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RESTORATIVE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
Redressing The True Purpose of Affirmative Action:
Making Up For the Deferments of Slavery, Jim Crow, and Kernering:
Re-Inviting Inner City Descendents of American Slaves to the Table
And Ending Linkiing Affirmative Action With Non-Slave Descendent Free Riders

By Ron Edwards
With collaboration with and research by Peter Jessen

A Continuation of "The Minneapolis Story, Through My Eyes”
By Ron Edwards, as told to Peter Jessen

October 24, 2003 (last updated October 28, 2003)

No education, no jobs, no housing.
No education, no housing, no hope.
——-Nellie Stone Johnson

Opportunity breeds predestination
Sandra Sklar

1 Introduction and Summary : The Two Key Questions About Brothers and Neighbors
2 The Three Dirty Little Secrets
3 The Question Remains: Can We Find Common Ground? The People of California Have Not Only Said Yes But Are Showing How. The Minneapolis Story, Through My Eyes Also Outlines How To Do So
4 First step in racial reconciliation : Repudiate Destructive Errors of 1968 Kerner Commission Report and     1998 Bell Curve
5 The Establishment Has Spoken, So Let Us check the culture's temperature spoken on affirmative     action, abortion rights, and gay rights. They have moved to the center. The far left and far     right need to move there too
6 Free riders corrupt the political process and undermine liberty
7 Let's Look to the Past and the Present So We Can Better Prepare for the Future
8 The Tiger Woods Rule Tiger Woods Rule
9 Open borders for illegal aliens continue the Democrats' Deferment of the dreams of Black Americans
10 Inner Cities As Plantations
11 The Supreme Court Decision: does it really make a difference? I don't think so.
12 College affirmative action acts as a distraction and cover from the real abuse: public education: K-12.
13 Martin Luther King Did Not Favor Racial Preferences Nor Waiting Preferences: Assimilation Through     Integration
14 Affirmative Action Causing Budget cuts to be taken as Black cuts
15 Supreme Court Ruling Could Lead to Benign Jim Crow, Benign Apartheid , Benign Separate but Equal
16 Where is the NAACP in Minneapolis?
17 College bands, newspapers, and sports: a different kind of affirmative action
18 To repeat: restoration is the central key idea of affirmative action: redress and catch up, not diversity or multiculturalism, the hijackers of the restoration goal of affirmative action
19 College and affirmative action: a series of oxymorons about America's culture and diversity
20 Repeal/Repudiate "Separate But Equal,” Goldwater, & the Kerner Commission/Bell Curve Conclusion
21 Warning: Recycling The Trojan Horse In The Living Room: Blacks as Stepping Stones For More     "Separate But Equal” Non-Black Minorities, Keeping Blacks in their Place
22 Conclusion: focus on the prize, not the prize keepers, as we address three wars on four fronts: the war on poverty and access/opportunity, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, and what has been called by the book title as “the war on the weak.”

1 Introduction and Summary: The Two Key Questions of Brotherhood and Neighborliness

People have asked me to comment on the Affirmative Action decision of the Supreme Court regarding the University of Michigan. As I have stated in my book, The Minneapolis Story, Through My Eyes, there should no longer be a need for Affirmative Action. But, as I also said, because its goals have not yet been met, it must be kept until those goals are in place. Those goals have been blocked and hi-jacked by saboteurs and free-riders, both Black and White. Thus, there is still a need for affirmative action. For the purposes of my discussion, I will refer to it as Restorative Affirmative Action, restoring Blacks to full citizenship in reality, not just on paper. A time frame for it will also be suggested.

My reference for over 40 years has been and remains the inner city. But first, let us put all of this into context. THE key need is education. And the dirty little secret is that both parties have colluded, along with self-appointed Black leaders, to make sure inner city Blacks are not educated. The only other conclusion is that Blacks are too dumb to learn (which, as that is empirically not true; leave the collusion reason, where our kids have been subordinated to the ideological/political). THE key process needed is to find the common ground all can stand on, and seek a reconciliation between races and classes and parties to enable that to happen.

Simply stated, as expressed in my book and discussed in this paper, the original goal of affirmative action has been changed to exclude, dilute, and/or prevent gains by the American ancestors of American slavery in the areas of education, jobs, and housing. Now it is used to continue the reneging of the promises of the 60s.

My book, The Minneapolis Story, Through My Eyes, is all about the sordid past, the uneasy present, and how to build a satisfactory future for all. In the book I pull the covers off and expose the actions of those who would make the inner cities the last outposts in America where the harmful political and economic machinery for keeping minorities "in their place,” especially the descendents of America's slaves, are played out in terms of education, jobs, housing, and the war on young Black men. In the book I lay out the problems as I have observed them in over 40 years as a grass roots community activist. I expose and explain and connect the dots between the misguided and elitist views of how America's inner cities are controlled. But I also have a vision of a America as a beacon on a hill for all. I challenge the "Mastuhs” to include a seat at the table for everyone.

To help in the discussion on how to do so I provide four documents.

FIRST, the base, my book, The Minneapolis Story, Through My Eyes. In it I accompany my critique and analysis with recommended solutions to consider in the areas of (1) education (Chapter 7), (2) jobs (Chapter 9), (3) housing (Chapter 8), (4) public safety (Chapter 16), (5) safe environment (Chapter 8), (6) governing, including citizen participation (Chapters 10-15), and (7) ethics (Chapter 5, 17, Conclusion). There are also chapters on my own biographical background (Chapters 1-4), philosophical stance (Chapters 5-6) and my solutions (Chapters 5, 17, Conclusion). In between each chapter is an "Interlude” related to the historic moments in our history (Minneapolis Star Tribune report on racism, good and bad; taking of Black wealth and land; gerrymandering; The Tulsa Race Riots; slave stories and slave ancestry, lynchings and assassinations), historic figures (Nellie Stone Johnson, Washington-Lincoln-Jefferson and Carver-DuBois-King, Jr./Marshall, Pullman Porters and A. Philip Randolph; Adam Clayton Powell), and a calculus of meaning and pain for analyzing actions and laws. The book is available through these online book stores, www.amazon.com, www.TheMinneapolisStory.com, and www.BeaconOnTheHill.com Press.

SECOND, as "The Minneapolis Story Continues,” the seven keys/themes/solutions paper has recommendations organized around the seven areas noted above, and expanded on, in my paper Seven Solutions in the "Solution Papers” section of my web page, www.TheMinneapolisStory.com.

THIRD, as it is the major policy piece in America that effects us the most, I am providing this paper, Restorative Affirmative Action.

FOURTH, within a month "The Minneapolis Story Continues” will be available. It will be a compilation of the Solution Papers, weekly newspaper columns, and daily web log as they appear currently on line at www.TheMinneapolisStory.com. It will be available through these online stores: Amazon Books online, The Minneapolis Story web page, and the web page of our publisher, Beacon On The Hill Press.

There are two questions that are the backdrop of this discussion that are at the heart and core of the DUTIES of the Sons of Abraham, The Peoples of the Book: Jews, Christians, and Moslems. The first question, asked in the Old Testament is "Am I my brother's keeper?” The second question, asked in the New Testament, is "who is my neighbor?” The Peoples of the Book subscribe to or accept this Bible, which makes clear that we are our brothers' keepers and everyone is our neighbor.

The major sources of the answer have been the Bible and Darwin. Conservatives and liberals conclude America's descendents of slaves are unlike others, always have been, and therefore can't make it on their own and require living on government inner city plantations (the 1968 Kerner Commission Report and the 1998 Bell Curve). Despite these roadblocks, the descendents of America's slaves continue to "escape.” But too many are still "kept in their place.” My book, this paper on Restorative Affirmative Action and my 7 Solutions piece are all about how to repudiate this policy, reconcile the races, redevelop the inner cities, provide equal access, equal opportunity, fairness and justice for all, so that all may sit at society's table. The book's solution recommendations are summarized in Chapter 7.

The Freedom's Arc for the descendents of America's slaves has been as consistent as it has been short and as perseveringly fought for. Technically speaking, Blacks have only had full freedom in this country between 1864 and 1976, 12 years, and from 1964 to 1968, 4 years, for a total of 16 years. Remember: "technically speaking.” Our people did not come over on tour boats nor were they welcomed on "y'all come” immigrant waves. They were forcibly brought, many dying on the middle pages between the shores, and kept uneducated, poorly housed, and working at the bottom of the job pool. Relatively speaking, these are the same conditions we fight today in our inner cities, the last outpost of those running our inner city Plantations: the least educated (Chapter 7), the poorest housing (Chapter 8), and the worst jobs (Chapter 9), along with the highest unemployment compared to other groups.

After being liberated as a result of the civil war, the Democrats in the South traded our freedom to the Republicans for the Presidency in a deal cut in the House of Representatives, as there was no winner in the electoral college. In exchange, the Republicans, the abolitionist party, withdrew Federal troops from the South ending Reconstruction. The Southern Democrats then instituted the Klan and Jim Crow laws.

The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, but it too became too much for both parties. When the Kerner Commission Report said in 1968 we were not like others and couldn't make it on our own, the permanent herding into the city plantations was established. This was “confirmed” as the right thing to do by the 1998 book, The Bell Curve,, that concluded we were too dumb to make it on our own. Despite these, many of us have flourished and escaped those confines, disproving their truth while the Democrats and Republicans persist in continuing this junk science. My story, the Minneapolis Story, is about those still held back, but still trying, but hobbled by laws, policies, and practices that keep inner city youth uneducated and thus unable to escape, putting as many in jail as possible.

The Minneapolis Story, Through My Eyes, is about my struggles against that and against the Black organizations that have sold out for their own benefit to this ongoing inner city extension of the White man's plantation. The book may be ordered from these online book stores: www.amazon.com, www.TheMinneapolisStory.com, and www.BeaconOnTheHill.com Press.

There are many helps leading to how to answer the questions, "Am I my brother's keeper?” and "Who is my neighbor?” A favorite from the Old Testament is Micah 6:8: "…do justice, and love kindness and walk humbly…” The best answers from the New Testament are the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Maundy Thursday exhortation to "love your neighbor as yourself” and to "serve one another.” That is it. Sum and substance.

How? By following the golden rule (which is at the heart of most the world's religions and some secular philosophies: treating others as you would like to be treated). Too often, this rule has been bent to say that he who has the gold rules. The need is not to persuade "the other” that they are wrong, to educate them, suggesting a superior position that has to be acknowledged by the inferior, as people act intentionally and have a right to their own opinion (this was the dooming seed of its own self destruction of bussing: Blacks couldn’t learn unless sitting next to Whites). The need, therefore, is to find, despite disagreements, the common ground on which to stand despite differences of opinion: a common set of YESes commonly desired and a common set of NOs commonly not desired (Chapter 5 of my book). This can be done despite there being differences of opinion on how to achieve the YESes and prevent the NOs. All it requires is ubuntu, or reconciliation of the races.

But first, lets reflect on some reminders about what we are all about:

It is important to remember that neither the books nor the two papers are about complaints and whining: they are about facts and proposed actions. They are about being positive and providing optimism and hope and recipes for success in the inner city. I have long believed that one should not critique unless one has an alternative solution to propose. Thus, in addition to the summary of my solutions in Chapter 17 of my book, I have also posted my papers "7 Solutions,” and Restorative Affirmative Action in the Solution Papers section of my web site. Full title of the former: "7 Key Themes, 7 Key Problems, And 7 Key Solutions For Solving The Problems Of America’s Inner Cities In Order To Stop Deferring The Dream And To Actualize It.” Why is there still a concentration of poor Blacks in the inner city? Because the left and the right share the idea of Black inferiority.

The Minneapolis Story, Through My Eyes,/i with its suggested solutions, was given to the Minneapolis Mayor in person, and, to the Council Members, most by mail (see Letter to the Mayor and City Council) in the "Solution Papers” section of my web site. Most of the City Council members returned them on the basis that they could not accept gifts. Clearly, from the letter, they were intended as help, not gifts. This is the level of acceptance of thinking under the box (let alone inside or outside the box) in Minneapolis and why Jerry Brown, as discussed below, is correct when he says we have to fight "the hegemony of the status quo,” and "speak truth to power.”

This paper about affirmative action, which I call "Restorative Affirmative Action,” joins my web page as an extension of my book, The Minneapolis Story, Through My Eyes, as part of "The Minneapolis Story Continued.” It shows how all can have equal access and equal opportunity at success while still being one's brother's keeper, while still being a good neighbor. And even though much of the book is Minneapolis specific, it all applies, across the board, to every city in America with an inner city population of minorities, especially Black Americans descended from slaves.

In this paper, a continuation of The Minneapolis Story and a continuation of the story of all inner cities in America (for background see The Whistle Blower of Minneapolis, a City Pages cover story about the book or Ron Rocks The Boat Again cover story in The Minneapolis Spokesman-Recorder. the Solution Papers section of my web page). In this "continuation” of the Minneapolis Story, I discuss the three dirty little secrets (education, middle class or above status, and the collusion between White Democrats and Black leaders to keep Blacks uneducated and dependent), as Brown v. Board of Education is put into perspective.

Next up is my discussion on the fog involved in the side discussions of diversity (code for affirmative action), abortion and homosexuality, when the culture and its establishment have already spoken on them (melding positions that use parts of both opposing sides). This is followed by the heart of my argument: that restorative affirmative action is still needed but won't be met until the free riders that undermine our efforts are separated from it, which includes the discussion of mixed races over Blacks (the "Tiger Woods Rule”), the displacement of Blacks by the illegal aliens of "open borders,” who are given a pass to the front to the line, leaving cities as Southern Plantations (both north and south of the Mason Dixon line). Hence, until these issues are resolved, the Supreme Court decision won't make much difference. Needed is a return to the understanding of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a change in the direction of the NAACP or else we will head back to "separate but equal” discrimination. I then discuss the difference between restorative affirmative action and college affirmative action for college bands, newspapers and sports. Thus the central key ideas of restorative affirmative action are redress through restoration, not diversity or multiculturalism that hijack the restorative goal of affirmative action. In this way, we change the focus to the prize, not the prize keepers, as we address four wars on four fronts: the war on poverty and access/opportunity, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, and, to use the title of the new book by Edwin Black, to end The War on the Weak, to make sure we do not resurrect the past, as in another book title: America's Crusade to Create a Master Race. Our country's mission: E pluribus Unum: out of many: one, and thus: Freedom, Liberty, Prosperity and Justice for all.

