The Dead End of Racial Politics FINAL Edition

• Published in: The Washington post
• Main Author: William Bradford Reynolds
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, D.C WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post 18.12.1990
• ISSN: 0190-8286

Are we really astonished that a selection process grounded on racial favoritism has fostered simmering hostilities among those disfavored because of their skin color? Is it really so surprising that the relatively few who are chosen under a special minority program bristle at the suggestion that they are "affirmative action" employees? And what about the millions of Afro-Americans on whom the quota door slammed after admittance of the designated token representatives? Is their growing disenchantment with the one-dimensional racial politics of "affirmative action" really so incomprehensible? Whites can, of course, continue to pretend that they are meeting this responsibility by the imposition and implementation of "affirmative action" programs - using race to get beyond racism. But the reality is that - quite apart from the moral bankruptcy of so racist a policy - the increasing flood of immigrants to our shores ensures that what has been a most inhospitable experiment for most Afro-Americans through the 1970s and 1980s will be openly hostile to all of them in the 1990s as other sizable minority groups clamor with equal intensity for their claim to a proportionate share of the "affirmative action" pie. The politics of race has long since ceased to be a black-white engagement.