ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 15, 1997 TAG: 9704150050
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
"THE WORLD we have created today has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.''
A friend offered me that quote from Albert Einstein when I sought her guidance on how America might rationally deal with the newest assaults on affirmative action.
It's a wonderful quote except for one thing: I couldn't figure out what it means.
My friend - the Rev. Paige Chagois, a race-relations activist in Richmond - thinks it means (among other things) that we must ``stop looking for downstream solutions to upstream dilemmas.'' The college registrar's office, she argues, is too late to start dealing with differential admissions rates. ``The need is to address academic disparities that begin in kindergarten, and even before that: Not just Head Start and Healthy Start and compensatory education, but also the way we fund education [on the basis of local property taxes] puts poor and black children at a disadvantage from which many never recover.''
At first blush, this thoughtful liberal seems to have bought conservative Glenn Loury's notion of ``developmental affirmative action'' - preference designed to enhance the performance of minorities while maintaining common standards of evaluation.
But while she wants to do a lot more ``upstream,'' she doesn't want to give up on ``downstream'' remedies, either. America, she is convinced, needs to transform opportunity from theoretical construct to palpable fact - and that may mean continuing some degree of racial preference, at least for a time.
Two recent items in particular sparked our long discussion. The first was the federal appeals court's upholding of California's Proposition 209, which bans all preferences based on race or gender. The other was a report that the University of Texas, Austin, will probably have fewer black students than it had before a circuit court's order forbidding race as a consideration in admissions.
The university, which likes the notion of increased diversity, had thought it could get around the court's decree by using socio-economic disadvantage as a proxy for race. It managed to get roughly the same number of black applicants into the application pool - only to have many of them beaten out by whites who met the disadvantage criteria but had higher test scores.
My friend and I wondered what to make of all this. Isn't it likely that no youngster who really wants to go to college will be denied the opportunity to do so? Those who fail acceptance at the state's flagship campus surely will be accepted a tier or two down the ladder. The implications of Proposition 209 are more difficult to think through, but still we found it hard to make a rational case for preferring black applicants simply because they are black.
Chagois and I talked for more than an hour and reached no satisfying conclusion. And then it got worse. I opened a letter from James Bernard Miles, who identified himself with ``the majority of Americans who have had it'' with the whole group approach, including Glenn Loury's. Listen:
``Individuals do, but groups don't, inherit opportunity. Do you actually believe that John F. Kennedy Jr. is a member of the same group and was born to the same opportunities possessed by some 35-year-old Caucasian guy in some poor rural county in Virginia, born to a 15-year-old girl whose mother was 17 years old, poor and uneducated when she was born? Do you actually believe that Colin Powell's son is a member of the same group as that guy born to a poor mother and poor father in Barry Farms [public-housing complex] in Southeast Washington? And do you actually believe this guy and Powell's son have inherited the same opportunity? ...
``Find me a black boy with ambition, competence, determination, and I'll show you that boy's future success. Find me a white boy without ambition, without competence, without determination, and I'll show you that boy's future failure.
``Opportunities given to him will not spell success, and opportunities denied the black boy will not cause him to fail. Some people will fail in Heaven, and some people will succeed in Hell. It has nothing to do with the group. It has everything to do with the individual character. That's why Harriet Tubman was free but the `group' wasn't.''
You suppose that's what Einstein had in mind? Just asking.
- WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP
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