Читать книгу Progressive Racism - David Horowitz - Страница 15
ОглавлениеAlternative to Affirmative Action
President Clinton’s much-awaited statement on race has come and gone and, as usual with this president, no one on either side of the argument is convinced that anything was said at all. Perhaps this reveals something about the general state of the nation—our inability to speak clearly, unambiguously and directly about the issue of race.
The president chose a University of California campus in San Diego as the site for his pronouncement in order to focus attention on California’s ban on racial preferences and what he described as the drop in enrollment rates resulting from that ban. According to university officials, African-American admissions to UC’s Boalt Hall law school, one of the most prestigious in the nation, dropped by 85 percent as a result of the new policy. But African-American enrollment throughout the whole University of California system actually increased. What the president chose not to discuss was the way in which the results at an elite institution like Boalt completely undermine the defenders of the affirmative action/racial preference policies that are now—thanks to Proposition 209—illegal in California. During the arguments over the California Civil Rights Initiative, opponents had claimed that race was only one of many factors and an insignificant one at best in awarding affirmative action slots at the university. Now it is clear that affirmative action is a system of racial preferences and racial discrimination and nothing more.
The president calls for a conversation about race, but what he really wants is a conversation about racism, and about white racism exclusively. His response to California’s rejection of racial preferences is that we must not “re-segregate” higher education. As though re-segregation was not already an accomplished agenda of the left; as though black separatists and their liberal allies were not the leaders of the movement; as though there were not separate black dorms and black graduations sanctioned by progressive university administrators; as though there were not special orientations for incoming black freshmen and expensive invitations to black racists like Khalid Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, Kwame Ture, Professor Griff, Sister Souljah, Leonard Jeffries, Tony Martin, Frances Welsing, etc., etc., to speak before black student unions and Pan African student associations and incite racial hatred against whites.
Lacking any interest in addressing the real problems of racial division in America, what the president did was to offer a challenge to those of us who remain faithful to the vision of the civil rights movement and reject government discrimination. To those who oppose affirmative action, the president said, “I’ll ask you to come up with an alternative. I would embrace it if I could find a better way.”
There is such an alternative. It’s called study. Study hard. If you want to get into an elite law school, that’s what you need to do. The alternative to rigging the standards, Mr. President, is to teach one’s children the value of an education in the first place. It is to stick around after conception to help children enter a difficult and demanding world. It is to give up the blame game and look at your own responsibility for where you are. It is to tell your children that getting educated is not “thinking white.” It’s thinking.
How is it helpful to African-Americans to tell them that it is not their failure when they do not meet standards that others do, but the fault of white racists who want to keep them down? This is a lie and everybody knows it. African-Americans are failing because they are not prepared by their families and their culture to succeed. If race or poverty were real concerns of the University of California, its administrators would not be excluding Vietnamese and Cambodian children (who do meet the standards) in order to make room for African-American and Hispanic children (who do not).
It’s time for a president of the United States to stand up and be proud of the fact that in America minorities are no longer barred because of race from America’s best universities, or indeed from any American university. Racial handwringing by guilt-ridden whites does not help the disadvantaged. On the contrary, it is an obstacle to their progress. It contributes to what is now a massive denial of the problems that minority communities create for themselves. And by contributing to the delusion that others who have been successful control the destinies of those who are not, it takes from them the power to change their fate.
June 23, 1997, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24401; http://www.salon.com/1997/06/23/horowitz970623/.
