Screw Driver

By Scott Glabe | Friday, June 11, 2004

We are all tied together—white and black Americans—in a single garment of destiny. There cannot be a separate black or white path to power.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.

— Point of order: Talk to the hand. —

The annual candlelight vigil celebrating the life and remembering the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. served as a moving tribute to the slain civil rights leader this past Monday. Students trod across the green en route from Cutter-Shabazz to the Top of the Hop, while the somber strains of Mahalia Jackson's "We Shall Overcome" hung in the air. Yet the rendition left an important question unanswered: Was the song simply memorializing the important struggles of the 1960s or referring to a new battle being fought in the present?

If Dartmouth's choice of a keynote speaker for its three-week remembrance of King is any indication, the administration prefers the latter interpretation. The keynote address, entitled "Integration and Equality in American Society: Realizing the Dream on the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education" assumed that this "realization" must occur through the continued fight for affirmative action in higher education.

This address was delivered by Shanta Driver, who, as national coordinator of United for Equality and Affirmative Action, directed "student legal intervention" in the recently-decided Grutter v. Bollinger case, which upheld the use of qualitative racial preferences at the University of Michigan law school. Since 1995, Driver has also been the National Director of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and to Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN).

As a pure matter of aesthetics, Driver's speech—which began by thanking "Dartmouth University"—was nearly unbearable. She spoke for approximately an hour and a half, two or three words at a time. Driver's voice was piercing and the speech poorly organized, with much of her content obscured by her stilted oratory and imprecise diction. Her constant display of emotion compensated for her dearth of hard facts, as if her depth of feeling might convince the audience.

Poor style alone does not invalidate the content of Driver's speech, which began by describing BAMN's (or CTDAAIATFFEBAMN, if you prefer) 2003 March on Washington. This introduction was followed by five lessons Driver learned while fighting to preserve affirmative action.

The first, meant to illustrate that "things had changed and could change again," was a somewhat rambling history of the civil rights movement. Driver alluded to "radical" Reconstruction to support her contention that segregation was not an inevitable result in the South. She blamed the lack of a civil rights movement post-1876 largely on Booker T. Washington, construing his argument to make the most of segregation by viewing it as an opportunity to establish parallel black enterprise as an acceptance of racism. One wonders if Driver is aware of the irony of this critique, given that she makes a life by practicing race-specific identity politics.

Driver continued her history with lesson two, which posited that affirmative action was the application of mandatory desegregation in education and not the brainchild of "friendly white administrators." She explained that the policy had to be applied nationally—not just in the South—because the paucity of black students at elite law schools represented de facto segregation. Driver noted that women now constitute half of law school students, but she then spoke fondly of the day when this number would reach 70%, seemingly contradicting her own arguments about representation.

Lesson three tried to explain why affirmative action is still necessary. Driver claimed that the policy must continue because black students are at a disadvantage due to inferior educational opportunities, the inherent bias of the LSAT and GPA, and incidents of "micro-aggression." Her core assertion rested on arguments for which she offered little substantive evidence.

Driver said that inferior high school educations inflict added pressure upon minority college students—thereby lowering their GPAs—while the inaccessibility of expensive test preparation courses hindered LSAT scores. These disparities, however, may be more closely correlated to socioeconomic status than to race. Indeed, they cannot be causally linked to race unless one believes in fundamental biological differences, a claim that Driver finds abhorrent. She also contended that the gap between white and minority median LSAT scores at the University of Michigan—170 versus 155—and the accompanying GPA difference did not constitute discrimination. Rather, she argued that LSAT scores and GPAs are not objective measures, but "reflect ways in which racism structures American society." As support, Driver referenced a study that showed a nine-point LSAT gap between students of identical academic backgrounds but with different races. (Incidentally, this only accounts for 60% of the 15-point gap.)

In claiming that the LSAT replaced Jim Crow as a "mechanism for segregation," Driver noted that the test was created by a "eugenicist" and once used to disadvantage Jewish Eastern Europeans. Yet Jews are over-represented on campuses today. Ms. Driver did not address possible flaws in her logic at any point. Instead, she constantly demanded an equality of outcome, not access. In his introduction, President Wright agreed that "results" and not just "access" are Dartmouth's responsibility.

Following point four—enunciated only as "To win we have to a build a New Civil Rights Movement"—Driver pleaded for a new generation of leaders to pick up the mantle and lead the charge for affirmative action. In the course of beseeching the crowd, she relied on a number of ad hominem attacks, even referring to black anti-affirmative crusader Ward Connerly as an "Uncle Tom."

Then question-and-answer time began, and things got more interesting. After a few softballs, TDR Editor Emeritus Alston B. Ramsay inquired whether his opposition to race-based affirmative action made him, as BAMN's website declares, a "racist," "segregationist," or, as Ms. Driver had just exclaimed during her previous answer, a "right-wing asshole." After some hemming and hawing, Driver suggested an answer in the affirmative. "If you're fighting for policy that you know systemically excludes minority students and in fact furthers white privilege, I'll let you answer what that makes you," she responded, without giving any reason why the conditional part of her response was correct.

This exchange illustrates Ms. Driver's greatest failure: Throughout her speech, she failed to contend rationally with opposing arguments, even ones that are logically sound. Afterwards, she fawned over her supporters, but, when confronted with opposition, she failed to engage in the civil discourse that was the cornerstone of Martin Luther King's success.

Screw Driver

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