The End of an Idea — Why Affirmative Action Should Stop
2011, not 1970?
We have had about a half-century of racial preferences and often unspoken but real quotas for hiring and admission based on racial identity. If the original intent was to level the playing field for African-Americans and Latinos, who had been subject to systematic and often gratuitously mean discrimination throughout much of the American South and Southwest, nonetheless the current rationale for sustaining affirmative action has become a veritable nightmare of contradictions, biases, and incoherence that is now well beyond reform. Conservatives mostly believe this; an increasing number of liberals quietly think it.
Who Is What?
First, what exactly is race today in America in which intermarriage and immigration have increasingly made it — and its ugly twin racial purity — often irrelevant? We are no longer a country largely 85-90% “white” and 10-12% “black,” but something almost hard to categorize in racial terms. Do university admission officers adopt the 1/16, one-drop racial rule of the old Confederacy? Does being one fourth African-American qualify one for consideration; three-fourths Japanese; half Mexican-American? Does a simple surname add — and often by intent — authenticity and credulity? The son of Linda Hernandez and Jason Smith — a Bobby Smith — is not considered, without genealogical investigation, Hispanic, but the son of Linda Smith and Jason Hernandez — a Roberto Hernandez of equal 50/50 ancestry — is almost instantly? If so, is race a state of mind and personal choice more than circumstances of birth? What exactly is white and what a minority — a dark-skinned Armenian-American is the former, a light-skinned Colombian American is the latter? A dark Sicilian-American is white, Barack Obama is black?
We are reaching the point in a multiracial and intermarried America where admissions officers and employers simply would have to hire British genealogists to trace our bloodlines — and instead, in millions of cases, therefore resort ad hoc to what Americans profess or think they are. Plenty of societies in history have predicated preferences on race — apartheid South Africa, Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, and the Confederacy are the most obvious — but all at some point had to codify their prejudices by some sort of repugnantly explicit genealogical science. We differ only in that our racial categories are said to be for preferences and recompense rather than for discrimination and punishment, and that we believe in our intellectual and moral arrogance that racial biases can, in our careful hands, be used for good purpose.
Sins of the Father
Second, there is no longer an easy yardstick by which to calibrate skin color or racial identity with past or present oppression. The original, noble enough justification of affirmative action rested on two principles: a sort of reparations that extended preference to atone for undeniable past discrimination; and a leveling of the playing field that assumed ongoing prejudice based on outward appearance and accompanying stereotyping — usually in terms of white privilege used against the darker other. But in 2011, such notions have become surreal. Someone with quite dark skin from India or Egypt surely is more easily recognizable as “the other” than someone indistinguishable from the “white” majority who has a Latino surname; yet would not a college admissions officer more likely admit a Pedro Gomez than a Tarsam Singh?
Is there a color-coded graph somewhere that says the darker one is, the more consideration one is due? Apparently not — given that most East Asians and Arabs are not usually extended affirmative action status. OK, but do third-generation affluent Japanese-Americans qualify for preferences on the rationale that their parents as children were interned in camps in the American West; or fifth-generation Chinese because their great-great-grandparents were treated horribly while building the transcontinental railroad?
It’s amazing the amount of verbiage we have to engage in just to undo the even more Byzantine and arcane explanations from entities like the White Privilege Conference, the NAACP and their ilk just to get back to common sense. Americans were forced into a dialogue about Nazism decades ago because of other nonsense of this type.
It’s 2011 and everyone needs a new clock. Are we to believe the expression “You can’t keep a good man down” is a crazy notion only good for a wild science fiction novel? In 1900 we still had wild West gangs in America and 50 years later had ferreted out the secrets of the atom – what has black culture achieved in the almost 50 years since Jim Crow and where is the expression, “The proof is in the pudding?”
Racism is racism and there is no reason why my family, who came from Poland and Germany 100 years ago to an area utterly devoid of black folks to this very day should have anything to do with affirmative action or reparations, even if you’re dumb enough to believe in such things. People in Poland never had anything to do with slavery and that didn’t change crossing an ocean in 1900 and there is absolutely no reason their children should pay any kind of price in college.
Nor does any white guy alive today have anything to do with slavery but the very intelligentsia in the black community who have this all figured out believe in guilt by skin color even 70, 180 or 250 years after the fact.
In a fitting display of Orwellian madness, the black intelligentsia believe in acclaim by skin color for themselves, jazz, etc., but nothing negative, gang violence, etc., even though the gang violence is now, today, not 150 years ago. It is the argument of a child and a racist one at that.
It is long past time to set aside this nonsense and move ahead. The NAACP, the Black Congressional Congress, all the black organizations from mayors groups to college campus groups to literary groups need to be called out and shown that it is themselves who indulge in wholesale racial talk and racism and not others as there are no white mainstreamequivalents who formally and in writing organize themselves by skin color – yet white folks are the ones accused of doing what others do and they themselves do not. The idea of a white college student or poetry group is absurd and rightly so.
Racism will always be with us but there is a great difference between groups that make formal statements of segregation and those that are that way because of a preponderance of achievement and demographics – what are people to do, slow down and not innovate to prove they’re not racists or so feelings aren’t bruised? I don’t know about you but I’m taking my graphics software classes and I’m not waiting even though there was only 1 black student in a college half black.
This entire race based conversation is debased, from Holder to Obama and this includes virtually the entirety of the black lecture circuit from Tavis Smiley to Nikki Giovanni to Cornell West. I challenge them to do what white folks do everyday and that is have careers that take a neutral stance and abandon their racial nonsense – the problem is, they wouldn’t have careers and wouldn’t know what the hell to do with themselves if their favorite subject was put on the back burner – themselves.
“Racism is racism and there is no reason why my family, who came from Poland and Germany 100 years ago to an area utterly devoid of black folks to this very day should have anything to do with affirmative action or reparations…”
I once had the experience of listening to a recent Emigre from Poland and an American Black man argue over racism.
The Black gentleman kept at the Emigre as to how Whites were all racist, and couldn’t possibly understand anything about racism or slavery.
Of course, the Emigre kept pointing out to him that the Poles had experienced slavery over and over, going back a thousand years or more – being located on a flat plain between avaricious neighbors will do that. Germany, Russia, Austro-Hungary, the Swedes, hell, the Mongols, all taking what they wanted and treating the Poles as sub-human, fit only to be worked, used, or killed, depending.
It didn’t make a bit of difference. The Black man’s understanding of matters were so arrogantly one-sided, so entrenched, that he simply dismissed everything the Emigre said. In his mind, all Whites were and always will be “racist and against the poor, oppressed Black man,” and that was that.
You can’t argue with fanatics.
“When you argue with an idiot, he’s doing the same thing!”
The alternative is to meekly accept their abuse! Good plan!
The English word slave comes from Slavic, the ethnic group that contains the Polish. The Vikings would come down the big rivers grab Polish people and sell them to Arabs or Greeks along the Black sea.
here is a clip from a polish historical movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qra0GqFbM98
I never forget watching one of the old Donahue shows when I was a kid and watching some black preacher telling an Orthodox rabbi that he(the rabbi)didn’t know what oppression was.
The rabbi just looked at him stunned.
It’s not Selma anymore.
Selma was never that bad. I know I’m from there. I was the outside agitators, both black and white.
Did you see American Experience, The Freedom Riders, a couple nights ago? I guess that it was just Birmingham and Montgomery where things were bad, All those damned outsider agitators, who provoked people into firebombing their buses and blowing up their churches.
End Affirmative Action now. We have seen the full damage of the first A.A. Pres. O-BOMB-A.
I firmly believe in the 1 drop rule. You are an African if you have one drop of African blood – no matter how tiny the drop.
Mary Leaky has proven that we are all decended from Lucy, an African woman. That means We are all Africans. Some of us are just light-skins. Most importantly We Are Family.
We are brothers. Hallelujah! The age of racial discrimination is over!
:) You forgot the Q.E.D.
I firmly believe in the one drop rule also. One drop of white blood means you are not a minority anymore. Means you have to pull your own weight.
I heard a self identified black lady on the radio say that every white person in America needed to have a DNA test done to determine they’re European ancestry and then should be taxed accordingly for reparations. Didn’t matter in the least to her that the person in question never had slaves nor, in fact, if it could be proven that their ancestors never had slaves. If they came from a certain region then they had to pay.
The black community has too many buffoons with cracker-jack university degrees that spout this type of psuedo intellectual nonsense. It’s the same old Malcom X racist BS wrapped in an intellectual wrapper. They’re the same as Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakahn and a host of other haters. You need to understand that they do this because they’re haters and because they make money from it. The only result is to reinforce white’s most negative impressions of blacks as low IQ haters who are one step away from running amok with machetes.
Could you imagine the uproar if we decided that any black who has gotten knocked up and received benefits or has been a generational welfare recipient be taxed and forced to pay it all back? I’d say we’ve paid reparations enough. If they want more, then they ALL come off EVERY form of benefit forevermore.
