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http://www.academia.org/lectures/dsouza1.html

Racism is Not the Problem:
Why Martin Luther King Got It Half Right

An Accuracy in Academia Address by Dinesh D'Souza

Delivered at AIA's 1999 Conservative University at Georgetown
University

I feel funny being back here at Georgetown. I was here a few years
ago, actually debating the dean of the law school, a woman named
Judith Areen. At the time there was a controversy here at Georgetown
because a conservative student named Tim McGuire who was in the
Georgetown Law School and worked in the admissions office as an
intern had stumbled across all kinds of data showing gigantic racial
preferences in Georgetown's admissions policy: huge differences in
the LSAT scores of students of different racial groups. He wrote an
article about this. So, Dean Areen very pompously denounced Tim
McGuire and said, "Oh, no! We don't practice any kind of racial
preferences here. We admit students based on their abilities, but we
don't just look at grades and test scores, we look at `other
factors'." So, in this debate, I said to her, "Well, Dean Areen, we'd
like to have a look at this list of `other factors' because whatever
these `factors' are, it's clear that no whites possess them. Whites
never seem to get into Georgetown Law School with these types of
scores."

What I'm getting at is that for a long time, this reflected the deep
level of evasion that has surrounded this whole race debate. I
confess that I've come to this debate as somewhat of an outsider. I'm
a first generation immigrant. I grew up in Bombay and came to this
country in the late `70s. For a year I stayed with American families,
and then I showed up as a student at Dartmouth. My first impression
of America was, "here is a place that is teaming with possibility and
opportunity." Not just economic opportunity, because I was raised in
a middle class family and had a fairly comfortable life in India, but
I think what struck me as great about America and appealing about it
is that it seemed to give you the chance to write the script for your
own life. If I lived in India, I would be comfortable, but I would
probably end up living one mile from my house. I would probably marry
somebody from my socioeconomic community. I probably would become a
medical doctor or an engineer. In other words, my life would have
taken a shape that could have been predicted and defined. Here, I
come to America; I start out in economics and business. I make a
radical U-turn; I go into liberal arts and political philosophy. I
think about becoming a professor. Mercifully, I don't do that. I go
into writing and go to the Reagan White House. So, my life takes on a
totally different shape. I married a girl from Louisiana who grew up
in California. So, it is the mobility and possibility of American
life, the sense that you are the architect of your own destiny, which
is the meaning of American freedom.

What I'm getting at is that immigrants come here and their general
impression is that America works. It has tremendous possibility. Yet,
we immigrants run into the leadership of domestic, indigenous
minority groups—the Jesse Jacksons of the world. What they say to you—
in fact this is kind of what Jesse Jackson was saying to me three
days ago on Crossfire, and we debated it the year before at Stanford
University—was, "You're wrong. America doesn't work. Racism,
prejudice, inequality—institutional factors will keep you down." To
which I said very directly, "Rev. Jackson, we live in a big country
and I'm sure you can find a lot of examples of racism, but can you
show me racism that is strong enough that it can prevent me, or
anybody else, from achieving the American dream. Show me racism so
strong that it is going to keep me out of graduate school, or keep me
from starting a business, or stop me from voting, or exercising my
rights as a citizen. Show me that kind of racism. Where is it?" He
sort of cleared his throat, hemmed and hawed, and fired off a few
rhymes, and so on. He said, "I can't show you this kind of racism,
but because it is not visible, doesn't mean it isn't invisible. And
because it is not overt, doesn't mean it isn't covert."

What is interesting to me about this debate is that it involves non-
white immigrants—most immigrants today come from Asia, Africa, or
Latin America—and involves the leadership of, in this case, the
African-American community, or one of its leaders. What's interesting
is that this is not a debate that involves whites at all. It's a
debate between immigrants and civil rights leaders about whether
America works—or doesn't work. It's kind of funny, but while I was
waiting to debate Jesse Jackson at Stanford, I told my wife, "I'm
debating him for the first time. Why don't you come with me up to San
Francisco, so I can take him on." She said, "No, no, you go alone."

So I go up there and here comes Jackson like a prizefighter and he's
surrounded by about 30 people. They all stand in line to shake my
hand and say, "Hello, I'm so-and-so and I work for Mr. Jackson,"
and "Hello, I'm so-and-so and I work for Mr. Jackson." All of the
while, I'm thinking, well, Mr. Jackson doesn't work.

