Getting Beyond Race

"Affirmative Action Is on the Rocks" read the title of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few months ago. Any hopes this headline might have raised were soon dashed, however. The author's point was not to denounce the race-conscious search for a proportionately diverse student body, but to assure colleges that they do not need affirmative action to obtain such diversity. Instead, he said, the pool of potential acceptances could be expanded by lowering standards for all applicants, de-emphasizing objective criteria like SAT scores and employing "individualized file review that makes it impossible to trace racial discrimination," i.e., impossible to trace the deliberate search for minorities.

Most dispiriting of all was that the writer, far from being part of the current racialist civil rights establishment, was one of the most stalwart of warriors in the battle against affirmative action, Michael Greve. As executive director of the Center for Individual Rights during the 90s, Greve helped bring the suit against the University of Texas that resulted in the landmark Hopwood decision in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, prohibiting the dual-admissions policy by which the school had been accepting minorities at a lower standard than whites.

Is this what the fight against affirmative action has come to? I glumly wondered as I read Greve's article. Lending a veneer of color-blindness and equality of treatment to what remains an obsession with racial representation and proportionality? Setting aside the idea of high academic standards, as well as the demand that minorities work toward those standards, and lowering them for everybody instead? This is far worse than affirmative action. One can almost feel a chill when Greve assures elite colleges that they will suffer no "competitive disadvantage" in lowering their SAT standard "once all elite institutions are compelled to observe the same rules."

So once again the dream is to be deferred, to paraphrase the title of Shelby Steele's book, A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America (1999). Steele is perhaps the most astute analyst of our continuing racial dilemma writing today. In this book and in articles subsequent to it in The Wall Street Journal, he describes how white America, led by its liberal elites, relieved its shame over racial inequality not by working toward genuine integration but by achieving cosmetic change through double standards, affirmative action and multiculturalism. Although he deplores these measures, Steele believes that they have enabled liberals to gain the moral high ground, leaving conservatives?with their universal principles of merit, competition, accountability, individual initiative, single standards and the pursuit of excellence?looking "mean-spirited" and unconcerned about specific racial remedies. Steele argues that conservatives must compete with liberals for moral authority by showing that these principles meet "the challenge of inequality."

Steele has a point about liberals having gained the moral ascendancy by sponsoring a racial spoils system. The fact that even foes of affirmative action feel it necessary to speak in terms of "diversity" is proof of that. But conservatives will never win the liberals' game playing by the liberals' rules and insisting on equality of result. Conservative principles have proved effective in combating poverty and improving lives, and Steele himself has asserted that the necessity of meeting high standards would inevitably raise the performance of black students over time. But these principles cannot guarantee racial proportionality in all areas of endeavor. The promise of America is one of equality of opportunity for individuals, not equality of result for groups. A society of guaranteed group outcomes is no longer a free society, and by delivering such outcomes America will gradually become non-America, a place where neither black nor white will really want to live.

Many factors aside from injustice can contribute to inequality of result. Thomas Sowell has shown how various groups bring different kinds of cultural capital to the collective table. James McWhorter has argued that many black cultural habits can be counterproductive. The real shame is the extent to which liberals have satisfied their own sense of moral superiority by inviting blacks to forgo the exhilaration of personal discovery in favor of playing a racial numbers game.

Maturity requires us to relinquish the hubris of thinking that we can undo the past, manipulate reality and achieve a preordained result. True equality entails accepting our common humanity and understanding the limits of the human experience.

In his address to the National Association of Scholars in January, the magnificent Ward Connerly pointed in this direction. Connerly labors both for the rollback of affirmative action and the imposition of high standards, starting in the lower grades where black disadvantage often begins. He himself rose from unprivileged circumstances to become a successful businessman, and he has endured the special hell reserved for black conservatives in our society today (as has Steele, to a lesser extent). "I want America to go beyond race," he told a hushed audience. "We all understand the history, but it's time for us to get beyond that, because our national spirit and morale are suffering. It's not just preferences," he insisted, "we have to get beyond race."

Now that goal is worthy of the dream so long deferred.

(An edited version of Ward Connerly's speech will appear in the summer issue of the NAS journal, Academic Questions, of which I am an editor, although the opinions I express above are my own.)