Posted on 07/02/2015 6:45:29 AM PDT by Kaslin
The Supreme Court has just agreed to reconsider the constitutionality of racial preferences in university admissions (although the advocates of these preferences prefer the seemingly more uplifting term “affirmative action.”) It is long past time that the Supreme Court declared this insidious and counterproductive policy unconstitutional for public universities and colleges, and hopefully private institutions will decide that it is incumbent upon them to also stop basing admissions decisions on race, gender or sexual preference.
The idea of granting preferences based on race, gender or sexual orientation is so offensive and so un-American that its proponents have had to construct an elaborate edifice of rationalizations to make it seem not only morally justifiable but entirely reasonable and downright necessary to the educational mission. But this edifice collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
There was a time I supported affirmative action. It seemed to me a matter of simple fairness to open up greater opportunities to historically disadvantaged minorities. But during the five years I spent in elite graduate schools I saw first-hand the woeful consequences, some unintended and some very much so deliberate, of this terribly wrong-headed policy.
When I was in law school, I heard the moral justification expressed in extremely blunt terms: 'It’s Payback for Slavery and Jim Crow.' Now, the minority students at Georgetown University Law School by and large had attended tony prep schools and graduated from elite (and expensive) Ivy League universities. And to my knowledge, none had experienced the horrors of chattel slavery or the indignities of discriminatory Jim Crow laws. Nonetheless, as one prominent African-American professor adamantly insisted, if a white coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia and an African-American son of a wealthy doctor were competing for the same spot in the law school class, it was morally necessary to give that spot to the African-American applicant, even if his LSAT score and grades were lower, simply because that is what America owed to black people.
So one inevitable result of weighing a thumb heavily in favor of minority applicants is that less qualified minority applicants are admitted while more qualified applicants are turned away. Inevitable, since a minority applicant with a lower LSAT score and undergraduate grades is automatically assigned extra points simply on the basis of which box they check on the “race” part of the application form. And there is ample evidence that minority students end up struggling to perform academically or even pass the bar exam. This performance gap has been both significant and persistent.
The other main justification of affirmative action is the urgent necessity of “diversity.” Now, Georgetown and other elite schools do have a certain kind of diversity. When I was there, my classmates included upper-class white males, upper-class white womyn, upper-class African-Americans and Hispanics, and upper-class gays. It truly did represent “the beautiful rainbow of diversity” if diversity can be reduced to skin color, gender, and sexual preference. But there were practically zero students who came from working-class backgrounds, or from the rural South, or who had ever personally experienced poverty or discrimination. (In fact, as someone from a poor rural Southern family, I was more than once sneeringly called an ignorant redneck.)
Now, apparently this “diversity” has some crucial symbolic significance, so that the school website can proudly feature a lot of photos with lots of white, black and brown smiling faces. But the more purportedly serious argument is that racial (and gender and sexual preference) diversity is absolutely necessary to truly informed classroom discussion of modern social issues. For example, how can the history of Supreme Court decisions dealing with race possibly be discussed without African-Americans in the room to share their personal experiences and insights?
That almost sounds convincing if you don’t give the question any serious thought. After all, how can you discuss Plessy v Ferguson, the infamous 1896 Supreme Court decision establishing the odious doctrine of “separate but equal” without the participation of black students, who presumably know more about the Jim Crow South than any white person possibly could? Well, you could just as reasonably argue that you couldn’t possibly discuss the 1917 October Russian Revolution without a Russian student there to explain how he felt about Bolshevism and the Tsar.
In fact, having read C. Vann Woodward’s authoritative history "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," as well as Eric Foner’s magisterial "Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution," and Eugene Genovese’s definitive social history of slavery "Roll, Jordan, Roll," I actually knew the relevant history far better than almost any of my classmates, black or white. But the presumption was that I couldn’t really understand what slavery was like because I was white. Well, it is utter nonsense to think that only a native born Russian can understand life in 1917 Petrograd, or that only a black person can understand 19th century American history and race relations. In fact, very often such a person presumed to be uniquely personally knowledgeable in fact is prisoner to cheap popular myths and misconceptions. In fact, the contribution most African-American students made to discussions of race and law rarely went beyond cheap platitudes, but were considered priceless wisdom merely because professors naively assumed that growing up black on the Upper West Side and attending Yale was somehow in some ethereal spiritual sense the same as spending a lifetime of bondage on a Mississippi cotton plantation in the early 19th century.
In short, so-called affirmative action is no more than a valuable benefit doled out to a privileged class of beneficiaries, who understandably wish to defend it. And it is justified on the basis of utterly specious rationalization because there is no legitimate educational purpose served by affirmative action. And it is time for the Supreme Court to finally recognize that just because it is a policy deeply favored by socially liberal professors at elite universities, it is nonetheless unconstitutional and bad public policy to boot. And I suspect there are finally the five votes necessary to junk this misguided and dysfunctional experiment in unadulterated racial politics disguised as benign social progress.
The reality of affirmative action is having droves of “minority” students at colleges and universities who can barely function at an elementary school level. Even the most top-tier and competitive universities have to implement special remedial programs on account of sub-par quota students (of course, they often need those classes for some of the kids on athletic scholarships, and for some of the dimmer legacy students too).
Affirmative Action = giving unfair advantage to a minority for the supposed purpose of achieving equality.
“Minority” is a rather relative term these days. Blacks are obviously the minority if you count them alone but if you lump them together with Hispanics clearly whites become the minority. Affirmative action has run its course. All it has achieved is giving positions of power or employment to persons that are less qualified who have usually made a mess of things. Many police chiefs in large metroplexes come to mind. Its time to drop AA and let the best qualified persons be chosen for the job.