Throughout this paper I will refer to two books, the 1968 Kerner Commission Report and the 1998 Bell Curve, the first a document by liberals and the second a document by conservatives. Each is a great piece of work. But their influence comes from very small sections of each. The first step to making Restorative Affirmative Action work is to repudiate their destructive errors, which, although taking up a small part of either, have packed the biggest wallop to enabling continuing the spirit of Jim Crow, especially in the inner cities.

The Kerner Commission Report, concludes that the solution for Blacks is to make them wards of the state as they are unlike other people and thus can't make it on their own like all other immigrants. This mars an otherwise wonderful work. Indeed, its suggested solutions, which I list in my book, are sabotaged and short circuited by the statement that the ancestors of slaves can't make it. But it serves its purpose: providing a “plausible” reason for keeping the ancestors of slaves in their place.

In The Bell Curve, it is a small chapter that attempts to demonstrate that Blacks are the dumbest of the dumb, as it ranks a "smart” hierarchy rating Orientals first, then Whites, then Browns, then Blacks. It concludes that the solution is to make Blacks the wards of the state. This is racist. This is stupid. Thus, in a few pages, a book is undermined and denigrated, even though it is otherwise a first rate book on intelligence. But it serves its purpose: providing a “plausible” reason for keeping the ancestors of slaves in their place.

Mickey Kaus once described those liberals who simply assume the permanent neediness of minorities as “Bell Curve Liberals”:

    …people who would never admit it but have internalized the notion that minorities are simply dumber than the majority. They either believe that such inferiority is in part genetic and in part environmental or entirely environmental. But the upshot is always the same: these people are helpless; and all we can do is rig the system to disguise it as much as possible and minimize social resentment and division.

This is why until both liberals and conservatives repudiate this nonsense, Democrats will continue to conspire against Blacks behind their backs and why Republicans will sit back and let them. My goal is to expose this falsehood and the fact that this is the public policy foundation, and so help us to move forward to integration of all peoples as Americans with equal access and equal opportunity to succeed or fail. Until this repudiation takes place, it will remain a recycling of the "same ‘ol same ‘ol.”

2. The Three Dirty Little Secrets

The first "dirty little secret” is well known: middleclass and above parents can afford housing in neighborhoods/suburbs with good schools and have accumulated wealth and/or incomes that can ensure that their kids make it through college if that is what they want to do, and thus have the opportunity for a good start up the ladder of social mobility. Let's repeat Nellie Stone Johnson: "no education no jobs no housing” and "no education no jobs no hope.” See Interlude 3 of my book.

The second dirty little secret, also actually well known, is that the education gap between Blacks and Hispanics on one hand and Whites and other Asians (who, depending on their country of origin, fall into one or the other category) continues to widen (see my book, Chapter 7) and thus gets better at helping to keep he descendents of slaves in our place.

The third dirty little secret is the collusion between Democrats and Black leaders to continue the vote getting strategies of dependency of inner city Blacks while the Republicans sitting idly by letting them do so in exchange for the suburbs. I cover this in Chapters 7-14, 16.

In just over a year we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education (decided May 17, 1954, after being argued December 9, 1952, and reargued December 8, 1953). We've made great progress except in the inner city, the heart of the red states on the political map, due in part to the faulty reasoning behind Brown's good decision (as discussed below in Section 21, "Warning…”). The Supreme Court said that decision was aimed at bringing about equal access, equal opportunity (the goal of the "solutions” in my book) for every American child (not LBJ's "equal results” but America's promise of equal access, equal opportunity) and, by admission, NOT for adults in housing and jobs. Now, in 2003, the Supreme Court says, after their decision regarding the University of Michigan college and its law school (Grutter vs. Bollinger, et al, argued April 1, 2003 and decided June 23, 2003, and Gratz et al vs. Bollinger, et al, argued April 1, 2003 and decided June 23, 2003), (in the words of Justice O'Connor) that it will take another 25 years to get to where we don't need affirmative action. However, if we continue as we have been, nothing will change, another 25 years will be called for, etc., as the situation continues in perpetuity.

I agree with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the thoughts of his book entitled Why We Can't Wait (See Unfinished Dream in the Solution Papers section of my web site, www.TheMinneapolisStory.com). Sadly, our self-appointed local leaders have advocated that it is “us” that is the problem and that it will take generations, teaching helplessness and hopelessness rather that the optimism and hope I call for in my book. Rather than marching on corporations our so-called Black spokesmen and women should be marching in protest against those who control what is being done to inner city Black youth (see pages 154-156 of my book), including the schools. Instead, "sellouts” (Blacks marching to the tune of their Democratic Party paymasters) help continue that perpetuation. With Blacks like these the Whites don't have to lift a finger to "keep us in our place.” Our "leaders” do it for them. Well, that certainly guarantees them jobs. But it won't provide jobs through needed education for the generations of kids forced to live under this jobs program for the "leaders” as it creates a sense of helplessness and hopelessness and future joblessness in the minds of too many of our inner city kids.

In selling out to the teachers unions for their votes in elections, Democrats, Black and White, have sold out inner city kids. The great irony of inner city education is that it is controlled by Democrats who, while condemning President Bush's "Leave No Child Behind” program have spent the past two decades, if not longer, leaving Black children behind. What we lost in Martin Luther King was his ability to preach the uniquely American integration of Enlightenment rationality (the good half of the secular left) with Christian realism (the understanding that human beings are not perfect or perfectible but can change and have good impulses, the good half of the religious right).

This is also seen in the ubuntu theology of reconciliation espoused and practiced by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa as the way to unite oppressed Blacks and oppressor Whites after apartheid in South Africa (to read more see my web site blog entries #163, 164, and 172. Bottom line: Solve the education question and you solve most other issues between the races and restore Blacks to the mainstream and finally sit all of us at the table. As former California Governor Jerry Brown said about the California recall election, it is time to fight "the hegemony of the status quo,” to "speak truth to power.” This is what I have done in my book, The Minneapolis Story, Through My Eyes, where I have pulled the covers off and exposed the actions of the powerful people and institutions determined to take their misguided and elitist views of how to control a city to the rest of America. As with my web site, www.TheMinneapolisStory.com, this essay, "Restorative Affirmative Action,” is part of The Minneapolis Story Continues.

3. The Question Remains: Can We Find Common Ground? The People of California Have Not Only Said Yes But Are Showing How. The Minneapolis Story, Through My Eyes Also Outlines How To Do So

The California election produced a socially liberal, pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-environment fiscal conservative Republican (tough on taxes and spending and on excessive government power) who accepts gays and medical if not recreational marihuana,and a hawk on security regarding foreign policy. This, it seems to me, will be viewed as not only an historic recall election but a vote bringing welcome seismic tremors to the cultural and political status quo, threatening "the hegemony of the status quo” and "speaking truth to power,” and, if we are lucky, help bring both the left and right closer to the center where it is easier to find common ground. My concerns regarding inner cities are the results of people fighting not for people or for kids but for ideas staked out either to the far left or far right. In this clash, inner city Blacks, especially school kids, get squeezed in the middle. Missing until October 7, 2003, was a credible view of and chance for a middle ground all could stand on.

With 23% of the Black vote and 50% of the Hispanic vote and 57% of the woman's vote and 50% of the union vote and 40% of the gay vote, and 62% of the total vote going to the two Republicans in the California recall, ideology was replaced with a sense of reality driven by a desire for practicality, that to succeed California had to find a common ground. The so-called base of the Democratic Party has obviously departed the common sense message of JFK: to spur economic growth and create jobs taxes must be cut. How can this be done when Sacramento increased spending 40% over four years and added 44,000 employees to the government payroll despite a hiring freeze, as well as creating other rules and regulations and levees on both employers and employees, creating a $38 billion deficit and other consequences resulting in tens of thousands leaving the state? Having worked in California on several Presidential campaigns, including that of Hubert Humphrey, I am familiar with its make up. You can image my shock to see in this recall election that three of the richest areas went to Davis by 63% (San Mateo County), 68% (Marin County) and 80% (San Francisco), whereas three of the poorer counties went to Schwarzenegger, with the percentages 64% (Merced County), 72% (Tulare County), and 75% (Lassen County). These voting results suggest that the Democrats, as I have outlined in my book, have lost their ability to represent ordinary people. As my book makes clear, Democrats do not represent Blacks in the inner cities. Rather, they treat the not rich and minorities as if they are workers on a plantation to be domesticated. The Democratic Party has to ask itself this question: was the Davis administration what a liberal Congress and Presidency would look like and govern? If not, what will it do to repudiate what is wrong with that picture and uphold what is right?

Add the huge vote for Governor elect Schwarzenegger by Evangelical Christians and his bringing San Francisco Democratic Mayor Willie Brown onto his team, as well as 1988 Michael Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich, and the sea change of this is seen all the more. If this can be extended to the inner cities, we will solve the problems long left unchanged by the two major political parties for half a century. I, for one, wish him well. I'll know how successful he is being by how he addresses the problems of the inner city. I'll be particularly keeping my eye on Watts. And if the Democrats try to do to him what the Republicans tried from day one to Bill Clinton and, tit for tat, the Democrats have tried to do to George W. Bush from day one, bring him down and not cooperate, we may well see those percentages above for Blacks, Hispanics and women increase across the country. But if the Democrats will work with the Republicans, then we will have a chance for a healthy two party system again that we can all respect and wish well. I wish that for all of us. He has a muscular mandate. May he flex it well.

For those who don't like the recall idea, and I'm one, I still have to remind us of the last three words of the Constitution's tenth amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

4. First step in racial reconciliation: Repudiate Destructive Errors of 1968 Kerner Commission Report and 1998 Bell Curve.

Throughout this paper I will refer to two documents, the 1968 Kerner Commission Report and the 1998 book, The Bell Curve, the first a document by liberals and the second a document by conservatives. Each is a great piece of work. But their influence comes from very small sections of each. The first step to making Restorative Affirmative Action work is to repudiate their destructive errors, which, although taking up a small part of either, have helped to legitimize continuing the spirit of Jim Crow, especially in the inner cities. It is important to repeat what was said earlier, as many just can't connect the dots on this, and thus don't get it.

In The Bell Curve, it is a small chapter that attempts to demonstrate that Blacks are the dumbest of the dumb, as it ranks a "smart” hierarchy rating Orientals first, then Whites, then Browns, then Blacks. It concludes that the solution is to make Blacks the wards of the state. This is racist. This is stupid. This, in a few pages, undermines and denigrates what is otherwise a first rate book on intelligence.

In The Kerner Commission Report, it too concludes that the solution for Blacks is to become wards of the state as they are unlike other people and thus can' make it on their own like all other immigrants. This mars an otherwise wonderful work. Indeed, its suggested solutions, which I list in my book, are sabotaged and short circuited by the statement that we can't make it.

This is how it is that, as noted above, Mickey Kaus described those liberals who simply assume the permanent neediness of minorities as “Bell Curve Liberals”:

    …people who would never admit it but have internalized the notion that minorities are simply dumber than the majority. They either believe that such inferiority is in part genetic and in part environmental or entirely environmental. But the upshot is always the same: these people are helpless; and all we can do is rig the system to disguise it as much as possible and minimize social resentment and division.

This is why until both liberals and conservatives repudiate this nonsense, Democrats will continue to conspire against Blacks behind their backs and why Republicans will sit back and let them. My goal is to expose this falsehood and the fact that this is the public policy foundation, in order to move us forward to integration of all peoples as American with equal access and equal opportunity to succeed or fail. Until this repudiation takes place, it will remain a recycling of the "same ol same 'ol.”

5. The Establishment Has Spoken! So Let Us First Check The Culture's Temperature On Affirmative Action, Abortion Rights, And Gay Rights. They Have Moved To The Center. Both The Far Left And Far Right Need To Move There Too.

Liberty and justice at the macro level and personal life and personal property at the micro level are not to be taken nor treated lightly. Too often the debate by both the political/religious left and right have been based in unwarranted fear; baseless panic; and fundamentalist fervor (both those on the left and the right need look at the Middle East to see the future for fundamentalist frenzies, whether religious or political, frenzies which not only tolerate no other way, but usually sees the existence of "others” as a call (divine or ideological) to eliminate the demonic "Great Satan” other. This is not the spirit of reconciliation.

My brothers and sisters on the extremes will not like this statement, but facts rarely interfered with the thinking of the far left or far right any way: but clearly, America has spoken on several sets of rights, including affirmative action rights, abortion rights, and gay rights.

This reflects the reality that most Americans reject ethnic or racial identification as a meaningful barometer of who they are.

In terms of the Supreme Court (and the general population) we can say this: the establishment has spoken favorably for affirmative action in the U.S.A., left and right, private and public sectors, liberals and conservatives, established businessmen and entrepreneurs, and the military and academe, have spoken: don't kill it. Keep it in some fashion as long as it is for fairness and not for quotas. The debates will continue, but affirmative action is here to stay for at least another 25 years. And if we make it restorative affirmative action, we can indeed end it in 25 years. How well we deal with it will determine whether it should continue. I fervently hope there will be no need. But restorative affirmative action is not based on the ideological notions of multiculturalism or diversity as narrowly understood but rather on the basis of fairness and a recognition that fairness still needs a boost (as opposed to having a quota based racial caste system, which would mold us in the image of the old American South as well as South Africa when it was an anti-liberty apartheid state). Most Americans accept multiculturalism as long as it is subordinated to the culture of America which values the culture of liberty, and accepts diversity not as a magic potion but as a part of fairness as long as it is subordinated to merit and the unique worth of each individual. Not that there can't be problems, which I discuss in the "Warning” and "Repeal” sections at the end of this paper.

