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Define "Needy"

In his Insights column of November 14 Joe Sullivan argues that college scholarship monies generated by the Tennessee lottery ought to go to the needy rather than, as some say about the Georgia Hope scholarships, to the greedy. Though in general I agree with him, I suggest that he and Tennessee legislators attend to what being "needy" really means. Clearly students who have gone through school on free or reduced lunch programs are, by legal definition, needy. But what about those a rung or two higher? How needy are they?

Consider the not uncommon story of two students who flipped hamburgers all during their high school years. One spent all his money on his car, his girlfriend, and his Hilfiger clothes. His parents denied themselves nothing in the way of big houses, big cars, big vacations. The other saved a portion of her salary each week and put it in a college fund. Her parents lived frugally, too, forgoing things they might well have afforded in anticipation of their daughter's tuition needs. At admission time which student is the needier and, therefore, more deserving of the kind of lottery-generated scholarship that Sullivan recommends? (It's easy, by the way, to draw an analogy from the animal world. Mother Nature does not provide any January help for the squirrel that ate all its acorns in July.)

Too, Sullivan's bombastic assertions and supportive quotes from North Carolina about Georgia's program overlook one important subtext of that program: its potential ability to keep in Georgia its ablest students, regardless of their wealth. The Georgia student who goes to Athens may live her life in Atlanta; the one who goes to Harvard may stay in Boston.

The really critical issue I wish Sullivan had addressed is how can we be sure that lottery money does not simply replace other monies now directed to education, which then would go to prisons or roads or health care or whatever, resulting in education remaining behind the financial eight ball. Most states that have a lottery have, in fact, done exactly that: used the proceeds to fund education, as promised by the advocates for the lottery, but have taken money that formerly went to education and used it to support other governmental services. Like it or not, the Georgia program did not do that; lottery money is an add-on. And that's one big reason why Georgia's teacher salaries and working conditions are so much better than Tennessee's that many of our best teachers are moving there.

Ted Hipple
Knoxville

What about Freedom?

I teach Constitutional Law at UT, and being ambivalent about the recent blackface incident, I have not entered the public debate. George White's misleading and counterproductive article [Color Conscious, Nov. 21] however, has forced me to weigh in.

First, let me be clear that I wish the members of Kappa Sigma had not done what they did. I wish they had thought ahead about how black students, both a racial and numerical minority at UT, might feel if they saw a group of young men in blackface. While I'm not sure that UT should have supported the fraternity's suspension, I think the meeting arranged between Kappa Sigma and black students was quite appropriate, and most likely to yield understanding and reconciliation.

As I read Mr. White's article, however, I was reminded of the frequent charge that the last thing some members of the civil rights establishment want, given their divisive, misleading rhetoric, is racial harmony. Space forbids my addressing all of Mr. White's problematic statements, so I'll focus on four.

First, while I can't imagine anyone reasonably defending minstrel shows, the fraternity members were neither performing nor on their way to perform a minstrel show. They were impersonating the Jackson Five. Again, while I wish they had not done this, associating them so closely with the evil motives behind the 19th-century minstrel shows is practically libelous.

Second, in referring to "the same foolishness at other campuses," Mr. White gratuitously equates Kappa Sigma's actions with incidents like that at Auburn. Yet that, I believe, involved the use of KKK hoods and lynching nooses, and so was properly punished as deliberate harassment.

Third, Mr. White suggests that the fraternity members are guilty of "arrogance and ignorance" because blackface images are "offensive and anti-democratic." While we should no doubt try to avoid offending people as a moral matter, a moment's reflection shows why offense alone has never been enough as a legal matter to deny someone First Amendment protection. Where could we draw a clear line in this area between protected and unprotected expression? People can be offended by anything they choose. As an Italian-American, I might not like someone dressing like a Mafioso from the Sopranos since this might perpetuate the stereotype of Italians as outlaw, parasitic mobsters rather than the hardworking, patriotic Americans most of us are. Yet if that person can be punished simply because I take offense, the limits on free expression are left to the whims of a lone bureaucrat or judge, placing us on a slippery slope toward totalitarianism. Though Mr. White cloaks himself in democracy, the Constitution's protection of offensive speech is profoundly democratic, since the unavoidable price for the privilege of living in an open society is having a thick skin.

Finally, Mr. White writes that "as neoconservatives attack affirmative action and other reforms, black people keep demanding an end to continuing racism." As for the latter claim, there will probably always be evidence of racism, and not only among whites. This expectation thus seems unrealistic, though this hardly means that progress in race relations is impossible. As for affirmative action, this is a hopelessly vague and thus meaningless term unless we specify the form, context, rationale, and favored groups we mean. I've defended affirmative action in some forms and contexts and critiqued it in others, but this hardly makes me a "neoconservative." In fact, it is one of the core principles of liberalism that provides the strongest challenge to affirmative action: It is the individual human being, and not just members of certain racial groups, who is fully protected by the civil rights laws. Both Title VII and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protect the individual person by their express terms.

As it happens, a liberal social and political order depends on the good will of the governed. I'm afraid that articles like Mr. White's simply undermine the good will essential to that order, and to meaningful racial reconciliation.

Martin Carcieri
Knoxville