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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (22967)	1/5/2004 2:20:12 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793698

Raspberry better watch it. He is sounding more and more like Sowell with every column. He may end up not getting invited to "do lunch" with the black caucus anymore. washingtonpost.com Affirmative Approach By William Raspberry Monday, January 5, 2004; Page A17 "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary . . ." -- Justice Sandra Day O'Connor Twenty-five years ago, that prediction -- contained in O'Connor's majority opinion in the recent University of Michigan affirmative action case -- might have seemed unremarkable. It was widely accepted that while racial preferences might be necessary for a time, they were a stopgap -- a way of fast-tracking a critical mass of black Americans into the middle class. I recently asked my black students at Duke University how long they thought racial preference would be necessary. To my amazement, several of them answered, in essence, "Forever." What -- perhaps over-extrapolating from a tiny sample -- could account for this new pessimism? Two things, I suspect. First, we black Americans have changed our measure of success. A quarter-century ago, we looked to the achievable goal of a substantial decrease in racial discrimination. Today, we look to the far more difficult goal of eliminating racism. The second, though less certain in my own mind, is that because their elders and advocates insist on racial preferences as a policy far into the future, our young people may be internalizing a sense of inferiority. They respond by displacing the responsibility for their shortcomings to the white-dominated society. But the implication is that we are permanently damaged goods, in permanent need of special concessions. What I find worrisome is that we aren't thinking about other ways of looking at these matters. We assert, more as political posture than realistic hope, that we will find a way to maintain racial preference in some guise. But suppose O'Connor is right -- that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences won't be necessary. What would opportunities for black Americans be like without affirmative action? What will be necessary to accomplish in the meantime? Lisbeth B. Schorr takes that question head-on in an article in the current issue of the American Prospect. "By assembling existing knowledge, deepening it and scaling up from current isolated successes," Schorr writes, "our society could make a long-term commitment to action . . . so that minority college applicants of 2028 would be educationally so well-equipped that they would not need the extra help of racial preferences." The approach she has dubbed "The O'Connor Project" calls on America to act to eliminate racial disparities in birth outcomes, school readiness, opportunities offered in the years before college, opportunities for transition to healthy young adulthood and opportunities for families to give their children a good start in life. These may not be the right priorities, though I don't doubt that several of them are. Indeed, most of the advocates of reparations for slavery, when asked how they would spend the money if, by some miracle, it became available, answer with a list much like Schorr's. But with this difference. The reparations advocates tend to devote their brainpower to proving their case rather than to designing programs. Schorr, an authority on successful social antipoverty programs, comes at it from the perspective of what we ought to do. Nor does she flinch from the cost. She estimates that an "O'Connor Project" s would cost between $110 billion and $125 billion a year -- not including the cost of universal health care, which she also believes necessary. Again, I don't vouch for Schorr's numbers any more than I endorse the entirety of her approach. But I have no doubt that this is what we ought to be talking about, arguing about and planning about. We need, in short, to reassert our responsibility for our children's success and not merely look for villains to blame for their failure. We need to devote as much of our collective intellectual and political power to improving our children's education as we devote to opposing vouchers. And our children, seeing the energy, enthusiasm and optimism with which we approach their future, might decide that they're not hopeless after all. willrasp@washpost.com © 2004 The Washington Post Company