The one diversity issue that still rages, although I believe Americans will also speak to it soon, is the allowance of religion in the public square. Despites the qualms (to put it kindly) of the left and right, America will affirm freedom of religion and separation of church and state but not allow separation of religion and state, as that goes against the liberty of personal conscience and would, taken to its extreme, outlaw any who prayed, and prevent any who believed in any religion from holding office, which is the goal of the fundamentalists on the left who are atheists and who conveniently stress the first half of the first amendment and ignore the second half (''Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”), and thus deny any official governmental role of any believer of any kind. As I write in my book (Chapters 1, 2, 5 and Interlude 4), Gunner Myra calls America's culture of liberty "the American creed,” and although he wrote on race relations it applies to all other areas of interaction and relations as well. America, as opposed to other countries, stands for individual liberty, and what I call "Restorative Affirmative action.” It is to promote universal individual liberty, regardless of race/creed/color/sexual orientation/gender, not group goals or Byzantine balkanization based on the particularities of color or race or creed or sexual orientation or gender.

The establishment has also spoken favorably regarding abortion. Most Americans accept abortions in the first trimester, are split regarding the 2nd trimester, and come together in agreement that it should be rare for the 3rd trimester, with most opposed to so-called late term/partial birth abortion, a once useful but sad end to babies born without brains or spines, but now sought as an elective by late term decisions, making it more akin to infanticide. The debates will continue regarding trimesters but abortion itself is here to stay. Roe vs. Wade will not be reversed (although the hysterics from both the left and right still use the issue to help them raise contributions as they raise the other side as a fear factor).

And the establishment has spoken affirmatively about homosexuality and gay rights. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Standard Manual of Mental Disorders. The debates will continue over what coupling means, from civil unions to marriage, but there will be no reversals regarding their civil rights.

Affirmative Action has not yet been implemented for its intended purpose. Its goal, restoration, was to help Blacks make up for forced lost time (slavery, Jim Crow, and being "cornered” since 1968 (Kerner Commission Report that said Blacks are different and not like others so they have to be cared for by the state, thus spawning a huge White bureaucratic jobs program for White democrats "to service and care for” Blacks in the inner cities. Thus the need for Restorative Affirmative Action is still a valid need, especially for those in the inner cities who are still being forced to lose time, as well as those in the middle class who have "escaped” but haven't built up asset legacies to the extent Whites have, with much of what they should have having been taken from them (see my Interlude 8 of my book, "The Minneapolis Story, Through My Eyes”).

In other words, we still need to fulfill the historic goal of affirmative action: to redress the drag placed on the advancement of Blacks by 250 years of slavery, 75 years of Jim Crow, and 35 years of the liberal 1968 Kerner Commission Report's two nation wrong-headedness declaring Blacks can't make it on their own without government help as they are not like other people (which was supported by the conservative 1998 book The Bell Curve which stated Blacks can't make it because we are too dumb. We Black Americans who are African-American and descended from slaves need Restorative Affirmative action.

This article also builds on the affirmative action paragraph of my February 2003 At-Large Voting: Another Way to Disenfranchise Minority Voters , which appears in the Solution Papers” section of my web site, www.TheMinneapolisStory.com:

    Affirmative Action is not “doing to others what you want everyone to do unto everybody else.” It insists that minorities (now defined to include far more than the ancestors of slaves, such as women, gays, people with physical disabilities) cannot and will not survive unless the system is tilted in their favor. In other words, we are inferior. That is racist. This goes against the grain of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the difference between being unqualified (receiving a purposefully poor education) and being qualifiable (what will happen if education for Blacks is as good and well funded as education for Whites). Affirmative Action enriches the special interests that “market” and administer it so they can obtain the funding that comes with doing so (either in the form of government programs or in bureaucratic positions mandated for the overseeing of it in both corporate, government, and educational settings). Now women, gays, the physically challenged, and other self-described victim groups, who never suffered slavery and who are not colored, have completely muddied the waters (pun intended). Why? To give the Democrats more voting blocs. They get the votes. Program administrators get jobs. And Blacks, especially in the inner cities, get very little.

The key to upward mobility in modern society is education. One of the greatest social inventions of modern times is the American public school system in general and the vast public university systems in particular. But to take advantage of the latter you need to succeed in the former. To keep us Blacks in our place, Whites have created a less than 3rd rate system for inner city Blacks in the public schools (see Chapter 7, on Education, of my book, "The Minneapolis Story, Through My Eyes”), making it more difficult to get into college. And, as many get in through affirmative action, they are sabotaged, as affirmative action skews Blacks to colleges above their grade and SAT ranges. Where they match, Blacks do as well if not better. Affirmative action, by moving everyone up a notch out of their level, insures the best don't do well. Unless the public K-12 system is fixed, we'll never make it in sufficient numbers to college. Indeed, in many states there are more young Blacks in jail than in college. That must change. If this was the case with Whites, the change would be made to happen over night (see pp. 154-156 of my book).

Therefore, let's call it what it should be called, "Restorative Affirmative Action,” in order to distinguish its historic mission for Blacks and thus separate it from the revisionism of those current groups using it today, groups that I call saboteurs or free riders, and to remind us it is to restore and move on, not to be forever. Affirmative Action has once again turned Blacks into beasts of burden, as it creates free riders who ride on the backs of Blacks. These free riders and saboteurs include several types of groups: (1) White middle class professional workers (planners, agencies at all levels, so-called educators, social workers, health professionals, therapists, etc.), (2) non-profits, and other "well intentioned” groups manipulating Blacks for their own benefit, (3) self-appointed "spokes groups such as the NAACP staffers, organizations run by or affiliated with both nationally known as well as locally known Black preachers and churches, etc., that say it will take generations to right the wrongs and thus they need to be paid to keep Blacks under control and in line, as well as (4) such professional victim/identity groups as feminists, White GLBT, physically and mentally disabled, ethnics (Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans), religions (Islam, Buddhists, etc.), atheists, and newly arrived immigrant groups (legal and illegal), among others.

These later groups are free riders who need to be stopped from taking the benefits meant for Blacks for themselves. Let us give these other groups their own versions of "affirmative action” if need be, but group by group, if there is a case for it. For Blacks the term has been shown, in our current context, to be meaningless. We need to use a better goal oriented term. I nominate: "Restorative Affirmative Action. The "unfinished business” of obtaining freedom for everyone, as Frederic Douglass expressed it, remains unfinished. Now clearly we all sign on to the notion that no one should denigrate another’s race, religion, national origin or sexual orientation. But too often this is turned around as if any of these are also victim groups with their different voices and different issues, as partners with the descendants of slaves, and thus claim the need of civil rights protections, diluting the rightful claim of Blacks. Simply stated, those descended from slaves have a different claim than those of other groups. The others are free riders.

The latest groups of free riders are illegal immigrants (newly sworn in citizens are not free riders). Look what is going on in California: illegal aliens are allowed to obtain California driver's licenses (as this is the foundation of all means of legal ID in this country, we should see every riff raff and criminals wanting "legal ID” go to California to do so; the ability of terrorists to get legal ID in California will greatly complicate Homeland security, calling for greater police powers, not less in order to deal with them). Also, illegal aliens are allowed to not only attend California colleges but do so without out of state tuition charged to them, putting them ahead of the line of all other non-California U.S. citizens. So does it make a difference anymore in California whether you break the law to get there as you can drive, send your kids to college and get on public assistance? This is a recipe for an even greater budget deficit than they now have, a recipe for greater taxes, and more companies and people leaving the state, a reverse exodus already done by tens of thousands. From my perspective as a Black man, however, the key problems with this is that it is one more deferring of the restoration still owed the descendents of American slaves.

The newest wrinkle are the "immigrants' freedom rides” to secure amnesty for the illegals. First of all, this demeans and desecrates the Civil Rights Freedom Rides of the 1950s and trivializes them. Secondly, granting blanket amnesty to 8 million illegal immigrants will be the greatest group of "free riders” ever. It would be better if democrats gave more thought to immigration amnesty beyond its use to bribe voters. There are no new immigrant waves for them to meet at the dock so they are creating them, at our expense.

So Blacks, having had to endure slavery then Jim Crow then the good intended but ill conceived and wrongheaded policy suggestions of the 1968 Kerner Commission Report, have seen affirmative action turned into a spoils system for middle class Blacks and for White and Black professionals in the "helping” and legal and do good professions. I'm not arguing against California's desire to give itself away. I'm just saying it still has an obligation of first priority to those who have legitimate claims: the descendants of slaves.

6. Free riders corrupt the political process and undermine liberty

The use by the political class to use free riders to usurp government purpose is the danger the Madisonians fought at the Constitutional convention. The Constitution recognizes the shared belief that human beings are not perfect yet neither are they purposeless, as all seek order and meaning, albeit in different ways. The idea was clear: checks and balances by distributing power among the legislative, executive and judicial branches (recall that before it was by the fiat of kings or kings with nobles). The will of the majority was to prevail but not at the expense of minorities -which then meant not ethnic or racial groups, as Blacks were already denied a vote - but those voters whose vote was less than 50% and thus on the losing side of a policy issue debate). The danger has become that "specific” rights have been elevated out of the changing realm of policy to the unchanging realm of "protected rights.” Every right that is so elevated adds to the centralization of power in the hands of the politicians and the agencies and takes it away from communities and individuals.

This is what the DFL has wrought in Minneapolis (and the Democratic Party in cities across America). They have turned cities into liberal plantations run by White middle class bureaucrats and so-called self-appointed Black "leaders,” all in the name of the poor. But to maintain their jobs and plantations and thus power, they must keep as many Blacks poor and disqualified as possible (to make sustaining their positions, and hence personal jobs, plausible). As many Blacks have gotten out despite the roadblocks placed in their paths, they have had to be replaced, just as Tammany Hall did with new immigrants (great scene of this in the movie "Gangs of New York”). Now the deal is to replace those that get out with free rider replacements such as women, GLBT, disabled, illegal immigrants, etc. The cities are prevented from being incubators of democracy and places for economic wealth building. This merely replicates the slave model of the South, incubating crime from young Black men and a war against them through the "war on drugs” programs.

As noted, in the South, for Blacks to learn to read, or for Whites to teach them, was a capital offense. If they could read they could find their way out following road signs. So today, if they can read they can get educated, get qualified, and obtain jobs that would enable them to leave the urban plantation ghetto. This the DFL fights in Minneapolis and the Democrats fight in cities across the country. Again, for details, see Chapter 7 of my book, in which my thesis is: "Poor schools for poor kids to keep them poor,” that inner city schools (the results of Democratic leadership in education) is little more than "clubbing the cubs into inferiority and helplessness.” This is why, in my book, I call for Minneapolis public schools to "stop the clubbing and teach skills, optimism, and hope.”

A parallel case is the war on drugs: if we win it what do all of those government drug war workers do? That is their fear. So, to many of us, this why they work to contain, not end the war on drugs. Indeed, as some have suggested, it was through government agencies that the inner cities were introduced to rock cocaine in the 1980s. It saved their jobs. Harvey Firstein, in the July 30, 2003 New York Times, "The Culture of Disease,” makes the same parallel case for those fighting AIDS (emphasis added):

    Instead, we’ve sold our next generation into drug slavery and their destiny to medical researchers because we’d rather treat each other as sexual objects than as family. Thanks to the drug companies that have made billions of dollars off us, and to the medical community that has gained a captive audience to fill appointment books, and to AIDS charities that have become a career for many, we have created an industry of disease that would crumble if AIDS was cured in our community.” In other words, "H.I.V. is an almost completely avoidable infection. You need to be compliant in some very specific behaviors to be at risk. In fact, if every person now infected vowed that the disease ended with him, we could wipe out the ballooning number of new infections.

Affirmative action was to enable this process of qualifying Blacks so they could make up for what was lost by purposefully run poor public education (especially in the Jim Crow South), get jobs where they have been purposefully denied them, and move on up and out. What the free riders have done is guarantee more rationale for the White plantation bureaucrats as more and more Blacks, despite the attempts to hold them back (see Interludes 2 and 10 of my book), have escaped. Indeed, the whole movement to include non-Blacks in civil rights is to maintain a constituency and thus both jobs for them and votes for the Party, as Blacks, no thanks to Whites, moved into the middle class during the second half of the 20th century faster than any group in the history of the U.S. All the more reason for cities to concentrate Blacks in poverty and crime zones to keep them uneducated, unemployed, unqualified, and thus in need of their services which means the service providers get to keep their jobs and their "clients” get to stay ghettoized and disempowered. The goal should be to work themselves out of a job not guarantee them on the backs of those they are supposed to help. This is the best case for privatizing some of these services.

In August 2003, the first set of ratings came out regarding the "Leave No Child Behind” requirements. And who was left behind, and by affirmative action no less? Minorities: Blacks and Hispanics and special education children. Here is the kicker: some states, which have a high percentage of White students, had never included their minority students in their statistics before, as they left out low-income and/or special education students, in order to get high scores. No wonder the Democrats opposed "Leave no child behind.” It exposes the truth of the Democrats' education system: geared to Whites and the affluent. For example, one state has 75% White students and yet set goals of "passing” for a school low: 40% to pass reading and writing tests, 39% for math to pass, and 68% have to graduate. Am I the only one doing the math here? 40% reading and writing and 39% math and yet they still expect 68% to graduate? How? Simple. The great majority of Whites graduate whereas the majority of minorities (Blacks and Hispanics) do not.

This is dumbing down is unbelievable. What Whites don't get is that it dumbs down their kids as well. And then people want to know why 2/3 of students entering college don't graduate. Restorative Affirmative Action is needed here so that all are accounted for and the poor records of Blacks and Hispanics are not allowed to be hidden in the aggregate. Before schools didn't test problem kids. Leave No Child Behind requires testing 95% of the students. Hence, "all of sudden,” most schools can't pass. They blame the White House rather than who they see in the mirror.

Now non-impoverished middle class people, mostly White, who are not poor, but are gay/GLBT, disabled, feminist, ethnic, or members of other self defined "minorities” are able to fill in for Blacks leaving and thus enable the centralized power of the Democrats in the inner cities to continue. Of these groups, only the disabled are truly different and require a different approach.

Certainly the integrity of all human beings and their equality as citizens must be held as paramount, and certainly, at one and another times, Blacks and women and gays and the physically disabled have been denied their integrity as human beings and their rights and equality as citizens. This must always be fought. But this doesn't lessen the argument: non-descendants of slaves are still free riders when compared to descendants of slaves. None of them are in the same league as descendants of slaves. Thus there should be no discrimination or legal penalties directed at them, just as, on the other hand, all other free riders need to be separate from "restorative affirmative action” for the descendents of America's slaves.

