Dumb Racial “Conversation”

Yesterday’s entry in the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s blog, “The Conversation,” perfectly if unwittingly exemplifies the lack of understanding of what affirmative action is, how it works, and why an increasing number of people object to it that is endemic in the defense of racial preferences on college campuses today. If there were such a thing as conversational malpractice, “When Too Few Minorities Are Too Many” would be an inviting target for litigation.

Noliwe M. Rooks, an associate professor of African studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University, argues, among other gems, that we must continue to engage in racial discrimination against whites and Asians in order to protect blacks from racial harassment. She, of course, puts it slightly differently — that if there are too few blacks on campus, which there would be if they weren’t given preferential treatment in admissions, whites will feel free to, and will, racially harass them. “It is time for us to be less compelled by the stories of white people who feel they have been robbed of what they are entitled to,” she concludes, “and more concerned with the students on campuses who are suffering racial harassment.”

She refers to some evidence that, she thinks, demonstrates a causal connection between small numbers of blacks and large numbers of racial incidents, but my favorite — and the one she spends by far the most space presenting — is “a recent incident that [she has] come to believe is a metaphor for the ignorance, fear, and hysteria dominating cultural conversations about race and affirmative action.” Because Prof. Rooks thinks this incident is such a revealing race-based metaphor, I think it’s worth quoting a good part of her description of it:

Some weeks ago, my husband and I were on the way home in our Prius when we stopped at a local store to buy a few things. I stayed in the car.

A few moments later, the back door opened, and someone threw some unbagged groceries in the back seat. The next thing I knew, a young white woman jumped into the driver’s seat and tried to start the car, which just requires pushing a button on the dashboard. I was initially too stunned to say anything, but when she noticed me sitting in the passenger seat, she panicked and began swatting at me, asking what I wanted, and shouting at me to get out of her car.

I was just at the point of getting it together to tell her that she was sitting in my car when she jumped out and started screaming for help. Of course, she began to attract lots of attention, and a few people were making their way over when, literally in mid-scream, she noticed that her car (also a Prius) was parked behind ours. She stopped screaming, opened the back door, took out her groceries, jumped in her car, and drove off without a word of apology.

I can’t know for sure, but given the frequency of racial profiling of drivers by the police, or the much-publicized fear of black people invading middle-class homes, I was left to wonder if her reaction would have been the same if I had been a white woman.

Now one might think, as Prof. Rooks acknowledges, that “confusing one car for another is something that might happen fairly regularly,” but she can see beneath the surface of things to the underlying racial reality. “[T]he extreme escalation and overreaction of the young woman has come to represent for me,” she writes, “a microcosm of how an African-American presence can expose fears and reveal underdeveloped racial attitudes both in academe and beyond.”

Prof. Rooks’s dramatically misleading metaphors and microcosms are informed (insofar as they are informed) by an equally powerful misunderstanding of the history and nature of affirmative action. She doesn’t understand, for example, that what she regards as “underdeveloped racial attitudes” (those attitudes, that is, that the re-education centers known as American higher education have not yet succeeded in stamping out) are in reality a still popular and powerful belief in the principle that people should be treated without regard to their race. Nor does she understand (or perhaps she simply doesn’t care) that Asians are victimized far more than whites by the current regime of racial preferences.

Here’s another good example of her misunderstanding. Prof. Rooks refers to a 2009 Pew Research Center poll finding that 70% of respondents said they “supported affirmative-action programs to help blacks, women, and other minorities get better jobs and education,” but that “support dropped to 46 percent when people were asked if such programs should give blacks preferential treatment.” (Other polls show an even more dramatic lack of support for race preference programs.) Prof. Rooks thinks this poll demonstrates that “the vast majority of people agree with the idea of affirmative action in the abstract, but have an issue with black students’ specifically benefiting from it.” In her view, anyone who believes people should be treated without regard to their race is racist. As a result she fails to notice that a large part of the opposition to affirmative action — and even of much of the racial harassment that she properly objects to — is caused not by racist resentment of blacks but by resentment rooted in egalitarian principles of the special treatment they receive.

That’s not the only misunderstanding. Here’s another whopper:

… it’s clear that at some point, our national debate over race and affirmative action shifted from a primary concern over when and how colleges might use the policies to help students overcome past and present economic, social, and cultural barriers to a belief that such policies should be used only if they don’t keep middle-class white students from attending the college of their choice.

We “shifted” because the courts ruled out generalized racial compensation as a justification for the discrimination inherent in affirmative action. And what we shifted to was not sympathy for “white people who feel they have been robbed of what they are entitled to” but “diversity,” which has become racial compensation simply parading under a different name.