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Posted on 09/06/2001 7:30:16 AM PDT by diotima

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 (UPI) -- Americans of all shades in the political spectrum, and conservatives in particular, are displaying a sort of grumpy satisfy action in the walkout of the U.S. delegation from the Durban farce. Well, I guess we should exclude figures like Jesse Jackson and the grievance industry that subsidizes him, but on the whole, the American public seems to be pleased that we, and our friends in Israel, are out of the circus.

That is a mistake. Jackson may be more showman than statesman, but he has a sure instinct for public relations. He senses that, to the world at large, and to some in this country, we look bad. He's right, although of course he doesn't know why. And the sad thing is that it didn't have to happen.

There is nothing wrong with the nations of the world meeting to discuss the policy of governments in the ancient and vexed matter of race, and the United States could and should have been a leader in such a conference. America is the most prominent multi-racial and multi-ethnic society in the world, and the one that has done the most to destroy legal and social discrimination. There is a good reason for that. We are a people of peoples, united on the basis of a civic creed, first stated in the Declaration of Independence. That creed not only affirms human equality before the law, but crucially grounds that affirmation in the gift of "the Creator." And for that reason, we are the hope of the world for achieving justice on principles of equity, utterly detached from race and ethnicity

Secretary of State Colin Powell should have brought a large, aggressive, and competent delegation to Durban. That delegation should have put our history, including our fight to overcome slavery, on the table. Lincoln was the obvious exemplar, and his use of the Founding Principles to fight the evil might have been the exemplary "Terrible Swift Sword," with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the whole Christian and Jewish leadership of the Civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s as exhibit number two.

That delegation should have exposed the lie that racism is largely white and European. It could have corrected the historical record by showing that Western political ideals and Judeo-Christian religious standards killed the beast of slavery in the modern era -- except, indeed, in non-Western regions, such as Africa and Asia, where its scattered brood may still be found hiding in the crevices. It could have pointed to the complicity of people of all races and creeds in the "peculiar institution," especially Muslims and collaborating blacks in the Africa of the age of exploration.

America's representatives could, and should, have contrasted the venal and fantastic schemes for selective slavery reparations with the immortal words of Lincoln's Second Inaugural. They could have pointed out that Americans believe the sins of the Fathers to have been washed clean in the blood shed at Gettysburg, by both sides, as Lincoln declared. And that U.S. delegation, headed by Powell, should have put before the world the vision of a perfectly equal and color-blind law, and an embrace of that vision in every American Heart as the American ideal and the political goal of the Bush Administration.
But there, alas, is the rub.

Powell, who would have headed such a vigorous presentation of the American Dream, is the most notorious of several apologists in this administration for the last remnant in this republic of race conscious law ... reparations-lite ... in short, for legal racial preferences under the guise of "affirmative action." And the president he serves has just authorized a Department of Justice brief defending such preferences in the landmark Adarand v. Mineta case, to be heard before the United States Supreme Court this fall.

You see, this fight is not over, even in America, and we have not, to this day, adopted the dictum of Justice Harlan in Plessy v. Ferguson: "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." And under this administration, there has been no sign, not one that we intend to do so. So it was, perhaps, convenient for the general and his staff to beat a retreat under a shower of anti-Semitic abuse from some place holders in a portion of the international community, and to have it appear that the only thing at stake was the never-ending hatred of some radical Moslems for Israel.

To stand up to such cacophony successfully, to turn the occasion into an American triumph in the court of world opinion, it would have been necessary for Powell and company to have embraced, at last -- at long, long, last -- the ideas and principles of the republic, something they are incapable of thinking, or saying, or doing.

(Dr. Richard Ferrier of Thomas Aquinas College is president of the Declaration Foundation, a non-profit organization chaired by former Republican presidential candidate Amb. Alan Keyes.). -- Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

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