Slouching Towards Gomorrah

by Robert H. Bork

  It may be thought that affirmative action is a way of buying social peace by enforcing proportional representation for all groups in all institutions. If so, it is obvious that the policy does not work. The results of affirmative action have been greater group antagonisms and self-segregation. The demand for equality of results is surely one cause of the increasing racial acrimony in our society. It is to be seen everywhere, from the new separation of the races on campuses to racial bloc voting on juries to workplace antagonisms. Nor is this just a problem between whites and blacks. Adjustments between races were difficult enough when that was only a question of those two races, but now we have large numbers of Asians and Hispanics, with many divisions within each group. By referring to non-whites generally as “persons of color,” an attempt is made to range all non-whites against all whites. The tactic cannot work in an ethnic spoils system. The chancellor of a major university told me that blacks were calling him a racist. I asked why. He said, “Too many Asians.” The prospects for racial and ethnic peace seem to be diminishing.

  It is no wonder affirmative action creates racial hostilities. When a white male who has never discriminated against anyone loses out to a black male who has never been discriminated against, despite the formers superior qualifications, anger will flare up on both sides. The reason for the white’s anger is obvious; the black will be angry because he knows that others know he has succeeded not on his own but because of his skin. The black is particularly likely to feel anger if he is placed by affirmative action in an environment in which he cannot compete equally. He may be college material but not ready for the college that takes him in. Perhaps, instead of being at Harvard, he should be at the University of Massachusetts.

  It will be difficult to get rid of affirmative action. There is no reason to think that the infliction of inequities will come to an end at some unstated time in the future, at least not without acrimony and further racial anger. The rhetoric of victimhood will continue as long as there are benefits to be derived from it, which is to say as long as whites seek absolution. Judging by the universities’ pusillanimity on this and similar issues for the past thirty years, unless authorities outside the universities intervene, affirmative actions inequities in the academic world will last forever, the period of transition will be eternity. Modern liberals have gotten us into a mistaken policy that we cannot continue and will have the greatest difficulty in ending.

  Modern liberals in government agencies, universities, and elsewhere will do their utmost to preserve affirmative action. But there is a new mood in the public. There is a move to put the elimination of affirmative action in California to a vote in 1996, and the issue promises to become national. The initiative to be put to a vote in California states: “Neither the State of California nor any of its political subdivisions or agents shall use race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin as a criterion for either discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group in the operation of the State’s system of public employment, public education or public contracting.” This is an attempt to restore what Congress thought it was doing in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the passage of the initiative would apply only to preferential policies put in place by the state or its subdivisions. Federal preferential policies override state law.

  Interestingly enough, some liberals now think affirmative action has lasted too long. Joseph Califano, who pushed hard for affirmative action in both the Johnson and Carter administrations, wrote in 1989 that the policy was intended “only as a temporary expedient to speed blacks’ entry into the social and economic mainstream” and that “its time is running out“19 Susan Estrich, a law professor and campaign strategist for presidential candidate Mike Dukakis in 1988, said that “For all its good intentions, affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach.“20 Ward Connerly, a black member of the Board of Regents of the University of California, said, “I tell you with every fiber of my being that what we’re doing is inequitable to certain people…. To those who say, ‘Affirmative action now, affirmative action as it is now’—that’s what George Wallace said about segregation.” The Board of Regents has ordered the California university system to stop preferences, but is said to be meeting covert resistance from educators and administrators.

  On the other side of the issue, the head of the California branch of the National Organization for Women called the anti-affirmative action initiative “divisive scapegoating” and “one of the most significant attacks yet on our rights.” A student at the University of California’s law school, Boalt Hall, said of Proposition 187, which denies California benefits to illegal immigrants, and the civil rights initiatives that they were messages that “racism is O.K.” and that “people of color are an O.K. target.“21 The fact that preferential treatment of those who are non-white and non-male is now their “right” merely confirms that many of its beneficiaries intend never to give up their privileged status. And the further charge that requiring non-discrimination for whites is “racism” shows how deeply anti-white racism has embedded itself in our culture.

  One absurd consequence of minorities’ admission to universities they are not fully qualified to enter is the self-esteem movement. The underlying idea is that achievement follows self-esteem rather than the other way round. A great deal of time is wasted at all levels of our educational system trying to build students’ self-esteem, time that might better be spent teaching them skills and knowledge that would justify self-esteem. In higher education, self-esteem is promoted by programs dedicated to women and to ethnic groups. The results have been disastrous. The decline of, indeed disdain for, scholarly standards that is characteristic of the feminist movement and women’s studies programs is also observable in ethnic studies programs. The most aggressive variety apparently is in African studies. The self-esteem of black students is, supposedly, raised by teaching them a false history of their race. Black students are, as Mary Lefkowitz puts it, taught myth as history.22 The programs tend to be indoctrination rather than education. The presence of Afrocentrism on campus, like the presence of feminism, lowers scholarly standards generally. Professors outside the program refuse to object and refuse to demand evidence and logic when impossible claims are made.

