BUYING FALSE RACIAL PEACE | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Say this much for candor like Glazer's about the depth of black deficiencies: It's better than the lying that politicians and college administrators have done in insisting that they can achieve racial "diversity" without sacrificing merit. Yet candor like Glazer's can turn quickly into craven calculation: No sooner had court suits and ballot initiatives forced liberals to admit they'd been lying about the depth of black deficiencies than some liberals played a kind of jujitsu, saying in effect, "OK, you caught us lying about black performance. Now what? Do you have the stomach to whitewash the institutions we integrated by fudging standards?" If Rosen, Glazer and Staples are right, some conservative policy intellectuals, CEOs and political operatives are folding their opposition to preferences, if only out of a skittish sensitivity to charges of racism. Glazer's own conversion to preferences is especially poignant on that score -- he is so penitential about racism that he's willing to suborn a racialism that is almost as bad. His position is also painfully instructive about liberals' drift into elitist self-justifications. At one point, he acknowledges one of his own former arguments against preferences: After a painful transition in which fewer blacks and Hispanics make it to the most competitive campuses, more of them -- honestly evaluated and appropriately placed on other campuses -- will lay a far stronger foundation for real advances that aren't tainted by double standards. Despite all the media alarmism about a plunge in black and Hispanic admissions, California's experience with Proposition 209 may actually confirm this. But Glazer seems unable to consider his own former argument, perhaps because he's become so solicitous of elite institutions, where transitional "whitening" might be felt most. "We cannot be quite so cavalier about the impact on public opinion -- black or white -- of a radical reduction in the number of black students at the Harvards, the Berkeleys, and the Amhersts," he writes. "These institutions have become, for better or worse, the gateways to prominence, privilege, wealth, and power in American society." But the public can and should be cavalier about the vision of Harvard as an arbiter of American destiny, which is really a notion based on a muddle of self-important but unexamined misreadings of the country's best strengths and prospects. "To admit blacks [to elite institutions] under affirmative action no doubt undermines the American meritocracy," Glazer concedes, "but to exclude blacks from them by abolishing affirmative action would undermine the legitimacy of American democracy." Well, certainly, for some Ivy Leaguers, meritocracy and democracy are opposed because the former resembles a club with its own elusive folkways of mutual ingratiation and certification. Beyond it, though, a more astringent meritocracy lets countless individuals rise above whatever in their pasts has kept them small and to contribute to something mighty, cosmopolitan and unparalleled. Earlier in this century, that sort of meritocracy -- not at Harvard, but at Glazer's own City College and Brandeis, at Holy Cross and Notre Dame, at Howard and Tuskeegee and at the better state universities -- became the real gateway "to prominence, privilege, wealth, and power." Their students' aspirations soared beyond their parochialisms to make good America's promise that "We are free not because of what we statically are, but in as far as we are becoming different from what we have been," as John Dewey put it. The legitimacy of American democracy hasn't depended much on the legitimacy of Harvard and Amherst. Has Glazer forgotten this? Or has he simply traded in the best lessons of his own life's story for the new fatalism about blacks' capacities and for faintheartedness about stimulating them? "The older New Deal politics of hope based on democracy has given way to a new politics of complaint based on diversity," laments historian John Patrick Diggins. When deficiencies are exoticized as cultural "differences," the beloved community of the civil rights movement thins out. It's as if liberals have chosen guilt over guts because they feel morally uneasy about their own success in a system they do not wholly defend yet cannot quite bring themselves to oppose. Instead of acknowledging their dilemma, defenders of racial preferences tend to exaggerate the worst transitional consequences of any shift to race-neutral policies. Alarms about the "whitening" of institutions under race-neutral standards tell us less about their real consequences than about the fact that our vast, national race industry of color-coding bureaucrats, corporate diversity trainers, foundation-funded ethnocentric activists and professors of pigmentation needs to stage passion plays about racism to play down good racial news and dramatize the bad. The industry's funding, career lines and sense of moral mission (which is blessed by the Church of Affirmative Action) depend on showing that racism is ubiquitous, implacable and insidious. And so, spring of 1996 brought the Great Racist Church-Burning Epidemic that wasn't. An advocacy group reported soaring arson against black churches; Jesse Jackson declared that men in black robes and blue suits were empowering men in white sheets. Oceans of ink were spilled in a mourning that was oddly pleased with itself: It was 1963 all over again; the coordinates of the old struggle against racism were clear; decent folk donated millions of dollars to help black churches rebuild. But most of the few dozen black-church arsons had been committed not by hooded nightriders but by stray derelicts, young drunks or insurance scammers, more than a few of them black. So the play's producers struck their tents and moved on. As the 1996 elections approached and the Supreme Court invalidated a number of electoral districts drawn mainly by race, the Coming Decimation of the Black Congressional Delegation premiered in Washington and on many editorial pages. With five black incumbents displaced from their racially drawn districts and facing new, white-majority electorates in the South, an ACLU voting-rights activist announced "a return to the days of all-white government." Soon the black delegation would fit "in the back of a taxicab," said Theodore Shaw of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Racist bloc voting was so strong that it gave the incumbents no fighting chance. Yet, on Nov. 5, all five of them won. Hundreds of thousands of Southern white voters elected them, knowing full well who they were. Suddenly, only the producers of the racial dramas seemed not to know them. So now, too, in the wake of Proposition 209 in California and the Hopwood decision in Texas, a tragedy called the Resegregation of American Higher Education is playing to capacity crowds. "Resegregation" -- as if most college admissions offers were intent on rejecting qualified applicants in order to keep the races apart. The NAACP's Shaw is out by the marquee again, crying that universities are "returning to a race-exclusive status." The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have been in full cry. And, again, good liberals are lining up in an oddly ebullient grief to buy tickets to this play. Some conservatives are lining up, too -- as they did to mourn the church burnings and to defend the invalidated racial districting that, while contrary to their principles, had served their narrow electoral interests. You might think that their presence would give the rest of us playgoers pause -- unless you remember that Lind foresaw that it wouldn't. Instead, we say that the conservatives are converts, coming "in from the cold," as Staples put it. Like the other racial passion plays, the Resegregation of Higher Education opened with a fanfare over a bad thing that really had happened. Just as a few black churches had indeed been burned by white racists, so, now, black and Hispanic admissions, without benefit of racial preferences, did drop precipitously this year at the University of California's two most competitive colleges, Berkeley (by 57 and 40 percent, respectively) and UCLA (by 43 and 33 percent). Never mind that this proves that admissions officers were lying when they claimed to be achieving diversity without sacrificing merit. And never mind that, even correcting for such lies, Berkeley will not actually "resegregate," since its freshman class will go from being 5.6 percent black last year to being 2.4 percent black this year. And never mind that the accuracy of these figures isn't clear, since the number of applicants who declined to identify their race tripled this year -- a hopeful sign, if you don't work in the race industry, which is practicing the jujitsu I've mentioned, apparently with great effect on people like Glazer and Yoo. Far more heartening and important is that, even without preferences, black and Hispanic admissions are down only marginally at the University of California's eight campuses overall, and that the qualifications of those admitted all but ensure a larger number of black and Hispanic graduates. No wonder, then, that UC officials, who are part of the race industry, didn't release, until two days after the East and West Coast Times' had sounded the alarms, the system-wide admissions numbers, which show a black drop of 17.6 percent and a Hispanic drop of 6.9 percent. Here's what it means: As columnist Charles Krauthammer noted in the April 20 issue of Time, the proportion of freshmen entering the UC system who are black or Hispanic was 17.7 percent last year, and is 17.2 percent this year -- a drop of .5 percent. While California's two most competitive state colleges have indeed whitened for now, those who didn't get admitted there without racial preferences did qualify for campuses, like Riverside or Irvine, where they're far more likely to succeed. Indeed, at Berkeley, the dropout rate for blacks is 42 percent, compared with 16 percent for whites. No wonder; their average SAT scores were 288 points below the Berkeley average. In the Wall Street Journal of April 7, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom noted that there's no reason to expect a similarly high dropout rate for such black students at, say, Riverside or Irvine. As for the applicants at those colleges that these newcomers and their Hispanic counterparts are in turn "bumping" -- the blacks and Hispanics who, without preferences, haven't gotten into the UC system this time at all -- they are those whose grades and scores are so low that if, if the past is a guide, they'd have dropped or flunked out disproportionately had they been admitted. The result is precisely the sort of good news the race industry hates to hear -- and that both Timeses have therefore failed to report: By every reasonable measure and precedent, more of this year's entering blacks and Hispanics will actually earn degrees than did their counterparts under preferences. More of them, proportionately. More of them, absolutely. No matter: The race-industry producers are on to the next morality play, this one about the impending demise of bilingual education at the hands of another California voter initiative. We need better political entertainment than this, and better politics. Glazer, of all people, knows what it is to see shame flicker across youngsters' faces as they scuttle equally fleeting intimations of worldly success because they know they're clueless about how to fulfill them. Affirmative action can provide those clues when it's centered in recruitment, remediation and, yes, acculturation. But acculturation to the norms by which most legitimate success is certified requires the sort of cultural heavy lifting that multicultural, "diversity"-driven