So, here I am a student at Dartmouth and I'm getting this feeling
that my sense of America as a country with a lot of possibility.
America is a country founded on thought. It is unique among the
nations of the world in that a bunch of guys sat down and said, "What
kind of country do we want to live in?" These are the Founders,
getting together in Philadelphia. They sort of invented America, a
country without a past. So, in essence, it's a country based on
ideas, based on thought. In some sense I felt that all of these
claims of inequality or prejudice—not that they weren't true—weren't
the whole truth. They didn't really capture what America was really
all about. So, the Jesse Jacksons of the world were wrong about
America as it is and as we experience it. But, were they right about
America as it was? Their trump card always is: "The reason we know
America doesn't work, the reason that there is a lot of racism—even
though I can't show it—is that there used to be a lot of it. What
about slavery? What about segregation? What about Jim Crow?"

On those facts, they appear irrefutably right and since they appear
irrefutably right, conservatives have a job of saying, "Well, yes,
you're right about that and you're right about that and you're right
about that, but there has been a change. Things were fine and
actually Martin Luther King was a very good guy because he opened the
door of rights and opportunity, but then we got to racial preferences
and that was sort of not a good idea."

Then I began to think to myself, well if Martin Luther King was
right, and in some ways if you go back even further—you look at the
civil rights leaders going back to Frederick Douglas—civil rights
leaders seemed to be saying, "America is a great country, it's a
great club. We just want to be members." They were, in a sense, pro-
American and were demanding and asking for the right to be let in and
they were asking to be let in by appealing to the American ideal.
Martin Luther King says, "I have a promissory note." You could
say, "Well, what note? Who wrote it?" What he is appealing to is the
Declaration of Independence—the notion that all men are created
equal. He is appealing to a southern slave owner and saying, "That
guy told me that I have rights." And he's right about that.

This was the tradition of the early Civil Rights Movement and then,
later, there was a break from that and a sort of alienation that set
in. I was curious when I began my book, The End of Racism, and even
in some degree with Illiberal Education, to find out where did this
alienation come from? What is this sort of story that we hear about
slavery?—Alex Haley's ten part series on Roots and so on—the Civil
Rights Movement as a glorious struggle against oppression.

There are many important scaffoldings holding this story up. As I
began to work on The End of Racism, I realized that this `story'
itself is, in many important ways, false. Not that it is totally
false, but that it is a story that has an ideological rudder driving
it and there's a lot of misinformation along the way. I'd like to
give a couple of examples of this because, I'll tell you, when I
graduated from college there were four or five things that I picked
up through the air that I took as unquestioned truths. Let me cite a
couple of them.

One is slavery is a uniquely western institution whose scars continue
to be felt in American society, today. Second, the Civil War was
fought largely over economic motives between the North and the South
and Lincoln, although he seemed to be against slavery, did say, "If I
could save the Union without freeing one slave, I would do it." This
would imply that Lincoln's primary motive in fighting the war was not
to free the slaves. I had heard that the Iroquois Indians had had an
important influence in framing the U.S. Constitution, a notion
reflected in a number of textbooks. I had heard that if affirmative
action doesn't work, then why don't we have reparations? After all,
didn't this country pay the Japanese reparations only a few years ago
for the internment of the Japanese during World War II?

As I started to look into these things, I realized that in important
respects that all of the four or five statements that I have just
given to you are false. Let's take them very briefly.

"Slavery is a uniquely Western institution." The idea here is that
the genocidal maniac Columbus came here, overran the peaceful
Indians, and imposed horrible institutions like slavery. The truth of
the matter is that the American Indians had slavery, long before
Columbus got here. Slavery is a universal institution that existed in
every culture known to man. The Chinese, the Indians all had slavery.
The Africans had slavery. Slavery had no defenders because it had no
critics. Nobody questioned it. It was like the family. It was taken
for granted. What is uniquely Western is hardly slavery; it is the
movement to overthrow slavery. That is a uniquely Western idea,
developed only in the west. It had to be exported elsewhere, often by
force.

Number two: the Civil War and Lincoln's motive's in the war. Without
getting deeply into this, the story is very simple. If Lincoln was
not fighting the war over slavery, he could have simply said that the
South can have slavery, the new territories can have slavery, and
there would be no war. What happened was that when the war broke out,
Lincoln was worried that some of the border states, such as Maryland
and Kentucky, which were on the Union side, would join the
Confederacy if the issue was framed about being solely a war about
slavery. At that crucial time in the war, Lincoln writes a letter to
Horace Greeley, which is then publicized. He says, "I'm fighting for
the Union! That's my reason for fighting." It's a prudential argument
by a statesman at a crucial stage in the war to prevent the border
states from going with the Confederacy, and, thus, prolonging the
war.

