CORRESPONDENCE
Nasty Nuances AND CCRI In "The Nuance Excuse" (Feb. 3), Thomas Sowell chides me, a longtime critic of racial preferences, for being "missing in action" during last year's campaign for the...
...To say that there comes a time for decision is not to say that all the world consists of good guys and bad guys or that all 24 hours of the day are high noon...
...But the world isn't like High Noon...
...Nor are they all twilight...
...Am I to understand that there is no room for such thinking in the conservative movement...
...The failure to understand this underlies innumerable sad "unintended consequences" in our social policies and even more tragic consequences in those in countries where government has been given more power...
...In the limited range of cases where this is so, efforts to ensure a modest degree of racial diversity in a public workforce may be justified...
...I wonder if Thomas Sowell is aware that, in revealing his libertarian sentiments, he frequently emerges as an ideologue who seems determined to force everything into a preconceived procrustean bed...
...Nor does every one of them always result in reverse discrimination...
...The number of Protestants (most are Pentecostal) has grown rapidly in recent decades to about 50 million, or more than 10 percent of Latin America's total, and there is a presumption, but so far only anecdotal evidence, that Protestants are more committed to values like education, the work ethic, and community than Catholics...
...Glenn Loury Boston, MA Thomas Sowell responds: Glenn Loury's letter fails to address the central point in my criticism of those who talk about "nuances"—we can make our choices only among the alternatives actually available, no matter how many more options we wish were available...
...3) has a problem with the pressure directed at Benjamin Netanyahu's government—including the letter Fairbanks signed—he should make that case...
...In the end, you are either going to have individual rights, with people all playing by the same rules and being judged by the same standards, or you are going to have group rights with preferences and quotas...
...The geographic, social, and cultural isolation of the black underclass is intimately connected to our nation's racially troubled history...
...It's High Noon (his term) from start to finish...
...Worrying about how one's image "emerges," to use Bunzel's term, has apparently become more important to some than the rights and wrongs—or the consequences for American society of continuing such polarizing policies...
...But Sowell and the supporters of Proposition 209 say that race should never be taken into account—not for any reason...
...There are many types of affirmative action, not all of them bad...
...Bibi's Pen Pals are Swell If Bill Gertz ("Bibi's Pen Pals," Feb...
...An overriding issue is whether a Western Hemisphere community, comparable to the European Union, is feasible given the cultural divide that separates Latin America from the United States and Canada...
...Hyperbolic Backwardness Elliott Abrams ("Why are the Latins 'Backward'?," Feb...
...Clear-cut solutions like gunning down the bad guys are hard to come by for most of us...
...I am uncomfortable with absolutes...
...Abrams overstates the significance I attach to Protestantism as an engine of cultural change in contemporary Latin America...
...It is true, for example, that Brazil has clearly benefited from large numbers of German (not Swiss), Italian, and Japanese immigrants...
...Period...
...It's as if he's forgotten the conservative virtues of prudence and pragmatism...
...A recent poll showed that most professors are opposed to racial preferences in college admissions, but how many have you heard say it out loud...
...Abrams ignores that issue, one to which narcotics-trafficking and immigration are indeed relevant...
...Yet, serious enforcement of anti-discrimination laws must inevitably lead to recruitment and outreach efforts undertaken with the intent of attracting black applicants (who are then judged in a race-neutral manner...
...Here, then, are the basic elements of my "nuanced" position on affirmative action...
...3) misses a central theme in his review of my book, The Pan-American Dream...
...Sowell says my call for an affirmative action that falls between "None at all" and "Too much" is the equivalent of removing the 65 MPH signs...
...It may be "nuanced nonsense" to Sowell, but I don't think affirmative action is just a matter of Yes or No...
...What he doesn't tell us is when that "sometimes" is—which is the sort of question we are debating...
...I am sorry for the vicious, horrible smear that may have suggested he was a Protestant or a Republican...
...And I bet other signatories of the letter—among them James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Zbigniew Brzezinski—will be surprised to find that they are agents for the Palestinian Authority, a charge Gertz implies but nowhere proves...
...When we are talking about laws and government, we are not talking about nuances...
...So long as Professor Loury uses soothing, sloppy words like "diversity" and "social justice," as he did in his New Republic article, he leaves an escape hatch as wide as a six-lane highway, reducing the "repeal" of preferences and quotas to empty verbiage...
...Affirmative action's long history of deception and surreptitious double standards, including the "race norm-ing" of test scores, makes it painfully clear that you are either going to ban group preferences and quotas in unmistakable terms or you are just wasting your time...
...But, as recent alarming data about growing Hispanic poverty in the United States underscore, heavy immigration into the United States from Latin America makes it vastly more difficult to solve the problems of poor citizens, most of whom are black and Hispanic...
