Delta Blues

By Benjamin Patch | Wednesday, January 21, 1998

Affirmative action is rather neat in theory, and, in most of America, it seems that way in practice too. A few slots are set obliquely aside for minorities, and the rest of the world continues on, consciences assauged.

But, though it has been billed as a solution to America's chronic racial strife, affirmative action has left an ugly scar on the underbelly of American culture. It subjugates merit and ability, replacing them with a mysterious subterfuge of stereotypes, animosity, and calculated prejudice.

I spent the last summer working for a newspaper in the Mississippi Delta, in the moderately sized town of Clarksdale. It was over two-thirds black, with an unfortunately lengthy history of poverty—on the outskirts of town lies the third poorest neighbor hood in America. If affirmative action was ever supposed to work, it should be here.

But, in what should be a great test, affirmative action has fallen flat on its face. Unfortunately, if you are young, black, and talented in the Mississippi Delta, you pack your bags and head north to Memphis, Chicago, Washington, D.C., or New York. Lured by the prospect of better jobs and higher pay in large cities, most talented black leaders are quickly drawn away from poverty and depravity. Clarksdale's talented whites, with roots sealed by tradition, comparative wealth and prospect, are more content to return home. They send their children to private school, whose proliferation is one of the predictable responses to integration.

The town's horrid public education system means that the few who 'make it,' to college and extended education, leave on the first available flight so that their children will escape the cycle of terminal poverty and woeful schooling that plagued their generation.

But Clarksdale's town government doesn't take stock of the situation, doesn't hire as its leaders the private school graduates who have gone on to College and then returned home. Instead, in the noble names of proportionnal representation and affirmative action, it selects a nearly exclusively black civil service; these are the blacks, remember, who couldn't get out.

Considerable hilarity ensues.

Throughout the summer, I sat through endless press conference after press conference, listening to government employees who made time and again the salary of a reporter stumble through barely, if at all, literate speeches. Government press releases often looked like the work of flippant grade-schoolers.

The whole situation has made integration extremely hard on the private sector. When the newspaper looked desperately to hire a qualified black secretary or reporter, no one wanted the job—the government's deal is a lot more lucrative. It's a whole new segregation between the white and black middle class—one works for private industry, the other for a government agency. I remember a picture of a local sorority for black women in finance and accounting— every single member worked for a government agency.

The original goal of affirmative action was to further integrate America in the office, and, presumably, society as a whole.

But it has only succeded in driving the wedge deeper between the two, by casting out merit in favor of vague, hastily constructed notions of social justice that would rather squeeze a worker or applicant into a narrow, predefined category instead of a deeper, individual examination.

But not everyone is content with this malaise. Ward Connerly, the California regent who pushed through Proposition 209 (the California Civil Rights Initiative), has weathered a barrage of slurs from his critics, from black leaders to The New York Times, who brand him, either implicitly or explicitly, an 'Uncle Tom' or 'sellout.'

Yet, the striking truth about his 'controversial' 209 is that voters were simply reaffirming a very minimally reworked draft of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, a law that was supposedly near canonical these days.

And while Connerly is batted around editorial pages across the country for staying true to the great spirit of the Civil Rights movement, a lot of the voices from the 1960s were eerily silent. Indeed, many black politicians and leaders saw fit to recline on the sidelines and take potshots for their own political capital.

It is still uncertain whether affirmative action was necessary to integrate America thirty-five years ago, but today many politicians are still unwilling to question its validity. To them, it is an unassailable tool of political leverage.

To the reporters and, much more poignantly. the people of Clarksdale, Mississippi, the perils of affirmative action are much more real. It has provided them with a frighteningly incompetant civil service, while only reinforcing false stereotypes about one another.

Delta Blues

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