* Rowan on "The Bell Curve", AA hypocrisy, and what is 'black'?
Topics: AA
02 Nov 1994
From: "DG Ervan Darnell"
On 10/28, Carl Rowan attacked "The Bell Curve" in his column. The most of
it was babbling about how tragic the past was. That's true but it has no
immediate relevance. Murray's thesis is either right or wrong as a matter
of reality, historical injustice just doesn't matter. That slippery piece
of reasoning from Rowan didn't keep him from characterizing "The Bell Curve"
as "pseudo-science".
However, he did have one interesting comment to make:
The wording of that old Tennesse law reminds us that in most
of America a person can have 87.5 percent "white blood" but
society still considers and treats them as "blacks," and even
as pariahs.
This Bell Curve book would base all sorts of national policy
actions on the supposed lower IQs of "black people." If
educational, economic and other public policies are to be
based on the mumbo jumbo in the Bell Curve book, which says in
effect that it is hopeless to try to lift blacks up to the
level of whites, how do we now decide who is "black"?
[anecdotes about mixed race marriages]
Yes, that's a good point. But where was this point when affirmative action
came along? At the point, Rowan (or, at least, his ideological allies) was
more than happy to think it was obvious who was black and who was white for
the purposes of handing out the goodies.
In the interim, I have read Murray's 10-page summary of his book that was
published in TNR. Rowan completely flips Murray's policy conclusion on its
head. Murray's conclusion is that we should *remove* race distinction from
public policy (for a variety of reasons, some fairly complicated). But
since that would change the status quo of special handouts for blacks, Rowan
states the exact opposite as the case, claiming that Murray would inject a
race based distinction.
There are lots of interesting assumptions tied up in the question what is
black? One always hears 'discriminating based on skin color is just so
irrational'. I always took this to be a cheesy liberal line. But recently,
I heard an (Asian) Indian insist that she was discriminated against because
her dark skin made her seem more black. Now, that's just perfectly silly.
It has nothing to do with skin color. When was the last time your promotion
was put in jeapordy by a tan? It has everything to do with attitude and
behavior (or assumed such). I'm not saying that's right or just, but it is
a distinction worth making. It answers Rowan's 87.5% jab. Being
genetically this or that is irrelevant. People who are plausibly black in
appearance and act 'black' will be treated that way.
Let me throw out the complementary statement as a theory: blacks who act
'white' face dramatically less discrimination than blacks who act 'black'.
If that is so, racism is no longer even remotely about 'skin color' but
about attitude and behavior.
This line drawing is a serious problem with AA. It is not merely that it
makes some mistakes on the boundary of white versus black. It amplifies the
boundary error. AA looks at the aspect of black society which is least able
to 'make it' in the world and then pushes quotas which are applied not to
that group, but rather to the group which is already doing well. The
argument is further mangled because those blacks which have the fewest
skills and worst social attitude are used to build the statistics that
'prove' discrimination and then middle class blacks are held up as the
example of who is discriminated against.
Skin color is a necessary part of this error because it allows for a clear
separation of who should pay and who should receive. You just cannot have
group 'justice' when you don't know who the groups are. It also makes for a
subtle semantic shift by casting the debate in terms of something truly
irrelevant instead of what really matters. The AA'ers have won the first
round just by getting people to agree to their improper framing of the
issue. The truth of a sliding scale of attitude and response to it would be
much messier. Even worse, it would require AA supporters to face up to the
fact that they are not only 'helping' blacks who don't need it, but also
punishing whites who have done nothing wrong (in the sense of acting in an
irrationally discriminatory manner).
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