Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

326 // THEODORE M. SHAW
ducers, and directors on the fifty top grossing motion pictures, forty percent of
the partners in leading law firms in New York and Washington, sixteen of
the top forty on the Forbes 400 and twenty-three percent of the total list, seven
and a half percent of senior executives of the nation's largest businesses, and thirteen
percent of executives under 40." Without begrudging one iota of these
extraordinary accomplishments, and with a keen sensitivity to the way in which
anti-semites and hatemongers may distort and manipulate the significance of
these statistics, it is nonetheless true that the relative empowerment positions of
the black and Jewish communities, and how that power is achieved, may inform
the substantive disputes between the two communities around affirmative action
and reclistricting in a way that sheds light on a fundamental change in that
relationship.
For Jews the idea of "meritocracy" works. And for Jews, the possibility of consistently
winning political support of non-Jews has meant that they have attained
significant representation in Congress and in other legislative bodies. For Jews in
the political process, coalition building is not just a possibility, it is the name of
the game. For African Americans, particularly in the South, the stubborn persistence
of racial polarization in the political process has meant that, with rare exceptions,
black candidates could not win political elections in majority white electoral
districts. Race remains the great American divide, and it simply affects
African Americans in a way which is not duplicated for any other group. 12
For African Americans, the notion of "meritocracy" is not sacrosanct, for experience
has shown them that regardless of merit, race has been an impediment to
opportunity. Moreover, structural inequality along racial fault lines exist from the
moment of birth, so that supposedly objective measures of merit and ability ultimately
reflect something other than who is truly deserving of opportunity.
Usually they reflect the benefits of privilege, in a self reifying process of unnatural
selection that becomes enshrined as "merit."
Thus Jews and African Americans come to the issue of affirmative action from
different experiences. Yet Jews' status as another minority group that has experienced
American discrimination means that the opposition of some Jews to
affirmative action has special resonance. Jews have been prominent among the
leading voices of American liberalism, and "liberals" have been important voices
on the issues of race. The Jewish experience with American discrimination
informs their views on affirmative action, particularly in the critical effort to
define it. The struggle over definition is, of course, half the battle. In the "linguistic
reductionism" that dominates current political discourse, its opponents
assert that affirmative action means "quotas." In the battle for public opinion they
know that if they can sell this "affirmative action equals quotas" argument, they
win.
The concept of quotas understandably elicits strong negative reaction from
some Jews. In the early part of this century, discrimination against Jews was open
and notorious. Many of the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities led