Preferential Damage

Among the strongest arguments that have been made against affirmative action are those regarding its harmful effects on its beneficiaries. Opponents of reverse discrimination have long argued, for example, that once the practice became routine, members of preferred minorities would feel a certain insecurity as to whether their attainments were due to their own abilities or to the color of their skin.

Proponents of affirmative action dismissed such objections, insisting that reverse discrimination was only a matter of rectifying generations of unfair treatment of blacks. When critics protested that granting goods that have not strictly been won on merit to blacks today is hardly a valid way to compensate for injustices to their ancestors, the defenders took a different tack, denying that merit had ever been the basis on which society's goods were distributed. A kind of affirmative action had always existed, they said?for the benefit of rich people, white men and the children of Ivy League alumni. Recipients of preferential treatment by race should therefore feel no special onus. (Although why a society built on nothing but racial power and privilege would concern itself at all with righting the racial injustices of the past was never adequately explained.)

Now, after several decades of affirmative action, its critics have been proven right on this score, as they have on others. The obvious old truth that it is better for your character and peace of mind to be rewarded for your work and abilities than for your racial identity has proven more durable than the tortured rationales of affirmative action proponents. And, interestingly, while whites tiptoe around the issue, blacks address it frankly. As Gerald Early, a black scholar at Washington University, put it, "African-Americans at white institutions" ask themselves: "Is my worth being appreciated or am I being used to integrate this school?" A recent incident at Harvard University confirms Early's observation.

Some months ago, Harvard's new president, Lawrence Summers, had a private meeting with Cornel West, one of a handful of Harvard faculty bearing the prestigious title of University Professor. West had recently recorded a rap CD, and Summers said he ought to focus on producing serious scholarly work, as is befitting his exalted position. West took the suggestion as a professional and racial insult. He went conspicuously public with his grievance, sulking and threatening to move to Princeton.

Fearing a resurgence of the old white boys' network, as a New York Times article put it, Harvard's entire Afro-American Studies Dept. denounced Summers and demanded his unequivocal support of affirmative action. Soon Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were in on the act. Summers was forced to grovel, but the ungracious touchiness displayed by West to a perfectly reasonable request from his university's president was a clear sign of a very large ego built on very shaky foundations. And the belligerent response of his Afro-American Studies colleagues indicates less a sense of confidence in their work than a need to be reassured about the glories of affirmative action per se.

Then there is the sad case of economist Glen Loury, once a conservative and outspoken critic of the civil rights establishment's emphasis on black victimhood, now a reborn liberal who denounces colorblindness as a mask of racial oppression and seeks Jesse Jackson's personal blessing. Loury teaches at Boston University at present, but in 1982 he became the first black to receive tenure in Harvard's economics department. According to black sociologist Orlando Patterson, Loury "was always doubtful as to whether" he had been hired "because of his Afro-American connections," and felt "anxiety about what his colleagues really thought" of him. Before long, Loury was close to a psychological breakdown. "I did not carry that burden well," he remarked recently to The New York Times. "One wants to feel that one is standing there on one's own. One does not want to feel one is being patronized."

Just as critics of affirmative action argued so long ago! What a diabolical contrivance reverse discrimination is. Its purpose is to bring about statistical racial parity in predetermined outcomes, but the very bestowal of goods by race can make individual recipients feel patronized and unequal, thereby feeding insecurity and further resentment. The cynical reply that there is no such thing as merit anyway, only power, does not hold up. People want to know that there are standards, and that they are living up to them as best they can. There is no satisfaction greater than that, even if the outcome is more modest than what might be attained through racial preferences. If there are whites who have been granted unmerited goods, so much the worse for them. The wisdom of Proverbs is apt: "Better is a handful with quietness, than both the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit."