Mark Bauerlein on BAMN

Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30), commented on the BAMN lawsuit I blogged about last week.

BAMN is trying to overturn a California law that bars the government from discriminating against and preferring individuals or groups based on race, sex, etc. Among other things, the group claims racial minorities have a constitutional right to preferential treatment. In “The Tortured Logic of BAMN,” Bauerlein notes BAMN’s obsession with the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly (“Stop Ward Connerly! Defend Affirmative Action & Integration!”).

The statement reflects BAMN’s fixation on Connerly, which is magnified on BAMN’s web page which bears the banner: “Stop Ward Connerly! Defend Affirmative Action & Integration!” (see here). Read more of BAMN’s statements and you see it’s a personal thing. Later on in the Chronicle article, George B. Washington, BAMN’s lead attorney in the effort, explains that the legal challenge isn’t aimed so much to change state law, but rather “to throw a wrench into campaigns on behalf of similar measures being mounted by the American Civil Rights Institute.”

That statement is Schmidt’s paraphrase of Washington’s claim. Two paragraphs later we get Washington’s own words on the tactic, and they’re worse: “The coalition needs to defeat Proposition 209, Mr. Washington said, because otherwise the American Civil Rights Institute is “going to go and play bully boy with minorities in states like Utah and Arizona.”

Think about that rhetoric. It sounds not like a serious legal mind at work, but rather a cheap politician taking lessons from Saul Alinsky, author of the famed Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. One of Alinsky’s tactics is “Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” That’s what Connerly has had to endure for more than a dozen years now, and one can only wonder at how he maintains the energy and composure to press on.

Logic tends to drive some to distraction, and they ignore or downplay far-reaching consequences. For instance, individual merit is a core American value. Everyone is equal before the law, and everyone is judged by his own merits and behavior, not by those of his group (black, white, male, female, etc.).

In the same vein, when an individual faces discrimination, his rights have been violated. He is to be compensated for the injustice, not his entire racial group. Government action that “benefits” certain racial groups can also be used to harm those same racial groups. That’s the danger of giving the government power to bestow favors based on race.

We must prohibit our government from discriminating against or preferring certain groups over others for any reason. Once upon a time, blacks wanted to be free of such restraints. A collective and dynamic forward motion released them from unjust race-based government action, but some blacks are determined to go backward.