VDH’s essay and James May have both made excellent points, but do not pinpoint the historical moment when WASP elites decided to co-opt the rowdy black power movement. I have traced this and much of my website is devoted to the problem. For instance, here: http://clarespark.com/2010/07/18/white-elite-enabling-of-black-power/. At the bottom of the blog (including quotes from the powerful persons who dunnit) is a link to all my black power blogs. It was deliberate policy and responded to 1960s urban riots, not to all minorities. Indeed, an entire cohort of “cultural historians” is pushing the line that the effects of slavery are still with us. Affirmative action is only one example of their reparations project. Every good liberal supports this policy, some advocating cash payments to the descendants of slaves.
Payments made; food stamps, welfare, all entitlements. Reparations are made every day.
Well said, my friend.
I remember when the Black Lawyers’ Association cancelled their proposed convention in Arizona because Arizona didn’t have a MLK holiday and therefore were racist. Is not the very name Black Lawyers’ Association racist? It has gotten absurd.
Excellent article by Professor Hanson.
I’m reminded of one of my friends from post-graduate training.
The man is white as snow, but was born and raised in South Africa, where he completed his doctorate degree.
By any intellectually honest measure, he’s more of an “African-American” than 98% of his colleagues who checked that box on their applications.
Thanks for the counterpoints – What is the goal of diversity? How diverse is diverse enough? What standard will the race conscious use?
When we have finished with the Racist Affirmative Action we need to turn our attention to its close relative Multi Culti Yuman Rites.
Reflections on Multiculturalism especially as applied to Mohammedans
Muslims say they are integrating yet they demand and get separate toilets, washrooms and prayer rooms; (back in their own countries they drown in filth and can’t provide their starving, overbreeding masses clean drinking water…)
Muslims say they are multicultural yet they object to Christian symbols like crosses and crucifixes and want them removed,just like Obambi does (and wherever possible, they attack synagogues and Churches and firebomb them) yet they want to build mosques and madrassas and to blast out their call to prayer from LOUDSPEAKERS 5 Times a DAY starting before dawn; (that’s because Islam came to abolish all other religions…)
Muslims say they respect our culture yet they want to wear burqas and niqabs and put curtains around swimming pools so we can’t gaze on them; (in fact they want our women to cover up as well…)
Muslims reject our religious holidays like Easter and Christmas yet they want us to observe their pagan traditions such as Ramadan and Eid with their barbaric slaughter of animals;
Muslims say they are Westernised yet they reject our national flags and want us to speak in Arabic;All powerful Allah only understands ancient ambiguous primitive Arabic (even though most of them are illiterate and rely on their imams or mullah’s for indoctrination)
Muslims say they love the West yet they want to overthrow our governments and want Sharia to rule; (they love being in the West to make it Islamic)
Muslims say they are grateful to the West yet they want to replace our laws which treat all people equally and introduce Sharia law which enshrines misogyny, inequality, slavery and barbarism; (that’s their religious obligation, why can’t you understand that, kafir?)
Muslims say they are tolerant but are pushing their Halal food onto all schools everywhere without asking us; (“tolerance” for Muslims means they allow you to live under Islam, provided you pay the jiziya with willing submission….)
Muslims say they are oppressed and so want government handouts and grants to ease their pain; (a clear entitlement according to the Koran, sira & hadith)
Muslims say they are victims and so want special treatment and privileges but never offer us the same in their countries; Virtually ALL Jews have been driven out of Muslim lands and Christians are close behind(indeed, they are victims: the existence of kafirs in positions of power is oppressive to Muslims, who are victimized by their corruption. The kafirs need to be purged from the land….)
Muslims say they want peace but the only peace they can agree to is when Islam RULES.
Muslims say they protect the innocent but forget to tell you that in Islam ONLY Muslims can be considered innocent ; all us Kafirs are GUILTY of not accepting Islam.
Isn’t it comforting to know that Muslims are so multicultural and have so much love and tolerance to offer?
It is amazing you know what Muslims say. Is that all one billion of them. 20% of the population of the earth, or do you think you might be generalizing.
Kevin,
The specific points raised by pragmatist are not generalisations. They are what happens when a tipping point is reached in the demographics of Muslim immigration. We have seen these things in many countries and there is nothing novel about them any more. It just how it is – like it or not. The evidence is all over the world. It used to be strange but it isn’t any more.
“Under the shadow of Islam it is possible for the members of the three religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism to coexist in safety and security. Safety and security can only prevail under the shadow of Islam,”
That is from the Hamas Charter and it is echoed in public in Egypt today in regard to the Muslim Brotherhood’s attitude towards “protecting” the Copts; this is no surprise since Hamas is a wing of the MB.
It is the song of Sayd Qutb and Islam in general; it is sheer arrogance. These are not people I want as neighbors.
This is in the Holy Koran AND the Hamas Charter…
“..until the rocks and trees shout out “oh, Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and slay him” ”
There is no possibility of peace with Islam.
Their plan is to subjugate and kill you is openly discussed…
except for when they lie.
VDH, you are asking no longer about color or even bloodlines.
You are asking to cancel the “oppressor/victim” game because since the adoption of “free agency”, you can’t tell a player by the uniform they are wearing TODAY, for tomorrow, they may switch sides as a matter of convenience…or because they are needed on the “other team” to skew the outcomes.
For instance, in many, many, many “expert studies”, what we have come to know as “Hispanics” or “Latinos”…are counted for the purposes of “statistical analysis” as ….white people.
Study any crime statistic that “rounds out the colors” by infusing “white” criminal statistics with any Ivy League admissions counselor would give extra consideration as Hispanic or Latino.
Same with IQ studies. Gang membership. (although this last category has quite a number of studies that does separate out groups as an admissions officer might)
You see, VDH…when it benefits the victim/oppressor study to have MORE whites…voila…they appear out of European lineage (Spain’s descendants are, spawned from Western Europe, after all)
When a study needs to eliminate whites…voila…they disappear.
You can’t call this game because of inclement weather or because of the “inconclusive whether”. When your entire country is being divvied up by intentional racial warfare, class warfare, religious warfare, …it not only needs “them vs. us”, “have vs have not”, godless vs. Judeo-Christian….it NEEDS “victims” vs. “oppressors”.
Color, creed, gender, religion, ….are not nearly as relevant. If you are identified as a part of the “victim” class…you get goodies. If you are identified as part of the “oppressor” class…you get slandered.
Government jobs for the former, government levies for the latter. Retribution via redistribution. The game goes on and it will not be called.
Yes. It isn’t now and never was about any variation of fairness that an honest person would recognize. It’s about political advantage, and below that, about the ability to slice and dice a population and set people against each other, with the ultimate purpose to destroy a culture.
In other words, Affirmative Action has succeeded beyong the corrupt and hate-filled originators wildest expectations.
Spike is the ultimate example and what a perfect specimen; white/black, christian/muslim, american/kenyan/indonesian, poor/rich, socialist/Kansasvalues, androgenous, wildchild/Harvard grad, agitator/annenburg executive, smoothtalker/rapfan/3-point shooter/golfer !! At least one gene to appeal to an entire planet. So ultimate that you have to wonder whether he was bred to be the penultimate marxist polyglot, a designer baby of affirmative action.
And don’t say it didn’t work. A man who doesn’t understand, who perhaps is incapable of understanding how basic auto insurance works has more power over our lives than any other person in the world.
“Chinese because their great-great-grandparents were treated horribly while building the transcendental railroad?”
Transcontinental railroad? Not only while building the Transcon but basically run out of town on a rail just about everywhere they were. Yet they did not rest, the UC system is highly over represented by Asians as a proportion of the general population. So be it. Transcendental indeed!
“horribly treated” Chinese. I agree. And so what?
How about the English indentured servants?
Then the Irish?
Then the Swedes?
Then the Italians?
Then the …
Bullshit. It’s America. Time for everyone to be Americans.
Including Latinos and so-called blacks.
You left out the Germans that Ben Franklin denigrated. Examples abound. There is evidence that Affirmative Action is having a detrimental effect on those it was set in place to aid.
Irish, Italians, Poles, Ukrainians, et al, got over being “oppressed,” went on with their lives, learned the language, “lowered themselves” & worked at lousy, poor-paying, sometimes dangerous jobs w/hardly a whine & became part of the melting pot…or they would’ve starved. Black & Latino “leaders” built industries to support their “persecution” & keep “the membership” as separate, BUT equal, as possible…all with a government assist. Blacks & Latinos who refuse to be part of the “victim” scam, but SOMEHOW manage to succeed anyway are in for a special kind of Hell only “their own” can deliver. Just ask Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, Alberto Gonzales, Allen West or Marco Rubio.
Maybe in the real world, affirmative action is already mostly dead, de facto, even as de jure all the stupid and illogical crap you regularly tell us about continues to go on—for a while.
I’m almost 69, and when a kid awakening to an adult world, the typical idealistic reaction I had was that it would be wonderful if there was NO RACE problem, because everybody was mixed, sort of Polynesian.
If humans continue to refrain from making more horrible wars, and globalization wrt business and immigration just keep happening, perhaps in a hundred years, at least the first world will be so mixed up that the race issue will be moot.
