Dubya's diverse
standards Dubya's diverse
standards
Published at http://www.indystar.com.
Dan Carpenter
February 2, 2003
Now that it has become fashionable once again to accuse vocal racial minorities of biting the hand that feeds them, who can fail to notice that the two most prominent opponents of affirmative action also happen to be its two leading beneficiaries? Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas didn't get into Yale because he was black. He got in because he was a good student who also was black. President Bush didn't get into Yale because he was a good student. He got in because he was a C student whose daddy had gone to Yale.
If SAT scores and GPAs were all that white people had going for them in the bidding for college admission, then critics of "reverse discrimination" might be excused for posing as champions of justice and the American way. But our lackluster leader of the free world would not have taken that classroom seat from a never-to-be-known competitor if the purported objective criteria were the exclusive criteria. He was a legatee, commonly called legacy, an applicant given special consideration because of accident of birth.
Needless to say, he was born at a time when Yale enrolled few who could have passed such family value on to Clarence Thomas. Yale, like universities generally, has done something about its lack of diversity over the past three decades or so. It has recognized that students from a background such as Thomas' bring distinct qualities that enrich the educational experience, just as people from Bush's background bring enrichment to the school treasury. This is not new. Family, gender, work experience, military record, athletic ability, cronyism and donations are among the considerations that have filled out resumes and filled (predominantly white) classes at our finer houses of higher education throughout history.
It is the very definition of hypocrisy to argue now that modest efforts to factor in a race other than Caucasian amount to oppression of whites and coddling of blacks. Even Colin and Condi think so. The University of Michigan program that the Bush administration opposes is a national model that assigns a dollop of credit for socioeconomic disadvantage to some young people who have shown themselves to be qualified by the numbers. In other words, they may not have the highest SAT scores and grade point averages, but they have exceeded the cutoff line for those partial criteria. They are good enough to make it, and they don't need black Bushite conservatives telling them they'll never be sure they didn't work for what they've gotten.
A meritocracy in rhetoric, an aristocracy in results, America is the land of breaks, and more power to Clarence Thomas for having gotten his. For Bush to spout pseudo-Kingsian utopian smoke about content of character while throwing gasoline on a fire he could have doused is in keeping with his adversarial agenda and his regard for our intelligence. Affirmative action is not a social program or legal issue so much as a political opportunity. Facing a choice between broadening his constituency toward the middle or hardening the right-wing fortress he has built, Bush took the negative action.
Trent Lott must love it, but so does Bill Frist. Maybe Bush has given up on broad support. After all, he didn't need it to get into the institution he now occupies. Therein lies another irony. As Al Sharpton put it the other day, "President Bush was a beneficiary of the ultimate set-aside program.
They set aside a whole election to give him a job."
Carpenter is a Star op-ed columnist.
Contact him at 1-317-444-6172 or via e-mail at dan.carpenter@indystar.com
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