Let's have some empathy for the lower class white guys

David Paul Kuhn, author of The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma, has a column today about how the Sotomayor nomination gives new emphasis to the case Ricci v. De Stefano highlights the issue of reverse discrimination. Frank Ricci, the dyslexic fireman who spent his own money to pay someone to read the books he needed to prepare for the promotion exam and then didn't get the promotion because New Haven was worried that no blacks had passed the exam is an example of a plaintiff who didn't earn the empathy of Sotomayor and her fellow judges. As Kuhn writes, while affirmative action might have made sense 40 years ago, it now has become an ossified notion that immediately assumes that all white males have a privilege and advantage that minorities and women can never hope to attain. Thus the logic of discriminating against them.

Ricci personalizes a policy that has been easily digested because it often involves statistics and not people. Now Obama and Democrats, as much as the high court, face the people harmed by that policy.

It was Obama who said in November 2007 that the Supreme Court should, "protect people who may be vulnerable in the political process" and "those who don't have a lot of clout."

Ricci personifies the vast majority of middle and working class white men who lack clout. This is at the heart of the brooding angst over affirmative action. The sense of dissatisfaction among these men is less that they were being blamed for past white men's ills, as Obama noted in his race speech, than the practical impact of opportunity lost.

Affirmative action skewed two generations of white men's sense of fairness. They came to believe that their gender and race worked against them. To many of these men affirmative action meant a domino effect of events hindering their ability to get into the right school, get the right job, earn more money and even, in their view, win a spouse. This is precisely how minorities often feel.

But liberals, and to an extent society at large, have long failed to sympathize with the white men who share this sense of struggle with the Sotomayors of the country.

Today, the divide of thought on affirmative action follows the divide on who benefits from the policy.

If you want to get a peek of how affirmative action has distorted our society, read Matt Labash's humorous, yet dismaying report on his visit to the Ninth Annual National Multicultural Business Conferenceas groups are trained to seek government contracts by hiring certain approved minorities in order to get those government set asides.

I take a cheese plate to a stand-up table and get down to networking with a guy in a loud Hawaiian shirt, who served in the Special Forces in Vietnam. He's Raymond Jardine of the subtly named Native Hawaiian Veterans LLC, which does not, as it might sound, run Pearl Harbor bus tours, but provides services such as setting up security systems for the State Department. "I'm Hawaiian, and I'm Cherokee," he tells me. "Actually, there's four total designations: 8(a), Small Disadvantaged Business Status, Service-Disabled Veteran Status, and uhhhh, what's the other one? Native status!"

In the "diversity-owned" small-business world, this is the equivalent of a mating call to companies of all sorts, looking to check off their subcontracting diversity blocks for everything from women to disabled-service veterans to every other imaginable minority. It's desirable in the private sector and even more so in the Beltway Bandit government-contracting sector, where lots of business comes in the form of set-asides, specifically designated quotas for these disadvantaged subgroups.

By "disadvantaged," I mean no disrespect. For that is the actual language of the Small Business Administration's 8(a) Business Development program, which equates minority status with having a handicap. To qualify for 8(a) status--what one federal procurement consultant calls the "golden ticket"--companies must prove themselves either socially or economically disadvantaged. And who are "socially disadvantaged individuals?" Well, pretty much every nonwhite person in America, according to the SBA.

It's not just the province of blacks, whom the program, born in the 1960s, was originally intended to help, nor just that of Hispanic or Native Americans. The roll call of SBA-designated sufferers has become rather long and grows ever longer, lately including persons with origins from Samoa, Brunei, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Macao, Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Bhutan, and the Maldives. "In the absence of evidence to the contrary," says the SBA, "individuals who are members" of these "designated groups are presumed to be socially disadvantaged."

But no worries, angry white male. Those who haven't had the advantage of being disadvantaged can also "claim social disadvantage." They just "must establish social disadvantage on the basis of a 'preponderence of evidence.' " This can come in the form of everything from job-application rejection letters to "contemporaneous records memorializing meetings." It explains why a white male former neighbor of mine, who does big construction contracts for the federal government in D.C., would brag to me that he made his female black secretary a business partner: Companies of all hues now seek to collect Rummy hands of disadvantage.

Especially as I had thought Jardine was repeating himself when he said he was both 8(a) and a Small Disadvantaged Business, which seemed a bit like calling yourself both fat and tubby. But the Small Business Administration assures me there are distinctions, they just neglected to clearly articulate what they are. According to the definitions on my DiversityBusiness.com glossary, a certified 8(a) firm is "owned and operated by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals and eligible to receive federal contracts" under the SBA's 8(a) Business Development Program. Whereas a Small Disadvantaged Business concern "is at least 51 percent unconditionally owned by one or more individuals who are both socially and economically disadvantaged." See the difference? Me neither. But as long as it represents more money for everyone from small businesses, to lawyers, to the consultants paid to figure this stuff out, nobody seems to mind.

Lewis Carroll couldn't have described a more topsy-turvy world. Read the whole thing. You will be slack-jawed at how distorted our world has become where everyone now seeks to claim victim status and the business opportunities that ensue if you can prove such a status. Remember, these groups gain advantages merely by belinging to one of these designated groups, not necessarily because they themselves have suffered a disadvantage.

In fact, with all these categories of being disadvantaged, perhaps Frank Ricci should have claimed victim status to get his promotion.