In a powerful column today, Shelby Steele, the African-American scholar who has written extensively about the meaning of Barack Obama, says that Obama is a type of black person who is useful as a symbol. But when he is revealed as not a symbol, but as a complex human being, his power is dissipated. This past week has unmasked Obama, Steele writes. Excerpt:
Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?
What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?
But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.
No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.
This is all a critically important insight. I wonder, though, if what Obama said today is enough to overcome all this, to put it all behind him. I wonder what Shelby Steele thinks. I wonder what I think.
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sigaliris, you probably have more experience in some areas of the corporate world than I do. In research and university land, I might know as much as you do. First of all, the 8A minority set aside contract system has been around for a longer time than you may believe. I knew a mathematician who worked for a such a shell back when George Herbert Walker Bush had just been sworn into office (1988), fully 20 years ago. The company benefited from mandatory set-asides from the Department of Energy, and those set-asides had been around for a while even then. The owner of the company was a "person of color" who hired a collection of white and East Asian Phd's to work on contracts. In this case, the work was classified and was intended to verify work done by some agency scientists. The company did hire good people who did good work, but really the only protected minority who benefited was the front man, note who they hired?
His was not the only such company, nor the only such contract. All Federal agencies have such contracts. A NASA official who was nearing retirement a few years back admitted completely off the record that his office as a rule tended to regard the 8A's as part of their overhead: in many cases they didn't even bother to review the results, because the work was so sloppy or poorly done as to be useless and without meaning. It was just considered to be a mandatory cost of operation, that a certain percentage of their budget had to be spent on useless results for political purposes.
This is not to say that all, or even most, 8A's are turning out junk. I frankly have no idea what the percentage is. I like to think that 8A's have gotten better over the years, but do not know. But that's beside the point: a percentage of every research agency is reserved for 'people of color', regardless of quality of work. If that is not a race-based spoils system, what is it?
I have friends in various civil service organizations, it was made plain to them that percentages of employees better match population percentages if they wished to keep on in their current position. I've heard the same thing from recruiters for Fortune 500 companies, there is a not so subtle pressure to meet .... goals. Not quotas, oh no! But goals. Goals of a certain percentage of new hires. Goals of retention, too. Qualifications of some sort do have to be met, but as we all know, what's on paper isn't always what's actually going to show up for work. But as we also both know, civil service protects both the useful and the useless. So once someone is in the system, they are there pretty much as long as they want to be, so long as they don't commit a serious crash landing. A percentage of jobs are thus reserved for 'people of color', period. What do you call that?
The majority of supervisors that I have had over my working career were minorities of one sort or another, and I've been blessed for the most part with good people regardless of what they are; the content of their character has generally been good. But it was no secret fully 20 years ago when I was working in blue-collar university-land that the pressure to hire people in my technical field who could be used to check off some boxes on the diversity forms was serious. It could be comical at times, when one group that was entirely minority was moved on the org chart in order to bolster the "check off box" count of another group that had a lot of people with seniority in it, to satisfy some Fed or other. But again, it was plain that a certain percentage of jobs better meet "nose counting" standards...what do you call that?
I recall how Earl Butz got wiped out of public life because he dared to point out the "diversity" of a government body in blunt terms. But from where I sit, any organization public or private that can't show not just a good faith effort, but the numbers within the organization to go with it can expect trouble.
Those who meet the quota...dang, the goal/outcome, sorry about that, can expect to be rewarded by the organization, because they are keeping legal liability low. Those who fail are setting the organization up for a lawsuit, and those are bad for business.
The _Grutter_ case in Michigan just lays bare what I'm talking about: the "right" color of skin was worth as much in terms of admission points as a perfect, perfect SAT score. And I doubt that much has changed despite the ruling. What would you call that, if not racially based, and a spoils system?
FWIW the construction trades in the parts the West that I am familiar with are increasingly dominated by Hispanics, both union and nonunion, and guess what? They tend to not hire whites or blacks. Liberals don't quite know what to make of that; on the one hand, not hiring black people in sufficient numbers is de-facto discrimination, on the other hand only white people can be racists...