affirmative action has rendered taboo. Here, elites' fear of appearing "racist" in confronting black deficiencies conspires with blacks' own fear of what Steele calls "being suddenly accountable on strictly personal terms -- in situations that disallow race as an excuse for personal shortcomings." It is wrong to play with youths' doubts this way, offering them simulacra of advancement instead of proving grounds where identities are earned, not ascribed. When we lie to young people about themselves and the challenges ahead in order to spare their feelings, faces that registered the fleeting shame of cluelessness at age 14 or 16 become smooth, even impassive, especially in college communities where professors of identity politics concoct "cultures" for youths in the throes of identity formation. Whether the decorous racial separatism that results is understated or is exoticized as "cultural difference," it reflects an agreement not to enforce standards that might spotlight racial chasms and drive the wounded to ever-more-desperate, ethnocentric rationalizations of failure. In that sense, affirmative action is indeed "damage control," as Yoo told Rosen in the New Yorker. But because preferences contort blacks' college and workplace experiences more painfully than liberals acknowledge, they generate their own damage -- in what Ellis Cose called "the rage of a privileged class." Steele describes the tortuous bargain for racial preferences as one in which each side agrees not to expose what's most vulnerable in the other: Whites agree not to notice that blacks aren't measuring up, and blacks agree to appear to absolve the white in question of racial guilt. If Rosen and Staples are right, conservatives and liberals are about to drive a similarly torturous bargain: Liberals will stop calling conservatives racists, and conservatives will stop calling liberals liars and panderers. Everyone will banter amiably and sip sherry; the American promise will writhe in silent agony on the common-room floor. Instead of seeking moral gratification and political pacification through affirmative action, liberals and conservatives ought to couple "heavy lifting" with higher transracial standards. At the college prep level, the New Republic's Charles Lane is right to argue that poor kids deserve funding for SAT prep sessions at the same levels that middle-class kids can afford. Let's change the incentives, not abolish the tests. Funding equity is even more important for poor elementary schools, but only if it's tied to a common curriculum, not dissipated by the bilingual and other exotica that so many non-white parents abhor. If it takes charter schools or vouchers to shake up the education bureaucracies that have color-coded and dumbed down our schools, let's try them. And a little more social discipline can be liberating: We ought to acknowledge, as sociologist Orlando Patterson does, that single parenthood, which correlates so highly with poor school performance, is an "internally generated disaster'" that owes far less to racism than to liberal moral relativism, buttressed by generations of welfare disincentives to family formation. We ought to admit, with sociologist John Ogbu, that the deficiencies exhibited in test scores even by black kids who are neither poor nor racially isolated reflect not the exams' racial biases but a black subculture of resistance to "acting white" that has been indulged and celebrated by multicultural relativists. We ought to find the courage to say that, at most universities, blacks' disproportionately bleak prospects owe more to what they internalized and led themselves to expect before arriving than to what whites are doing to them on campus (aside from corralling them along lines determined by preferences). And we ought to dispense, once and for all, with the ideologized, binary, liberal-vs.-conservative rhetoric on race. In truth, most "high church" liberals are racial conservatives: They champion policies and espouse a doctrine that would conserve and enhance racial differences. And many conservatives risk becoming the worst sort of racial liberals -- so eager, so desperate to live down their own shameful record of disdaining and excluding non-whites that they fall for every race-industry hustle and reproach. It's time to change course. Honorable conservatives, famously, exhort people to improve performance but are slow to support programmatic incentives that inculcate the right moral messages. Liberals, notoriously, are ready to "program" improvements but reluctant to exhort. Honorable conservatives and liberals should merge their respective strengths and join higher standards with stronger incentives and supports. Such efforts would drive home the right moral message -- not that color equals culture or that group membership carries public rights, but that being an American means being equal to the freedom to become more than what one has been. "Everyone has two heritages: ethnic and human," says black jazz musician Wynton Marsalis. "The human aspects give art its real enduring power. The racial aspect, that's a crutch so that you don't have to go out into the world. Jazz music teaches you what it is to live in a democracy, to be American." The American ethos that Glazer and other latter-day apologists for affirmative action have lost and that Lind wants us to regenerate is no more "conservative" or "liberal" than jazz or baseball. It isn't suited to the morality plays and psychodramas beloved of the race industry. But its renewal may spare us the balkanization and religious absolutisms that grip so much of the rest of the world. SALON | May 5, 1998 Jim Sleeper, the author of "Liberal Racism" (Viking), will be a fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy this fall. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E++T A L K Discuss affirmative action and other topics on race in Table Talk's Race Project area.