By giving it a warm fuzzy nice-sounding name, they fooled Americans for 50 years. If they had named it what it is: “No jobs for qualified Whiteys”, we would not be having this debate now.
You said it
“AFFIRMATIVE ACTION” = State-sanctioned Racism.
“Let’s use racism as a tool to end racism.” The fascists who believe in “Affirmative Action” fail to see the blatant hypocrisy in their actions.
Furthermore, so-called “Affirmative Action” is WORSE than arbitrary racism by individuals... Why? Because it has the added element of fascism by using our government to commit acts of racism. Nothing “affirmative” about this.
If used in college admissions, so-called “Affirmative Action” is essentially a throwback to the deep south discrimination of the 50’s and 60’s, only with another racial group other than whites being preferred.
Imagine that instead of the present online or by-mail college application processes, everyone had to physically go to the College admissions office and stand in line to apply... Affirmative action would REQUIRE SEPARATE LINES BASED ON SKIN COLOR with Al Sharptongue and Jesse Jacker pre-screening who goes to which line:
—”OK, dude, your skin is BLACK, so you go to the African American Express student admissions line.”
—”OK, dude, you skin is WHITE, so you go to the ‘White Guilt remedial class’ and if you pander enough and pretend to be black, we might consider your application.”
Pathetic. This is the neo racism of our times and nobody sees it.
Kill it. AA is state sponsored reverse discrimination.
So when do those who suffered from AA get reparations?
And it’s been like that for forty plus years.
By halftime, they’re half gone. Late to class and unprepared, when they even bothered to show, and underperforming on recitations and examinations. The Peter Principle at work.
Almost all the whites were still around.
And many of the ones who do graduate are just quietly shifted from company to company, firm to firm, agency to agency rather than being justifiably terminated.
And doesn’t the words “no person” mean exactly that? Oh wait, Cocktail Party Kennedy, Blackmailed Johnny and the Robot 4 would disagree.
It was illegal, immoral and doomed to failure from the get-go. Nobody owed anybody anything. The laws were effective from date of enactment, not back in history. There are no “remedies” for the past. And even if so, one would have to subtract the fair values of disproportionate crime, welfare takings, etc. Not to mention “but for” discrimination, they’d be residing in Africa, not America. After all the capture and boat ride over were also acts of discrimination. Did the racism start when the boats hit shore?
A charade on White America, hard workers, great students, and now Asians. Couched in “positive” language (see e.g. pro-abortion = “choice”) The hypocrites who advocate and run these programs never give up their own positions or applications of them or their Lil Darlins, do they?
The pandering is obvious. The discomfort equally so. They wouldn’t dare admit inferior students unless it was politically/financially expedient.
This crap should have been screamed out of existence from the first mention of the hypocrisy. Now we see what pandering has created, a whole host of “Gimmes” who don’t and won’t work for what they want. This “all we want is a chance” from the 60s was nothing more than a charade, a political and financial payoff.
Nothing ever satisfies them, witness today. The ghetto’s still the ghetto, The Great Society is an utter failure and look at the divisiveness, riots, and hateful political rhetoric.
Affirmative action deprives white people of their autonomy and dignity.
Of course, some of this is avoided by the fact that affirmative action students flock to non-majors like "African American Studies" or "Chicano Studies," which may be a good thing because it creates less of a downward pressure on legitimate courses and programs of study.
O'Connor gave what, 25 years in Grutter v. Bollinger? That was handed down in 2003, and it hasn't been 25 years, yet.
We last addressed the use of race in public higher education over 25 years ago. In the landmark Bakke case, we reviewed a racial set-aside program that reserved 16 out of 100 seats in a medical school class for members of certain minority groups. 438 U. S. 265 (1978). The decision produced six separate opinions, none of which commanded a majority of the Court. Four Justices would have upheld the program against all attack on the ground that the government can use race to "remedy disadvantages cast on minorities by past racial prejudice." Id., at 325 (joint opinion of Brennan, White, Marshall, and Blackmun, JJ., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). Four other Justices avoided the constitutional question altogether and struck down the program on statutory grounds. Id., at 408 (opinion of STEVENS, J., joined by Burger, C. J., and Stewart and REHNQUIST, JJ., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). Justice Powell provided a fifth vote not only for invalidating the set-aside program, but also for reversing the state court's injunction against any use of race whatsoever. The only holding for the Court in Bakke was that a "State has a substantial interest that legitimately may be served by a properly devised admissions program involving the competitive consideration of race and ethnic origin." ...Click on the link to read some of Sandra O'Connor's amusing opinion, include an ode to diversity for diversity's sake, and asserting that American Business craves diversity, and government legitimacy depends on diversity.It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 43. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
SCOTUS has gone further left since the Grutter decision was handed down. Smart money bets on upholding any race-based preference, as long as the race being benefited is underperforming.
The more they underperform, the more pronounced the need for preference. That is liberal logic, and that is what the law will impose.
The purpose isn’t “equality,” it is “diversity.”
Nailed it!
Only members of the white race are stupid enough to believe the propaganda that we are going to don diaphanous gowns, garland our heads with flowers and then hand in hand with our Third World brothers dance across sun drenched flower strewn fields.
Exactly
Don’t know why this remains. The country has proven that it doesn’t work. Look at he White Mosque for the proof.
Affirmative action + on-the-job training = Obama
The fact that they coined the term “affirmative action” is a big clue. Good things don’t need new euphemistic names. Obvious, clear concepts don’t need euphemistic names. If racial quotas (a clear, accurate description) were a good thing, they wouldn’t be obfuscating it with terms like “affirmative action”.
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