Written December 12, 1992
The runners are milling around the starting line, stretching, limbering up. An official is explaining how the 100 meter race will be started. Let’s listen in.
“At my instruction you’ll take position at your marks and get set. Shortly thereafter I will fire the starting pistol. At that time, all African American and other minority runners will leave the starting blocks and begin their sprint. Once these runners have their head start, a second pistol shot will signal that non-minority runners may begin.
“As you know, this procedure is necessary to give minority competitors an equal opportunity to win. As President Lyndon Johnson said in 1965: ‘You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’
“This ‘Fair Start’ procedure is necessary to redress past injustices. Good luck and may the best man win.”
The above scenario is, of course, fictitious. Anyone foolish enough to suggest that Black athletes aren’t competitive would promptly be hooted out of town — and deservedly so. Blacks are, if anything, over-represented in sports.
Few people have dared to ask why. At any suggestion that Blacks might have a genetic advantage we have been assured that this is not so. “Hard work and dedication” we are told are the key to Black athletes’ success. Granting that this is so we then have to ask: Why is it that people who do not need a head start on the playing fields and in the stadiums of this country do need the head start provided by Affirmative Action in the schools, factories, offices and boardrooms of America?
The answer is simple: They don’t. The same Hard Work and Dedication which works so well in athletics will work equally well when applied to other endeavors. The problem is that Hard Work and Dedication is not applied to other endeavors with anything like the frequency we see in sports. Why not?
Because it is not necessary. Why invest long hours and hard work — “sweat equity” — when skin pigment will do as well? Who among us, given an objective, wouldn’t choose the easier way to accomplish that goal, rather than a more difficult and time-consuming method? You want into medical school? Well, you can either keep that grade point average up for years on end to qualify or you can have parents of the right ethnic background.
Is it merely an ironic cooincidence that the two areas where Blacks indisputably do well — entertainment and sports — are two of the only areas where Affirmative Action has not reared its ugly head? Not likely. It might be argued that Blacks have done well in sports because there was no Affirmative Action to hold them back.