Jeff Long's Duel of Eagles: The Mexican and U.S...
...Lind argues that affluent Latinos and blacks are unfairly using affirmative action to enter élite universities...
...Is this what Martin Luther King Jr...
...I cannot imagine, either, what must have been going through Lind's mind when he said homosexuals suffer because of the liberals' interest in affirmative action for Latinos...
...Any examination of current political discourse, though, clearly shows it is conservatives who not only refuse to discuss class interests but charge those who do with promoting class conflict...
...That Lind lacks objectivity is apparent as well in other examples of his previous work...
...History again: Following friar Bartolomé de las Casas" work known in English as Tears of the Indians, the Spanish crown began importing African slaves to the Indies to relieve the horrors of their treatment of the Indians...
...Hispanic and Latino have much more to do with political preference and geography than the Federal bureaucracy...
...If Lind were to study more recent Texas history, he would know of the school equalization case brought against the state by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund on behalf of the Edgewood School District in San Antonio...
...Beginning around 1996, the thaw ended...
...I would argue that even on the Left, journals lack race consciousness and fail to practice affirmative action...
...Given the nature of American society, however, I still feel it is important to promote the development of a strong Latino middle class, because it is the sector that has a responsibility for the less fortunate and should be in the vanguard of protecting civil liberties...
...Elite rationalizations for this are part of the reason why "the older New Deal politics of hope based on democracy has given way to a new politics of complaint based on diversity," as the historian John Patrick Diggins has observed...
...citizens or legal residents, deserve individual protection from present-day racial discrimination, under Federal antidiscrimination laws, which might be strengthened by criminal penalties...
...What he fails to recognize is that except for Latin Americans, prior to 1965 quotas based on ethnic and racial criteria existed...
...Why have my fellow Ivy League Jewish gatekeepers missed this...
...Census...
...In the Yucatan, and of Riches forthe Poor: The Clemente Course in the Humanities...
...Fight for the Alamo (1990) and Andres Tijerina's Tejanos Under the Mexican Flag, 1821-1836 (1994), he wrote a love poem and took poetic license with the truth...
...In addition to its lack of sociological nuance, Lind's article is short on historical substance...
...Even if I were to become the Grand Wizard of the Texas chapter of the KKK (something that is quite unlikely, inasmuch as David Duke has denounced me in print), it might still be the case that racial preferences for Latino immigrants are unjustified and that the Democratic party supports them for reasons of electoral strategy...
...Lind tells African-Americans they should be upset by Latinos' special preferences...
...That way of looking at race is an age-old view of American society...
...For the past 32 years, I have taught at California State University's Northridge campus...
...But the transition from "disadvantage" to "diversity" that Lind describes so well has gone too far—as moralistic, legalistic Americans are wont to do—and is snuffing out our larger civic idealism in officially entrenched racialist brokering...
...In the face of Lind's tactics it needs to be reiterated that Latinos have historically suffered discrimination," says Acuna...
...So the attempt to pit blacks against Latinos is not only morally reprehensible, it is specious on both genetic and cultural grounds...
...They were enamored of his simplistic class analysis, although it trivialized culture and lacked a critique of capitalism...
...Were he to take a closer look at this country's history, he would find that many Latinos in the vast territory ceded to the United States following the Mexican War immediately became U.S...
...On the national level, too, a failure to understand the effects of race is dividing us...
...I hope he is right in thinking there is still a chance to debate racial preferences in at least some liberal publications...
...Mexicans and Central Americans...
...That number (well known to anyone who reads the New York Times) is of great importance...
...But their motive is not a selfish one...
...By the last, I mean anyone from a family that has lived in poverty for more than one generation—i.e...
...Surely it would be shameful for journals that claim to invigorate public discourse to follow Democratic Party strategists in deciding what to publish on race...
...Writing in the New Republic, he warned: "We cannot be quite so cavalier about the impact on public opinion—black or white—of a radical reduction in the number of black students at the Harvards, the Berkeleys and the Amhersts...
...It is only recently that gringo politicians started showing up at their gatherings...
...If he were, he would find that very few Latino students go to élite schools, and those who do were at the top of their high school classes...
...On this issue Michael Lind's journey "up from conservatism" is not yet complete...
...By that definition Spaniards are Latinos, but inhabitants of the east coast of Central America who don't speak Spanish are not...
