Saine,

I welcome your very interesting and exciting critique of my expressed
dissension on affirmative action and feminism. Sorry i couldn't respond
earlier. I shall make amends by going straight to your contentions and
addressing them - wherever possible.

Since your first demurrer was to look askance at what i contend to be a
liberal position on affirmative action and feminism, it seems to me where we
first differ is who is a liberal and what constitutes liberalism. It needs to
be emphatically stated here that the terms liberalism and liberal are terms
in dispute; not everyone agrees on who is a liberal and what constitutes
liberalism. To the extent that this might end up being the crux of our
differences, a breakdown of my position would help rather than further
complicate things. You were spot on when you detected that it is the eclectic
synthesis of different traditions in political philosophy that consitute my
own inchoate philosophy. My own position is unremittingly a conflation of
classical liberalism in the tradition of  Adam Smith, Hayek et al and Burkean
conservatism  reined in by Isaiah Berlin's scepticism and Popper's Critical
Rationalism. Let me pause to further delineate this rather unclear picture.
By classical liberalism, we refer to it to mean the old liberalism that
emphasizes limited government, the rule of the law, free markets,
redistribution  instead of egalitarianism and, of course, individual liberty.
Because of the internal contradictions inherent in being both a liberal and
an egalitarian, i have ceased being an egalitarian to tidy away such
contradictions, and we've replaced such a change of heart with redistribution
through progressive taxation to help the less fortunate in society who
invariably won't fare very well within the free market's "creative
destructive" tendencies. I feel compelled to add this subtext because the
position posited above is easily muddled with the libertarian one. Burkean
conservatism, however, and as the name seems to suggest, refers to Edmund
Burke's widely shared view that "social and cultural change must place
emphasis on the superior wisdom of institutions which have developed with
time; and a belief that changes should be based on reducing 'incohernces' in
current tradition and practices, which themselves supply hints about
adaptation to changing circumstances". We invoke Burkean conservatism, only
insofar as it will aid the surviveability of such traditions, practices and
institutions like the family and marriage. How does Isaiah Berlin's
scepticism and Popper's Critical Rationalism fit into this? Because of the
inevitable internal contradictions of such a highly eclectic synthesis, it
becomes also inevitable that some amount of tidying away will have to ensue
for us to make sense. Thus a conflation of Isaiah Berlin's scepticism and
Popper's Critical Rationalism will be the broom, dust pan and waste bin we
will employ to tidy whatever internal contradictions come up. Since this is a
very informal forum, i think it would be prudent not to delve too much into
the technicalities of my position and also to avoid a theory-laden prose so
others can feel free to join the fray; i shall leave the delineation of my
position as painted in the vignette above. Where clarifications are sought, i
shall endeavour to clear the clutter.

In your critique, you brought up the context of juxtaposing American
conservatism's decrying of affirmative action and the American liberal
defence of affirmative action. And in the process, observed that i shared
more with conservatives than with American liberals, even though i profess to
be a liberal. There is nothing mischievious in invoking such xenophobes like
Pat Buchanan and making comparative analysis. I happen to think that it was
very smart move on your part; even though it sent the wrong signals to cranks
to depict me as a Right wing xenophobe and fruitcake and thus the hate mails
came galore. This is not your fault. The smartness in this move is to isolate
criticality of affirmative action from current liberal thought and shelve it
to conservative domain. This managed for a while to besmirch my own
liberalism. Before i exorcize the devil you have ably injected into my
position, i will first make some general observations.

It is true that American conservatives like Bill Buckley, William J. Bennett,
Norman Podhoretz, Glenn Loury; Pat Buchanan and his crowd of xenophobic
freaks and extremists all use - more or less - similar arguments against
affirmative action. That, however, doesn't make criticality of affirmative
action a natural domain of conservativism. More to the point, two very
different peoples can raise the same questions about the same thing with
different intentions and aims. To further illustrate this i shall give an
example. Now, the ragtag fraternity of those opposed to free trade are
largely leftists of all shades and to some degree, protectionist xenophobes
like Pat Buchanan and his crowd of madness. Does this imply that opposition
to free trade must be abandoned by the left simply because it implicitly puts
the left in the same camp as a nasty piece of Right wing freak like Buchanan?
To press the point further, is it right to nullify the protest against free
trade by leftists simply because virtually all the rant and rave against the
multinational corporations and free trade are prima facie Buchananite
rhetoric, especially in his last book, 'A Republic not an Empire'? The point
is that two very different peoples can speak up against the same thing with
different intentions and aims. Similarly, my objections to or criticality of
affirmative action and feminism might be - more or less - the same charges
conservatives, very different in temperament from me, invoke but with
different intentions or aims. That should help in exorcizing the devil.

