The president wants the American people to have an honest talk about race. Fine. Let’s start by candidly admitting that the president is not being honest.
Bill Clinton believes in racial preferences. He thinks that certain minorities deserve favored treatment to promote “diversity” and make up for discrimination in the past. When Californians had to vote on a measure banning such preferences in state government, the President campaigned against it. His administration has also defended set-asides that give favored groups a designated percentage of federal contracts–whether they are the best candidates for the job or not.
Now, a case can be made for establishing and maintaining racial preferences. Clinton doesn’t make it. He disavows any intent to promote quotas, favor the unqualified over the qualified or engage in “reverse discrimination.” What he does instead is defend “affirmative action,” an innocuous-looking vessel that he can fill with whatever content he chooses. In a recent town hall meeting, he praised the Army for “the affirmative action program that produced Colin Powell.”
But what the Army means by the term and what Clinton means are two different things. Clinton employs it as a euphemism for discriminating on the basis of race in favor of certain minority groups. That’s not how affirmative action was originally defined, before it was hijacked by proponents of racial entitlement.
What it meant was taking concrete steps to assure that minority applicants had a full chance to compete with whites. In the early executive orders on the subject, federal contractors were ordered to take steps to bring about “equal employment opportunity,” not equal employment results.
Affirmative action of this kind still makes sense. If you’re Prestige University and want the nation’s best students, you know that talented, able white kids from well-to-do suburbs will apply for admission without being prompted. You also know that a Hispanic teenager of equal potential whose parents came from Mexico may not be aware that the university would be happy to have him and would extend financial aid so his family could afford it.
Instead of passively accepting whatever applications come in, you have to take “affirmative action” to get the word out. You may also have to re-examine your admissions procedures to make sure they aren’t inadvertently depriving the university of outstanding minority students. And you may feel that simple fairness requires you to do everything you can reasonably do to make sure that minorities once underrepresented at your school get the message that they will be given full and fair consideration when they apply.
That is very different from the practices used today in the name of affirmative action, which amount to preferring less-able minority candidates over more able white ones. The University of Texas Law School operated a dual admissions system–one for whites and Asian Americans and another for blacks and Latinos. The University of Michigan is being sued for allegedly doing the same thing. Under its policies, a white student with a certain grade point average and ACT score is automatically rejected, but a black student with identical credentials would almost certainly be admitted.
This sort of approach might be justified on the theory that, given the chance, the best black applicants will perform just as well as whites who have had all the advantages. But the theory doesn’t work in Ann Arbor. African-American students are 2 1/2 times more likely to fail to graduate than whites. Like most universities, Michigan has elected to lower its standards to get the right admissions numbers.
The Army program praised by Clinton, on the other hand, is famous for refusing to boost the number of blacks by demanding less of them–even when that means falling short of its goals for minority representation.
In their 1996 book, “All That We Can Be,” sociologists Charles Moskos and John Sibley Butler write, “Establishing and maintaining standards may cause short-term turmoil, as it did in the Army of the 1970s, but it also means that individuals who attain senior positions are fully qualified. . . . Among people who understand the Army’s promotion policies, blacks promoted to positions of authority bear no stigma.” Unlike the experience at the University of Michigan, black recruits are less likely to wash out of the Army than whites.
As Clinton suggests, the experience of the military provides valuable guidance. It shows that we can bring about undisputed equality of opportunity without assuming that minorities can’t be expected to perform at the same level as whites. But to be perfectly honest, it’s not his critics who need to heed that lesson.
