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Gates-Keepers To Racial Preference

Lurita Doan has a thing or two to tell Harvard, and she does it very well in her Los Angeles Times OpEd, ?On Race, Harvard Still Must Learn.?

Her father, Lucien Alexis Jr. (Harvard, 1942). Was the only black member of Harvard?s lacrosse team. When he and fellow team members arrived in Annapolis for a match with the Naval Academy in 1941, the Academy demanded that he be removed from the field, ?declaring that no midshipman would take the field with a colored man.?

Tempers boiled, and the Harvard lacrosse team prepared to forfeit the game. William J. Bingham, the university?s athletic director, intervened, ordering Harvard?s coach to send my father back to Cambridge. Harvard played the scheduled match.

This episode of discrimination provoked a controversy at the time, with scalding editorials, calls for investigation by the Senate, and much criticism of Harvard in the Harvard Crimson. As Ms. Doan writes,

Almost 70 years later, it?s clear that the Harvard-Navy lacrosse game of 1941 offered a near-perfect teachable moment for the cause of equality (a cause Harvard claimed to espouse) had the school so chosen. Early on, Harvard could have shattered the grip of racial hatred by standing firm. But Harvard didn?t seize the moment. Instead, it chose the easy path.

Now, in an argument that those on the left will find counter-intuitive or even odd, Ms. Doan sees history repeating itself in the Gates affair.

Harvard?s leaders, in 1941, were not ready to see the future. Nor are they today. From his statements in the days after his arrest, Gates seems locked in the past regarding race. His first reaction was to demand preferential treatment, see himself as a victim and see his arrest as ?the way a black man is treated in America.? The message he has sent is that what happened to him was purely about race, when we?re far beyond that.

If he looked around, he would discover that black men and women can and do compete equally at Harvard, and need no special protection, class or distinction. They achieve using intellect, hard work and perseverance. The world Gates inhabits, which prefers victimization and demands special treatment, is as wrong today as Harvard?s Jim Crowism was in 1941.

Obama?s ?teachable moment? could have done the nation a great service by denouncing race-based distinctions of any sort. After all, he wasn?t elected because he?s black, but because Americans thought he had the wisdom, temperament and ability to serve as president. Yet neither the president nor the professor has seized the moment to take bolder steps in a discourse on race.

Instead, we have a black president who insists that the state continue bestowing preferential treatment on people because they look like him.

Full post as published by Discriminations on August 02, 2009 (boomark / email).