7. Let's Look to the Past and the Present So We Can Better Prepare for the Future

Historically, affirmative action was to restore us Blacks to our rightful place in the line and at the table with all other citizens. Slavery held us back 200 years until the Civil War. Jim Crow held us back 88 years from 1876 to 1964. The Kerner Commission Report in 1968 began the delay that has lasted since then, another 35 years since that report, which said that we can't make it on our own and established policy directions that continue to attempt to hold us back, succeeding in education in general and in the inner cities in particular. It's lame "two nations, one White and one Black” has been used to hold us back on the notion that there is nothing that can be done about it (held by the naive who aren't into the vision thing and by those who are evil enough to deny us our equal rights as we are seen as not equal and thus must be kept in our place).

Those accepting the notion in the short chapter on Blacks in the book The Bell Curve that says we are too dumb to make it on our own use “junk science” to "scientifically” rationalize holding us back. Government programs which continue to keep poor Blacks plantationed in the inner cities hold our hope, our young people, back, by continuing a system with a huge disparity in learning. Nonetheless, we are striving mightily and have made great progress despite the de facto and de jure laws against us (see Interludes 5 and 7 of my book). So, in the words of Moses, "let my people go.” Let my people participate in the American Dream as participants, not as by standers. We need to affirm restorative affirmative action”.

The current form of affirmative action has little to do with Blacks and more to do with jobs of those Whites who are "servicing” minority programs, who have in turn become free riders as well: so-called planners, educators, therapists and social workers, the whole K-12 complex that gets more and more money for its employees as they do less and less for their inner city students, etc. But again, as this “keep them in their place gap” seems to be the desire of the party bosses, their is no urgency to change, only the urgency to prevent programs that could close the gaps, such as charter schools, vouchers, greater use of Internet based distand learning, and concentrating on knowledge content instead of educational process, and having teachers trained in knowledge content rather than in teaching methodology. Its like giving soldiers guns without bullets.

What good is process and methodology without practical knowledge (reading, writing and ‘rithmeticking) to teach as opposed to ideologically based interpretations (culture war social issues) presented through the feel good lens of what is supposed to raise self esteem (do what feels good), when becoming good at learning content will provide that self esteem. The evidence showing that even in low-income schools, content-rich, test-proven methods succeed. There plenty of successful programs (being fought by the educational establishment) run by educators of all ethnicities (Newark, South Boson Harbor, New haven, Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee) and the opposition to them offers more proove that change is not desired in inner city schools by the ruling political party in the cities as it could lead to their rebellion, as they attempt to keep their dependent voters under control and in their vote column.

Thus, I am for "Restorative Affirmative action.” This is not about feelings and their interpretations. This is about empirical evidence clear to all who will look at it. The evidence regarding the plantation mentality of Whites trying to keep as many Blacks down as they can is abundant (see my book, especially chapters 7, 8, and 9, on education, housing and jobs). We need to end the distortions and corruptions of the Declaration and Constitution as they relate to such terms as freedom and liberty and democracy and the equal access/equal opportunity to prosperity that they foster. And in terms of education, the need is not the college or law school, is the primary school.

The learning gap first appears in primary school, and is almost hardened in place by 4th grade. All the affirmative action dances done by vain glorious activists regarding Ivy League schools and leading law schools are window dressing to the real deal: the systematic clubbing of our cubs in primary schools, where they learn helplessness and hopelessness, and then Whites wonder why so many wind up dead or in jail before they are 30. The answer is simple. It is because that is how Whites have voted.

If the NAACP marched and worked for this one goal alone, closing the educational achievement gap, in order to help in the assuring that our young Black kids enter middle school at the same learning level as Whites, it will have done more for the future of the descendents of slaves in general and America in particular than with any other project or program it now has, and will have finally justified its continued existence, as the futures of our young all begins or ends with education. I’ve been told that for those of our own Black naysayers, saying it will take generations, that there is a book out there that says otherwise: No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, by Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom. That is what we should be addressing, not the specific Superintendent chosen by the Board. The board chooses the conductor it wants to lead its educational orchestra. They choose the music. They set real goals and goals good for public relations but not attaining change.

Let us be clear about what we are talking about: the cities of America are about nothing short of the purposeful and intentional attempts to manage social change, what some call social engineering. No one should be surprised by that. Every culture is about social management. The political question of significance through time is always the same: "who benefits,” and what to do when the consequences are not beneficial? In other words, what is "a good society” and what can we do to increase the chances that ours will be "good” for as many as is possible? Instead, I submit that the social change we see is that aimed at maintaining the status quo. We'll soon know whether the California recall will break the status and "hegemony of the quo” or will itself be broken by the status quo.

8.The "Tiger Woods Rule.”

The first question is this: who is "affirmative action,” today, really for? Clearly it has been diluted, and is no longer for the descendents of America's slaves, as originally intended. It has become a jobs program for middle class White liberals running liberal programs that provide them with retirement and health benefits but not those they are to serve. It is for those who "service” Blacks, multiculturalism and diversity. And this part of the discussion doesn't even begin to discuss how these middle class White planners funnel/conduit tax funds for White developers building subsidized "affordable” housing for big fees at tax payer expense after which few Blacks wind up living in what then become gentrified housing for Whites.

The country has "moved on” and is now embracing what could be called "The Tiger Woods Rule,” which is that we are now a nation that recognizes the primacy of multi-racial groups over mono-racial Blacks, which are considered by too many as better breeds than those who are just Black (and more likely to be descendents of slaves). With the "The Tiger Woods Rule,” Whites win (as always) and Blacks lose, as all other groups, especially mixed ones, are inserted below Whites and above Blacks, shoving Blacks further down the societal mobility totem pole, closer to where Blacks "belong,” or, in James Baldwin's eloquent words, "putting the Ni**ers back in their place.”

According to the July 19-25, 2003 TV Guide, pp. 23-24, all Black programs like "The Cosby Show”, "Good Times”, "Sanford and Son”, won't be made again, and, recent shows, like "Cedric the Entertainer Presents” (the most watched show by Blacks), "The Bernie Mac Show”, "Eve”, and "One on One”, with all Black casts, must now diversify to stay on the air (of course our self-appointed so-called "Black leaders” started this when they attacked shows like Amos and Andy but raised nary a word about the Beverly Hillbillies).

In other words, "The Black show…is dead.” No longer can there be all Black shows. They must now have Whites. Mind you, no one is making all White shows have Blacks. This is the dark side of Affirmative Action in its current practice as a program now defined as diversity and multiculturalism for which the only conclusion can be that anything all Black is not good. This is another corruption of the current ideology of the left that is used to put others ahead of Blacks. This is an important topic because when it gets twisted and used as a weapon, Black "spokesmen” and "Black organizations” benefit, but not Blacks as individuals or citizens. And it is Blacks succeeding as individuals and citizens that is my goal, not so-called Black leaders and their organizations masquerading as THE spokespersons for Blacks (see my Solution Paper NAACP Takes Eye Off Prize. on my web site, www.TheMinneapolisStory.com).

Now I know some Blacks and some liberals and the entire far left is saying that I am speaking heresy. True that. But I'll put my 40 years working the streets of the community over their ivory tower lives any day of the week. And just what is heresy? It comes from the Greek word "herein,” which means "to choose.” I choose. They dictate. It is the Democrats and the NAACP that doesn't want Blacks to choose even more than Whites don't want us to choose. They want us to follow their Plantation order. You think I'm exaggerating? Then you haven't read my book and the wealth of data and evidence I bring to bear to support my argument. Read the book and then tell me I'm exaggerating. I welcome the discussion. You can order the book at www.TheMinneapolisStory.com.

I maintain that I take the high road and its moral high ground whereas the Democrats and the NAACP have taken the immoral, unethical low ground. Answer this: what is more important: Blacks as individuals or only Blacks as followers of the Democrats and the NAACP? If the Democrats and NAACP are not supporting us, why continue to support them? This is why I say I am a Nellie Stone Johnson Democrat (the founder of the Farm Labor party in Minnesota who was sought out by Hubert Humphrey to join the Democratic Party; she said fine, as long as all three names were used. And then after merging the smallest Minnesota Party, the Democrats, with hers, they eased her out. HHH championed civil rights for everywhere but Minnesota (see Interlude 3 of my book).

And what is at the pinnacle of the high road's high ground? The Golden Rule (see Chapter 5 of my book). Please note that all major religions endorse the golden rule. We need to do so also. In my book, on p. 98, I write: "If we followed the Golden Rule, we would not need affirmative action or the Voting Rights Act. That we need these shows the unfairness that is not only tolerated but also is purposely and intentionally attempted” and practiced. This paper builds on what I have written in my book. It is important to understand that it is not just Whites that are putting Blacks down through Affirmative Action, it is Black organizations like the NAACP as well.

We also need to combine blame of the traditional "whine” that "its the man” with blame also for our institutions (education, police, city council, city bureaus) and that of individual behavior. History teaches us that people have free will and are thus are free to do good or ill. There are people who do evil. And if they make institutions evil it still is by free individuals free to change them back.

People blame the economy, families (especially parents), capitalism, racism and differentness (such as race), as the culprits. Think again. These are all run by individuals. Missing this understanding has led to an obsession with negotiation (see the 18 Models of Conflict Resolution paper in the Solution Papers section of my web site) to see how true this is. Evil exists (if it doesn't, what do you label slavery, genocide, infanticide, or the atrocities I write about in the "Interludes” of my book, especially Interludes 2, 8, 10, 14-15, to name just a few?). Each of us is capable of evil. People are not basically good. It takes work and effort, made easier by agreed upon values about civility, fairness, and a level playing field. We have to work at it.

Hence, we need rational analysis of our behavior, which is why I recommend a set of desired YESes and undesired NOs (in Chapters 5 and 17 of my book) as the base for developing a common ground for us all, as well as a calculus to use for evaluating them in Interlude 16. We can't get to the YESes and dispense with the NOs until we accept that evil exists, and thus look at our situations as something other than something that needs "educating others” (refusing to recognize that they are acting intentionally) or "better understanding” of what "led them” to behave as they did, as if no individual is responsible for his or her behaviors.

And what is the Democratic Party doing about this? We used to celebrate being American while welcoming people of every ethnic, linguistic, racial and religious background and invite and show them how to become this new, non-ethnic entity known an "American.” The new emphasis on ethnicity (blood) and race would have Nellie Stone Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr. turning in their graves. They would also spin in their graves at this White plantationism at the expense of both Blacks and American exceptionalism. This notion that immigrants need not be united by English, and no longer become an American but a ________ (fill in the blank hyphenated with a separate identity and values system) is a recipe for the breakdown of our country.

To consider America a land of many cultures, united merely by accident of geography, is one more way in which Democrats justify putting everyone else at the head of the line ahead of the descendents of America's slaves. We do all of us a disservice when we encourage or ignore fellow citizens to think of themselves not as Americans, as one, but as members instead of a "better” group based on ethnic, racial or sexual minorities. This is merely reviving the worst aspects of municipal tribalism. The genius of our country, and why people fight to come here, not fight to leave, has been the flexibility to allow all their privacy behind closed doors who nonetheless become united by one language and one sense of civility in the public square.

The Democratic Party tells us to wait while it tells those it is trying to sway to get their votes that they don't have to become Americans, that taxpayers and the descendents of slaves will step aside while Democrats pay for the education, free health care and a driver’s license (with which they can then vote for the Democrats) of illegals until they too get cast aside like us for the next group of people to make dependent and faithful voters. This is the clearest evidence of the "hate America” crowd in America: don't bother becoming an American citizen, and because we are so bad we "owe” you these benefits. No, not at all. But America DOES owe the descendents of slaves. What happened to newcomers before they came to America was not done by America. Slavery was. It must still be redressed.

9. Open Borders For Illegal Aliens Continue The Democrats' Deferment Of The Dreams Of The Descendents of America's Slaves.

In a recent column in The Washington Post by Michelle Malkin, we saw again how the Democrats have proceeded to defer the dream of the descendents of America's slaves. Illegal aliens are being allowed to obtain mortgages and homes, despite their status, despite their overstaying their visas. Here's the kicker: its legal, and thus Democrats recruit, harbor and encourage illegal aliens to do so, at the expense of America's Blacks and, of course, America's majority White tax payers (who showed they "get it” by their California recall vote). Malkin quotes a person in the California mortgage industry as saying:

    It boggles the mind to think how many illegal aliens are homeowners in this country thanks to these programs, all fully insured by our government. Because of fear of lawsuits for discrimination I can also tell you that a lender may have a borrower who speaks little or no English who claims to be either a citizen or resident alien and it will not be questioned nor any proof required. Since FHA does not require any such documentation, a lender cannot cite their regulations as a basis for the request as they can on conventional loans.

How can the Democrats claim to be supportive of native born African American descendents of slaves when they not only allow but encourage these practices?

Our theme here is restorative affirmative action. How can that be achieved when the Democrats, in search of votes, encumber, as in California, the state budget, hospitals, schools and prisons with illegal aliens, saying it is OK for them to jump ahead of us to the front of the line? The Los Angeles Times calls it “creating a Third World chaos in the California economy,” and the new book “Mexifornia” by Hoover Institution fellow and California State University Fresno professor Victor Davis Hanson explains in detail the disastrous economic and moral results.

And who is asked to pay for this besides the taxpayer? Black workers. One example: auto repair jobs that blacks used to hold at $25 an hour are now worked by illegals at $8/hour. Besides harming the economy and deferring once again legitimate claims of African Americans, it continues the dark side of diversity's "separatist ideology,” harming the illegals too for without E pluribus Unum, out of many one, that is to say, without "assimilation” and learning American culture and language, they cannot succeed, as would be the case of any American White person immigrating to another country and not learning and accepting their culture and language. But the Democratic Party doesn't seek citizens (they could vote against you). They seek more dependent voters. Am I opposed to immigrants? Not at all. But get in line, please.

