Conservatives Wrong to Claim 'Minority' Status

To the editors:

I am writing to applaud Alan E. Wirzbicki on his column, "Bleeding-Heart Conservatives" (Opinion, Sept. 24) in which he describes recent attempts by conservatives to co-opt minority status.

As member of an organization often noted for its strong conservative presence--as Wirzbicki notes, "The last two presidents of the Undergraduate Council have been Republicans"--I am amazed at how many times I have heard conservatives describe themselves as minorities.

I particularly remember hearing a conservatives council member call himself and his colleagues on the Republican Club minorities during a discussion of faculty diversity. Disregarding the discussion about the lack of female and minority tenured professors, he claimed that the "real minorities" were conservatives and any attempt to increase faculty diversity should focus on increasing conservative faculty members.

This co-option of minority status has proved very powerful for conservatives who through their pronunciation of minority status seem to be arguing for special rights. On a campus which purports to be so inclusive and diverse, we don't want to deny anyone the right to speak, particularly anyone who cites prejudice.

Wirzbicki writes of the "coming out" dinner that he feels like he should be offended, "but [such events] are so pathetic that I am not." Well, I am. As a minority on this campus I find it both disrespectful and offensive that a group which has often rejected claims of discrimination by minorities, now seems to be arguing the same thing.

Being minority means something on this campus, and it means something more than a simple semantic reading would imply. "Minority" connotes a group that has been historically oppressed and repressed, a group whose voice has been either dismissed or ignored by white normative America.

However, being a minority also implies a sort of power. In a country in which identity politics have quickly become salient (much to the dismay of many conservatives), minorities have learned to organize to demand respect and acknowledgement. Being a minority has meant learning to become visible after being invisible for so many years, something that conservatives in this country and at this institution have never had to contend with.

I urge conservatives to re-read the history books, specifically America's treatment of its minorities before they enshroud themselves in a minority "mantle."

Kamil E. Redmond '00

Sept. 26, 1999

The writer is the vice president of the Undergraduate Council

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Right-Wingers Hypocritical

To the editors:

Alan E. Wirzbicki ("Bleeding-Heart Conservatives") gets it exactly right in puncturing the conservatives' pretense that they are being "victimized" because not all of us accept their thinly-disguised demands that America continue to be ruled by the old notions of white male supremacy.

That, of course, is why they're so incensed by the impact the social movements of the 1960s have had on American society and why continue to claim that the days before the 1960s were the "good old days."

Fortunately, there are many who refuse to believe that the stifling racist and sexist social order of that time is something we should aspire to re-create.

What Wirzbicki shows, and what the apologia for conservatism in Harvard Magazine reveals, is that when it comes to hypocrisy, American conservatives have no peers.

Lee A. Daniels '71

Sept. 24, 1999

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Wirzbicki Off the Mark

To the editors:

Alan E. Wirzbicki criticized "the strange victimhood complex among conservatives at Harvard." His editorial surprised me because I know many of the conservatives on campus, and none of them suffer this complex.

Wirzbicki acknowledges that conservatives are underrepresented in the Faculty and tacitly admits that they're usually maligned by the campus press. It might be expected that a group burdened by such bias would fight for redress and vie for special privilege. Some people do expect that, and they perceive a grab for personal accommodation when conservatives poke fun at the institution of victimhood or satirize Harvard's inequitable (on the low side) distribution of minority privilege to the conservative minority here.

However, conservatives don't denounce the hypocrisy of minority status because they want it for themselves. They want a campus where people realize that they're not part of an oppressed group.

People here are fortunate, hard-working individuals at an elite university. At the very least, conservatives have realized this for themselves--making Wirzbicki's characterization of them strange indeed.

Anne L. Berry '01

Sept. 27, 1999

The writer is president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Republican Club