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CounterPunch
January
20, 2003
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 bjackson@buffalo.edu.
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