Linda Chavez is President of the Center for Equal Opportunity. She is a writer, a thinker, and educator, and a hard-nosed commentator. She offers a veteran's wisdom about the ongoing battle over affirmative action in our nation.She is the happily married mother of three sons, and the grandmother of several children.
She worked in the Reagan White House, nearly had a cabinet position in the new Bush administration, and has been on the periphery of the center of both liberal and conservative political power in this country for years.
Ultimately, she is an Hispanic who has rejected the politics of ethnocentrism for the unifying power of old-fashioned liberal democracy and made good on the promise of the American dream.
Mostly.
Chavez' new book, part political memoir and part autobiography, makes a fairly compelling case for the above. By way of quite an engaging biographical narrative, she gives us a smartly guided tour of American race politics in the later half of the twentieth century.
Chavez is at her best when recounting stories of attempting to teach Hispanic undergraduates amidst the ferocious affirmative action battles and campus power struggles of the early 1970s. Not only are these stories interesting in themselves - violence, vandalism, and threats of bodily harm abound - but they make the overarching narrative of her rightward migration all the more compelling. As we watch over her shoulder while she cleans excrement out of her car or steps over the dead cat on her doorstep, or as we listen in on the campus meetings where her opponents toy with switchblades as they speak to her, we get a real sense of the ugly power politics of a movement ostensibly aimed at producing well-educated citizens of a civil democracy.
More surprising are Chavez' anecdotes about encountering the same sorts of personal power games while working with Republicans. Her notes on Watergate and on working in the Reagan White House are particularly fascinating and often surprising. For example, she commends Pat Buchanan as the least sexist of her colleagues ("Pat didn't see me as a woman but as a fellow conservative
"), and then tells us that at times she "felt like little more than a high-status hostess."
And while Chavez does immensely admire Reagan and many members of his staff, she also admired Al Shanker, her liberal boss at the NEA, and does not hesitate to say it. That lack of hesitation in stating her position regardless of partisanship is what's so striking and refreshing about Chavez - she judiciously metes out both praise and blame to everyone with whom she has worked, both liberal and conservative. Reading a "conservative" book that neither flatly excoriates liberals nor offers only a golden encomium for Reagan is a refreshing departure from the norm of popular political rhetoric. Chavez doesn't pull any punches, but neither does she hit below the belt.
If
An Unlikely Conservative
suffers from any flaw, it is the structure of the text itself. Chavez brackets the body of the work, a straightforward linear narrative, within the account of her nomination to the Bush cabinet and subsequent withdrawal, and an epilogue declaring herself a thorn in the side of the AFL-CIO. While the story of the unsuccessful cabinet bid certainly belongs in Chavez' memoirs (it has been heretofore the peak of her, ahem, notoriety), bracketing the majority of the politico-biographical narrative within such a frame makes the tone of the book perhaps a shade too defensive. Nevertheless, it is a commendable work and, especially for those seeking a vision of affirmative action's "dark side", particularly useful.
Sherri Monique King, when not toiling for the development department of the Heritage Foundation, spends most of her time feeding her addiction to all things pop culture.
To view the original text of this review, please visit TownHall.com.
