Why Blacks Should Give Bush a Chance, from the Spring 2001 City Journal:
Not since the Johnson administration has there been more concrete movement to free African-Americans from their status as the country’s problem race — and the lessons we’ve learned from LBJ’s failures mean that this administration will avoid the pitfalls of the War on Poverty’s hand-out philosophy. Who would have thought that a Republican administration would give such promise of reaching the long-sought goal of turning things around for black America?Predictably, leftist black pundits who claim to represent the black view in America won’t grasp the import of this moment. Brent Staples of the New York Times informs us that “black Americans’ distrust of this administration is running extraordinarily high.” Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, histrionically comparing the irregularities in the Florida vote count to the evils of Selma, urge black Americans to refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Bush administration. Yet these are calls to distrust and resist a golden opportunity for black America….
Leftists who distrust meritocracy viscerally resist subjecting minority children to frequent standardized tests. Such people should try reading minority students’ applications to colleges and graduate schools and seeing the dismayingly low SAT and GRE scores that intelligent black students submit so disproportionately. What pulls black students down on these tests is a culturally ingrained sense that the kind of thinking that the tests entail is a white endeavor rather than a race-neutral ritual. Curing this ideological handicap is a challenge….According to the left’s version of compassion, black students, because of society’s inequity, ought to be excused, by affirmative action, from serious competition, and many blacks find the Bush administration’s disapproval of such racial preferences one more reason for distrust. But affirmative action means subjecting blacks to lowered standards — “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” as the Bush campaign deftly phrased it. In my view, this policy was a necessary evil in the 1960s, when America was still overtly racist. But such a policy, like chemotherapy, should be administered only as long as necessary, given the havoc it wreaks upon the body politic while curing a local ailment. More and more thinkers, both black and white, argue that the time to end it is now. After all, they point out, when the University of California ended racial preferences, the number of black students fell at only two schools and increased at most others.
One political party envisions lowered standards as black Americans’ fate for the foreseeable future. The other supports improving schools so that blacks can compete on their own. A Martian recently landed in America would wonder just why a group suffering from a legacy of being considered inferior would warmly embrace lowered standards and fiercely resist being prepared for competition.
Read the rest of John McWhorter’s article.
