[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 84 (Tuesday, June 17, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1221-E1222]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   THE FAILURE OF RACIAL PREFERENCES

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. CHRISTOPHER COX

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 17, 1997

  Mr. COX of California. Mr. Speaker, this past weekend, President 
Clinton delivered a speech in San Diego criticizing the people of 
California for enacting the California Civil Rights Initiative [CCRI]. 
The wisdom of CCRI in outlawing special preferences based solely on 
race, said Mr. Clinton, should be suppressed in favor of continued 
race-based classifications by our Government. The following essay, 
published in the New York Times the same weekend, describes why 
Californians--and Americans--are indeed wise to abhor Government-
mandated racial preferences.

                [From the New York Times, June 15, 1997]

                 Face the Failure of Racial Preferences

 (By Newt Gingrich and Ward Connerly; Newt Gingrich is Speaker of the 
  House of Representatives. Ward Connerly is chairman of the American 
     Civil Rights Institute and a University of California regent)

       In August 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave 
     heartfelt voice to his dream of

[[Page E1222]]

     a world where children are judged by the content of their 
     character rather than the color of their skin. A few months 
     later, in May 1964, President Lyndon Johnson told the 
     graduating class of the University of Michigan, ``The Great 
     Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to 
     enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents.''
       Unfortunately, three decades and $5.4 trillion of Federal 
     Government spending later, Dr. King's dream still remains 
     unfulfilled and nearly all of America knows that the Great 
     Society has become an expensive failed tribute to the 
     collective liberal imagination. Over the years, Federal 
     welfare programs for the poor were enacted that created and 
     sustained an illusion of activity but that, in reality, did 
     more harm than good.
       Even worse, a complicated set of Government rules and 
     regulations were developed in almost every area of life, the 
     intent of which was to eliminate discrimination. Yet the 
     cruel fact has been that Government has brought about nearly 
     as much discrimination as it has eliminated--just in a 
     different form--and has masked the very real problems that 
     still exist.
       President Clinton's speech on race yesterday in San Diego 
     was actually a missed opportunity to address these issues; 
     there was little indication that his advisory board on race 
     includes anyone who will critically examine the impact of 
     racial preferences on society. But more important, we wish he 
     could have laid out a plan for real education reform that 
     would produce genuine equality of opportunity for all.
       Let us take a look at the record. Welfare spending is more 
     than eight times what it was in 1965, adjusted for inflation, 
     and it's time to ask, What do our children have to show for 
     it? Well, for starters, over four million more of them are 
     now living in poverty--43 percent of all black children and 
     41 percent of all Hispanic children. Violent crime has 
     skyrocketed, especially in the inner cities.
       But for evidence of the Great Society's greatest failure, 
     look no further than the current state of public education 
     and President Clinton's politically expedient but totally 
     indefensible support for racially based ``Band-Aid'' 
     measures. Rather than face up to the catastrophic failure 
     of inner-city educational systems and deal honestly with 
     their essential problems, the President, like others 
     holding on to this failed system, refuses to reform a 
     system that fails morally as well as practically.
       Like so many whose political fortunes depend on unions and 
     bureaucracy, Mr. Clinton, sadly, refuses to acknowledge that 
     the ill-conceived education policies of the 1960's deserted 
     the children who needed help the most.
       The education bureaucracy won't concede that, despite 
     spending trillions of dollars on education over the past 30 
     years, American children are further behind today. It doesn't 
     want to admit that the S.A.T. scores of African-American 
     children, which average 100 points less than the scores of 
     white children, are the direct result of the current 
     policies. The National Education Association doesn't want to 
     bear the blame for the fact that 40 percent of all 9-year-
     olds can't meet basic literacy standards or that 66 percent 
     of African-American fourth graders fail national geography 
     standards. These are not racial inadequacies, they are 
     education inadequacies.
       Nor will the education bureaucracy admit that low-income 
     high school students are giving up on school in ever 
     increasing numbers. The fact is that disadvantaged children 
     are not receiving the ``knowledge to enrich their minds and 
