Slouching Towards Gomorrah (38 page)

To make matters worse, white anger is rising, too, precisely because of the liberal effort to produce equality of results. Affirmative action, in the sense of preferential policies, is really a euphemism for quotas, and it is a perfect prescription for racial animosity. At the beginning of the civil rights movements successes in the 1960s, what we now know as affirmative action was unthinkable. The 1964 Civil Rights Act explicitly forbade all forms of discrimination on the basis of race or sex. Even so, it would not have been enacted without the assurances of its backers, most prominently Hubert Humphrey, that there was no possibility of discrimination against white males. Today, that discrimination is everywhere, from schools and universities to employment, promotion, government benefits, and more.

When affirmative action was first mentioned, the policy was conceived as one of outreach. Governments and businesses would reach out to find qualified minority individuals, or individuals who could quickly become qualified, but who might not know of the opportunities available to them. The policy was enforced, however, by bureaucrats who believed that if significant numbers of minorities were not hired as a result of an outreach program, the employer was not trying. The Supreme Court made matters worse by ruling that any employers test or practice that resulted in racial “imbalance” or had a “disparate impact” on minorities required extensive and often difficult justification. Hiring and promotion by the numbers began. This followed directly from the modern liberal notion that equality of results is natural. Instead of monitoring the good faith efforts made, the bureaucrats demanded results.
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Goals and timetables were insisted upon. An employer who must reach a goal of a certain percentage of minority employees by a stated time is under a quota requirement. Affirmative action was transformed from an outreach program to a quota program, and the Supreme Court, in direct violation of the antidiscrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, approved.

The civil rights organizations changed direction. During the long judicial and legislative battles for anti-discrimination laws, they insisted over and over again that they wanted no special status for minorities. Now they sought special status and preferential treatment. The switch was surely partly due to the fact that blacks were not advancing as rapidly as these organizations had expected,
so that something in addition to non-discrimination seemed required. But there were surely also individual and organizational imperatives. If individuals and organizations had been working full time for anti-discrimination laws for decades and decades and finally achieved those goals, what were they to do? Could the individuals concede that there was nothing more to do and seek other employment? Could the organizations admit that they had no further purpose and disband? Humans rarely act that way. Affirmative action, or preferences, provided a new purpose. The step was the easier to take because, being modern liberals, these folks found equality of results an even more congenial goal than equality of opportunity.

All of this was done mindlessly and without public debate. As happens all too frequently in the United States today, courts and bureaucrats made the important and sensitive decisions about public policy. The public was, at best, reduced to the status of onlookers. Nobody asked whether blacks should be the only group to benefit from affirmative action, how long the preferences would last, or what the effects would be on race relations. What happened in the United States is what has happened around the world where affirmative action has been tried. Thomas Sowell, a conservative black intellectual, made an international study of government-mandated preferences for government-designated groups and found common patterns:

The United States is no exception to the international experience. Preferential policies here were put forward as temporary measures, but Lyndon Johnson gave the game away when he announced that in “the next and more profound stage of civil rights” the object would be “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.“
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We have been at affirmative action for over two decades now and, as could have been predicted, such equality of result as has been achieved is artificial. Proportional representation in various fields has been reached by diktat, by depriving people of freedom, which is what a policy of racial preference does.

We have expanded the area of tyranny by expanding the number of groups entitled to preferences. We now extend affirmative action to women, Hispanics, Asians, Aleuts, Pacific islanders, and American Indians. People who have suffered no discrimination whatever are entitled to preferences. As Terry Eastland points out, heavy immigration has brought large numbers of Hispanics and Asians who are at once entitled to preferences though they have suffered no wrong at the hands of this society.
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A wealthy Spanish businessman who has just arrived in this country is entitled to preference in, say, getting a government contract, though a poor Frenchman would be entitled to no advantage whatever. Altogether, 60 percent or more of the population of the United States are entitled to preferential treatment. Only white males are not (unless they happen to be Hispanic) and only white males may be discriminated against.

It is inevitable that once the favoritism game begins, other groups will demand their share of its benefits. Those demands are difficult to resist precisely because there is no respectable rationale for preferential policies. Thus, there is no criterion that can be stated to explain why other groups are not entitled to favoritism. It is necessary, of course, that the group demanding advantages be able to articulate some way in which they have been unfairly treated, but that is not at all difficult. Simple lack of proportionate representation will do.

