Racial bias--explicit, implicit, conscious, or
unconscious--in U.S. universities and colleges is not a new subject. Race relations have been a heated,
controversial subject of research and discussion for decades. Since the 1960s, recommendations for
improving race relations have largely been unidirectional, favoring more and
larger government programs to assist the advancement of non-Whites in the broader
society and to compel non-Hispanic Whites to abide by stronger norms of
diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. These political and social policies have
accompanied the changing demographic composition of the United States, from an 88.7%
Non-Hispanic White Majority in 1970, to 72.4% in 2010, with projections to
55.5% in 2030, and Non-Hispanic Whites becoming a minority in the early 2040s
Universities have been the vanguard in defining and trying to document racial bias in America, and leading the efforts to expand government
involvement in higher education and society in general to reduce and eradicate it. Only a handful of scholars have argued that
government programs often exacerbate race relations. These scholars have been widely criticized or
dismissed by the vast majority of those favoring more government laws,
regulations and programs. (Take a look
at the notes and bibliographies of the recent spate of books on identity politics
and try to find references to Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, William Hutt,
and other authors documenting state repression of Blacks and other minorities.)
I encountered this reality as early as 1972. I was a visiting scholar at Stanford in 1971-72
as a fellow in the inaugural year of the National Fellows Program, now in its
37th year, at the Hoover Institution. Fresh off completing Race and Politics in Urban Malaya (Hoover Press, 1974), a revision
of my doctoral dissertation based on a year’s research in multi-racial Malaysia
(Malays, Chinese and Indians), I next drafted a short book entitled A Theory of Racial Harmony, based on
that experience and researching 20 other multi-ethnic/racial countries, resulting in publication of Politics
in Plural Societies: A Theory of
Democratic Instability. The
first two books are available as free download on my website, alvinrabushka.com.
I submitted the manuscript to Stanford University Press for
review and possible publication. Ordinarily
academic presses send manuscripts to experts in the field for review and
comments. In my case, the then Executive
Editor took matters into his own hand and returned the manuscript with a letter
dated May 18, 1972, without review.
After a paragraph of positive comments on style and clarity
of exposition, he turned to the substance of the book. Here he proffered a litany of charges against
my racial harmony hypothesis that governments often exacerbate, rather than
ameliorate, race relations and that racial harmony is better in conditions of
free markets and limited government: “the carriage breaking down; the
exposition begins to muddy up; the persuasiveness of the argument fades
markedly; tough propositions are dealt with too quickly,” and several others.
But his foremost charge was that my “thesis begins to look
like an argument for keeping them [he presumes we all know who “them” are] down on the farm,” and that my empirical examples were “anomalies and
anachronisms.” “You’re writing
economics, but you’re also writing about highly visible problems we all worry
about, and I’m afraid we remain confidently unconvinced.”
The manuscript, he stated, needed more real-world analysis,
but that would, he guessed, result in my thesis coming unglued. But this was his assertion, not that of
experts in the field.
I subsequently found a publisher willing to proceed with my
book, the University of South Carolina Press on behalf of the Institute of International Studies at the University of South
Carolina. Read it free online and judge
for yourself.