...If his current argument against them has some of the flavor of old-style Texas race-baiting, I hope this comes from a failure in tone and a misunderstanding of history rather than from the true feelings of the author...
...Just a few years ago, when I helped Mike to understand something about Latino culture for a novel he was writing, Powertown, and later when my wife and I advised him about accents on Spanish words for his poem, The Alamo: An Epic, he seemed to me not only fair-minded but sympathetic toward Latinos...
...Recently, and perhaps inadvertently, he untied the ribbon around an élite game of defending racial double-standards...
...Should affirmative action be determined by race or class...
...But in my experience and opinion, it isnot mainly electoral politics that has scared editors and writers off the subject...
...Have we traded in the lessons of our own family histories for a new fatalism about blacks' capacities and prospects and for faintheartedness about stimulating them...
...He then manipulates the facts, claiming that liberals avoid the issue of class and concentrate on gender and race...
...White...
...Along with the percentage of Latinos who live in poverty, it proves the need for affirmative action in education, business, housing, and employment...
...Lind is basically right, though, in saying that a brief glasnost has come to an end in many publications, including most of those he mentions...
...But today's Jewish Ivy League gatekeepers—a bit like the otherwise worthy Joe Lieberman when he too-unctuously thanked Al Gore for picking him as his running mate and then went crawling to Maxine Waters for ratification— are insecure enough in their status to want to bend over backwards to legitimate it...
...Foreign students are considered separately...
...They and their ancestors had been in the territory for a long time, some families since the 16th century, preceding the large influx of African slaves...
...In both cases, for example, members of the middle class do much better than their poor counterparts, who often come to the United States from rural or overcrowded urban areas...
...The burden of proof is thus on Lind...
...Of course it does, and often to great benefit of both the student and the society...
...Asian or Pacific Islander...
...By 1990, two-thirds of the Latino residents of Los Angeles County were foreign-born, and half had come to this country after 1980...
...He also took the opportunity to tilt against his chosen windmill, affirmative action...
...Nevertheless, I agree that class should play a determining role in the distribution of preferences...
...A more recent example of his bias is Vietnam: The Necessary War (1999...
...Much the same can be said of "The Diversity Scam...
...I don't think Lind understands this...
...But that isn't flexibility, it's duplicity, not unlike what Lind rightly reports we are peddling to Hispanics as well...
...Sonora is a state in a foreign country...
...In the end, however, the argument about affirmative action based on race versus class is a cruel joke played on democracy...
...Northridge...
...One by one, proponents of race-neutral social andpolitical reforms like Jim Sleeper have ceased to be welcomed by liberal magazines...
...So it is more than a little surprising that Lind now sees the liberal media as being guilty of race-conscious orthodoxy...
...One possible explanation begins with Nathan Glazer, who opened this debate when many of us were still children...
...It has to do with national politics...
...immigrants for generations to come, and a preponderance of Americans are then wholly or partly of Latino descent, that would be fine with me—as long as Latino immigrants and their descendants are treated no differently than white immigrants from Europe, Russia and the Middle East, or immigrants from East and South Asia (who today are excluded from affirmative action programs limited to Latinos and blacks...
...Latinos collectively are a far more effective "interest" than, say, Costa Ricans or Peruvians or even Mexicans...
...In my several published discussions of the subject, I have always applauded the elimination of the pro-European national quota system set up in the 1920s and its replacement by a nonracist system...
...I realize that some blacks and some Latinos are timid about opening another debate on the Civil Rights Act...
...Jim Sleeper, a past contributor to The New Leader whose books include Liberal Racism, will be teaching a course on politics and the media at Yale next spring...
...Interestingly, Lind covertly attacks the 1965 amendment to the Immigration and | Nationality Act...
...He recently won a voting rights case before the United States Supreme Court by a 9 to 0 majority...
...That isn't completely right...
...The injustices suffered by particular Mexican-Americans in 1850 or 1940 might justify compensation to particular old families, but it cannot possibly justify special treatment, at the expense of "non-Hispanic white" American citizens, for Mexican or Costa Rican or Argentine nationals who emigrate voluntarily to the U.S...
...Lind finds diabolical liberal machinations behind the terms, yet they are simply geared to what Madison, in The Federalist, pointed out is the way a democratic society works...
...My point here is that Lind is fighting a straw man...
...It was not until World War ? veterans attended college under the GI Bill that a significant number of Latinos were educated beyond high school...
Vol. 83 • September 2000 • No. 4
