Could the War Change the Debate Over Affirmative Action?
For one thing, more often than not, skin colors blur in a blood-dimmed tide. Yes, the volunteer army is disproportionately black and Hispanic for reasons reflecting economic disadvantage, if not, indeed, exploitation; and, yes, in consequence, there can be spectacular instances of disaffection and even disloyalty. But it would be as wildly wrong for leftists to presume black disaffection in the ranks as it would be for rightists to presume it. For most young Americans of all colors who've been cast into war, the U.S. military's widely praised affirmative action promotes not the color-coded "cultural differences" celebrated by student ethnic-flag-wavers and their indulgent deans but a trans-racial integration and a "solidarity" that, for better or worse, is far more extensive (and successful, by both personal and social measures) than anything campus diversity advocates had in mind. The Michigan undergraduate admissions "point" system which Jennifer Gratz is challenging as a plaintiff gives "underrepresented minorities" and athletes an additional 20 points; applicants with perfect SAT scores 12 points; and "legacies" (alumnae's children) only 4. If the Army Corps of Engineers tried social engineering like this to cross such academically imagined racial divides, it would build fewer real bridges across flaming trenches, let alone the Tigris and Euphrates.
The kind of diversity that matters in liberal education shouldn't be the military's version, of course, any more than it should be Amiri Baraka's, in which a skin color automatically betokens a distinctive "culture" (read: "set of deficiencies"). Nor should it be the kind that drives the amicus briefs which General Motors, Texaco, and other Fortune 500 corporations have filed in support of Michigan's racial preferences. Army generals and CEOs have the luxury of ordering people around as no community of scholars ever should and of imposing racial designations and (decorations) to advance tightly focused battlefield and marketplace ends. In contrast, a liberal education and the public discourse that grows from it require and nurture a more vivid, open kind of diversity. It consists of far-more varied and competing but also more well-grounded, hard-thought understandings of things like the Iraq war and the world in which we have undertaken it.
These views and debates about them wouldn't be even passably intelligent, let alone informative or honest, if they were incubated or channeled along race lines or market bottom lines. "As a black lesbian, I consider this an imperialist war," I heard a student say recently and wrongly. Liberal education had failed her, and she it, and partly I blame the people who run big, selective universities like Michigan's or my own Yale. Their problem, of course, is that they run big, selective universities, which are corporations, albeit non-profit ones, competing for public preeminence among market-driven institutions, whose ethos they must adopt in order to survive yet must challenge in order to deserve their distinction. So they straddle the gap between serious thinking and niche marketing by indulging comments like this student's. So doing, they fail in their expressed mission to cultivate and defend a truly liberal diversity.
No wonder some of the best university administrators, like Lee Bollinger, who was Michigan's president when the suits were filed and now heads Columbia, end up sounding like Socrates, operating like Machiavelli's Prince, and going home at night feeling like the great stoic Marcus Aurelius. You gotta love 'em, even when, like Bollinger, they appear to have skipped Aurelius' wisdom. Their discourse about diversity is, shall we say, euphemistic, having undulated along with their institutions' successive pretenses that affirmative action countered racist discrimination, or compensated past injustices, or redressed disadvantage or, lately, helps a hundred narrative and epistemological flowers bloom, and never mind that some aren't flowers but illiberal weeds.
These rationalizations have seemed almost as contradictory as some of President Bush's justifications for invading Iraq, but whether his end game winds up rallying or disillusioning us, it will demonstrate that our varied understandings of ourselves as a nation and of what we are doing abroad don't separate ultimately by race: Even Louis Farrakhan rejected such meanings after 9/11, and despite its opposition to the war with Iraq, his Nation of Islam has been no fifth column. Some African Americans have even had second thoughts about racial profiling; more have felt a sneaking, tokenistic pride in the roles played by Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, perhaps the more so because they differ on war strategy and, indeed, at least somewhat, on the value of racial preferences themselves.
As the ground of racial reality and assumptions shifts palpably under our feet, is it too much to hope that the war may speed the end of the chattering classes' tiresome imposition of the left-versus-right floor plan of the French Chamber of Deputies on American racial politics? Conservatives were forcibly reminded by the Michigan corporate amicus briefs that affirmative action's biggest defenders against the 1998 Washington State referendum that abolished it had been Boeing, Microsoft, and Starbuck's. And those same briefs have given some liberals and leftists reason to suspect that the policy isn't as "progressive" as they thought it would be. American capitalism has proved subtle, protean, and absorptive enough to shuffle our racial decks just enough to confound its champions and well as its critics.
Even conservative cries about "reverse discrimination" against whites have been somewhat confounded. However well-justified the charges of plaintiffs like Gratz, the most serious and most justified purpose of the suits and referenda is to get a hook into policies that were concocted by the executive and judicial branches, not to mention the admissions offices, away from the sunlight of debate that would have preceded actually legislating them into practice. What rightly bothers honorable conservatives and liberals alike about preferences isn't the (relatively small) proportion of whites like Gratz who are truly sidelined by them, but the subtler and more lasting effects of fudged standards on the intended beneficiaries themselves and on the tone, substance, and integrity of everyone's learning and self-development, not to mention their public policy making.
If liberals were more honest about this they'd stop scoffing at "legacy' and athletic preferences in admissions while defending racial ones, which are even worse. If anything, the scoffers might consider reversing their stance, which now comes close to suggesting that what's good enough for jocks and heirs must be good enough for all blacks. Never mind that many athletic scholarship winners and legacy students these days are black; the argument was always insulting to all, and, by implication therefore, to beneficiaries of affirmative action. Typically, when Justice Clarence Thomas, who'll be among the justices hearing the Michigan arguments next week, was appointed to the court, too many liberals both vilified him and crowed that the elder President Bush was practicing affirmative action. How anyone was supposed to think better of a policy thus defended is a mystery.
Let's all step back and acknowledge that some things are best done with a wink and a nudge: Maybe it is preferable that liberal educators and their apologists dissemble a bit about their need to take race into account than that those of us who want the color-coding taken out of liberal education have to dissemble our own discomfort, as we do now, about the fact that, for example, at too many institutions and conferences, every single academic panel "must" have a person of color, even if he or she knows nothing about the topic under discussion. And just as conservatives ought to fulminate less about "reverse discrimination" and allow for more discrete, statesmanlike moves toward racial integration that defer a little to educators' sound judgment, so liberals should accept curbs on admissions policies that are too aggressively driven by every college's desperate eagerness to "look like America," and should stop hooting in the same breath at preferences for athletes and legacies, which do have better justifications than color-coded ones.
Maybe liberals could even agree to oppose double and triple dipping by affirmative action's recipients: If a student who wins a race-inflected admission to a selective college is truly as reasonably well-qualified as his or her liberal champions claim, then surely, in four years at that fine institution, he or she can level the playing field enough to get into, say, law school or business school without a second dosage of racial steroids. Heavier lifting that should have been done earlier in life can't be finessed by endless fudgings at admissions offices.
The war against terrorism, we've been told, is being fought to defend classical liberal visions of individual development and social felicity against people who hate and want to destroy them. But they have been blighted too often, and not always so subtly, here at home. The army shouldn't be outperforming the selective universities, as it is, not just with higher proportions of non-whites, as would be expected, but also in its refusals to pass off or indulge serious deficiencies as mere "cultural differences."
Scholarship shouldn't do that any more than soldiering should. Somehow, for me at least, the war is making that clear. Even as President Bush's "lone cowboy" posture is driving liberals to cry that this should be a nation of laws, not men, the war itself is illuminating the countervailing principle that, necessary though suits over "reverse discrimination" may be to force open the relentless, gratuitous color-coding of American life, ultimately this is a country, not a courtroom. Would that liberal educators kept nourishing and elevating the former as well as they do the latter.