Posted on 05/26/2008 9:07:54 PM PDT by jazusamo
Years ago, when Jack Greenberg left the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to become a professor at Columbia University, he announced that he was going to make it a point to hire a black secretary at Columbia.
This would of course make whomever he hired be seen as a token black, rather than as someone selected on the basis of competence.
This reminded me of the first time I went to Milton Friedman's office when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago back in 1960, and I noticed that he had a black secretary. This was four years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and there was no such thing as affirmative action.
It so happened that Milton Friedman had another black secretary decades later, at the Hoover Institution-- and she was respected as one of the best secretaries around.
When I mentioned to someone at the Hoover Institution that I was having a hard time finding a secretary who could handle a tough job in my absence, I was told that I needed someone like Milton Friedman's secretary-- and that there were not many like her.
At no time in all these years did I hear Milton Friedman say, either publicly or privately, that he had a black secretary.
William F. Buckley's wife once mentioned in passing, at dinner in her home, that she had been involved for years in working with a school in Harlem. But I never heard her or Bill Buckley ever say that publicly.
Nor do conservatives who were in the civil rights marches in the South, back when that was dangerous, make that a big deal.
For people on the left, however, blacks are trophies or mascots, and must therefore be put on display. Nowhere is that more true than in politics.
The problem with being a mascot is that you are a symbol of someone else's significance or virtue. The actual well-being of a mascot is not the point.
Liberals all across the country have not hesitated to destroy black neighborhoods in the name of "urban renewal," often replacing working-class neighborhoods with upscale homes and pricey businesses-- neither of which the former residents can afford.
In academia, lower admissions standards for black students is about having them as a visible presence, even if mismatching them with the particular college or university produces high dropout rates.
The black students who don't make it are replaced by others, and when many of them don't make it, there are still more others.
The point is to have black faces on campus, as mascots symbolizing what great people there are running the college or university.
Many, if not most, of the black students who do not make it at big-name, high-pressure institutions are perfectly qualified to succeed at the normal range of colleges and universities.
Most white students would also punch out if admitted to schools for which they don't have the same qualifications as the other students. But nobody needs white mascots.
Various empirical studies have indicated that blacks succeed best at institutions where there is little or no difference between their qualifications and the qualifications of the other students around them.
This is not rocket science but it is amazing how much effort and cleverness have gone into denying the obvious.
A study by Professor Richard Sander of the UCLA law school suggests that there may be fewer black lawyers as a result of "affirmative action" admissions to law schools that are a mismatch for the individuals admitted.
Leaping to the defense of black criminals is another common practice among liberals who need black mascots. Most of the crimes committed by black criminals are committed against other blacks. But, again, the actual well-being of mascots is not the point.
Politicians who use blacks as mascots do not hesitate to throw blacks to the wolves for the benefit of the teachers' unions, the green zealots whose restrictions make housing unaffordable, or people who keep low-price stores like Wal-Mart out of their cities.
Using human beings as mascots is not idealism. It is self-aggrandizement that is ugly in both its concept and its consequences.
Sowell, as usual, nails it. His reward for clear thinking? Being called an “Uncle Tom” by the left...
My best English teacher in junior high...was a Black, handicapped woman.....never, ever gave a thought about her color.....This was about 1963/64......
Sowell, as usual, hits it outta the park!!!
Another great Sowell essay.
Thanks again for the ping jazusamo. I always enjoy reading Dr. Sowell.
He’s always right.
WOW. He is so dead right on! THIS is one of the two men who happen to be black that I would cast my POTUS vote for in a heartbeat! Or sooner! There are some areas where I am not in complete accord with him, but 99.9999% of the time I think him dead on the money!
Bravo.
My father and grandfather had a woman vice president for many years before it became fashionable. She was paid as much as any male vp.
They also implemented the four day work week a long time before it was in vogue.
And my grandfather was one of the first to invest many years ago in a now very successful corporation that was started by a woman.
They didn’t have to be forced to do anything. They found the best people for the job and implemented the best policies for their company.
Obama wants to have a national discussion about race. I say we start with this column.
This succinctly explains the essential truth of Ackbar Hussein and Michelle Insane for liberals. If they could have elected "the" Convicted Liar or "the" Shakedown Artist president that would have been fine. To libs, africanhyphenamericans are interchangeable.
What Sowell doesn't point out, but I'm sure he knows, is that the ahyphena mascots on college campi bring taxpayer dollars in the form of grants & tuition to the college coffers. It isn't important that they succeed, only that they bring the money. This is, in part, why Eastern Michigan University went thru such contortions last year when it was determined that an ahyphena "student" had murdered and sexually assaulted a white coed. Thank God their attempts at coverup didn't succeed and the creep went up for life.
Barry O is the mascot of the Dems. He parrots every bad idea they've ever had...
Wow! Great essay!
I dunno. I went to a collegiate job fair at my company. We interviewed about sixteen kids who were selected from on-campus interviews. The stated goal was to make offers to the two best qualified. Everyone agreed on the best qualified, a kid who wrote a ponytail and sneakers to the interview. There was no clear second place, but several strong candidates.
There was a kid from Tuskeegee Institute who, in my mind was the most personable and least qualified. The pressure to make him an offer was palable. There was a black woman from HR who more or less implied that unless he was manifestly unqualified we had to choose him and an Asian woman middle-level manager who agreed that kids from Tuskeegee were long on personality and short skills, but what the hey, hire them and they might work out.
I was uncomfortable and wouldn't relent. (They never asked me back. I was standing on principle, race played no part in my decision.)
For one thing, the job we were hiring for was systems engineer. Normally, people right out of school make terrible systems engineers. You need to do something specific, e. g., antenna design, signal processing, et al. before you work on the big picture. He might be relegated to a role of little more than typist or technician, get discouraged and never blossom. If we were hiring someone for test engineering or reliability, a more limited role where you more or less learn on the job, I might have been more flexible, but hiring a kid in over his head doesn't do him any favors. But you get to check an affirmative action box. Tom Sowell would understand.
The left treats blacks with no more respect than they do any other “mascot”.
They cheer when they see them, but relegate them to the sidelines when the real players come on the field.
Sowell. National treasure.
It’s liberals like Algore who now use Global Warming as an excuse for denying the poor and afflicted in Africa the opportunities tied to industrialization and mechanization. Heaven forbid that these poor people get electricity to pump and purify water when they are perfectly capable of manually running the pumps while avoiding the “carbon footprint” associated with electricity. Unbelievable.
Agreed...Though Dr. Sowell didn't name Barry, which he hasn't been bashful to do in previous columns, I had the impression after reading this column that Barry was his reason behind it.
Now, how can you tell the color of a person from their resume? I'll omit any racial stereotypical humor.
My wife's brilliant solution to the problem was to keep the resumes that she wanted, and call the rest of the candidates "unqualified". Worked perfectly.
And, curiously enough, the lady she hired...the most qualified person...was African-American. Amazing what people will accomplish when bureaucracy is taken out of the way.
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