symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 8, 2001 | by J.C. Watts, Jr., | Paul Gottfried

It is important to underline the reasons for the close connection made by black spokesmen between racial sensitivity and government preferences in jobs and admissions. Such a connection continues to drive black politics. Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America and Robert Weissberg's The Politics of Empowerment document the key role of public employment and government favors in the creation and sustenance of the black middle class. Unlike Asians, Jews and many West Indians, the majority of American blacks identify social mobility with special treatment by the state. That treatment is assured and expanded by cranking up white guilt to pressure lawmakers into offering blacks newer and ever more costly forms of compensation. As Weissberg demonstrates, this racial shakedown does not benefit most blacks, but the political and fiscal empowerment of black politicians does provide jobs to black professionals. The latter have become role models for other blacks, who believe that their own career engines will be greased by government. Given the fact that a much higher percentage of the black middle class has risen this way than is the case for other groups, the operative assumption, according to Weissberg, is unfortunately correct.

This pattern of mobility also explains why there is less of a correlation between testable intelligence and socioeconomic stares for middle-class blacks than for most other ethnic and racial groups. Such a finding, according to Sowell, need not demonstrate an inherent genetic disadvantage. It means that blacks are able to rise beyond their demonstrated merit and, moreover, deem this as acceptable. And black politicians go on the warpath, screaming about "bringing back slavery" whenever objections to this arrangement are raised.

There is a mechanism of reinforcement at work here, which has been noted by black critics of affirmative action and black empowerment. Talk about victimization also justifies a system of rewards that is mostly unrelated to merit and it raises the prestige of black politicians who can shake down the white establishment for favors, even if most blacks never receive the benefits of that shakedown. There is no way that Republicans can oppose these practices while playing catch-up for black voters, particularly if they must deal with the scam artists in question.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party may have bitten off more than it can chew in rushing to serve the civil-rights establishment. The question is how much the Democrats can cede on one side without making the rest of its constituency uneasy. Jewish voters did not take offense when Democratic vice-presidential candidate Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut paid court to Louis Farrakhan, despite the minister's stated enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler. Lieberman is undoubtedly a Jewish celebrity, and many of his Jewish Democratic voters seem far more anxious about the Christian right than they do about black anti-Semitism. But this indulgence of black excesses may be only temporary, and one wonders whether Lieberman's obsequious behavior would have been tolerable to his Jewish fans if it had been a non-Jewish Democrat who had visited Farrakhan to please black politicians. Even more significantly, over half of white Catholics still vote for the Democratic Party because of what may be an ancestral identification with organized labor and working-class issues. But will this diminishing Democratic constituency shrink faster if the Democrats put more government muscle behind black professionals and their children, to the detriment of blue-collar Catholics and their kids?