Affirmative Action’s Negatives

The great tragedy of Trent Lott is not that one man managed to tarnish the entire Republican Party’s image on race; after all, only 9% of African Americans voters chose President Bush.

The tragedy is that he managed to sabotage conservative ideas in the process, making the right’s principled opposition to affirmative action seem like nothing more than a front for latent bigotry.

This is a monstrous lie.

Conservatives do not oppose affirmative action because they are crypto-racists. They oppose it because they deem affirmative action itself to have become racist and, what’s more, unconstitutional in its current form, an outright system of racial quotas that blatantly discriminates not just against whites but also against nonblack, Latino or Native American minorities, violating the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

It was not always so, nor was it intended to be. President Johnson said in 1965: “You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race saying, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair.”

Johnson was right. Blacks, who had only just won the battle for their civil rights, needed and deserved special protection from entrenched and institutionalized racism.

But times have changed. Race is not the stumbling block to progress it once was, in large part because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race.

Attitudes have changed as well. As Lott’s recent evisceration by conservatives and liberals alike must surely prove, racist sympathies are anathema in the public sphere, a cause for deep shame and professional censure.

Affirmative action, too, has changed from a necessary corrective measure intended to ensure that blacks had equal opportunities to a superficial, reverse-racist social engineering protocol designed to guarantee minorities places in colleges and companies, often at the expense of more qualified candidates.

The pendulum has swung too far. One form of discrimination has been substituted for another, deferring still further Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a colorblind America. King’s vision is the true guiding force of the conservative agenda on race. Evidence of this can be found in the writings of Ward Connerly, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, some of the clearest thinkers behind the movement to end racial preferences.

It is incumbent upon the new Republican leadership to repair the damage done when self-preservationists betray their principles and give their political opponents ammunition in the process. They must stand up for the integrity of conservative ideals or else sink deservedly in the ignominy that now surrounds them.