Belz – Conservative Principles and Black History
Conservative
Principles and Black History:
Affirmative Action and Identity Politics
Herman Belz
University of Maryland
The
Philadelphia Society’s Fall Regional Meeting
October 2, 2004, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Black History and
Conservative Principles
1. What are
conservative principles? [cf. ISI
principles as per Lee Edwards’ book]
Human ends and flourishing are grounded on moral law established in the
nature of things, i.e. the natural order of the created world
Political power is legitimate only as it defers to this moral law
The ends of government are to preserve public peace, maintain justice,
defend security of the American people, nation, and republic
Freedom presupposes the rule of law in the form of a limited government
founded on the fundamental law of the Constitution
The rights of
personal liberty and private property are fundamental civil rights and are an
essential condition of limited government
2. Black
history-what is it about? What is its meaning and significance?
Its content, character, trajectory, and end?
Black history, as a part of American history, is the story
of the Americanization of people brought to this country from Africa for
purposes of labor and service. Decisive
events in this story include the American Revolution, which led to the founding
of the American Republic, and the Civil War, as a result of which blacks were
emancipated from slavery and enfranchised as citizens of the United States.
This change in the condition of American blacks was not a
natural event. It was not a
necessary, irresistible, immanent development from within the body politic of
the American nation-or from within the body of black people considered as a
“community” or as the “slave community”.
Nor were emancipation and enfranchisement racially determined or
genetically encoded events-a kind of naturalistic-materialist evolutionary
development on the model of Darwinian evolution.
Emancipation and enfranchisement were contingent historical
events based on political and moral principles, to the end of the flourishing
and the good of individuals for their own sake and for the sake of the common
good of which they were a part.
3. What ends,
objects, purposes, motives, norms, principles, goods, aspirations characterize
the experience of black Americans? What
are the political and moral implications of this historical experience?
Can or should it be viewed as “conservative”, “traditionalist”,
“radical”, “revolutionary”, “liberal”, “progressive”,
“communitarian”, “libertarian”, “democratic socialist”,
“democratic capitalist”-to consider the question in the terms of
contemporary ideology?
In the moment of emancipation, as previously in the
American setting, blacks sought personal liberty;
citizenship and civil rights including property rights; social freedom,
dignity, and honor-in order to expunge the marks of social death and dishonor
imposed by slavery on the basis of racial identity.
Emancipation gave blacks “proprietorship” of their own persons, introduced
free labor for blacks, established citizenship rights for blacks on the ground
of the Constitution, enlarged the scope of black agency. This
view of the meaning of emancipation is shared by historians across the
ideological spectrum.
4. What has been the
course of black history from emancipation to the present?
Does it follow the path of stability, continuity, and progressive
development? Or
insurgency, rebellion and revolutionary upheaval?
Or subordination, suffering, oppression, and victimization.
Does black history have an intrinsic and essential character so that it is bound
always to be the same-no matter the change in historical conditions and
circumstances? Is black history a
part of American history? Is
it the history of a separate people whose national identity has been obscured
and denied through its involvement with the people of the United States?
Liberal and radical scholars view slave emancipation as a social revolution that
set the nation on a new course by redefining the meaning of freedom.
Conservative scholars see the abolition of slavery and the
enfranchisement of blacks as a completion of the Constitution.
If slave emancipation was a revolution-“America’s unfinished revolution”
in the left-wing view-what is the new meaning of freedom?
If black enfranchisement was a fulfillment of Founding principles, what
is the meaning of those principles with respect to contemporary race relations?
5. A useful
framework for considering these questions is the concept of “an American
Dilemma”-the title of Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 book on race relations in the
U.S. The dilemma refers to the
choice Americans faced between continued acceptance of local and regional
particularism in racial matters, including racial subordination of and legal
discrimination against blacks, on the one hand, and enforcement of national
constitutional guarantees of civil rights and liberties of black citizens, on
the other hand.
The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s fulfilled the promise of
liberty and equality for all persons irrespective of race embodied in the 13th,
14th, and 15th amendments and the civil rights laws of the
Reconstruction period. The CRA 64
and CRA 65 brought the country into conformity with the American Creed,
signifying political and moral commitment to resolve the American Dilemma.
This understanding of the Civil Rights laws was widely shared at the
time.
6. The civil
rights movement and the legislation of the 1960s, conceived as means of
enforcing constitutional rights, were also characterized as a “civil rights
revolution.” The meaning of this
revolution was and remains disputed.
