Black and white issues
Mike Marchand
Undistinguished Alumnus
No matter where we as Americans go, even in the brave new world that's followed Sept. 11, we're always hounded by one issue: race relations.
Don't believe me? The perfectly ordinary action of hiring a football coach nearly exploded into a race riot when the "Reverend" Jesse Jackson took time out of his busy schedule of knocking up secretaries and shaking down corporations for payoffs to lecture the Notre Dame about how it simply had to hire an African-American coach. In the end, we got the best guy we could, which was the goal all along. But since he just happens to be black, it was all of a sudden massively important that Notre Dame hired him.
Such idiocy is not limited to the Notre Dame bubble. In New York City, plans were underway to build a statue of the three firefighters who raised the American flag Iwo Jima-style over the ruins of the World Trade Center. But the statue was to be racially cleansed. The three bronze heroes were to be white, black, and Hispanic, when in reality, all three of the flag-raisers were white.
Some people ask here, "Why should this matter?" In some sense, it doesn't. There were black and Hispanic firefighters who died saving others in the World Trade Center, and it is right to remember their sacrifice. But the three men who raised the flag were real people, with real names: Billy Eisengrein, George Johnson and Dan McWilliams.
Changing their race is at best overzealous, out-of-control political correctness and at worst straight dishonesty, offensive to them and the FDNY victims of the attack. When the real Iwo Jima statue was built based on the video of the Marines raising the flag, nobody bothered to bleach the face of Ira Hayes, who was Native American. And this was in the time when the law of the South was Jim Crow.
But the attempt to alter ethnicities to satisfy some statue affirmative action plan is a dangerous trend. We all saw the picture of the flag-raisers on television and on magazine covers. Who noticed that they were white? Not very many of us. Heroes, definitely; firefighters, of course; New Yorkers, yeah, Americans first and last, but white?
Only someone so focused on race that it consumes their every opinion of culture singled out their race. And hence, they wanted to change it. The other 99.9 percent of us could care less if they were white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, male, female, young, old, straight, gay, Republican, Democrat or any other subset of our one American group of the human race. They already represented us. They didn't need to have their appearance changed to appease someone's sensibilities.
Look, I'm not knocking diversity. It's a wonderful thing. But who said that everything had to be diverse? Who believes that African-Americans can only have heroes who are African-American, or that Latinos can only have Latino heroes? What cockeyed thinking caused someone to look at that picture and say, "It's not a perfect moment — those guys are white!" and then set out to rewrite what really happened?
The problem is that there are two kinds of diversity advocates: those who support inclusiveness of minorities to what we already have, and those who support inclusiveness of minorities along with the changing or outright exclusion of the past. For example, offering classes of gender or African-American studies are commendable goals, and they fall under the first. But history books that devote more space to Malcolm X than Abraham Lincoln go too far.
Closer to home, Notre Dame was right to consider and then eventually hire Tyrone Willingham. But the idea that Notre Dame was somehow a racist institution if they didn't, as expressed by some sports journalists and race relation "experts," crosses the line.
And remembering the sacrifices of the minority members of the NYPD, FDNY, and PANY/NJ is of course, a valuable idea. But commissioning a memorial statue that does so at the expense of history and the real people involved, serves only as a monument to knee-jerk political correctness.
Thankfully, the statue plan was scrapped after vocal criticism. But if we truly lived in a colorblind society, the idea would have never reached the planning stage. And just because that one example of ethnic shading was stopped doesn't mean that the belief is still out there, waiting for another chance to ruin a moment of unity and force us all to think in terms of black and white.
Mike Marchand, class of 2001, is a contributor to RealClearPolitics and The Politix Group. He loves his large army surplus jacket, does not consider himself more conservative than Jesse Helms, and is in fact 21-years old. His e-mail address is Marchand.3@nd.edu. "Undistinguished Alumnus" appears every other Monday.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Monday, January 28, 2002
