The last time I mentioned Henry Louis Gates, it was in reference to skin color preferences at Harvard University, where Gates is a professor. See this post.
In July, he and Lani Guinier (Bill Clinton’s “Quota Queen”) wanted to commission a waste-of-time-and-money study to determine why black immigrants outnumbered and outperformed black Americans at the Ivy League school. Clarence Page, who is no conservative, offered a possible explanation: “Immigrant kids work harder.”
I don’t care too much for Gates’s ideas (that blacks need extra help to succeed), but I wanted to blog about his article, “Swallowing the Elephant.” He offers the usual explanation why blacks vote for Democrats and will continue to do so. From the New York Times (registration req.):
The moment when the Republican Party lost black America can be given a date: Oct. 26, 1960. Martin Luther King Jr., arrested in Georgia during a sit-in, had been transferred to a maximum-security prison and sentenced to four months on the chain gang, without bail. As The Times reported, John F. Kennedy called Coretta King, expressing his concern. Richard Nixon didn’t.
This is true. While doing research for a column titled “Why Courting the Black Vote Won’t Work”, I found pretty much the same thing. I wrote: “So why did blacks switch from voting for Republicans in large numbers to voting for Democrats? Some say it was President John F. Kennedy’s perceived sensitivity to the oppression of minorities that endeared him and the party to black Americans, and they’ve been voting for Democrats in droves ever since.”
Gates continues:
Some black Republicans will tell you that however important the legal reforms of the civil-rights era had been 40 years ago, blacks today will be well served by the party of school reform and faith-based programs, the party of the so-called ownership society. [So-called?] “These are going to be the pillars of the black community,” Condoleezza Rice told me. “In my little community in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 50′s and 60′s, there were black-owned businesses everywhere, and everybody owned their own homes. That made our community strong. We’ve got to get back to that….”What’s more, many blacks are evangelical Protestants, and tend to be more conservative than their white counterparts on “social” issues like gay rights and capital punishment. “The Democratic Party is not 90 percent more black friendly than we are,” Rove exclaims.
Why, then, are blacks such down-the-line Democrats? My Harvard colleague Michael Dawson, a descendant of a black Democratic congressman from Chicago, agrees with Rove that black people are socially conservative. But the issues they vote on are racial and, especially, economic.
First of all, I don’t like race politics and I don’t like Karl Rove’s “explanation.” As I’ve written time and again, the GOP should focus on its core principles and not waste time and energy on the “black vote.”
Now black liberals take issue with me every time I say that, and I’m certain one or more will comment on it. Courting groups based on religion or socioeconomic status is inherently different from seeking their votes based on skin color. Perhaps I haven’t articulated very well why this is so, but I’ll give it another try.
For too long skin color has been a handy excuse in this country. Blacks were systematically denied basic rights because of their skin color. Forty years after the demise of legal segregation, skin color is still used as an excuse. In this case, it is the reason special treatment is necessary, they claim. That is, because America is racist, we need government protection in the form of lowered standards in order to achieve. We’ve flip-flopped in four decades.
During the Civil Rights movement, blacks wanted to be first class citizens. Now that we have the rights others died for, some blacks want to return to second class citizenship by asking for and getting lowered standards.
One of the unintended consequences of race preferences is that blacks from other countries, not just whites, are putting affirmative action kids to shame. “Intellectuals” are trying to figure out why the lowered standards deal isn’t working, at least at Harvard. To me, it’s obvious. If you can get into a school with lower grades and scores than your white counterparts, there is no incentive to compete against them. You don’t have to anyway because you’re black! Apparently, blacks from other countries aren’t exposed to such warped (and demeaning) ideas.
Then again, how can one with less academic preparation compete with another who has a strong academic background? This is what preferences are designed to sidestep, and I think it is wrong. We need to raise the academic standards and expectations of black students.
Perhaps I’m putting too much stock in what black liberals think. We all have our opinions, and we usually stick with them. I’m attracted to race-neutral policies and repelled by racial ones, the same as I would be toward racist ones. That’s just the way I am. Given the history of divineness of race, I believe there are more important and less distracting factors to focus on.
Gates’s assessment that blacks vote on racial issues is correct, but he’s incorrect about the economic issues. What liberals mean by “economic issues” is not more business ownership or lower taxes, but ownership of other people’s money in redistribution of wealth schemes. Government contract preferences and every other social program you can think of are obvious devices to take from one to give to another.
And I don’t think blacks as a group are any more socially conservative than any other group. Opposing homosexual “marriage,” for example, doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is conservative. I’ll develop this idea later.
Bottom line: Gates’s article is a glimpse into the psyche of those who vote for liberals like John Kerry, even though they don’t like him, either. He talks to them about race and government programs ad nauseam, and apparently, that’s what black Democrats want to hear.
Update: Read what Tex the Pontificator has to say.