     to enlarge their talents,'' as President Johnson promised. 
     Instead, many education and minority leaders cling to a 
     system of racial preferences using the diplomas of an 
     arbitrary few to paper over what has become a national human 
     catastrophe. For the sake of all our children, these people 
     must face the cold, hard truth: Every time we use racial 
     preference to effect change, it is proof that we have failed 
     a child somewhere.
       President Clinton refuses to face the core of the problem: 
     Money without reform will not educate our children. Look at 
     the spending in inner-city schools today. The District of 
     Columbia spends more money to educate its children than any 
     state in the country--more than $9,000 per student per year--
     and yet its children rank at or near the bottom of national 
     test scores. Something is very wrong with the schools of our 
     nation's capital; both the teachers and their students are 
     being shortchanged by a stagnant, uncaring educational 
     bureaucracy.
       Government-imposed quotas are no substitute for education 
     reform. Racial preferences may offer an illusory way out for 
     a few students, but sadly, the vast majority of children in 
     the inner cities are being deprived by their schools of the 
     opportunity to go to college. We've all seen recently the 
     dramatic drop in minority admissions to the University of 
     California at Berkeley and the University of Texas School of 
     Law, institutions that did away with race-based preferences. 
     This shamefully underscores how much race and race alone has 
     been used instead of merit in our halls of higher education.
       Supporters of preferences see those numbers as vindication 
     for their claims of racism in America; they are simply wrong. 
     The real villain in this 30-year morality play isn't bigotry 
     or the University of California Board of Regents or the 
     United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The 
     original affirmative action policies were indeed well-
     intentioned efforts to redress centuries of racial 
     discrimination. Yet they have been perverted over the years. 
     The racial preferences used in their name have been used as 
     masks to avoid real reform. They have become an excuse to 
     perpetuate an inner-city system to cheat those children most 
     in need out of a real future.
       Failing to save these children should cause shame to all 
     Americans. No one has chosen to help our underprivileged 
     develop their talents. No one has insisted they have schools 
     in which they can succeed. As a country, we all share that 
     shame, but the creation of a small minority professional 
     class through racial preferences to ease elitist guilt is an 
     unacceptable and unconscionable alternative. And applying 
     racial preferences to business practices is no better.
       Yet the education bureaucracy warns that ``radical'' reform 
     could harm children. It is difficult to imagine that any of 
     the education proposals being offered today could do any more 
     damage than the failed policies of the last 30 years.
       There are promising solutions: In the 104th Congress, for 
     the first time ever, a legitimate school voucher initiative 
     for the children of the District of Columbia was passed in 
     the House; there were enough votes to pass it in the Senate.
       Unfortunately, unions, resistant to change, prevented it 
     from coming to a vote. Representative Dick Armey of Texas, 
     the majority leader, has introduced a similar measure this 
     year. Is giving poor parents the same opportunity as wealthy 
     ones to send their children to the school of their choice a 
     risky venture?
       Is giving poor parents the opportunity to send their 
     children to a safe school truly dangerous or just threatening 
     to those dependent on the status quo? Is it harmful to the 
     future of our children to demand that they be able to read 
     before they are passed on, or do real standards bring too 
     many of the failures of the current bureaucratic system to 
     light? Does lowering the standards of graduate school 
     admissions for certain individuals really address inequality 
     of opportunity or simply give one group a place at the table 
     while trampling on the basic rights of another? Do we bring 
     the people of this country closer together when we reject one 
     of America's most basic principles--the notion that people 
     should be judged individually on merit, not collectively by 
     the color of their skin--or do we breed new resentment and 
     doubt?
       Education is the key to a productive, healthy citizenship. 
     But our system of racial preferences is the wrong door. The 
     failed Great Society policies have devastated and divided two 
     generations. We have seen how Government-imposed racial 
     preferences actually stand in the way of true educational 
     reform. The President must abandon the misguided belief that 
     our society should ever use discrimination to end 
     discrimination.

     

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