Also, thinking back on other memories from my youth, before TV started bringing other peoples into our living room, I clearly remember reading, or rather, looking at the pictures, of National Geographic.
Especially the old people, but even the young ones, from places in the Middle East, and Africa for sure, just looked so alien and UGLY, and unhealthy! The thought of marrying such people was unthinkable, to me at the age of 18, say!
And, NOW?
Another not-so-old memory—recall when blacks started making a fuss that they were not represnted in movies and TV, according to their percentage of the population? What, in the 70′s? Recently, I’ve been checking out old movies from the sixties, and earlier, and it’s indeed full of almost only lily white actors.
And, NOW?
It’s very un-PC, but I’ll bet you that blacks are WAY ABOVE their percentage “quota” on TV—not sure about movies, since I stopped going after Forrest Gump: too many leftwingers as actors, and the movies were just too bad.
Just as the old racist whites from the South had to die out, because most of them were too brainwashed to change their prejudices, pace George Wallace, it could be that in another generation or two, when all the old prejudiced pols in DC have died, enough truly color blind leaders will drop legal affirmative action.
Then, VDH, if you’re still alive, this will be one subject you can stop writing about!
“when all the old prejudiced pols in DC have died, enough truly color blind leaders will drop legal affirmative action.”
What pols are you talking about? The Congressional Black Caucus? Last time I checked their website they were being bankrolled by Big Pharma. [I just went to the website and couldn't find the list of donors - maybe they're hiding it?] There’s to much money in prejudice, its a going concern, dude.
Big corporations are well-loved by the congressional blacks and liberals. They can make deals for quotas and corporations can pass on the additional expense to the consumer. Its simply another business expense. The real enemy are small businesses. Too difficult to engineer race/gender-based regulation. Too self-reliant.
Maybe, dude, after another generation or two, which is admittedly a long time frame for all of us locked-into-TODAY dudes, even the blacks in congress will change.
The “pols” I was referring to?
I didn’t even think of your TODAY fact, about big business and the black caucus. I was imagining a secular paradigm change, wherein the electorate, ITSELF, grows more and more color blind, and thus at the margin, over time, removes the parasites who feed off race, with people like themselves.
San Francisco will probably continue to burden us with extreme Pelosi types, but I picture the color blind awakening as spreading from the inside heartland states toward the outside blue ones, over time, dude.
Fascinating essay and totally apt for today’s world. However, demagogue’s in this country will rage as nothing seen before to maintain this artificial barrier to good civic relations here.
However, continue to raise this issue and keep on presenting it and maybe soon we’ll have a rational discussion and resolution regarding our so-call affirmative action laws and behaviors.
It’s not affirmative and it’s not action.
It’s not affirmative…if by affirmative we mean to uphold, confirm, ratify that one group NEEDS to be given, handed, favors because they could not compete on their own merit.
It’s not action, if by action we mean constant motion, evolving, not standing still or falling backward.
It is now …and has been for some time…negative reaction. It no longer rewards, it seeks to punish. It does not seek to include, it seeks to exclude.
It no longer has rules, it only has exceptions. It is not based upon basic civil rights, it is based on imagined civil wrongs. It does not seek to level the playing field…it seeks to level every building and structure surrounding the playing field.
It’s not about paying it forward, it’s about payback.
This is not about allowing everyone to obtain the American Dream, it is about wiping out the Dream itself and calling anyone who got there…a thief.
Well said, cfbleafchers.
I’d add only that I think it’s odd that Hansen’s itemization of the Orwellian aspects of affirmative-action apparently aren’t applied to the male/female frictions (quotas?) lurking around everywhere. Or, maybe that’s another subject.
I graduated in 1954 from a then traditional all men’s liberal arts college which has now a periodic newsletter which reads like a mid-20th century women’s “finishing school”; probably because it has now women in the majority.
….my apologies, correction:
….. my typo should read: “Hanson’s”…..
Thomas Sowell has written a few books on the subject.
Dr. Hanson
Thank you for pointing out this insanity and challenging academia.
Here’s another theory for you. We all trace our roots to sub-Saharan Africa, so perhaps admissions officers, and others, use a simple turn-signal approach for determining the good and bad of victimhood. Those who stayed behind: “good.” Upon leaving, and crossing into Eurasia, those who turned left and settled: “bad” (except, for some strange reason, the home of the conquistadors). Those lefties who, at a latter time, kept going across the Atlantic: “bad.” Those who turned right after exiting Africa and stopped at various places: “kind of good.” Those righties who kept going and crossed into the Americas: “good.”
It makes about as much sense as anything else.
We all trace our roots to sub-Saharan Africa…
That’s perfectly true unless all the anthropologists are wrong. In that case, why don’t we all claim African heritage? After all, the only difference between the so-called “races” is when they left Africa; they all started there.
And if we’re all African, then we can at least drop “African-ness” as a criteria for special treatment.
Also, if I remember my limited brush with biology correctly, none of us are 100% male or female; every male is 2% female and every female is 2% male. (I’m not sure if those percentages change for gays and I imagine they are dynamic for transgendered folks who are in the process of changing their sex.) Perhaps that would be sufficient justification to stop all gender-based special treatment.
There is a truly physical difference when it comes to gender, not an artifically induced one (with the exception of transgenders, perhaps). A woman has a physical need for maternity leave after the birth of her child – a man does not. And although it’s not PC to acknowledge there are emotional and mental differences in addition to the physical dissimilarities between most men and women, they exist and should not be ignored… totally opposite of the whole “race” argument.
Bottom line is to get the government out of the business of determining how to treat whole groups, and retreat back to the principle of protecting the INDIVIDUAL’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in his/her own way. The government has not proven itself to be adept at common sense.
Bravo!
Bullseye!
Why is the supreme court so impotent on this? Their record is pretty bad on these matters. Consider the upshot of the Dred Scott ruling. It said that Dred Scott had no individual right to anything because he was s.o. else’s private property. That’s basically the same upshot of the Roe vs. Wade decision, that a “foetus” was not a human being, and therefore had no individual right to protection by law enforcement. “It” was the private property of the woman, and therefore, she could dispose of it as she pleased, and it was nobody’s business. Dred Scott has never been overturned by scotus. Majorities in L.A. are now using their “minority” status there the same way others previously did, but they have an even greater advantage as their numbers are in fact a majority. The judiciary is the branch of government most prone to corruption, and why Jefferson thought it should be the most limited branch of government. Don’t look for scotus, or any court to sort out the mess that they created, they usurped far to much power in Marbury vs. Madison to give that up now.
Change “British genealogist” to “Mormon genealogist”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy
According to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing in the famous/infamous Grutter vs Bollinger ruling of June 23, 2003, Affirmative Action becomes officially unconstitutional as of 25 years from that date. (Isn’t it simply amazing how that particular expiration date was put in by the founding fathers, centuries earlier? Well, nevermind the details; you have to be a supreme court justice to understand such subtleties!) Anyway, we now have only 17 years plus one month left to go!! Personally, I am really looking forward to June 23, 2028, the day that Affirmative Action finally and officially ends! Everyone, please mark your calendars!
Amen – calendar marked.
O’Connor and her confreres said nothing about a future court extending her “best used by” date for another 25 years.
I can almost hear Sotomayor’s or Kagan’s opinion now: “Justice O’Connor’s reference to 25 years was aspirational only and is in now way binding on the Court today. While we afford Justice O’Connor’s opinion in Grutter great respect …blah, blah, blah… and while we as a society have made some modest progress, as we can see from the experience of [insert reference to preferred group(s) here] we are a long way from achieving the vision that prompted Justice O’Connor’s 25 year limitation…blah, blah, blah…”
You can trace the worship of “diversity” in its current illogical and inconsistent form back the the SCOTUS decision in Bakke, which overruled a Cal. Supreme Court decision that race could not be used at all in making admission (or, presumably hiring) decisions. Read from today’s perspective, Powell’s opinion says, “you can use race as the deciding factor as long as you don’t say (in a policy) that that is what you alway do.” Diversity” became a code word for a soft form of affirmative action.
What is quite interesting in reading Powell’s decision in Bakke and O’Conner’s decision in Grutter v Bollinger, which flows from Bakke, is that the “education benefits of a diverse student body” appears to have been accepted without evidence as an assumption. There is some form of begging the question or circular argument going on.
I think I could make an argument that having a homogeneous student body also has educational benefits. Yet I doubt very much the court would have accepted an admissions program where race was used as a negative factor (but only one of many factors considerd) to eliminate candidates.
Professor Hanson,
Eric Holder was correct when he said that our nation needed an honest discussion of race. Mr. Holder, himself, along with Barack Obama, Van Jones, Shirley Sherrod, and a host of lesser names we have come to know these past couple years, have done much to move this process along. It doesn’t matter that not one of these individuals is capable of holding such a discussion. What matters is that the American people get to experience the full measure of the politics of social justice/racial identity, with all its “contradictions, biases, and incoherence” – to this litany, I would only add the word “malice.” The trickle down effects of the first affirmative action presidency can’t come soon enough, but with such a bulwark of institutional and political support, I don’t suppose it will come anytime soon either. Thank you, Professor Hanson, for providing a forum for just such a discussion.
