Thursday, January 02, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Backstory: Content with their lack of character

By Michael Green

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream that someday African-Americans--indeed, all Americans--"will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Let us consider the content of some Americans' character:

¥ Senate Republicans presented their leader, Trent Lott, with his head on a platter. Lott got in trouble for endorsing Sen. Strom Thurmond's racist, segregationist presidential campaign of 1948. Nor did it help when the allegedly "liberal" media awakened from a decades-long slumber and, using material found by non-liberals, demonstrated Lott's long history of such thoughts and comments.

So, Lott's replacement is George W. Bush's favorite U.S. senator, Bill Frist of Tennessee, whose voting record resembles Lott's. And Frist's replacement running the GOP Senate campaign committee is Virginia's George Allen, whose living room featured a Confederate flag in honor of a cause dedicated to the proposition that owning human beings mattered more than loyalty to one's country. Why them? Because Republicans can't let African-Americans think Lott stands for their party.

Fair enough, but are Frist and Allen an improvement? They look less like grand wizards than Lott, but they moved up partly because, trying to save his job, Lott started talking about supporting affirmative action and other measures that might help minorities--in other words, compassionate conservatism, the phony phrase Bush used in campaigning in 2000.

Please repeat: Affirmative action is good, quotas are bad. A case now before the U.S. Supreme Court shows some universities rate an applicant's skin color above, say, writing ability. That's ridiculous. But ethnicity, gender and heritage merit consideration. Most Republicans disagree.

Reasonable people can and should differ reasonably. But will Democrats attack Republicans for their wholly cosmetic efforts to appeal to minorities? Will they criticize the Republicans, including Sen. John Ensign, who said that comments like Lott's would hurt their efforts to woo African-American voters--not that his comments reflected a problem in their souls? Or will Democrats continue to pursue suburban voters, some of whom left the cities because of their ethnic composition, and forget their base of ethnic voters who show signs of abandoning them? Will the "liberal" media watch both parties or return to counting J.Lo-Affleck sightings? That will depend on the content of their character.

¥ Almost as bad as thinking race doesn't matter is thinking that nothing else matters. Take Linda Howard. Please.

The university Board of Regents adopted Regent Steve Sisolak's proposed blanket apology for its bad behavior so that it could get on with its supposed reason for existence: governing our higher educational system. Howard voted for it.

The next day, Howard declared that she had no reason to apologize for requesting hundreds of personnel or student records from UNLV, including those of a student who called her an "idiot" in print and a fellow African-American elected official, County Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates, who holds a university job for which Howard applied. According to Howard, she deserves an apology as a victim of the racism of fellow board members and system officials.

Technically, Howard could request those files because no policy against it existed, and university system lawyers long have considered privacy worthless anyway. That doesn't mean she was right to do it.

Nor is she totally off-base in using racism as a defense. African-American (and Latino) politicians traditionally receive far more scrutiny than whites, and far more criticism if they are corrupt. It's unfair, but true. The problem is that any regent who does something inexplicable or inane has been criticized, including in this space.

The bigger problem is that Howard does her cause no good. She professes to be rightly concerned that minority students get a fair shake; not only is she a minority representing a district with many minorities in it, but all of us should be concerned about that. But she also should be concerned with whether Nevada's universities and community colleges get good students and teach them well, and whether they are well-respected institutions of higher learning. When she embarrasses herself, and seems to believe that race matters more than right and wrong, that hardly contributes to a good public image for herself or the system--or African-Americans.

Another problem is Howard's supporters. Several African-American political and educational leaders came to the meeting at which the apology was issued to defend Howard. Friends should be loyal to one another, but was the motivation friendship or race? It sounded more like the latter.

If Howard was singled out because she is African-American, does that mean other African-Americans consider her actions justifiable? If she and her supporters believe that, one shudders at what Dr. King would think of the content of their character.