By James Mardis, KERA 90.1 Commentator
Dallas, TX – There are two factors that make the President's stance against considering ethnicity as a factor in the admissions process so offensive: history and clarity.
It is offensive and plainly wrong to have the leader of our nation muddle the University's admission policy to justify his political ill-will on matters of race and the education of a striving underclass. To hear the President state that the admission policy "penalizes prospective (white) students based solely on their race" feeds the bigoted mind with images of an admission team tossing out lily white-enveloped applications while gingerly attending to those black-packaged jewels. Whether you are laughing now at this image or not, there are modern day examples for you to consider.
The recent Republican political campaigns against senatorial candidate Ron Kirk ("He's Not Ready") and gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez (with allegations of drug money laundering in a primarily self-funded campaign) are in this same vein. When another well-heeled southern Republican, Jesse Helms, faced Harvey Gant in the early '90s race for his exalted position, he launched a television and print campaign featuring a white worker's hand being stopped by a thickly-muscled black hand. Helms was sent back to office in a last-minute rush to the polls.
President Bush, like Trent Lott, has regressed his argument with the impassioned words of his forefathers on this issue. In the same manner that Mr. Lott championed the bigoted agenda of the Dixiecrats, Mr. Bush trots out the universally bigoted term "quotas." His introduction of this term insures a societal backlash from whites with a like mind.
And it is the word "quota" that makes the second factor in debunking the President's stance on the policy so ironic. The history of America's unofficial quota system for whites is offensive and odious. Mr. Bush is a beneficiary of that quota system. He and some of you prefer the word "privilege," but let's not quibble. President Bush talks so rapidly about correcting racial prejudice that he doesn't hear himself say, "Do it without considering race." The history of America's racial wrongs is tremendous. Unfortunately, it is also not so far in our past. There are legal woes for many U.S. companies that have systematically used old race-based practices to deny minority patrons and employees. Two fairly recent examples are Texaco and Denny's. After 30 years, HUD continues to report on housing discrimination against minorities. Then there is the 2002 study by professors from the University of Chicago and M.I.T. that clearly declared the discrimination by employers against applicants with "ethnic" sounding names on resumes.
What makes the ongoing debate on admission policies abundantly asinine is that it seeks to limit the aspirations of the best of what society has to offer. I would better understand or maybe not even care if we were talking about people standing in line for vials of crack. But we are actively trying to legislate the slow destruction of what is the future of America's brain trust. What is true in America today is that we are not smart enough to weather many more storms like the economic crisis, terror attacks and health care pandemics like the HIV virus that mark these times. There are more than enough colleges and universities to educate the rejected whites that claim racial bias kept them out of their first choice universities. If we all recognize the truth in that statement, then we must preface our response to these assaults on our litigation system for what they truly are: privilege suits.
James Mardis is a writer from Dallas.