This is too long. I apologize for that. Now I need to try to meet a deadline.
An addendum to my previous over long post. Upon reflection, I recall that Earl Butz got in trouble for pointing out the nose-counting style of "diversity", but what really wiped him out of political life was telling a disgustingly racist "joke" to reporters, who then repeated it in heavily redacted form. Shortly after that point, he became the former Secretary of Agriculture, and quite rightly so. This is intended as a clarification and nothing more.
Anti, thanks for your long post. Which I didn't find too long at all, as it was quite informative and interesting. You're right that you know more about these areas than I do, but what you say sounds pretty accurate.
The way minority set-aside contracting has worked out seems to me to reflect a profoundly cynical attempt by government to co-opt the notion of equal opportunity into yet another patronage plum. It doesn't benefit minorities in general--does not provide a leg up to parity, which I think was the original hope. Instead, it benefits the politician who oversees the giving of contracts, and the front men who take cash off the top. We've certainly seen this in Philadelphia. I don't see this as damning all affirmative action efforts, though. Nor do I think it should reflect badly on black people in general if some black politicians are corrupt.
I have personally observed corporations hiring black candidates who were clearly not qualified. This is a lot harder for me to figure out. Why would a company not take the trouble to get a candidate who was both black AND COMPETENT? How do they benefit from this kind of cynicism? A company I worked for hired a black salesman who was just no good. Which I know because they put him into the same improvised office space where two other women and I were trying to do editorial work. Yes--phone sales, with the constant noise, in the same room with concentrated detail work. That in itself would tell you it wasn't a high-quality work environment. This poor guy floundered from the beginning and ended up ignominiously let go. However, we were located in an area rich with high-quality black college graduates. I'm sure there were better candidates. My own theory is that the company was too cheap to pay what it would have taken to get a good black salesman, so they hired a loser because he was cheap. And then let it be known that, gee, they did their best, but what can you do with "those people"? I don't understand the mindset that makes those decisions, but again, I don't see why it should reflect badly on black workers in general. The company executives (white) were the ones who showed their lack of quality in that situation.
I'm afraid I have no cogent conclusion here--long day. I offer these random reflections to let you know I appreciated your reply.
Sigalis, if you are still looking at this thread, we probably agree more than we disagree on this. I've gone through a number of positions on Affirmative Action (AA) in my life, starting with "it's not needed" and moving on to "Yeah, something like this is needed because there's still too many racist jackasses around" to "this thing is just not working at all" to my present position of resignation that it is here to stay, it's not going to work very well ever, it could be useful from time to time, but in the long run it's going to become more trouble than it is worth.
I have not lived in a city with a large black population for many years. But I have lived in places where "Hispanics" (in this case, Mexican Americans) are 40% or more of the population. One of the Universities I visit from time to time is probably 60% or more Hispanic, plus the President, some Deans, various department heads, at least 1/3 of the faculty, most of the support staff, etc. are Hispanic. There is literally no way that anyone who is Hispanic can be discriminated against on the basis of the color of their skin, or accent, or last name at that place. Now consider two families in the area with the pretty much the same income, living next door to each other, both intact families, both fathers professional men. One is "Hispanic", the other is "white". Each family sends its son to this university. Assume that both young men have decent grades and a good enough set of study habits, work ethic, intelligence to succeed in college.
The "Hispanic" son is going to get preferential admission, but since admission is essentially open that doesn't matter. There are a number of services for the "hispanic", starting with various "Society of Hispanic (teachers, engineers, etc." support groups, special tutoring services, various loans/grants, and so forth. All of these offerings basically are in place with the premise that anyone who has a "Mexican" last name is short of money, discriminated against by someone in the community/university, in need of help, etc.
Upon graduation, employers will seek out the "Hispanic" student more than the
"white" student, because they need to check off those boxes on Federal forms. Once inside a company, one young man will find it a little easier to advance than the other, again because of AA principles.
