But only when it’s done right, as in the military. The trouble is, nobody does it like the military. More often it’s done on the cheap–as in the recent case of the University of Texas law school, which set up a separate, second-class admissions process for minority applicants. As a result, “affirmative action” has become the euphemism of choice for not-so-subtle racial quotas, for lowered standards instead of expanded opportunities. For all the things Colin Powell says he’s against. He might have acknowledged that at Bowie State. And he might have performed a real public service if he’d talked about the lessons from the military model that civilians can put to use. The big one, according to sociologist Charles Moskos, is that you must not lower standards. A bright line has to be drawn between “compensatory action”–intensive remedial education to help “members of disadvantaged groups to meet the standards of competition”–and “preferential treatment,” in which “those standards are suspended.” This is a crucial distinction: “Most Americans support compensatory action,” Moskos writes, “but majorities of both blacks and whites consistently oppose [preferences].”
Powell’s disappointing speech is part of a larger pattern. We are back to platitudes and evasions on this issue. Especially evasions: race, the abiding agony of American politics, appears to be sliding off the table in the 1996 presidential election. Thank God for that, you say? It is a subject more often demagogued than discussed. But churches are burning, an underclass is slipping farther from the mainstream and the courts seem prepared to severely limit affirmative action without offering any alternative. “There has been an insistent pattern of decisions,” says Paul Gewirtz of Yale Law School, “and the politicians will have to react.”
Not if they can help it. Clinton’s response has been a combination of nursery rhymes (“Mend it, don’t end it”) and passive resistance. The Justice Department has launched a preemptive barrage of rhetorical fudge while trying to preserve the most blatant racial “set-asides”–quotas by any other name–all of which seem destined to be challenged in the courts. The policy is demagoguery by omission; the president will make lovely speeches while allowing affirmative action to evaporate because he hasn’t proposed an aggressive, nonpreferential “compensatory” program to replace it.
Traditionally–at least since Nixon’s Southern strategy"– Republicans have been truly despicable on race, and there are more than a few stalwarts who continue to bloviate disingenuously in support of a “colorblind” society, by which they mean a tacit relapse into segregation. Bob Dole flirted with this last year, proposing legislation that would end racial preferences. But he was chastened by Newt Gingrich, a sensible centrist on this issue, who argued that Republicans couldn’t oppose preferences without making a compensatory counteroffer. “Newt thought we’d just sound like a bunch of racists,” said a source close to the speaker. Gingrich wanted to link Dole’s bill with a major urban-empowerment initiative. (When House Republicans floated an empowerment plan this spring, it sank without a trace.) “A lot of things have been diverted by the budget battle,” sighs Tony Blankley, the speaker’s press aide. And so the Republicans have drifted into a rather pregnant silence on affirmative action. It could be resurrected as a “wedge” issue–if Powell refuses the vice presidency, and if California (which will vote on an anti-preference initiative in the fall) becomes a battleground state. But one senses that Dole doesn’t have the stomach for that sort of thing. “Actually, I’m sort of relieved,” says Clint Bolick of the Institute for justice, a noted opponent of racial preferences. “Clinton is so adroit as a candidate, and Dole is so… less so. If this is going to be argued publicly, I want our side to be argued well.”
Good luck. The debate over affirmative action, or the lack of one, resembles so many other issues in the American social-policy desert: Democrats offer the status quo; Republicans offer social Darwinism. We get slogans, not substance. There is a reason for that, of course: substance costs money. It would have been nice if Powell had stepped forward and cut through the baloney, if he’d elaborated on the principles he set out in his book: that a distinction has to be made between affirmative action and racial preferences; that we can no longer afford any program, however well intentioned, that selects or excludes according to race. It would have been better still if he’d challenged both parties to make a determined effort, to spend money-as the military has-to make room for promising, disadvantaged youngsters by expanding educational opportunities, perhaps through a military-style service corps. But he didn’t. He sounded like every other politician, simplistic and evasive. What a shame.
