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Affirmative Action and the Rise of Neotribalism
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19859 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
8,900 Words |
| Author
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Wayne Allen
Wayne Allen is assistant professor of political science with
specialization in political philosophy and legal theory at
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. |
Racial feelings run deep. Race not only signifies a peculiarity, a characteristic, but a distinction based on a tangible, inescapable physical fact. Unlike a political party, social club, or even an occupation, which can be chosen, race indelibly marks a person as a type. Thus consciousness of one's type naturally puts one in an adversarial relation to other types.
When law or public policy allocates benefits or privileges based on racial characteristics, it becomes an object of hatred by those ignored because of their unchosen type. The individual is left no recourse other than to hate himself because of his type, or turn violently against those who make categorical racial distinctions. Affirmative action is now raising to a conscious level those primitive, ugly feelings that Western civilization has tried to subdue under the veil of law. As these feelings emerge, adversaries confront one another not as political opponents within a system of rules but as combatants driven by passions of blood.
The rise of race consciousness in America, or the belief that race should be made the basis of policy, began in the 1960s, not the 1950s, when the civil rights movement began. It took the general romantic form of an attack on the Establishment. The Establishment was a vague symbol for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) and what they represented. Prior to the 1960s the American community was a composite of racial and religious groups largely dominated by WASP aspirations, ethics, and power. The Establishment signified not only WASP virtues but also the capitalist economy that reflects and is nourished by these virtues. WASP virtues included hard work, self-discipline, self-reliance, duty, devotion to family, reverence for God, and respect for the law that protected that delicate balance between the individual and community. But the spokesmen for cultural and moral relativism, with their passion to overturn the Establishment, sought not to add to this mosaic of American cultural life but to supplant it. This is the hidden motive force of what may be termed minoritarian politics.
This passion is not new. Adolf Hitler was the first modern political leader to use the expression Establishment as a symbol of hatred, and for many of the same reasons. Hitler too attacked the old order, the Weimar Republic, and the conventionalism that rested on individual rights. He also abandoned and finally crushed the constitutionalism at the heart of the republic and replaced it with the imperatives of blood and soil--the categories of race hatred.
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