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When I give my corporate speeches, almost invariably I open up with this line: “Looking out at your faces today, I can see that this group hasn’t caved in to that whole affirmative action nonsense.” Sometimes, the audience of mid-to-top-level executives will look around, see all the white faces, and laugh. Most of the time, they just burst out laughing right away.

I had a baseball coach pose this question to me: “You have two guys run down to first. They have equal times, but one has much better form. Which one do you choose?”

You choose the one with the bad form. You can coach him to use good form and he’ll beat the other guy.

In the same way, blind adherence to SAT scores and GPAs is ridiculous. Take two kids, one white and one black. The white kid’s in private school, has educated parents, opportunities to travel, intensive SAT tutoring. He takes the SATs three times and submits his highest score—1,280. The black kid is brought up by a single mom who didn’t graduate from high school. No books in the house, works after school, shares a room with two brothers. No SAT tutoring, takes it once, gets an 1,120. You’d take the black kid, right?

Except, I forgot. The white kid’s dad was your roommate in college. You spray-painted the dean’s car together sophomore year. That was fun! Remember the look on Dean Whitehead’s face? Oh, and your brother does a lot of business with the family. Hard not to take the white kid.

Of course, most white kids don’t have these advantages. But almost no black kids do.

We don’t live in a race-blind society. Two professors, one from M.I. T., the other from the University of Chicago, proved it with an elegant experiment. The professors selected 1,250 job advertisements in Boston and Chicago. To each employer, they submitted two pairs of made-up résumés. One pair of highly qualified candidates and one pair of average candidates. In each pair, one had a “black” name like Tamika or Tyrone and one had a “white” name like Amy or Brad. The professors found that the “white” names were 50 percent more likely to be called for an interview than the “black” names.

George W. Bush was the beneficiary of affirmative action. In more ways than we’ll probably ever know. He got into Yale after a lackluster career at Andover. What people don’t realize is that, like the University of Michigan, Yale had a point system when Bush applied in 1964. George W. received five points for being the son of a Yale graduate, twenty points for being the grandson of an extremely important Yale graduate, who was a U.S. senator and a Yale trustee, and a point for being a cheerleader at Andover. He almost didn’t make it, though, because he lost ten points for showing up drunk to the interview. Fortunately, he got thirty points for being a Bush with over a 920 on his SATs, and he slipped through.

I’m not saying that all Republicans are racist or that all racists are Republican. That would be a reprehensible overstatement, akin to something Ann Coulter might say. But if Ann were a Democrat, she would point out that, after years of declining during Clinton, black poverty is now on the increase. And she would make great use of the fact that youth poverty among blacks is now at its highest level in the twenty-three years they’ve been keeping the statistic. And she’d blame it all on Bush. She’d claim it was because of overt, deliberate racism, rather than his more general bias toward the already privileged. She might even say that his tax cuts are inherently racist, because not only are blacks disproportionately likely to be at the bottom of the economic ladder, but they’re disproportionately unlikely to be at the top.

But that’s Ann. I personally would never accuse Bush’s tax cuts of being racially motivated. I just think that, very generally speaking, they happen to hurt black people and help rich people. Who tend, again generally, to be white. That’s all I’m saying.

During the whole Trent Lott mess, Gene Weingarten, a writer for the Washington Post, found a great