Looking back at my school years, attending majority-black public schools in L.A. during the early and mid-1980s, I’m not so much struck by the things I experienced, but by the things I did not. Not once did I encounter anything even remotely akin to the politically correct bullying that these days defines the black community. I was always the “funny kid.” I told Jew jokes, black jokes, Mexican jokes, gay jokes, etc. No one took offense because we were all in on it together, friends laughing among friends. In fall 1985, I gave a speech to the student body in which I parodied Martin Luther King Jr. Imagine the outcry if a white kid did that today. But in ’85, I received a standing ovation.
On graduation day in 1986, I met the father of one of my best friends, who I’ll call Eric. Eric had moved to L.A. from Virginia to live with his aspiring-musician brothers. I’d long heard about his father, a towering figure in Virginia “civil rights” politics, a crusading preacher with a gift for speechifying. Meeting him in person, he didn’t disappoint. He was tall and immaculately dressed, with a deep booming voice that made me think his car must carry a bumper sticker reading “Ask Me About My Oratory.”
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Later that day at the graduation party, he and I got to talking, and it wasn’t long before the conversation turned from small talk to race and politics. At some point, the topic of affirmative action came up. For as long as I can remember, affirmative action, with its racial quotas and “color over competence” mandate, was a policy about which I was inflexibly hostile. As a child, I rejoiced while watching Walter Cronkite dourly report on Allan Bakke’s Supreme Court victory (Bakke was the white guy who successfully…