HBD Books

Seeing the headline about Colin Powell defending Sotomayor reminded me of why I really dislike the man.  Here’s an excerpt from The Affirmative Action Hoax, pages 265-271.  

During President Clinton’s much publicized national dialogue on race, he confronted affirmative action critic Abigail Thernstrom with the question: “Do you favor the United States Army abolishing the program that produced Colin Powell?  Yes or No” (Lane 1997)

Ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom President Clinton singled out as the showpiece of affirmative action, provides a striking illustration of how it is reported and how it works.

The author continues by citing a book by Judith Ruth Harris that summarized the data on adoption studies and made the case for hereditarianism.  

Nevertheless, Harris argues (1998:251) that racial differences in intelligence are not completely genetic.  Her evidence that cultural background is also important is that among Blacks in the United States, “Jamaicans are academic achievers and they do very well indeed; their success stories are reminiscent of those of Jewish immigrants a generation earlier.”  The only source that she cited for Jamaican success was an article by Steve Roberts, “An American Tale: Colin Powell Is Only One Chapter in a Remarkable Immigrant Story,” in U.S. News and World Report of August 21, 1995 (pages 27-30).  Roberts began by informing his readers that “the experience of West Indian blacks in America” is “no less remarkable” than that of “Chinese or Jews.”  His proof was “Colin Powell’s  vast extended family.”  His niece “has a master’s degree from Tale…Powell’s son has a law degree from Georgetown.  Other cousins attended MIT, Brown, Berkeley, Howard and Columbia.”…

Roberts [didn't] mention that Colin Powell…himself owed his rise to Chief of Staff of the United States Army (and from there to Secretary of State) to his race…

As in other areas of American life, racial discrimination in the military is most transparent and quantifiable at universities.  A 1982 memorandum at the U.S. Air Force Academy, with the notation “for your eyes only,” listed cut-off scores of the combined Verbal-Math SAT for different races of applicants.  For Blacks, it was 520, (italics in original) which is in the lowest 1 percent  (italics added) of all test-takers.  For Hispanics and Native Americans, the cut-off score was somewhat higher.  The average combined Verbal+Math SAT score of all students admitted was 1240, in the upper 15 percent of all test-takers; for Whites, it must have been considerable higher.  (I believe that the author must’ve misunderstood his source.  It’s much more probable that blacks averaged 520 on each of the two parts of the SAT, giving them a combined score of 1040, which is still significantly less than the group average.  No way blacks scored at the first percentile.-Richard H.)

Graduates then form part of the pool of candidates from which as high a proportion of minorities as Whites must be promoted.

Colin Powell was a beneficiary of this process.  He was promoted to general in 1977 because the Secretary of the Army refused to sign the list of promotions of colonels to general unless Blacks were added to them.  In 1981, Powell’s commanding officer said that if the division ever had to go to war, he would request that Powell be replaced.  Charles Lane, who recorded (1997) these facts, noted, “Such a rating would ordinarily [i.e., if he were White] have meant an early end to Powell’s career.”

Powell, like Black multimillionaires Bill Cosby, O.J. Simpson, “Mr. T,” Patrick Ewing, Julius Erving, and Donal McHenry (the owner of the Philadelphia Coca-Cola bottling company), also helped himself to huge profits from a Federal Communications Commission program that allowed tax deferrals on the sale of broadcasting properties to “minority-led investor groups” (Thernstrom 1997: 443; Eastland 1996: 177-80).

(I will remind the reader that I am not the one who chose Colin Powell to exemplify the way Blacks achieve success in the United States or the virtues of affirmative action.)…

Opponents of affirmative action have also used Powell to illustrate what they claim is the principal evil of affirmative action.  Commentary of March 1998 (pages 18-57) asked twenty widely known participants in the affirmative action debate for their opinions (“Is Affirmative Action of the Way Out?  Should It Be?”).  One opponent of affirmative action, Midge Decter, dwelled (page 24) on President Clinton’s use of Colin Powell as the showpiece of affirmative action:

“How Colin Powell felt about being used as an example…I can guess…Deeply insulted and furious would be my bet, as any high-achieving Black must be at the possibility that his standing in the world is being chalked up to his having been given special consideration for the mere color of his skin.”

But she guessed wrong.  Powell supports affirmative action.  Ethan Bonner, in a typically laudatory review of The Shape of the River (a pro-affirmative action book-Richard H.) in the New York Times (“Study Strongly Supports Affirmative Action in Admissions to Elite Colleges” (September 9, 1998): B10), quoted Powell’s derisory comment about the supposed harm that affirmative action does to its recipients’ self-esteem: “Asked about the stigma that opponents say affirmative action imposes on blacks who attend these elite colleges, General Powell was dismissive.  ’I would tell black youngsters to…get one of those well-paying jobs [that they will get through affirmative action] to pay for all the therapy they’ll need to remove the stigma’.”

