Days of Grace (24 page)

Thompson’s second objection was that the proposition endorsed standardized tests (SAT and ACT) that were culturally biased; in addition, they are hardly infallible at predicting later success, including academic success. “Cultural bias” is the phrase of choice for nationalistic blacks when their philosophy collides with the basic demands of education. If whites do better, then the tests must be culturally biased. No one raises this question when the children of poor immigrants from Southeast Asia outclass native-born Americans in scholastics. My own position is different from Thompson’s. Can one attribute a low test score to socioeconomic bias? Perhaps. Can one invoke cultural bias to explain a 700 SAT score? Ridiculous!

To Thompson’s first objection, that black athletes would be barred by the new standards, I asserted my belief that
any loss in numbers would be short-term. In response to the new standards, black youngsters would simply rise to the challenge and meet them. To the objection of cultural bias, I responded that Thompson could hardly come up with a credible alternative set of requirements that would yield a higher number of qualified entering black students. Did he really want an essay test, instead of the multiple-choice format of the SAT and ACT tests? Then, I told him—only half in jest—
no
black kid would get in, since the quality of writing among black students in general had become notoriously poor. As for John Chaney’s mantra that black kids “deserve a chance”—of course they do, I responded. Everyone deserves a chance. What Chaney’s plaintive cry reflects, however, is the obsession with entitlement that is rampant among young blacks. The idea that society owes them special favors for average efforts has taken root with a vengeance.

In my essay “Coddling Black Athletes,” I wrote:

The ethos of entitlement must be countered. I remember a distressing visit to Stamford High School in Connecticut, at the invitation of coaches there, to meet their varsity athletes at the time that “Prop 48” was being hotly debated. I asked the kids—many of them black, and most of them male—if they thought it fair that persons who performed weakly in academics should be given athletic scholarships. The response of every black male was that he was entitled to the scholarship, even if someone more qualified academically would be deprived of one. Not one suggested that athletes should be held to the same standards as nonathletes in competing for scholarships. They argued that they had spent endless time in training, that blacks had been discriminated against, and so on; it finally came down, however, to their sense of entitlement. On display was the increasingly dominant African American adolescent ethos of entitlement, of “You owe me,” which I consider monstrous. One can be sure that an adolescent with such an attitude will make no particular effort at scholastics. Why should he? His teacher (black
or
white) owes him a passing grade.

I can understand the argument that blacks should have been paid reparations for slavery and segregation. By an act of Congress, Japanese Americans interned during World War II received $20,000 per family for that injustice. Germany is still paying reparations to Jews through its relationship with the state of Israel. No one has paid black Americans anything. In 1666, my state, Virginia, codified the conversion of black indentured servants, with limited terms of servitude, into slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation came in 1863. In my time, no one has seriously pursued the idea of making awards to blacks for those centuries of slavery and segregation. We may indeed be entitled to something. But our sense of entitlement has been taken too far. One of the major tasks of my teachers as I grew up was to make sure that no black kid gave up the
struggle to do better because of despair in the face of segregation. We were taught that segregation counted for nothing against our duty to ourselves to work hard and do well. Our future, if we stayed in the South, was circumscribed by the “Sacred Six” list of jobs for blacks, serving blacks. By choosing one of these careers—physician, dentist, lawyer, teacher, minister, or mortician—one could even have a measure of prestige and prosperity. We nevertheless worked hard. Should we now give up because of an oppressive sense that we have not been compensated for historic wrongs done to us? Absolutely not.

The cult of entitlement is not limited to the poor. One Christmas not long ago, I was in the company of a close friend of mine, a successful doctor, and his son Bobby, who was himself a recent graduate of an elite private college and a renowned law school. African Americans all, we were guests in the sumptuous home of a nationally known television personality, also a black American. Our talk turned to affirmative action.

“Bobby,” I asked my friend’s son, “would you have accepted entrance into the law school under the rule of affirmative action, if your grades were not good enough for normal admission?”

“Yes, I would have,” he replied.

“Why? Affirmative action wasn’t meant for you, surely. You were born and brought up in luxury, with the best teachers and private schools from kindergarten on up. You’ve lived a charmed life.”

“As a black, I belong to a group that has been historically abused and discriminated against. I’m entitled to redress.”

“Is that your best argument?”

“Also, we need a greater ethnic diversity among lawyers, even if we don’t need more lawyers. And law-school entrance requirements are probably slanted to favor whites.”

“So you would accept affirmative action?”

“Yes, I would. Don’t you think I should?”

“No, Bobby. Philosophically, intellectually, I think affirmative action is just about indefensible.”

“Well, Arthur, all my friends think like me.”

“Yes, I know. We have a problem there. A serious problem.”

If American society had the strength to do what should be done to ensure that justice prevails for all, then affirmative action would be exposed for what it is: an insult to the people it is intended to help. What I and others want is an equal chance, under one set of rules, as on a tennis court. To be sure, while rules are different for different people, devices like affirmative action are needed to prevent explosions of anger. Practically, affirmative action is probably necessary. But I would not want to know that I received a job simply because I am black. Affirmative action tends to undermine the spirit of individual initiative. Such is human nature; why struggle to succeed when you can have something for nothing?

THE PROBLEM OF
leadership continues to plague black America. The very fact that we speak of “leaders” and “role models” as much as we do tells of our lack of power and organization. No reasonably coherent body of people would think in terms of “leaders” and “role models.” Jewish Americans, for example, do not have leaders and role models, as we define them, even though certain highly influential people are Jewish. But we depend on all sorts of blacks to be leaders and role models for the community. We even think of athletes and entertainers in this way; we see basketball players and pop singers as possible role models, when nothing could be further, in most cases, from their capacities.