...3), Thomas Sowell chides me, a longtime critic of racial preferences, for being "missing in action" during last year's campaign for the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI...
...I want an affirmative action that is bounded because it recognizes what is too much and what is too little...
...2. CCRI apparently outlaws the use of race as an explicit factor in the recruitment of public employees...
...Bunzel may congratulate himself on being more-nuanced-than-thou in what he prefers but, while you may prefer anything you wish, you cannot do anything you wish—certainly not through crude instruments like laws and government...
...Those of us whose careers have been in academia have seen it all too often...
...But preferences can and should be rolled back without a constitutional mandate that state actions be, in every instance, purely colorblind...
...But some secularized Catholic societies, e.g., northern Italy, Spain, and Quebec, have achieved political pluralism and prosperity in this century, and I don't consider the Protestantization of Latin America indispensable to its progress...
...If he wants to run with the rabbits and hunt with the hounds, then it is up to the rabbits and the hounds as to what they want to do...
...Lawrence E. Harrison Cambridge, MA Elliott Abrams responds: Considering that Harrison has now written essentially the same book three times (Underdevelopment Is a State Of Mind, Who Prospers, and now The Pan-American Dream), I thought the review about which he complains pretty friendly...
...When Loury opts for government monitoring of employers' racial statistics and for laws and policies based on gaps between groups, then he has bought the key assumptions behind affirmative action...
...These men obviously had Israel's long-term survival very much in mind when they urged Netanyahu to seek peace...
...Moreover, 33 years after the Civil Rights Act, and with blacks widely represented at many levels in innumerable industries, the "outreach" argument is really reaching...
...Thomas Sowell seems to believe the world is divided up into "good guys" and "bad guys...
...Instead he impugns Fairbanks without clear grounds...
...He says Fairbanks worked on Iraq's behalf before 1990...
...Loury's closing question is a curious one, since I have never been a gatekeeper for any movement...
...Sowell misrepresents my reasons, spelled out at length in a New Republic article, for adopting this inconveniently "nuanced" position...
...I disagree...
...government and dozens of other respected people in Washington...
...Michael J. Mazarr Arlington, VA...
...Abrams may leave the impression that I am an unalloyed immigration enthusiast...
...Far from indicting Fairbanks with this essay, Gertz has indicted himself with shallow journalism...
...Good and bad are often mixed...
...I see nothing wrong in principle with saying that quotas are forbidden and also believing that some consideration of race is permissible...
...I am Jewish and a lifelong Democrat...
...One bizarre consequence of Abrams's hyperbole is the strange bedfellow he has assigned me: Jerry Falwell...
...Sowell thinks that if the factors holding back poor blacks are "internal" instead of "external," then there is no appropriate role for government...
...3. While extreme black poverty does not justify preferences, it does expose as morally inadequate the "race is irrelevant" complacency of the colorblind absolutists...
...That employers (public or private) with unusually few black workers should be asked to document their efforts to attract blacks is but a prudent and necessary concomitant of a public commitment to non-discrimination...
...But so did the U.S...
...CCRI denies to public agencies the flexibility needed to handle such cases...
...The caricatures of my position in Bunzel's letter go beyond even the usual generous allowance for hyperbole in polemics...
...JOHN H. BUNZEL Stanford, CA Thomas sowell responds: Over the years, the phrase "affirmative action" has acquired so many different and contradictory meanings that this term is mentioned nowhere in the California Civil Rights Initiative, rather than have the discussion of preferences and quotas get bogged down in the kinds of obfuscations over this phrase exemplified by John Bunzel's letter...
...Deploring the consequences that follow is an exercise in inconsistency or cosmetics...
...Talk about nonsense...
...Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with wording virtually identical to that of the California Civil Rights Initiative, has not presented the insuperable problems for the police that Loury suggests, I see no reason to imagine that CCRI will...
...v. Peters, et al...
...Even a conservative like Richard John Neuhaus, who favors a colorblind society, understands that "sometimes taking race into account is appropriate and necessary...
...The issue is one of substance, not semantics: If you are not going to ban group preferences and quotas outright, then they are going to continue sub rosa just as they arose sub rosa in the first place...
...To set the record straight, I list them briefly below: 1. The effective discharge of some government functions requires that cognizance be taken of citizens' racial identities (for example, the making of undercover police assignments...
...So held the conservative federal judge Richard Posner in a 1996 opinion about the hiring of prison guards, Wittmer, et al...
...As for the movie High Noon, when a work of fiction becomes an enduring classic symbol, it is often because of something important that it tells us about the world of reality, including people who are not there when crunch time comes...
...I plead "guilty" to the charge of having been ambivalent about the colorblind absolutism of CCRI...
...I am especially troubled by Sowell's intolerance for contingency and approximation...
...Yet, the underlying logic of CCRI denies that government has any responsibility to reduce the gap in development between black Americans and others in society...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 22
