Live By The Preference, Die By The Preference

Thanks in part to Jack Kelley, the USA Today reporter recent exposed as a serial fabricator, the backlash to the Jayson Blair backlash has begun in earnest.

To all those who blamed the Blair flameout on affirmative action gone wrong, the backlash backlashers reply, “Gotcha! You blamed Blair’s scandal on affirmative action, but you’re letting Kelley be just one flawed guy. And you claim to oppose double standards!” The latest, and one of the best, examples of this new genre is today’s column by Donna Britt, the Washington Post columnist who regularly covers the race and gender beat.

But where are the hordes of columnists decrying the horrific effects of overambitious white reporters who are too trusted by their editors and shoved into jobs beyond their gifts? In fact, some Kelley co-workers saw him as such a phenom, one whose difficulties handling such pressures took years to expose.

But pundits allowed Kelley to be Kelley: an honesty-challenged individual whose published fairy tales — the most infamous involving severed heads rolling down a street after a bombing — mostly reflected badly on him and his newspaper.

But Blair is black. So he instantly morphed from singular flawed human into the latest example of Black Folks Gone Wrong.

And again:

Nobody felt that Madonna’s once-constant exhibitionism reflected badly on Italian Americans. Or that Britney’s and Christina’s confused sexual machinations suggest young white women are slutty. After the thievery at Tyco and Enron, who turned the question of execs’ ethics into one of race?

Yet black individuals’ problems can’t be their own. They must be part of a flawed black mind-, body- and soul-set that trumps each black person’s uniqueness.

The obvious reply, of course, is that Kelley, Madonna, Britney, Tyco/Enron execs et. al. were not hired because they were Irish or Italian or white. Because they were hired as individuals, their accomplishments and failures can be regarded as their individual responsibilities, and when they screw up they can be fired as individuals.

As the Blair affair should have made clear to preferentialists like Britt (but obviously did not), one of the most objectionable aspects of “diversity” is precisely that it precludes treating its beneficiaries primarily as individuals. The whole rationale for “diversity” is that they represent something “different,” and worse, that “difference” has to do with their racial and ethnic identity.

Britt laments that when a black person fails his or her failure is always regarded as a black thing rather than an individual failure, as the result “of a flawed black mind-, body- and soul-set that trumps each black person’s uniqueness.” Insofar as this is true, it is largely because for a generation the Donna Brittians have been proclaiming, first, that there is a “black mind-, body- and soul-set” that all blacks can be assumed to possess, and, second, that unless whites are exposed to the “difference” it represents their education will be woefully flawed and incomplete.

If Jayson Blair had not been regarded as a representative of blacks on his way up, he would not have been regarded as a representative of blacks on his way down.

(Thanks to Fred Ray)

Say What? (3)

  1. Flatlander100 April 2, 2004 at 1:07 pm | | Reply

    You let her get away with too much. I’m not sure what columns and reports she was reading about the Blair affair, but I can’t recall a single column or story that attributed his fraud to his being black. Most of the blame assessed, as I recall the articles, and I read widely across the national press on the matter, was laid at the feet of the NY Times editorial staff, nearly all of whom were white. Her suggestion that the press saw Blair’s guilt as “black guilt” is nonsense. Which, of course, makes nonsense of her claim that it was racist not to present Kelley’s guilt as white guilt — which I presume is what she meant by writing that “pundits allowed Kelley to be Kelley.” Though it’s hard to say.

  2. Flatlander100 April 2, 2004 at 1:07 pm | | Reply

    You let her get away with too much. I’m not sure what columns and reports she was reading about the Blair affair, but I can’t recall a single column or story that attributed his fraud to his being black. Most of the blame assessed, as I recall the articles, and I read widely across the national press on the matter, was laid at the feet of the NY Times editorial staff, nearly all of whom were white. Her suggestion that the press saw Blair’s guilt as “black guilt” is nonsense. Which, of course, makes nonsense of her claim that it was racist not to present Kelley’s guilt as white guilt — which I presume is what she meant by writing that “pundits allowed Kelley to be Kelley.” Though it’s hard to say.

  3. cka3n April 7, 2004 at 4:53 pm | | Reply

    Affirmative action’s bitter pill

    Rosenberg is right as far as he goes – if there is constant insistance that black applicants receive additional consideration because they are black, their subsequent failures will be analyzed in light of their affirmative action boosts. I can’t deci…

Say What?