Cohen, Carl. Naked Racial Preference: The Case Against
Affirmative Action . Boston: Madison Books, 1995: 102

Racial classifications have insidious long-term results: anger and envy flowing from rewards or penalties based on race; solidification of racial barriers and the encouragement of racial separatism; inappropriate entry of race into unrelated intellectual or economic matters; the indirect support of condescension and invidious judgments among ethnic groups-in sum, the promotion of all the conditions that produce racial disharmony and racial disintegration. What Kaiser and the union defend is very far from an innocuous good deed. It is a plan having very damaging consequences to very many people.

Some of the damage, direct and substantial, is done to those like Weber and Bakke who bear the immediate burden. "Society" does not pay; the "white majority" does not pay; individual citizens pay. The penalty to them is great and undeserved. Reverse discrimination is not an invention or a hypothesis yet to be confirmed; it is a sociological and legal fact.

Carl Gutierrez-Jones,

Department of English

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106

E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu