Richard Nixon Inaugurated Affirmative Action to Destroy the Left – and it Did just that.
Affirmative Action was a Trojan Horse which sullied, sabotaged and captured the consciousness of the Left, accentuating identify politics and hurting blacks and whites alike.
By
David Gottfried
Affirmative action has finally sighed its last sigh of sanctimonious snobbery and elitest derision. For five decades, it had undermined the progress of blacks (the severe emotional wreckage heaped on black psyches, discussed below, should have been obvious to everyone), wrongfully curtailed the career paths of millions of white people, increased racial animosity, and had turned the left, which in 1968 had all the pride of the Delacroix masterpiece, “Liberty Leading the People,” into a little munchkin cowering before the Wicked Witch of the West. Now that this awful debasement of liberalism has come to an end, it will be instructive to remember who started affirmative action and why it was started.
Richard Nixon developed affirmative action to increase animosity between working class whites and blacks.
In the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (1961 to 1969), the Federal Government endorsed what it termed “affirmative action,” but that affirmative action bore no resemblance to the affirmative action program struck down by the Supreme Court last week. Neither Kennedy nor Johnson nor Martin Luther King advocated the lowering of standards to enroll blacks in schools or hire them. Back then, liberals believed in the quaint notion of aggressive efforts to educate blacks and to boost their test scores to eradicate academic differentials.
However, under Richard Nixon, affirmative action was sullied and debased as it became a program in which a given percentage of blacks had to be hired for a job, or enrolled in a school, and scores on standardized tests were frequently overlooked.
In the first few months of Nixon’s presidency, the “Revised Philadelphia Plan,” which called for quotas to ensure black representation in certain construction jobs, and/or jobs as bus drivers in Philadelphia, was promulgated and pushed by Nixon’s Justice Department. To achieve these quotas, black deficiencies in merit were overlooked. Indeed, Howard Gillette, Jr. wrote:
”The program, which was quickly extended to other metropolitan areas, was partly intended to draw the support of African Americans to the administration and partly an effort to drive a wedge between blacks and their allies in the labor movement.”
The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Howard Gillette Jr., appearing at this website: https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/philadelphia-plan-2/
A more extensive analysis of Richard Nixon’s shrewd use of affirmative action, to enervate the left, can be found in “The Nixon Administration and the Revised Philadelphia Plan for Affirmative Action: A Study in Expanding Presidential Power and Divided Government,” by J. Larry Hood, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1, Democracy in Transition (Winter, 1993), pp. 145-167 (23 pages)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27551085
I am not a biblical scholar but there is something from the New Testament which goes like this: A bad tree will not yield good fruit. And affirmative action is the rancid fruit that Nixon gave us.
Affirmative Action: The Annihilation of Black Self-Confidence and a Bevy of Bogus Career Opportunities
Of course, many people think, without ever examining the issues, that black people benefit enormously from affirmative action. I disagree.
Have you ever asked yourself what it might be like to have a verbal SAT score of 590 and to sit in a classroom in which almost every white student has a verbal SAT score well over 700. A black boy whose verbal SAT was 590 will, when overwhelmed by classmates soaring in the mid 700’s, settle back towards the bottom of the class. And many of the blacks will settle toward the back of the class; they are the modern day, pseudo liberal equivalent of black boys condemned to sit at the back of the bus.
Most of them will graduate; surely the rich phony liberal experts at Harvard can’t allow for a rash of failures. But how many of them really get good jobs and careers. Their white colleagues doubt them because of affirmative action, prospective clients doubt them because of affirmative action, and they doubt themselves. I believe that racism is a terrible thing, but I will readily concede that I am afraid to ever let a black man be my doctor or my lawyer. First, I want to see his test scores.
Of course, some blacks will ascend to seemingly high places by means of a form of glitzy affirmative action at the boardroom, and I am sure Chase Manhattan Bank and other titans of international corporate fascism have plenty of phony black princes, all dressed up and looking like unemployed black models. They remind me of the sort of dictators that used to run South Vietnam. They served at the pleasure of the United States Government, but we pretended that they were their own men. And at the end of the day, after that glorified black clerk at Chase Manhattan Bank comes home, he must be crying inside: The white people pretend to respect him and make a fool out of him because he has no real power.
