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Jewish World Review/ September 29, 1998/9 Tishrei, 5759
Linda Chavez
Sosa and the race card
JUST IN CASE YOU THOUGHT this year's remarkable home-run contest between Mark
McGwire and Sammy Sosa was about baseball, think again. The race was a metaphor
for race -- at least, that's what no less an authority than ABC's Cokie Roberts implied
on the Sunday morning news show "This Week."
"I'm for Sammy Sosa," she said, "because, as my husband pointed out to me, the most
common name in baseball is Martinez, and I think that Sammy Sosa represents the
future of baseball -- and the future." So, let's get this straight: Cokie wanted Sammy to
hit more homers than Big Mac as some sort of portent of America's demographic
future?
Nonsense. But the usually sensible Roberts isn't the only person recently to make silly
pronouncements on the subject of race. Earlier this month, a presidential advisory
board recommended that a permanent Presidential Council on Race be established. To
do what? Why, continue our national obsession with race, of course.
So far, President Clinton hasn't adopted the idea. After all, we already have a U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights to study racial problems, not to mention an Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission to monitor employment discrimination, a Federal
Office of Contract Compliance Programs to enforce affirmative action in government
contracts, and an Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education and a Civil
Rights Division in the Justice Department to ensure compliance with non-discrimination
laws. Nonetheless, the president says he is committed to a continued national
"conversation" on race.
And if talking endlessly about race doesn't improve race relations, two distinguished
academics have a more concrete suggestion. In their new book, "The Shape of the
River," former Princeton President William Bowen and former Harvard President Derek
Bok argue that, for the foreseeable future, race should determine who gets into
America's elite colleges.
Bowen and Bok maintain that unless such schools admit blacks with lower grades and
test scores than their white or Asian classmates, few blacks could ever attend the
nation's most competitive colleges. They justify their proposal by citing evidence that
blacks who have been admitted to these schools in the past went on to earn more
professional and graduate degrees and more money over their lifetimes than did blacks
who attended less prestigious schools.
But, the same kind of preference programs that Bowen and Bok advocate for Ivy
League colleges also determine admission to most professional and graduate schools,
as well as hiring practices in most major corporations and lawfirms, which at least
partially explains the higher salaries and greater number of graduate degrees earned
by blacks who have attended elite universities.
Even if racial preferences confer real benefits on the recipients of those preferences, is
that a good reason to perpetuate them indefinitely? Will we really be better off as a
nation if we make race the deciding factor in choosing who gets into our best schools
or who gets hired after graduation? And how do we determine how many admission
slots or jobs to assign by race, or how much lower the qualifications we're willing to
accept so long as candidates meet our racial criteria?
Then there's the Sosa factor to consider. Since Sammy's fellow Hispanics are one of
the fastest growing groups in the country, we better begin reserving even more spaces
for this disadvantaged group. Hispanics already receive preferences in admission to
many schools and in awarding jobs and promotions, although they appear to 'need'
preferential treatment less since their qualifications are, on average, higher than blacks,
though lower than whites or Asians, according to available data.
But if skin color and strict proportionality are going to be our new guidelines, folks like
Bowen and Bok had better decide how large a piece of the educational and economic
pie they want to reserve for Latinos, too.
Of course, there is a better way -- as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa have
demonstrated all season. Neither man has made much of skin color during this
competition, and each talks of the other as if he were a brother. What they have taught
us by their example is a simple lesson: Make the best of your God-given talents by
hard work and perseverance. And, most importantly, keep your eye on the ball. The
rest will take care of
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6/10/98: We have a ways to go in the bilingual war
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1/28/98: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Politics Vs. Principle
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