Perhaps, it is largely because of  you juxtaposing my objections to
affirmative action alongside that of American conservatism that is
responsible for you not to grant that liberalism should jettison affirmation
action on the grounds that it maligns equal worth and imperils liberty -
ideals sacrosanct to the liberal credo. For the purpose of clarity, i shall
now delve into why a liberal and liberalism - liberalism insofar as it is the
classical one and not the American one - ought to oppose affimative action
and feminism. I shall also state for the purpose of clarity why the liberal
critic's position has no truck with the conservative one insofar as
intentions and aims are concerned.

A liberal concerned with the Black man's plight in America will not commit
the conservative folly of being ahistorical about such a plight but will be
wise enough to take into account the history of subjugation that the Black
man was subjected to for more than three centuries. The liberal will
recognise that such historical abuses and its concomitant effects like
economic hardships, political disenfrachisement and social alienation. To
cure these ills, and integrate the Black man to the mainstream, will require
not only enshrining the civil liberties of all men into the nation's
constitution and guaranteeing them all the political, social and economic
liberties, hitherto thought to belong just to 'other' races only, but to
launch a radical social and economic investment of resources to the derelict
neighbourhoods, Districts, inner City slums, and towns where they have for
centuries been ghetto-ized. Such radical social and economic investments
would be on the same scale of FDR's New Deal liberalism that has changed
forever the social map of America by turning the country into arguably the
first upwardly mobile middle class country in recorded history. FDR's New
Deal managed in one majestic stroke to turn America's impoverished working
class populace after the devastating effects of the Great Depression, into
upwardly mobile emerging middle classes. Here, one pauses to tentatively
forward the thesis that had the Black man not been shackled by Jim Crow and
was treated as a full citizen in the same lenght as Jews, Poles, the Irish,
etc, FDR's New Deal would have arguably done more or less the same for them
as it did for Jews and other oppressed ethnic groups that did not feature
heavily in American national life then. Of course, i will grant that the
history of these groups in America don't share very similar strands of
oppression with the Black experience and the reason for their presence in
America are very dissimilar. It is true that Jews, Asians, Eastern Europeans,
the Irish, etc, etc, are largely economic migrants or escapees of political
oppression from elsewhere whilst the Black man was literally forced against
his will to come to America in the futherance of exploitation and tyranny.
Yet, one can still make the case that the New Deal because it will target and
indeed touch the poor more and not just the emerging upwardly mobile Black,
looks far more certain in helping to ameliorate the plight of the Black man
than a system that implicitly sets quotas on Blacks. Also because such a
Rooseveltian New Deal will seek to radically transform the wretched
ghetto-ized environs that Black folks have been segreagated to - as Jews,
Poles, Irish, Italians, Greeks, etc, faced similar fate - such transformation
will improve the health and education of Black folks to the point where they
can begin to embark on a process that will enhance their competetive-ness in
national life.