The Iroquois Indians: I look into this little canard and I discover
that the only evidence for this [that Iroquois Indians shaped the
Constitution] is a letter from Benjamin Franklin. It turns out that
there was something called the "Iroquois League." There were about
ten tribes. These Indian tribes were having fratricidal conflict and
eventually someone said, "Let's form a league. Let's meet two or
three times a year. Let's sort out our differences." It wasn't a
success; the Iroquois League fell apart in a few years. Anyway,
Benjamin Franklin, very dejected by the argumentative nature of the
Philadelphia convention and frustrated by the inability of the people
to come together in a union, writes an open letter. He says, look,
basically, if a bunch of barbaric Indians can get together and have a
league to sort out their differences, why can't we civilized white
guys get together and pull together a constitution? This, I kid you
not, is the sole basis for arguing that the Iroquois League is the
hidden fount of wisdom behind the U.S. Constitution.

And finally: the reparations for the Japanese. Well, I looked a
little bit at those debates and they're interesting debates. It's a
legitimate question of whether or not if a country, even if a country
makes a mistake under conditions of war and interns the Japanese,
should reparations be paid to them? Putting that aside, the Congress
decided that we did make a mistake. We should pay reparations, but we
are paying reparations to the families that were, in fact, interned
during the war. $15,000, I believe, was the amount. But, I mean, you
can't go to the U.S. government and go, "Hey, I'm Japanese. Where's
my $15,000?" No, you had to be in the camps. So, the whole point was
that the whole idea of reparations was aimed at actual?as opposed to
what I suppose you would call historical?victims. This is a very
important distinction. This distinction is also a part of American
history, although I won't go into this.

So, here I am. I go from campus to campus to take part in these
debates and I began to float these counter-arguments and so on. They
generate a tremendous controversy, not because people disagree with
you, but because these issues go against their whole sense of not
only identity, but also their whole notion of moral virtue. Being a
virtuous person is being built into having certain types of
attitudes.

I remember when I was talking about Illiberal Education and The End
of Racism, I'd go to a campus—and this was Tufts just a few years ago—
and it's a room bigger than this, but I come in to speak and there
are a group of students in chains! They chained themselves to their
seats in the front row. Okay, it's a free country. But as I get up
and come up to speak, these protesters begin to rattle their chains.
I'm a little perplexed by this, but what saves me is fortune. Which
is to say, the crowd in the room becomes too big, so they say, "Let's
relocate to a new venue." So, these poor kids are chained to their
seats! "Where's the key!"

One reason I'm interested in these debates is also that I'm in kind
of a unique position in this debate—partly as an immigrant, partly as
a person of color. After one of my talks, a student comes up to me
and says, "You know, Dinesh, I agree with some of what you said—not
all, but some, but I'm a white guy. I could never say that. I'd be
hounded off the podium, I'd be excommunicated," and so on. He's
right, you know. One of the reasons that I have stayed in this
debate, even though my writing has migrated to other issues, is I
feel like I have a kind of a weird "ethnic immunity" in the race
debate. I'm quite determined to use it in order to raise the curtain
on all of these taboo issues that can't be talked about, not because
people have bad motives, but because the debate is rigged as of now.
One of the reasons I enjoy getting to campuses is raising these
questions in the right tone, in the right spirit and in the spirit of
intellectual discussion. So, the debate becomes widened and a lot
more range of issues becomes permissible to talk about.

I don't really want to talk about the affirmative action debate
narrowly today, but I thought what I would try to do is to get behind
the debate a little bit and say a few words as to why this has become
such a big and bitter debate in America today.

The civil rights movement is one that was based upon taking the idea
of merit as opposed to the idea of nepotism. Nepotism simply means
favoritism—the boss who gives his lazy nephew a job instead of hiring
the most qualified guy is practicing nepotism. Nepotism has an old
history and is usually justified by the boss saying, "Well, my nephew
does have merit. He's related to me." But against this idea, which,
as I said, is very universal, the civil rights movement came up with
the idea of, "no, you should be judged as an individual, you should
be judged on," as King says, "the content of your character." Why not
see, not who you are or who you know, but what you can do? This
becomes the operating slogan of the civil rights movement: "Treat us
as individuals, based on our merits."

