language and an alien culture, consistently score in the highest ranges on standardized tests, surpassing whites and gaining admission to the best schools available. In fact, affirmative action measures in education are designed by the left to limit opportunities for Asian minorities, while favoring low-scoring Hispanics and blacks.33 But where ideology is concerned, facts do not matter. Within the ideology, only one explanation is possible for persistent inequalities: the hierarchies of race, class and gender, and their system of oppression.
“Pacific Islanders” are the one Asian group defined as an “under-represented minority,” not coincidently because they are the one Asian group that was the subject of American colonialism.
When the left demands a level playing field, it is not interested in neutral rules and equitable standards. It is interested in combating the alien powers of the race-class-gender hierarchy and their alleged oppression of blacks and other designated minorities—the new stand-ins for Marx’s proletarians. The left is oblivious to the experience of persecuted minorities who have been successful, such as Asians, Armenians, and Jews. It is not interested in the cultural factors that shape individual choices. It is not interested in individuals and their freedom, and therefore in securing an equitable process. It is only rhetorically interested even in equal results. What drives the left is its quest for the power to fundamentally reshape the social order by state fiat, to enforce its own prejudices and preferences, which it calls “social justice.”
If the left actually set out to achieve an equality of results, it would have to invade and then control every inch of the private sphere. Consider what it would mean to implement this demand. It is true that 40 percent of America’s African-American children are poor, a condition that handicaps them in any educational competition. The left accounts for the resultant disparities by its mythical construct, “institutional racism,” which allegedly blocks their way. Since the fault is “institutional” rather than individual, the remedy is institutional reform: rigging educational and performance standards to force an equality that doesn’t currently exist.
But the primary reason that African-American children are poor is cultural, not institutional or racial. If it were racial, there would be no (or only a small) black middle class, whereas the black middle class is now the majority of the black population. Statistically speaking, a child born into a single-parent family is five times more likely to be poor than a child born into a family with two parents, regardless of race.44 Eighty-five percent of African-American children in living in poverty grow up in single-parent households.55 It is that circumstance—and not “institutional racism”—which actually handicaps a portion of the African-American population and denies them opportunity. By the time such children are ready to compete, they may suffer from dysfunctional behaviors, or have developed disabling habits, or have internalized attitudes hostile to academic achievement, or simply lack the supportive environment that a middle-class, two-parent home provides. The excessive dropout rates among students who take advantage of racial preferences to overcome these inequalities are the statistical indicators that these parenting handicaps are real, and that no rigging of institutional standards can make up for them.66
“Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty,” Robert Rector, Heritage Foundation, September 5, 2012, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/09/marriage-americas-greatest-weapon-against-child-poverty.Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 237.Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It, Basic Books, 2012.
In the face of such realities, what can “leveling the playing field” mean? How can the state make up for the irresponsible behaviors and mistakes of the biological parents? By forcing them to get married? By compelling them to look after their children? By requiring them to teach their offspring to study hard and not be self-abusive? Is this even practical? Is it wise? Should the state become a Big Brother for those who fall behind, taking over their lives and curtailing their individual freedom? Yet that is the logical inference of the proposals of the left.
To achieve the benevolent outcomes that progressives promise would require a government both omniscient and wise, a utopia that has never existed. Such a state would have to mandate comprehensive transfers of opportunity and wealth, and would conduct a relentless battle against human nature to overcome the resistance to its impositions by those unwilling to give up their liberty or the fruits of their labor. The call to level the playing field, pushed to its unavoidable conclusion, is a call for the systematic subversion of American individualism and democracy, the destruction of individual freedom and the creation of a totalitarian state. The level playing field requires a totalitarian state to eliminate the disparities resulting from human nature and private circumstance. Yet the totalitarian state is itself a hierarchy of forbidding dimensions.
In the aftermath of communism’s collapse, such a prospect may seem remote, which is why the dangers inherent in these progressive reforms are often discounted. But the efforts to undermine the system of individual rights are already well advanced. Moreover, it is the nihilistic ambition behind the radical assault that presents the most immediate threat. For it is possible to destroy the foundations of social trust without establishing a socially viable alternative. Underlying the idea of racial preferences is a corrosive premise that the white majority is fundamentally racist and cannot be fair. For those who embrace the idea, the institutions, traditions, rules and standards that white majorities have arrived at over the course of centuries merit no respect. Affirmative action race preferences are an assault on the very system of economic and legal neutrality that underpins a pluralistic democracy. By denigrating the rule of law as a mask for injustice and oppression, the left undermines the very system that makes democracy—and racial equality—possible.
To support race preferences, the left demands that government abandon the principle of “color-blindness” and equal protection under the laws. It does so in the name of opening doors that allegedly remain closed, since it claims that minorities are still “excluded” or “locked out.” But its only evidence for this is statistics that show disparities between minority representation in certain jobs or educational institutions and their representation in the population at large. The villain, according to the left, is the invisible power called “institutional racism.” (It has to be invisible because actual discrimination against minorities is already outlawed.)
No one seriously contends that admissions officers at America’s elite colleges are racists. In fact, college admissions offices are normally desperate to recruit as many eligible minority applicants as they can, offering them large financial rewards for being “under-represented.” As a result of California ballot Proposition 209, the University of California system is one of the few institutions legally required to eliminate the racial preferences it put in place for minorities. Yet the UC system is still spending $160 million annually on outreach programs designed to increase minority enrollments.77 Since this is the case, it is hard not to conclude that any deficiencies in minority admissions are the result of individual failures to meet academic standards.
“Increasing Minority Enrollment at the University of California Post Proposition 209: UCLA’s Center for Community College Partnerships,” Ramona Barrio-Sotillo, 2007, p. 57, http://udini.proquest.com/view/increasing-minority-enrollment-at-goid:304826328/.
The idea that America is a country ruled by racist precepts and powers, as leftists claim, is absurd. If African-Americans are oppressed, what would explain the desire of so many blacks to come to America’s shores and—in the case of Haitians—to risk their lives in doing so? Are they longing to subject themselves to a master race? In fact, the reason they want so desperately to immigrate is that in America they have more rights, more opportunities, more cultural privileges, and more social power than they do in countries like Haiti, which has been independent and run by black governments for more than two hundred years. This difference is attributable to America’s