Powell exemplifies quite a few things I detest about American culture.  The first is the most obvious: incompetent blacks in high places playing the victim.  Second, the role of a black mascot for conservatives and liberals alike.  Clinton can use him as the case for affirmative action and conservatives who don’t want to be seen defending whites can instead worry about  AA’s effects on such an obviously (in their affirmative action minds) smart and qualified black.  What about Powell’s record makes him such a paradigm of competence that anybody can point to him as the symbol of all that is good and just?  Simply being a black man of national prominence who isn’t a religious nut (Alan Keys) or someone who speaks ebonics (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Allan Keys) seems enough.  Like Obama, Powell is as much a beneficiary of meta-affirmative action as the classical kind.  

Republicans' Black Best Friend

For conservatives he gets to be their black best friend who shows that they’r not racists.  For liberals, Powell is (like John McCain) a person whom they can point to as a Republican they like while getting points for praising a black man.  They don’t use Clarence Thomas for this because he’s a real conservative.  Powell, being a liberal with an ‘R’ after his name, fills the role of the righteous black man trying to save whites from their own bigotry.  

When Bush wanted to make the case for the Iraq war to a skeptical liberal media and international community, he knew he could trot out his virtuous black to make them swoon.  FAIR, a liberal advocacy group which pretends to work for “objectivity” in reporting, wrote about the press reaction to Powell’s pro-war presentation at the United Nations.  

In her Washington Post column the morning after Powell spoke, Mary McGrory proclaimed that “he persuaded me.” She wrote: “The cumulative effect was stunning.” And McGrory, a seasoned and dovish political observer, concluded: “I’m not ready for war yet. But Colin Powell has convinced me that it might be the only way to stop a fiend, and that if we do go, there is reason.”

 

In the same edition, Post columnist Richard Cohen shared his insight that Powell was utterly convincing: “The evidence he presented to the United Nations — some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail — had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise.”

 

Inches away, Post readers found Jim Hoagland’s column with this lead:

 

Colin Powell did more than present the world with a convincing and detailed X-ray of Iraq’s secret weapons and terrorism programs yesterday. He also exposed the enduring bad faith of several key members of the U.N. Security Council when it comes to Iraq and its “web of lies,” in Powell’s phrase.

 

Hoagland’s closing words sought to banish doubt: “To continue to say that the Bush administration has not made its case, you must now believe that Colin Powell lied in the most serious statement he will ever make, or was taken in by manufactured evidence. I don’t believe that. Today, neither should you.”

 

On the opposite page the morning after Powell’s momentous U.N. speech, a Washington Post editorial was figuratively on the same page as the Post columnists. Under the headline “Irrefutable,” the newspaper laid down its line for rationality: “After Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

 

Also smitten was the editorial board of the most influential U.S. newspaper leaning against the push for war. Hours after Powell finished his U.N. snow job, the New York Times published an editorial with a mollified tone — declaring that he “presented the United Nations and a global television audience yesterday with the most powerful case to date that Saddam Hussein stands in defiance of Security Council resolutions and has no intention of revealing or surrendering whatever unconventional weapons he may have.”

 

By sending Powell to address the Security Council, the Times claimed, President Bush “showed a wise concern for international opinion.” And the paper contended that “Mr. Powell’s presentation was all the more convincing because he dispensed with apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil and focused on shaping a sober, factual case against Mr. Hussein’s regime.”

Europeans remained skeptical, but Powell filled the role of popular black there too.  

After the war turned out poorly, Powell would come out against it.  Many liberals wrote about how disappointed they were that he didn’t speak out when his voice could’ve made a difference.  Scott Horton in Harper’s reports on Powell’s claim that he tried to talk Bush out of the war.  

Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces. “I tried to avoid this war,” Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.” Powell has become increasingly outspoken about the level of violence in Iraq, which he believes is in a state of civil war. “The civil war will ultimately be resolved by a test of arms,” he said. “It’s not going to be pretty to watch, but I don’t know any way to avoid it. It is happening now.”

Horton goes on to say “Colin Powell the secretary of state seems much like Colin Powell the soldier.  He took his orders and followed them.  But history will question why he did not do more.”  A white man who made the case for a war that he knew was wrong would have been judged much more harshly.  And he wouldn’t have had sympathetic crowds to whom he could parade his cowardice and careerism as wisdom and courage.