[Editor’s Note: This message was received last night at 10 p.m.]
Dear Bill,
After a long afternoon of Diversity Training, I stumble out feeling thoroughly diversified. Although much of it was as silly as you might expect, I ended up thinking that forcing people who hire other people to spend half a day thinking about the value of diversity is a good idea. So call me a liberal.
And I may call you Bill. I agree with you, Bill, that differences in age are a valid justification for asymmetry of address: Student Joe to your Mr. Buckley. And I agree that certain older people have an aura of … authority? gravitas? something like that, which makes it very hard to go on a first-name basis even when invited to do so. In the case of one very distinguished Washington woman–oh heck, it’s Katharine Graham–this sometimes has the perverse result that people call her “Kay” to her face, but naturally revert to “Mrs. Graham” behind her back. Endicott Peabody, on the other hand, is a bad example, since there is no detectable first name there anyhow.
The military may also be a valid exception. But (my last crack at this) what about fellow civilian adults of about the same age or older? It seems to me that symmetry should be the rule. If you’re Mr. Buckley to your cleaning lady, she should be Mrs. Jones to you. But it’s a lot easier all around if you’re Bill and she’s Betty.
On to affirmative action. The problem with your position that private affirmative action is OK but government affirmative action isn’t is this: If you think it is wrong for the government to practice racial favoritism, then that surely includes the racial favoritism of forbidding private discrimination against blacks but allowing private discrimination against whites.
Presumably you agree that it should be illegal for a private university to maintain a scholarship fund open only to white people, or to have overt preferences for whites in admissions. (Or maybe I presume too much. Do you agree?) To treat the races (or, analogously, the sexes) equally, it must be illegal for even private universities to have a special scholarship fund or admissions preference program for minorities.
There are only two ways out of this dilemma. Wait, make that three. First, University of Chicago Law Professor Richard Epstein’s solution: Repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and legalize private racial discrimination in both directions, while the Constitution would continue to forbid racial discrimination by the government. Second, my solution: Admit that the situation is asymmetrical (that word again), and that a certain amount of discrimination in favor of historically oppressed groups is justifiable for both private enterprise and the government. Or third, bury your head in the sand, as most people on both sides of this argument do, and pretend that affirmative action as actually practiced (liberals) or as it might ideally be practiced (conservatives) does not amount to racial favoritism.
Your choice.
Best,
Mike
