THE
MINORITY RIGHTS REVOLUTION(Cambridge, MA and London, Eng.: Belknap
Press
of
Harvard U. Press, 2002) by JOHN D. SKRENTNY
John
D. Skrentny's The Minority Rights Revolution is probably the
last, best academic history of the development of affirmative action
in the United States. Overall, it is not an easy read or a
beautifully crafted one, as he must describe laws, bureaucracies,
rulings and regulations, court interpretations – not exactly the
venues of poetry. Occasionally, political strategies are also
included. What makes this an important work is that Skrentny
attended Harvard as a graduate student where he was awarded a degree
and studied under the prominent scholar Orlando Patterson; Skrentny
interviewed men like Hugh Graham Davis, author of an earlier,
fact-filled work on the development of civil rights; and Skrentny
also interviewed Alfred Blumrosen, who may be considered the chief
architect of what we call today affirmative action (hereafter AA).
Skrentny's book is published by Belknap of Harvard University Press;
it is academically solid with an abundance of discursive footnotes.
Thomas Sugrue, a reviewer of this book, declared that Skrentny “has
written the definitive account of the dramatic expansion of minority
rights in America in the 1960s and 1970s.”(book's back cover) This
work satisfies both academia and the Establishment. But what does it
omit? What are the major questions about the development of “civil
rights” that he fails to ask?
On
page V, Skrentny asserts that he is mainly on the Left politically.
He adds, “Policy elites make decisions and those decisions
matter.”(14) In his book he basically traces the elite and how it,
and its employees, arrived at what today we call affirmative action.
Yet in doing so, Skrentny changes the meanings of words in an
Orwellian sense. Thus, “The minority rights revolution was a
sudden growth of federal legislation, presidential executive orders,
bureaucratic rulings, and court decisions that established
nondiscrimination rights.”(4) No, that sentence is absurd.
Instead it established the right, and often the duty, to discriminate
against white men. All are equal, but some are more equal than
others.
Prior
to outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, Nazi legal experts researched
America's segregation laws, for the purpose of adopting some for use
against the Jews in Germany.(See James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American
Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, Princeton
U. Press, 2017) But once war erupted with the US, the Germans
willingly highlighted the hypocrisy of the US that complained about
Germany's racial laws when the US had numerous racial laws of its
own. Skrentny does not mention it, but through WWII a majority of
American states had laws forbidding intermarriage of different races.
The Japanese invaded much of Asia, but they hoped the local people
would view them not as invaders but as liberators! They would
liberate the Philippines from the colonialist, white racist
Americans; the Indonesians from the colonialist, white racist Dutch;
IndoChina from the colonialist, white racist French; Hong Kong,
Malaysia, Burma, India, from the colonialist, white racist British
empire. Within the US, most Japanese (citizens or not) were interned
in camps under Roosevelt, so they were generally too isolated to be
aware of current Japanese propaganda: however that propaganda did
evoke some response among other minorities, including on the then
tiny Black Muslim movement. To counter this Axis appeal,
“...President Franklin Delano Roosevelt strongly promoted the
United States as a symbol of human rights and race equality.”(11)
Skrentny
titles his second chapter - “'This is war and this is a war
measure': racial equality becomes national security.”(21) In a
radio address in January 1941 Roosevelt declared that those fighting
against the Axis were fighting for the Four Freedoms: freedom of
speech and expression; freedom of religion; freedom from want; and
freedom from fear.(24) A few months prior to the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor and America's official entry into the conflict,
Roosevelt signed and Executive Order to promote Fair Employment
practices in America's expanding war-time industries. While Skrentny
spends some pages on FDR's proposed social programs during the war,
he does not mention a plank in the 1944 Democratic Party's platform
that would limit salaries to a high of $25,000 a year.
With
the defeat of Hitler and Tojo, the US was soon engaged in a Cold War
with Stalin's Communist Soviet Union. The world-wide Communist
Parties had long stressed their opposition to both racism and
colonialism (except when the topic was Soviet occupation of Eastern
Europe.) To many major players in the United States, if America was
to achieve “world leadership and defeat communism,” the US would
have to “eliminate white racism, both domestically and
internationally.”(72) To achieve this end, some states enacted
their own FEPC laws, the US Supreme Court outlawed legally segregated
schools in 1954, Pres. Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock in 1957
to insure that several Black students could attend the white Central
High School (of course, Ike was a Republican, but nevertheless, no
president had sent troops South on behalf of Blacks since the
Reconstruction era), and a few years later, Congress passed the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 [hereafter, CRA]. “Because these reforms were
classically liberal, however, the new laws did not identify any
particular minority groups. The initial civil rights gains for
blacks, for example, in fact protected any and all
Americans. These were simply nondiscrimination provisions.”(84,
emphasis in Skrentny's original.)