The status of Blacks who “benefit” from affirmative action reminds me of what Hannah Arendt said was the psychological impetus for the murder of six million Jews: German non-Jews ultimately hated the Jews because they did not respect the Jews because the Jews had no real power. A Jew may have had some money, but he was called kike and beaten-up and at the end of the day, the European Jews, no matter how much money they had, were still the ghetto Jews. Similarly, the black man might have a record label, and he may be a big shot ballplayer, and the phony rich liberals at Chase Manhattan might compliment him on his perfect wardrobe, but his safety and his status are as tenuous as the ticker tape machine giving us the prices from Wall Street from that fateful day in October 1929.
And what would a black seventeen-year-old with a Verbal SAT score of 590 do without affirmative action. He would not go to Harvard, or Yale, or Columbia. But then again most white kids who go to college don’t go there, and their lives are not failures. A black boy or girl, who goes to a school where his white competitors are not in any way superior to himself, has the opportunity to shine and make a great life for himself. I am thinking of schools like NYU or Hofstra. How did the lords and ladies of bitchy, prissy, tea and crumpets liberalism ever manage to be so fucking stupid as to overlook the virtues of colleges that are not decked out in old Bostonian Protestant Preppy grandeur but are still quite fine in giving a guy or girl an education.
How the “Beneficiaries” of Affirmative Action Were Robbed of a Coherent Voice
Think of that black kid, with a verbal SAT of 590, who has, courtesy of the capon-making empresses of affirmative action, gotten into Yale or Harvard. He is overwhelmed by the better educated whites all around him. The whites, reeking of suburban superciliousness, look upon him as a toadstool while pretending to see in him the second coming of Sidney Portier. The false praise of the white man makes him justifiably enraged, but he can’t express his discontent because the white man is doing an excellent job of imagining himself Katherine Hepburn in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” The white students’ vaster reserves of knowledge intimidate him, and makes him question his intelligence and ability, but he has to believe that he’s super smart, or just as smart as the white students around him, and the chasm between the ideology he is supposed to believe in and what he actually discovers when he hits the books is almost impossibly difficult to process. The ideology instilled in him teaches him to be black and proud, but everything he experiences makes him feel meek and ashamed. The conflicts, for a solitary black boy hundreds of miles from home, dwarf most teenage challenges the way a typhoon dwarfs a pleasant sprinkling of rain.
Of course, there are answers that can tell him that A) he is not Inferior, B) but he certainly is academically deficient, and C) the reason is because of complex psychosexual problems in the black community. These issues cannot be spoken of in polite company because of certain blinders “liberal intellectuals” have placed on discussions of race and sex. Maybe, at a future date, I will try to discuss these issues, but I have found that whenever I address psychosexual issues I am roundly condemned as a certain pseudo liberal prudery is displayed whenever its ideals and assumptions are questioned.
Because blacks cannot articulate the misery they experience, their discourse becomes far-fetched, illogical and incoherent. Some black students will say that no white man can really speak to a black man. But I know that is nonsense because a black writer once spoke to me:
I was reading “Go Tell it on the Mountain” by James Baldwin. Toward the beginning of the book, we see the protagonist at age 12. He is rooted to his black church, but at age 12 he knows that he will be forever alienated from his black church because he knows he is gay (the book doesn’t use the word gay or homosexual; people knew how to write then), and when I read Baldwin, I instantaneously knew that he was talking about my experience with my synagogue. I knew that I would be severed from the Jewish people just as certainly as Baldwin was severed from the black church. In real art, a writer can speak of a very specific experience, he can talk about his experience in a black neighborhood at age 12, and he can universalize his experience and make me, a Jew in another part of town, know exactly what is going on in his head because it went on in my head. When Baldwin’s prose spoke directly to me, he confirmed something that Norman Mailer had said, in the “Prisoner of Sex,” in 1971:
“Whoever believes that such a leap is not possible across the gap, that a man cannot write of a woman's soul, or a white man of a black man, does not believe in literature itself.”
But the intellectually impoverished black students, starving on the affirmative action plantation, have to say that a white man can’t speak to a black man.
Soon, the “advanced” black left abounded in the weirdest theories. For example, some black “scholars” used to say, repeatedly, that a black man can say hurtful and cruel things to and about white people but can’t be deemed racist because blacks have no real power. That’s sort of like allowing John to throw his excrement at people because John is a schizophrenic.
