Word: mansfield
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Senate was to vote last week on spending $1.5 billion for construction of 21 more MX missiles, Ronald Reagan rode by motorcade from the White House to Capitol Hill for a climactic personal appeal on behalf of the controversial weapon. Meeting with Republican Senators over lunch in the Mansfield Room, the President pulled out a $5 bill to pay for his meal and quipped to Majority Leader Bob Dole, "Include...
...would have thought Prof Mansfield had rid himself of venom against affirmative action after his article in The National Reviewlast spring, where he exhibited his ignorance about American society when posing the following query: "How can (Blacks) be made into first-class citizens? But is it not evident that this question should be rephrased as. How can they make themselves into first-class citizens?" Now any serious student of American racist patterns and Afro-American life could tell Mansfield that Blacks have never lacked the will--yes, that rugged individualistic will that New Right analysts cherish so much...
...Mansfield'sand Murray's New Right perspective on affirmative action is also ill-informed about the American political process. For one thing, practices akin to affirmative action are not without precedent, past and present, in American social and political patterns. These might be called defacto affirmative action. Sometimes these practices--practices that modify and circumvent the so-called natural forces of the market place--are political, and at other times they take the form of "social power" and are thus covert or informally political. Since the Civil War, politics in American counties, cities, states and at the federal level have...
These instances suffice to illustrate the point that Mansfield and Murray and other New Right critics of affirmative action fail to grasp--that affirmative assistance, whether over or covert, has characterized important aspects of American social and political processes well before the evolution of contemporary affirmative action polices for Blacks. Hispanics, and women. While not usually declared as preferential practices for a given class of persons (though occupational and educational preferences for war veterans were and are so declared), what I call de facto affirmative action amounts to very much the same thing. And, like current practices, the de facto...
Affirmative action policy is the country's first major endeavor to enable Afro-Americans a fair bid for these ends. Mansfield's and Murray's talk about "patronizing" whites and "dependent" Blacks misses the point. What businessman or corporation gaining zoning benefits, tax benefits, massive loans, contract overruns, or what veteran gaining educational and job benefits, is immobilized and job better or worse, it just doesn't work this way in. American society. And I consider any suggestion by New Right writers that it should work this way for Blacks--but not for Blacks-but not for Irish, Polish, WASP...