Black
historian, former Chair of the Civil Rights Commission, and left-wing
activist Mary Frances Berry asserted that the CRA of 1964 did not
apply to whites; it was enacted for Blacks. At first glance,
Skrentny seems to agree with her. He writes: “..., it must be
emphasized that American citizens and political elites saw Title VII
and the entire CRA of 1964 as being a law for African
Americans.”(100) But on the very next page he quotes a leading
liberal politician and floor manager pushing the proposed legislation
through a Senate where filibusters had killed previous bills. The
Minnesota senator was one of those most responsible for garnering the
votes to pass the CRA into law and: “Senator Hubert Humphrey stated
bluntly that 'the bill has a simple purpose...to give fellow citizens
– Negroes – the same rights and opportunities that white people
take for granted.'”(101) Here, as elsewhere, Humphrey spoke of
equal rights, NOT preferential rights over whites. Skrentny also
reports, it was not only Humphrey who interpreted things this way,
for “...the civil rights leaders before 1965 never made affirmative
action as later understood one of their central demands [however] the
policy nevertheless became civil rights...”(343, again, the
emphasis in Skrentny's original).
Skrentny
acknowledges that AA meant “official minorities,” and abandoning
the classical liberal approach concerning individual rights, and
replacing it by dividing the nation into “oppressed minorities and
privileged majorities.”(85) Moreover, AA was a cheap, easy,
available way to appease the desires of the EEOC.(86) Who should be
included on the list of minorities on the EEO forms to be sent to
employers? The replies would determine whom they had hired and in
what proportion. Blumrosen, of course, wanted the data concerning
Blacks hired at any given firm. Earlier forms for various government
agencies had included listings for Puerto Ricans or Mexican Americans
or Spanish-speaking, American Indians, and various words to include
Asians too. The early EEOC forms did not include the category for
women, although women were included in the CRA. Nor did the EEOC
inquire of employers about Poles, Greeks, Irish, or Roman Catholics,
or Jews. There were no inquiries on the forms about those
categories, even though the CRA included categories for banning
discrimination based on national origin or religion. But the EEOC
ignored these aspects of the law. The reason for this omission:
Skrentny thought the employer could readily make a tally by looking
at his work-force, without asking them. This was not necessarily
true, as most Hispanics viewed themselves as white, so looking at
them might not have revealed that they were Hispanic. If the
employer then checked their names, he could also have checked to see
a Polish name, a Greek one, and Irish one. Yet, the ethnics were not
counted in the government's official tally.
In
the 1940s and 50s, Jews were included on some government forms.
Blacks objected, and the Jews decided not to press the issue, as they
were also aware of how the data might be used against them.(282-83)
In the EEOC the question of religious AA in hiring was never
broached.(435) For a time during President Nixon's drive to promote
Black capitalism, and other minority enterprises, the Small Business
Administration did include Hasidim (a very Orthodox Jewish group),
but that effort did not last long.(162-63) Skrentny asserts that
there were no AA university quotas for white ethnics (310); but he is
wrong. Beginning in 1976 Italian-Americans were granted the
privileged AA status at the City University of New York.(See Linda
Kirillova's MA Thesis, “When Affirmative Action is White:
Italian-Americans in the City University of New York, 1976 –
Present,” Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 2016)
Nevertheless,
this appears to be so unique that Skrentny's assessment of the issue
is essentially correct. Blumrosen defended the policy
of excluding white ethnics from AA because to do otherwise
would have interfered with the main goal of helping Blacks.(438)
But
there is another reason white ethnics were not included on the EEOC
forms that would have given them a guaranteed percentage of jobs,
places in universities, promotions, etc. Would the inclusion of
white ethnics really have harmed the Blacks? The Black proportion of
the population presumably would remain the same. Was Blumrosen's
explanation for the exclusion, the “reason,” or a rationale for
depriving white ethnics of AA privileges? And many white ethnics did
seek to be included among the AA beneficiaries. Indeed, Polish
advocates wanted to know why Hispanics were the only whites included
in AA.(293) And being excluded from the government's list of
official minorities meant that “national policy therefore
racialized ethnics as privileged whites.”(314) And today in public
schools from elementary to high school to university, there are
lectures and classes taught stressing how all whites are privileged
and therefore ought to be restricted. In some classrooms today,
several teachers have boasted that they do not call upon whites.
From the seemingly minor point of an agency creating distorted
regulations and sending employers questionnaires demanding
information about employment of certain minorities, but ignoring
other minorities, from that act of excluding some groups on a
government form, from that seed forests of hatred have blossomed.
Bottom
line, author Skrentny, like almost all academics, supports
affirmative action and the manipulations of the elite forces to
impose it on America. I disagree, and this review will be part of my
forthcoming book seeking to expose the lies and deceptions of the
civil rights movement.
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