We blacks look for leadership in men and women of such youth and inexperience, as well as poverty of education and character, that it is no wonder that we sometimes seem rudderless. One major reason for the ineffective record of Black Power was that the major exponents were young people—almost all of them young men—who had
few qualifications for leadership beyond bravery. Vision, learning, experience, the wisdom that age often brings were all generally lacking. We are also afflicted, it seems to me, with the Messiah complex, which is another sign that we as a people are wandering in the wilderness. I often think that if the blacks of Memphis had organized themselves properly, they would not have felt the need to send for Martin Luther King, Jr.—the Messiah—to help them with a local crisis involving garbage collectors. Then he would not have been killed, like a Messiah, doing what others should have done for themselves.

I must also confess, although I know I may offend some people, that I did not fully share their passion for Malcolm X. I was fascinated by his autobiography, but until his conversion following his pilgrimage to Mecca, I found him in other ways hard to accept. Having lived under white-imposed segregation, I was not about to deliver myself to the black-imposed segregation central to the Nation of Islam. I thought that his teachings on race (derived from the Nation of Islam), about blacks as the superior people and whites as mutant devils produced by the mad scientist Yacub, were preposterous. I admired Malcolm’s bravery and his determination to educate himself. I admired and still admire the self-help ethic of the Nation of Islam, and the emphasis on cleanliness and self-discipline. Sometimes I bought copies of the newspaper
Muhammad Speaks
, simply to find out what was going on, or what the Muslims thought was going on. But the “white devil” rhetoric made little sense to me. Nor was I completely impressed and convinced by the story of Malcolm’s conversion. “Malcolm,” I wanted to ask him, “do you mean to say that you had to go all the way to the Middle East and actually
see
some blond, blue-eyed Moslems before you would believe that some existed? I’ve met a few on my travels. I could have saved you the trip.”

The current passion for Malcolm has less to do with the actual Malcolm, admirable as he was in certain ways, and much more to do with both the hunger among our young
people for guidance and their capacity to grasp at straws, to fantasize about power and authority. We leave whole worthy sections of Malcolm’s character and creed untouched, such as his thirst for knowledge and his prolonged effort to educate himself; his self-discipline; his ability to grow. I think the Spike Lee motion picture, whatever one may think of it as cinematic art, gives a fairly rounded portrait of the man; and yet, in the world, Malcolm lives mainly as an embodiment of black rage at and defiance of whites, and Martin Luther King, Jr., seems to have few followers or admirers among those who admire Malcolm. It is as if King spoke only to whites, Malcolm only to blacks.

In any event, Malcolm was more than a cut above certain leaders today who talk militantly but who, compared to Malcolm, seem to have few genuine ideas or ideals, or the courage for which he was justly famous. In this category I would place New Yorkers such as the Reverend Al Sharpton and Professor Leonard Jeffries. Such men may mean well but need to be challenged. In my opinion, the key to such leaders is their instinct to build and maintain a power base that is usually small but also distinct and their very own. I am well aware that for such people, I hardly count. “I don’t give a damn,” I imagine them saying, “what Arthur Ashe or anyone else like him thinks. I must guard my power base.” To maintain that power base, the “leader” has to talk and act in a militant way, no matter what he actually thinks. Sharpton, in running in 1992 for the U.S. Senate (a distressing thought, were it not for the various white demagogues who have sat in the U.S. Senate, some no more qualified than Sharpton), has attempted to broaden his base; but his record is not encouraging, especially escapades such as his defense of the unhappy Tawana Brawley, who helped to polarize the state of New York along racial lines with an unlikely story of abduction and rape by white men. Jeffries, the chair for nineteen years of the Department of Black Studies at City College of the City University of New York, represents to me the almost complete subversion of an intellect by race. His blanket, pseudo-scientific attacks
on whites, and Jews in particular, are indefensible—and he himself has hardly defended them, since he has published virtually nothing of his own in his years as a professor at the college.

Whenever I visited my father in Virginia, we would usually watch the news on television together. Quite often, after listening to some black leader speak, Daddy would shake his head. “Now that don’t make any sense to me,” he would say. “Arthur, does that make any sense to you?” Often it didn’t; yet I had to assure my father that, semi-literate though he was, he hadn’t taken leave of his senses.

Worried about the quality of black leadership, a small group of well-to-do blacks, of which I was a member, some years ago met regularly in such resort settings as Hilton Head, South Carolina, and Miami. Each time, we paid the expenses of one prominent black politician to visit and talk with us. Among those who came were the former mayor of Atlanta Andrew Young, and Douglas Wilder when he was lieutenant-governor of Virginia. We wanted to stimulate an exchange of opinions among the leaders, because we found that many did not speak to one another but instead strove to protect their individual turfs. It was a tiny gesture, but I hope it helped.

Although Sharpton and others like him in the African American world gain the headlines, I am grateful for those other blacks who quietly prepare themselves to occupy positions of authority and to represent all of us in a morally responsible way. I refer to talented, farsighted blacks such as Andrew Young, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Douglas Wilder, the governor of Virginia; John Lewis, the former civil-rights worker, now a congressman from Georgia; Maxine Waters, the California congress-woman whose district includes many people tragically affected by the recent Los Angeles disturbances; Kurt Schmoke, the mayor of Baltimore; Maynard Jackson, the mayor of Atlanta; Willie Brown, the speaker of the California Assembly; Sharpe James, the mayor of Newark; and David Dinkins, the mayor of New York. Some, like my
friend David, may have made a few political mistakes; basically, however, they are all persons of integrity and ability.