Affirmative action racial preference, and multiculturalist identity
politics, directly implicate the meaning of the civil rights revolution and its
significance for black history.
7. Race-preferential
affirmative action, adopted almost immediately by federal administrative and
judicial officers as a means of enforcing the nondiscrimination principle of the
civil rights acts, can fairly be described as a revolutionary project against
the Constitution and the laws of the nation.
Racially defined affirmative action awards benefits to persons
of color who have not been discriminated against as individuals, at the expense
of persons who have not engaged in acts of unlawful discrimination on account of
race.
Race-based affirmative action substitutes group rights for individual rights
under the revolutionary theory of disparate or adverse impact discrimination, in
place of the traditional legal concept of intentional disparate treatment
discrimination.
Disparate-impact driven affirmative action rationalizes and justifies group
rights, racial proportionalism, and equality of result as correct principles of
social organization and civil rights policy.
This is “a new public philosophy that distinguishes between persons on
racial and ethnic grounds and ultimately denies the existence of a common
good.”
This policy is defended under authority of the CRA 64 and CRA 65, in the name of
14th Amendment equal protection of the laws.
Such a justification is not merely a “legal fiction” in a technical
sense. It is a subterfuge and
deception, an egregious betrayal of public trust.
8.
Racial affirmative action was legally approved in 1971. In
the past fifteen years the legal rules regulating it have been tightened.
Racial affirmative action is not firmly established as a matter of
constitutional law. It does not
receive majority support in public opinion.
In contrast, approval of racial affirmative action is an entrenched
element in elite opinion in business, the media, academia, and government.
Its protection among and by institutional elites, however, depends upon
deception and subterfuge. This fact is becoming more widely known.
[cf. Daniel Sabbagh, “Judicial Uses of Subterfuge: Affirmative Action
Reconsidered,” PSQ, vol.118 (2003)]
The deception required to sustain race-based affirmative action is calculated
and deliberate. The scope of public
dissimulation surrounding civil rights policy expanded greatly in the 1990s when
tightening of the rules by federal courts was perceived as a threat to the
existence of affirmative action. In
this circumstance the justification of racial preferences shifted from the
remedial strategy of eliminating the effects of past discrimination to the
prospective strategy of creating “diversity” in higher education and
corporate employment.
9. Diversity
is conceptualized according to the social theory of multiculturalism and pursued
through the instrument of “identity politics.”
In multiculturalism the deception of affirmative action racial
preferences is compounded by the introduction of numerous officially designated
minority groups.
The determination of these groups is theoretically justified
by analogy to historic discrimination against blacks. As a practical matter, it
is politically motivated, expedient, willful, and contingent.
Racial affirmative action is divisive.
Identity politics is fractious and disintegrative. Presented by its
sponsors as a form of antidiscrimination policy, multiculturalism is designed to
guarantee to members of designated minority groups their right to a distinct
“identity.” This right places covered institutions under a legal obligation
to enhance, among students and employees, “respect by each person for that
person’s own race, ethnic background, sex, or sexual orientation, as well as
appreciation and respect for the race, ethnic background, sex, or sexual
orientation of other individuals.” “Identity” is the good called into
being by multicultural justice. Diversity
policy assumes that the most effective way to prevent injury to members of the
group is to grant positive preferment with respect to things needed to confer
political recognition of the group’s “cultural particularity.”
Identity politics is practiced more in relation to the subjective
consciousness of cultural perceptions than the objective economic benefits of
conventional affirmative action. It assumes a pose of ethical and moral conceit,
affecting a concern for justice as recognition of, and sensitivity to, the
identity of the other.
10. How and
why did multiculturalism and identity politics come into existence? What
relationship do they have to black history?
Opinion on the left is divided. The
elitist liberal view is presented by John D. Skrenty in The Minority Rights
Revolution 1965-75. Skrentny argues
that identity politics resulted from government officials’ extension of the
black civil rights enforcement to a limited number of minority groups, which
they viewed as analogous to blacks based on “perceptions of group meanings and
cultural categories.
