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.