by Lee Bockhorn

Having spent my teenage years living in California before I came to the U of M, I took a more than passing interest in the controversy surrounding California Ballot Proposal 209, which proposed to end the use of racial preferences and quotas in, among other things, the awarding of state contracts, employment, and admissions to Californias public universities. On Election Day the people of California approved the measure by a 54% - 46% margin.(Several groups, including the ACLU, have filed lawsuits to prevent its implementation, so the issue will ultimately be decided by the courts.) Since that time there has been a flurry of bitterly angry protests at UC Berkeley and throughout California, and much discussion of the issue here at the U of M, which has included a resolution passed by MSA in support of affirmative action and several columns and letters in a certain other campus newspaper. Given all of the vehement debate over this issue, I would like to make a calm, rational argument against affirmative action in the sincere hope that those on both sides of the debate will make reasoned arguments, instead of resorting to childish behavior like stealing the entire press runs of campus newspapers, as the protesters at Berkeley chose to do.

Certainly race is a touchy subject, and I dont pretend to have all of the answers to Americas great racial divide, but having grown up for my first eleven years in Texas and having attended a California high school where almost half of the students were non-white, I have been forced to confront the subject of race before. I believe that racism, by anyone of any race, is repugnant - a sign of intellectual immaturity and irrational xenophobia. Having said that, I voice my opposition to affirmative action policies because, despite the good and noble intentions behind them, I believe they have failed to truly address the root problems of race in America.

When talking about affirmative action, it is important to assess the current situation of minorities in America over three decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the institution of affirmative action programs. By all accounts, the gap between the races has not improved. A growing black underclass trapped in a prison of drugs, gangs, and lack of economic opportunity remains in our inner cities. Racial tension on our campuses has increased; while minority enrollment has increased, retention/graduation rates and GPAs for blacks in our nations universities has dropped. After even six years in college, only 26 percent of black students graduate.

Todays civil rights leaders - Jesse Jackson and others -- cite these examples as reasons why affirmative action should continue. However, I believe that after thirty years and not much improvement due to affirmative action, we should begin examining why these social policies which were designed to lessen Americas racial differences have instead made them more acute.

A book which I highly recommend to anyone hoping to further understand America's racial dilemma is The Content of Our Character by Shelby Steele, a black English professor at Stanford University. Among the many topics Steele discusses in the book is his own opposition to affirmative action policies. He believes that policies of racial entitlements have more to do with assuaging white guilt and insulating blacks and other minorities from their own self-doubt than truly improving their lives in America. He points to a famous statement made by President Lyndon Johnson at Howard University in 1965: You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, Youre free to compete with the others, and justly believe that you have been fair. On the surface this statement appears reasonable, but upon closer examination one sees that it deflects emphasis from minorities responsibility for personal development and achievement to whites responsibility for redeeming their own guilt. Steele makes his argument forcefully:

The actors in this statement -- You (whites) do not take a person(blacks)... -- are whites; blacks are the passive recipients of white action ... this is really a statement to and about white people, their guilt, their responsibility, and their road to redemption. Not only does it not enunciate a black mission, but it sees blacks only in the dimension of their victimization --hobbled by chains-- and casts them once again in the role of receivers of white beneficence. Nowhere in this utterance does President Johnson show respect for black resilience, or faith in the capacity of blacks to run fast once they get to the starting line. In the minds of those whites who share Johnsons views, minorities are seen as perpetual wards of paternalistic government; as people with so many afflictions and pathologies that the Constitutions core principle -- that rights inhere in individuals, not groups -- must be disregarded for therapeutic purposes.

The greatest problem with policies of racial preferences is that they have created an atmosphere where everyone, particularly on college campuses, practices a politics of difference, where racial, ethnic, or gender difference is made a currency of power which encourages members of groups to see themselves as victims and to use that victim status as a claim on entitlements. This distracts all of us from the what should be our goal -- true equality, which is much more difficult to achieve, as opposed to the sham equality of racial and gender preferences. Proportionate racial representation is not the same as racial development, yet affirmative action policies engender a confusion of these two very different things. As Steele writes, Preferential treatment does not teach skills, or educate, or instill motivation...it rewards (blacks) for being underdogs rather than moving beyond that status -- a misplacement of incentives, that, along with its deepening of our doubt, is more a yoke than a spur.

Recently a columnist in the Daily responded to the argument that affirmative action policies perpetuate viewing people not as individuals, but members of groups, by writing: Affirmative action is not the factor that causes people to be seen as groups -- American society does this by continuing race and gender discrimination. In other words, you started it, so it is only fair and necessary to reciprocate. However, the logic behind this argument for racial and gender preferences is simply wrong. I am not denying that white maleness has not been used as an unfair source of power -- it has, and to a much lesser degree, still is in some instances. But the problem with using white male status as a source of power is that very use of race and gender as a source of entitlement. When women and minorities use their race or gender for the same purpose (the politics of difference), they commit the very same sin; but even worse, they indirectly sanction the very form of behavior that oppressed them in the first place. This eye-for-an-eye rationale perpetuates the emphasis on our differences, rather than moving our nation forward to the ideal of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- a day when everyone will be judged not by the color of their skin (or their gender), but by the content of their character.

The hope of King and all those who fought for integration was that we could overcome our fears and uncertainties about our differences and strive for communal goals -- to make our differences less important than the things we shared. Unfortunately, the current self-appointed leaders of the civil rights movement have perverted those admirable values that the movement once stood for by encouraging women and minorities to use their membership in a group as a source of power, rather than working to improve the conditions necessary for minority and female development, which can only take place one individual at a time. We cannot survive long as a unified society when ones difference, rather than personal achievement, is used as a source of pride and self - worth.

Diversity and pluralism are the buzzwords of choice for those who support the continuation of affirmative action policies based on racial and gender preference. However, diversity is meaningless without a common ground to rest on and enrich, and policies which continue our nations obsession with our differences will only make that common ground more and more elusive to find. The voters of California, as citizens of the most diverse state in the Union, were wise to finally reject such policies, for California more than any other state must begin to build that common ground for our nation to solve its most enduring social dilemma. MR