Annie
Diamond Member
- Nov 22, 2003
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Damned if you do or don't. Larry Summers and women at Harvard...
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/wisseadvance.html
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/wisseadvance.html
...I see no reason to doubt Summerss sincerity; he usually says what he means and means what he says. Taking him at his word, then, I conclude that he was not sorry for having offended liberal orthodoxy; he was sorry, genuinely so, for having given some sort of offense to women, for sending them an unintended signal of discouragement. Having first done our sex the courtesy of treating us as peers, he was now determined to treat us as a victimized species. Henceforth, he would tailor his thoughts to the ability of women to bear the hearing of them.
Not only did the president apologize, he rolled out a six-point program that would make affirmative action for women a top priority in hiring and promotion at Harvard. To anyone who has followed the career of group preferences in America, the process at work here was depressingly familiar. First come the threatsin this case, the tearsof the designated victims; then come the anguished efforts of well-meaning liberals to alleviate the pain; then follows, inevitably, the stirring of further, unappeasable resentments. The person one pities is a person one may like but does not truly respect, writes John W. McWhorter, one of a number of courageous blacks who have seen through the misplaced charitable inclinations that lie behind the American regime of affirmative action, and the web of lies and crippling self-deceptions that ensues from it.
But the exploitability of liberal white guilt is as nothing compared with the exploitability of liberal male guilt. Through their accusations of bias, through their testimonies of suffering and of hurt feelings, the tenured women of Harvard vaulted to the top of the heap of the truly disadvantaged, including, it seems, in the eyes of the man they had laughably named as their chief oppressor....