Harpooning a Liberal

A noted conservative describes how he relishes mixing it up with campus liberals.

HARPOONING LIBERALS IS A LOT OF fun. As a regular speaker and debater on the college campus, I am especially for- tunate to get paid to do it. My harpoon expeditions not only help to support my family, they also provide a service that is badly needed in academia today. Our campuses—and, alas, Dartmouth is no exception—have become quite monolithic intellectually. What better than a harpoon in the rear end to arouse a al from his dogmatic slumber?

The liberals love to talk diversity and celebrate diversity, but when they get a real dose of it, they often react with horror. I discovered this more than a decade ago when my first trade book, IlliberalEducation, was published. I vividly recall a talk I gave at Tufts University, where I was alarmed to see a group of students sitting in the front row in chains. These students, who were African-American males, had chained themselves to each other, and to their seats. I guess their point was that my criticisms of affirmative action amounted to a justification of oppression. Even before I started my lecture, the students noisily rattled their chains. At the time I was inexperienced in handling protesters, and I didn't know how I could possibly give my talk with all the noise. Nor was anyone from the administration in sight to establish any kind of order.

Fortunately I was saved by divine intervention. The controversy over my appearance had brought out a huge crowd, and there were students crowding the hallways and standing outside. So the organizers decided to move the lecture to a larger hall. As the crowd shifted to the new location, the protesters found themselves chained to their seats. "Where's the key?" one fellowyelled out.

Since then I have become a veteran in handling dissent. While I relish speaking and debating at left-wing campuses—some people consider it my specialty—I am less enthusiastic about speaking at campuses that are leftwing and lowbrow. I am thinking of campuses such as San Jose State or the University of South Florida. On these campuses there is a large contingent that is both radical and dumb, a lethal combination. These students listen to the facts I present, but they are too uninformed and inarticulate to rebut them. So they experience an inner rage. More than once I have had a student run shrieking from the room. Sometimes the students simply cover their ears or shout out obscenities. In away I sympathize with them: Their world view has come crashing down, and it is very painful for them to cope with this realization.

At more highbrow campuses the students demonstrate their opposition in subtler ways. In some cases, right as I begin my speech a student who is sitting in the front row will slowly and deliberately stand up, stretch out as if in an uncontrollable yawn and then pick up his backpack and slowly begin to walk out, obviously drawing the attention of everyone in the audience. This is a situation in which, as a speaker, I have to completely humiliate this student in order to defeat his distraction strategy and to win back the attention of the audience. There are several ways to do this. Usually I address the student, "Excuse me'.' ''He turns around; he doesn't expect me to do this. And then I say something like, "It's the third door on the right." And then, as if explaining the situation to the audience, "I realize that diarrhea can be a serious problem." There is a burst of laughter, the focus of the audience returns to me, and now I can go on with my speech.

The brightest opponents of my views don't resort to such tactics; rather, they try to outsmart the speaker. For example: "Mr. D'Souza, I appreciate your quotation from Orlando Patterson, but you have quoted him out of context." To this I reply, "Of course I have quoted him out of quotations are out of context. If I were to quote him in context, I would have to quote his entire book." Another condescending opener that I have heard several times is: "Mr. D'Souza, has it occurred to y0u..." followed by a line that I have heard a hundred times before, "...that you are a beneficiary of affirmative action? How, then, can you criticize it?"

When I hear a question such as this, I rub my chin, as if thinking deeply, before giving my ready answer. "I may have benefited from affirmative action. I didn't ask for it, but I may have received it. If I have, then my reaction is not to be pleased but ashamed. The reason is that it puts all my accomplishments into question. No matter what I achieve in life, there will always be someone to snicker and say: 'Well,yes, but he only got there through affirmative action.' And, look, it isn't some Ku Klux Klan guy saying that, it's liberals like you! So the premise of your question illustrates one of the ways in which racial preferences harm those of us who are minorities."

On more than one occasion I have been asked, "You have made some inter- esting points, but isn't it true thatyou can only say these things because you are not white?" I think I was expected to go into stuttering denial. Instead, I said, "Of course that is true. As a person of color I enjoy a kind of ethnic immunity, and that allows me to speak with much greater candor. If a white guy said the things that I say, he would be hounded off the podium! This shows the degree to which the race debate is rigged. Many people's opinions are excluded at the outset. My goal, therefore, is to use my ethnic immunity to raise the curtain on some of these taboo issues, and to expand the parameters of what it is permissible to say so that we can have an honest discussion that includes all parties."

One tactic that I have lately encountered on campus is students and professors who stand up and say to me, "How can you say that racism has declined? I am white, and I am a racist." When I first heard this, from a white female professor of education, I was dumbfounded. My amazement increased when the black students in the audience began to applaud the self-confessed racist. Then I realized why: Here was a white person corroborating their belief that America is a racist society.

How, I asked myself, should I respond to this weird self-incrimination? I decided to take an aggressive approach. "Well, you say that you are a racist and this is probably true. I am glad that you recognize it, and you want to make amends for it. So why don't you resign from this university and make room for a black or a Hispanic person? Why not give up your seat?" When the professor expressed reluctance, I continued, "Why are you hesitating? Come on, why not put some action behind your convictions? You remind me of the humorist who said during the Civil War: 'I have already given two cousins to the war, and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother!' In supporting racial preferences, you are happy to sacrifice other peoples careers to pay for your misdeeds."

This was enough to answer the female professor, but on another campus an elderly white male who had also proclaimed himself a racist continued the argument in this way: "But giving up my seat would be too easy," the cunning rogue said. "I want to stay at this university so that I can fight for affirmative action and for other forms of social justice. That is the best way for me to make amends."

"Let us imagine," I said, "that you have stolen furniture from someone else's house. You are in possession of stolen goods. Now the victim comes to you and says, 'I want my furniture back.' You refuse. The victim says, 'But it's my furniture.' You answer, 'But for me to give it back would be too easy. I am going to keep the furniture. But at the same time I am all in favor of laws against theft.' Wouldn't this be a ludicrous position to take?"

And so it goes. I am trying to give you a sense of what these arguments sound like.

What, then, is my objective? It is threefold: to inspire and invigorate the conservative students, who often feel besieged on the liberal campus; to flummox and bewilder the radical students, who are for the most part immune to persuasion; and to persuade the students in the political middle, who are usually the majority on any campus. If I can achieve these three goals, then my labors on the campus are fully justified.

"My objective is to inspire and invigorate the conservative students, who often feel besieged on the liberal campus."

DINESH D'SOUZA is the RishwainScholar at the Hoover Institution atStanford University. He can be reached atthedsouzas@aol.com.