During my grad school years, whilst teaching young students at a university in Washington, DC, I would sometimes bump up against a young (invariably white, male) conservative who expressed concern that only minorities could get good jobs, or get into good schools these days, because of affirmative action or less formal P.C. sentiments. I would generally raise an eyebrow an invite the whiner to take a walk down to Capitol Hill at quitting time and watch the folks walk to the subway. Capitol Hill was, and is, virtually brimming over with straight, white guys with thinning hair. Their interns were and are the young white boys and girls born to their law partners and golf buddies. In other words, the Hill was swarming with the beneficiaries of white affirmative action.
That bastion of the old white guy, The Wall Street Journal, takes note of this phenomenon today, astutely noting that now that Obama (a Black man, if you are colorblind and hadn't noticed) is poised to be president, he might very well be taking Black folks with him into the halls of power:
"For more than a decade, Mr. Obama has cultivated ties with a growing circle of black power brokers who are poised -- and eager -- to wield greater national influence. Some of these insiders stand to gain new status in an Obama administration, and many more in law firms, big corporations and on Wall Street. They believe that their proximity to the president-elect will burnish their reputations, much in the way that white elites always have leveraged connections in business and politics."
Well, duh.
I am not much for identity politics--I've been too disappointed by Jesse Jackson, Hillary Clinton and Condaleezza Rice to assume that any person with some oppressed status will rule more wisely than Ward Cleaver--but seeing some color on Capitol Hill is a welcome change anyway. For one thing, my African American daughters (and plenty of other children almost as fabulous as mine) will see people who look like them in positions of authority. This will be helpful as I groom my eldest to take her seat on the Supreme Court someday. But mainly, the more people and the more types of people sharing power in this country the more corners of the United States we will cover when we start making policies. Too often, leaders make policy that affects whole groups of people they have no familiarity with. Diversifying power means diversifying the perspectives and knowledge instrumental to leadership of a diverse country.
Image: Compromise of 1850 from britannica.com
