5 February 2003

Martin Luther King envisioned a world in which every man would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the conduct of their character. And had not his precious life been cut short several decades ago by a smarmy little coward, one wonders what the good doctor would have to say about affirmative action in 21^st Century America.

I had a great deal of respect for Dr. King. And in all his writings and all his speeches, I never once heard him say that we should be a country that discriminates based on racial preferences – because that was the very system he dedicated his adult life to abolishing.

In Dr. King’s day, racial preference was the unspoken law of the land. Harry Truman had only recently integrated the U.S. military. And I can recall south Texas in the early sixties where water fountains and lavatories were often still marked "whites only".

Yes, racial preference has always been an ugly, racist idea.

And it remains so today.

Today, however, the racial preference game is 180 degrees out from where it was 40 years ago. And the U.S. Supreme Court – as weird as it sounds – has yet to decide the question. Before that auspicious body, as I write this, the nation’s highest jurists are struggling with the question of whether or not certain races should receive preference in college admissions. Racial preference remains a de facto consideration in hiring practices within most major corporations in America today, and so it is also with the federal government’s Civil Service hiring program.

The only discernable difference between then and now is that now such preference is legal racism, whereas previously it was simply the "good ol’ boy" system at work.

And, of course, now the preferences are set aside for blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, females – your basic hodgepodge of race, creed, color, and sexual orientation. You know – all those things anti-discrimination laws were specifically designed to prohibit.

In a nutshell, the problem is that there are a finite number of seats at any college or university, and there are more applicants for those seats than there are seats available. For most of our history, acceptance at an American college or university was based solely on the academic merit of the applicants. Except for people of color who were routinely denied a seat, regardless of their otherwise fine academic record.

What, then, was the solution? It was felt that in order to bring blacks up to par with the majority white population racial preferences would be okay – at least for awhile. But that sounded like racism (which it was), and the phrase "reverse discrimination" found its way into our lexicon.

So liberals did what liberals always do when they can’t find any other way around a problem: they changed the language. "Why," they exclaimed, "this isn’t discrimination at all. We’re simply trying to achieve racial diversity."

Yeah. Right.

"Diversity" is now the buzzword to explain any number of preference programs. We are told to believe that diversity is not just good, it is the ultimate good.

For all of human history, the peoples of this world have divided themselves into interest groups. Groups become clans. Sooner or later whole nations identified themselves with their culture.

It isn’t just blacks. The Nazis didn’t like the Jews. The Jews didn’t like the Gentiles. The Germans didn’t like the English. The Catholics didn’t like the Protestants. The French didn’t like anybody.

Then came this experiment called democracy. All of a sudden people from all over the planet were flocking into "the new world", where opportunity abounded for anyone with the courage to grab for a piece of the apple.

Did discrimination simply evaporate? Not at all! New York City, the "melting pot" of civilization, is still divided into factions – as is virtually every city in America. "Gangs of New York" is one of the hottest movies currently on the silver screen.

Yet somehow we survived and are today the greatest nation ever to inhabit the face of the earth. Was this because of our diversity? No! It was because enough of us rose above our differences. We are not strong because of our diversity. We are strong because we overcame diversity in the name of the common good. We were willing to meld our cultures and to succeed, not because of our differences but in spite of them.

You want to hear something really weird? Dr. Ravi Zacharias is a Christian Apologist who says "university" is a word whose root is "unified diversity". Spooky, huh?

No thinking person can argue that there isn’t a need in the black community. The argument, then, descends to differences over the right and proper solution.

Liberals would have us believe that we’re on the right track with this new-age racism. But then liberals – at least for the past five decades – have been in the business of racial division. Their mantra is, "You (blacks) can’t make it without help." How insulting!

Conservatives, on the other hand, believe in the triumph of the human spirit. We believe that the only true limitations any of us have (in this day and age) are the ones we place upon ourselves. "You can make it," we say.

An argument can be made that the black community is damaged by affirmative action far out of proportion to any alleged benefit accruing from it. For instance, the black drop-out rate at most of the more demanding institutions of higher learning (Harvard, Yale, etc.) is wholly out of proportion to the black drop-out rate at, say, the University of Texas at Arlington. The reason for this is that affirmative action programs have placed blacks into an arena in which they are ill prepared to compete.

I believe this is due to the poor condition of inner-city schools, and I believe that is so because the liberal answer lo these many decades has been to throw money at the problem. Never mind that study after study demonstrates that money isn’t the answer so much as where you choose to spend that money.

A few years ago I read a newspaper in a moderately sized American city in which my eye was caught by two articles. Spread across the font page was an article about how the city’s schools were desperately under funded. On an inside page of another section was a photo and small story about a man who plowed his brand new BMW convertible into a building. The man was a senior administrator with the school system – a PhD who hadn’t set foot in a classroom for years, yet could afford an expensive sports car, despite his employer’s alleged lack of funds.

Check out your own local school system. See if you can get a breakdown of positions and salaries. Classroom teachers are woefully underpaid, and many are not properly trained. But many administrators make six-figure salaries. How, exactly, does this benefit the educational process? Is it any wonder that qualified teachers are hard to recruit?

Affirmative action is racist and therefore wrong. It should be rooted out and eliminated wherever it may be found. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer. Work at the elementary level is what’s called for. Stop worrying about little Johnny’s self esteem and start teaching him to read and write. Stop advancing students who are failing. Stop making excuses for failure and start holding people accountable to suffer the natural consequences of their irresponsible behavior. Do this and there will be no need for affirmative action at any level.