Michael,
Anyone free from GOP PC brainwashing understands the concept of a black person who talks like a white person.
BTW: Colin Powell was a major beneficiary of affirmative action.
"The issue, Mr. President, is not affirmative action but racial preferences," declared Abigail Thernstrom to President Clinton at his "Town Hall" discussion on race in Akron, Ohio, Dec. 3. Clinton returned the volley: "Do you favor abolishing the affirmative-action program that produced Colin Powell? Yes or No?" Thernstrom, co-author of an anti-affirmative-action tome (and participant in a current dialogue on race in Slate), responded that she does not "think that it is racial preferences that made Colin Powell."
In the current Newsweek, Thernstrom amplifies: Yes, Colin Powell benefited from affirmative action. But the military has a good kind of affirmative action, which expands equal opportunity without making racial preferences. She offers as an example Powell's promotion to brigadier general by President Carter's Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander. When originally sent an all-white list of candidates for the position, Alexander rejected it, demanding a list that included some blacks. From the revised list, Alexander chose Powell.
As Jacob Weisberg noted in last week's Slate, critics of reverse discrimination often insist that they support affirmative action. And they often point to the military as the one American institution that's got the distinction right. The military, by all accounts, has indeed done a great job of integrating its higher reaches and achieving racial harmony without harming its ability to serve its mission. Affirmative action in the military is a success. But has the military avoided the alleged poison of reverse discrimination? Not at all. The real lesson of affirmative action in the military is that reverse discrimination is not so poisonous. It gave us Colin Powell.
Thernstrom's anecdote about how Powell became brigadier general is ambiguous on its face. The boss asked for a list that included blacks and then chose a black off the list. Equal opportunity or reverse discrimination? A little more information resolves the ambiguity. One reason Powell wasn't on the original list is that he was, at 42, below the age normally considered eligible for promotion to brigadier general. An exception was made in order to give Secretary Alexander a black as he had requested. Powell, who has always been forthright in his defense of affirmative action, says himself that he wouldn't have appeared on the second list or been made the youngest general in the Army if it had not been for preferential treatment.
slate.msn.com
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