Affirmative action is settling down in our constitutional polity like a determined guest seeking to establish squatter’s rights. Though the issue is far from settled, controversy has subsided. The Supreme Court has pronounced indecisively on several occasions and in several voices. The Democratic Party, trying to exist on a faded and confused memory of itself, has lost its early enthusiasm for affirmative action, but remains “committed” to it in the routine sense of that word—stuck with it. And the Reagan Administration, elected in a spirit hostile to affirmative action, has found it necessary, or merely convenient, to tolerate it, even to truckle to it.
Former Interior Secretary James Watt’s fatal remark about a coal-leasing board he himself had appointed (“a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple”) helped to bring the Administration’s attitude to public attention. Secretary Watt should have been ashamed of himself, and perhaps under his boastful cynicism he was. But, in the usual manner of shame, he seemed to put the blame on others, on the groups clamoring for such treatment. To supporters of affirmative action, this was “insensitive,” and insulting. Secretary Watt should have appointed the same people, minus the Jews, but without saying why. He should have known that to state the true purpose of his appointments was to render them useless for that purpose. He should have known that affirmative action works only when it is concealed and lied about. He should have known that, because everyone knows it; the concealment and the lies are all the more necessary because everyone knows the truth.
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