Atavism

I promised myself years ago to write a response to William A Henry’s 1994 book In Defense of Elitism. Phil recommended that I read it, so I promptly bought it. It then waited on a bookshelf for a year. I’ve read it twice, the most recent one recently. This post is not the self-promised response to the book as a whole but rather of a single paragraph. Henry’s finest paragraph lies almost hidden and unassuming within his most controversial chapter, “Affirmative Confusion” whose topic any any reasonable person can deduce. The paragraph is reproduced below (with all due respect to Henry and his publisher’s intellectual and property rights):

The error is in looking for a group basis, a categorical basis, for pride. One’s worth and self-regard ought to come from individual competitive performance, not from group identity. Pride based on clan or tribal connections is atavistic. It appeals to people who fear they cannot succeed as individuals, and by diverting their energies it all but ensures that they will will not succeed as individuals (91).

The chapter is obviously addressing American Affirmative-Action programs. Henry claims from his position of anti-egalitarianism that the AA programs play into group identity politics to the detriment of all involved. Blacks, he writes, will subsume individual responsibility to the quota system. That instead of studying, hard work, building social connections, and community service upon which one builds a platform for future (and continued) success, individual blacks will rely on the quota system to guarantee a position of employment. Whites, then, will notice less-qualified blacks working amongst the professional ranks and wonder why a double standard exists for excellence. The resulting tension pushes racial reconciliation even further down the timeline instead of the intended sooner. The pernicious, camouflaged land-mines of identity politics litter the ground on which American racial groups are destined to share. AA programs result in, according to Henry, an atavistic impulse amongst contemporary generations of Americans. People for whom the Civil War and Civil Rights are chapters in high school textbooks instead of lessons on social revolution experience present racial problems in a cognitive dissonance. In other words, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and whites reach backward, rummaging through history’s closet, and from their group’s narrative derive their individual attitude. White’s (rightly) say that neither their families nor themselves owned slaves, voted to segregate Asians along the coasts, or used Hispanic nannies. Blacks will reach back to conjure up the spirit of oppression -- none of which matters to Hispanics and Asians. Hispanics wonder aloud why blacks deserve special programs when Hispanics constitute a larger slice of the population and have that whole language barrier to work out. Asians, well, I don’t know enough about Asian-American culture positions to say (and frankly, neither does Henry). The atavistic impulse that Henry disdains is individual’s use of historic events on a racial/ethnic scale as rationale for present individual problems. In other words, the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves. If a black woman, Hispanic man, white man, Asian woman cannot qualify for professional and secure jobs, the applicant should not cast a net backwards to find explanations. The problem does not lie in the past but in the present. One’s resume is nearly all that matters in our time, not our excuses.