In terms of immigrants, even Don Samuels, Jamaican immigrant and Minneapolis Council Member, is, as City Pages has pointed out, a person with "perspectives framed by a can-do optimism that feels naive and anachronistic to many local African Americans.” Why does this White alternative newspaper, usually quite good in its reporting, say that inner city American Blacks feel "can do” is naive and anachronistic? In reality they see, with the policies regarding education, jobs, and housing, that the problem is not their lack of "can do” but the city's policy toward them of "you can't do.” This isn't helped by the deferments of slavery (when we were allowed to do nothing and taught hopelessness and helplessness), Jim Crow (when the Emancipation was shackled legally in the South making personal progress along side Whites impossible, dashing dreams all the more and causing even more hopelessness, although not all dreams, as Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded everyone in August of 1968: see my Unfinished Dream Solution Paper on my web site), and the 1968 Kerner commission report which said we weren't like other immigrants who could do the "can do” thing, that we can't make it on our own, and therefore will remain dependent on government. In their self fulfilling prophecy they then passed laws and regulations that ensured that we could not.

Despite this, many Blacks have shown they "can do” and have made it. But too many in the inner cities, especially young Black men, are still being deferred and kept off track. 300 plus years of "can't do” has an effect. We must end the wrong headed assumptions of city/state/federal government about Blacks "can't do” and bring our young people, especially the young men, to learn optimism, self validation, and self affirmation. Which is why there is suspicion of Samuels in the Minneapolis Black community. He identifies, as a Jamaican "can do” with White America's "can do” and doesn't believe American Blacks descended from slaves can. And yet the other Black Minneapolis Council Member, Natalie Johnson-Lee, is proof that American Blacks "can do.”

Whether White or Black, we need people in government who understand the struggle to get to even considering "can do,” let alone acting on it, and the steps needed to teach skills, optimism, and hope. This is why I have gathered the problem resolution suggestions in my Book in another Solution Paper on my web page: Seven Solutions. The paper's full title is: "7 Key Themes, 7 Key Problems, And 7 Key Solutions For Solving The Problems Of America’s Inner Cities In Order To Stop Deferring The Dream And To Actualize It.”

10. Inner Cities As Plantations

Black inner city Plantation leaders too often continue the monstrous injustice of American history by constantly playing both the "race card” and the "we represent Blacks” card when, instead, they should be working for Restorative Affirmative action, restoring Blacks to full citizenship, equal access, equal opportunity, and a chance for prosperity through true education and meeting job qualification to enable equal pay jobs, and equal access housing, not to mention small business and entrepreneurial enterprises.

We all know that affirmative action was originally created to deal with admitted unfairness and injustice of forcing Africans and their descendents into slavery. This was a monstrous violation of the Constitution of the Declaration's central tenet that "all men are created equal.” The Constitution said slaves were not equal, and even for counting purposes, equaled only .75 of a person.

And even though at the time slavery was legal and accepted world wide, slavery was still a particularly monstrous violation of what makes America the exceptional nation for, unlike other countries, we espoused that just rule proceeds only from the consent of the governed. Through slavery and Jim Crow, that consent was denied. The Kerner Commission Report of 1968 was unable to overturn the 1964 voting rights act but did provide for as many blocks as possible by saying Blacks are not equal in different terms: not like others, can't make it on their own, hold back, don't try, be wards of the Democratic party.

Ending slavery was a moral imperative, just as ending slavery anywhere in the world today is a moral imperative whether people want to admit that or not. But ending it is not enough. We must also restore what was lost by Blacks by having had to endure slavery, Jim Crow, and the policies resulting from the Kerner Report.

Whether we should be the liberators of others (i.e., Iraq) is still an open question. But who better than the descendents of slaves to understand the agony of those in countries like Iraq and North Korea and Syria, or Egypt, as well as countries in the sub-Sahara, and what has to be their peoples' desire to be freed from their slavery and tyranny? Surely ending slavery and oppression is a moral imperative, e.g., in Iraq and in other countries in Africa and the Middle East or how else can we complain about our own past slavery or our continued plantationing in the inner cities?

We know we are in Alice in Wonderland thinking when both the Democrats and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan call for "regime change” in Washington, D.C. but didn't for Iraq nor do they for other tyrannies. Personally, I opposed the War on Iraq, believing it could be handled through the U.N. I still believe that it was possible. But possible and probable are two different things. The U.N. refused, making the possible improbable. And as of this writing, it continues to refuse. It bothered me then and it bothers me now: I hear more opposition toward President Bush than I did for Saddam Hussein. How can the UN claim legitimacy, and how can the Democratic Party continue to say we should be under the UN umbrella, when the UN is led by dictators each with long lists of human rights violations, especially for our ancestors in Africa and we Democrats don't call them on it?

And let's be clear: slavery still exists, something the U.N. has not been able and/or not been willing to try to eliminate. According to the Anti-Slavery Society in London, some form of slavery exists in almost every nation, ranging from oppressive labor and debt bondage to the more rare chattel slavery, which is what the Old South was about: where people are actually owned by another. In 1986, the society reported that 150 million were in one or more of this type of bondage world wide. Today, it says that 50 million are in debt bond alone and that 179 million children are in the worst forms of child labour, while the International Labour Organization (ILO), says there are about 211 million working children between the ages of five and 14 years old, of which 49% are girls.

So this is still a world-wide problem. And when the U.N. actively works to end it, I'll be more inclined to listen to them. And how can the NAACP, who knows about the horrors of slavery better than any expend efforts with African heads of state who deny their people freedom and liberty rather than work with the political leaders of this country for restorative affirmative action in our inner city? See my NAACP Takes Eye Off Prize. Solution Paper on my web page.

My concern, as expressed in my book (see Chapter 14), is that the original goal of affirmative action has been changed to exclude or dilute or block or prevent gains by Blacks, as the emphasis now is on White women, ethnic groups, sexual orientation, non-Christian religions, the disabled, newly arrived immigrant groups, speakers of languages other than English, etc. In the same way that moral equivalency has ruined our foreign policy debates (with arguments that began by equating 9/11 as our fault, and thus justified, and then moving on to such a low common denominator of ignorance, comparing America with Nazi Germany and Bush with Hitler).

These are hindering the attempt to redress the holding back imposed on Blacks since we first stepped foot on these shores. So how can middle class women be equated with unemployed Black sharecroppers? How can prosperous GLBT folks be equated with ghetto kids? How can non-English speaking newly arrived immigrants of any kind be compared to the Jim Crowed and Kernered descendants of slaves who are ghettoized and disempowered and clustered in inner city ghettoes and projects and impact zones? How can White, educated, middle class professionals in these other categories make claim to be in need of their civil rights in the same manner as the descendants of slaves and then without a qualm move themselves to the head of the line ahead of the descendants of slaves? How? By controlling the legislation. Why? Because they can. How? This is how the left has classified themselves and declassified Blacks.

These other groups have been turned into affirmative action groups in order to protect and increase the jobs of government bureaucrats: service/therapeutic/education jobs by establishing the equivalent of quotas for these other groups so that the government bureaucracies job bases expand not contract. The Democrats back this in their attempt to expand their voting base. The sacrificial lambs? America's descendents of slaves. The result: the historic repeat of pushing Blacks out of the way. And Black organizations, such as the NAACP, stand by and do little. Why? Because they don't want to make mad the government, foundations and private groups that provide their salaries, for the NAACP has become their career, not their cause, their personal prize not the vehicle to fight for the prize for all Blacks.

Quotas for all self-proclaimed groups with a grievance supported by professionals paid to foster and work with their grievances, cancel out the moral imperative on which affirmative action was initially based. This is why I say change the name of affirmative action to "Restorative Affirmative action.” The numbers quoted in my book about the poor education of inner city Blacks (Chapter 7), the poor housing of inner city Blacks (Chapter 8) and the lack of jobs for inner city Blacks (Chapter 9), gets lost in the emphasis to help groups that don't need the help and which, together, essentially kick inner city Blacks further down the latter of social mobility and success. By definition, then, any who support these groups as well as new immigrant groups over the descendants of America's slaves are just siding with a more pernicious and more difficult kind of Jim Crow approach to America's descendents of slaves in order to, again, "keep them in their place.”

The great social movement for civil rights for Blacks has been turned into a cottage industry of job rights for the White bureaucrats and planners and project managers as well as therapists and social workers and so-called educators, all of whom run the poverty and education and minority programs as well as disburse the crumbs they throw to the Blacks in the inner cities who carry their water and participate in this scam, especially organizations like the Minneapolis local branch of the NAACP (as well as the national NAACP; again: see the "Solution Papers” section of this web site for this NAACP Takes Eye Off Prize. paper and its July 2003 convention in Miami).

11. The Supreme Court Decision: does it really make a difference? I don't think so.

Will the Supreme Court decision really make a difference? When news comments have groups across the political spectrum claiming victory with the decision, one should be wary. What does it really mean to say that preferences should be limited a little bit, that they can be given but can't be abused? Some would do less, some more. How does that help? What is abuse? Is there such a thing as a little bit enslaved or a little bit pregnant? You are or you are not.

How about the abuse of 200 years of slavery and 80 years of Jim Crow and 35 years since the 1968 Kerner Commission Report of trying to disguise Jim Crow in the inner cities?

With everyone rolling over and saying nothing other than "we won,” how can any claim the status quo has really been changed? How has the decision tangibly helped inner city Blacks with education, housing and jobs, as discussing it at the college level is too late: the majority of inner city Blacks have already been disqualified from college, hence the use of affirmative action to cover this. With no forums really discussing and debating the decision in terms of individual citizenship as opposed to differently aggrieved groups, can we not conclude that all of these various commentators claiming a valedictory really just want to maintain the status quo? This means the groups involved, not to mention college admissions departments and Black organizations playing their race card to get contributions to keep themselves and their jobs funded, keep their jobs, and go on with business as usual.

Just as red lining ghettoizes Blacks in housing, affirmative action "race lining” also ghettoizes Blacks intellectually, tagging them as maybe being good but still not as good as Whites, which means no progress at all. Worse, it goes against Martin Luther King's goal of defining ourselves by our character, not our color. When color becomes important, we become unimportant. What we see is the work of people protecting their vested interests, which goes against the potential benefit to poor and underprivileged Blacks, especially in the inner cities (under educated, under employed, poorly housed).

Affirmative action was originally designed to give individuals an opportunity to catch up with the opportunities in society, to have the same chances to climb the ladder of social mobility. The Black underclass, like the White underclass, and like the underclass in any society, is not there because of having or not having affirmative action. It is due to the political and cultural issues (i.e., the oft repeated periods of slavery, Jim Crow, Kerner Commission and Bell Curve). Affirmative action was to address the negatives of these political issues, not prolong them.

The danger of this is now seen in the NAACP seeing itself as a player on the world stage of other countries with their peoples of color, societies with economic and social dynamics the NAACP knows nothing about, as their problems are NOT problems of color but (1) problems of local culture and their distinctive histories, politics, ideologies, religions, and political philosophies and (2) their lack of adherence to proven concepts for individuals of liberty, justice, democracy, private property ownership, and individual rights as opposed to group rights based solely on color, and (3) the failure to use proven concepts for government and social institutions.

Africa, with all of its wealth of resources, should be a prosperous continent from the Mediterranean to the Horn of South Africa. Ditto Russia and its 11 time zones of resources of oil, gold, timber, minerals, farm land, etc. Both are at the bottom. Both lack freedom and democracy. One White, one Black, both with poor, unfree populations. Neither have a market economy. Neither respect personal freedoms. Neither encourage wide spread ownership of private property. Neither has a true system of checks and balances. Neither has a federal system. So it has nothing to do with color. It has all to do with the system, and so far, historically, the American system has proven to be the best. These values that ensure economic and political progress are universals, not tribal or ethnic or racial. Nationalism, Socialism and Racism are all failed systems (see Solution Paper The Economics of Racism on my web site). So why can't both political parties celebrate these universal values and why won't the "Black leadership” not only celebrate them but return to its civil rights roots and seek them for all Blacks, not just those in leadership positions? My concern is that too many of these value systems stop at the city line and are denied to inner city descendents of slaves because they are subjected to a school system that, believing they can't make it and need be wards of the state, need not do a lot with the students, and who are subjected to a city work force whose jobs depend on their being kept in their place.

12. College affirmative action acts as a distraction and cover from the real abuse: Failed Public Education For Blacks: K-12.

"Failure” is in the eye of the beholder. Indeed, "failure” is an interpretation of expectation. If you don't expect much there is little chance of failure. I expect much. I believe public schools, taking tax payer dollars, are both professionally and morally obligated to see that every student in each grade, K-12, is reading, writing and 'rithmeticking at grade level. Not all agree, meaning both the teaching profession and the courts. As noted on Chapter 7, on Education, in my book, a New York judge ruled in 2002 (New York Supreme Court Appellate Division), that, overturning a lower court's ruling that the state had failed to provide "a sound, basic education” for the students, as required by the New York State constitution. However, the Appellate Court said that was OK, as, ruling 4-1, the state is only obligated to provide a "minimally adequate opportunity, which it defined as an eighth grade education, which the court said the schools were already providing. The one dissenting judge said this meant that the state had "no meaningful obligation to provide any high school education at all.”

In other words, when schools and judges in Minnenapolis are saying the schools are providing, do they mean K-12 or eighth grade? If you accept the New York ruling, Minneapolis provides. If you accept my interpretation that all should be at grade level, K-12, they do not. The schools are providing "minimal education” and considering it OK just as those who accept as OK "minimum wages” on which a full time worker cannot support his or her family (and often two on minimum wage cannot). Accepting the minimum is accepting the mediocre. I do not accept. And now the final statement from that court: the majority of the judges said that "Society needs workers in all levels of jobs, the majority of which may very well be low level.” So there you have it. An elitist group rules for the masses. And yet, even at McDonalds, the workers have to be able to read, work a cash register, and offer accurate change.

Is it Blacks or society? The reality is, according to science, that we all belong to the same race: the human race. "Race” is a new construct. It means little biologically although there can be meaning in ancestry or ethnicity. But, as the Democrats control the inner city schools and as the inner city schools perform low according to my criteria, but NOT according to these judges, I can only conclude that the DFL in Minneapolis assumes Black students are not capable of achieving K-12 grade level the same as Whites. This, clearly, is racist.

