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Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
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In "'The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas'" (JAH, March 2006), Anthony Chen documents a New York civil rights legislative dispute decades before the national debate. "Critics of fair employment," Chen writes, "found it useful to profess a strong belief in racial tolerance but continued to oppose FEP [fair employment practices] legislation on the grounds that it would promote preferential treatment, lead to racial quotas, and exacerbate racial divisions" (p. 1261). Chen presumes that "fair employment legislation" objectively describes FEP. And when Chen tendentiously labels FEP opponent State Senator Frederic Bontecou a "ringleader" (p. 1239), he undermines the incredulity animating his rhetorical question: "Since the bill mandated nondiscrimination, what was their [FEP opponents'] basis for expressing fear of quotas?"(ibid.). |
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"Ives-Quinn called strictly for equal treatment ...," Chen protests; "[it] epitomized a color-blind, individualized model of social regulation. Yet, it provoked much the same hue and cry as affirmative action would years afterward" (p. 1263). Yes, in 1945 Americans feared that a nominally color-blind model would transmogrify into a social engineering monstrosity. Did not later events vindicate them? Chen shows neither interest in this issue nor cognizance of Hugh Graham's The Civil Rights Era (1990), which shows how the eeoc (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) circumvented the 1964 Civil Rights Act's color-blind stipulations. |
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Chen cites Robert Moses, the powerful New York parks official, whom Senator Bontecou quoted in debate: [the proposed bill] "will inevitably lead to the establishment of what in European universities and institutions ... was ... the quota system under which Jews and other minorities were permitted only up to a fixed number proportionate to their percentage of the total population" (p. 1256). Given Europe's then-recent trauma, rooted in ethnic quota–fixation, Moses knew whereof he wrote. |
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Oddly, "Hitlerian rule of quotas" dies in Chen's title. In Europe the issue of ethnic over/under-representation was linked to "the Jewish Question." Even in the United States during the early twentieth century the elite was concerned about Ivy League admissions. Because poor Jews often outperformed wealthier gentiles, university administrations created "holistic" criteria to achieve gentile-friendly "diversity." (See Steven Farron's The Affirmative Action Hoax [2005] and, published later that year, Jerome Karabel's The Chosen.) Meanwhile, in Europe resentment erupted over ethnically disparate distributions of wealth, professional positions, etc., so some governments enacted affirmative action policies to "redress" the under-representation of Aryans and eventually attempted genocide against non-Aryans. (See both my "Affirmative Action and the Nazis" at http://www.anthonyflood.com/, 2003, and Steven Farron's "Prejudice Is Free, but Discrimination Has Costs," Journal of Libertarian Studies, Summer 2000.) Stalin's use of affirmative action to achieve diversity-celebrating (and leader-deifying) ends is also worth noting. (See my "From Communist Policy to Affirmative Action," Telos, Summer 1996.) |
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By the 1960s a new prey was targeted for legalized discrimination. (See my "White Male Privilege: A Social Construct for Political Oppression," Journal of Libertarian Studies, Winter 1998–1999.) Of course, if Chen favors racial balance, diversity, and other conceptual facilitators of legal discrimination, his oversights are no mystery. |
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| Hugh Murray
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| Milwaukee, Wisconsin |
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