Update (9/11): Some readers are under the mistaken impression that I attended the HBCU conference. I didn’t.
The photo below of me and Justice Thomas was taken last October at the Heritage Foundation. Thomas spoke about his experiences and signed copies of his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son.
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At the recent Annual Conference of the White House Initiative on National Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it was “not acceptable” that there aren’t more black people in her meetings at the State Department. (Source)
Based on the context of the entire speech, which I read, she wasn’t insinuating “racism” had anything to do with it. It sounded like she was encouraging blacks to become involved in Foreign Service.
There’s nothing wrong with encouraging blacks to consider certain careers, but it sounds too much like pandering to me. If I were giving a speech in front of a black audience (which I hope to do on my book tour), I wouldn’t complain about the paucity of blacks at blog conferences. Who cares?
No matter what the topic, I’d take time to address substantive issues that blacks, not the government, need to fix, like the outrageous levels of illegitimacy and crime among blacks. That is not acceptable. There are more pressing concerns than not seeing other blacks at a conference or in meetings. I wouldn’t waste time, not one second, “lamenting” that there aren’t more people “who look like me.”
Rice believes it’s OK for colleges to consider race when admitting an applicant (I’m wondering if she thinks it’s OK for colleges to also admit white students based on race), so I hope she isn’t advocating using race preferences to recruit more blacks to the State Department. With her level of education and experience, she should be more circumspect.
Contrast Rice’s remarks with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s to the same group. He “benefited” from race preferences, as I have, and we both bear the stigma of and aversion to this odious practice. An excerpt:
A longtime opponent of race-based preferences in hiring and school admissions, Thomas said, “Just from a constitutional standpoint, I think we’re going to run into problems if we say the Constitution says we can consider race sometimes.”
Thomas, 60, has voted on the court to outlaw the use of race in college admissions and in determining which public schools students will attend. He wrote with evident resentment in his autobiography “My Grandfather’s Son” that he felt he was allowed to attend Yale Law School in the 1970s because of his race and took a tough course load to prove he was as able as his white classmates.
“My suggestion would be to stop the buzz words and to focus more on the practical effect of what we’re doing,” he said Tuesday.
“What we’re doing” when we allow the government to prefer one person over another based on race, practically speaking, is giving government the power to discriminate based on race, the battle cry of the entire civil rights movement! You see, people don’t want to know the truth. They get it twisted in their minds, deluding themselves into believing lowering the bar for blacks is a good thing or that race preferences have nothing to do with lesser qualifications. (See The True Meaning of “Black Pride”)
Not being good enough to get accepted to a school or hired for a job is one thing. I can study more and get better grades or acquire the necessary skills and experience, or move on to a school or job for which I’m qualified. But when someone implies that I should receive some unearned benefit because I can’t do any better on account of my race, well, those are fighting words.
I would guess that most people don’t care about race preferences. This demeaning policy likely does not affect their daily lives, so it’s low on the priority list. We all should care about it. Think about that grainy black and white film footage you’ve seen from the 1960s: cops turning hoses and dogs on black protesters, Democrats standing in school doors to prevent black kids from entering, whites shouting at black students as they walked to school, etc. To get the government out of the skin color business, this country engaged in a tense struggle for equal treatment. Race preferences make a mockery of that struggle.
It’s 2008, and the government is still in the skin color business. Blacks are “benefiting” from it these days, and that’s why they support it. But one day, the government might revert to its former practice. When that happens, what legal and moral leg will blacks have to stand on?
None.
How have you been helped or harmed by preferences?
