The Disgrace Commission
Caldwell, Christopher
The Disgrace Commission Clinton's Race Initiative Aims Mainly to Prop Up Affirmative Action By Christopher Caldwell President Clinton's yearlong initiative on race, launched with much fanfare in...
...We stand," she says, "between the African Americans, who are really at the bottom rung, and the white community, which is at the top rung because they are at the top of the power structure...
...Oh quickly admitted that slavery is "the absolute worst mar on our history as a nation," but her feint towards multiculturalism is in sync with President Clinton's thinking...
...This has given him cover to run a fact-finding commission that deplores facts, a "forum for discussion" in which discussion of ideas is routinely quashed with impatience and even irascibility...
...The Democratic coalition of out groups and have-nots is threatened whenever one of these groups winds up succeeding...
...Other members include Linda Chavez-Thompson, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO (which backs affirmative action...
...The most instructive comparison to the race commission would be the Little Rock economic summit that the president staged shortly after his election in 1992...
...So it is with the race commission...
...There are two Republicans on the board: former president and CEO of Nissan USA Robert Thomas...
...Suzan Johnson Cook, a Bronx Baptist who heads something called the Sujay "audiovisual ministry" and represents the "faith community" on the board...
...In other words, to use the president's terminology, they risk being "brought together" into "one nation...
...But even more important than the uniformity of board members' opinions is the uniformity of their allegiances...
...The idea of "finding answers" to economic problems was a pretext for the real business of the conclave: identifying and cultivating academics and businessmen who would agitate for the president's economic programs...
...Kean is a Republican so complaisant on race issues that he has practically apologized for his partisan affiliation...
...The real purpose of the president's initiative is to assemble a bipartisan, multiracial coalition to defend affirmative action against a legal, legislative, and plebiscitary onslaught...
...The Disgrace Commission Clinton's Race Initiative Aims Mainly to Prop Up Affirmative Action By Christopher Caldwell President Clinton's yearlong initiative on race, launched with much fanfare in his San Diego commencement address last June, hits its midpoint this week...
...and the country's record of assimilating immigrants, which is its greatest triumph...
...Describing the position of Asians (America's wealthiest racial group), Oh fears that they're going to be sacrificed to white aspirations...
...This, of course, is an intentional conflation of two issues: the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, which is the country's greatest shame...
...There was unanimity as well that the government should be more vigilant in collecting data on incidents of racial bias...
...First, growing up in Oklahoma in the '20s and '30s, he was a victim of Jim Crow laws and suffered a range of appalling indignities...
...He opened the September meeting by describing his own memories of segregation in 1950s Little Rock, but then he held up 1990s Fairfax County, Virginia—where the school system has "kids from 182 different countries with over 100 different language groups"—as a model of racial comity...
...Akron for a few reasons: First, it is rich in those race boards and other bodies that the race initiative is eager to foster...
...the Rev...
...What, then, is it for...
...President Clinton's race initiative is further evidence of how central the Democrats think affirmative action is to their future as a political party...
...At the Maryland meeting, Ted Childs, IBM's vice president for global workforce diversity, testified that affirmative action "has served us well...
...That's why I hate the term 'model minority.' It really makes me blanch...
...Robert Thomas remains a defender of Nissan's aggressive "diversity" program...
...For companies like IBM, the administrative and human-resources bureaucratic overhead required by the affirmative-action state is a huge sunk cost and a formidable barrier to entry for smaller competitors...
...Clintonites are concerned that the board has few accomplishments to point to, and this week's Akron event is only one of the steps they are taking to raise its profile...
...Second, at 82, he's in his dotage...
...It just doesn't happen to be the nation the president has in mind...
...It's easy to conclude that the race commission isn't accomplishing anything because it's not meant to...
...The race commission is now playing a role in a range of other events, like the presidential initiative on "hate crimes...
...The board has had only two large public meetings since last summer— one in September in Washington with Bill Clinton himself at the head of the table, one in November in Maryland...
...Already we can discern the template that will shape the race commission's "findings": The commission will argue for its importance based on black-white failures, and declare victory based on immigrant successes...
...Connerly, for example, could contribute to this discussion...
