More Work To Be Done To Level Field

This column needs a warning label.

Maybe a skull and crossbones with a red circle and line through it.

Imagine as you read this that my jaw is set; think of Winston Churchill or an English bulldog. I don’t know whether to laugh at the absurdity of the current racial dialogue or cry.

Read the New York Times editorial of Feb. 28, 1995 (I’ll be glad to mail out copies) and look into your own soul. It is an editorial titled “The Nuclear Wedge Issue,” and the subject is the gathering crusade against any form of affirmative action. It exposes the cultural evil of racism and how it is manipulated as a political issue. Here are some excerpts:

“By concocting a fantasy that white males are a new victim class in the world’s richest nation, they see a highway to a pre-emptive lock on the electoral vote.” That means white males because 62 percent voted for the GOP in 1994.

I don’t see white males as singleissue voters who can be stampeded to save their privileges at the expense of those they love. It is insulting to white men to believe that they can gain votes by creating a “wedge” based on lies. All any white male has to do is look around at the politicians, executives and professionals he sees every day to know who dominates and why.

“The attack on affirmative action depends on exaggerating every inconvenience suffered by a white worker or student into a massive insult against egalitarian principle.” The actual data shows white males and white-male-owned firms have lost only a tiny percentage of the economic advantage they have had for decades over labor unions, apprenticeships, politics, academics and government or municipal contracts.

“The bipartisan tradition of reasonable remedies for past discrimination has withered. In its place the nation has a new class of politicians willing to argue that it is intolerable for a white male anywhere in America to taste one drop of the discrimination that over the decades has been gulped in gallons by blacks and women.”

Think about the film footage you’ve seen of the civil rights battles. Imagine your life if your gender, color, religion or disability had limited every opportunity regardless of how hard you worked.

Can you remember when there were no African-American basketball, football or baseball players? Did an all-white team, then, have anything to do with a lack of skills among African-American men? Think of all the times you have worked in offices where the only person of color was the janitor and the only woman a receptionist. Have we evened all that out in 20 years of affirmative action?

“The plain truth is that the number of blacks at the professional or skilled labor levels is simply too slight to produce competition, let alone discrimination against white men.” The group most helped by affirmative action guidelines are women. Every woman, every father of a daughter needs to understand that you or your children are targets and that some white men are unwilling to compete in a market that does not give them traditional privileges. There is no level playing field. There may be one in the future and then affirmative action will be unnecessary.

“Mr. Kristol (who created this strategy for a GOP victory in 1996) likes to say that affirmative action has been poisonous for race relations in America. There is poison in the air these days, but not the one he imagines.” We are being offered, in the guise of a justified backlash, a cynical immoral poison. We are being offered dishonor.

As I sat with my anger the other night, wondering if I should write this column, “Ishi: the last Yahi” turned up on my TV. It is a documentary about the last member of a California tribe who walked out of the woods after 40 years of hiding. A bounty had been placed on his people (five dollars a head, one dollar a scalp including babies) and they had been killed by hunters. His last bit of family had died the year before he appeared when a surveyor came upon their hidden camp and took all their fur robes and hunting bows as souvenirs. Only Ishi survived the winter.

There were 10 million Native Americans in 1600, there were 300,000 left in 1910 when Ishi walked out of his wilderness. More than a million were killed by bounty hunters in California.

It is so hard for a nation to swallow the bitter pill of its own unjust history. We are tempted instead, as other nations are, to think of ourselves as victims. Yet, the only way to be a moral society is to know the crimes you have committed. Affirmative action may need some changes but it is not poison. The poison we are being offered is an evil concoction of greed and privilege. Don’t swallow it.