  A prominent Afrocentrist lectured at Wellesley, where Lefkowitz teaches, stating that Greek civilization was stolen from Egypt and that Egyptians were black. He claimed, among other things, that Aristotle stole his philosophy from the library at Alexandria. During the question period, Lefkowitz asked the lecturer why he made that claim when the library had been built after Aristotle’s death. His only answer was that he resented the tone of the question. Several students accused Lefkowitz of racism. Her colleagues, who knew that the lecturer was making historical misrepresentations, remained silent.

  When Lefkowitz went to the then dean of the college to point out that there was no evidence for some of what the Afrocentrists were teaching Wellesley students, the dean replied that each person has a different but equally valid view of history. When she made the point about Aristotle and the library at Alexandria at a faculty meeting, a colleague said, “I don’t care who stole what from whom.” Academics are afraid to challenge the misrepresentations of feminists and Afrocentrists. The likely penalty is to be called sexist and racist. Those terms have been flung about so indiscriminately that one would have thought they had lost their power to intimidate, but that is not the case. Worse than that, many professors and students feel that women and blacks, having been oppressed, have a right to their own histories, however false they may be.

  The damage done by Afrocentric myths includes increased racial resentment. In order to make their claims—Socrates and Cleopatra were black, Greek philosophy was pilfered from the blacks of Egypt—even minimally plausible, it is necessary for the Afrocentrists to explain why the supposed debt of Greece, and hence of Western civilization, to the blacks of ancient Egypt is not widely known
. The answer they offer is that whites not only stole their civilization from Egypt but have engaged in a massive cover-up ever since to maintain white supremacy. Blacks who believe that are naturally hostile to whites.

  One reason Afrocentrists are not challenged is that race is becoming a subject it is almost impossible to discuss honestly in public. Professor Lefkowitz has been praised for her courage in calling the myths of Afrocentrism what they are. She has shown courage, given today’s racial climate, although it should not require bravery to point out what amounts to scholarly fraud. But intimidation on matters of race is everywhere. A finalist for the presidency of Michigan State University was forced to withdraw his candidacy because four years earlier he had said: “As blacks begin to get into sports, their natural athletic abilities come through. They have actually done research on an average black athlete versus an average white athlete in basketball, where a black athlete can actually outjump a white athlete on the average.” An uproar resulted when those remarks became known at Michigan State. A black graduate student said, for example, “To try to justify racist views as science is preposterous. When other people in sports and entertainment have come up with those statements, they were axed immediately.“23 Everybody who has paid any attention knows that black athletes dominate most sports, not just basketball. That it is impossible to say so without endangering your career is preposterous.

  At the University of Pennsylvania, a professor trying to elicit discussion about the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of “involuntary servitude” referred to blacks as “ex-slaves” and said that as a Jew he was an ex-slave of Pharaoh. Several days later, when three black students complained, the professor apologized to them. Three months later, the Black Student League demanded his resignation, and the professor issued a public apology, to no avail. The university administration suspended him for two semesters and required him to attend sensitivity training sessions.24

  In a faculty sensitivity session at the University of Cincinnati a woman was forced to stand up and be mocked as “a member of the privileged white elite” because she was blonde, blue-eyed, and well educated. The trainer implied that her three degrees from prestigious private schools were not really earned but were a genetic entitlement. When the trainer later ordered her to stand up again, presumably to be abused once more, she could only sit and sob. Not one of her one hundred colleagues who were present came to her defense.25 This episode illustrates two things. Sensitivity sessions often turn into verbal assaults on representatives of a group deemed to dominate; here, whites. The more significant aspect of this episode, however, is that the woman did not respond with anger to an utterly unfair attack and that her faculty colleagues sat silent and allowed the attack to go on. We have become a submissive people, which is particularly true of whites where race is an issue.

  Amity Schlaes, an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, wrote an article in the Spectator in January 1994, describing the white middle class’ fear of blacks after Colin Ferguson murdered six whites on a Long Island commuter train, and after a jury in Brooklyn acquitted a young black despite powerful evidence that he had murdered a white. She wrote that whites were frightened because Ferguson’s “manic hostility to whites is shared by many of the city’s non madmen.“26 When copies of the article were circulated among Schlaes’ colleagues at the Journal, she became an outcast. A number of her co-workers would get out of the elevator when she got on. People who had eaten with her in the staff cafeteria refused to sit at the same table. A delegation went to the office of the chairman of the company that owns the Journal. It did not matter that Shlaes had pointed out that minorities were the greatest victims of minority crimes or that nobody could show that a single element of her article was untrue or inaccurate. “Her crime,” wrote the then editor of The Spectator, Dominic Lawson, “was far greater than being merely wrong. She had written the truth, regardless of the offence it might cause. And in modern America, or at least in its mainstream media, that is simply not done.“27 Paul Johnson makes the same point in “Gone is the time when Americans led the world in saying what they thought.“28

