There have been many opportunities to criticize articles in the Washington Post by its point man on civil rights, Darryl Fears, and I have taken almost more of them than I can cite — here, here, here, here, and here. Today, however, in an article on voting rights, he has committed what I believe is perhaps the most irresponsible paragraph about civil rights that I have ever seen in a responsible newspaper.
Along the way to this whopper he makes an error that has become ubiquitous in the commentary on Judge Roberts’s arguments about amending the Voting Rights Act in 1981 and 1982. Roberts, Fears charges, “forcefully advocated a policy that would shorten the law’s reach” when in fact he opposed amending the law in a way that would, and did, significantly expand its reach.
But that error is as nothing compared to this argument (yes, argument, even though this article purports to be a news story, not an editorial) in favor of renewing the pre-clearance and obligation to create majority/minority district provisions contained in Section 5 of the Act:
Congress has used Section 5 to guard against efforts by southern segregationists to scuttle the attempts of black people to vote. Since Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War, southern states have used a variety of means, from poll tax to literacy tests to violent intimidation, to keep black people from casting votes. In some cases, police blotters listed the offense of African Americans who were lynched as “tried to vote.”
Leave aside the non-trivial error of asserting that “Congress has used Section 5” to do anything. It passed Section 5 to prevent discrimination against black voters, but it is the Justice Dept. and the Courts who have “used” it.
The real problem with the paragraph is the argument that discrimination against black voters during and after Reconstruction means that we should renew Section 5 now. It doesn’t. In fact, it would make as much sense to argue that racial preference in college admissions need to last another 25 years, or longer, because in the nineteenth century, and even in the early decades of the 20th, black people were lynched in this country.
But wait, maybe that’s what preferentialists do argue when they’re not forced to trot out “diversity”….
My comment to the Post on the Fears article:
Customer – 08/06/2005 10:32 AM
Darryl Fears’ reference to “voting rules that discriminated intentionally, as opposed to … rules that have a discriminatory effect” (“40 Years After Passage, Voting Law Is in Dispute,” August 6, p. 3) is redundant, if not incoherent. “Discriminatory” implies intent. The word he was probably looking for is “disproportionate.”
Current acts of aggression are not justified by reference to events of 50 or 150 years ago. Conspiracy theory is not justified, by some selective narrative; and the current usage of the VRA implies that minorities necessarily face a racial conspiracy to disfranchise them. Living minorities of disadvantage, cannot demonstrate that they would have inherited anything individually, if not for some events of a hundred years ago. The law cannot reward them for being only biological heirs of past disadvantage on a racial basis. Apparently the line is that diversity is good for you, unless you don’t believe that it is valuable in itself; in which case, you owe reparations for a fictitious inheritance that didn’t happen. Truth doesn’t depend on what different classes of those being propagandized to, may believe. It is thus clear that both positions are propaganda, otherwise how could truth change according to who is being addressed?
John S. Bolton writes:
>>>Conspiracy theory is not justified, by some selective narrative; and the current usage of the VRA implies that minorities necessarily face a racial conspiracy to disfranchise them. ”
Conspiracy isn’t a theory when it’s proven. If you wish to deny the existance of racism at work today against African Americans today, from hiring, promotion, government contracts and YES, AT THE POLLS, feel free to scroll back through “Discriminations”, particularly this voluminous thread:
http://www.discriminations.us/storage/002795.html
Civil Rights marchers shed their blood to get the right to vote, against vicious mobs of white southerners. I suppose this chapter of RECENT AMERICAN HISTORY needs to be read to the non-believers as often as possible.
–Cobra
John,
That is what they do argue when not forced to use diversity, although its a broader social justice argument than just reparations or historical discrimination. In fact, we hear very little about “diversity’s” benefits anymore in Michigan.
Of course, the social justice argument is better than diversity in some ways – except for the fact that social justice would seemingly be better served with race-neutral “universal” programs that benefit all individuals based on socio-economic conditions. Universities just don’t want to pay the price of admitting significantly more poor students.