One of the things that strikes me as interesting about the debates surrounding race is ... the multicultural context, by which I mean we don't just have whites and blacks in this country anymore. We have Hispanics. We have Asians. American Indians. Many groups with many different ancestral histories and competing claims. What multi-culturalism tries to do is to link these different groups — the non-white immigrants, the indigenous minorities, blacks, American Indians — and then add to those groups, groups like women, gay rights groups, and so on in a common cause against the white male oppressor.

Multi-culturalism assumes that these other groups have something in common; which is, that they are marginalized, they are outsiders, they are victims of discrimination. I think, however, that when you look more carefully at these other groups — forget about the white male oppressor for a moment. Just look at these other groups. You can divide the racial groups into two categories, indigenous minorities — primarily African Americans — and non-white immigrants ... from other countries. And what is interesting is that if you focus on these two groups, the immigrants and the indigenous minorities, you realize that they have two totally different perspectives on the American experience. One could loosely speak of an immigrant point of view and loosely again speak of an indigenous or perhaps even an African American point of view.

The immigrant point of view is: America works. America offers horizons of opportunity and possibility that you can't possibly get elsewhere. The immigrant's base of comparison is his own country. So the immigrant says, "Well, listen, if I am in India, they will pay me $2.00 a day to work. If McDonald's is willing to pay me $5.00 or $7.00 an hour, that's pretty good. This is a great opportunity. Let me put in overtime." The immigrant's point of view is an America full of possibility.

And yet we who are immigrants ... I am a first generation immigrant. I came to this country when I was 16.... The immigrants in this country are confronted by the leadership of indigenous minority groups who, in effect, say to us, "Dinesh, you're mistaken. America doesn't work. What you call the 'American Dream,' is, in fact, a cruel hoax. Just stick around a little while and you'll see that the hand of racism is going to keep you down." To which the immigrant replies, "What hand of racism?" We don't deny the existence of racism, but we deny its persuasiveness. "Show me where racism is preventing me from getting into the University of Michigan. Show me where it's preventing me from joining a law firm or getting a job or getting a loan. Show me where racism is keeping me down." And the answer is, "if you can't see it, if racism isn't obvious, if it isn't apparent, that's only because it has gone underground. If racism is not overt, it must be covert. But nevertheless, even covert, this institutional racism, this racism invisibly built up, built into the structures of our society, is keeping us down."

And so this is really the heart of the American debate. It doesn't even involve whites. It's really a debate among minorities about whether or not the American dream can work for us. It is to this question that I would like to now turn my attention for a moment.

Getting Your Fair Snare

Even if at a theoretical level we need affirmative action to fight discrimination, it's not obvious that affirmative action policies, as they are practiced, have anything to do with discrimination at all. At least not in any direct sense. So now let's step back and ask: why have them? Why are campuses around the country so upset about Proposition 209? Why are they so upset about the color blind idea? Why are they so threatened by it, and why are they complaining so bitterly that if affirmative action is not permitted, if color blindness becomes the governing principle, that the results would be terrible? They are pointing to a real problem, but the problem, I want to point out, does not have much to do with racism. So what is the problem?

Here is the problem as I see it. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement mobilized in opposition to what could be called the idea of nepotism. Nepotism is basically favoritism. Racism is one form of nepotism. It is basically favoritism on the basis of race. But there are other forms of favoritism. You can get favoritism because you are the boss's nephew. You can get favoritism because somebody just went to the same school as you did. But racism is one particular form of nepotism. Well, the Civil Rights Movement basically said, "We are against nepotism, and especially racial nepotism, and we are for merit." And so the original Civil Rights Movement said, "We want to be treated equally on the basis of race. And we believe that if you do this, if you have laws that treat people equally, then we believe that all groups in a sense would begin to see themselves advance and perhaps advance in comparable numbers."

I think what has happened in the last 25 years is that this assumption has become — has proven to be false. And what we are seeing, somewhat to our dismay — I admit it is not even an ideological problem, but it is an interesting social problem — is that merit — merit — produces much of the same inequality that racism used to produce. Think about that. Merit produces some of the same inequality that racism used to produce.... Everybody knows that merit produces inequality between individuals. If you put 10 guys on a straight line and ask them to run a hundred yards, they would never hit the finishing tape at the same time. You have individual differences. We all accept that.