Racism is the affirmation of the falsehood that inequality is inevitable due to race differences. In reality, inequalities are due to internal (self) and external (culture/societal laws), neither of which are based on race or color. Club them and the inner self shuts down. Believe they can’t do it and no attempt is truly made to try. If public schools adopted proven curriculum and best practices, we would see a difference. Obviously, with education spending having increased 50% over the past 20 years with worse results for inner city Blacks, the reality is clear to any but an ideologue who worships narrow party ideas over proven facts, or those who both give to and receive money for Democratic Party political campaigns. Poor education is always defined by the professionals as due to the lack of funding and thus solvable only with more money, and as long as that remains the definition, the status quo will merrily continue to condemn young Blacks, especially young Black men, to poor performances, which many will “tsk tsk” and then go on, merrily delighted that the status quo means they get to keep their jobs and obtain ever higher salaries and nicer retirements. Indeed, even the "Leave No Child Behind” program is accused of being under funded. Yet, the numbers suggest otherwise:

DOE Funding for Elementary and Secondary Education (dollars in billions)
Source: U.S. Department of Education

Year ‘96 ‘97 ‘98 ‘99 ‘00 ‘01 ‘02 ‘03

Amount $14.6 $16.8 $18.5 $21.4 $23.1 $27.9 $32.7 $35.7

Increase($.2) $2.2 $1.7 $2.9 $1.7 $4.8 $4.8 $3.0

Percent -1% +15% +10% +15% +7% +20% +17% +9%

The real issue is people, not government. The courts and the governments can say and do what they want. But the key is people. As John Gardner, former HEW Secretary used to say, the major changes in our society, certainly those I'm most concerned with, came not from the public sector but from the private sector and the religious sector: the abolition of slavery, the reforms of populism, child labor laws, the vote for women, civil rights, etc. After all, who or what were they fighting: the laws and regulations of the public sector.

And here is another “dirty little secret:” The current effort to achieve change by the Democrats with affirmative action through the public sector falls far behind the efforts achieved, despite the public sector, by the private and religious sectors, as both have done more than government (the military being the major exception). Corporate management is far more integrated than university faculties. Companies and churches are far more integrated than the national Congress or state legislatures or either of their staffs.

Politicians like to posture. But they still behave as plantation masters. And until these government groups/organizations/agencies match their rhetoric with action, I reserve having any faith that their actions will amount to much. If they don't change, the 25 years O'Conner talks about will just be as it has been for the past 50 years, renewed once again, continuing the day of reckoning for Blacks, who continue to pay the price, until the ultimate day of reckoning that will have to be paid by Whites (who believe they can continuously postpone it).

A key problem now is that faith organizations, the source of much progress and high moral ground, high road strength, have changed, both Black and White fair organizations, as too often, they now follow the public sector, as if they were a branch of it, rather than play its historic role of trying to lead with a prophetic voice, of which Martin Luther King, Jr., is the best example.

Andrew Sullivan, on his web log, comments on the Jeff Rosen piece in the June 2, 2003 Sunday New York Times Magazine,””, at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/01/magazine/01ACTION.html. Here is what Andy Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com) said, 6-2-03, about the article:

    Jeff is viscerally against affirmative action, but he has come to endorse it. Why? Because if it’s abolished, universities will only opt for more egalitarian methods to achieve racial diversity and could trash academic standards even more thoroughly than the current system. It’s an argument of elegant surrender. The assumption of his case - indeed of the entire debate - is that minorities will simply as a matter of fact always score lower in test scores. That’s a given for the foreseeable future, if not for ever. Mickey Kaus once described those liberals who simply assume the permanent neediness of minorities as “Bell Curve Liberals,” people who would never admit it but have internalized the notion that minorities are simply dumber than the majority. They either believe that such inferiority is in part genetic and in part environmental or entirely environmental. But the upshot is always the same: these people are helpless; and all we can do is rig the system to disguise it as much as possible and minimize social resentment and division. The only way we can have racial integration in universities is therefore by destroying academic standards.

Sullivan says that the alternative to quotas is the evisceration of standards, which will mean that "then we truly have lost our faith in the power of meritocracy and the equality of the races.” Sullivan rejects what he calls a counsel of despair. He says we need to "Keep the standards. Drop the quotas,” that is, end affirmative action. And this is true, if affirmative action continues to be run as a quota program.

What I am calling for is to return it to its original purpose: a restorative program, not a quota program, a program with standards. What needs to be done in higher education is to see that Blacks get admitted to the schools that match their high school performance in terms of grades and SAT scores, and then make sure that they also get into graduate school. Otherwise, we'll continue with lily white universities using a quota rather than a standards approach to achieve affirmative action, doing an injustice to all concerned, and extending their cruel hypocrisy even further, as they take Blacks whose grades and SAT scores don't match those of the non-affirmative action students, and thus the incoming Blacks have a higher rate of dropping out. But this doesn't mean I dismiss Sullivan's comment. It should be used as a standard to make sure that the evisceration of standards does not occur and that the merit system and equality of the races are allowed to move forward together in parallel, and use Restorative Affirmative Action to identify and match those qualified with the appropriate schools.

How does one get to the holy grail of education, college, if not prepared by the K-12 system? We should see a flood of young Black people heading for college. Instead, we get a trickle. Instead we get whining from the Black community's "Black leaders” on how deprived we are as the government or the man or companies are not doing enough for us. But if our kids were educated they would not speak like this, as they would recognize that they have to prepare and plan for the future using their skills and knowledge. But how can they when they are not prepared? The recipe for success is relatively simple: prepare for it, develop a skill or expertise, practice it, get good at it, and apply it. This will happen if they get a great education that teaches academics, skills, optimism and hope. It is this that should be the focus of the NAACP, not gun control, not Hollywood, not African dictators. The NAACP and any Black leaders should be pushing for equal education that teaches academics, skills, optimism and hope, and makes clear that by self-application, individual progress can be made on the prosperity ladder of social mobility. And where should this emphasis start? In the elementary schools. If the kids can't ready by 4th grade its over according to most educators. Any yet when 68% of Black 4th graders can't read to grade level, is there any wonder it all falls apart after that? If this was the case with White children you'd see a change overnight. But if we fixed it, you couldn't keep them in their place. So that's the first question to answer.

13. Martin Luther King Did Not Favor Racial Preferences Nor Did He Favor Waiting: He favored action, assimilating through integration.

In Martin Luther King's time, "affirmative action” was not a much used term. King favored preferences but not racial preferences. King favored economic class-based preferences, what "liberation theology” calls

"the preferential option for the poor,” both Black and White. Thus we must be clear: he never publicly advocated what is now called "affirmative action” in terms of school admissions or employment. He saw that as divisive. He wanted nonracial economic class-based preferences to help the poor, both Black and White poor. That would have worked. By making it “racial” in The Kerner Commission Report, issued after King was assassinated, Blacks could still be kept in their place. Nonetheless, they keep moving up and out. My concern is for those still left behind in the inner cities, especially the young men. See the Solution Papers section of this web site, Unfinished Dream in honor of the 40th anniversary of his speech, and the excerpts from The Playboy Interview with King.

But there is another reason, besides getting the job done, and why we need to set 25 years and make it stick: federalism vs. nationalism. It is the sorry practice of Democrats in the South which led to the rupture of federalism to cause the national government to go beyond its powers to end Jim Crow. In an ideal world, Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964, on narrow constitutional grounds made sense, as it overrode states rights. But to uphold that position, he had to assume Blacks in the Southern states were fully protected and provided constitutional rights. But the real didn’t match the ideal: those states with Jim Crow laws nullfied the 13, 14, and 15th amendments, which abolished slavery, extended citizenship to freed slaves, and protected the right to vote against racial discrimination. So from the standpoint of these amendments, Barry Goldwater was dead wrong. And certainly, morally and from the standpoint of the Declaration of Independence, he was wrong again. We haven't trusted the Republicans since. The Republicans have yet to publicly repudiate his stance.

So if the Republican Party apologizes today for Goldwater's position, and repudiates the “they can’t make it on their own” position of The Kerner Commission Report and The Bell Curve, we might believe they are finally the party of the Big Tent and consider their invitation. We are still waiting. We also want the Democrats to repudiate the "Blacks can't make it on their own” policy foundation of the Kerner Commission Report. Finally, we want organizations like the NAACP branch in Minneapolis to make the same repudiation instead of saying we can’t, that it will take generations, and just leave it to them.

When people want to know what the Constitution means, they should check with the Federalist Papers, where the basic discussions on that are gathered together. Regardless of whether one is a strict constructionist or not, the Federalist Papers are the definitive exposition of the Constitution’s original intent. As James Madison, our Constitution’s author, stated, “Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a FEDERAL, and not a NATIONAL constitution…The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” The states used this to continue slavery and, after the Civil War, to continue to deny Blacks freedom through Jim Crow. Now the courts are using it to deny many things. We need to swing back to a federal approach to state sovereignty with states being made to keep their part of the bargain in following the constitution so that it applies to all citizens, not just those they select.

14. Affirmative Action Causing Budget cuts to be taken as Black cuts.

Will we see the numbers of African Americans increased in colleges and graduate schools and government jobs or will we merely see a fewer number combined with the statements "see, we have some,” now allowing fewer?

After Jim Crow, Blacks should have achieved leaps and bounds in education decades ago, and yet the great disparity in education between Blacks and Whites still exists, as discussed in Chapter 7 of my book, because policy keeps it so. Education is the key to prosperity and getting ahead, and Blacks getting ahead are not staying in their place.

And how about the job market: most of the states are now talking about massive budget cuts. That means last in first out, so much of the gains made over the past two decades by Blacks, the last in, could get wiped out ("hey, we'd like to do better but we don't have any money” will be the cry to again see to it that the money goes to protect jobs of government Whites, for who cares about the Blacks as we know they'll always vote Democratic). The true proof of Whites turning their backs on integration is when, in times of downturn and austerity, the majority, percentage wise, of those laid off becomes Blacks and other minorities. The question, therefore, is not how we preserve diversity, whatever that means, but how we preserve fairness in terms of all citizens of the city, not just White citizens. Will we really tolerate reverse affirmative action: Blacks and minorities getting laid off first and in greater percentages of their groups? All that does is affirm prejudice, segregation and separation, and second class citizenship for inner city Blacks. We can handle prejudice. It is the segregation and separation that is the killer.

15. Supreme Court Ruling Could Lead to Benign Jim Crow, Benign Apartheid , Benign Separate but Equal.

The late great Democratic Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan once offered the suggestion of "benign neglect” as a way of letting Blacks work it out on their own. Between the professional Democratic Party White caretakers and Black organizations funded by the former, he lost out. His predictions regarding the decline of inner cities and Black families, so castigated then, have been borne out to be true. This means nothing to those whose jobs depend on the status quo and get paid to be caretakers. E pluribus Unum, out of many comes one, has been turned upside down and thus changed to out of one people comes many separatist groups, each with its own funding base, each with its own group of White bureaucrats, each a voting block for Democrats. With the Republicans standing by smiling, for the more they can keep in the cities the fewer will get into the middle class and out to the suburbs. It has been a good try. But more Blacks by percentage have moved into the middle class than any other group.

We need to be race conscious only to the extent that it enables us to redress wrongs. But the goal should still be to be a common people. This is the common ground I discuss in Chapter 5 of my book. Instead, with all the separate interest groups demanding cultural parity, the American culture suffers. The extremists will find ways to take the Supreme Court decision and turn it into a mechanism to divide the nation by race, not common principle, returning us to the 19th century. The Constitution with its amendments, when properly applied and interpreted, is color blind: Equal protection is for all, regardless of color. But to get to color blind we must first get to equal protection.

16. Where is the NAACP in Minneapolis?

The greatest sadness to me is that the NAACP in Minneapolis remains mum. What in the world do they stand for? It would seem the NAACP in Minneapolis stands for whoever funds them. Their proclamations and declarations of vision and empirical data and documentation appear to be part of an elaborate sham to protect themselves and their jobs by not rocking the boat, by doing nothing, by not disturbing the Whites who then see to it that they then keep getting funding for their jobs. Is there any difference between the missing files of the NAACP branch and former Council President Jackie Cherryhome's taken files?

What is the NAACP hiding? I suspect they are hiding proof of what I write. The files of the NAACP are closed and the Ward files have disappeared. They seem to believe few, if any, care. Let's go on record: we care. Do you? For background on the local NAACP chapter, see Web Log entries 7, 18, 20, 23, 25, 28, 30, 33-35, 89-90, 95, 97-99, 107-108, 113, 123-124, 132-133, 137, 139-140, 142-143, 153, 162, 164-165, 167-169, 171, 174-175, 185. And to learn more about the most recent, including their expelling me for speaking up, see web log entries 194-202. When they disqualified my voters, brought in White voters (85% of those who voted for the winning candidate were White), they showed their true hand: they stand not for the prize of freedom for those of us in the field but for the prize of patronage for themselves for doing what the DFL bosses tell them to do. As you can see from the entries above, my “platform,” from the book, to those entries to my “7 Solutions” paper and this one on Restorative Affirmative Action, has been open for all to see. I offer it as an agenda for all local branches of the NAACP, for they will not receive these kinds of ideas or this kind of encouragement from the national NAACP. And that is also part of my great sadness, for a once pround organization fighting for civil rights to turn its back on the prize and instead focus its eye on its staff.

17. College bands , newspapers, and sports: a different kind of affirmative action.

There are two types of affirmative action programs in colleges and universities, both undergraduate and graduate schools. One is based on merit. The other is based on race without merit. Let us acknowledge the difference. All affirmative action programs based on who can play in the band, write for the newspaper, and play on the teams, are based on merit, as are legacy programs admitting alumni offspring or offspring of big donors. How can anyone object to colleges wanting the best musicians, writers and athletes they can get, as well as students, including those offspring of donors?

That still doesn't address the now discredited affirmative action program, a program I say should be focused on Blacks only as the "restoration affirmative action” program, to jump start the long sabotaged program of redressing the systematic holding back of Blacks in education, jobs and housing. If we are serious, then we can follow Justice O'Connor's notion of needing it no more than 25 years (if, and its a big if, the same is done for elementary schools) and eventually doing away with what only Justice Thomas seems bold enough to address, the stigmatizing of minorities as not being good enough (and that goes for both "lead” minorities, Black men and women and White women).

The ruling of the Supreme Court again sets it off as an attempt to be the court of all the people. It recognized that Affirmative Action has been blown by this country and now needs to do it right. Lets join with the court and set as our goal the achieving of that redress so that affirmative action will no longer be necessary in 25 years. As Justice O'Connor stated, in her majority opinion, that the ruling should be considered to have a time limit: “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

18. To repeat: restoration is the central key idea of affirmative action: redress and catch up, not diversity or multiculturalism, the hijackers of the restoration goal of affirmative action.