One of the problems has been, in the last 30 years or so, the country
has increasingly moved in that direction. This isn't to say that we
have eradicated the idea of nepotism, but we have opposed it with the
idea of merit. So, if you look, for example, at campuses today,
increasingly, you have admissions based upon ability. Now, remember,
when I say "merit," it doesn't necessarily mean just grades or test
scores. Merit can be defined differently. When I was a freshman at
Dartmouth, we were told—and this might be a huge lie, but we were
nevertheless told this by other students—the "Dartmouth Myth." We
were told, "Look, we are very different from Harvard. Their idea of
merit is sort a sickly, somewhat effeminate boy who reads a lot, but
can't do anything else—can't swim, can't hike. He's not well rounded.
Here at Dartmouth we look for the `Marlboro Man.' This is the all-
around guy who has, maybe, a gentleman's B+, but nevertheless knows
how to climb the Appalachian Mountains." This was our inflated self-
image.

My point is, here are two Ivy League schools, both of them having
different ideas of merit. One may be looking at grades and test
scores. MIT might say, "Okay, all we care about is how good you are
at math and science, and that's it." Harvard may say, "We look at
your SAT scores." Dartmouth may say, "We look at you grades and test
scores, but we also care about your extracurricular talents." My
point is that we conservatives aren't trying to preach what merit is.
We're saying to use merit however you want, just don't include race.

This issue has gotten me into much unneeded controversy. The other
day, I was on a campus and almost had a group of students charge the
stage because someone stands up and says, "Why is it that you are
critical of affirmative action based on race, but you're not critical
of affirmative action for athletes?" So, I said (and I guess I wasn't
thinking all that well), "Because being a quarterback is a talent,
but being black is an accident." You know what I mean. I had to look
very hastily for the exit at this point.

Here's what I'm getting at: Our country is becoming more
meritocratic, but even as we have become more meritocratic, the
racial or ethnic inequalities in our society have remained the same
and in some cases have increased. This is also an irony of capitalism
and we see it in the larger currency of the culture. The
technological revolution has made America a more entrepreneurial and
meritocratic society, but as a result, you have huge differences in
wealth. This is not because of differences in inheritance, but
because of differences in created wealth. My point is that this
result—which is that merit, like racism, creates inequality—has been
a big surprise to the Civil Rights Movement.

The Civil Rights Movement is not surprised that individuals differ,
but it is very surprised that groups do. Martin Luther King once
said, "If you treat us according to the content of our character, you
will see the riches of America widely dispersed between groups." His
assumption was that if you have rights, you will have somewhat of a
group equality as a result. That has not happened. Look at campuses.
We've had prop 209, the colorblind initiative in California. One of
the many reasons that that was such a bitterly fought battle was that
many scholars, from both sides of the spectrum, knew that if you had
a campus like Berkley, that was admitting students on a colorblind,
merit principle, what you're going to see is a campus predominantly
made up of Asians and whites. The number of Hispanics and blacks in
such a campus would be small. This is not because there are bigots in
the admissions office. Rather, it's because these merit standards,
however you apply them, are producing this racial result.

For years, this result was in denial. If you look at textbooks that
look at these problems, they will say things like, "Well yeah, but
you know the tests are biased. Look at the scholastic assessment
test. Doesn't it measure cultural content? Doesn't the cultural
content depend on where you grew up, where you went to school, who
your parents are, were there books at home," and so on. Now, let us
take for a moment, the SAT. Most of you have taken the SAT. I took it
many years ago and it didn't seem to me that it was devised by the Ku
Klux Klan, but nevertheless, let's put aside the verbal section of
the test which is conceivably biased because it has synonyms,
antonyms, and reading comprehension. So, fine, ignore the verbal test—
throw it out. Look only at the Math test. Typical question: If an
automobile can go 30 miles in an hour, how far can it go in 40
minutes? I think that most of you will agree with me that equations
are not racially biased and Algebra is not rigged against Hispanics.
The point is that even on the Math test, you see, not the same, but
bigger racial gaps than on the verbal test.