Yours truly,
ThOR
No discussion of race in this country is complete if it doesn’t address white guilt — the sensation, not the “fact.” None of the people you mention are capable of that. Neither are Joan Walsh, Rachel Maddow, or Sandra Day O’Connor.
And what is it about white guilt that we should understand? Discuss.
“Affirmative Action”, “minority” set-asides, and studies departments are permanent features and will endure for centuries.
Nope, not after June 23, 2028. See my note above. Heh. :)
easy fix? sure.
every person, white, purple, green, whatever, put down a minority status whenever asked. put it on every form. it will soon become a part of you. computers will automtically pick it up. hey, i thought i was ______???
you mean i’m not? i’m offended.
then, people will have to prove you are not, ‘ one of them’. that will take
lots and lots of people doing lots of investigative work into everybody’s
background. he!!, we can’t even prove conclusively where one potus really
came from w/o doubt. multiply that by 10 million, 50 million. problem solved.
everybody gets undeserved handouts, or nobody does. that’s how we are told to travel, equal before the law.
I always put that I’m Native American – on account I was born here…..
Apparently no one checks to see if you’re of mixed ethnicity, so we should all claim we’re 1/2 or 1/4 something. Obama is black; ignoring the white 1/2 has paid off in…massive amounts. This inarguably tells you a lot about what he knows is an advantage and what’s a disadvantage.
Outrageous! How can I follow Obama’s footsteps without AA???
This topic is not that difficult to dissemble. First ask anyone who supports AA if they themselves would give up their jobs as college professors or administrators, or fire half of their staffs to satisfy AA? Second, ask any liberal pol if they would fire half their staffs in order to look like America? Third, ask the broadcast stations to supplant their white anchors for blacks? Fourth, ask the progressvie 527s and progressive charities to fire their executives and staffs to look like America.
AA to white progressives is like monopoly: it is an impressive game but meaningless to them since it is just a game that they have manipulated for the last 40 years.
The so-called affirmative action policy and resulting legislation was generally regarded as a form of compensation for acknowledged previous injustices: slavery and later, milder discrimination?
However, was slavery uniquely a western institution and were its victims exclusively black, or other minorities? Were any black people ever among the owners or traders of slaves?
Surely, if that were the case, then compensation should only be given to particular individuals, after proper genealogical research and the compensation should only be paid by other individuals, according to the guilt of their particular ancestors.
What about the descendants of Arab slavers migrating to America? Should they be liable to pay compensation to the descendants of the victims of their ancestors?
What about black africans who sold other black africans to slave traders, before later, themselves being sold to slave traders? Surely the descendants of such people may be entitled to some form of compensation form the descendants of their oppressors, while simultaneously, they are liable to pay compensation to the descendants of the victims of their ancestors. How reliable would the records be and who could prove a claim.
Or do the proponents of affirmative action claim that their ancestors, but no one else’s, are entitled to an amnesty for any crimes committed before arrival in America? They also claim that the descendants of people who were not in any way invlved in oppressing them must somehow be liable to compensate them.
What about descendants of nazis? Do jews have any claim to compensation from them?
Equality before the law is impossible to achieve, so long as regulations enforce discrimination in any form, no matter how the politically correct rhetoric describes it.
The legitimacy of any claim for affirmative action rests mainly with political calculation, not any fundamental principal.
Equality before the law would have eliminated the disparity between the average income and wealth of the descendants of former slaves. Not immediately, but in the same timescale as other groups of poor voluntary immigrants. Race would likely have disappeared as an issue. Instead, it will be perpetuated, with resentments among its modern victims which demagogues could exploit.
Do you fight injustice with justice? Or with an equal and opposite injustice?
With Irish heritage, maybe it’s not too late to get a piece of the affirmative action.
Diversity!? The Island has been mostly conquered, and sometimes settled – The Anglo-Normans brought the Welsh, Flemish, Anglo-Saxons, and Bretons – Celts, Vikings from Scandinavia, and Spanish along the way too.
Sanctimony is the new religion of guilt. It doesn’t seem to be lasting though – thank God. I’d swear it got a very average guy elected President though.
You should reach for Iceland, I believe there were Irish there before the Vikings threw them out.
“The first certain discoverers of Iceland were Irish monks who, in the style of St. Brendan, tested their faith by undertaking perilous ocean voyages. Perhaps the conspicuous migrations of Icelandic nesting birds across Ireland suggested to them the existence of land across the ocean. At the beginning of the “Viking Age,” c. 800 AD, the Irish knew how to get to Iceland and back and some monks had spent considerable time in that empty country.”
http://www.iceland.is/history-and-culture/History/Vikings/
On the other hand, when I found out Jews were not a minority I had my first good night’s sleep in two thousand years.
Barack Obama is not ‘Black’. He is half Donkey and half Honkey.
One point that I have always found obscure and untalked about but is a byproduct of affirmative action. Take a group that is in the white catagory like say liberals of a socialist persusasion and what do you accomplish by restricting the number of non liberals and non socialists i.e. conservatives? The liberals gain their total institutional control and dominance much more easily once they have reduced the number of non liberals by filling the system with “minorities”. This happens obviously in all colleges and universities and also in many bureacracies.
And while your at it, throw out Pell Grants, a hugh waste of tax dollars.
My neighbor teaches remedial math to Pell Grant students at the local university. He is a democrat. But on this matter he just shakes his head and acknowledges the huge waste of our tax dollars. Many, many of his students come for the socializing, show up sporadically at class and on those occasions actually challenge the computations he’s putting on the board. Just having a good time.
Affirmative action is an idea whose time has passed. It was needed back in the 1970s, where minorities did have a hard time getting into institutions of higher learning and well-paying jobs, but now the playing field is more than level. If you’re not a minority, it’s impossible to get a job with the government these days, unless you go in as a contractor or are appointed at an SES level. It just won’t happen, and I know from personal experience. Moreover, there are no such things as performance-based evals for govvies – the slack is picked up by contractors. The government is too afraid of civil rights lawsuits, and so, does nothing.
I can back this up. I’m a white contractor and we’re basically there to do the work the black fed’s are too good to do. Most are masters at looking busy! Some don’t even care that much and just disappear to go shooping to talk to their “girlfriend!”
It also doesn’t matter how much documentation the gov’t has to fire these people. If they are fired for cuase they immediately yelp racism and they (THE GOV’T) ALWAYS lose in court. That’s why the gov’t just moves them to places where they can do the least harm until they finally retire or die. It’s just cheaper!
it was never needed
it has always been a myth
“throughout much of the American South and Southwest”
It was nationwide. First time VDH has missed the mark.
Thomas Sowell and Condoleezza Rice are not black regardless of their parents or skin color. This is because they refuse to wear the mantle of black victimhood.
No it wasn’t. That is a horrible thing to say about a country that truly didn’t have segregation and Jim Crow laws nationwide. It was specifically localized.
Please learn your history before you tar an entire nation with your racist brush.
Talk about facts askew, racism was indeed nation wide. The rest of the country was just less obvious about it. It was just as personal in Chicago, New York or Philadelphia.
Don’t suppose superiority for the location of birth. All too often it was an attitude of condescension and “they are fine people” as long as they live in their own ghetto and clean the house well and pick up the trash on time.
For all that there were decent people in the North and the South, just don’t think it was because of geography.
You people are insane – or truly racist. You think you have a handle on something you obviously have no idea about! Speak for yourself, perhaps – but don’t you dare speak for the rest of us!!!
Ummm…I think you should go back and read the last couple lines of LB’s post. I think you missed their point.
Ummmm – no I didn’t. Don’t dare to condescend to me when in actuality it’s pretty clear what this person (and the other) meant. That we were/are a nation of bigots. It is so insulting to the generaltions of good people in this nation and to their memory.
When all is said and done, when hiring, firing and favorable/adverse personnel actions are tinged with the sex/race/ethnicity of the employee, it’s simply identity politics and it makes the libbies feel good about themselves.
When apartheid was the rule in South Africa (i.e., minority rule) it was vilified by the libbies. How DARE a white minority control the country!? Although American whites are a majority in the USA, we are now expected to embrace apartheid and call it “leveling the playing field”.
Sandra Day O’Connor (the poster child for white guilt) was one of the lamest justices ever to sit on the court. Her ruling that affirmative action expires in 25 years was moronic, at best.
The majority race in the USA is fed up with being discriminated against. On an individual basis, how can anyone say that racial discrimination is evil, then turn around and discriminate racially? The affirmative action “program” is simply racism rationalized by the left so that they can satisfy their pathological need for self-esteem.
It’s not really about AA. It’s about the opportunity to call your ideological adversaries racist.
I’m surprised Dr. Hanson didn’t expand more on what an “industry” race identity politics has become.
