X-Percent Plans : After preferences, more race games - guaranteed percentages of minority students are latest affirmative action strategy

National Review, Feb 7, 2000 by Shelby Steele

The problem is that this moral authority invariably comes at the expense of minority development. And this, I believe, is the single greatest problem in American racial reform.

This profound neediness determines all, and it drives the society over and over again into engineering and away from the slower but effective struggle of development. Affirmative action and X-percent plans may not close skills gaps between the races and may injure our best institutions, but they display that posture of repentance that moral authority requires. Because this problem of moral authority affects all whites, it is distinctly nonpartisan. If Democrats engineer with affirmative action, many Republicans now want to engineer with X-percent plans. The need for racial moral authority is so absolute and urgent for white men on both sides of the political divide that they simply cannot risk a developmental approach to equality. Out of the white mouth, development-with all its disproportionate yet necessary demands on former victims-plays as mean and victim-blaming. Neither Gore, Bradley, Bush, nor McCain can ask minorities for the sacrifices that parity with other groups demands. All four are engineers. Even when they support development in earlier grades-as G. W. Bush does-they favor college admissions programs that tolerate the very mediocrity that keeps minorities from becoming truly equal.

They will likely justify this by saying that minority disadvantages are exculpatory. The disadvantage explains the weakness and therefore the weakness should be tolerated. But of course, in the long run, reality does not tolerate weakness even when it is caused by a legacy of slavery and segregation. And here is the nub of the problem. Just at the moment when this truth-made clear by centuries of black suffering-might be allowed to become a powerful motivation to excellence in black life, it is muted by white institutions and leaders who protect blacks from it as a way of asserting their own moral authority.

In a free society, inequalities will be overcome primarily by the will of those who suffer them. This truism does not "let society off the hook" so much as point toward reform that asks a lot of the people it tries to help. It is only the obsession with moral authority in those who never suffered inequality that makes this seem harsh.

Mr. Steele's most recent book is A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. He is a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.