November 23, 2005
Original Intent, Continued Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:00 AM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “I disagree, however, with Mr. Gordon’s next assertion, that the Freedmen’s Bureau bill was thus ‘much more analogous to modern-day legislation making victims of natural disasters eligible for federal help than modern-day affirmative action, which is aimed at a vague group of people for a vague amount of time for vague reasons.’ Slavery was not, of course, a natural disaster, and black Americans did not owe their postwar impoverishment to ‘vague reasons.’ Slavery was an institution legalized, protected, and subsidized by the federal government, and it held only Africans and their descendents in bondage.” Of course slavery was not a natural disaster; it was a man-made one, but no less a disaster for its victims for that. Therefore the Freedmen’s Bureau bill offered help to anyone who had been held in bondage, much as disaster relief offers help to anyone whose house or business was in the path of a hurricane and was damaged by it. Disaster relief does not offer help to everyone named Smith because a lot of people named Smith suffered losses in a hurricane. Affirmative action benefits people of the requisite skin color, even if they are on the Forbes 400 list. And I never said that the freed slaves were impoverished for “vague reasons.” I said that modern-day affirmative action offers help for vague reasons—race and ethnicity—rather than specific reasons, such as poverty. Mr. Zeitz further writes, “Let’s bring this back to Mr. Gordon’s argument. I quite agree with him that there is a strong appeal to class-based affirmative action. But there is a historical argument to be made that the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers were comfortable with class and race-based affirmative action. And there’s a case to be made that while some white Americans have been left behind by the federal welfare state, all black Americans were targeted victims of that same welfare state in very recent times. Black taxpayers subsidized my family’s climb into the middle class. In this sense, I can’t disentangle race and public policy.” I’m afraid I don’t see the evidence that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment were comfortable with race-based affirmative action, at least in the evidence he presents. And, yes, all blacks were the targeted victims of government action that, today, seems almost surreal. But those laws, thank God, are now on the ash heap of history, just like slavery. Terrible wrongs were done to black people in this country over the centuries by the government of this country, but those wrongs have, after a heroic but remarkably bloodless struggle, been righted. Today if you need a leg up, the government will help you get one, regardless of race. That’s how it should be. The poison of race should not be a factor in the equation. Why? Because it violates Martin Luther King’s dictum that people should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. As long as people are eligible for benefits simply because of the color of their skin, we are not judging them by the content of their character. That is inescapable. Affirmative action perpetuates discrimination on the basis of race because it discriminates on the basis of race. It is a medicine that, far from curing the disease, makes it worse.
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