Civil Disobedience?

An attentive reader, Gabriel Rossman, alerted me to this article by Mark Edmundson that appears in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on “Civil Disobedience Against Affirmative Action.”

Edmundson begrudgingly admires the “opportunistic wit” that has led to an effort to enlist college applicants in a pledge to lie about their race on college admissions as a way of throwing a wrench in the works of racial preferences. That effort, which finds its home on the NoRace.org web site, began with a letter (which can be found here) to Jay Nordlinger of National Review:

“Jay, what would happen to affirmative-action programs if a significant portion of college applicants intentionally misreported their races? Even if most applications were marked correctly…a little civil disobedience could introduce just enough margin of error to really bring out the pure intellectual chaos and moral repugnance of affirmative action.

“Think about it: Schools would be forced to visually confirm the race of every applicant who claimed to be a minority. The explicit process of racial classification…the naked barbarity of the data collection…would render affirmative action politically indefensible. What dean of admissions wouldn’t be a little uncomfortable in front of Fox News cameras turning away a previously accepted student on the first day of orientation because he or she had the incorrect skin pigmentation?”

According to Edmundson, lying about your race may well be “a provocative sort of guerrilla theater,” but, he asks,

does lying about your race on a college application really qualify as an act of civil disobedience? The followers of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi put their lives on the line to protest injustice; because of them, we associate the words ”civil disobedience” with extreme courage against ruthless state power. Lying about your race on a college application, on the other hand, looks a little more like self-interested scheming.

Could it be said that telling the truth about your race in a context where you expect to be rewarded for it is also “self-interested”? Oh never mind. Following is the comment of my correspondent regarding Edmundson’s put-down of preferences protesters, which I heartily endorse:

This is true, but I don’t think the gray lady would mock the efforts of liberal protesters. In fact, the last time the exact words “civil disobedience” appeared in a NYT story on affirmative action was 7/19/95 in a story about the UC Regents decision: “Another possible Presidential contender, Mr. (Jesse) Jackson, has threatened that he and his supporters will practice civil disobedience if not granted time to defend the programs.” Nowhere does the story call Jackson’s invocation of civil disobedience grandstanding because he is unlikely to suffer serious consequences.

Nonetheless, it is nice to have the precedent set. The next time pro-preferences activists perform political theater, like block entrance to a library door (as they routinely did when I was a UCLA student in the late ’90s), I hope the NYT has the consistency to ridicule their efforts because they are … risking consequences no more severe than a pro forma arrest at worst, which btw, is nothing compared to the serious possibility of expulsion that one faces for lying on a college application.

Say What? (6)

  1. Sam Barnes December 14, 2003 at 1:57 am | | Reply

    From the article:

    “The followers of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi put their lives on the line to protest injustice; because of them, we associate the words ”civil disobedience” with extreme courage against ruthless state power.”

    Uh, no we don’t. The only reason Gandhi and King were successful was because neither the British empire nor the U.S. government exhibited the “ruthless state power” of your garden-variety totalitarian regime. Sure, their actions took a certain amount of moral courage, but Saddam Hussein (for instance) would have tossed Gandhi into a mincer for his troubles.

    Public civil diobedience can work in a free society that tolerates dissent, but it’s not extremely hazardous in that context. In a totalitarian context, public civil disobedience is merely a novel form of suicide.

  2. . December 15, 2003 at 1:06 pm | | Reply

    On about half of my applications, I put my race as Other (Write in: Elf). The other half required me send in a picture of myself.

  3. Funky Ph.D. December 15, 2003 at 2:23 pm | | Reply

    Can one be called to account for lying about something as ill-defined as “race?” Race is a fossil of 19th-century pseudo-science, with about as much validity as phrenology and the theory of criminal fingerprints. In the absence of any objective markers of so-called “race,” I don’t see how a publicly-funded institution could expel a student whose self-assigned racial identity is inaccurate. If I say I’m black, or Asian, or Pacific Islander (which I am, as my mother was born in Hawaii, a Pacific island), how can anyone dispute me? I guess there are DNA markers for certain “racial types,” but I’d like to see the uproar if the government denied me my “racial identity” on the basis of a saliva test.

  4. Richard Nieporent December 16, 2003 at 7:52 pm | | Reply

    I have always wondered what would happen if people started lying about there race. What would the present day racists, i.e., liberals, do? The Nuremberg Laws used 1/8 ancestry as a determination of Jewish identity. Would they follow that rule or would they go to the more stringent one-drop of black blood rule? And if so, how would they enforce it? Would we have mandatory testing of individuals for racial genetic markers? Would the government then issue every individual a card that clearly stated his/her racial identity? Would the liberals even realize that they were instituting a reverse Apartheid law? Would the irony be lost on them?

  5. Michelle Dulak December 17, 2003 at 11:08 pm | | Reply

    Richard,

    I have often wondered what universities or other organizations practicing affirmative action would do if they actually had to define “Black.” So far they haven’t had to — though I think that they have had to define “Native American” (at least, I think the UC system had to), because Native American campus groups were alleging fraud.

    But your suspicion is correct; the “one-drop” rule is alive and well. That’s why Tiger Woods is Black, even though he insists he isn’t; and why the new San Francisco DA, Kamala Harris, is “the state’s first African-American DA” despite having an Indian (as in the subcontinent) mother. Woods (whose mother is Thai) and Harris might equally well be described as Asian-American, but don’t hold your breath.

  6. Questioneer December 22, 2003 at 4:45 pm | | Reply

    I always thought of putting, “You better ask my great-grandmother. She had a lot of gentlemen callers of many ethnicities.”

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