...Even in the midst of the Saddam Hussein confrontation, he devoted much of his speech at his annual ecumenical prayer breakfast to a discussion of the race initiative...
...It's an article of faith among Democrats that the pro-labor policies of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations produced the prosperity that allowed working men to move to the suburbs and buy their own homes—and, alas, become Republicans...
...ran a Pulitzer-winning series on race in 1994...
...The president and his "race advisory board" are marking it with a trip to Akron, Ohio, for a "town hall" on racial issues...
...and former New Jersey governor (now Drew University president) Thomas Kean...
...And the president clearly intends to talk it up...
...She was promptly upbraided by Franklin, who insisted that the oldest of our racial conflicts has pride of place...
...A national race commission that leaves completely unrepresented the majority position on such a central issue as affirmative action can hardly be designed to "articulate the president's vision of a just and unified America," to use Franklin's description...
...The race commission may be hitting its midpoint, but it hasn't really hit its stride...
...Whether black or white, Republican or Democrat, all of them have institutional affiliations that lash them to the racial status quo...
...Franklin took the question as an opportunity to attack Ward Connerly, the leading spokesman for Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative...
...Without affirmative action, large chunks of the Democratic coalition who presume themselves to be its beneficiaries— from the black middle class to professional women to Angela Oh's model minority—could tumble into the same electoral bin as all those suburban white people who care about "values" and chafe against taxes...
...The city has a Coming Together Project that unites 200 race-based organizations, along with an annual "Race Walk," whatever that is...
...The local paper, the Beacon-Journal, Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard...
...Robert Thomas, the most low-profile of the board members, may be the most important, since he is lining up corporate leaders to "support the goals of the initiative...
...In October, White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles called together 60 senior officials from executive-branch agencies to urge that they back the race initiative with public professions of support and policy tie-ins...
...Of course it has...
...But Oh and Franklin agree on a more fundamental point: Whether the race problem is black-white or multi-ethnic, whites are to blame, and affirmative action is the solution...
...and Los Angeles criminal lawyer Angela Oh, who rose to prominence as a spokesperson for the (minuscule) community of Korean liberals in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots...
...All seven witnesses at the Maryland meeting late last month told the board that affirmative action was necessary...
...The people in California that advocate Proposition 209, for example, are not addressing the subject of how to make the university more diverse...
...the liberal Democrat ex-governor of Mississippi William F. Winter...
...It translates into being a human shield...
...There are plans for involving it in housing policy...
...After an early November meeting in College Park, Maryland, to discuss diversity in higher education, Franklin was asked why—at a moment when affirmative action is under fire from the Supreme Court, and our biggest state has deemed affirmative action an unsuitable way of promoting campus diversity—no opponents of affirmative action were invited to testify...
...So hunky-dory is the agreement among board members that you'd almost forget that race is a problem in America...
...The people whom we did invite," Franklin replied, "had something special to say about how to make universities more diverse than they are...
...The board assembled around Franklin is revelatory...
...Consequently I'm not certain what Mr...
...There is unanimity on virtually everything the race commission discusses—a shocking unanimity, given the rhetoric of "deep divisions" and "vexing problems" that gave rise to the race initiative in the first place...
...The only departure from unanimity came with Angela Oh's comment last summer that the board should abandon the black-white paradigm of race conflict...
...Its executive director is Judith Winston, general counsel for the Department of Education, who earlier this year sought to challenge the University of California regents' elimination of affirmative action on grounds that neutral admission requirements have a "disparate impact" on blacks...
...Like patronage, affirmative action is a prize bestowed by politicians, not by markets...
...It's the commission's good fortune to be headed by historian John Hope Franklin, author of the classroom-subsidized bestseller From Slavery to Freedom, who is above reproach in two ways...
...The president's advisers have admitted, too, that it helped that Akron is so white—particularly given suspicions, fired by the immoderate language of some board members, that beating up on whites is the board's raison d'etre...
...Asked in July whether he didn't think his party should be better represented on the board, he warned against consulting the "far Right," but owned that the input of "thoughtful Republicans" would be welcome...
Vol. 3 • December 1997 • No. 13
