Republicans Affirmatively Divide and Conquer

By: Bruce S. Ticker

"What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice."

- black abolitionist Frederick Douglass as quoted by Clarence Thomas

For the three decades of my working life, it has been an experience to be a middle-class white guy pitted against low-income racial minorities.

I need a new challenge - to be pitted against upper-income white guys who are pitted against nothing more than the wait to collect their inheritance and all kinds of built-in privileges that derive from being born into a wealthy, influential family.

That's what affirmative action is really about. While struggling white folk and poor black people fight among themselves for society's crumbs, those in power divide and conquer us, and perhaps even sit back and have a hearty laugh.

To clarify, I have nothing against people who are rich. I respect wealthy people who genuinely try to give back to society and recognize that not everyone is fortunate enough to live as they do. Yet there are many rich people who believe that a lucky accident of birth makes them Gods.

Affirmative action is just a byproduct of a screwy economic system that rewards the already-rich, pulls up a fraction for better lives, and leaves the rest of us in a vicious every-man-and-woman-for-themselves cycle.

Many African-Americans may well grow up believing that whites living story-book lives take jobs from them that they need to feed their families, and in turn many whites believe blacks get breaks which deny these angry white males jobs that they have earned.

Clarence Thomas, that Oreo cookie who got his Supreme Court post through the Bush Family Affirmative Action Project, has gall exploiting the words of a giant like Frederick Douglass to argue against the use of affirmative action in a dissenting opinion last Monday (June 23).

What Thomas neglects to mention is that his own people had been denied basic justice for three centuries, and out of that grew affirmative action and other programs intended to level the playing field. He correctly notes that Howard University and other black academic institutions are segregated, but where was Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall - a Baltimore native - to turn when African-Americans were denied entry into the University of Maryland's law school? Thomas was able to attend Yale and the chief judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals, Robert M. Bell, is an African-American, all thanks in large measure to Marshall's early work as a civil rights lawyer.

So now we're spending years in court haggling over whether white or black students should be permitted entry into undergraduate school and law school. Would the son or daughter of a rich, powerful politician or businessman need to worry about affirmative action programs deciding whether they are admitted to the school of their choice?

Is it fair for a student with a 3.8 grade point average, such as one plaintiff in the affirmative action case, to be rejected by a college because of her skin color? Is it fair that a young person attend classes in a devastated public-school system because he grows up in a poor inner-city household?

In the last three decades, Republicans have made an art form of pitting those kinds of people against one another so they can get elected because they have absolutely nothing else to offer. Nixon started the tradition in modern times and it was perfected by Reagan and both Bushes.

If the politicians are serious about erasing any need for affirmative action, they would build up the economy so we would not need to claw at one another to make a living; all educational systems would be fully developed so that all college applicants will be on equal academic footing; and the wealth would be sufficiently redistributed so that nobody in this society would go hungry and homeless.

They're not serious, of course - not enough of them. They divert our time, attention, and resources on school vouchers, faith-based programs, and tax cuts for the rich - none of which will accomplish anything meaningful.

What struggling people of different races and religions need to recognize is how they are being played against each other and then work to improve society for us all.

If we continue moving in our own separate directions no matter how much we crash into one another, we'll get nowhere fast. The most effective way to help yourself is to join together with the rest of us so we all help each other.

Then Bush and his kind will have no more aces up their sleeve. They can't fight us once we are on to their tricks. There are more of us than them.