LARRY BIRD AND THE BLACK MAN'S DISEASE Larry Joe Bird has announced his retirement from basketball. And the debates have already begun: Just how great is Bird? Bird was said to have "white man's disease" - can't jump. Now he must also suffer from what we might call "black man's disease" -- you don't know how good you are because you may be getting a break from "affirmative action." The Detroit Pistons' Dennis Rodman called Bird "overrated." And Isaiah Thomas chimed in that though Bird was "very, very good," he concluded that "If Bird was black, he'd be just another good guy." Of course that was right after Bird's Celtics beat the Pistons in their 1987 NBA playoff series. But even a guy as sure of himself as Larry Bird has to wonder: Is it true? Has the white-dominated media given me more than I deserved? African-Americans suffer massively from black man's disease. Walter Massey heads up the National Science Foundation. Before that he was Vice-President for Research at Argonne National Laboratory, part of the University of Chicago -- a PhD in physics, and I read that he has been a very good and productive scientist. But Massey has suffered from the black man's disease. About his younger days he said: "The most difficult thing about being a black anything...was that it was hard to tell how good you were." If a black did move up, "there was the temptation to attribute it to affirmative action." Nowadays Massey must wonder: Would I have gotten the top job at NSF if I were white? That must take a little bit away from a well-deserved sense of satisfaction for the results of his hard work and dedication, just as for Bird. Hispanics suffer, too. Migdia Chinea-Varela writes a "My Turn" in Newsweek asking "Am I being picked for my writing abili- ty or to fulfill a quota? Am I a writer, or am I just a minority writer?" The malady hurts in another way, too. A New Yorker wrote that during the 1930s, if you wanted electrical work or plumbing or auto mechanicking done well and cheap, you found yourself a Negro to do the job. That way you could get quality work below the market price. Nowadays, people don't think that way. Instead, many whites figure that African-Americans must be inferior or else they would not need special assistance in get- ting contracts or finding jobs. Few whites think that "equal opportunity" programs simply even up for discrimination. They point to university programs where blacks are admitted with lower scores, and then naturally get poorer grades. That means that the blacks who graduate are likely to be less capable than whites who get the same degrees. Who wants to go for a transplant to a heart surgeon who might not have been qualified to get into medical school? One reason that Jewish physicians were long thought to be particular- ly skillful is because the medical schools discriminated against them. We're talking facts now, facts as true as the process of science can produce. These are facts as true as that the average black baseball player on a major-league roster in the early days was a better player than the average white player on the same roster. If you doubt it, read Hank Aaron's autobiography, I Had a Hammer. [People should be judged as individuals, you tell me. Sure. But show me a human being and I'll show you someone who judges people by categories. A black looks at a white player and says "Can't jump." Though Dick Fosbury set the high jump record, it makes sense to think that way, doesn't it? And a white -- or a black taxi driver -- sees a young black male on the street and says, "Watch out." Who is to say that a prudent person should not worry about crime, given the statistics?] [Lots of the judgments we make about groups of people are false. I'll bet that when all is said and done, it turns out that there are zero inherent intellectual differences among the races. But the prevalence of false judgments does not mean that we should deny the true ones.] [Shelby Steele's The Content of Our Character and in Stephen Carter's Affirmative Action Baby both lament the black men's disease, and prefer that affirmative action programs be scrapped.] [Taking pride in our work and accomplishments is vitally important for most of us. Steele and Carter tell us that affirm- ative action robs them of some of this satisfaction and joy.] I am not saying that we should get rid of affirmative action programs because there is no discrimination. Of course discrimi- nation is important. Rather, I'm saying that special advantage is worse than not having such programs. People don't respect you, and you don't respect yourself, if you don't have to meet the same standards as everyone else. (And affirmative action detracts from the spirit of America as a country of equal treat- ment under the law.) Black leaders who call for continuation of affirmative action are selling out their birthright of human dignity. It does not matter whether they are doing it because they misjudge the situation, or whether they do it because trying to get spe- cial advantage -- which certainly benefits themselves even if it does not help their constituency -- is as natural as rolling off a log for public leaders today. The important thing is that these programs hurt blacks more than they help. [Blacks don't even get the benefits that setaside programs promise. Too often whites use blacks as fronts and rake in most of the profits. This happens in the purchase of television stations, cable television systems, Wedtech and other small business operations, and everyplace else that there are "minority" set asides or subsidies. That doesn't raise whites' opinions of blacks very much, either.] The most painful thing about the minority assistance pro- grams is that for so many decades the greatest hurt to blacks was that whites considered them inferior. And now they support programs which are founded on the supposition that they are indeed inferior. * * * Julian Simon, adjunct scholar at Cato Institute, teaches business administration at the University of Maryland, and is the author of The Ultimate Resource and Population Matters: People, Resources, Environment, and Immigration. Word count 1123 \article2\birdlary August 20, 1992 from 88-128 Williams 4/26/8 page 1/article2 birdlary/August 21, 1992 Charley Quick. DuBois. It's a good news-bad news story with my friend Walter Williams, the columnist and economist. The good news is that I read column after column and laugh, or file it for future use, or say to myself "right on." The bad news is that I figure Walter's columns must be written by a white man. Bird truly suffers from what may be a real malady - the white man's disease: can't jump. Walter Williams knows what bad news this is, both from the point of view of the way the whites see blacks and the way that blacks see themselves. Economists have a concept "revealed preference." They estimate how much a life is worth implicitly to a hospital by the amounts that are necessary to spend to save an additional life. These minority assistance programs give us the revealed price of pride. There must be a lot of proud blacks out there who would like to say to these offers, "You know where you can stick it." page 2/article2 birdlary/August 21, 1992 References: Chinea-Varela, Migdia, "My Life as a `Twofer,'" in Newsweek, "My Turn," December 26, 1988, p. 10. "Walter Massey On Being A Black Scientist," (The AAAS Ob- server Interview), The AAAS Observer, Supplement to Science 4 November 1988 No. 2, p. 8-9. Wilbon, Michael, "Conceit, Passion, Artistry," in The Wash- ington Post, August 19, 1992, p. D3. Sell, Dave, "Pistons' Rodman Is Adjusting To Life in the NBA Fast Lane," in The Washington Post, May 8, 1988, p. C4. Brown, Robert, "Forgetting Isn't the Answer," in Letters to the Editor, The Washington Post, May 5, 1988, p. A22. page 3/article2 birdlary/August 21, 1992