Here’s a media conspiracy for you: Call it “backlash journalism.”
It is journalism by and for those who are fed up with affirmative action, even in its most modest forms. It has an ax to grind. It ignores the lessons of history. It spotlights horror stories that make affirmative action look bad. It turns a blind eye and deaf ear to any stories that make it look necessary. Above all, it never, ever suggests better alternatives.
One recent assault, a 419-page book titled “Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in America,” by Jared Taylor, might better have been subtitled “The Failure of Affirmative Action to Satisfy Jared Taylor.”
Why, Taylor asks with 1,339 footnotes, do blacks continue in spite of civil-rights reforms and outright preferential treatment to make life miserable for themselves and others through family failures, violent crimes and drug abuse?
Black leaders only add to the problem, says Taylor, when they become “shakedown artists” who encourage excuses, “handouts” and self-pity that generate a “denial of individual responsibility.” Why, Taylor asks, don’t blacks behave more like Asian immigrants in “taking possession of their own lives”?
Actually, most black Americans have done precisely that. More than 60 percent of black Americans live what might commonly be called normal working lives. They are doing their part to take possession of their own lives. It is our nation’s public education and private enterprises that have been slow to respond, particularly when it comes to helping the other 40 percent take possession of their own lives.
But if Taylor, in his vast research, ran across any legitimate complaints by blacks or any other minorities, he doesn’t spend much ink on them in this book.
Nor does Charles Sykes. In his “A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character,” he sees only an epidemic of “victimism” in American culture. It sparks nuisance lawsuits and pesky protests. He cites with no small amount of glee, for example, the female fans who sued a baseball team because it only gave Father’s Day gifts to men. If you want to learn about the many legitimate discrimination suits that receive awards every year, look somewhere else.
Despite omissions, Sykes is beside himself with annoyance over those who insist on affirmative action in spite of America’s new “atmosphere of tolerance.”
Such “victimism,” he says, assumes blacks cannot meet existing standards and ultimately forces all blacks to “deal with the nagging doubt that its policies stigmatize all successful minority individuals.”
I appreciate the compliment, but whenever I hear this familiar litany I always wonder whether white Americans who have gained special treatment in the past ever feel stigmatized by it. Why is it only blacks who are supposed to have “nagging doubts”?
Forbes magazine took a different tack in its Feb. 15 issue with an article headlined “When Quotas Replace Merit, Everybody Suffers.”
As the loaded words in its title suggest, the article presumes without argument that all affirmative-action efforts, no matter how modest, are “quotas” that, accordingly, throw “merit” out the window.
Its bold, unabashed slant fatally undermines its main point, which is that affirmative action costs more money than it is worth. Conspicuously, the article carefully calculates the “costs” of affirmative action without making any similar calculation of its benefits.
Yes, benefits. The article eagerly names a number of major corporations that have gone well beyond the bare minimum efforts that simple government compliance would require, yet curiously the piece omits the reasons why these corporations are going out of their way to do it.
Government compliance doesn’t explain it. Neither do liberal good intentions. Backlash journalists won’t tell you, but the reasons have a lot to do with their bottom line. For one thing, changing demographics have forced forward-thinking companies to abandon their past indifference to women and minorities.
Simply put, there aren’t enough white guys to go around. As the Labor Department’s famous “Workforce 2000” documents, we are moving into a period in which more than half the work force will be women and minorities. Only 10 percent of the projected increase in the work force over the next 10 years will be white males.
Consumer profiles are diversifying, too, so companies are finding that for myriad reasons it pays to have a work force inside that is as diverse as the audience they’re trying to reach.
Backlash journalism has tunnel vision about this. Taylor, for example, mocks USA Today for mandating a rough balance of black and white people in its photo coverage. Yet, is anyone besides Taylor so blind they cannot see the practical public-relations virtue of showing as broad an audience as possible that your newspaper has not forgotten them?
Forward-thinking companies are following the military model. Once it earned a reputation for equal opportunity, it has attracted and maintained its best-educated, best-trained and most racially and gender-integrated force in its history, without use of racial or gender quotas.
I call it “supply-side affirmative action.” Once you earn a reputation for fairness, talented people of all colors and genders will beat a path to your door. They also will stay longer, reducing turnover costs.
A major reason why America has fallen behind overseas competitors in some important areas is that countries like Germany and Japan make maximum use of the talents of all their people. Affirmative action, imperfect as it may be, tries to do the same in a much more diverse society. It does not by any means solve all of our problems of poverty or productivity. But it’s a start.
