NewsFlash! Attention Neo-Conservatives: Martin Luther King Supported Affirmative Action

"You mean this isn't why neoconservatives worship him...?"

Neos have been in the front lines fighting AA for the last 20 years. Actually, a paleoconservative once admitted as much to me. He just thought neos were doing it because AA keeps so many Jews out of the universities.

I think we need to distinguish between the founders of neoconservatism, who know what it is start out with nothing and make it, and their pampered children, whose bellies may not be in the fight.

The political and economic emancipation of Black America becomes more tarnished every year?

Thanks for the history lesson. I wasn't aware that MLK was "the Great Emancipator." (Economic emancipation, too? Wow -- MLK was even greater than what the public schools teach!)

Very funny. Yes, the public schools teach that Blacks are still economically enslaved. That's the logic that is used to support affirmative action today. King did more than "affirmative action" and quotas; his work led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the practical desegregation of countless institutions across America, including "private" institutions such as bus lines and lunch counters. King confronted Jim Crow and won.

But he didn't economically emancipate black Americans; their greatest economic progress preceded the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it didn't follow it.

Would you rather credit others for these deeds or would you prefer to discredit the deeds entirely? If the former, I'd say you're mistaken - there is no better person to canonize (LBJ? JFK?). If the latter, you're just sick.

None of those names played any role in black economic progress -- they hadn't even been elected President and VP yet, respectively. So whom do I give the credit? No particular individual deserves it (certainly not King, who was indifferent to the role of black businessmen in creating black-owned wealth), as opposed to the scores of largely anonymous blacks who between 1940 and 1960, persevered and prevailed. (If you want to cite a black hero in matters of economic emancipation, the article names someone who really deserves credit, long before King -- Booker T. Washington.)

However, that also means giving credit to the many anonymous whites (teachers, employers, etc.) without whom much of that black progress would not have occurred.

And then there is a third group -- the truly forgotten black folks, who risked everything, starting businesses, many of which succeeded (most new businesses fail, regardless of race of their founder). Unfortunately, that entrepreneurial spirit is largely dead in America in the age of AA.

And exactly what do you think the difference is between AAPs, as originally intended, and quotas?

I think there are at least two different answers to that question, based on there having been at least two different groups of supporters of AAPs. One group thought you could actually have non-quota AA. This group was naive. The other group didn't for a minute believe you could have non-quota AA, but cynically paid lip-service to that goal.

What I know best is higher ed. In higher ed in New York City, the wedge issue was remediation. AA supporters insisted you could take the most rigorous undergraduate college in America, the City College of New York, and relax admissions requirements for students who were allegedly just shy of meeting the school's Olympian standards. The AA students were admitted in 1965. But they weren't close to meeting CCNY's admissions standards; they weren't in the same galaxy. In case you think I'm exaggerating, the book Errors & Expectations by Mina Shaughnessy, who ran the CCNY remedial writing program at the time, contains hundreds of examples. (The book is out of print, but I bought it used from half.com.)

In 1969, some of those same students took over buldings at CCNY, demanding that all admissions standards be eliminated; the City University of New York trustees caved in, and the following year made all of CUNY an "open admissions" system. And the CUNY degree -- particularly CCNY's -- was soon worthless.

During the 1990s, I taught remediation at CUNY for several years. While the media spoke of CUNY's remedial classes as functioning on a high school level, some of my college-level students cut to the chase: the remedial classes functioned on a third-grade level. (Note that the students I cited did not attend one of CUNY's "big three" of Baruch, Queens, and Brooklyn colleges, where standards were presumably higher.) And remedial classes were dragging down the standards in "college-level" classes, as remedial students were permitted simultaneously to take remedial and college-level classes.

Under AA, all over America elite universities began routinely accepting students who could not possibly meet their academic standards. And so began the regime of "mismatching," and a vicious circle of black failure that has since spread like ripples from a stone, to graduate schools and to predominantly black public schools.

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