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.

Full Commentary: http://jewishworldreview.com/0409/page042009.php3

Righting Reagan’s Wrongs?

The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT
Published: November 13, 2007

Let’s set the record straight on Ronald Reagan’s campaign kickoff in 1980.
Early one morning in the late spring of 1964, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, her husband, Robert, and their 17-year-old son, David, said goodbye to David’s brother, Andrew, who was 20.
They hugged in the family’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Andrew left. He was on his way to the racial hell of Mississippi to join in the effort to encourage local blacks to register and vote.
It was a dangerous mission, and Andrew’s parents were reluctant to let him go. But the family had always believed strongly in equal rights and the benefits of social activism. “I didn’t have the right,” Dr. Goodman would tell me many years later, “to tell him not to go.”
After a brief stopover in Ohio, Andrew traveled to the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a vicious white-supremacist stronghold. Just days earlier, members of the Ku Klux Klan had firebombed a black church in the county and had beaten terrified worshipers.
Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights of African-Americans.
The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.
That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”
Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”
Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.
That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.
Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.
He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.
And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.
[To read the entire op-ed, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin ]