The Cure for Racism

In 1966, Vermont's Senator George Aiken proposed that the U.S. disentangle itself from Vietnam by declaring victory and withdrawing. America should think < about a variation on the Aiken scenario in order to begin leaving behind its fatal domestic quagmire of race. The nation should decide that, in order to rescue everyone's honor -- above all, that of African Americans -- it is time to withdraw from an untenable dynamic, from the racial equivalent of what the French generals in Indochina called "bad country."

The legal and rhetorical overemphasis on race in the past generation (busing, affirmative action, quotas, punitive political correctness) has ended by compounding the oldest American melodrama. What should have been, at most, a temporary tactic (like Lincoln getting Congress to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War) has become a permanent installation of bad principle -- a way of life.

The supposedly virtuous high road of race preference has taken the nation into dubious terrain. America's chattering classes have been beguiled by the idea of compensatory unfairness. They have not recognized it for what it is: a flirtation with the devil, a deepening reliance on the principle that formed the foundation of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. This was the poison at the center of apartheid and Hitler's Nuremberg Laws.

What affirmative action affirms, covertly -- the hidden premise, growing more powerful -- is a proposition not distant from the conclusions of Messrs. Herrnstein and Murray in The Bell Curve. In an America where all the genes of the world have settled and hope to succeed, the only way to justify open-ended affirmative action for blacks is to shake one's head and say, "Well, you know, we have to do this: African Americans are inherently inferior." Who would have thought the mind-set of a Kluxer would turn up as U.S. government policy?

We must presumably distinguish between the good, official racism (which is polyunsaturated) and bad racism (which is the saturated fat of the redneck). Well, good racism does not drive out bad. It is weak-minded and dangerously innocent to think one can enlist an immoral principle (sorting out individuals by race) in the service of social justice. The battle against bad racism becomes (like the war in Vietnam) not only unwinnable but self-perpetuating. And worse: the effort to combat racism grows evil in itself.

ldeological corruption flourishes in government agencies, as it does in the universities -- a kind of moral hiv. It destroys immune systems. A liberal icon teaching at Harvard whispered to me one day, "Affirmative action poisons the university for everyone. The students, both black and white, know it is crooked. The professor knows it is crooked. You cannot teach in these circumstances." The Federal Reserve Board at the moment is considering a new regulation that would require all small businesses applying for bank loans to identify themselves by race and gender. To what one-thousandth will the Fed measure my bloodline? (Was there a trace of some pristine, nonwhite, non- European victimness four generations back?) All is well. Subdividing bureaucratic determinism files away more millions of citizens in its racial pigeonholes.