As I indicated below in praising Jonathan Yardley’s criticism of Ira Katznelson’s new book, WHEN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION WAS WHITE, the book has valuable things to say about the shameful racial discrimination that was endemic to both FDR’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal. That history, however, can provide a defense of racial preferences today only if such preferences are justified by a desire to compensate for past wrongs, a justification that the courts have rejected. (Well, I suppose retribution would provide another justification, but the courts wouldn’t be too happy with that one, either.)
In any event, as I argued, Yardley’s review was excellent, but that certainly cannot be said of Nick Kotz’s review in the New York Times yesterday.
It’s hard to take seriously a review that begins by asserting, incorrectly, that
President Johnson initiated a sweeping new government policy called affirmative action. Its purpose was to overcome at least some of the accumulated human damage caused by 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow, and to ensure further progress toward equality.
President Johnson did many things, some of them good (such as pushing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act), but he did not initiate “a sweeping new government policy called affirmative action.” His Executive Order using that phrase, quoted in my discussion of Yardley linked above, was mainly a restatement of an Executive Order 10925 by President Kennedy that also used the phrase, and with the same clear meaning of taking affirmative steps to ensure that all applicants and employees are treated “without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” [Emphasis added]
Kotz concludes:
Katznelson argues that the case for affirmative action today is made more effectively by citing concrete history rather than through general exhortations
Yes, he does argue that, but for reasons stated so well by Yardley the argument is not persuasive.
President Johnson initiated a sweeping new government policy called affirmative action. Its purpose was to overcome at least some of the accumulated human damage caused by 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow, and to ensure further progress toward equality.
350 years of slavery?
In the US?
My bicentennial calendar must need ajusting.
BTW, in South Africa today they have Jim Crow, except that it’s required that black South Africans must be hired. Odd I’ve never seen any liberal condemnation of this clearly racist law.
Rich
For Rich’s calendar:
I seem to remember that a few blacks were imported to Virginia in 1620 or so. Virginia then did not have legal slavery, and the men were, I suppose, technically free, though they may have been enslaved before they made the crossing, and there’s no way to know whether they went voluntarily.
Throw Jim Crow in, as the text (“slavery and Jim Crow”) suggests, and you’ve pretty well got 350 years.