Racial Preference Demagogues

By Jeffrey Hart | Wednesday, January 21, 1998

As the national debate on racial preferences heats up, I have begun keeping a notebook in which I record marvelous flowers of rhetoric, and that notebook is filling up rapidly.

It is a settled rule of demagogy that when you cannot attack the issue head on, because you would lose, you misstate the issue and scream.

Now, the case for racial preferences might be stated as follows: 'In the United States, the law should discriminate in favor of some Americans and against other Americans on the basis of race.'

And one could add a second proposition: 'In the United States, it is good policy for institutions serving the public to discriminate in favor of some Americans and against other Americans on the basis of race.'

The advocates of racial preferences do not dare to come out and support either of those propositions as thus stated. They cannot do so openly because the mind of the nation is now turning slowly but decisively against both.

And so we come to some of my collector's item notebook entries:

Speaking on September 25 in Little Rock, Arkansas, on the 40th anniversary of the integration crisis at Central High School there, President Clinton said, 'The rollback of affirmative action is slamming the door of higher education on a new generation, while those who oppose it have not yet put forward any other alternatives.'

Now, there are so many falsehoods in those few words that it represents a record even for Mr. Clinton.

No doors are being slammed. True enough, the enrollment of black freshmen at the two most prestigious universities in California has dropped since racial preferences have been outlawed. But just because you can't go to the University of California at Berkeley or at Los Angeles does not mean that a door has been slammed in your face. Lots of students do not get admitted to Berkeley or UCLA. At both the undergraduate and graduate levels, there are many fine universities in California.

What is at issue has been called 'fit.' That is, placing a student at a university in accordance with the evidence the applicant presents. Mr. Clinton, in his inflated and demagogic rhetoric, really wants blacks admitted to the prestigious universities even if there is a huge gap between their credentials and those of others competing to get in. He can't possibly come out and say that, so he hollers and screams.

In a recent lead editorial, The New York Times discovered a new kind of racial justice.

The Times is alarmed that in the Supreme Court's upcoming session, the court is likely to bar racial preferences unless a clear prior record of racial discrimination can be shown.

Nervously, the Times ties itself in a semantic pretzel: 'If it does, the Court will be perpetuating inequality in the name of equal treatment.'

In other words, the black applicant, even with much lower scores and so on, must be admitted to Berkeley or UCLA or we are 'perpetuating inequality.' (George Orwell, call your office.)

On October 9, 1997, Bob Herbert, the Times' regular black columnist, echoed that kind of sophistry in a column titled, 'Affirmative Action Rollback.' The bogus assertions are now so commonplace that even the language is getting boring, but I nevertheless must quote Mr. Herbert in my role here as a social scientist:

'What is happening is that in the name of fairness the doors of colleges and professional schools are being slammed in the young and eager and hopeful faces of ethnic minorities.'

Well, under racial preferences, doors were certainly being slammed in the faces of young and eager and hopeful Asians and whites. People such as Mr. Clinton and Mr. Herbert speak as if the only faces that matter are black faces.

Then we have the instructive case of Lino Graglia, professor of law at the University of Texas, whose racial-preference admission policy has been knocked down by a federal court.

In a public exchange, Dr. Graglia permitted the following statement to pass through his lips:

'Black and Mexican-Americans are not academically competitive with whites in selective institutions. It is the result primarily of cultural effects. It seems to be the case that...various studies seem to show... that blacks and Mexicans spend much less time in school. They have a culture that seems not to encourage achievement. Failure is not looked upon with disgrace.'

Now, Dr. Graglia omitted one necessary qualification: some blacks and some Mexican-Americans are competitive with whites in selective institutions. They belong there, and they are the victims of racial preferences, because their achievements are being discredited.

But what Dr. Graglia said is broadly true. If it is not true, why were racial preferences instituted in the first place?

About half of Dr. Graglia's law professor colleagues at the University of Texas are Jews. Does any one doubt that Jewish Americans, as a group, do well at academic work? Between 1945 and 1995, did Jews move up the academic ladder more rapidly than, for example, the Irish or the Italians in the United States? As a group, you bet they did.

Dr. Graglia was instantly denounced by his university's acting president, by the university chancellor, and by the law-school faculty.

There were, of course, the usual demonstrations and bull-horn speeches on the campus. Dr. Graglia apologized for causing trouble, but, after all, could not repudiate the truths he had said.

In the Oct. 20 Nation magazine, Professor Patricia Williams of Columbia Law School labored mightily to insult Graglia.

'Graglia is the darling of a number of powerful conservative think tanks,' Professor Williams wrote. 'He is the mascot for an organization that embodies the new right-wing politics of reversal.'

Professor Williams does not bother to address the substance of what Graglia said.

Professor Williams, indeed, is a vivid proponent of a new legal theory that narrative rather than facts is what may really matter in law.

Thus she has already written that it does not really matter whether Tawana Brawley was raped back in the 1980s or just invented the incident. In either case, Professor Williams holds, Brawley remains the 'victim of some unspeakable crime.' Sure.

Stick around for the rest of the 'debate.' The demagogy is going to be absolutely gorgeous.

Racial Preference Demagogues

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