Mary Frances Berry, the imperious and widely unlamented former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, is now reduced to being a tenured history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She has “has spent her life trying to uphold the promise of equality that began with Brown v. Board of Education.” Just ask her, which is what the Penn Arts and Sciences Magazine did in making her the cover girl for its Spring 2005 issue. (Go to p. 9 of the pdf file for the article about her, “Still A Lot More To Do.”)
Berry is free to admit that she’s not perfect, however, that she has her faults.
“Sometimes I wish I could abandon principles when there’s a lot of stress and a lot of Sturm und Drang, but I’m not able to do that,” she says. “There are certain things that I believe. I may be wrong about what I believe, but I believe it. I believe in truth . I believe in people having a fair shot. I believe I’m a purist when it comes to free speech. So I’m not able to abandon what I believe in order to curry favor or to have friends.”
Fortunately, the piece about Berry is not without humor, saying at one point that the Brown decision “created fertile ground from which the civil rights movement grew” and that Berry is “one of the fruits of that flowering.” And Berry herself, in another aw shucks confession, makes her own contribution to levity:
A registered Independent with a deep and abiding faith in the necessity of affirmative action to achieve equality, Berry admits that her uncompromising nature has made her a political target for those on both sides of the partisan fence. She may be the only person to draw the ire of conservative pundit George Will and Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff. Says Berry,
Re your title: do we have to choose?
She definitely absorbed the “self-esteem is important” mantra. It’s like a job interview when you’re asked to list three bad things about yourself…”oh well, I work too hard, I’m just such a perfectionist, and I’m too giving to my co-workers and bosses.”
Never heard the quote from Ms. Williams’ husband. Quite nice. I never understood why some AA supporters were so against what the district did–from what I understand both the women really were pretty equivalent, yet they’ll support AA when college applicants, job candidates, etc., are nowhere near equivalent. One complaint I read from an AA militant was “This woman had invested nine years of her life in that school district. So when they decided to lay off on the basis of race, they knew exactly who the victim was going to be.” (11-23-1997 St. Louis Dispatch)
So? Law school and med school applicants invest years of their lives stuyding, so do job/promotion applicants. I guess it’s OK if you don’t know who the victim is going to be. Perhaps that case instilled a fear that it could then happen to them in their settled careers. Anyway, I found it a telling quote.
>>Never heard the quote from Ms. Williams’ husband. Quite nice.
I agree. Why do AA supporters have a problem with the language of the 14th Amendment? Unfortunately, we as a nation have never given the Equal Protection Clause a chance to work as written.
Prior to 1964, Jim Crow was allowed to operate. Subsequent to 1964, racial and gender preferences came into vogue.
People such as Ms. Berry can’t (or refuse to) understand this concept and continue to advance unequal opportunity as a means of achieving “equal opportunity.”
Berry is certainly not “the only person” to have been criticized by both Will and Hentoff. I mean, quite apart from affirmative action, Hentoff is also pro-life. And pro-Israel. And was an opponent of publishers’ and libraries’ boycotts of apartheid South Africa. Lots of common ground with Will there, yes?
Hentoff has a sort of reputation as a Lefty because he’s a free-speech absolutist and writes for the Voice. But the only way someone could characterize him as “far-left” is by not having actually read him. Sheesh.
Apparently she must be a professor of revisionist history. Here’s a portion of a 2004 piece by Peter Kirsanow, another member of the commmission:
In 1997, a Government Accountability Office report noted that management is in disarray, projects are poorly managed and take years to complete, spending data isn
Berry makes a virtue out of both of these traits.
Hentoff is a well-known libertarian, so to characterize him as “far left” or to compare him to traditional conservatives is just plain wrong. He’s also an independent thinker – and contrary both traditional “far left” or “libertarian” thought-patterns, Hentoff is also somewhat pro-life (he believes the issue should be defined in terms of when a person becomes a legal person, as opposed to the mother’s absolute rights), although I don’t know exactly where he’d draw the line.