“As Long As Race Remains A Problem…”

The debate in Michigan over the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) has revealed something that, I suppose, shouldn’t really be a surprise: the advocates of race preferences really seem to have no clue as to how their arguments sound to anyone who has not abandoned the traditional American ideal of treating people “without regard” to their race.

Thus, during a debate last Wednesday at Grand Valley State University in western Michigan, Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau, said that “[a]s long as race remains a problem in the United States, the solution must be race-based.” This is nothing if not a demand for “race-based solutions,” i.e., racial preferences, forever. So much for Justice O’Connor’s 25 years.

And then, in a display or real chutzpah, he claims that the effort to stop rewarding some people and punishing others because of the color of their skin is “divisive”! (This common argument has always struck me as rather like a mugger criticizing his victim for provoking conflict by not giving over his wallet quietly and peacefully.)

Next, the quotable Mr. Shelton of the NAACP said racial preference (actually, he said “affirmative action,” but they’re the same thing) “is about eliminating the preferences of the good-ol’-boy network.”

I didn’t realize there were any “good ol’ boys” in Michigan (but then, I’m an Alabamian transplanted to Virginia, so what would I know?) — or if there are, that they’d somehow worked their way into the various admissions offices at the University of Michigan, the hiring and promotion offices of Ford, General Motors, etc. At least Mr. Shelton of the NAACP seems to think there’s something wrong with some “preferences,” and that’s a step in the right direction. I wonder what it is, though, about connection-peddling that he finds so much more objectionable than race-peddling.

Finally, Mr. Shelton became totally and utterly incomprehensible.

“If we ever get to the point where discrimination no longer exists, and affirmative action was still on the books, you wouldn’t even know it was there,” Shelton said.

What on earth could this possibly mean? If we reach the promised land where discrimination has altogether disappeared, and some people are still being given preferences because of their race, no one would be able to tell? [Addendum: Of course, if benefits and burdens were still distributed based on race, discrimination would not have ceased, would it?)

Well, maybe Mr. Shelton of the NAACP couldn’t tell. That wouldn’t be surprising, since he can’t tell now, either.

ADDENDUM

And speaking of not being able to tell, Mr. Shelton of the NAACP is, and was, not alone. One the same panel with him at Grand Valley State on Wednesday was Mark Fancher, a lawyer with the Michigan ACLU. I don’t know whether Fancher of the ACLU is honestly ignorant of American and civil rights history, contemptuously thinks his audience is, or simply engages in conscious misrepresentation, but whatever the explanation here is what he said:

Mark Fancher, an attorney for the ACLU of Michigan, and Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau, both maintained that affirmative action gives minorities and women a foot in the door.

Take it away, said Fancher, and “we will go back to the 1950s and 1940s.’’

Why, I wonder, the 1940s and 1950s? With regard to race, those decades were characterized “only” by segregation. If ceasing to provide minorities with special, preferential treatment can somehow nullify the Civil Rights Act and Brown and take us all the way back to the 1940s and 1950s, why not all the way to the early 1900s and lynching, or, indeed, all the way back to slavery?

Fancher of the ACLU’s comment is so ridiculous that my first thought was to wonder if he is a preferentially admitted graduate of the University of Michigan law school. He is not, but before UM Law School alumni issue a collective sigh of relief, note that he was on the faculty there for two years.