Since merit is producing much of the inequality that racism used to produce, a lot of activists and Civil Rights leaders have come to the conclusion, I believe, that merit is the new form in which the old rac[ism] has manifest itself. They have come to believe quite confidently that merit itself is a kind of racist concept. That it embodies racist assumptions. And this is a very dangerous notion because America — the ideal of America and the ideal to which we who are immigrants are attracted — is the idea that in America, you can start at the bottom. But if you have the ability and the effort — you are willing to work hard — you can have the opportunity, based on your merit as an individual, to advance. And so the attack on merit as an idea is an attack on the American ideal itself....

It's not even an attack on American practice. Remember, the Civil Rights Movement was an attack on American practices that fell short of American ideals. What Martin Luther King said is "the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal. Well, why don't the laws treat them equally?" Practice was falling short of principle. I think what is a little bit worrisome about the debate now is that it actually challenges the principle of merit itself. And that's why you'll hear a lot of people say things like, "What is merit?" or "so-called merit?" with a wink and a nod — as if we all know that merit isn't really a fair [relay] race.

In Search Of ... Minorities

The interesting thing about this debate is that we've had, for a generation or so, these so-called affirmative action policies. I don't want to be too dogmatic about this. I think most Americans in the '60s were pretty supportive of these policies on the grounds that something needed to be done to break the back of the old segregation. Remember that affirmative action in this country was established initially for one group — blacks — to compensate and atone for and address a very specific series of historical crimes; slavery, segregation, and so on. No other group has been subjected to any comparable history. And so that was the original goal. Special preferences [for one group], for a particular, temporary — although unspecified — period.

But in the late '60s and early '70s, other groups essentially showed up. You'd have the Hispanic groups, the women's groups, the gay rights groups. And what they said is, "Hey, we are the new blacks. We are victims of discrimination, too. We demand to be given our space on the affirmative action band wagon."

If you look at history, you'll see that black leaders in the '60s said, "Hey, forget it. You have no comparable claim." But then a kind of second thought prevailed in which some activists said, "Look, as long as we blacks, who are 10 percent of the population, are asking for affirmative action, we are reliant upon the goodwill of whites. They are the majority. They have the power. It's up to them to give it or not. But if we let the Hispanics in (8 to 10 percent), if we let the women in (50 percent), if we let in all these groups — and share affirmative action benefits with them — we have a majority. We won't be reliant upon anybody's goodwill. We can vote to keep these preferences going on for pretty much as long as we want. Forever if need be."

So the decision to "admit" these other groups was ... a political calculation. And one could argue that it strengthened the political base for affirmative action, although, of course, it has greatly weakened the moral case for it.

Discrimination Goes Both Ways

It has greatly weakened the moral case for it because you have had such a promiscuous expansion of beneficiaries, that today you can an immigrant from Barbados or Bombay and you qualify for certain benefits that native-born Americans don't get. You can be the son or daughter of Jesse Jackson, who went to the private schools in the D.C. area, and you get a preference to go to the University of Michigan over the son of a white postman. No sane person can defend these preferences. And so I think, to be honest, the debate about affirmative action, intellectually, has pretty much ended. By "ended," I mean that there are very few people even making a bold, public defense of preferences. I found this when I wrote Illiberal Education. A lot of the administrators would really deny what they were doing. They wouldn't defend it. They wouldn't debate me on it.

I remember ... here at Georgetown Law School ... a young fellow, Timothy McGuire, was working in the admissions office and he noticed huge differences in the test scores of students admitted. And he wrote an article in the campus paper, saying, "There is a lot of discrimination based on race going on at Georgetown Law School." The dean said, "Oh, no. Oh, no. We don't discriminate." And people said, "Well, really, so how do you explain this?" And she said, "Well, see, we don't just take grades and test scores into account, we take into account other factors." So I wrote a letter to the dean and said, "I'd love to have a list of these other factors because whatever these other factors are, it is pretty obvious that no whites or Asians possess them. Because whites and Asians never get into Georgetown Law School with those scores." For a couple of years, the great disguise was denial that preferences were even being implemented.