The Supreme Court, essentially, agrees with my position, at least in theory, when O'Connor writes that the court "expects…the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary” in 25 years. Note: racial. Not gender, not sexual orientation, not disabled, not religions, not ethnicities, not cultures, not, in other words, any other self-described victim group. The purpose of affirmative action is to remedy past wrongs to the decendents of slaves, not further the new ideologies of diversity or multiculturalism, neither of which right past wrongs. They are about social evolution, a very different subject.

Note that "liberal” schools, especially elite ones, despite their self righteous hand wringing favoring their version of affirmative action, have woefully few Blacks on their faculties. But they too know how to play the game: they too want federal funds ("who benefits?, remember). To get federal funds they have to admit so many minorities (Blacks, Women, Hispanics, etc). There is no requirement that they have to learn anything. We all know Blacks as well as White women who were admitted, passed and graduated to keep those federal funds coming and who took positive advantage of it by working hard and getting appropriately credentialed just as we know those who took negative advantage of it and coasted through (there are those who have no pride but are takers, who will skip a lot of the work if they don’t have to do it to get their degree). And although it is a lame and narrow question, it still makes a point: who do you want to do your surgery or fly your plane: a person there for quota reasons who slacked off or a person there because of their skill and character? Who will get promoted over time: the person with the degree or the person who also has the knowledge that the degree represents? These are not insignificant questions. The NAACP would do us better by standing up for merit instead of quotas, and standing up for change in the key to all of this: K-12 public education, especially K-6), and work to make sure all students are up to grade level in terms of reading, writing, and ‘rithmeticing.

Certainly, in Arthur Schlesinger Jr's apt phrase, we celebrate our movement from exclusion in the 18th century to inclusion in the 20th and 21st centuries. But to make it so it must be so in action, not just words.

19. College And Affirmative Action: A Series Of Oxymorons About America's Culture And Diversity.

As noted above, colleges heavily engage in "affirmative action” for applicants so that they can fill their athletic teams, fill their bands and orchestras, man their newspapers and year books, have students for the theatres, and have students that fit in with their particular academic specialties. All of this is on merit. This is as it should be in a meritocratic society. Just be clear that none of this has anything to do with race. The data shows that when students are admitted to colleges with other students with similar high school grades and SAT scores, the percentage of who do well is nearly identical among Whites and Blacks. But when Blacks (or others) are jumped ahead into schools where they, the Black students, don't match the others' high school grades or SAT scores, they have a high failure rate.

The problem will solve itself when we restore education results and accountability in the public schools producing the college applicants, graduating kids who can go to college and those who want to go to grad school.

The goal I am calling for is to restore opportunity by allowing a level playing field of the American dream for everyone. That is the historically restorative action I affirm, so that leadership roles in all institutions reflect the citizens of our society. Otherwise, the institutions can't be said to be for all its citizens nor can one hold the fiction that there is equal access and equal opportunity. If the institutions don't have members statistically close to the population as a whole, it is significant and means that there has been, up and down the education line, systematic discrimination in the education system so as to prevent the underrepresented from being able to qualify, or, once on the job, to prevent their advancement. Hence the phrase by Martin Luther King, Jr., that although, especially in the inner cities, Blacks are not qualified, they are qualifyable. But if true educators were in charge, and not union backed posers (many are teaching subjects in K-12 they never majored in, nor mastered; there is a strange silence about the many teachers who can't pass the qualifying test for their subjects, a problem that will begin to reverse itself when we have teachers get advanced degrees in subjects rather than methods), for then we could act on the truth of King's words, that these unqualified inner city Blacks are still, nonetheless, qualifyable, and that the goal should be to get them qualified, which they would be if they were just given the appropriate education.

Quite often Whites in particular think all is OK. They need to get outside the dominant White news papers and read the independent minority papers too. I address this issue in my "Solution Papers” s section in Why American Cities Need Black Newspapers.

I document my own experience in Chapter 7 of my book. What was done to me is still being done to Black students. The Coleman study that showed Blacks did better when sitting next to Whites in school was used to perpetuate negative action: bus students and leave their neighborhoods segregated. The real issue was that where there were Whites more money was spent on schools. Bussing was one of the great social experiments with a hidden agenda: keep Blacks from progressing so they would stay wards of a growing state bureaucracy and voters for the Democratic Party.

These are the wrongs that Restorative Affirmative action is meant to right, and those are the situations that we need to overcome by restoring all institutions to reflect the society of which they are a part. And if education was equal, they would. But as long as the Democratic Party gives control of their education plank to the teachers unions who contribute heavily to their re-election campaigns (which is like the fox bribing the farmer to be put in charge of the hen house), their focus will remain their jobs and their health care benefits and their retirement and their efforts to keep everything safe and not rock the boat. Either the results of education for Blacks is on purpose or the practitioners must be labeled failures for continuing the same teaching methods as if doing the same things over and over would somehow provide different results. Either way, they are culpable. New superintendents won't make much difference, for the "action” is in the class room, and until teachers colleges change too, there will be little impact in the class room.

The current debate over the Iraq war demonstrates the problem. Again, we all can differ in how we feel Iraq should have been liberated. But now, after the fact, we should be celebrating, regardless of whether our way was used or not (mine was not). But the fiercest advocates of affirmative action based on diversity and multiculturalism are also the biggest America haters. If liberty and freedom and individualism are rooted in the culture of the West and thus of America, then it means that all who come to America, as well as those born here, need to stand on that common ground.

We must drop the fantasy of not judging other cultures and stop saying that theirs, for whatever deluded reason, is better than ours (as the left used to say in the 30s about the USSR or in the 50s about China or even now about Cuba). I use the word oxymoron for those most opposed to the results of the War on Terror, as they would be the first ones shot if they lived there with their ideas, especially those who are pro-women, pro-gay, pro-everything else that is anathema to the rulers of the Islamic states, and even more so if they are actually women.

20. Repeal/Repudiate "Separate But Equal,” Goldwater, and the Kerner Commission/Bell Curve Conclusion.

Slavery is separate and unequal. Segregation is separate and unequal. Only integration provides an environment of equal access and equal opportunity. The "separate and equal” resurrection of recent court decisions is not progress. It is one more way to defer our dream and to prevent restoration. If you want a suggestion for a litmus test from me for appointees to the Supreme Court, that is the only one that matters. For all other litmus tests are merely left and right wing propaganda. Only the law should count, not its ideological interpretations based on the latest "current notion of equality.” Separate but equal must be repudiated.

It is worth repeating about Barry Goldwater’s run for President on the 1964 Republican ticket as also being a run against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His basis: faulty reasoning regarding states rights grounds, which, although literally correct, was historically incorrect as his view refused to either acknowledge or judge that slavery violated the Declaration and the Constitution, as did the Jim Crow laws, which were a defacto repudiation/repeal of the 13, 14, and 15th amendments. Until the Republican Party publicly acknowledges this and apologizes for it, it will be very difficult for Blacks to trust them on the issues of their civil rights, no matter how badly we are treated by the Democrats. As stated earlier: Goldwater's stand must be repudiated and apologized for.

Both the liberal 1968 Kerner Commission Report and the conservative 1998 book The Bell Curve arrived at the same conclusions for different but similar reasons: that government has to take care of Blacks because they can't on their own as they are different ("separate”). This notion that we are different and dumber than the rest is not proven in either work or in any other (and although Darwin thought so he never proved it), and thus both must be repudiated.

Without repudiating/repealing these, Blacks will be other minorities' stepping stones up the ladder of social mobility, as one more burden is placed on our backs and once again we are kept in our place in favor of others. The inner cities of American in general and that of Minneapolis in particular prove my point.

Simply put, we need to assimilate everyone to achieve equality of access and opportunity. A recent book, Remaking the American Mainstream, by Richard D. Alba and Victor Nee, addresses this issue. This is the notion behind the "melting pot,” as in the 1782 statement of the Frenchman J. Hector St. John de Cevecoeur when he waxed poetically that in America, individuals from different backgrounds "are melted into a new race of men.” To Alba and nee, assimilation refers to the process by which different people from different places come to see themselves as part of a new and larger family, if you will. This is the process some call "Americanization.” And it has been what has happened in most countries. But in the U.S., those in charge who have come to not like their country call this coercion and cultural condescension and oppose assimilation. They consider it wrong. Indeed, there was a point when this movement was so strong in New York that there was a drive to make it a bi-lingual English-Spanish state. Two things killed that. One was that there were too many other second languages. The other was that self-appointed Spanish leaders told newcomers under no circumstances were they to learn English. This would have given them a locked up voting constituency they could then use to bargain with the Democrats, except many of the newcomers wanted to be Americans and many parents realized the folly of their kids not learning English.

What Alba and Nee suggest is a dynamic and nonlinear process where boundaries blur and all shift one way when in the public square and another way when behind closed doors or with people like those from where they came from. Ivory tower ideological hopes aside, the truth is that, even with Mexican-Americans, the pull of the new country is so strong that 60% of the children of the third or later generations speak only English. America, dynamically always in a state of change, is changed by each new group. Descendants of slaves need to be allowed to work into the mainstream as every other group rather than being told they are different and can't do so.

21. Warning: Recycling The Trojan Horse In The Living Room: Blacks as Stepping Stones For More "Separate But Equal” Non-Black Minorities To Keep Blacks in their Place Will Backfire.

The reason I continually call for seeking common ground (agreed upon YESes and NOs, Chapter 5 of my book) and a spirit of reconciliation (Desmond Tutu's "ubuntu philosophy of reconciliation,” my web log entries 163, 164, and 172) is because I don't see any other way to avoid recycling the 2nd half of the twentieth century in which we as Blacks become simply stepping stones for other minorities or special interests to use to advance ahead of us, continually keeping inner city Blacks in their place.

The Constitution is like a broken plate that was dropped before it was ever used, and continually gets dropped and reglued, and with each regluing getting more chips and tiny holes. We need an adhesive to fill the chips and holes. That adhesive is the Declaration of Independence and the first 15 amendments. The Declaration of Independence provides us with "all men are created equal” but left the Constitution incomplete and unhardened. The three Civil War Amendments completed the Constitution and hardened the adhesive to fix the chips and fill the holes. As noted above, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the14th Amendment extended citizenship to freed slaves and is known by its last five words: "equal protection of the laws,” and the 15th Amendment protected the right to vote against racial discrimination. They were ratified in 1865, 1868 and 1869 respectively.

The 14th Amendment nullified the infamous Dred Scott decision (see Interlude 6 of my book), which not only ratified the legality of slavery but allowed it to be established in the new territories as well. Had history then stood at that, new territories with slavery plus existing slave states would have outnumbered the non-slave states, and would have then been in a position to dominate the federal government and change the constitution to allow slavery in every state. The North didn't want to be controlled by the South. Abolitionists didn't want an extension of slavery. This was the backdrop of their joining forces leading to the Civil War.

The 14th Amendment, faithful to the intent of the incomplete Constitution now completed, properly set rights, both natural and civil, as something that referred to individuals, not groups ("persons” is the word used). No where is the word "race” used.

The Constitution was cracked again with the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision and its infamous phrase "separate but equal” that legalized segregation and reopened the “race based” interpretation of laws and the attendant discrimination that always accompanies segregation. Justice Harland dissented because the Declaration is color blind and thus the Constitution should be too. This led the way to a good decision in 1954 for the wrong reasons that have bedeviled the affirmative action debate ever since that 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. It was made clear that segregated schools violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. But its reasoning gave new life to "separate but equal,” the situation we now see in the inner cities of America. Bussing left us separate.

Chief Justice Warren also demoted the Constitution in favor of pop psychology as he wrote that to separate school children "solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to be undone…Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson…this finding is amply supported by modern authority,” the authority of psychology, of all things, promoting feelings over the Constitution. Thus, they ruled, unless it creates feelings of inferiority, racial classifications are OK. This was in part what Martin Luther King, Jr. fought against when he called for judging people by the content of their character not the color of their skin. Warren opened the door for "affirmative action” as a restoring principle, but based on class not individuals. Now any group claiming something hurts their feelings bellies up to the bar of "gimme” to the government.

Thus the door was open for Blackmun, in Regents v. Bakketo rule (which is the word I prefer to the Court's choice of word, "opinion”, as it had the force of a dictate) to resurrect "separate but equal,” a sword that can cut both ways. Blackmun wrote that "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.” Say what? Differently? Not equally? That set the stage for opening the door of the Civil Rights Act to any group with a grievance or claim of victim hood, creating a mass of free riders which, when you include women as a "minority,” is well over half the population. The 1964 Civil Rights Act rested on the concept of merit and ability, not race or ethnicity. It was based on individuals. Regents v. Bakke distorted it to a case on class, which also set up the trend for "special interests” and "protected classes.”

This Pandora's box was opened by President Lyndon Johnson when he re-wrote the Constitution by saying equal opportunity means equal results. The Democrats, to their foolishness, have remained faithful to this as a vote getter ever since, although the California recall vote suggests people are finally understanding the toll it takes on their individual freedom, liberty, and prosperity in higher taxes, more regulations, and lost jobs as a result. As I wrote in my book (Interlude 16, p. 299):

    Throughout, I have held that "equal opportunity” does not mean "equal results.” That is foolish. Many think Lyndon Johnson's worst deed was the Vietnam War. Certainly I was no fan of the war. It may not have been necessary. It surely wasn't executed right. But as Gorbachev later said it helped bankrupt the Soviet Union, we may have to begrudgingly admit it helped end the Cold War. And his Great Society was well intended (we were all in favor of ending poverty even as we disagreed on the means to do so). His worst deed was how he defined the goal of the Great Society. The reason the Republicans were so horrified by the Great Society is because they correctly interpreted his Left, Socialist goal as being unintentionally totalitarian. The goal, as LBJ stated it, was:

            not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.

