Sowell & Bakke

Berman James Watts, August 1997

Sowell's editorial attack on affirmative action recalls the "victim" of the Bakke decision. A well heeled and supported Bakke sued for entry to medical school in a famous "reverse" discrimination suit in 1978. It seems that the black who displaced him has, in these days of proposition 209, Rodney King and the OJ case, run afoul of the officials who determine a doctor's performance. At least one death is attributed to his misdeeds.

Affirmative action scarcely served to solve the problem of any discriminatory decisions by such authorities. Short of an effective test in which identical individuals in identical situations except for race are considered, how is the fairness or alleged lack of prejudice of such traditionally segregated administrators and boards to be determined? Indeed, why didn't Bakke simply claim black or other minority ancestry (after all most whites have black ancestry) rather than use a cumbersome lawsuit unless the negatives of such a course of action outweighed that of the path he took as an anti-minority hero?

Happily the Aeromedical Center at Ft. Rucker, AL has inadvertently run such an impartial test. An apparently white doctor with heretofore sterling performance introduced a black Captain as his fiance. His colleagues and supervision immediately inquired as to his sanity. Can't you see she's black? When he replied ,"yes and so am I" his performance subsequently and suddenly became so bad as to require not only his removal from the organization but to threaten his qualifications for the profession.

If the tiny gains of affirmative action are subject to such prolonged and popular white assault, the effects of bigotry are preserved. If the second line defense of biased white assessment of black performance goes without correction, bigotry's effects are assured. If black Quislings and white racial demagogues find profit in the oral art of rationalizing deceit, bigotry remains a most potent force.