But the difficulty of affirmative action is how it can be so easily manipulated by the likes of Pat Buchanan to undermine the very people it is meant to help. Buchanan himself demonstrates this ugly (but, I fear, effective) technique in his critique of Sonia Sotomayor on the Rachel Maddow show. Buchanan suggests that Sotomayor is incompetent and unintelligent because she is a self-identified "affirmative action baby." Sotomayor got into Princeton, Buchanan argues, because she was Latina and she's a nominee to the Supreme Court because--you guessed it--she is Latina. Thus all of Sotomayor's accomplishments and achievements are dismissed in one fell swoop.
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Of course what Buchanan is really mad about is what I would call the loss of his guarantee of undeniable privilege. (He calls it "discrimination against white men.") He is at least smart enough to understand that he can't count on getting absolutely everything he wants, just by virtue of being a white male. But he's also dumb as rocks not to realize that he retains enough damn privilege to do just fine. White men are not a threatened species, for better or for worse, and this myth of perilous "reverse discrimination" is absurd, but also dangerously insidious. I would feel less concerned if I didn't think that Buchanan represented a sizable number of white men misdirecting their anger.
But back to the absurd part, for a minute, and a bit of family history. My mother's side of the family is pretty WASPy, with a relatively long line of men who went to Harvard and Yale, and got advanced degrees, and had successful careers. My brother felt pressure to continue in this tradition, and though his grades and test scores were top-notch and he wrote a sweet and intelligent application essay, he just couldn't get into an Ivy League. And he was so disappointed. He encountered similar difficulty after graduating from college and looking for his dream job. He struggled and was depressed and felt like a failure. My mother grumbled about affirmative action--"he's a white man--that's the problem," she would say. And I just gave her the eye and shrugged my shoulders at the both of them. It made sense to me that affirmative action would displace white men (and maybe sometimes white women, too), and why not my brother? Why shouldn't he be displaced by someone who has had fewer privileges, benefits, opportunities? After all, my brother would still maintain all the other benefits he had as a result of being white and male and growing up in a family with some means.
It's at least ten years since my brother received his rejection letter from Harvard, and I can say with certainty that history has proved me right. My brother went to a perfectly good liberal arts college, graduated with honors, and finally found himself a job...at the Council on Foreign Relations. And when he was ready, he applied to graduate school at Columbia, and was accepted. See, he didn't NEED Harvard. He didn't NEED Yale. (While, for someone like Sotomayor, Princeton may have made all of the difference in the world.) This is what Pat Buchanan fails to grasp: the "threat" of affirmative action to white males is entirely imaginary. And the outcome of affirmative action is not that incompetent people of color are thoughtlessly promoted. Rather, affirmative action allows competent people of color to rise beyond unfairly limiting circumstances not of their own making. That's the sort of progress our country could use more of.
Now, for a little comic relief (hat tip to Jennifer of Mixed Race America)
