Last week, conservative wordsmith and Baltimore Orioles baseball fan George Will cheered the recent federal appeals court decision to throw out FCC broadcast equal employment opportunity rules put on the books three decades ago in the twilight of Mays, Mantle and Clemente, before the dawning of Ripken.
The ruling could force the FCC to scratch from its regulatory-lineup card a requirement for commercial wireless carriers to disclose the makeup of their teams. Though minor compared with broadcast EEO rules, common carrier EEO filings serve as a subtle reminder of hiring that government would like to see from U.S. companies.
Will gloats that the FCC’s attempt, at the NAACP’s urging, to “bully … radio stations on the suburban of St. Louis campus of Concordia Seminary of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod … have now backfired wonderfully.”
Civil-rights activists and liberals, my guess is, will dismiss Will’s color commentary as just more right-wing tripe. In other words, they’ll stereotype him just as others say they are typecast according to skin color, national origin, religion, disability, etc.
That is what the race issue is all about. It is emotionally charged and so polarized as to make reasoned debate futile.
The unfortunate truth is Will is right, but not for all the right reasons. Score it a fielder’s choice.
Do-gooders are doing in affirmative action and making things easy for folks like Will and others who believe the policy, in any carnation, is wrong.
In recent high-profile affirmation action diminishing cases involving EEO in St. Louis, Adarand contracting in Colorado and teacher promotion in Piscataway, the hell-bent desire to make things right overtook a government goal of trying to make things better. It is affirmative action’s fatal flaw.
By definition, it is impossible to make past wrongs right today. To force the issue is to miss it and mess it up badly. On the other hand, to do nothing is wrong, immoral and simply unAmerican.
Indeed, in an August 1966 column titled People Without a Country, liberal I.F. Stone observed, “The Negro requires and deserves the fullest measure of patience and understanding in his agony, for this is the agony of his rebirth. His racism, answering ours, is a necessary step toward our ultimate reconciliation. The riots-and they will become worse-have a logic of their own: Can we deny that only the fear of race war can force us finally to gird for Negro rehabilitation and reconstruction as we gird for war abroad, on a giant scale and with a generous hand? Of all I read in The Negro American what I liked best is a remark Robert Coles records from an unnamed Negro in Mississippi. `Negroes don’t have it so bad,’ he said, `they can recover mighty fast, if we only get a chance.’ Therein lies the hope for him and for us and for what must become, in the fullest sense, our common country.”