In this view, multiculturalism and identity politics formed a second stage of
the “rare American epiphany” that was the civil rights revolution. This
“epiphany” reveals “rich white men . . .
falling over themselves to help weak groups,” making policies not in
their own self-interest, but on behalf of the disadvantaged-the poor,
nonwhite, women, disabled. Categorically
excluding themselves and their kind from benefits, elites decided which groups
were morally worthy of government attention. [SAPD, vol.18 (2004)]
The orthodox radical-left interpretation denies the antagonism between blacks
and other designated minority groups that is implied in the thesis of “the
American epiphany”. In the
leftist view, the civil rights revolution was the result of “movement”
protest against “conquest, empire, and contract labor as enduring sources of
American racism that were intertwined with slavery and Jim Crow.”
The civil rights movement was not only about “blackness.”
Beyond redressing the wrongs of slavery, it was a “social
justice” movement, aimed at a “wide range of racism practices,” that was
intended “to transform American society.”
[Victoria Hattam, “The 1964 CRA,” SAPD, vol. 18 (2004)]
11. I argue
that multiculturalism and identity politics are derivations from race-based
affirmative action. They are
attempts to sustain affirmative action racial politics against the threat posed
by tightening of the legal rules regulating racial preferences, and by
heightened moral criticism of the disintegrative and disordering effects of
racial politics and policy making.
Race-preference affirmative action is confused, and its confusion is compounded
in multicultural identity politics. Race
is a superficial and outward physical attribute of human beings.
The confusion of affirmative action lies in its positing of race as an
attribute of intrinsic meaning and significance in the nature of human
beings-in their moral and intellectual tendencies and disposition as
individual persons.
In the context of American history, affirmative action is defended on the
ground that the black experience has been that of suffering and social
sacrifice. Blackness thus becomes
morally worthy and deserving of compensatory privilege, an identity to be
appreciated and rewarded in the manner of preferences enjoyed by the white
majority.
Identity politics compounds the confusion by extending the concept of race to
ethnic, cultural, and phenomena-things that, properly considered [according to
the metaphysical principle that a being or a thing is what it is] are not
matters of race.
The concept of race is rendered meaningless in a cognitive and scientific sense.
Of course its vagueness and ambiguity make it rhetorically useful in politics,
as seen in debate over the ways in which “race counts” in politics and
society-i.e. the ways it has counted in the past and ought to count in the
future.
12. In the
context of 20th C. statist
liberalism, the real purpose of racial affirmative action and multicultural
identity politics is to keep alive the dream and the illusion of socialist
redistribution of property, wealth, power, and liberty.
Peter Wood aptly observes that the political appeal of
“diversity” and identity politics lies is that they “offer a way of
advocating centralized control and social redistribution without having to draw
from the empty well of Marxism or the clichÈs of class struggle.”
[Heritage Foundation, The Insider, pp.4-5]
13. Black
history is deeply and willfully misunderstood when treated as a deposit and
source of socialist ideology and racial politics.
Black persons in America were enslaved on racial
grounds. Their history is that of
individuals desiring, hoping, demanding, and achieving liberty and equal rights
as American citizens.
Slavery in America forced a preeminently racial identity on black persons.
Post-emancipation recognition of equal liberty and citizenship rights under the
Constitution was intended to eliminate racial identity as a normative element in
public law and policy for the common good.
These are principles of the Founding, grounded in reason and justice in
the tradition of western civilization. They
were written into the Reconstruction amendments. The
embodiment and implementation of these principles in the Civil Rights Acts of
1964 and 1965 resolved the American Dilemma.
14. Race-based
affirmative action and its multicultural progeny disavow the principles of equal
liberty and citizenship rights under the law.
These policies are seen by their advocates as addressing a New American
Dilemma. This is the choice between
rule by democratic majorities, which are opposed to affirmative action, and rule
by judicial and administrative elites that created and sustain the regime of
racial preference.
The history of black Americans, in my view, disposes them toward inclusion in
the national political community on the basis of equal liberty and citizenship
rights, rather than toward recognition as a sub-national community on the basis
of racial identity and classification.
Concluding note: In
this paper I have not considered the relationship of affirmative action and
identity politics to civic disorder and racial violence of the 1960s.
An alternative view would focus on the social violence of the civil
rights movement as indicative of the rebellious and revolutionary meaning of
black history.
Skrentny writes: “The wild
card in the future of affirmative action is the possibility of renewed urban
violence. No one has ever explained
the wave of riots that rocked the United States in the 1960s, and there is no
guarantee it may not happen again.” However,
Skrenty observes: “it is not
clear that urban rioting would be combated with job opportunities” as it was
in the 1960s.