In contrast, what affirmative action does - as Harold Evans lamented in his
influential popular history of American history in the last century, 'The
American Century' - is to "enable the 'submerged tenth' to escape the ghetto,
those left behind have become more mired in intractable social pathologies.
And most black children still go to black schools in black neighbourhoods
where they are likely to get an inferior education." Meaning that whilst
affirmative action has pushed some "submerged tenth" of blacks in the
segregated impoverished ghettos to escape to the suburbs to become part of
America's middle classes, some 90% of those that remained in the ghettos are
to this very day, living lives that are reminiscent of the 1960s. This is not
to mention the incarcerated ones or those who are just waiting for Federal
and State statisticians to add them to their figures of social breakdown. The
reason for this is simple. By its very circumscribing nature, affirmative
action cannot conceivably cope with the plight of black folks. Affirmative
action simply is not enough. For people who endured centuries of oppression,
prescribing something that by its very nature restricts what form of aid or
"compensation" they are entitled to invariably will leave out more than it
ends up helping. True, as Evans points out again, it might be the case that
affirmative action was largely responsible for 30 years of Blacks' relative
stride in economic, political and social power and prestige whilst their
middle class base continues to expand and "there are now four times as many
black families with incomes of over $50,000 a year as there were in 1968".
Yet, what remains an incontrovertible fact is that whilst that "submerged
tenth" has fled to the suburbs thanks to affirmative action, those still
ghetto-ized in wretched communities have no other escape route save Rapping,
MCing, Boxing, R'n'Bing, and Sporting their way out of ghetto misery. This is
where the perversion of justice and equality lies. And it is the reverse
discrimination i refer to when i say reverse discrimination. For a system to
be created that saves a measly "submerged tenth" of a people at the expense
of those who really needed help is reverse discrimination and goes against
every liberal credo i hold sacrosanct. It maligns equality and imperils
liberty.

If an imitation of FDR's New Deal empirically stood a good chance of helping
more black folks out of misery than affirmative action ever is capable of
standing a chance, why then did American liberal elites settle merely for
just affirmative action? The reasons are somewhat murky but we shall attempt
to pinpoint some of them. Affirmative action was just a neat way of
copping-out of the dilemma faced by an American liberal elite that realised
that the plight of black folks has to be faced and dealt with but didn't
fully have the courage to take on a belligerent opposition from virulent
racist consituents like the vile South, which ironically was a Democrat turf
and Democrats happened then to be in power. Be that as it may, such spineless
cop-out by the liberal elite never prevented in landing conservatives the
prize of the South as a new territory and hence the whole 'Reagan Democrat'
configuration in US polliticking. Aside from the political fallout, there is
a very credible argument Evans forwards. Let him explain: "A better
alternative to the tokenism of preferences would have been a renewal of money
and programs to attack individual discrimination and raise all members of the
underclass. **But that would have been expensive, and it would have required
more determination, energy and unity of vision than liberals possessed**."
Emphasis mine.

Expensive? For three centuries of exploitation and oppression of black souls?
If such expensive programs like FDR's New Deal that required similar energy,
expense, unity and vision can be launched to alleviate others out of poverty
in the mid 1930s, what on earth should stop a country that has exacted so
much from black souls and has to this day given so less back, from extending
such largesse to that country's most exploited, oppressed and wretched
peoples? If German companies can be forced to compensate Jews who were
enslaved to work for German companies during the Nazi madness, what is
stopping those American institutions and corporations that made similar
exploitation of black souls from sending in their own reparation funds and
help bankroll a New Deal for black folks? Why not use these reparations to
launch a New Deal for black folks who to this very minute remain ghetto-ized?

As you can see for yourself now, this is irreducibly a classical liberal
position; a position your liberal friends in the American mainstream won't
have the stomach to add their imprints to because of its wider ramifications.
Conversely, Conservatives like Buckley, Buchanan, Podhoretz et al will go
livid if they are lobbied to add their imprints to such an agenda. That is
the classical liberal position. Race, ethnicity, gender and religion are
irrelevant. And under no circumstances would we opt for what would amount to
explicitly ending discrimination for one group only to end up launching other
discriminatory acts against other groups that pervert equality and justice
and imperil liberty. The New Deal i favour, does none of the above.

