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Discriminations-Minorit. Governments USA
By Derrick Z. Jackson
AMAZING AMNESIA. How sweet the white privilege. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, ’’Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." Right on time for the King holiday, America is elevating yet another man to lifetime power on the claim of sincere ignorance of his association with racism and sexism.
Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito was repeatedly asked in this week’s hearings about his membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. The group lasted from 1972, the year Alito graduated from Princeton, to the mid-1980s. The group whined in its writings that increased numbers of ’’women and minorities will largely vitiate the alumni body of the future."
In the dictionary, ’’vitiate" means, ’’1. To reduce the value or impair the quality; 2. To corrupt morally; 3. To make ineffective."
Alito claimed membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton when he applied for a promotion in the Reagan administration in 1985. Alito said, ’’I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."
There is no evidence Alito was active with the group. But his exploitive tie is a critical window into his mind that shatters all these claims of his intellectual honesty. In 1985, he used his membership in the group to boost his career with the right wing. This week, to assure his seat on the high court, he claimed he knew nothing about the group’s bigotry.
During the hearings, Alito said of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton:
’’I don’t remember this organization."
’’I have wracked my memory about this issue, and I really have no specific recollection of that organization." None of this is of consequence in a nation where President Bush won reelection on the strength of his white vote. It was a vote that thrived on ignorant fears, fears that allowed Bush to get away with an agenda that resulted in such things as going to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the attack on affirmative action, even though white women have always been its chief beneficiaries, and the assault on gay marriage despite absolutely no proof that it damages the values of our society.
The agenda is now almost complete. On a Capitol Hill with Bush’s Republican Party in charge, Alito will get his seat and the right wing will have its chance to reverse the gains of the King era, gains which were extended from black people to Latinos, to white women to gay and lesbian people, to the physically challenged. Alito will join the pantheon of modern white power brokers who continue to determine the laws of this country despite their flirtations with bigotry and romancing the segregated past.
In his convenient amnesia and his vigorous support of Ronald Reagan’s attempt to roll back rights, Alito mimics the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Rehnquist wrote in 1952 that the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision upholding segregation was ’’right and should be reaffirmed." He owned not one but two homes with restrictive covenants against selling them to black people or Jews. Yet he said in his 1986 confirmation hearings to be chief justice, ’’I simply can’t answer whether I read through the deed."
Alito’s memory loss mirrors that of Trent Lott, who is still a powerful Mississippi senator despite three speeches to the post-Klan Council of Concerned Citizens and despite claiming ’’no firsthand knowledge" of the group’s racism. It echoes John Ashcroft, Bush’s first attorney general, who praised Confederate leaders in the racist publication ’’Southern Partisan" and then claimed in his confirmation hearings, ’’I can’t say that I knew very much about the magazine."
Memory is irrelevant in a nation that accepts a president who spoke during the 2000 presidential campaign at Bob Jones University despite its nationally known racial and anti-Catholic bigotry. Bush defended his appearance until pressure from Catholics forced him to apologize to the late Cardinal John O’Connor. ’’On reflection I should have been more clear in disassociating myself from anti-Catholic sentiments and racial prejudice," Bush wrote.
Bush made it very clear what forces he wanted to associate with in 2003. The week before that King holiday, Bush threw the weight of the White House behind the white students who wanted to destroy affirmative action at the University of Michigan. Bush will soon have a Supreme Court that can kill it in all programs, along with a woman’s right to choose. No one can claim sincere ignorance about the vitiation of rights and the national division to follow.
Derrick Z. Jackson’s e-mail address is jackson@globe.com