The long awaited Affirmative Action victory...

Hi all,

I was not planning on writing so soon but then the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action this morning. It has been a long fight and this victory is a deeply personal one for my family.

I can remember my father coming home for dinner in the late 1980s and he would go off on how affirmative action was hurting black students at San Jose State where he taught for three decades. He felt anger and shame over having to send a disproportionate amount of his black students to remedial english.

In many ways, these dinner conversations were my first introduction to the racial culture wars and I remember being confused as a 13 year old. For most of my childhood, strangers would approach my family at restaurants and stores and tell us how beautiful we were and that we were the future of America. Eventually, I asked my father why this kept happening and he told me it was because we were a black and Jewish family. Unfairly or not, these strangers saw us as a sign of hope that we could move beyond race and America’s racist past.

I did not take this to mean anything more than a nice sentiment. As a descendant of multiple tribes, race had very little meaning for me. What matter most were the stories of my ancestors and I took tremendous pride that they had survived three of the greatest racial horrors: slavery, segregation, and the Holocaust. Why would I give any power to race?

That is exactly what the college admissions officials were demanding of me when it was my turn to apply to college. They wanted me to check the black box. The official at NYU said I was a sure thing for the $25K MLK scholarship.

I remember thinking as a 17 year old, which way was America going? Unfortunately, for all my life America has chosen the path of racial engineering and still does. Today’s Supreme Court victory is a firm strike against those efforts and we own a great debt of gratitude to people like Thomas Sowell and Ward Connerly for leading this fight for so long. In their honor and in the honor of the Supreme Court victory, here is a video and essay from my father, Shelby Steele, from the early 1990s.

In this video, Steele debates affirmative action with Charlie Rose in 1991. Bill Cosby & Clarence Thomas come up - hey, it is 1991.

Here is an excerpt from Steele’s essay in the New York Times (before they cancelled him in the late 1990s):

“Even though blacks had made great advances during the 60's without quotas, the white mandate to achieve a new racial innocence and the black mandate to gain power, which came to a head in the very late 60's, could no longer be satisfied by anything less than racial preferences. I don't think these mandates, in themselves, were wrong, because whites clearly needed to do better by blacks and blacks needed more real power in society. But as they came together in affirmative action, their effect was to distort our understanding of racial discrimination. By making black the color of preference, these mandates have reburdened society with the very marriage of color and preference (in reverse) that we set out to eradicate.

“When affirmative action grew into social engineering, diversity became a golden word. Diversity is a term that applies democratic principles to races and cultures rather than to citizens, despite the fact that there is nothing to indicate that real diversity is the same thing as proportionate representation. Too often the result of this, on campuses for example, has been a democracy of colors rather than of people, an artificial diversity that gives the appearance of an educational parity between black and white students that has not yet been achieved in reality. Here again, racial preferences allow society to leapfrog over the difficult problem of developing blacks to parity with whites and into a cosmetic diversity that covers the blemish of disparity - a full six years after admission, only 26 to 28 percent of blacks graduate from college.”

Click here for full article.

Lastly, the response to yesterday’s post was amazing. Thank you to all of those who subscribed yesterday — your support is not taken for granted.

All my best,

Eli