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Friday, January 23, 2004

Reader msmordin found my entry on What I think and caught the first line, "I think that Affirmative Action probably seemed like a good idea at the time." He (?) sent me links to three articles on the subject, all of which I am happy to recommend. Now, if you're like I used to be, and still mired in the idea that one cannot possibly be against the idea of Affirmative Action as it has come to be practiced without being a racist, then it is likely you will get little out of reading them. In fact, you probably won't bother. If, however, you are ready to start breaking the bonds of your "more sensitive than thou" pose, you may get something out of them, and so I offer them up for your consideration.

The Weekly Standard: The Diversity Taboo, by Heather MacDonald

Frontpage: Affirmative Action, Negative Justice, by Barry Loberfeld

Harper's Magazine: The age of white guilt: and the disappearance of the black individual, by Shelby Steele

The third, by Shelby Steele, is particularly good. It's always good to read essays by fine authors. (For instance, if you're interested in Judaism, it can't hurt to read an introduction written by a guy like Herman Wouk.)

I found the following section interesting, as I think it explains much in both academia and, in many respects, the press (I touched on this phenomenon with regard to the press, although with far less depth and eloquence here.).

Everyone wants to be important. Everyone wants to make a difference. Combining importance with career advancement is a double-bonus. Speaking of prominent author James Baldwin, Steele writes:

What Baldwin did was perhaps understandable, because his group was in a pitched battle for its freedom. The group had enormous moral authority, and he had a splendid rhetorical gift the group needed. Baldwin was transformed in the sixties into an embodiment of black protest, an archetypal David--frail, effeminate, brilliant--against a brutish and stupid American racism. He became a celebrity writer on the American scene, a charismatic presence with huge, penetrating eyes that were fierce and vulnerable at the same time. People who had never read him had strong opinions about him. His fame was out of proportion to his work, and if all this had been limited to Baldwin himself, it might be called the Baldwin phenomenon. But, in fact, his ascendancy established a pattern that would broadly define, and in many ways corrupt, an entire generation of black intellectuals, writers, and academics. And so it must be called the Baldwin model.

The goal of the Baldwin model is to link one's intellectual reputation to the moral authority--the moral glamour--of an oppressed group's liberation struggle. In this way one ceases to be a mere individual with a mere point of view and becomes, in effect, the embodiment of a moral imperative. This is rarely done consciously, as a Faustian bargain in which the intellectual knowingly sells his individual soul to the group. Rather the group identity is already a protest-focused identity, and the intellectual simply goes along with it. Adherence to the Baldwin model is usually more a sin of thoughtlessness and convenience than of conscious avarice, though it is always an appropriation of moral power, a stealing of thunder.

The protest intellectual positions himself in the pathway of the larger society's march toward racial redemption. By allowing his work to be framed by the protest identity, he articulates the larger society's moral liability. He seems, therefore, to hold the key to how society must redeem itself. Baldwin was called in to advise Bobby Kennedy on the Negro situation. It is doubtful that the Baldwin of Go Tell It on the Mountain would have gotten such a call. But the Baldwin of The Fire Next Time probably expected it. Ralph Ellison, a contemporary of Baldwin's who rejected the black protest identity but whose work showed a far deeper understanding of black culture than Baldwin's, never had this sort of access to high places. By insisting on his individual autonomy as an artist, Ellison was neither inflated with the moral authority of his group's freedom struggle nor positioned in the pathway of America's redemption.

Today the protest identity is a career advantage for an entire generation of black intellectuals, particularly academics who have been virtually forced to position themselves in the path of their university's obsession with "diversity." Inflation from the moral authority of protest, added to the racialpreference policies in so many American institutions, provides an irresistible incentive for black America's best minds to continue defining themselves by protest. Professors who resist the Baldwin model risk the Ellisonian fate of invisibility.

Again, all three essays are good in their own ways, as the issue goes beyond mere issues of black and white and into the greater issue of human liberty. Enjoy.

3 Comments

thank you for reading them.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_why_the_fbi.html

another Great article by Heather Mac Donald, if you are interested.

Thank you for posting these. Shelby Steele's essay is magnificent. I was especially struck by this challenge:

The age of white guilt, with its myriad corruptions and its almost racist blindness to minority individuality, may someday go down like the age of racism went down--but only if people take the risk of standing up to it rather than congratulating themselves for doing things that have involved no real risk since 1965.

I might have struck the word "almost," but that's picking a nit. A powerful, persuasive argument.

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