As it is, notwithstanding my opposition to any form of affirmative action for
any oppressed race, i will only call for it to be scrapped in America totally
in the event that it is to be replaced by an imitation of the Rooseveltian
New Deal that will genuinely help the poor that most need help and not just
the upwardly mobile emerging middle classes. This, it seems to me, is highly
unlikely to ever happen; and so i shall remain a critic and a dissenter
lamenting how through affirmative action, American liberal elites have
copped-out on black folks' plight. All my political instincts tell me that
sooner or later, political conservatives will finally bludgeon affirmation
action to death. Bush might not do it; but in my reckoning, because there is
such a huge popular white lower middle class and working class appeal to its
abolition, on the State levels, affirmative action might draw its final
breath in a decade or so. The tragedy would be that far from ameliorating the
plight of black folks and closing the yawning chasm between the black haves
and have-nots, there would be those still left in the ghettos to fend off for
themselves as the welfare State is rolled back further and all modicum of
State or Federal gov't generosity towards the poor and needy is further
curtailed by the advances of libertarian ideologues within the Republican
party as liberals surrender to assaults from the Right. This is not a
far-fetched estimation of things likely to chance in America in the 21st.
Century.

Similar objections apply to affirmative action for women. With women, the
largesse advocated for to be extended to black folks plight would be
undeserved for obvious reasons. None in his right frame of mine will
juxtapose the plight of black folks to that of women. As i said in my last
piece, we will just abolish all laws - statutory, customary or otherwise that
discriminate against women and make equal opportunities a feature of national
life. None shall be barred from active participation in national life because
of such irrelevant characteristics like gender, religion, race and ethnicity.
Again, such call for equal opportunities to be extended to all peoples of a
polity, has no truck whatsoever with affirmative action or reverse
discrimination. By equal opportunities, classical liberals mean by it to
refer to equal worth of ALL living in a polity in the eyes of the secular
liberal State, its institutions and laws.

Before i wrap this up, i will just add that my hostility towards feminism
runs deeper than my last piece allowed - especially the demented, perverted
and twisted feminism of the Andrea Dworkins of this world. I noticed that you
wished to shrug off the threat people like Dworkin pose to future male-female
relationship. I'm afraid Dworkin is crucial. She might be a sidelined
feminist crack-pot, but by Heavens she has done her share of damage in
male-female liaisions. See, as Keynes was astute enough to point out, the
heresies, heretics and radicals of today are the next decades' conventional
wisdom. After all, Milton Friedman was in the 1950s a widely derided heretic
but decades later virtually all he wrote on his monetarist approach on
economic management appear to be conventional wisdom. What you might wish to
shrug off as harmless today and unlikely to ever see the living daylights,
might just be the conventional wisdom your grand-daughter chants as her new
battle cry for freedom. What you and i regard as a perverted heresy today is
tomorrow's conventional wisdom. After all a millenium ago, it was a heresy to
argue for the enfranchisement of women but today, it is taken for granted.

To throw more light on the importance of radical feminist fanatics like
Dworkin, i shall narrate an anecdote that will tell how radical feminism is
helping to morally corrupt society into succumbing to its perverted
perception of sexuality and most importantly rape. Recently, there was a very
emotionally exceptional and moral perplexing case that involved two teenagers
- a boy and a girl in Bedfordshire. The boy at the time of the incident was
16 and the girl 15/16. Now, these two have been seeing each other for quite
awhile and it is not denied that it was a healthy burgeoning relationship.
The boy was commended by all who know him in his community for his selfless
communal voluntary activities especially working as a volunteer at his local
church without any history of yobbery or criminal record. Similar sentiments
can be expressed of the girl. Both come from stable stereotypical middle
class families. It is reported that one evening they went out on a date; that
after the end of the date, the two shared the usual neckings and smooches but
in this instance, things turned from the occasional and expected smooches and
neckings to something more passionate. The passion was such that the
self-restraint that was usually there to curtail them going beyond the normal
neckings and smooches finally ebbed slowly away as self-restraint gave into
passion and sexual act. The girl didn't object to the sexual advances and
tacitly consented to it. Her objection only came - according to the boy's
testimony - when it was too late for him to stop as he was in the process of
ejaculating and climaxing. I hasten to add that this was the first time for
both of them. Well, according to their testimonies anyway. On the basis of
this narration, the girl cried foul and the boy was charged with rape and
arraigned before magistrates. As i said earlier, this is not a very clear cut
case of rape and morally and emotionally very perplex. For this is one of
those issues that no amount of minutiae moralising and rationalising can
finesse to the point where everything is very clear cut and blames
appropriately apportioned. But the presiding judge decided to go ahead and
convicted the boy of the rape charges and his name was recommended to be put
permanently on the sex offenders register.