One of the most interesting phenomena, people are saying, "Now that UCLA is — because of the regents' decision — applying a color blind admissions policy, the number of Hispanics has really gone down a lot." Well, that is a problem and it's worth discussing, but one of the interesting things that tells you is the degree of discrimination that was going on before. If a color blind policy has caused a number of Hispanics to go down from 300 to 40, then it shows you that 260 Hispanics for the last several years have essentially been admitted on a preferential basis. That's what the critics of affirmative action were saying all along. That's what the defenders of affirmative action were denying. They were saying, "Oh, no. We're just picking between comparable or equally- qualified applicants."

Forever and Ever, Amen

I remember I spoke at Philip's Exeter a couple of years ago, and I remember very clearly a student who came up to me — a young black student — who said to me, "You've been talking about affirmative action based upon disadvantage and so on." And he said, "Look, I am a beneficiary of affirmative action. I grew up in a poor family in the inner city in New York. I come from a single-parent family," and so on. He said, "I didn't have many opportunities in life. I am a success story of affirmative action." He says, "Maybe they gave me a break to get to Exeter, but I've taken advantage of it. I've got good grades. I've got good test scores. I'm, you know, vice- president of the student body. I've taken advantage of my opportunities. What's wrong with that?"

And I said to him, "There's nothing wrong with that. You are, indeed, a success story of affirmation action. But let me ask you this: This year or next year you're going to be applying to college. You want to go to Swarthmore, you want to go to Princeton, you want to go to Berkeley, well, let me ask you this. Do you think you deserve another preference to get into those colleges? In other words, you are studying here, one of the best prep schools in the country. You have lots of other students who are studying at public schools that cannot compare in terms of facilities and resources. You have taken advantages, you say, of the opportunities affirmative action gives you. So why would you now want another preference to get into college and another one to get into graduate school and another one to get a job and another one to get a promotion and another one to get a government contract? In other words, isn't there a point at which one has to say "enough"?

Second Class Students

One of the things that struck me as a student — and I saw this even before I was aware or familiar with the affirmative action policies — is the way in which these ideas play out beyond the admissions gate into the classroom and begin to affect the rhythm of life on campus and even what you study. I saw this in my own experience in this way: When I was a student at Dartmouth, I found — I would go into certain classes — American history most notably — and I realized, [as an immigrant from India] I don't know anything. Professors at a good school will walk into classroom and say, "Okay, today we are going to talk about the Federalist Papers. Madison's discussion of faction. Publius's view of book ten." If you think of it from my point of view, this was absolutely incredible. Who the heck was Publius? What were they talking about? Without the proper background; without the proper training, I was completely at sea in this classroom.

If you have an aggressive system of admissions preferences — for any reason — on a college campus, you, in a sense, create two student bodies. One student body that is in effect capable and able of keeping up the pace, and another student body that has the danger, the risk, the temptation, of falling behind.

If you are a student that is not well prepared ... and a professor walks in and says, "Okay, I want you ... to read Hamlet by Tuesday." Think about it. A lot of our public schools are not training young people to read — let alone reading Hamlet — let alone by Tuesday. So what happens is, if you are having problems reading Hamlet by Tuesday, it becomes very tempting to believe — very tempting — that the reason I'm having these problems is not because I'm not well enough prepared, but it is because Shakespeare was a white male. In other words, it becomes very tempting to believe that the problems are due to a kind of Eurocentric curriculum. That the racism that, in a sense, applies to the admissions policy, also continues into the rhythms of campus life.

The West Is Best

This drive against Western civilization, if you think about it, is a little bit silly. You could sit in a Paris cafe and within five minutes pick out all the Americans, black and white, in a moment. Americans are raised in a very homogenous common culture. People [ask] ... "is the melting pot still working?" You only have to go to an airport, look at a 65-year-old Indian woman with a dot on her forehead and a sari and she looks completely out of place in western civilization. But you only have to look at her five year old to realize that that little tyke is completely at home in western civilization. In other words, assimilation works very rapidly and quite unconsciously on people. And my point is this: what you are seeing, the attack on western civilization, is not driven by a desire to escape from the ideas of the west or find some alternative ideology.

