The Bravery of Being Out of Range

Sniping at Affirmative Action & Racial Identification

I’m listening to Roger Waters. He’s got a song which is catchy if you like Roger Waters called ‘The Bravery of Being Out of Range’. That’s a nice self-deprecating title describing my experience of Affirmative Action. The weird thing is that I have never been in close proximity to the black underclass, except as a race writer. You see I’ve always considered myself a favored son, a scholar-athlete and a square up cool dude. Most of the men in my family are all that. Except you know that as a race writer I have had to consider the following black underclass objects.

• Michael Brown

• Trayvon Martin

• Amadou Diallo

• Mumia Abu Jamal

• Shaquanda Cotton

• George Floyd

• Rodney King

• Latasha Harlins

It’s like the No Justice League of Super Victims. Everybody has to say something about the future of black America in categorical terms that account for and explain the freakish nature of their injury or death. So before I go any further, let me invoke my own immunity to Derrick Bell’s Rules of Racial Standing, particularly item four.

FOURTH RULE
When a black person or group makes a statement or takes an action that the white community or vocal components thereof deem "outrageous," the latter will actively recruit blacks willing to refute the statement or condemn the action. Blacks who respond to the call to condemnation will receive superstanding status. The blacks who refuse to be recruited will be interpreted as endorsing the statements and action and may suffer political or economic reprisals.

I know Afropessimism is all the rage these days - ever since the deification of Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino. Then again, as the gangsta poet once said, “We ain’t fucking them hoes.” In other words, I invoke the privilege of being out of range. I don’t need to keep up with what’s going on in the Dirty South or among the hoodrats. I don’t worry about my relatives who live in reasonable proximity to Baltimore. Philly or Milwaukee. We can all breathe. I don’t know more than a few handful of my subscribers, and as white as they may consider themselves, racial considerations do not enter my mind as I write here. Maybe that makes you comfortable or uncomfortable, but I’m not playing race games of any sort here.

In the summer 1974 I attended summer school in ritzy Pacific Palisades, 11 miles from home. My intent was to escape the relative weakness of the public schools in my less than stellar neighborhood. My parents had already wrangled me into a parochial school. These were the best means available to them. My youngest sibs were bussed to elementary school 20 miles away. My youngest brother got into the ABC program and went to high school in Edina, MN. We were not a family of means, but we figured things out. There were no such things as charter schools back then, and as a family of five kids, we certainly couldn’t afford private school for the lot of us. It turned out in that same year, Loyola High School, one of the top schools in California decided to do a bit more recruiting from my neighborhood. Six of us from Holy Name of Jesus School were invited to sit for the entrance exam. Sometime during that summer session I was informed that I had been accepted. I wanted to go to Palisades High School, but it turned out that I got a score in the 92nd percentile. So long Palisades. My dad took me out to a special dinner at a restaurant on Olympic Blvd where they served Lobster Thermidor. It my first $50 meal.

Back in those days, we were considered ‘underprivileged’. And as I met my black classmates at Loyola, I finally understood what that meant. Like most Americans, I had no idea about the actual lives of upscale, good looking, intelligent young black men. Four out of six of us from Holy Name made it into Loyola. Not Patrick. Not Vincent. None of us were particularly well-off, but we were soon introduced to blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos who were and some who were not. We were immediately swept up into the school spirit as brothers, and what happened or did not happen at home did not matter. The classrooms, the playing fields, the libraries - all were level. You either upheld the standards or you did not. Dress code? Check. I easily handled the discipline - but I was still a bit overwhelmed. Was it culture shock? No, it was the orientation to society. It was a simple acceptance that here was a place of success and the rules that mattered here also mattered in the successful world. One’s good bearing here would bear one up in the big wide world. Of course we had graduates that attended all of the great schools. What they were like was no longer surprising to me. I competed. But yeah I was still just a kid.

Back then, those of us with radical roots had learned to accept the grace of white liberals with a dose of suspicion. There’s a great poem by Adrian Piper entitled How to Handle Black People: A Beginner's Manual I will include here at this link. Excerpted:

if, by some misfortune,
                 your purposes are such that
you find it impossible to be both
                 courteous and candid
at the same time;
if, by some unhappy accident,
                 you cannot find it within you to be both
                 honest and civil,
It would be better for you
                 not to deal with black people at all.

I said recently in my best aphoristic style that.

Affirmative Action is patronizing nepotism. Who’s your daddy?

