ROY EDROSO

Affirmative Action

Dehumanization has long been a favored tactic for the opposition in civil rights debates. If a member of a persecuted minority asks for his rights, it always helps to assert that he doesn't know what he wants, the poor dim wog. This dodge, alas for enemies of liberty, had fallen out of favor in recent years. But in the post-9/11 everything-has-changed world, where Arabs and other racial unfortunates are routinely asked to take up the dark man's burden, it seems to be making a comeback.

David Horowitz, a former Black Panther sympathizer who has spent the latter part of his life raging against African-American malfeasance, gets an assist from leading conservative LABGAWU ("Look, A Black Guy Agrees With Us") Thomas Sowell at TownHall.com. Sowell quotes Horowitz' explanation for the tears in the eyes of students who had conducted a silent protest vigil against him at Duke. Sowell says it's "one of the most touching scenes in Horowitz's book," and this at first disarms--how generous that this anti-affirmative-action activist can feel the sorrow of his opponents!

But wait, Sowell explains: "Why tears? In his book, David Horowitz asks: 'Is it because they fear that the umbilical link to victimhood will be cut and they will be forced into the moral complexity of full citizenship--a status that their mentors have purposefully withheld from them?'" Sowell says amen, but adds (perhaps to soften the typical harshness of Horowitz' locution), "There is something else that may go deeper. Because black students are admitted to colleges and universities with lower requirements than their white classmates, they are often visibly less able to cope with the academic work, as reflected in such things as lower grades and higher dropout rates." And, because "black students are insulated from any criticism of their performances, behavior, or ideas" by "Draconian speech codes," these students are left "in a painful predicament, whose real source of pain cannot be openly acknowledged by either themselves or by their white classmates..."

So the real source of their pain is Ted Kennedy! And the sad thing is, these poor, dumb, dark children, in the blindness of their shame and rage, take it out on David Horowitz, who's only trying to help!

Be Slaves or Starve

A subtler and more chilling example is found in fashionable Brooklyn zine ShoutNY (Jan 2002). Scott Carney's "Blood, Sweat and Gears" examines the shipbreaking trade in the Indian city of Alang on the Gulf of Cambay. As other reporters have seen, shipbreaking is dangerous (burned and severed limbs are common) and the men who do it are ill-paid and ill-protected. So Greenpeace has stepped in. But wait: when shipwrecking goes away, the workers have no source of income, and thus are really worse off. The "middle-classed bourgeois" Greenpeace, Carney observes, has really put its foot in it!

A valid observation, which could lead in any of several directions. For example, an investigation (or at least a questioning) of the economic order that places its workers in this "be slaves or starve" position. But in this modish publication, in an age of easy answers, we don't go there. Carney closes:

As I left Alang on a motorcycle that had been modified to pull a cartload of passengers, a man with a charred arm asked me to take him back to America. But I knew that the man in the hardhat was right -- these men were shipbreakers, and there was no place for them outside of Alang. Maybe Alang was no place for me [emphasis added].

Sorry, buddy. But let me assure you, this is not a selfish decision on my part. You may think you want out of this hell, but I have seen the world and I know your place in it. Let Greenpeace patrol the ecosystem; but our econosystem, too, is delicate and needs defending. As they wouldn't unleash potato bugs in the rainforest, I wouldn't presume to transplant you from poverty into abundance. Your destiny, like mine, is manifest.

Sowell: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/printts20020107.shtml
Carney: available only in offline edition of ShoutNY, on newsstands now.