It's interesting. A few years ago there was this massive search — the idea was, look, western civilization is racist and sexist and homophobic. Well, let's look at non-western cultures. Maybe we will find a better alternative to the bigotry of the west. And so our educated faculty friends began to look abroad. Looked at Asia. Looked at Africa. Latin America. What did they find? They found that these non-western cultures are pretty inhospitable to these very ideas. I mean, India has a caste system. Women can't drive.

When I was in high school, we were taught a proverb that went like this: "I ask the Burmese why, after centuries of following their men, the women are now walking in front. He pointed out that there are many unexploded land mines since the war." I tell you this half as a joke, but only half as a joke because it does convey a much broader sense of male superiority — a patriarchy, if you will — which very much is the universal norm.

Recently, I read an article about the Chinese government's long-standing program of administering shock treatment to avowed homosexuals. One government official in this article credited this practice with, "a high cure rate." Non-western cultures are pretty politically incorrect if you will. The important point is that the great books, the great ideas of non-western cultures often reflect these ideas. The Koran, [is considered] the great, spiritually-emancipating work for millions of Muslims, and yet it does have — we can't deny — some notion of male authority. The Indian classic Bhagavad Gita celebrates transcendental virtues. They are a rejection of what you would call western materialism, secularism and perhaps even separation of church and state.

Activists on our college campuses and our college professors and the deans have suddenly realized that the great works of non-western cultures reflect the ideology and even the prejudice of those cultures, and this is a real multicultural dilemma in our schools and universities. The teachers can't say, "Okay, we're gonna' teach you about non-western cultures, and we're gonna' denounce them for being even more racist and bigoted and retrograde than the west." This option, as you know, is politically impossible. Why? Because the non-western cultures are thought to be victims. They are victims of colonialism, of imperialism, of racism. And the whole idea behind multi-culturalism is to celebrate those cultures. To exalt them. To cherish them. To use them as inspirational role models to build the self-esteem of students on the campus. And so in reality, multi-culturalism cannot apply a critical lens to non-western cultures.

You have what can be called a double standard of multi- culturalism. While pretending to be interested in all cultures and pretending to apply a kind of uniform lens of curiosity about all — they say, "Why have mono-culturalism when you can have multi-culturalism. Many is better than one." But in fact, you have a double standard in which western civilization is essentially seen critically, and non-western cultures are essentially seen uncritically. Western civilization is defined by a series of crimes — racism, sexism, and so on — even though all those crimes are, in fact, universal....

The Real Enemy of Slavery

The historical irony is that the movement against these universal evils — the movement against slavery, the movement for the liberation of women — these emancipation movements are uniquely western, and they're uniquely western because they make unique claim to the western notion of equality. And the western notion of equality originated essentially in Christianity. Christianity posits that all men are created equal in the eyes of God. Originally that view was thought to apply only to the next world. It was thought to apply only in a spiritual equality. But what distinguished the early anti-slavery movements was that they said, "No, this equality is not just a spiritual equality in the next, it is a moral equality that should be respected politically. That no man has the right to be governed without his consent."

And so you see the case against slavery and the case for democracy are the same. In both, there is the same principle that no one has the right to govern us without our consent. And this is why the American founders understood from the very beginning the contradiction between the practice of slavery and principle of the Declaration of Independence. The Civil War was really nothing more than an acting out of that contradiction.

An Anthropologist, His Levis and a Camera

What can young people do? We live in quite an interesting and exciting world. We live in a world in which ... the world, the globe, is becoming more western.

[For] a century ... it looked like western power was under retreat.... Great conservative thinkers like James Burnam wrote a book in the middle of the century called The Suicide of the West. He said, "In 1890, the west controlled 90 percent of the real estate on the planet. Today we control about 40 percent. And at this rate, pretty soon we'll control nothing.... In a simple mathematical calculation, the power of the west is greatly declining."

