h**0
发帖数: 374 | 1 The Dangerous Consequences of Putting Race First
白等躺赢，美华好日无边
Yale shows us how it plays out in practice. More discrimination divides us
and feeds resentments.
In this unusual summer of love, our new rulers—those tolerant folk who now
control the physically decaying streets of major cities alongside the
intellectually decomposing common rooms and newsrooms of many universities
and media companies—have instructed Americans to work on developing their
race-awareness.
If you haven’t yet checked your white privilege, identified the roots of
your own oppression or made valiant efforts to ensure that Black and Brown
Americans are given proper lexicological distinction over white Americans,
then you haven’t been paying attention. For a diverse nation that has
strived, not always successfully, to make a reality of the ideal of “E
pluribus unum,” the risks of fragmentation from such an explicit call to
ethnic self-consciousness are stark.
To invite Americans to place such emphasis on race and the various
grievances and privileges that flow from it is to sow division as
effectively as any racist trope about immigrants or minorities.
Kamala Harris, who may soon be president-regent in the administration of a
visibly deteriorating Joe Biden, has been a talented exponent of this
identity-first politics. You’ll recall how just last year she rounded on Mr
. Biden in a Democratic debate, accusing him of having spent much of his
career befriending racists and pursuing policies that were designed to hurt
people like her.
It’s promising that Ms. Harris has evidently now found it in her heart to
forgive Mr. Biden, thereby offering a shining example to us all that
conciliation rather than confrontation is the way to go. Only a cynic would
suggest her motives stem from anything other than a belated and welcome
recognition of the power of togetherness.
In sidelining the many economic, sociological, behavioral and other factors
that contribute to inequality, the narrow focus on race risks exciting
unreasonable expectations about what can be achieved through race-based
measures. And in ascribing inequality to discrimination and oppression,
rather than a complex array of factors (of which discrimination is surely
one), the activists will produce results that will do nothing to further the
ideal of equality.
We didn’t have to wait long for evidence of how this would play out in
practice. Last week the Justice Department made legally explicit what
everyone has known for a long time: that Asian-Americans especially, but
also whites, are discriminated against by the nation’s top universities.
The department is threatening to sue Yale over its admissions practices. It
seems that the university founded by one of the most viciously cruel 17th-
century slave owners has been trying to expiate its original sin in part by
favoring candidates from certain ethnic backgrounds over those from others.
If you believe Yale and its ideological soul mates in the media, the case is
wholly without merit. In a masterful piece of willful self-deception, the
journalistic equivalent of putting a telescope to a blind eye, the New York
Times last week suggested there was no discrimination: “The Trump
administration’s charge that the university discriminates against Asian-
American applicants was disputed by many Asian-American students.”
The evidence for the claim that there is no discrimination was—stay with me
here—Asian-American students who had been successful in their applications
to Yale. The inconvenient testimony of the many more Asian-American
students with outstanding academic records who didn’t get in was largely
overlooked.
Racial preferences have been a longstanding source of neuralgia for
universities. I’m reminded of the story a colleague once told about a
California professor who defended the state’s affirmative-action program at
the time by saying that if places were awarded purely on the basis of test
scores, “97% of our admits would be Asian. The other 3% would be Jewish.”
Most reasonable people applaud efforts to build a more representative
student body, and ultimately perhaps a more equitable world, by making
accommodations for those of historically disadvantaged backgrounds,
including underrepresented minorities. But a brief glimpse at the political
landscape suggests that the measures tried so far have not been wildly
successful. Doubling down on race-based preference risks only increasing the
resentments and frustrations felt by a large and diverse group of
disadvantaged Americans.
There are other hints that the elevation of race-consciousness is having
some unintended political consequences. Even as President Trump continues to
lag Mr. Biden in the opinion polls, his support among Hispanics has risen
to about one third of that ethnic group. There are a number of reasons for
this, but it seems possible that some Hispanic voters may be viewing with
caution the Democratic Party’s apparent identification with black lives
above others.
It isn’t only so-called white fragility that sees threats in the assertion
of racial identity as the prime route toward progress in redressing
inequality. The already fragile fabric of the nation’s larger patchwork
identity is at risk. |
|
