Aggressive affirmative action still needed today

Editor:

John Keisling's diatribe against affirmative action nowhere acknowledges the persistent virulence of the original, plain vanilla strain of racism. On the contrary, he says that "if all official discrimination is ended ... there will be no race-based privileges to resent." (I did indeed slightly change his meaning by this omission, but his exact words are more or less equivalent to "If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.") This lacuna makes his own essay an example of why affirmative action is better than the inaction I infer Mr. Keisling would prescribe: many Americans, particularly white Americans, remain sublimely ignorant of the fact that while their principles may be free of all racism, their culturally-conditioned perceptions and practices are not.

I do not subscribe to the polemical nonsense that 'only whites can be racist.' Racism is human, and, like any other full-grown human failing, it does not just go away if you ignore it. Nearly everyone Ÿ not just the Fuhrmans and Farrakhans Ÿ draws on culture-bound, race-influenced criteria to interpret the character, behavior or competence of others. No sane black person in this country forgets that fact for long. But until the time comes when we can forget it, it is hardly 'reverse racism' to expect that white people too exert some effort to perceive reality more accurately.

Most any non-white adult in this country can tell you the exact point in his or her childhood when she or he became aware of the difference that color was not supposed to make. So can John Keisling. The difference is that his was an isolated experience, an exception to a normal reality that he fondly imagines as having once been "colorblind," at some time in the pre-affirmative action past when Americans were "bound together as of old." Where and when was that Ÿ World War II movies? Chain gangs? Even the civil rights movement of the 1960's splintered apart on the reefs of racial misunderstanding, in spite of a far greater sense of common commitment than exists today. Mr. Keisling's distress with the proliferation of race-centered gathering points is understandable, but I would have more sympathy with his distress if he showed a glimmer of understanding of the reasons why minority students feel the need for such support.

The condition that Mr. Keisling calls colorblind is more accurately described as being blind to the reality that continues to color the experience of normal non-white people: the experience of being tacitly, often unconsciously, assumed to be less qualified for desirable or authoritative positions because they, not being white, do not match our images of the white people who dominated those positions in most of our past experience. Hey, I know it's dumb; I also know it's as powerful a force as overt racism in clouding our abilities to evaluate qualifications fairly. It was not created by affirmative action, and killing affirmative action won't make it vanish.

Affirmative action as I understand it Ÿ aggressive recruiting of minorities, including some effort on all sides to practice more inclusion and less exclusion Ÿ seems to me still necessary before we can lay claim to setting "fair, objective standards." In my own wildest dream-world, it might even give people of Mr. Keisling's persuasion some much-needed practice at seeing normal non-white people as normally competent, although it probably won't as long as they insist on blaming non-existent quotas for their doubts. I don't suppose that even Mr. Keisling would seriously argue that Willie Brown, Clarence Thomas, and Michael Jordan constitute a fair, objective sample for assessing the standards by which black people's competence is evaluated in this country; no conceivable norm can be constructed around these data points, but this is the sample that appears in his column. His political prescription is as far from ground-level reality as that sample.

Martha Sowerwine

Classics graduate student

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