How unseemly can you (actually, I) get? Yesterday I was unseemily puffed up with pride at being deemed “Notable & Quotable” by the Wall Street Journal; today, in addition to having just committed a neologism, I am about to criticize one small misfire in the otherwise typically excellent “Best of the Web” column, Obama The Unseemly, by the Wall Street Journal‘s always excellent James Taranto.
After having provided chapter and verse of our current president’s increasing unseemliness, Taranto criticizes a recent Nation blog post by Jamelle Bouie, who had written that he was dumfounded by a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute documenting the absence of white guilt among Millennials and that a substantial majority of them (58%) even believe that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. “Honestly,” Bouie wrote, “— as an African-American myself — it’s hard to figure out” what it “actually means.”
Taranto patiently explained that, among other things, “18- to 24-year-olds — that is, … people born 24 to 30 years after the Civil Rights Act became law,” feel little or no white guilt because “their experience gives them little to feel guilty about.” He then granted, however, that Bouie had made one good point:
As we argued in October, whites in America are at an advantage in that they seldom have occasion to be conscious of their race. It’s a worthy exercise for a white person to try to imagine how it feels, for example, to be a young black man and thus to fit the stereotype of a potential criminal, or a black college student who faces the stigma of being thought a beneficiary of affirmative action.
I have no quarrel with this “worthy exercise,” but I do think it’s a mistake to equate the feelings of a young black male confronting the stereotype that he’s “a potential criminal” with the feelings of “a black college student who faces the stigma of being thought a beneficiary of affirmative action.” The former really is a stereotype— “A widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing: ‘sexual and racial stereotypes.'” But the latter is something else entirely.
There is no doubt a stigma attached to being thought a beneficiary of affirmative action, but that thought is not a stereotype. Most young black males are not criminals, but most blacks in selective colleges that practice affirmative action are in fact its beneficiaries. Certainly all are not, and the fact that they are branded with the stigma along with those who are is one of the cruelest effects of affirmative action. Indeed, it is a cruelty compounded and made much worse by the insistence — incorrect as it is shrill — of affirmative action’s most ardent defenders that ending race preferences would result in re-segregation, in effect that there would be no minorities in selective colleges if preferences now given to them were removed.
UPDATE
I sent a copy of this post to James Taranto, and to his credit he replied promptly (though unpersuasively). He insists that both the stereotype of the young black man as criminal and of the black college student as a beneficiary of affirmative action have a basis in fact, that neither is 100% accurate regarding individuals, and the fact that the latter stereotype is more accurate than the former is a difference only of degree, not of kind.
In one sense, of course, all differences are matters of degree, but I remain convinced that here the number of degrees of difference is pretty close to 180, making it so clearly a difference of kind that one is a stereotype and one isn’t. Here’s an analogy:
- “Men are better at math than women” is a stereotype. It may be statistically true, but even if it is it will very frequently be wrong regarding individuals since there are millions of women better at math than millions of men.
- “The preponderance of the world’s very top mathematicians are male” is not a stereotype. It is a statement of fact.
“Blacks at highly selective colleges that have affirmative action policies received preferential treatment in admissions” is much closer to the latter than the former.
