-Caveat Lector-
January 20, 2003
http://www.counterpunch.org/
Bush, Blacks and Jews
by BRUCE JACKSON
On Wednesday, January 15, Martin Luther King's birthday, George W.
Bush ordered White House lawyers to use all their energy, resources and
experience to convince whatever members of the Supreme Court
needed such convincing that the University of Michigan should not be
permitted to factor an applicant's minority status into its admissions
calculations, and neither should the University of Michigan-or, by
extension, any other American university-have the option of ensuring
ethnic diversity in its student body. Minority ethnic status, Bush said,
shouldn't provide an academic advantage and educational institutions
shouldn't have favored slots. Educational institutions, he has several
times said, should rather offer "affirmative access," a vaporous phrase
that seems to mean everybody is free to apply to whatever institution he
or she wishes and institutions are under no obligation to do anything
about anything.
It's sort of like a white restaurant owner in Mississippi in 1960 affirming
that everyone has access to his restaurant. Everyone does, in fact, have
access, but black folks aren't going to get inside. And if any should
make a fuss about it they're going to get their ass kicked and they'll go
to the county farm for a while. But, boy, they did have their access
affirmed.
Affirmative access is what George W. Bush had when he got accepted by
Yale University despite mediocre prep school grades, and by Harvard
Business School despite mediocre Yale University grades. His father's
position as a very rich guy and as a Washington politician with huge
connections and power to benefit both schools, to say nothing of being
an old grad of Yale, provided Dubya's a whole lot of affirmative access.
And that affirmative access was no doubt what got him into Yale's Skull &
Bones, the same all-white-no-Jews-or-Catholics men's club to which his
father belonged. And affirmative access explains the $12 million gift his
partners in the Texas Rangers gave him, just gave him, with no rational
explanation whatsoever.
Perhaps you too could have had that kind of affirmative access at Yale
and Harvard Business School if you were son of a man powerful enough
or rich enough or old boy enough for you to fall into what those schools
call "legacy admissions"-candidates whose applications would be tossed
into the paper recycling barrel in the first round were it not for daddy's
position and power, or the fact that there was a building on campus
named for someone in the family or that right now someone in the
development office was trying to get the family to underwrite the
erection of another such building, or get some other kind of erection
going. And perhaps, for the same kind of affirmative access reasons,
your Texas business partners would one day just give you $12 million.
Dubya's foggy years
Back when a lot of Dubya's friends thought he was nothing but a whore-
mongering dope- smoking coke-sniffing falling-down drunk he may
have hung around with the kind of folks who had use for affirmative
action. But he doesn't talk about that part of his life any more, perhaps
because he doesn't remember it, or perhaps because he prefers to
pretend he doesn't remember it.
The hagiography has it that, at some wonderful non-affirmative action
point in his life, he discovered Jesus and was shortly thereafter handed
all those millions of dollars and so many swell connections by his father's
friends that he could be rich entirely on his own without depending on
anybody and he could put all those bad questions behind him. He was,
from that moment on, a self-made man. Self-made made are their own
affirmation and have no need of affirmative action.
When he was running for president, that's how he answered all
questions about the years in which he was or wasn't a whore-mongering
dope-smoking coke-sniffing falling-down drunk. Jesus separated that
Then from this Now with a sanctified wall that might as well have been
made of stone: Dubya simply refused to talk about anything the other
side of it.
And the press, with uncommon discretion, let him get away with it. The
same press that for years dogged Bill Clinton just about to death over a
real estate deal in which it turned out he or his wife made or didn't
make a few thousand bucks at most, just let Dubya get away with
everything.
Since the all-white-but-one-who-might-as-well- be-Supremes gave
him Florida, he has been, in his official household, able to brag on his
ethnic openness by pointing to such senior staff ethnic success stories as
Condoleeza Rice (a university provost when she started tutoring Dubya
on axes of evil here and abroad) and Colin Powell (a very good soldier
who keeps his mouth shut about an astonishing number of things, this
one included). Among the Supremes he seems particularly fond of
Clarence Thomas, who, um, did have a bit, quite a bit of affirmative
action throughout his entire career, but realized how evil it was once he
became a Supreme Court Justice and didn't have anyplace else to go
and therefore didn't need it any longer now that he's got Supreme
access.
What this is really about
Only The Shadow knows what's in the hearts of men, so we can only
speculate about what prompted George W. Bush to put the weight of his
presidency against the admissions office of the University of Michigan.
We can be pretty sure of this: Dubya cares no more about admissions to
UM than he cares about quality of life issues for villagers in Afghanistan
or Iraq. Whatever is motivating him, it's homegrown.
For starters, it's payback to the Christian conservatives who put him in
office, dotting the i's on his appellate court renominations last week of
Priscilla Owen of Texas and Charles Pickering of Mississippi, both of
whom had been rejected by the Senate last year. And it's probably
payback to Clarence Thomas ("I never had affirmative access with that
woman") and Thomas's puppeteer, Antonin Scalia, both of whom were
instrumental in the Florida decision that put Bush in office. It's a clarion
danke to everybody who paid to put him where he is. It's another way of
saying, "Don't let this unresolved Al Qaeda mess let you think I've gotten
distracted and forgotten why I'm really here and who put me here. I'll
deliver for you. I'm delivering for you now. Armaments orders are up
and if all goes right they'll be up for a long time to come. We'll get those
Iraqi oil fields under control sooner rather than later. We'll soon be
drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge and all those other places
just sitting there full of woodchucks doing nothing profitable. I will
continue delivering for you. And you, my dear friends, know the post
office box where checks for BUSH 2004 should be sent, earlier rather
than later, thank you one and all, praise Jesus who votes Republican
straight across."
What's this incursion into academia going to cost him? The votes of the
liberal professors? How many of them are there, and they all vote
Democrat or Nader anyway. The black vote? He only got 9% of that last
time and the projections show no significant movement. His father left
office with the cruelest ethnic joke in American jurisprudence: replacing
Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas. Repercussions? Zero. Black
voters are not a factor in any Bush family political scheme and never will
be. (Keeping them from voting, as happened a lot in Florida 2000, is
another matter entirely. If all the Florida black voters who should have
been able to vote had been permitted to vote, the University of Michigan
wouldn't have White House lawyers crawling all over the place now.)
Quotas
I've gotta tell you: George W. Bush doesn't know jackshit about quotas.
He doesn't read books and he has no historical memory. He grew up in
privilege and it was privilege that got him into schools that would
otherwise have rejected him, as did the University of Texas Law School,
which, I guess, considered his family and his money too northeastern to
warrant special handling. His personal experience of quotas, so far as
I've been able to find out, is restricted to how many fish you can yank
out of the private lakes without being busted by the game warden on
the canoe ride back to the big house.
Dubya said that Michigan's awarding points for ethnicity and attempting
to have ethnic diversity is a quota system that must be abolished
because discriminatory quotas are bad. But he's turning the world
upside down. The kind of quota that has to go is the kind that keeps
people out, not the kind that tries to help them get in. Saying that we've
fucked you and your entire family for generations but now we all start
life on the same level playing field is an obscenity. You don't fix
generations of unequal access simply by saying, "We're equal now." The
idea of a level playing field is a metaphor; it has nothing to do with real
life. The real life field is not the least bit level.
I'm an English teacher, so professionally I like metaphors, but you have
to keep things in perspective. Reading and hearing about a broken leg
is nothing compared to the fact of having a broken leg. Metaphor is
words; real life is real life.
The myth of the level playing field and the fallacy of meritocracy
There's no such thing as a level playing field in American education. It
never existed before, it doesn't exist now, and it won't exist because an
American president says on national television that it exists now. Real
change takes more than smug statements by a rich guy on national
television.
Kids who grow up in households where parents have the ability and
education and time to read to their kids and help them with their
homework and have the status to get teachers and administrators to
take them seriously do better in school than kids who do not have any of
those things. Every parent and teacher in America knows that..
Kids who go to prestigious prep schools are more likely to get into
prestigious colleges, whatever their SATs, than kids who go to ordinary
schools. Kids who go to school in poor cities do not, on the whole, get as
good an education as kids who go to school in rich cities or in the rich
suburbs surrounding poor cities. Every parent and teacher in America
knows that too.
Those are facts of life. You can't make them go away by saying they
don't matter any more, we have a level playing field, we have affirmative
access. These problems are real, they matter. Access gets you to the
door; only action gets you inside.
Freaks
Yes, it is possible for kids from poor households who are very, very
smart and very, very energetic to transcend their environment and make
it up through the establishment. Bill Clinton was one of those kids and so
was Condoleeza Rice. They're both terrific success stories; they both
triumphed over astonishing odds.
And they're both freaks. Condi and Bill are Freaks. You know that.
You've always known that. Most kids aren't that brilliant or that
ambitious. Can you imagine living in a society in which everybody was
like those two? Most kids are like most other kids.
We can't afford a school or university system defined in terms of rich
kids like George W. Bush on one side and brilliant kids like Bill Clinton
and Condi Rice on the other. We need a school and university system in
which most kids have a fair shot of making it, not just the lucky few who
are born rich or brilliant and lucky.
