“WHITE AMERICA…AN ETHNIC FAIRY TALE�

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I read his book, Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (New York: Broadway Books, 2004) and would recommend it to all.

REAGAN’S NAVY SECY: “WHITE AMERICA…AN ETHNIC FAIRY TALE”

by William Perry Pendley

March 1, 2005

In 1995, in what Time called “a legal lightening bolt,” the U.S. Supreme Court all but killed racial preferences in federal government contracting in a case litigated for a decade by Mountain States Legal Foundation, Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña. Therefore, in 1998, for the first time since it adopted racial quotas in government contracting in 1977, Congress debated the constitutionality of their use. Nonetheless, Congress left its racial preference language unchanged, leaving it to the courts to declare it unconstitutional.

Instead of adhering strictly to the Supreme Court’s commandments in Adarand, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and then for the Eighth Circuit reinterpreted that ruling and upheld government’s use of racial preferences in contracting. Given three separate opportunities to rebuke the appellate courts for their refusal to follow Adarand, the Supreme Court declined to hear the cases, most recently in November 2003, over a vigorous dissent by Justice Scalia and Chief Justice Rehnquist. Experts now await a split in the circuits.

That split may soon come, from an unusual source. On February 11, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard arguments in a test of racial preferences in government contracting out of Washington. Atypically for the Ninth Circuit, the three-judge panel has two conservative judges who may follow Adarand, sending the case to the Supreme Court.

If it gets there, it will be met by new scholarship that undermines the factual basis for governmental distinctions between European Americans and select groups of non-European Americans. James Webb, the most highly-decorated Marine officer of the Vietnam War and Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, argues, in his first non-fiction work, Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), that preferences are based on two erroneous assumptions: “[A]nyone who was not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant had grounds for complaint about his or her people’s collective ‘struggle.’ And anyone who was a WASP was by default a privileged, less-than-deserving whipping post.”

Thus, because the history of the Scots-Irish, for example, was “both unknown and irrelevant” to Congress when it adopted racial quotas, the Scots-Irish, lost twice. “First, since the dominant forces in American society were by assumption the WASP hierarchy, to be white, Protestant, and of British heritage immediately lumped one in with the New England Brahmin elites….” (“In this perverted logic,” notes Webb, it is as if all WASPS “had landed together on the same ship at Plymouth Rock and the smart ones had gone to Boston while the dumbest had somehow made their way to West Virginia.”) “Second, [t]o be of Southern descent brought with it an immediate presumption of invidious discrimination and cruelty dating back to the slave system and the unequal, segregated society that followed it.” This disregard for “the vast distinctions among white Americans” helped create “a statistical straw man of ‘white America’” used to justify racial quotas, which “was nothing more than an imaginary façade. Indeed, white America is so variegated that it is an ethnic fairy tale.”

Had Congress sought to give lie to the fairy tale, it could have done so. For example, writes Webb, in 1974, the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) found that, “even prior to the major affirmative action programs, there was a greater variation within ‘white America’ than there was between white America and black America. n terms of education and income, the whites at the bottom were in approximately the same situation as blacks.” NORC’s General Social Survey for 1980-2000 shows that, over the last thirty years, racial preferences have “exacerbated” the situation. Concludes Webb, “these members of our society can hardly be called advantaged in a way that justifies legal discrimination against them as interchangeable members of a supposedly monolithic white majority.”

If the Supreme Court wants a basis for ending racial preferences, in addition to its 1995 Adarand ruling, it could use James Webb’s scholarship.

http://www.mountainstateslegal.org/summary...fm?articleid=86

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I heard some stats on Auburn. In 1991, Auburn had 4.1 % black enrollment. In 2003 Auburn had 7.3% black. At the same time the black enrollment went up, the white enrollment went down. Auburn is improving.

Alabama State and Alabama A&M have seen decreases in white enrollment.

Now Charles Steele is wanting the civil rights march extended to Auburn