Piper reminds us that insulting the intelligence of black people is fraught with risk. And there is for me and for people who call themselves white, an equal amount of risk. You see, I gave up the pastime of second-guessing black Americans back in the mid 90s. It was disorienting to renegotiate my position with regards to ‘blackfolks’ the term I used when I was a Progressive anti-racist full of moral certainty and verbal fire. But I gradually disinvested a number of those interests and determined to become a better writer instead of a predictable polemicist.

These days I rather look at Americans as racinated, and playing to what they believe to be the strengths of those racial roles in the context of American society. It’s a mushy, performative business - rather like being an art dealer in NYC, or a restaurant critic in Los Angeles. There’s always a healthy trade in moral hazard. Some personalities are fit for that, but I have pulled all of my monkeys from that circus.

The recent Supreme Court decision going against Harvard’s convoluted excuses to shuffle deserving Asian candidates to the back of their bourgeois bus is a good one. The devilish details will find themselves gamed as those who consider themselves above or below the law will make their manipulations and special pleadings. The simplest intent and the clearest language should survive. Consideration of racial identity necessarily corrupts. It is as intellectually dishonest as consideration of blood type or 23&Me or zodiac sign. American universities and corporations keep putting themselves in loco parentis. It’s an insult to my intelligence. As long as it’s legal, we must bear down and suffer - we accept the grace with a dose of suspicion.

As I have always maintained:

The problem with today's multiculturalism is that it is different than pluralism. Pluralism is the proper ethos for America, multiculturalism is not. The difference can be explained simply by assuming Americans can be divided into two tribes:

Ideological Tribe A
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained without regard to race, creed, color, sexual preference, etc..

Ideological Tribe B
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained with special regard to race, creed, color, sexual preference, etc.

Hopefully, Tribe B has been properly harpooned. This is justice. It is not what we call cosmic or social justice. Ideologues of the tribe will backbite for a generation.

You will well note, as I did with this morning’s WSJ that extended statistical arguments will be made about the impact of racial discriminations for the purpose of undergraduate admission at elite universities will point towards the social utility of minority tokens. Of course it stands to reason that elites will point to the critical role of elite educations they have received from said elite universities - no doubt citing friendships and the kind of pleasant stories I have abstracted above about my own elite high school. But I’m still a Peasant and there are, as far as I know, no Peasants in Congress. I am no longer underprivileged, I can have lobster anytime I please, so there must be some kind of meritocracy out there in America. I say that meritocracy is not in any significant way determined by Affirmative Action or tokenism. So the opportunity to declutter is appreciated even as the patronizing types take snipes at Justice Thomas.

As an IT professional, I know very well how I could generate an algorithm to produce some kind of score, perhaps like a FICO score, giving whatever weight I prefer to each and every petal of this flower of youth. As unnerving as it sounds, I’m sure an AI bot could do the job in a second or two. It’s a cruel and unusual way to treat teenagers, but that’s the filter. It’s not as if nobody knows what the elites are demanding of our high school children. Our high school children, mind you, not their own legacies.

And we know the results, here in California we have all known them for years.

You don’t go UC Berkeley and flunk out. You go to UC Davis. Or instead of Davis you go to UC Santa Cruz. And of course if you want to go to UCLA, forget it. But just ask, these are all the statistics there are to care about, right?

What is a Hispanic? Is it a Mexican? We all know that President Nixon invented the term and pushed it into the social science lexicon, and we are all familiar with the phrase “Blacks and Hispanics”, and we all know what to expect from these groups. These expectations are occupying too much of our headspace. Notice what you don’t see in the above chart and notice what you do see. No Protestants, Catholics, Jews or Atheists. No Shia, no Sunni. But a slew of genders. Because diversity, right? Here’s what all of us know. We can opt out of race if we choose to. Many data scientists already have because there are very smart reasons to do so. If you don’t believe me, read this. The point here if you don’t want to read it is that there are thousands of ways to measure human performance and the legacy of racial social science only hogties our institutions and minds.

Out of Range
My life, like everyone else’s life has not stopped being judged by everybody in every dimension. So whatever happened to me when I finished Loyola was very important at the time, but much more determined by the content of my character than by the quality of my transcripts, weighted as they may or may not have been for whatever were the expectations 45 years ago. My character was and remains under my discipline. In truth, I do not and don’t try to control how it is people perceive me. It allows me a much better night’s sleep. So I greet the good news of legal deracination with a sigh of relief. Reinstating racial discriminations for whatever reason has a new and very high legal barrier today.

Nevertheless, I understand via Henri Tajfel, that groupthink is real. Whatever the law, we will be subject to it. It is our nature. In our society of laws, however, we are much better off measuring merit and performance via the most objective means possible. To maintain a meritocracy available to us Peasants, that’s the best way forward. Yes, we already know how.