Politicians, from the most insignificant to the highest office in America, have learned how to game the system using the “race industry” techniques, and they will never give up the advantages inherent in this “business”.
Since “black industry” leadership has been successful in installing the first (half) black president, this momentum cannot be checked for fear of disparaging any participant that may take offense.
Take the main stream media for example; The blind deference engaged in the last 5 years about Obama and his superior intellect and administrative capability. What utter idiocy.
And “government employment” seems to be the most prevalent method of exacting the “rectification” necessary to appease the “offended”.
As long as there is a Democrat Party taking advantage of this “industry” and it’s “employees”, this addiction shall never be diminished, but rather incited for it’s reward of blind complaisance.
Increasingly, watching the news out of Detroit, Watts and Atlanta, and driving through the part of downtown Los Angeles where the homeless missions are, I wonder to myself exactly how these thousands of illiterate shuffling black zombies are better off now than their forefathers were as slaves on the plantation.
Affirmative Action prolongs racism. It’s only logical to assume that any black professional may have achieved his position through affirmative action, so he may be less capable than his peers.
Giving me 500 strokes at golf won’t make me Tiger Woods, even if I then “beat” him.
It’s basically a racket at this point. I’m not saying that I actually believe this, but if it were to come to light that the only reason David Duke isn’t pumping gas in backwoods Louisiana for a living is because he gets two attache cases a month filled with used tens and twenties from Al Sharpton, it wouldn’t entirely surprise me.
The Democrat Party needs to keep blacks and hispanics scared and dependent, because, otherwise, the Party would eventually degenerate to a rump comprised primarily of academics and union members (and that last group on a good day).
Affirmative action is a cancer on the body politic. We in the West will either remove it or it will kill us. Nothing else, of all the bad things government does (and there are many), is such an injustice to people who have done nothing to deserve punishment. Adding insult to grievous injury, it rewards those who have done nothing to merit reward. It drastically lowers American competence and seriously weakens us against overseas competition.
Trust me, no one in Asia gives a flying about helping those who won’t help themselves. They’re about competence and nothing but competence. People who don’t measure up to the requirements take lesser places and that’s how it is. The Asian idea is that the best and smartest get the prizes, and it should be that way because they’re the ones who studied hardest and got the top scores. Meritocracy, you see, brings many benefits in places where it is allowed to flourish. Only in places like the stupid and formerly rich West was such idiocy as affirmative action allowed to pollute the country’s productive resources. We can’t afford such foolishness anymore.
In college, we used to put “black” on those cards sent out by Department of Education and Welfare, as if it really mattered.
Perhaps we should all call ourselves “alien” in the race box. If more specificity is required, put “illegal”. They seem not to ever ask about the status of an illegal alien. There are taxi drivers who have put “illegal alien” on their application for a taxi license, so who in their right mind would challenge you ?
I’ll tell you why affirmative action should stop.
Because we get a lot of smooth talking morons in public life who, predictably enough, proceed to make decisions that smooth talking morons would make.
Merit and ability have been supplanted, replaced by petty strategizing in the name of (perceived) self-interest, low level ideological stances and monstrously ignorant political correctness.
The upshot is the current political and economic mess we’re in.
America’s paucity of statespersons is coming home to roost.
Interesting discussion. You should post your viewpoints about this on http://www.whitehousevoice.com!
First you need school choice.
Certain groups in our society are at a severe disadvantage. These are those that live in low performing school districts and can not afford private education. A majority of these are Black or recent immigrants and it is understandable that many in the higher education community want to make up for the raw deal they were handed based on where they lived. Affirmative action is seen as the best way to compensate for that problem even though the flaws are obvious and fatal.
The real solution is school choice. Then it is up to the student and/or their parents to make sure they are the most qualified to get into the best colleges and affirmative action will be much harder to defend, even by the liberals that really want to believe it makes sense.
Mechris;
Most of those kids come from single parent families, meaning the support structure is weak. Minority parents read to their kids less. There is less interest in their kid’s education as seen by the achievement gap and the dismal number of high school dropouts. The discipline is poor, given the percentage of young men that decide to take up crime.
No amount of school choice is going to solve a cultural problem. Without a strong home environment, schools can only do so much.
One additional dimension of the affirmative action system which wasn’t discussed is the impact it’s had on the groups which it supposedly helps. By decoupling knowledge, skills and abilities from actual real-world achievements, a generation of those peoples ‘protected’ by AA have been given a very tangible and potent lesson that what they do doesn’t really matter – it’s who they are that counts. This is a dangerous lesson for groups of people to learn – it leads to all sorts of problems in the future.
It was completely right of the federal and state governments to intervene on behalf of people who were being discriminated against. It was wrong as hell to institutionalise racism into law through affirmative action.
uncle miltie says it all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg4fxUpRzj8
pass it on
I, for one, favor affirmative action. When the issue of correcting social injustice is broached, the thought that automatically comes to mine is to inflict another punitive requirement on the South. As any enlightened person, including Dr. Hanson, will tell you, Southerners are all racists and deserve all the punishment legally allowable. Fine, we’re happy with affirmative action and all the rest. When was the last time you saw any public display of resentment for it from the South. For that matter, when was the last time, you saw any article like this one from a Southerner. And you’re not going to. It’s no accident that the biggest internal migration in the last 30 years is that of blacks returning to the South. I’m sorry to see it’s causing so much angst for our northern friends to have to live with their own rules.
uhmmm. hey, I hate to break this to you but everyone has been migrating to the south…It’s the economy stupid !
Just about anyone born in America today is a mutt. Anthropologists have determined that we are even more mutt than we previously believed. They have found that humans have Cro-Magnon genes also. The latest theory is that humans needed the Cro-Magnon genes in order to develop the speech centers of the brain.
How soon before we have AA for Cro-Magnons?
Two anecdotes.
1. The comment about dark-skinned Sicilians reminded me of a college reunion I attended maybe 15 years ago. The student band that was popular when I was at that college was performing for the dance. A student from earlier times was excited about this because one of the singers was a well-known African-American alumna (A-A father, white mother) whom he had never met. When the band came on stage, he couldn’t figure out which one was her! After staring for a while, he picked the woman whose grandparents were from Sicily.
2. I spent a few years in the mid 80′s consulting at a major utility. One manager told me that when a position under him was open, there were 5 applicants from within the company, two African-American males, one Latino female, and two white males. He was told to choose the most qualified person, and this, in his opinion, was one of the white males. His superiors and the HR department grilled him about his choice several times, but he didn’t give in.
After thirty years of equality it has now turned into income-redistribution, reparations and vengeance. I find this is a very dangerous and counter-productive path to be going down.
VDH: “and instead, in millions of cases, therefore resort ad hoc to what Americans profess or think they are.”
For an example of how this really works out, check out Andrew Bolt, an Australian pundit, and the suit against him in Australia for violating their “Racial Vilification Act” by calling certain people “white Aborigines”.
With all of the talk about the legacy of slavery, I’ll bet that very few people actually know who the first slaveowner in the English colonies was.
You’d think that it would be a fairly well known bit of trivia.
It was in Virginia and he actually sued to own a slave. His name was Anthony Johnson (the slave’s name, by the way, was John Casor) and if you look him up, you’ll find out all sorts of interesting things about him, including the fact that his legal argument amounted, essentially, to multiculturalism.
Actually, I think universities do need affirmative action. I’ve never known a more bigoted group of people in my life. They judge you on where you went to school (but never what you majored in), who your friends are, what you purport to read, etc.
And they also are viciously racist. Paternalistic condescension is as racist as anything the Klan is into.
Affirmative Action seems to be an article of faith in our universities today. As such I believe it should be extended.
Universities must hire conservatives and liberals on a 50/50 basis.
amen!
The change is long overdue but one of the greatest political and structural barriers to abolishing AA is the entrenched army of bureaucrats employed at the federal, state and county level. These folk’s entire existence is defined by the process of discovering, investigating and prosecuting discrimination of all kinds – whether it in fact exists or not. They will not go away quietly.
“Wrong is wrong–always.”
Exactly. Another way to put it “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Affirmative Action should have been a single decade policy, and at the outer limits, 20 years to allow for one generation to “catch up” economically. AA has created almost 5 decades of resentment among the Caucasians it has deprived of a level playing field in their lifetimes.
AA has committed legalized discrimination against my husband his entire work life, and is now doing the same to my sons. If you know prejudice in your lifetime, it doesn’t much matter to you what came before or will come after–you have lived with prejudice your entire lifetime, something only octogenarian minorities can honestly claim these days in America. The Pursuit of the American Dream has been seriously hampered for white males for most of my life.
And no. I refuse to understand prejudice against anyone, including myself. It’s always ugly.
Victimhood is the way by which unremarkable Americans can feel special. Take it away and they are ordinary. Every now and then VHD writes a similar essay attacking Affirmative Action, but to what ends? It does no good. Affirmative Action is as entrenched as Social Security and Medicare, and it isn’t going away, ever. Add to that, the victimhood-as-peerage mentality and a society in which clear argument that exposes hyprocrisy is seen as “mean-spirited” and of course, racist, then any chance of its elimination is futile.