    To achieve "equality of result” in terms of equal access and equal opportunity is one thing. To expect, as many on the Left pushed for, equal results as the redistribution of property and wealth. Whether LBJ meant this or not is a moot question. The Left of the Democratic party does. But to do so would require absolute state coercion at every level, including the redistribution of private property, and telling everyone what they could become in society, as if they were potted plants to place in a socially engineered garden, which is the opposite of what most of us mean by freedom and liberty. This is why some progressives, as much as they are leary of the Republicans, are just as leary about the Democrats, for no one is repudiating this.

      Additional excerpts from Interlude 16 of my book, “Calculating A Better Future For All”:

        It is a beautiful, poetic statement albeit a wrong and deadly one…We all know that human beings are, by nature, unequal, whether we are playing in the Super Bowl or on Jeopardy. What I have been talking about is that Blacks haven't been allowed to participate in the game…

        The political Right gives lip service to "equality of opportunity”…

        The political Left, on the other hand, gives lip service to "equality of results,” for that policy clearly favors them and would give them the great coercive power of the government to enforce it…

        …So the real issue for both the Right and Left, as I see it, is power, not fairness or justice, even if the words "fairness” and "justice” are used to justify the taking of freedoms and liberty. But as we saw from Chapter 2, "law” by itself is not enough if it isn't exercised equally: we want total impartiality in the application of law. And as we have seen in Interlude 8, this has clearly and purposefully been denied to Blacks.

      The "angry White male” has a point in that the Regents v. Bakke said that because "whites as a class” need no protection, they have "no standing” to challenge racial preferences in the law. Now, that is just as discriminating and angering to Whites as it was to Blacks when Blacks had no standing. Some think this was rejected in a 1995 decision, and that it is its memory that haunts Whites wondering if this shoe could be dropped again. But it was not rejected or reversed. It was merely narrowed, by the decision of Justice Sandra Day O'Conner, because she said racial classification had to be given "strict scrutiny” and is permitted if there is a "compelling state interest.”

      The debate continues. There are White Democrats who consider Justice Thomas a turn coat (as the only good Black is a Democrat). There are also Black Democrats who consider him a turncoat as well (as they are true believers that only Democrats will help Blacks, denying, as they do, the history of the Democrats during slavery, during the Jim Crow period and post Kerner in the inner cities).

      Justice Thomas wrote that based on the Declaration, there is a "moral [and] constitutional equivalence between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality.” And it's the "current notion” that gets us into trouble. As W.R. Inge is said to have remarked, he would marry the spirit of the age soon finds himself a widower. In other words, many ideas don't stand the test of time although they can certainly test the time.

      And that is why using a class such as race, rather than the individual, creates a Trojan Horse, as it is used to dilute the restoration intended by affirmative action for the descendents of slaves. It undermines Blacks and it undermines democracy. As I write in Chapter 14:

        A major change in the 1980s came when civil rights was no longer interpreted in terms of race, which was to enable Blacks to better play catch-up after 300 years of slavery but instead began to be defined in terms of victim groups based on gender and sexual orientation. Thus, the Civil Rights Commission, which was traditionally against racial discrimination, is no longer about civil rights as that term was traditionally defined. It is now open to all kinds of new groups, now called "protected classes,” which includes not only those of gender and sexual orientation, but the physically challenged (who used to be classified as "handicapped”).

      I'm not opposed to these groups working out how to obtain their rights as well, but it is not the same thing. The key is that most of these groups are White, which defeats and ignores the original purpose.

      This became the new "current notion of equality” that has become the spirit of the age. And now, in California, the latest "current notion of equality” is illegals being granted citizenship or the equivalent of it by letting them go on social services rolls, collect welfare, get educated, get mortgages, get drivers licenses, all at tax payer expenses, adding one more kept dependent group to vote for Democrats and one more group to jump to the head of the line ahead of us. Why not work out with Mexico the granting of work permits that lets them come, work (begin, perhaps, in agriculture), and return home. It would benefit them, us, homeland security, and the tax payers pocket, while keeping clear that even this kind of proposed “affirmative action” for illegals again defers the descendents of the American slave an creates a wedge between Blacks and Hispanics.

      This will only get worse because of the Michigan Cases of 2003. Please note: we still need restorative affirmative action for the descendents of American's slaves, but not for newcomers or any other self-described victims group at the expense of the restoration for the descendants of slaves. We are again told to wait. Martin Luther King, Jr. explained this in his book by the title of Why We Can't Wait. Why self-appointed Black leaders in Minneapolis have bought into this "spirit of the age” saying it will take generations should shock the community out of its lethargy. Sadly, to date, it has not.

      The "compelling state interest” suggested by Justice O'Connor was the need to promote diversity through racial preferences, which means that as more and more different groups immigrate to this country, they too will be asking for the same kind of protected class status and all the goodies that go with it, again deferring our dream. The Democrats continue to pander to new arriving groups for their votes and the Republicans stand by and let them and we, again, pay the price. The notion of some that because this was for an educational institution it will be limited to educational institutions shows that they have their heads in the sand and certainly don’t have their fingers on the political pulse.

      Who would have guessed I would be quoting Justice Thomas again, but who else is there standing up for Blacks in this? He dissented from majority decision saying that "the Constitution abhors classifications based on race…because every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits, it demeans us all.”

      That is why I have framed my restorative affirmative action not on race but on injustice, on the historical reality of what this country has done to Blacks through 200 years of slavery, 88 years of Jim Crow and 38 years of Kerner Commission nonsense treating us on the basis that we can't that we can't make it on our own.

      Given the expansion of civil rights to new special interest groups and protected classes groups, of which illegal immigrants is but the latest, surely Justice Thomas speaks for us when he wrote in his dissent that the Michigan decision "has placed its imprimatur on a practice that can only weaken the principle of equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment.

      If this continues, diluting more and more the significance of the Black contributions to this country over the past 400 years, we will be kept in our place again by the Democrats in the Trojan Horse of what I can only call "non-restorative affirmative action.” The first step to restoration is to provide equal education in K-12, which is where the true restoration is, for then we won't need affirmative action quotas in higher education.

      22. Conclusion: Focus On The prize, Not The Prize Keepers, As We Address Four Wars On 4 Fronts: The War On Poverty And Access/Opportunity, The War On Drugs, The War On Terrorism, And, in a Word: "The War On The Weak.”

      It may seem strange to end this paper with a section title with "The War on” phrase four times. My purpose is to remind us to learn the lessons of history, so we don't get taken in by what Edwin Black in The War On The Weak calls sham science, fake science, and fake academics, the American experience of intellectuals trying to keep Blacks down and justifying why they should be sterilized to prevent their reproduction. His book is subtitled, America's Crusade To Create A Master Race. It is about the eugenics movement (the idea of manipulating human genes to improve individuals, groups or entire populations, and has been used to investigate diseases as well as for the political purposes of sterilization, euthanasia and genocide) in this country in the early part of this century, a movement funded by some of the great foundations, a movement that achieved getting eugenics laws passed in 27 states, laws that allowed those deemed inferior to be sterilized: the weak, the imbeciles, the seemingly incompetent.

      In reality, the categories were White hillbillies, Blacks, and immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. It was America's attempt at ethnic cleansing, under the umbrella of the highest "authority,” science, and a 1927 Supreme Court decision, which said eugenics laws were constitutional as, in the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, "three generations of imbeciles is enough” (this too was later repealed). The movement was pioneered in the U.S. and spread to Europe and elsewhere.

      In his book Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler praised America's sterilization laws and immigration restrictions. Hitler used eugenics to base his "final solution” of liquidating Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the retarded, and the handicapped. The movement is now called human genetics and seeks to fight disease. We need to make sure that's all it does. But the movement is consistent with what Darwin said. Darwin, in his book “Descent of Man,” referred to Africans and Aboriginal Australians as “savages” and stated:

        “Civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world…The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

      This concept influenced the Dred Scott Case, 1856, which stated slaves

        “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order…so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

      The American Constitution says men are created equal in the eyes of God. Harry S Truman stated in his Inaugural Address, 1949: “We believe that all men are created equal, because they are created in the image of God.” This drives home the centrality of the contest between the concept of separation of church and state, for if it is interpreted (1) as meaning there is no God, and so men are not only not “created,” they are not “equal,” just as Darwin espoused above, and (2) as meaning Christianity should be removed from the public square (remember the 1st amendment states "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” (with the second half conveniently discarded), then (3) what is all the fuss about equal access and equal opportunity, equal education and jobs/housing, as Darwin and the southern slavers would have to be given their due to it would have to be given to Hobbes and let the powerful prevail.

      Here again we see the influence of the rulings allowing classification by groups as opposed to dealing with individuals, and listening to those whose groups who are offended, in this case, the secular left). And remember Marx, for all of his voluminous writings, dismissed Africa in the only two paragraphs he used to write about it.

      As the two Michaels show in their quotes at the beginning of this paper, this will not be an easy task. But with vision and perseverance, it can be done, now as opposed to later. Martin Luther King, Jr., acknowledged this when he said that although there were Blacks who were not qualified, they were qualifyable through training and working up to it. Needed is to get young Black men qualified by whatever training is necessary, including adding technical or vocational tracks to schools rather than the current college only preparatory curriculum that is not appropriate for all students (and certainly not for the 2/3 who start and don't finish).

      This is what the NAACP should be fighting for, not working to dine with dictators in foreign nations, as if dictators dining with them will change their systems. It is time for the NAACP to again focus its eyes on the prize at home.

      In my Solution Paper on the NAACP posted on my web site, NAACP Takes Eye Off Prize, I approvingly quoted both George Bush and Tony Blair. I want to close here by quoting Bill Clinton. Clearly, on the world stage of the past decade, these are the three giants (Clinton, Blair, Bush) able to wear seven league boots in a world populated by "the mini-minded mini-men of mini-ville” politics. This is from Clinton's statement on the War in Iraq, made July 23, 2003. I quote it because it discusses the one thing we need to remember: to find the common ground on which all of us Americans as citizens of a great nation can stand together. We don't have to agree on the how. But we should be clear on the what. And the what, is, liberty and freedom for all, equal access and equal opportunity for all, and if these concepts mean anything, then they are for the world, not just the U.S. They are for the entire rainbow of people, not just Whites, they are for all members of the human race, and they are for "all God's chillun.”

      As a descendent of slaves and of Native Americans, I can assure you, my dear readers, that there is a great deal of difference between the negative slant the press is giving the war on terror, as if we were a colonial power, when in reality we should be proud of being liberators and that the opposition that is left is not a nation's defenders but rather the dead-ending remnants of a totalitarian regime and their Al Queda compatriots. Clinton gets it right. Lets apply what he says to civil rights and finally bring an end to the current farce of affirmative action, reestablish it for what it was intended for, Restorative Affirmative action, and work to make sure it is no longer needed, for anyone, in any group, within 25 years. Here is what he said.

        We should be pulling for America on this. We should be pulling for the people of Iraq. We can have honest disagreements about where we go from here, and we have space now to discuss that in what I hope will be a nonpartisan and open way. But this State of the Union deal they decided to use the British intelligence. The president said it was British intelligence. Then they said on balance they shouldn’t have done it. You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president. I mean, you can’t make as many calls as you have to make without messing up once in awhile. The thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do now.

      Note: he also said that "it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted-for stocks of biological and chemical weapons” in Iraq.

      We need to come together in America, and link the freeing of peoples everywhere with the final act of freeing our own inner city people in the United States.

      It was important to free them. It is important to free ourselves. Lets make the call for civil rights, for democracy for the world, and for liberty and freedom for all our people and all peoples of the world.

      I agree with Black scholar Thomas Sowell who has called for a new contract with Black America, especially in terms of education (including offering school choice), avoiding the environmental extremism that causes affordable housing and businesses to be impossible due to myths about species protection, and his call to better sustain public safety through crime control, and offer real hope of racial progress as well as prosperity progress.

      My Seven Solutions paper was been written to add to the discussion. Its full title bears repeating: "7 Key Themes, 7 Key Problems, And 7 Key Solutions For Solving The Problems Of America’s Inner Cities In Order To Stop Deferring The Dream And To Actualize It”. A group often ignored by the White community that should be a prominent part of the discussion is the Black press, as I note in my paper Why American Cities Need Black Newspapers. To remind us that we have a deep well to draw from to enable us to stay positive in working together to find that common ground for progress, we will do was have always done, as expessed in my Enduring Through Music: Here, There, and Everywhere paper.

      Lets acknowledge our mistakes, which we'll make, and let us pledge, commit and promise to always focus on doing the right thing. For me that means working from the list of YESes and NOs of Chapter 5. We all know, in our hearts as Americans, what that the right thing is and the right thing starts with education and then moves on to jobs and then to housing. So let's start by developing a set of Sullivan Principles for our city (see my Chapter 14). Lets start by following my "7 Solutions” piece in the "Solution Papers” section of my web site. Let's follow Nellie Stone Johnson rallying cries: "no education, no job, no housing” and "no education, no jobs, no hope.” Bring in the clichés. They work: Let's make them happen. Let's do it. Let's overcome. Let's realize the dream. Let's bring it on. Let’s roll.

      Now let's all gather together and fling the freedom gates open wide and lead everyone through them. Why? Because, going back to the question "who benefits?”, we all do. Thus it all boils down to what values and vision we want to support. I close with the close of my book that summarizes this sense of values and vision:

        Viktor Frankl ended his book Man's Search for Meaning in this way:

        So, let us be alert--alert in a twofold sense:

               Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.
              Since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

        And so, the Minneapolis story calls us to be alert in a twofold sense as well:

          Since slavery, Jim Crow, Tulsa, Rosewood, Duluth,
          Hollman and August 2002 in Minneapolis,
          and the racism, violence, and White terrorism
          described in Interludes 2, 6, 9-15, we know what man is capable of.

          Since the Civil War, Dred Scott, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
          the land-takings and wealth-takings from Blacks,
          the attempts to bring Jim Crow back and the current problems in the inner cities
          in terms of education, housing, jobs, and equal access/opportunity,
          the Watts Riots of 1965, the urban riots of 1967, and the latest unrest in Minneapolis in 2002, we know what is at stake.


Ron hosts “Black Focus” on Channel 17, MTN-TV, Sundays, 5-6 pm. Formerly head of the Minneapolis Civil Rights Commission and the Urban League, he continues his “watchdog” role for Minneapolis. Order his book, hear his voice, read his solution papers, and read his between columns “web log” at www.TheMinneapolisStory.com.

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