This has forced the scholars on the other side who are serious—and
most of them are—to admit that these tests are accurately measuring…
what? Not IQ, they're not biological ability tests. They're measuring
differences in academic preparation. We're facing a reality about our
society that we should face compassionately, but firmly. That is that
there are big differences in performances between groups. In fact, if
you want me to be as blunt as possible about it, let me say that two
groups, Asian-Americans and Jews, are hugely over-represented. Asians
are about 3% of the population, and about 25-30% of elite California
campuses. Jews are about 2-3% of the population and about 20-25% of
leading Ivy League schools. These groups are over-represented by a
factor of 8.

Then you have groups that are under-represented. The affirmative
action dilemma is that the activists say, "Let's increase the level
of the under-represented groups." Fine, but you can't do that without
decreasing the levels of the over-represented groups. It's an
algebraic impossibility. So, this has created the tension of the
affirmative action debate.

Sometimes when I talk about these differences in performance, you may
not believe me. You'll say, "Oh, that's the SAT. Okay, fine. That's
one test." Let me strengthen my point in this way. This points to a
disturbing reality in out society, even in times of prosperity. That
is if you take any measure of academic achievement or economic
performance—let's take a reading test given to a 5 year-old. Let's
take the math section of the SAT. Let's take the law school test.
Let's take the GMAT. Let's take the firefighter's test. Let's take
the civil service exam. Let's take the police service test. It
doesn't matter what test?you name the test?and you give this test to
a randomly selected group of 100 whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asian-
Americans—of any age at any part of the country—I will tell you in
advance the result. Asian-Americans and whites will do the best,
Hispanics will fall in the middle, and African-Americans will do the
least well.

I have been in this race debate for some years, now—I've debated
Jesse Jackson, Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, and the head of the
NAACP, Kweisi Mfume. All of these guys, and I assure you that there's
not one guy in the country who has ever given me a single counter-
example that refutes the pattern described here. Many people run
shrieking out of the room and call me names, but the fact is that
there is not one person in this debate who has given me a counter-
example.

What we have here is a pattern. While it's conceivable that this test
or that test may be flawed, it's a little ridiculous to claim that
every test in every part of the country—many of which are devised for
particular jobs—is biased. Now, a huge debate is hiding behind this
and the huge debate is over, "why?" Why, in a society where we all do
kind of believe that people are created equal, do you have these
differences between groups? What do you really do about them? I just
want to address this debate very briefly.

There are three positions in this debate. The first position as to
why merit seems to produce some ethnic inequality is The Bell Curve,
the infamous Charles Murray book. It says, "Look, there might be some
genetic differences between groups." This view, which I am loosely
going to call the "genetic view," has been opposed for a long time by
the "liberal view." The liberal view is: the reason that you have
these group differences in academic performance is that society
creates them. Oppression, inequality, and racism artificially
manufacture these differences, which would otherwise not exist. The
genetic view and the liberal view have been fighting and they have
been in a seesaw battle. One goes up, the other goes down.

In the early part of the century, most people assumed that there was
some truth to the genetic view. This view came under attack in
the `50s and `60s when the liberals said that, "How can you say that
blacks are falling behind when you have all of this racism. Look at
Jim Crow, look at all of this state-sponsored racism." This view was
overwhelmingly plausible, which is why the genetic view was beginning
to sink.

Today, we have just the opposite: the liberal view is beginning to
sink. This has created a crisis of thought in American academia. Now,
why is the liberal view sinking? I'll mention a single statistic that
dramatizes this. Look at the SAT. What I'm about to say is true of
the verbal and math sections, but lets just look at the math section.
If you look at data from the College Board—easily verifiable and
uncontested by anybody—you will find that Asian-Americans and whites
coming from families making less than $20,000 per year score higher
on the math section of the SAT—and the verbal, too—than African
Americans coming from families making over $70,000 per year. Think
about this for a moment and remember that the veracity of this is
undisputed. Think about the effect of that on the liberal view. The
liberal view would say that society manufactures these differences.
For a long time they would say, "The test only measures socioeconomic
privilege." This simple fact decimates that view, but it also calls
into question the broader view. How can racism do this? How can
racism make poor whites and poor Asians do better on a math test than
upper-middle class African Americans? Nobody has had the answer to
this. Not one thoughtful person has been able say how that could
happen. So the liberal view, which was once unquestioned, has now
become outdated. It can not explain the world we live in.