Since the judgement handed was largely based on the presiding judge's
discretion, one can only speculate on the profundity of the judgement handed
down. In my opinion, there is no doubt that Dworkin - who did much of
feminism's theorising on rape that: "Seduction is often difficult to
distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist bothers to buy a bottle of
wine" - has insidiously perverted the legal profession's sense of what
constitutes rape and consent in sexual acts and this judgement might just be
an affirmation of that. Never mind that when logically pursued this
perversion of Dworkin's can lead and indeed is susceptible to a perversion of
the basic legal definition of consent. Yet, such radical perversions of
sexual relationships and rape are now conventional wisdom because most men -
especially in the academia and the legal profession for obvious reasons -
under duress from the insurrection of the radicals have succumbed to this
view. As i write this, i wonder if we all literally agree with Dworkin's
premise, how many men a day commit rape? Consent in sexual relationships no
longer means what common sense attaches to it. Many thanks to Dworkin.  Oh,
and do tell that to Gloria Steinem - supposedly the moderates who in the very
end, rehash, repackage and regurgitate the radical ideas into languages
acceptable to their male allies without stripping them of their divisive
edges that invariably thrust wedges between the sexes.

As the cited rape case evinces, the peculiarity and sanctity of the
male-female sexual relationships is such that legalistic demarcation of
rights and any form of moral rationalising cannot explicitly or exactly state
which is which and what is what in male-female sexual relationships. Yet,
feminist subversive radicalism thinks otherwise. Moderate feminism might not
agree to everything on such subversion, but in the final analysis will
rehash, repackage and regurgitate the radicalism into moderation without
stripping it of its capacity to create more confusion and thrusts more wedges
between the different sexes.

Which finally brings me to something i've always privately debated with
myself: whether Clinton and Lewinsky's  sexual escapade - going by Dworkin's
definition of rape and consent which he Clinton, himself part and parcel of
the feminist movement's influential male radical allies certainly endorses -
is not actually rape? But reading some of the debates on this issue by
feminist writers in America - even if they agree with most of  Dworkin's
perverted position on sex, rape and consent - the sisterhood would have none
of it. Never mind the fact that had Clinton been a Republican freak or an
ordinary American male, he was at least culpable of sexual harrassment -
according to Dworkin's Laws on sex and consent. The sisterhood would have
none of it. The only complaint the sisters filed was how cheap Clinton's
choice of a sexual escapade is [calling Lewinsky such coarse and obscene
names like a "trailer trash tramp"] and that he is the victim of a "vast
Right wing conspiracy". Yeah, right. Clinton is special and an ally so the
rules have got to change. Don't get me wrong: i defended Clinton during that
period in an article to the Gambia's Daily Observer where i stated clearly
that what chanced between the two was private even if we privately don't
approve of it - morally. And since it was on the whole consensual -
discounting the seductive moves on the part of both - legally it was not an
impeachable offense.

 Saine, i hope you are not one of the feminist movement's male radical allies
in the universities who rehash, repackage and regurgitate their radical
material into a moderate language without stripping it of its divisive and
chaotic proclivities. I hope i have succeeded by being useful in providing
you a rethink on your commitment to the agenda of the feminist movement.
Saine, i remain convinced that the logical conclusion of feminism is not to
grant more and greater freedoms for women but to thrust more wedges between
men and women. This is why as long as there remains life in me, my hands
aren't enfeebled to the point where i can't lift a pen to write or even type
and the clarity of my thinking remains, i shall oppose feminism and all those
isms that malign equality, pervert justice and imperil individual liberty.

Finally, i thank you for your generous remarks and lucid expositions on
affirmative action and feminism - i gained enormous insights from them. I was
genuinely gladdened to read the take of someone who favours affirmative
action, an ally to the sisterhood and also living America on all these
controversial issues. Long may such fruitful exchanges continue between
Africans; for it is the marked signal that we are witnessing progressing.

All the best,

Hamjatta Kanteh

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