But, hell, maybe I am being unfair to blacks. The left in general developed a penchant for arch, adamantine and absolutist speech and thought: Susan Sontag, as fashionable as any Upper East Side clothes horse, had the perfect slogan for 1968: “The White Race is the Cancer of Human History.” (And in forging this slogan, Sontag repudiated what she said in “Illness as Metaphor,” published only two years earlier: Do not liken social and political problems to biological nightmares) Norman Mailer, never to be outdone in the promotion of paranoia, said that bureaucracies tend to inculcate the growth of cancer cells and that American society had a carcinogenic psyche. But no one made the left look as pitifully weak and stupid as Allen Ginsburg who said, at a 1967 demonstration at the Pentagon, that he would, through Buddhist chants, “levitate” the pentagon. (He used to charge that the FBI had spied on him. Such nonsense. The FBI must have loved him because his masochistic silliness undermined the left more than J Edgar Hoover ever could)
Diversity – a Diversion from the real lives of black and white people
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In the 1978 Bakke case, the United States Supreme Court peddled the idea that affirmative action was a worthwhile goal because affirmative action would increase diversity. The word diversity is a bit mellifluous as it can make one think of divers of divine things. In those days, the Supreme Court knew how to get shabby thinkers sentimental with cute verbiage. (Think of Griswald v Connecticut, when the Supreme Court established a right to privacy by imagining that there were “penumbras” stretching out of the 1st, 4th and 9th amendments to the constitution.)
But think of what diversity means in fact. Think of the 1984 Democratic Presidential Primaries. They buttress the proposition that diversity increases inter-racial conflict.
Jesse Jackson did very well among white voters in states where there were very few blacks. However, Jesse Jackson did very poorly among white voters in states with larger concentrations of blacks. This suggests that the more whites got to know blacks, the more whites wanted to get away from blacks. For example, Jackson did terribly among white voters in New York and Illinois, states with substantial black populations. However, Jesse Jackson did much, much better in the more conservative state of Maine, where the black population was decidedly low. In Maine, where whites didn’t confront ghetto blasters, rising crime, and the destruction of their neighborhoods, it was easier for whites to imbibe and accept the sweet dreams of black-white coexistence championed by banal documentaries on public television.
Also, the very notion that an influx of more black students to a school will give the school “diversity” smacks of racism. The proponents of diversity very often have a sit com conception of race, as if the importation of more black students will impart the ballsy fat mommas, comical pranksters, and stern church ladies of “Sanford and Son,” “Good Times” and “Moving on Up” onto their staid, white-bread campuses.
What will happen now and my suggestion for the future
https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/their-finest-hour/
Some articles have said that the apparent demise of affirmative action has not really transpired and that it can be reborn through the admissions essay. In other words, although an admissions officer can’t admit a student because he is black, he can admit a student if he writes a good sob story (sorry, I meant to say admissions essay).
The admissions essay, everybody knows, is one of the poorest means of selecting applicants. I will never forget a certain date: Wednesday, September 8, 1982.
My incoming law school class had gathered for Freshman Orientation. A professor, who had served on the admissions committee, spoke to us and advised us that, over the years, he had witnessed the enormous chasm between what students say and what students do. He said that 90 percent of incoming law students purport to want to help the poor and that 90 percent of law school graduates go to work for firms dedicated to making corporations and rich people richer. Anyone, who has any sense, will refrain from considering admissions essays.
Some people have said that we should look at other indicia of oppression other than race. For example, if we were to award spaces to applicants on the basis of economic deprivation, we may be able to admit more applicants, black and white, who were reared with little funds. I support such a scheme.
However, sadly enough, I have not seen a single damn article which argued that we must increase our efforts to give black kids a proper education. Also – and I almost never hear this – we must admit that there is something wrong with the way we are teaching blacks. Nevertheless, we keep teaching them the same way. This is what some people call the textbook definition of insanity: Repeating the same worthless work even though it fails. I have specific ideas as to what must be changed if we are to educate blacks, but I must refrain from stating them as they will probably offend the reigning “liberal” sensibilities of our era. (Maybe I’ll discuss them in a future essay) In any event, I believe blacks can be educated and their scores can rise just as high as whites. And if we don’t try to do this, we will – every last one of us – concede that we are racists.
Perhaps, some blacks are a bit embarrassed to restudy things they studied so long ago. If they are, I advise them to consider Winston Churchill, who I know is often considered a racist and imperialist. That man had to repeat the first grade twice. And his foundations in the English language were so firm, his fortress of mighty England so impregnable, that he marshalled the English language to war and defeated Adolf Hitler.