Race goals are easier, not better

Jewish World Review
by Clarence Page
April 20, 2009 / 26 Nisan 5769

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com

Here's a quick history quiz for you. Which nationally prominent leader said this?
"Edicts of nondiscrimination are not enough. Justice demands that every citizen consciously adopts a personal commitment to affirmative action, which will make equal opportunity a reality."
Was it the Rev. Jesse Jackson? The Rev. Al Sharpton? Sister Souljah?
No, it was then-Gov. Ronald Reagan of California in his 1971 executive order. He sounded more liberal, at least on this issue, than the racial quota-fighter who became president nine years later.
Times have changed, but on race not all that much, as far as Julian Bond is concerned. The civil rights era hero, now chairman of the NAACP, whipped out that old quote like an ace up his sleeve during a debate at the Library of Congress last week to argue that what was good for Gov. Reagan two generations ago is good enough for America now.
I'm not as certain of that as he is. Sitting in the audience at the debate, I was struck by how much America's persistent problems with race have changed, while so many of our leading affirmative action proponents have not.
Yet I was also struck by how replacing race-based affirmative action with the class-based kind is easier to say than to do, especially at elite colleges and universities.
That's one reason why Bond opposed the evening's proposition: "Should affirmative action be based on wealth and class rather than race and ethnicity?"
President Barack Obama thinks it should, he has said in writing and out loud. "We have to think about affirmative action," he said in at last summer's convention of black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American journalists in Chicago, "and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren't getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more." It is safe to say that, in the fashion of President Richard Nixon opening doors to China, Obama's position later helped him with white voters and didn't hurt him very much with blacks.

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