A Lott of Racial Nonsense

The brouhaha over Trent Lott's "racially insensitive" comments gave me no little pause.  No, not the fuss generated by trying to be nice to a 100 year old man, but the utter lack of objection when Lott specifically endorsed treating people unequally based upon the color of their skin. 

Comes now Mr. Rodriguez to mouth the standard liberal defenses of this undertaking – euphemistically described as "affirmative action" – but more accurately described as "separate but unequal".  To achieve equality of opportunity, he contends, we must first treat people unequally.  "To each according to their ancestry", one might say.

The assertion that one can somehow atone for past racial discrimination by creating an entirely new class of victims is self evident nonsense.  If my grandfather punched your grandfather, that injury finds no redress in permitting you to punch me. We are, after all, individuals, and possessed of rights not because we are members of a race or class, but as individuals.  Groups have no rights whatsoever; one cannot discriminate against a group, but only against an individual based upon a group characteristic.  Groups can claim no redress; only individual victims may assert such a right.

If "leveling the playing field" – addressing race discrimination against members of one group by racially discriminating against members of another – were not a sufficient oxymoron, it has long since been abandoned as the rationale for race conscious policies.  Now, the forces of "diversity" assert that we somehow benefit simply by exposure to members of different groups.  Obviously, this rationale falls a tad short when deciding how to award governmental contracts; who cares whether the folks paving the road are white or black, male of female, provided we get good work at the lowest possible cost?

So, let's restrict it to college admissions.  Query: how is it that the student body at (say) Notre Dame benefits by admitting the son of a black lawyer who lives in Short Hills and went to the best prep schools, but not by admitting the daughter of a white single mother from Wharton whose family never earned more than $15,000 per annum?  How is it that race can be made a proxy for a particular experience or point of view? 

Notre Dame admissions are a zero sum game.  That is, more qualified people desire admission than the school can accommodate.  Hence, if one awards someone a "plus" or "points" in favor of admission based upon skin color, one must, perforce, penalize others of the non-favored race. 

One can quote all the statistics one wishes about how well "whites" are doing generally, but that is of small comfort to the young person excluded from Notre Dame due to his race.  Having suffered an injury based upon the color of his skin, he finds little solace in the explanation that the Admissions Office didn't mean it personally, or that other people who share his skin color are doing very well.  Perhaps selfishly, he feels wronged, despite the fact that others who look like him were admitted.  Why should he feel any different than any other victim of patent, admitted racial discrimination?

If, as Mr. Rodriguez suggests, "Americans are sharply divided by race", the last thing government ought to be doing is reinforcing that division by taking account of race.  On the contrary, government ought NEVER to take race into account, treating it as the irrelevance it is.

And the phrase "reverse discrimination" ought to be excised from every sentence in which it appears.  ‘Taint no such thing.  If one faces discrimination based upon race, describing it as "reverse" adds nothing.  Such discrimination is ALWAYS wrong.

Rodriguez opines that discrimination on the basis of race is no different than that based upon athletic or musical talent, alumni status, etc.  But the falsity of that statement is easily enough proved.

       Imagine, if you will, that Trent Lott's statements were construed as favoring discrimination in favor of athletes; would anyone care?  This country did not fight a civil war, or endure soul wrenching social conflicts lasting decades, over alumni preferences. 

Race is different.  Taking account of race strikes at the heart of the American ideal that all men are created equal.  Governmental choosing of winners and losers, or the drawing of distinctions of any kind, based upon something as irrelevant as skin color, is invidious.  It deprives us of our individuality, making us forever slaves to accidents of birth and pigmentation.

To paraphrase Lincoln, the question presented by America is whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.  Can a nation, based upon the idea of equality before the law, overcome our tribalistic impulses?

The Left answers in the negative.  To the forces of "diversity" and "multiculturalism", the is no such thing as the American people.  Instead, society is divided among warring and suspicious tribal groups of hyphenated Americans, and that which precedes the hyphen dictates the rights to which one is entitled.  Individual identity is subsumed into group membership. 

This is not a new problem.  A century ago, Roosevelt (T. – the Republican) noted:

"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism... a hyphenated American is not an American at all... Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul... The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, ... each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with (its group) than with the other citizens of the American Republic... There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else."

Just so.

Race consciousness emphasizes and reinforces the irrelevancy before the hyphen.  Americans do not draw distinctions among themselves based upon their ancestry.  We are all in this together; America is a shared enterprise which knows no ethnic boundaries.  Americanism is an idea, not an ethnicity.  All who ascribe are equal players, none entitled to preference, none subject to burden. 

We cannot "level the playing field" for one person by shafting another.  Any program which accords illegitimate benefits or imposes undeserved burdens based upon ethnicity is wrong. "Jim Crow" and "affirmative action" boast the same parentage; neither has any place in America.  Here, individual rights, not politically correct, multiculturalist group-think, matter. 

       America's great promise is that of individual rights.  Race consciousness fundamentally contradicts that promise.  If the shining city on the hill saw its luster seriously tarnished by the stain of racialism, that patina cannot be restored by resorting to the evil which dulled its shine in the first place.