Here, as elsewhere, the scope of preferences keeps expanding. There are now 160 federal government preferences alone.
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The number of state and municipal preferential programs is probably countless, and the private sector also practices affirmative action. Universities routinely practice discrimination in admitting students and hiring faculty. I know young lawyers looking for academic positions who suffer the very considerable handicap of being white males. One of them was told by a law school faculty member on the appointments committee that the school was hiring but had only one place for a white male. At another school, the interviewer looked over the young mans resume and said, “This is very good. You have had two important clerkships, with Bork and then Scalia, and in the Solicitor General’s Office you have argued cases in the Supreme Court. You have accomplished a great deal in a short time.” He paused and then said thoughtfully, without a trace of irony, “Of course, it’s not as good as being black.“

Affirmative action is being pressed into areas where it will prove positively dangerous. “The application of the principles of affirmative action to medical education is significant, implying, as it does, that their proponents’ ideological commitment makes them willing to risk the graduation of incompetent physicians.“
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The desire to graduate as many minority students as possible, who are often admitted with inadequate qualifications, creates a strong motivation for the administration to lower standards.

Either voluntarily or under pressure from the government, a large majority of major corporations engage in affirmative action. Some make managers’ bonuses dependent on the preferential hiring of minorities and women. Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton list seemingly endless programs of this sort.
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Mortgage lending criteria must not have an adverse disparate impact on minorities; even small businesses are harassed to achieve proportional representation of women and minorities in their work forces; minority preferences govern the allocation of government contracts, broadcast licenses, and scientific research grants; disciplining of federal government workers must be racially proportional; the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board measures merit in part by a civil servant’s support for affirmative action; accreditation agencies take into account the proportion of minorities on the
faculty and in the graduating classes of the schools they oversee.

Group polarization has increased. One has only to look into university dining halls to see the various races and ethnic groups clumped together with their own kind. Racial antagonisms on campuses are vastly worse than they were thirty years ago, and students agree that preferential admissions policies are the cause. Meanwhile, in employment as in academic admissions, people are changing the ethnic backgrounds they claim to ones more likely to bring benefits.

This has led to the systematic denigration of white, heterosexual males. Roberts and Stratton compare the rampant anti-Semitism among the educated classes even in pre-Hitler Germany to the assault in American universities on white males: “Like German anti-Semitism, the demonization of the white male is an
intellectual
movement.“
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And so it is. The most ardent advocates for affirmative action, and the most heated charges against white males are to be found in our universities. Nor is it hard to see why. In order to prefer certain groups it is necessary to harm others. Since the injustice of what is done is obvious, it is, unfortunately, human nature to justify it by imputing grave fault to the people harmed. For radical egalitarians who dislike the traditional culture of the West, moreover, it makes sense to attack those historically identified with that culture, white males. White females are exempt because it is politically astute to identify them as victims and so add to the coalition against white males, and because the powerful feminist movement is also hostile to Western culture. Besides, feminists make far more formidable adversaries than do white males.

Starting the policy of preferential treatment was a serious mistake. Continuing it would be a disaster. There is no respectable rationale for continuation. The most frequently heard argument is the claim that active discrimination against minorities and women continues in this country. For reasons to be discussed, it is extremely doubtful that such discrimination is at all common. Let us assume, however, that it is. The attempted justification fails, nonetheless. There are laws upon laws forbidding discrimination in employment and promotion, in housing, in voting, in access to places of public accommodation, in lending, and much more. We have the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, 1964, 1968, and 1991; we have the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, 1975, and 1982. There is
agency upon agency devoted to finding and ending discrimination: the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office, civil rights sections in various government agencies, as well as state and municipal laws and enforcement agencies. There are thousands of such agencies, and more than 100,000 government lawyers, investigators, and agents who spend hundreds of millions of dollars enforcing the laws and regulations. If that were not enough, there are laws providing for private lawsuits and an army of private attorneys bringing discrimination claims. If discrimination is provable, we have far more than adequate means of dealing with it.

This means that affirmative action is generally applied to a pool of minorities who have suffered no discernible discrimination. Imagine a group of one hundred Hispanic men, ten of whom are to be admitted to Stanford under a policy of preference. In order to imagine that discrimination is being cured, it is necessary to suppose that, by a rare coincidence, preference is given to an individual who has actually suffered discrimination but cannot prove it, and may not even suspect it. If there are any victims of undetected discrimination in the pool of one hundred—suppose that there are ten—the likelihood is that none of them will receive preferential admission to Stanford or, at best, one or two will. Statistically, therefore, any person who has been the victim of unprovable discrimination will usually go without a remedy, while a person who has not been discriminated against will be given an undeserved benefit. It is difficult to see how a windfall for one cures an unsuspected injustice to the other. Affirmative action is simply irrelevant to discrimination.

This point is not met by shifting the accusation to one of institutional or structural racism and sexism. Not only does it raise the problem of the pool, just discussed, but structural charges are merely silly, a way of insisting that there must be discrimination although no one can see it. Structural racism or sexism would have to manifest itself in a series of individual acts of discrimination. That equally or better qualified blacks, Hispanics, or women were denied jobs or promotions in favor of white males would be provable and anti-discrimination laws and agencies would come
into operation. Structural theories are simply an admission that actual discrimination cannot be shown, coupled with an unsupported assertion that it must nevertheless be pervasive. Only modern liberals and people with a vested interest in discovering racism would advance such an empty theory.