Why argue with crystalline examples of people from say, Chile, when the target audience thinks that “chile” is something you eat at Wendy’s or Taco Bell? Is it any wonder those two black girls in Baltimore McDonald’s beat the hell out of the white transvestite recently? They were jealous; he(she?) was infringing on their victim territory. Kinda’ like when an established business attempts to undermine a start-up challenger.
I teach adults at a private vocational school. Recently, in an English class devoted to clear thinking, we discussed politics. When I gently — ever so gently — pointed out that unemployment under Bush was 4 percent and it now runs between 12 and 20 percent depending on locale, the black students went ballistic. One threw her book at the ground. There is not enough space here to describe the twisted circular arguments that followed. By the way, guess who was reprimanded after the students complained? Facts don’t matter. I repeat, the facts don’t matter. Get that through your heads class: From this moment on, facts will never again matter in the United States of America.
This is our future, and now that such victim-fanatics are in charge (and I refer not only to African Americans) they will stay in charge through such tactics, including mass Latino amnesties and character-destroying video segments (of course video – the opposition can’t read; another reason VDH wastes his time here…) The next election cycle is going to be ugly, ugly, ugly. Smile perishing Republic. Smile.
can you fail the students for “not clearly thinking?”
nothing to lose a job over and as far as californians are concerned you are in the belly of the beast; maybe a twist in tactics
the key is not mentioning bush
try discussing the minimum wage and how it keeps the poorest and least skilled from ever being legally employed and see how that goes
DONT MENTION BUSH
“Affirmative Action is as entrenched as Social Security and Medicare, and it isn’t going away, ever.”
Then not only now, but never again will we be a nation where all men are created equal.
if that is a private school and those students are still there then I wouldn’t be.
I can see that at a public school.
Affirmative Action and reparations are endorsed by liberals. In reality, it’s just a way of saying blacks are not qualified but for the color of their skin. Isn’t it downright insulting to imply that white people are intellectually superior? I’m white, and it insults me!
Pat Paulson used to say during his presidential campaign in the 70′s that most of America’s current problems stem from a very unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian.
The point is not simply that affirmative action a bad idea. We all know that. Any justification of it ended decades ago but it is defended with the same tenacity that Henry Ford defended the continued manfacture of the Model T even as competitors were beating Ford to death with new models in the late 1920′s.
The problem with affirmative action is that it has become “Too Big to Fail.” It isn’t a program or even a philosophy anymore, it’s an industry How many federal, state and local officials are part of the “Diversity Assurance Complex?” How many universities and private corporations have “Diversity Compliance Officers” who do nothing more than count racial/ethnic noses? How many law firms and public advocacy groups make their bread-and-butter by filing suits against the aforementioned organizations whenever the books “don’t balance?”
In the university setting the usual progression has been for “The Office of Affirmative Action” to evolve from a one or two-person operation to a sub-department to a department to a “cabinet-level” position headed by a Vice-President. These increasingly large bureaucratic entities operate with practically no oversight because any effort to actually examine what they are dong or (heaven forbit!) modify their operations is immediately chalked off to “racism.”
With all of these personnel and all of their funding depended on ferreting out racism it is no wonder that they find it much in the same way the legendary Witchfinders General used seek out heresy. You can’t justify your job without results.Unfortunately the sort of “racism” that these later-day Torquemadas find is invariably something so minor or so silly that you wonder how adults could actually be concerned about it. The recent kerfuffel concerning the UCLA student who made satirical remarks in bad taste (note “bad taste”) about the Chinese is a perfect example. She was nothing more than a pelt to nail to the door to justify the existence of whatever diversity bureaucracy exists at the school.
chambers:
Some of those organizations, particularly private corporations, develop departments and their associated costs independent of any sort of desire to do so. My wife works in Human Resources for a large corporation in my city. Its product and operations require recruitment of new engineers in a couple of specific disciplines. If they find a qualified engineer in one of those disciplines, that person is virtually guaranteed to receive an offer, based on the relative scarcity of such applicants. The scarcity stems more from our location, and the lack of political correctness of the industry (nuclear power) than an absolute scarcity of qualified engineers. Male, female, black, white, brown, yellow, green with pink polka dots – it does not matter if the person can ‘engineer.”
Despite this, however, this corporation’s recruitment policies are subject to significant government scrutiny. They MUST PROVE that they are not favoring advantaged classes of applicants vs. the identified disadvantaged classes. None of this is free. Significant effort and resources are devoted to proving such compliance, in addition to the efforts to actually comply.
Consequently, they have a department of some significance, including personnel, legal consultants, etc. to address these issues. When is enough enough?
Your wife has my sympathies. Let me share a story with you.
I teach at a university in Ohio. In 2008 our school experienced one of the strangest “affirmative action” problems that I can recall. A high-level school administrator, a black woman, had considerable oversight for “human relations” and “diversity” matters. She had considerable seniority. She was also a minister at her church. One week she delivered a rather heated sermon on the “sin” of homosexuality including comments that it was a voluntary choice and that said sinners could not attain the afterlife. Naturally there was an uproar from the local gay community who demanded her resignation. The local black community was just as fervid in her support and our administration was left with that awful “deer-in-the-headlights” look that college administrators assume whenever they have to make a real choice. There were community meetings and “healing sessions” and all the usual community outreach palaver intended to try and find a solution.
Finally the woman accepted a buyout fromt the school and left. I only bring this up because, even with this episode on her resume, the ex-administrator was just appointed Human Relations Administrator for the city of Jackson, Michigan. As I said, once you are a member of the “Diversity Business” it’s pretty hard to get thrown out.
Since institutional discrimination is prohibited by law, and armies of race-baiting trial lawyers are ready to sue at any discrimination, real or imagined, any company or entity that would discriminate would soon be bankrupted by a blizzard of legal (and PR)trouble. So the current message of affirmative action appears to be this: minorities are just too stupid and/or incompetent to compete with smarter white people. I would like proponents of AA to explain to me why this is not the case. If blacks, Latinos. etc, are equally capable, and equally intelligent to whites, then why the need for AA? It must be the hidden, always simmering hidden racism that infests the hearts and minds of all white employers. Yeah, that must be it.
Affirmative action has morphed into a multi-billion dollar industry replete with lobbyists, lawyers and special interests. It’s a grab bag of goodies; a spoils system. All attempts at any reform are immediately demagogued with race baiting.
Any sane country would have reassessed these programs in the 1970s, expanded those that were working and elminated those that weren’t. Not in the USA though. Like all entitlement programs it just grew and grew, in many instances doing more damage than good.
Obama gave a speech…in May 2007 I think…where he raised the possiblity of switching AA from a race based program to an economic class program. His handlers pulled his chain hard and that was the last we heard of it.
Real-life stories:
1. When my granddaughter was registered for first grade, her mother found out that “minorities” were preferentially admitted to advanced or accelerated classes. So she listed my granddaughter (whose name is basically English/Jewish) as “Hispanic” and said to me “Who is to say we are not?”
2. Some years ago, I taught an engineering course as an adjunct. The class was taught in a “distance learning” protocol as well as to a regular live classroom. One of the distance learning groups was composed of mostly students with Spanish, Indian, or other recognizably foreign names. I never saw these students. When they did worse on their midterm than any other group of students, and I suggested they needed help with their study skills, I was chastised for my racism for an hour by their faculty adviser, and was not ever hired as an adjunct again by that university.
Yes, we need to rethink the whole affirmative action system.
Insane, pernicious policies like AA, unlimimited welfarism and “green energy” make liberals feel good about themselves, so they’ll be with us forever, sadly.
Another affirmative action travesty:
Neighbors of ours who recently came from South Africa, and are incidentally fluent in Swahili, tried to register their child in school as “African-American” and were prohibited from doing so because they are “white.”
This is why I stopped calling myself African American. Black describes my race and ethnic identity. American describes my national identity. I’m not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination, but I have to agree with how silly that sounds.
Dear Leader Obama is the prime example of affirmative action gone crazy; our first affirmative action president.
A totally unprepared and experienced person got to be President by living the affirmative action life style; from kindergarten to law school and then elected office. Obama is failing and we are suffering from all the good intentions that affirmative action implies.
Affirmative action is simply discrimination in a pretty dress – sounds good but others are discriminated in the process. We need to stop this practice of discrimination of all kinds and shapes………..
I have read many of the comments about this article and its interesting that a lot of you believe that we should be done with affirmative action. I only have one question. Could anybody tell me how many AA CEOs there are there out of all the fortune 500 companies? Once you answer this question then you will understand why affirmative action is still needed.
Most companies don’t want to watch their company go down the tubes, that’s why the want the best person for the job regardless of skin color. Can you imagine the poster boy for the dysfunctional lunacy of AA, Barack Obama running a company? Maybe you can, but big companies with thousands of employees and stockholders don’t feel like putting things in the hands of a politically correct but incompetent affirmative action baby just so that drooling liberals have one fewer thing to gripe about.
how can you argue that one form of racism (affirmative action) is ok.
your analogy is a dishonest leftist smear. it is people like you that turn things into racism by counting how many AA are in certain positions.
a lot of those CEO’s are not unlike the IMF chief ..old boys. that isn’t racism it’s cronyism.
affirmative action hurts everyone.
travel the world and you will find that the USA and Canada are the least racist countries in the world. THE END.
