In a post a few days ago, Would Passage Of The Arizona Civil Rights Initiative Invalidate Arizona’s Tough New Immigration Law?, I attempted to raise a red flag hypocrisy alert by in effect warning my fellow critics of race preferences that we need to temper our enthusiasm for Arizona’s tough new immigration law with an awareness that we risked being called hypocrites insofar as that law encourages racial profiling. A strong argument can be and has been made that it in fact does not do that, but that will not prevent the hypocrisy charge against us, and we must be prepared to respond.
It simply will not do to respond that “You’re one, too!” but unfortunately that is what the great Victor Davis Hanson has just done. “On the matter of racial profiling,” he wrote yesterday on National Review Online’s “the corner”:
No one wishes to harass citizens by race or gender, but, again unfortunately, we already profile constantly. When I had top classics students, I quite bluntly explained to graduating seniors that those who were Mexican American and African American had very good chances of entering Ivy League or other top graduate schools from Fresno, those who were women and Asians so-so chances, and those who were white males with CSUF BAs very little chance, despite straight A’s and top GRE scores. The students themselves knew all that better than I — and, except the latter category, had packaged and self-profiled themselves for years in applying for grants, admissions, fellowships, and awards. I can remember being told by a dean in 1989 exactly the gender and racial profile of the person I was to hire before the search had even started, and not even to “waste my time” by interviewing a white male candidate. Again, the modern university works on the principle that faculty, staff, and students are constantly identified by racial and gender status. These were not minor matters, but questions that affected hundreds of lives for many decades to come. (As a postscript I can also remember calling frantically to an Ivy League chair to explain that our top student that he had accepted had just confessed to me that in fact he was an illegal alien, and remember him “being delighted” at the news, as if it were an added bonus.)
Victor Davis Hanson writes brilliant and beautiful prose faster than I can read it and still manages to get virtually everything right, or more: I can’t think of anything else he’s gotten wrong. But his response here to the coming hypocrisy charge is disturbingly wrong.
In order to defend this law we must be able to argue persuasively either that it does not in fact authorize racial profiling or that it is justified in “being conscious” of race and ethnicity (the preferred formulation of the preferentialists), to the degree that it does, in the same manner and for the same reason that it is legitimate for a police department to “take race and ethnicity into account” in selecting an officer to go undercover in a Mexican gang.
It’s quite true that “they” profile constantly, as I pointed out for the umpteenth time the day before the post I mentioned above, in More Liberal Hypocrisy: Race “As One Of Many Factors…”. But it’s not true that “we” do, and Hanson’s use of “we” — “we already profile constantly” — lamentably joins and acquiesces in their behavior. Of course liberals are hypocrites regarding racial profiling, avidly supporting it when done by admissions committees and corporate personnel offices and denouncing when the same thing is done by the police or security officers. But that’s not news, and pointing to their hypocrisy is no defense to our joining it.
