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Text File | 1995-03-21 | 5KB | 90 lines

Affirmative Anger

By Suzanne Fields
The Washington Times National Edition 3/20/95


In the splintered diversity of contemporary America, hostility toward
selected groups is more obvious than ever. Multiculturalism,
affirmative action, harassment-happy training sessions encourage
otherwise tolerant people to look for slight, affront and offense.

Sometimes they see what is there, sometimes they exaggerate what they
see, and sometimes they imagine something not there at all. Real
offenses do exist, but group anger propels so many personal
accusations that it's not always so easy to discriminate between
what's fair and what's not.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the white male backlash. The
white male, from his ascendant position in American society, was once
willing to accede to those less powerful than he so long as everyone
played on the same field. But when quotas favored others less
qualified, women's studies classes soon overflowed with an
over-reaching hatred of the white male, and minorities and women got
the breaks at employment of fices, white males stood up and said
"We're not going to take it Iying down." One sly wag (no doubt a
heterosexualfemale) even wrote a bumper sticker: "Save the males."
White men grew tired of being fair game, attacked with all manner of
epithets and slurs by selfanointed, selfrighteous sexual and racial
separatists who judged white men by the color of their skin, not by
the content of their character.

With incredible chutzpah and only a fleeting nod to irony, Barbara
Ehrenreich argues in Time magazine that white men ought to console
themselves with the gains their wives have made: "Numerically
speaking, white women are the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative
action and because white women tend to marry white men, it follows
that white men are, numerically speaking, among the top
beneficiaries, too."

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who is running for the Republican
nomination for president and who has strenuously campaigned for the
feminist vote ever since he alienated the sisters with his
prosecutorial questioning of Anita Hill, talks about "lots of
bigotry" in our country, which he defines as aimed toward
"minorities, women and Jews." But even he finds trouble sustaining
the inclusive stretch that Jews deserve or benefit from affirmative
action. Jews were kept out of universities before the 1950s because
of quotas and most loathe quotas of any kind.

Though it's not usually frontpage news, many blacks and women
similarly loathe and fear affirmative action now that it is a
psychological obstacle on the ladder of opportunity.  Bill Clinton
was not committing political suicide but looking for survival when he
declared he would review federal affirmative-action programs.
"Reviews" are always an effective stall for time.

A number of black intellectuals, liberal and conservative, have done
the academic groundwork for opposing affirmative action. Thomas
Sowell, Shelby Steele, Stephen Carter, Glenn Loury and Stanley Crouch
are not unlike Jewish intellectuals of four decades ago, who followed
the lead of Lionel Trilling, the first tenured Jewish professor of
English at Columbia Universi- ty. Like the Jews, these black
intellectuals can be both insiders and outsiders--to confront
personal ethnic experience and their American experience without
feeling forced to the margin. They don't see themselves as victims,
but as competent enough to compete with the best and the brightest.

In a fascinating article in the new Atlantic Monthly, Robert S.
Boynton describes these black intellectuals: "By explicitly rejecting
victimization as a basis for [their] identity, they expand the
conversation to include a greater spectrum of voices in the debate
over what it means to be an American citizen." The emphasis is on
American commonalities, not ethnic differences.

Walter Williams, a black professor of economics, told administrators
who hired him to teach at George Mason University that he would
accept a professorship only if he were chosen on the basis of his
skills and credentials: No favoritism, no affirmative-action, no
asterisk by his name.

In his book "Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby," Stephen
Carter argues that such racial discrimination is an attempt to buy
"racial justice cheap." Private achievement through economic
opportunity, bearing no relationship to the achiever's race, endures.
Affirmative action only enrages.

Suzanne Fields, a columnist for The Washington Times, is nationally
syndicated.