Page actually defends the beleaguered affirmative action programs at the University of California with the argument that enrollment levels of blacks are expected to drop when affirmative action is ended. Would Page have us believe that the admissions departments of liberal universities like the University of California are infested with angry whites conspiring to keep black enrollment down? Or with built-in “institutional biases” that exclude blacks? The reality is that since 1957, when the California regents adopted their famous “Master Plan,” every single California resident, regardless of race, who graduates from high school with certain achievements has been guaranteed a place in the university system. Matriculation from various points in the system, starting with community and junior colleges to positions at Berkeley and UCLA (its academic pinnacles), are based on grade-point averages and achievement tests, and these alone.
In defending policies under which racial preferences trump achievements, Page compares them to the “geographical diversity” criteria of the Ivy League schools, commenting, “Americans have always had a wide array of exotic standards for determining ‘merit.’” Page doesn’t seem to realize that “geographical diversity” criteria were introduced to restrict the enrollment of Jews rather than to provide affirmative action programs for students from Wyoming and Utah. Page even quotes, without irony, a friend who said he was convinced he got into Dartmouth because he was the only applicant from Albuquerque: “I’m sure some talented Jewish kid from New York was kept out so I could get in.”
When I was a student at Columbia in the Fifties, the geographical diversity program was in place and the Jewish enrollment was 48 percent. That was the Jewish quota. As Jews we were well aware of the anti-Semitic subtext of the geographical program and talked about it among ourselves. But we did not launch protests or seek government interventions to abolish the program. Once the principle of Jewish admission was accepted, even residual (or “institutional”) anti-Semitism could not keep Jews, who constituted only 3 percent of the population, from flooding the enrollment lists of Ivy League schools. Liberals like Clarence Page support affirmative action because they are in a state of massive denial. The problem of low black enrollment at elite universities is not caused by racist admissions policies. It is caused by poor academic performance among blacks.
In defending affirmative action policies, Page reveals the underlying element in most expressions of “black rage” these days. This is the displacement of personal frustrations, the unwillingness of many blacks to go through the arduous process that other ethnic minorities have followed in their climb up the American ladder. Thus Page opens his chapter on affirmative action with a personal anecdote. As a high school graduate in 1965, he applied for a summer newsroom job but was beaten out by a girl who was less qualified and younger, but white. Shortly after that, the Watts riot occurred and he was hired. Page’s comment: “You might say that my first job in newspapers came as a result of an affirmative action program called ‘urban riots.’” This is a thinly veiled justification for criminal behavior and a familiar cliché of the Left: white people respond fairly to blacks only when they have a gun to their heads. Thus Malcolm X, who scorned the civil rights movement—in a 1963 speech he referred to “the recent ridiculous march on Washington” because he believed, wrongly, that Americans would never give blacks their rights—is seen in retrospect by many black intellectuals as its author because his violent racism scared whites into yielding. But what is immediately striking in Page’s reflection is that he doesn’t pause to consider that this was his first job application and that it was only for a summer position. Perhaps the men doing the hiring wanted to have a girl around the office for a couple of months. This would be an unprofessional rationale for the hiring, but not racist. Nor would it require a riot to remedy.
Page gives no thought to the possibility that he would have been hired eventually anyway. Recognizing that significant changes take time is not the same as saying that they require force to implement. Was it the threat of riots or of affirmative action laws that eventually made black athletes dominant in leagues whose owners often do not rank among the socially enlightened? Or that allowed black cultural artists to achieve an equally dominant position in the popular music industry? How did Oprah Winfrey, a black sharecropper’s daughter from Mississippi, become mother-confessor to millions of lower-middle-class white women (and a billionaire in the process) without affirmative action? Page has no answer. And he doesn’t even address the most striking implication of his anecdotal encounter with racism as a youth: The kind of discrimination that upset him then has, in affirmative action, been systematized and elevated to a national policy.
The primary reason most conservatives oppose affirmative action is one that is given almost no attention by progressives eager to attribute base motives to their opponents. Racial preference is an offense to the core values of American pluralism, which depends on individual rights and the neutrality of government toward all its communities. Affirmative action is a threat to inclusiveness, because privilege is established as a group right and enforced by legal coercion. Affirmative action—which is in practice, despite all denials, a system of racial preferences—is a threat to what Felix Frankfurter identified as “the ultimate foundation of a free society . . . the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.” Affirmative action based on principles like geographical diversity constitutes no such threat, but policies based on race do. Racial preferences are a corrosive acid, eating at the moral and social fabric of American life. Every time a black leader refers to the paucity of blacks on the faculty of Harvard or in the upper reaches of corporate America, the automatic presumption is that white racism is responsible, not factors contributing to individual merit or the lack thereof. The legal concept of “racial disparity” employs the same assumption. The idea that government must compel its white citizens to be fair to its minority citizens presumes that white America is so racist it cannot be fair on its own account. This involves supporters of affirmative action in an illogic so insurmountable it is never mentioned: If the white majority needs to be forced by government to be fair, how is it possible that the same white majority—led by a Republican president named Richard Nixon—created affirmative action policies in the first place?
There is no answer to this question because, in fact, affirmative action was not created because of white racism. It was created because of widespread black failure to take advantage of the opportunities made available when legal segregation was ended. Since the politics of the left are premised on the idea that social institutions determine individual outcomes, this failure had to be the result of institutional rather than individual factors. Whites led by Richard Nixon accepted this fallacious argument and, because they did not want blacks to be second-class citizens, created affirmative action programs.
If affirmative action works, as Page implies, it does so in ways he does not mention. Its primary achievement is to have convinced black Americans that whites are so racist that some external force must compel their respect and, secondarily, that blacks need affirmative action in order to gain equal access to the American dream. The further consequence of this misguided remedy has been to sow a racial paranoia in the black community so pervasive and profound that even blacks who have benefited from America’s racial opportunities have been significantly affected in the way they think. How significantly is revealed in the almost casual way the paranoia surfaces: “‘Black is beautiful’ was the slogan which made many white people nervous, as any show of positive black racial identification tends to do.” Does it? The television mini-series Roots was one of the most significant milestones of positive black racial identification—an epic of black nobility and white evil purporting to represent the entire history of American race relations. It was not only produced and made possible by whites, but also voluntarily watched by more whites