None of these things are available to the "white" student. His friend and neighbor from next door gets some "freebies" he can't get. And why? Well, to be blunt, because of the "color of his skin rather than the content of his character". Now from what I can tell, so far this situation isn't causing much friction, in part because there are so many other forms of aid to students available. But if times get hard, it's going to be more and more difficult to justify giving all sorts of extra help to Middle Class Student A and none to Middle Class Student B based solely on the fact that Student A has a last name like "Lujan" and Student B is named "Smith".
Put it another way: an increasing number of the "Hispanic" students I meet and work with sound like any other US student. If someone from Philadelphia met them and didn't know their name, likely that someone would think they were meeting someone from an Italian background or maybe Greek, certainly a generic "Mediterrainian" (sic) culture. But, of course, Italians are not a protected class. "Hispanics" are. So what does it say when people who really are succeeding just as many people in the Civil Rights era hoped for, continue to receive all the special benefits that were originally offered as a compensation for discrimination and poverty?
Fast forward some number of years to an America in which "white" people are less than 50%, many of the middle class people are "Hispanic" but are no more "Mexican" or "Puerto Rican" than the average Italian in Philly is a "Sicilian"...in other words, a time when more and more minority people look, speak and live just like their "white" neighbors...but the full machinery of AA still exists, and amounts to an official policy of institutionalized discrimination against "white" people. Think there could be some corrosive effects?
Where I visit, that future is here, now: there are cities/universities I go to that are majority Hispanic or nearly there. I'm happy to say that things seem to be working pretty well. But I can't help wondering how long that will last.
Sigalis, to try to relate to your article, hoping you are still here...one of the key differences between people is how they regard human nature. If one believes in the perfectability of mankind, which I call the "Rousseaian conceit", then one will tend to believe that laws will be obeyed as intended and constructed. If one has a view of humanity as flawed and fallen, then one accepts there can be no perfect government, or economy, or set of laws, etc.
The people who created AA, and the 8A's and a lot of other things were in all probability sincere individuals who believed that everyone else would follow the rules as they intended them to be followed. If that's true, I'm sure that the actual results have been frustrating to them. Now, if they'd been nasty old curmudgeons who believe that people are going to be up to no good whenever they think they can get away with it, like those deadwhitemales who crafted the Constitution with all its checks, balances and "friction", then maybe the programs would have been written differently, and might work better. Or maybe not. When a program is basically in the business of handing out government money /and/or government favors, the potential for various forms of corruption is there from the start. Which, from my Burkean perspective, suggests we should have been a whole lot more careful how we went about "social engineering" in the first place, and in the unlikely event that AA actually is ever done away with, we'll have to phase it out slowly because so many social constructions now rest upon it.
As for the black salesman, I haven't a clue why people do what they do. Based on what you write, the guy was set up for failure from the start, for any of several possible reasons starting with the one you listed: "Well, gee, we tried, but look here what happened...". Certainly the "office space" provided suggests he was set up to fail. Another alternative: the pay was so lowball, nobody who could do that job would take it, because they could get better money elsewhere...but the guy who did take it was desperate enough to give it a try even though it was over his skill level. Was that position filled later, and I wonder at what pay level? Maybe they wanted to give the job to a specific someone, and this guy showed up so they set him up to fail, then gave the job to the intended person?
I see something like this with the H1B visa program; a company lists a job for a computer scientist or an engineer at a pay scale 20% below the national mean. Say that the job pays $50K, they offer it for $40K gross. Guess what? Nobody applies. Then the company hires someone from India or Pakistan at that rate who's glad to get it just to get a job in the US, and if the company is challenged they wave around their "jobs Americans won't do" banner.
The problem is, college recruiters tell me that the keep running into high school guidance counselors who steer bright students away from engineering/computer science/other sciences. Why? "Because those jobs are all going to Indians and Chinese". So there really is a shortage of grads in those fields to some extent, but it's caused in part by the lowballing H1B program, which is "justified" on the grounds of a shortage of grads. And around that circle goes.
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