The Washington Times
12 September 1997
Paul Craig Roberts
The Friday of Labor Day weekend, when most Americans were getting ready for the last vacation of the summer, I was in a hotel with thousands of professors at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. I was part of a five-member panel (plus moderator) selected to discuss “Echoes of California’s Proposition 209,” the civil rights initiative that passed last year and prohibits the state and local governments from using racial quotas.
The initiative and the responses to it show how confused civil rights advocates have become. Proposition 209 says it is unlawful to discriminate against, or in favour of, anyone because of race. That used to be what desegregation and integration were all about. When “affirmative action” first began, it meant people would not let racial prejudice interfere with their selection of students and employees on the basis of merit. the best person was to be chosen regardless of race.
Civil rights activists, federal bureaucrats, and federal judges soon turned this on its head. In practice, affirmative action came to mean choosing people because of their race and gender. Affirmative action became a system of preferences that favoured groups designated by federal bureaucrats as “protected minorities.”
Bureaucrats and judges ruled that protected minorities are entitled to their fair share of the slots, and fair share came to be defined as race and gender proportion. Anything less was proof of discrimination. To avoid costly discrimination suits, employers and universities adopted a system of quotas that hired, promoted and admitted “protected minorities” independently of the evidence of merit to which white males were held. After a couple of decades of quotas, equality in the law - the original civil rights goal - has been replaced by privilege in the law. The ultimate irony was the American Civil Liberty Union’s lawsuit to have Proposition 209 ruled unconstitutional because it prohibited racial discrimination.
Now that the courts have permitted Proposition 209 to go into effect in California, the political scientists wanted to know if the nation was in danger from this reaffirmation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution. What did emerge from the discussion is that race and gender have become big businesses. There are a lot of people employed in the business of race and gender balance, and there are a lot of professors living on research grants to foster diversity.
none of these people want to see an end to quotas. The way they defend quotas is to deny that they exist. The Hispanic member of the panel said he had heard anecdotes about quotas but knew of no real evidence. The black member thought quotas merely mitigated oppression rather than conferred preference, and the feminist member maintained that the white male power structure was shouting “quotas” as an epithet against women and racial minorities.
Learnedness has a way of ignoring the facts. the Library of congress has documented 160 federal quota programs, and the award of government contracts for racial reasons has received a great deal of public attention as a result of Supreme Court cases. Even book publishes are cashing in by offering reference works on how to benefit from minority status. “All ethnic minorities and people with disabilities have an advantage in finding money to fund their college education” declares an advertisement for “The minority Student’s Complete Scholarship Book.”
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Asian entrepreneurs have discovered that because of their race, they automatically are considered socially disadvantaged by the government and therefore have a better shot at lucrative government contracts. “They’ve gotten into the system and figured out how to use it,” says Thomas Bettridge, regional administrator of the small Business Administration’s office in New York City, where Asian-Americans’ share of contracts have soared to 64.1 percent from 3.5 percent in the past decade. the news report notes that the Asian entrepreneurs are far better educated and capitalised than whites that are “disadvantaged”, designation is based on racial classification alone.
The Clinton administration is determined to maintain the system of racial preferences despite the opposition of the American people and increasingly the courts. to save quotas, Mr Clinton is trying to install Bill Leann Lee as assistant attorney general for civil rights. Mr Lee is a quota activist who is certain to misuse the Justice Department’s law enforcement powers to defend and extend quotas. Ideologies are committed to their causes and have no trouble sacrificing constitutional principles in order to achieve their ends. if the Senate Republicans confirm Mr Lee in office, they will have helped Mr Clinton strike a blow, against our greatest achievement equality in the law.