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- 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.
-
-