Affirmative racism mascots

Thomas Sowell:

Years ago, when Jack Greenberg left the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to become a professor at Columbia University, he announced that he was going to make it a point to hire a black secretary at Columbia.

This would of course make whomever he hired be seen as a token black, rather than as someone selected on the basis of competence.

This reminded me of the first time I went to Milton Friedman's office when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago back in 1960, and I noticed that he had a black secretary. This was four years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and there was no such thing as affirmative action.

It so happened that Milton Friedman had another black secretary decades later, at the Hoover Institution-- and she was respected as one of the best secretaries around.

When I mentioned to someone at the Hoover Institution that I was having a hard time finding a secretary who could handle a tough job in my absence, I was told that I needed someone like Milton Friedman's secretary-- and that there were not many like her.

At no time in all these years did I hear Milton Friedman say, either publicly or privately, that he had a black secretary.

William F. Buckley's wife once mentioned in passing, at dinner in her home, that she had been involved for years in working with a school in Harlem. But I never heard her or Bill Buckley ever say that publicly.

Nor do conservatives who were in the civil rights marches in the South, back when that was dangerous, make that a big deal.

For people on the left, however, blacks are trophies or mascots, and must therefore be put on display. Nowhere is that more true than in politics.

The problem with being a mascot is that you are a symbol of someone else's significance or virtue. The actual well-being of a mascot is not the point.

Liberals all across the country have not hesitated to destroy black neighborhoods in the name of "urban renewal," often replacing working-class neighborhoods with upscale homes and pricey businesses-- neither of which the former residents can afford.

In academia, lower admissions standards for black students is about having them as a visible presence, even if mismatching them with the particular college or university produces high dropout rates.

The black students who don't make it are replaced by others, and when many of them don't make it, there are still more others.

...

I have seen these students struggle and fail, some after actually graduating. This is cruel. It is based on a false premise that given an opportunity unqualified people can succeed. The fact is that most of the unqualified have even less chance of succeeding when put in these environments where more is expected of students than they can deliver. Equally unqualified whites in the same environment would also fail. It is not race that is the problem, it is the content of their previous education and experience.

Everyone should be entitled to an opportunity to compete on that level, but it is wrong to extend that opportunity beyond the vetting process. In the past too much attention has been wasted on the opportunities denied more qualified whites. While that is wrong and deserves attention, what is worse is the failure imposed on the unqualified who are pushed ahead. We know liberals don't care about whites denied opportunities, but they at least pretend to care about blacks who are victimized by being put in a position where they will fail.