Jesse Jackson makes an odd bagman, but that’s the role he assigned himself in the recent Piscataway imbroglio.
Last week, Jackson helped deliver more than $300,000 to a Piscataway, N.J., school district so that it could pay off a white teacher who had been fired from her job as part of an affirmative-action plan. The teacher, Sharon Taxman, had sued the district, twice winning in court, and was about to have her case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But Jesse Jackson and other so-called civil-rights leaders couldn’t let the case be judged on its merits. So, at the 11th hour, they raised enough money to buy Taxman’s cooperation. She got nearly a half-million dollars from the school district and her new civil-rights benefactors in return for dropping her suit. And Jackson & Co. dodged another, perhaps lethal, bullet aimed at the heart of racial preferences.
This sort of high-stakes legerdemain won’t save racial preferences for long, however. The Supreme Court is bound to take up the issue again soon enough, and the likelihood is the next case will be even better suited to striking down preferences.
For all the claims of affirmative-action advocates to the contrary, the Piscataway case was never opponents’ best shot. Taxman may have lost her job to a black teacher because of affirmative action, but unlike the situation in most such cases, she could not claim to be better qualified or to have more seniority than the black teacher who received preferential treatment.
Taxman and her black colleague were hired by the school district on the same day and had nearly identical credentials and job performance evaluations. Indeed, the Piscataway school district could have saved itself a lot of trouble and still had a 50-50 chance of achieving its desired result if it had simply tossed a coin to decide which teacher should retain her job in the reduction in force.
If affirmative action always–or even usually–boiled down to a choice between two equally qualified candidates, one of whom was white and the other black or Hispanic, I suspect most people would be willing to give the edge most of the time to the minority candidate. I know I would, especially in situations where the minority candidate had overcome social or economic hardship or disadvantage.
But that’s not how most affirmative-action programs work, whether in picking students for admission to colleges or universities, hiring or promoting employees, or selecting contractors for government-funded projects.
What is called affirmative action today is a system of mandatory and voluntary preferences that give advantages to demonstrably less-qualified black and Hispanic candidates over better-qualified whites and, in some instances, Asians.
In university and law school admissions, this can mean high-achieving white or Asian students are passed over in favor of students with mediocre to relatively poor performances.
In police and fire departments, it can mean white male candidates must wait years to be hired or promoted while women and minorities receive favored treatment.
In public contracting, it can mean low-bidding firms headed by whites–many of whom are small businessmen without college degrees–lose out to higher-bidding firms sometimes headed by black or Hispanic millionaires. And it can mean white contractors can’t even compete for some jobs.
There are lots of bona fide victims of this new kind of racism. And there are too many for Jesse Jackson and his co-conspirators to buy off one by one. Wouldn’t it make more sense to take all that money and invest it in programs to help black and Hispanic youngsters to compete on their own merits so they wouldn’t have to rely on the morally bankrupt policies promoted in the name of affirmative action?
It’s a sad day when the legacy of the civil-rights movement can be squandered by those who believe justice can be bought and sold. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream has turned into a nightmare.
