Now that the great affirmative action debate has begun, what is the president's position? Classically Clintonesque: tactical retreat. He remains for affirmative action but pledges to review all federal affirmative action programs to weed out those that don't work and aren't fair.
With typical wonkishness, Clinton turns a question of principle into a program review. As Michael Dukakis would say, this is not about ideology, this is about competence.Is it? Sorting through affirmative action programs in search of abuses presents a stance of statesmanlike objectivity and distance. But the stance is a pose. The administration has already shown where it stands on affirmative action.
Last year, in the notorious Piscataway case, the Clinton administration took a stand so aggressively in favor of racial preferences that Jeffrey Rosen, legal correspondent for The New Republic, called it an "attempt to rewrite the law of affirmative action" that "blithely endorsed the most extreme form of racialism."
Clinton wants now to dodge and weave on affirmative action. Let him first explain Piscataway.
This is the case: In 1989, the Piscataway school district had for budgetary reasons to let go one of the teachers in its high school business department. The two with the least seniority, Debra Williams and Sharon Taxman, had identical records: hired on precisely the same day in 1980, with equal academic credentials and with similarly favorable progress reports.
Whom to fire? Normal procedure is to flip a coin. Instead, and in the name of "diversity," Taxman was let go because she is white and Williams is black.
Taxman filed a complaint. The Justice Department (first under Bush, then under Clinton) took her side and won in court. It won because both sides conceded from the start that this was not a remedial act. There was no history of discrimination in the Piscataway school district, nor did the school board claim there had been. Nor were blacks underrepresented among the faculty.
Moreover, firing for reasons of race is a serious trampling of rights. The U.S. District Court summarily ruled for Taxman.
So far, simple. But then it gets interesting. The school board appealed the case, and then, under the new assistant attorney general for civil rights, Deval Patrick, the Clinton administration switched sides and in the appeal filed a brief against Taxman.
Patrick is no obscure clerk working his will in the bowels of the bureaucracy. His job, which was to be Lani Guinier's, is high profile. Clinton himself yanked Guinier's nomination because he could not agree with her views. He then chose Patrick.
Patrick's brief represents affirmative action at its most intellectually bankrupt. In a case where there is not even a claim of remedial purpose (for past discrimination), a person is fired for reason of race and race only.
The Department of Justice then switches sides to uphold the firing on grounds of "diversity." But the court found that in the Piscataway schools black professionals are, if anything, statistically overrepresented. What then does diversity mean?
The road to racial animosity and ethnic Balkanization is paved with good intentions. Forget the 32 pages of federal affirmative action programs that the administration is so ostentatiously to review. Let it explain and defend Piscataway.
Let the debate begin with this question: Should American citizens be fired from their jobs for reasons of race? For 20 years people have been intimidated from raising such questions for fear of being called racist.
The great change for the coming campaign is that the taboo has been shattered. Why? Because after 20 years it has simply become impossible to suppress by intimidation the deeply held feeling of a vast majority of Americans that our tangled system of racial preferences is fundamentally un-American, destructive and actually poisonous to race relations.
Because when the Department of Justice blandly defends the racially motivated firing of a teacher in the name of "a policy of equal educational opportunity," our threshold for Orwellian doublethink has finally been breached.
The affirmative action battle that has been fought in the courts among advocates and interest groups is about to enter the political arena. In a democracy, this is as it should be.