WHITE ETHNICS DENIED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION STATUS

The following is meant to be part of a chapter of my forthcoming book on civil rights and affirmative action.  This excerpt is a partial review of Skrentny's Minority Rights book.  Hugh Murray

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.