Jews
Here's something weird: when you talk about affirmative action to
people who want to abolish affirmative action the ethnic group they
bring up more than any other is Jews. "Jews made it without affirmative
action," they say, "so why can't these people." The term "these people"
applies to whatever ethnic group they don't like. But the rabid anti-
affirmative action people don't like Jews any more than they like black or
Hispanic or Asian people.
When I'm in those conversations I get emotional because I remember
things, things that my students and my own children have no memory of.
Like ads for places that said they were "restricted." I remember asking
my mother what that word meant and her telling me it meant only very
rich people could go there, not people like us. Indeed, people like us
couldn't go there, but it had only secondarily to do with the fact that we
didn't have any money. The word "Restricted" meant "no Jews allowed."
It was a twofold insult: the exclusion of us then, about which I never
cared, and my mother's embarrassment in having to explain it to me,
about which I will never not care.
It wasn't that long ago and it's not all gone. There are still clubs in
Buffalo, New York, the city where I live now, that are restricted in exactly
that same sense. Buffalo's not special in that regard. A lot of cities have
clubs like that.
There's a very good reason so many New York Jewish intellectuals of the
1930s got their degrees from CCNY or got their education in the New
York Public Library: those were the only two institutions many of them
could find that let them in. Years later, when I was a kid trying to get into
college, Jews still couldn't get into Princeton at all; you didn't bother
applying there. Only a small number of Jews were allowed into Yale and
Harvard and if you applied you knew you were fighting for a spot in very
small quotas. Scholarships were also restricted. I remember filling out
the application for a Danforth Fellowship (Senator John C. Danforth of
Missouri, a wealthy scion of that same family, was Clarence Thomas's
sponsor before the Senate Judiciary Committee) and the high school
guidance councilor tearing it up, saying, "You can't apply for that, Bruce.
You're a Jew. Danforth doesn't give scholarships to Jews. Didn't you read
their application?" Like it was my fault.
Two things destroyed that restricted world of the Danforths and got
Harvard and Yale to increase their quotas and Princeton to decide it was
time to let Jews walk its theretofore goyische-only paths, and both were
governmental affirmative action programs.
First, the GI Bill, enacted in June 1944, paid for tuition and books and a
good piece of the living expenses for any veteran of WWII and Korea who
wanted to go to college, and provided financial incentives for colleges to
make room for those millions of returning veterans. No college or
university could afford to ignore those funded, mature, purposeful
students. And twelve years later the National Defense Education Act of
1958 made it possible for educational institutions to expand scientific
research in all areas and increase their teaching in anything having to do
with science, language and culture.
Those two pieces of legislation were the educational equivalent of the
WPA and the Renaissance. Their combined impact on American life has
never been calculated. The two of them in combination are the greatest
tsunami of affirmative action in American educational history.
What neither George W. Bush nor I know about what happens in college
I've been a college teacher for 35 years and I still don't know what
makes some kids do well in college and other kids not do well. I can tell
you that it's not their high school grades and SAT scores. Neither do I
know what lets some people do well and others not after college. I've
seen students with great grades go into a life of marking time and kids
who marked time in college go into a life that keeps getting better every
year.
Some kids come to college far better prepared for their first year than
others. They're easy to spot. Those are the kids George W. Bush wants
to have first dibs on all the available spaces. But evidence of
preparation doesn't tell you everything you need to know. Something
happens in that first year to many of them and differences that may
have seemed huge on one side of the admissions office become
insignificant the other side of it. Often the thing that matters most isn't
the high school grades or the SAT scores but rather the first three or
four college teachers those kids encounter.
Affirmative action, wisely applied, attempts to compensate in some
small way for those inequities that life put in the path of those kids. All
of those kids-not just the very rich or the very smart ones, who don't
need it anyway, but all of them. Of course it's not a perfect solution. It's
just a solution. If we had a perfect world we wouldn't need solutions. But
we don't have a perfect world.
Affirmative action is a lot better than lying to ourselves with inaccurate
and inappropriate metaphors from the world of organized sports, like
"flat playing fields." Where in real life are things run on a basis of flat
playing fields anyway?
Why should college be singled out for this special restrictive treatment?
The only place there's a flat playing field in when you're playing a game
and somebody has had the time and money to make sure the game is
played on a field that is flat.
Only idiots and liars confuse games and fields with the real thing.
Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P.
Capen Professor of American Culture at University of Buffalo. He edits
Buffalo Report.
His email address is [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Forwarded for your information. The text and intent of the article
have to stand on their own merits.
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