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Affirmative action crypto-racists
Jewish World Review ^ | Jewish World Review Dec. 30, 2002 | Norah Vincent

Posted on 12/30/2002 5:39:33 AM PST by SJackson

The great tragedy of Trent Lott is not that one man managed to tarnish the entire Republican Party's image on race; after all, only 9% of African Americans voters chose President Bush.

The tragedy is that he managed to sabotage conservative ideas in the process, making the right's principled opposition to affirmative action seem like nothing more than a front for latent bigotry.

This is a monstrous lie.

Conservatives do not oppose affirmative action because they are crypto-racists. They oppose it because they deem affirmative action itself to have become racist and, what's more, unconstitutional in its current form, an outright system of racial quotas that blatantly discriminates not just against whites but also against nonblack, Latino or Native American minorities, violating the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

It was not always so, nor was it intended to be. President Johnson said in 1965: "You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race saying, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe you have been completely fair."

Johnson was right. Blacks, who had only just won the battle for their civil rights, needed and deserved special protection from entrenched and institutionalized racism.

But times have changed. Race is not the stumbling block to progress it once was, in large part because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race.

Attitudes have changed as well. As Lott's recent evisceration by conservatives and liberals alike must surely prove, racist sympathies are anathema in the public sphere, a cause for deep shame and professional censure.

Affirmative action, too, has changed from a necessary corrective measure intended to ensure that blacks had equal opportunities to a superficial, reverse-racist social engineering protocol designed to guarantee minorities places in colleges and companies, often at the expense of more qualified candidates.

The pendulum has swung too far. One form of discrimination has been substituted for another, deferring still further Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of a colorblind America. King's vision is the true guiding force of the conservative agenda on race. Evidence of this can be found in the writings of Ward Connerly, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, some of the clearest thinkers behind the movement to end racial preferences.

It is incumbent upon the new Republican leadership to repair the damage done when self-preservationists betray their principles and give their political opponents ammunition in the process. They must stand up for the integrity of conservative ideals or else sink deservedly in the ignominy that now surrounds them.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Government
KEYWORDS:

1 posted on 12/30/2002 5:39:33 AM PST by SJackson
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To: W.; Cachelot; Yehuda; Alouette; Nix 2; veronica; Catspaw; knighthawk; Optimist; weikel; TopQuark; ..

If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.
2 posted on 12/30/2002 5:46:41 AM PST by SJackson
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To: SJackson
Normally, Miss Vincent and I see eye-to-eye, but she wanders a bit afield here.

Whenever one makes a comparative decision about other people on the basis of their races, one is indulging in racial discrimination. Nearly everyone does it now and then; Thomas Sowell has called it a form of "amateur sociology," which sometimes has a protective function. However, to instantiate racial discrimination in law, making it a positive obligation of private persons, is as evil as anything ever done by any government anywhere. This applies both to the Jim Crow laws of the past and to the system of preferential treatment by race we call "affirmative action."

Moreover, Congress had no Constitutional basis for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, nor for any law that purports to treat with us according to our race, sex, creed, or ethnicity. The 1964 CRA was a blatant violation of Congress's enumerated powers and of the common understanding of freedom of association. It constituted a partial taking of the rights of commercial property, entirely without compensation. It lies at the root of a thousand different sociopolitical troubles we endure today, and should be repealed without replacement.

Dinesh D'Souza and others have noted that the 1964 CRA was an indication of its own irrelevance. It took the energy and good will of whites to pass it, and could not have been enforced without whites' near-uniform cooperation. The systemic discrimination on racial lines that once characterized American life was already a fading memory in 1964. What the CRA did was to institutionalize another pattern of discrimination, which has been shamelessly exploited by racial-identity interest groups ever since.

It is not a matter of "the pendulum [having] swung too far." It's a matter of our having substituted one form of racial discrimination for another, thus turning the law over to racial-identity demagogues eager to use it for their own political advancement.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://www.palaceofreason.com

3 posted on 12/30/2002 6:36:07 AM PST by fporretto
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To: SJackson
bump
4 posted on 12/30/2002 7:11:03 PM PST by GOPJ
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To: SJackson; fporretto
Vincent's argument is internally inconsistent. She argues on behalf of LBJ's 1965 justification of affirmative action, only to then embrace the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was anti-affirmative action. She then sings hymns to MLK, who had jettisoned his belief in colorblindness in favor of affirmative action, before his assassination.

I thought Vincent was a libertarian, but this sounds like cliched, neoconservative casuistry.

FWP, was the 1964 CRA really unconstitutional AS WRITTEN, or only AS INTERPRETED by the USSC? Inquiring minds want to know.

P.S. Best (goyische) New Year's wishes!

5 posted on 12/30/2002 11:38:33 PM PST by mrustow
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