So, in this debate, a group of us—Tom Sowell, I, and a few others—
what we're saying is that you might consider a third view which is
not the genetic view and not the liberal view. This is the view that
explains group differences by pointing to differences of culture, and
by culture I simply mean behavior. These differences are observable
in everyday life. They can be measured by social science. They can be
directly correlated with academic achievement and economic
performance. Just to say a word about that debate. A sociologist
named Dornbush from Stanford was puzzled by a claim in The Bell Curve
that said Asian-Americans are genetically smarter in math—they
have "higher visual/spatial abilities." There was sort of a weird,
Darwinian argument which posited that they originally came from the
cold Alps and had to spot a white hare running across the ice, and so
on—I'll put that aside. So this sociologist, Dornbush, says, "Let me
check. Let me do a comparative study with a wide span of kids and
let's see." He does this study and he concludes that there is a very
mysterious reason for why Asian-American students do a lot better in
math. That is that the Asian-American students study a lot harder. He
said that the Asian-American students spent, on average, 10-12 hours
per week studying and doing homework. For white students: 7-8 hours.
For Hispanics and blacks: a little bit less.

Now you might be saying, "Now, why do the Asian students study
harder?" I'll say that an important reason for this is family
structure. If you have a two-parent family, you have more time to
devote to supervising your child's discipline, their study habits,
and so on. If you're in a single-parent family, it's more difficult.
What is the illegitimacy rate in the Asian-American community? It's
about 1%. In the African-American community, it's about 70%. This is
a big difference.

My point is that here we are, arguing in a serious way about a big
problem in America and I know I'm not 100% right about these issues,
but you can't debate them. People go wild. They go nuts. They want to
restrain you from arguing with them, even in a pleasant, factual,
empirical tone. This is what's wrong with the race debate. It is not
that any group, including African-Americans, cannot greatly improve
their situation.

I was on Crossfire three days ago. The NAACP is having its
convention, and one of their great concerns is not that blacks are
not benefiting as greatly as they should from this tremendous
technology boom. It is not that there are not enough entrepreneurial
businesses created by African-Americans. It is not how to train
people to take advantage of the want ad signs booming across the
classified pages in every newspaper. It is that there are not enough
blacks on evening TV dramas.

Here we are on this serious national show, debating this idiot issue.
This is in an era coming out of the `80s where you had Bill Cosby,
the iconic figure of television in the `80s. We're living in a very
multicultural pop culture in which Oprah Winfrey has influence, in
which the most popular star with crossover appeal is Will Smith. Why
are we talking about this?

My point is that this is the evasion of the race debate. The NAACP
passed a resolution to sue gun manufacturers. I'm not exactly a gun
fiend myself, but the point is what they're evading is one of the
problems that is a terrible problem: inner city crime. A lot of it is
black-on-black crime, but it's hard to talk about it because it
doesn't fit the story. I mentioned earlier about the "civil rights
drama." It's a full drama. It has villains, Bull Connor. It has
heroes, Sojourner Truth. So, it is a black and white narrative
against which the world is seen. Once you understand this, you can
understand how the world is read through this lens. South Africa was
big issue in the `80s. Why? Because you had apartheid. You might have
a lot of problems in the rest of Africa—relocations, forced famines,
mass killings of people. That's not an issue. Why? Because it lacks
this moral melodrama.

What I'm getting at is that here we are looking at this issue. I
think it is an issue we should approach sympathetically because it is
an issue on which people feel deeply about. It is an issue in which
in this country you don't want people left behind. Yet, it is the
temperature of this debate that creates the antagonism. I think that
what we need to do is to find creative ways to approach these issues,
to open up these taboos, to make a wider range of view legitimate and
respectable.

I'll conclude with something Franz Fanon, a black liberation writer,
once said and contrast it with something Lincoln once said. Fanon
says, "Ultimately it is the dream of every victim to exchange places
with his oppressor." What he means to say is that, "you've done it to
me and isn't it justice that I do it to you." In some ways we don't
want to downplay the truth in that, and, yet, I want to Fanon with
Lincoln. Lincoln says, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be
a master." What Lincoln is saying is that he rejects the principle of
a master and slave. This, in capsule form, is what the affirmative
action debate is all about. This conservative view is standing on the
Lincolnian notion of rejecting discrimination in either direction,
and this gives us the high ground.

I'll conclude with something King said: "Ultimately, every man must
write with his own hand the charter of his own Emancipation
Proclamation." What he means is that in a free society, we have a
right to be treated equally under the law. We do have that right, but
we do not have any more rights than this. What we make of our
freedom, how we use our rights, the kind of script that we use of our
own lives, is ultimately up to us.

Thank you.
http://www.academia.org/lectures/dsouza1.html

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