  Lawson goes on to account for the popularity of Rush Limbaugh and Jackie Mason by suggesting that they have “the role in modern America that underground satirists had in Russia during the late Soviet years. They were popular, and even loved, because they were the only people who could publicly demonstrate the absurdity of the official media dogma—the bogus brotherhood of man, promulgated in the USSR by Pravda and lzvestia, and in the USA by the likes of the Washington Post and the New York Times.“29 He came to realize why the American media are so neurotic, “why they are quite so slavish to the humourless ethos of political correctness. They realise that their own country is in fact riven by social divides along racial and religious lines. But no amount of silence on the matter will make the differences disappear.“30†

  It is ironic that racism and sexism have been discovered to be the deep, almost ineradicable, sicknesses of this culture at precisely the time when they have been successfully overcome. If they have not entirely disappeared, they are mere wisps of their former selves, except when it comes to white, heterosexual males. That discrimination is now so acceptable that it applies not only to matters like college admissions, hiring and promotion in government and in companies, but even to the design of the curriculum. The best known instance occurred at Stanford. The university had a very popular required course in Western culture. The idea was that students should have at least a nodding acquaintance with the minds and works that have shaped the West and that constitute our heritage. But radicals and minorities objected both because Western culture should not be celebrated, being racist, sexist, violent, imperialistic, and not at all like those wonderful Third World cultures, and because the authors that were assigned—Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Locke, Shakespeare—were all white males. The culmination of the campaign consisted of a conga line snaking across campus, led by Jesse Jackson, the protesters chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s gotta go.” And go it did. Universities routinely collapse when hit from that end of the cultural and political spectrum. Stanford revised the course, eliminating some of the white male authors and replacing them with women and writers “of color,” some of them bitterly hostile to Western civilization. This is a quota system for the curriculum. In capitulating, Stanford acquiesced in the claim that Western culture is at least highly suspect and that its great works are little more than justifications of white male dominance.

  The problem is by no means confined to the universities. It is now rampant, for example, in the world of art. The New York Times carried an article asking “Is ‘Quality’ An Idea Whose Time Has Gone?” The story reports that the idea of quality has become a lightning rod for a stormy debate about Western values vs. non-Western values, men vs. women, and, of course, race. The division is also political, with those on the right generally embracing the word, those on the left generally deploring it. The word “quality” is denounced as racist, and those who reject the word in universities as well as in the art world, in the words of the article, “often exhibit an alarming readiness to set up a bogeyman called the heterosexual white male, make him the scapegoat for everything bad in human history, and try to discredit the word quality—and with it all of Western civilization—by identifying it with him alone.“31

  Getting ourselves out of this modern liberal swamp of discrimination will not be easy. The Supreme Court seems inclined to waffle on the issue.† Getting rid of affirmative action by democratic means may not be easy either. Though majorities of Americans of all races disapprove of this discrimination, the modern liberal elites will fight to retain it, and they have an impact on public policy out of proportion to their numbers.

  Yet it is crucial that we do end this misbegotten policy. The objection to our current treatment of race is not only that it has made honest discussion virtually impossible, though it has. Nor is it simply that it is unfair to individuals, though it is. Nor
that it will destroy incentives, though it will. Nor that it will make America less competitive precisely at the time when it needs to be more competitive. Nor even perhaps that it is intensifying racial hostility. The most basic objection is that it is destroying what America means, changing us from a society whose rewards may be achieved by individual merit to one whose rewards are handed out according to group identity.

  13

  The Decline of Intellect

  If, as Brigette Berger has quite plausibly asserted, “the fate of the modern university and the fate of Western civilization are inextricably intertwined,”1 our prospects at the moment do not seem bright. Universities are central cultural institutions. Their preservation of the great works and traditions of Western civilization, including the traditions of rationality and skepticism, have been crucial to the growth of individual freedom, respect for the rule of law, and scientific progress.

  Universities now threaten to abandon those ideals and to instruct the rest of society to abandon them as well. As the universities lose respect for intellect, that attitude spreads not only to lower schools but to the society at large. It is perhaps unclear whether the universities are instructing the culture at large in the joys of anti-intellectualism or whether the universities have been infected by a culture already lobotomized by television. Probably the influence runs both ways. The universities have an independent reason to abandon intellect: the barrier that rationality places in the way of politicization.

  Whichever way the causation runs, the trend in question appears to be the result of an ever more insistent egalitarianism. America never has been enthusiastic about high intellect. “Again and again, but particularly in recent years,” Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1962, “it has been noticed that intellect in America is resented as a kind of excellence, as a claim to distinction, as a challenge to egalitarianism, as a quality which almost certainly deprives a man or woman of the common touch.”2 He noted that anti-intellectualism “made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian.”3