John: Your comment makes no sense.
Thanks for playing and please come again.
OBAMA IS A “VICTIM” OF THE MEDIA WHO ENABLED HIS ELECTION INTO A JOB FOR WHICH HE IS OBVIOUSLY NOT QUALIFIED. THE ULTIMATE WELFARE JOB PROVIDING FREE TRAVELS, GOLPH, HANDOUTS TO FAMILY AND FRIENDS AND PROSPECTIVE VOTERS. IF HE IS NOT RE ELECTED HE WILL CONTINUE TO CRY VICTIM AND CONTINUE TO BLAME BLAME BLAME. VICTIM IDENTITY = $$$
The simplest way to solve most of the problems that VDH correctly raises about affirmative action is to make it based on socioeconomic status rather than race. Doing so would still benefit many minorities while eliminating most of the worst abuses of affirmative action: cultivating an identity for the sole purpose of obtaining special consideration (“Geraldo Rivera” = “Gerry Rivers”); wealthy minorities whose children benefit from AA despite receiving every advantage in the world, etc.
Wow! We seem to be having the national discussion about race promised by our president and after two years, not yet broached.
When I opened PJM this morning VDH’s bold column (kudos to the visual guys who provided the race card) was at the top of the heap right under the masthead. Now it’s post no. 4 or 5 or whenever you log on.
Pity. If Roger Simon would keep an honest and civil discussion on race relations in America front and center, PJM wouldn’t feel so diffuse and so tired. Might even force MSM attention on the seriousness of emedia and PJM in particular.
Gird your aged loins, Rog. An honest discussion of race in America could restore honest standards and approaches To American education (where the abuses of AA are most egregious) that would benefit all, African Americans first and foremost.
Keep the discussion alive.
Didn’t have time to read all the Comments. But the point that’s missed here is that racial preferences are “preferment and recompense” and “discrimination and punishment” at the same time. The old WASP (and then whites generally) private discrimination was preferment for whites, and discrimination (“discrimination is the hallmark of the civilized mind”, BTW) against non-whites. Our current, and legally imposed, affirmative action plans are preferments for non-whites and discrimination against whites. The point is, that every human society is a hierarchy. So, there’s no question of non-discrimination; the only question is, who’s on top?
Giving it some thought, I disagree. The only affirmative action success I’ve witnessed in the last fifty years was the post world war two American draft. The conscription system did get the American military racially integrated almost over night, at least by 1955. Of course, given all the draft exemptions, the military EM rank and file came from a pretty narrow social class of males, especially by 1968; females were exempt, and still are. Hum, gee, the gender ratio for American law school graduations is 1:1 currently. I don’t know about civilian males, but affirmative action sure has been good for civilian females. Extend the affirmative action draft to females and maybe there will be a 1:1 kill ratio between genders in the military? That would be a first, equal dying for equal pay between the genders in the Marine Corp. Just think of it as extending Title Nine to playing with hand grenades.
Affirmative action is reverse racism by another name.
I worked for an energy corporation for 24 years. This particular business was dominated by white male engineers. We always knew that eventually actions would be taken against the company because the scales were tipped, unintentionally, in one direction. About ten years ago a couple women were pegged to be downsized because their performance was sub standard. They invoked chapter 9 laws and forced the CEO to find them both an entry level leadership position. Neither of these women ever contributed much to the bottom line but they did play the affirmative action card to the max. They recently have managed to get many male employees “downsized” while promoting the affirmative action promotions of many more women in the company. All I can say is that affirmative action can gift you a leadership position but it can never make you a respected leader.
If, after 50 years of Affirmative Action programs, anyone tries to claim that more of the same is needed, I say, “WAKE UP!!!! GET A CLUE!!! IF IT HASN’T WORKED AFTER 50 YEARS OF TRYING, IT AIN’T GONNA WORK!!!”
Pardon my hollering.
By the way, if it has worked, then all should be well and no more is needed.
Affirmative action does indeed deserve to die, but I think it will take a good while. Disparate impact is the much more offensive idea in the area of race relations. It was at the heart of the famed DiStefano case that dogged Sotomayor. The Roberts Court looked close to undoing disparate impact in that decision, but didn’t pull the trigger. Too bad. This loathsome doctrine enshrines the concept that even if there is at present no racial discrimination, that past discrimination permits colleges, employers, etc., to go ahead and discriminate on the basis of race, like in the DiStefano case. Because there was past discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in Hartford CT, then the test results that allowed the promotions of the men who made the requisite scores could be thrown out because not enough black applicants made the same score. This was for a firefighter exam. Life and death issues involved in that profession, but no biggie, let’s make the promotions based not on qualifications and knowledge, but on racial/ethnic grievance. That is no way to run a vibrant and multiethnic society such as this one. It is an invitation to enormous divisiveness. The Democraps should think this through. If they persist in this, they risk turning whites into bloc voters for the GOP, much like blacks are for the Dems.
Not much really to weigh in on with all of my points being touched in several different comments above. I would just say, Racism will never end entirely, but you must define and differentiate Racism between Tribalism. If you happen to be black and you would prefer to live among other blacks in a community run by blacks, and you want your children to go to black run schools with little black children does that make you racist? or Tribalism. There is a difference and a White man should be able to raise his children in an all white environment if that is his choosing without it being racist, along with blacks, browns, ….ect
Tribes of the early days did not co-mingle and they did just fine, who ever came up with this forced diversity idea was wrong, flat wrong. I think integration causes racism, and resentment. Far as getting extra points for a job or school entrance because of your heritage, well of course that is going to cause racism thoughts and resentments, It’s not fair, but It is only not fair to the White man…..the Evil ruler of the world. It’s a tired complaint, and many of neighborhoods have been ruined because this so called integration raising all boats. Let’s face the facts, different races have different traits and qualities, It’s a fact. One is not superior to the other but different. It is now time to do away with affirmative action, integration, special grants and privileges for minorities, If not it is beginning to become to the point where White people are resenting it so much it could eventually cause so much resentment that Racial tensions will equal that of South Africa, and from there the only place to go is civil Race war, Is that what we want? We are all equal but different, let’s face it, live with it, and let people of likeness live amongst their own if they choose without labeling them racist. I could go on with Evidence of many things people would really feel uncomfortable hearing, but it’s the truth and it may now just be time to tell it. America has a Black President for God’s sake shall we still complain to ride the gravy train.
“I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This!”– Herman Cain Debates in South Carolina
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NRimwvPLdo4#at=47
watch this …a beautifully simple explanation or racism and discrimination.
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=MzkxZDE1NjM3NjU1YzZmMWIxNzY2MmI1YWRmNTNkZmE=
THE END
Racial preferences for African-Americans who are actually descended from slaves are at least defensible. But the current regime gives preferences of one sort or another to anyone who is not a white male. Why should a Chinese immigrant with a Ph.D. from MIT be entitled to set-aside government contracts? And yet he is, though the SDB and 8(a) programs, just as if he were a poor black woman who grew up in a Baltimore project. Preferences for immigrants are the most galling. The US is what it is – if an immigrant feels it is racist, he is welcome to try another country.
We’re probably all descended from slaves. Every part of the world had experienced slavery at some point in history or other.
Affirmative action is nothing more than another effort to implement social and economic justice or the effort to social engineer the redistribution of wealth. Otherwise, it is all too common to overlook the American concept as presented in the US Constitution that equality and fairness is guaranteed. . .to everyone.
Right.
I’d say that just about every single “affirmative action/race based policy” is unconstitutional based on their legal merits.
But, what politician or chief justice has the fortitude to make this call?
NONE
This is a brilliant essay, easily one of the best I’ve seen in years. It clearly deconstructs the inherent absurdity of “race”-based preferences. Any geneticist will tell you that people of all races are vastly more similar than they are different with which to begin.
Thanks for sharing. Its very helpful.
When the civil rights act was being debated a southern democrat said to Hubert Humphrey that quotas and affirmative action would be the result and therefore he would not support it. Humphrey countered that quotas and affirmative action were expressly forbidden and if the gentleman could find a reference in the law he would eat it. The people who fought this act were denegrated as southern racists and were basically run out of town by public opinion dominated by the liberal press.
The last schools in the south were integrated legally in 1969 that was 50 tears ago. 4 full 12 year education cycles have passed and black scores still lag behind other groups. Thurgood Marshall said that Brown vs Board of Education was won using crap science and it was one of the foundations for this mess we have today. We are not all equal and the reason is well beyond race or ethnicity and has evrything to do with culture.
You forgot a few genes in the mix.
This has been the most spirited, detailed, and thorough discussion on this topic I can remember. Truly enlightening.
Can we have this put into a forum where we may continue this debate?
The absurdity of the American preoccupation with race became evident to me when a friend of mine, an MD called Gunther Schiller (name slightly changed) who can trace his ancestry some 400 years (Germany) was registered as a Hispanic by the university employing him to teach. His father lived in Argentina–where Gunther was born–during the war and later until the late 1960′s. Eventually they moved to the U.S. and Gunther, born in Argentina, finished his education in California during the 70′s. That gentleman, a U.S. citizen by choice is considered a Hispanic by the U.S. Government. It makes one wonder about the integrity of whatever databases the U.S. Government is using to determine who gets what in the racial redistribution game.
Unfortunately all of that labeling people like cattle has lead to more stupid racism. Years ago I saw that in Boston, perhaps one of the most racist cities in the U.S. This man–we will call him Beppo– was chatting in perfect Italian with someone at a party. Later I had a chance to chat with him (in English) but as he walked away from the circle a third person told me in a confidential tone that he was a Brazilian “trying to pass” for Italian. I explained to that poor ignoramus that many Italians emigrated to Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela during the 20th century. Judging Beppo by his impeccable use of the Italian language and his general demeanor I had no doubt that he was innocent of the “charge” against him. The whole thing left me wondering what kind of idiotic ideas about “race” are circulating around some empty heads out there. Later I learned that Beppo’s parents where from a small town in Friuli (Italy) and they owned a chain of ice cream shops in Sao Paulo, Brazil… :)
As we learn more and more about DNA and the complexity of the interactions of the human family I hope those ideas are discarded once and for all. Throwing away AA would be a great start.
Thanks again to VDH. As usual, your article was timely and very thought provoking.
It has been stated earlier, but it will be impossible to get rid of AA for one big reason. Follow the money !!
There is no way the victims, lawyers, lobbyists, etc., are ever going to give up the gift that keeps on giving.
I often ask my wealthy psueo-intellectual liberal friends if they are in favor of AA. Without hesitation, almost all weigh in immediately how important it is to “level” the playing field. When I then ask, “are you ok if you hard working son/daughter who is an A student doesn’t get in to Cal Berkeley, but a much less qualified minority will take his place at Cal ??”. Needless to say the silence I get back in deafening.
All rules apply to liberals, except when it comes to them.
A corollary: in medicine, practitioners who accept Federal (Medicare and Medicaid) payments now must prove to their minders they are not discriminating against minorities in order to continue to receive money for services rendered. Thus, I laugh and cry silently as I listen to my receptionist ask all new patients what race they are, if they are Hispanic and their counrty of origin. No one is obligated to answer, but most people are rule followers and comply. I have become infamous for declining the ethnicity quiz when I registered as a patient at my own clinic. I tried to explain that my family lived in the Deep South from 1964-1968 and people died in order to end racial discrimination. The ethnicity questions are a disturbing return to those awful years.
A good way to show the weakness in this system is to indicate another race other than your own on all forms asking for any ethnicity. Preferably the rarest ethnicity you can think of. And indicate several races for other family members.
Once they are forced to prove anyone’s ethnicity through testing, these policies will have to be eliminated for failure to satisfy their own requirements.
I can’t wait to see these policies go up against the Supreme Court and get dissected.
Heh! Bring on the riots!
Here’s the exact Census questions on race and ethnicity
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2009/questionnaire.aspx
You’d have to choose “Other race’ and make something up.
Looks like you could be a black Alaskan native, with the available options.
The under-taxed, highly-subsidized ultra-wealthy of this country are succeeding in getting the middle and lower class to point fingers at each other as the causes of (fill in the blank: higher deficits, problems with health care, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.). We are justifiably frustrated because our portion of the pie is shrinking. But it’s not the (fill in the blank: minorities, unions, welfare cheats, liberal media, teachers, working poor) who are getting the money that used to be ours, it’s the very, very wealthy. Don’t fall for their “no class warfare” crap. It IS class war and we’re ALREADY losing.
Tod;
Huh???
The US has the most progressive tax system in the world, meaning we rely on the wealthiest Americans to pay most of the country’s taxes – and they do. The top 25% of earners pay 85%
http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html
In fact almost half of Americans pay NO federal income tax at all, the result of all the accumulated tax deductions and breaks handed out by both Democrats and Republicans:
A more technical analysis:
The Growing Class of Americans Who Pay No Federal Income Taxes
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/206.html
The Income Tax System is Broken
43 Percent Of Americans Pay No Federal Income Tax
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/15/politics/otherpeoplesmoney/main4945874.shtml
What do you think should be done about this obvious travesty?
Reading the comments has been as informative as Dr. Hanson’s post.
My brush with affirmative action/minority set asides: There was a contract let by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to map the timberlands that were part of a large indian reservation in a southwestern state. The small business I worked for was NOT a minority, but the owner found a native Alaskan indian to bid on the contract.
The Alaskan had his own small engineering firm, but the work they did was in no way similar to the work at hand. No matter. The native Alaskan got the bid, subbed out the work to us, took a cut, and everyone was happy.
On a more philosophical note, I wonder what it must be like to be a minority and to be very good at your, job, and truly deserving of the advancement you receive. But then to be nagged by thoughts about whether you got this because of your abilities, or partly because of your color? Also, to wonder what others were thinking. I guess some minorities would be bothered by this.
Ward Connerly would have the answer to your last paragraph.
http://www.acri.org/
I was adopted and don’t know the racial mixture of my birth parents (nor do my adopted parents know). Do I qualify for the benefits of AA based on a DNA test? If so, wouldn’t that be racist?
And under AA, which would supercede: the ethnicity of my birth parents or the ethnicity of my adopted parents?
My step children are half black and half Korean. They’ve learn under AA that there is no benefit to recognizing their Korean half when AA is being considered.
AA actually discourages recognizing one’s complete heritage by creating preferences.
I am for affirmative action. Hold up, before you go off, hears me out.
I teach a class called AVID (Advancement via Individual Determination). The point of the program is to identify what we call the middle student. These are kids who earn a 2.0 to about a 3.0 GPA, stay out of trouble, have potential to succeed, and are off the teacher’s radar. Often these kids are “minorities” but more often they are kids who come from families whose parents have not gone to college or have difficult circumstances they are dealing with. Several studies have demonstrated that first generation students are less likely to attend college and earn college degrees. Why? Their parents do not always understand the steps it takes to get there.
What we do in the class is explicitly teach students the skills and communication strategies needed to succeed in rigorous curriculum, we work with parents to get them more involved, and we hold students accountable. We work to break the victim mentality and teach them to pull themselves up by their boot straps. Students who are selected have average to advanced test scores, thus they are competent, but for some reason, they have not figured it out. Most importantly, students participate voluntarily and be committed to improving themselves.
In the end, any “affirmative action” should have been designed to help people attain the skills to become successful. It works best when it address real problems, not offer a band aid handout solution. Rather than saying “Here is a job or a college acceptance. We will give it to you because you are black, female, Asian, or what have you,” people should help people gain the skills they need to get the job or gain acceptance as a result of their own merit. What is sad is that for the powers that be, it easier to give the hand out.
Nobody gives the Asian countries any grief for their ungodly homogeneous populations…
The unfortunate racist condition of the black community (including the black church) was proven by the overwhelming percentage (>90%) of blacks that voted for Obama. They simply voted color. All other races voted either McCain or Obama, and not in some overwhelming block.
The black community is on the ‘drug’ of liberalism, purchased by many years of taxpayer’s contributions to liberal programs such as welfare, Planned Parenthood, food stamps, etc, etc. The Democrats were ‘smart’, knowlingly or unknowingly, to have purchased with everyone’s tax money a voting group.
Black America, grow up, get over it, just be people!
Eugene Robinson’s book Disintegration had some interesting things to say about the current makeup of Black America. You don’t have to agree with his (liberal) policy prescriptions to agree that the demographics have changed, and require a thorough policy re-think.
White Priviledge: To give to white persons special freedom or immunity from some liability or burden to which non–white persons are subject.
As a black man in a professional position, it is assumed that I must have gotten to my place through affirmative action and thus must have displaced a more qualified white person. A white man in my same position having accomplished what I have accomplished is given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to be competent.
As a black, if I voted for Obama, I had to have been motivated by race. Over 90% percent of black people voted for him so it must be a race thing for all blacks, never mind the fact that the last three Democratic candidates each recieved 90% or more of the black vote. A conservative white person votes for a white candidate, it assumed that he is voting the issues and not race.
I am not denying that there are people of color who have gotten jobs that they are not necessarily qualified for. I’m not saying that many of, if not most of the blacks in this country who voted for Obama were not motivated by the prospect of voting for a black man. I am saying that the conservatives on this page like to engage in broad generalizations. You point to Obama’s supposed ineptitude as a leader and blame it on AA. What is your excuse for the ineptitude of Bush? I say RDA, Rich Dad Affirmation.
End the racist affirmative action yesterday. Black people need to understand as a race, that if you judge any person on their race they are a racist. All hard working, honest and good hearted Americans deserve an equal unbiased shot at success. Racist are you supporters of affirmative action.