All that has been turned around. With the collapse of Communism, you suddenly have the tremendous expansion of western ideas, and I think in some ways the west is at the peak of its historical influence, and that western influence today is transmitted not by force, but is transmitted voluntarily. I mean it's one thing to say, okay, we control these countries because we have supervisory armies that have essentially occupied them. It is another thing to say that you have countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America that essentially are writing letters to American companies saying, "Please relocate, please open branches here. The only path to prosperity for our country is to have foreign investment." Western civilization has in a sense advanced dramatically.

People who talk about cultural relativism, which culture is better and so on, can never explain two things. They can never explain immigration. See, immigration is a refutation of cultural relativism. The immigrant is making a decision to leave one country and go to another. Why would he do it if he didn't think that one country was better than another. He is making, with his feet, a very important decision. The second phenomenon is that you have a universal movement away from agrarian tribal societies toward modern societies. That movement is unstoppable. People who start by wearing wooden shoes and now wear leather shoes never want to go back to wearing wooden shoes.

I remember when I was growing up in India that we would have western anthropologists come visit the Indian villages and study tribal peoples and so on, and a tribal guy comes out of his hut, looks at the western anthropologist with his glasses, his camera, his jeans, his tent, and so on, and the peasant says, "Hey, I want your camera. I want your jeans." And the professor of anthropology from Yale says, "Oh, no. I'm not here to try to promote western values. I am here to study you. In fact, I think in many ways you are in a superior position to me. You are living in harmony with nature." And the tribal guys says, "Well, that's all very interesting, but can I still have your camera?"

Get Smart

On campus, I think the best thing that you can do — I would suggest two things. The most important thing is to get a very good education. Conservatives ... tend to be far more enthusiastic about advocating the reading the great books than actually reading them. I think it is important for us to plunge ourselves into the issues of the American founding. Why do we have a representative, and not a direct, democracy? We could, by technology, on every major question, have a random sample of Americans polled and do it that way. Why do we hire other guys — like Clinton — and ask them to decide for us? When you put it that way, you immediately see the great problems of the idea of representative democracy! [Laughter and applause]

A Clinton Aside

Claire Booth Luce said history will judge each president by one line. "Lincoln freed the slaves," "Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot." What can you say of Clinton? Think about it. Nothing. In a sense, he tried with the health care stuff and had he done it ... but he didn't do it. I say that Clinton has become the custodian — against his will — of the Reagan revolution.

The Clinton guys sit around apparently, talking about how they can find a place in history. It's kind of comical. Reagan never did that. In fact, Reagan once said he never cared about what history would think of him. He said, "all I want to do is turn around the economy, I want to defeat the Soviet Union, I want to restore a respect for traditional values and if I can do that, I don't care what the historians think." Clinton's a real contrast with Reagan in many important ways.

One of the things Clinton said at the beginning of his presidency was that he wants to have a university system and a cabinet and a government that looks like America. Right? I have only one problem with that. And it's with one word in that statement. It's the word looks. What's going on here and what Clinton is emphasizing, is a cosmetic diversity. Not a real diversity. Look at the Clinton cabinet. 75 percent are lawyers.... This is a very homogenous group. Very homogenous socially, culturally, professionally, even ideologically. It's claim to be representative of the great heterogeneity of America is clearly false.

Laugh a Little

In fighting these trends, the most important thing is to be well educated and to have a balanced sense of humor. Recognize that humor is a deadly weapon because, remember, you are in a weak position on the campus. You don't grade yourself. You are in classes where you are at the mercy of others. So what you want to do is not necessarily to be a kind of kamikaze, but rather to promote your ideas intelligently often by asking the kind of wry question that exposes the contradiction in somebody's else's argument.

Times Are Changing

I think the tide is very much with us. As Bob Dylan said, "You don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing." I'm not very old now, but it's amazing to me how much, in the short space of a decade or so, the political tide has shifted. No one could really have foreseen these developments. In fact, Reagan is one of the few people who did foresee many of them. But it has been a tremendous change.

We are coming back to a great — a very wise point that Martin Luther King once made.... He said what America is fundamentally about is ... equality of rights. He said, "Ultimately every man will have to write with his own hand the charter of his emancipation proclamation." What King was saying ... in the tradition of Lincoln ... is that the government can give you equality of rights under the law, but that's it. That's it. That's it. What you do with those rights and what you make of your destiny, that ultimately is up to you.