“Engine” Charlie Wilson, chairman of General Motors and President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, is famous for telling a Senate hearing in 1955 that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the rest of America.”
I was reminded of that statement when I read the following comment by the new head of Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii, which has a multi-billion trust fund it would like to spend for the exclusive benefit of native Hawaiians (a category that does not include whites who happened to have been born in Hawaii). According to an article in the Honolulu Advertiser (link via Howard Bashman), she said the ideal result
would be fulfillment of the schools’ promise to help more Native Hawaiians and, because the general community also should benefit, at least some insulation against accusations of racial discrimination.
Well, yes, I suspect that spending several billion dollars on Native Hawaiians would provide some residual benefits for non-Native Hawaiians there, just as spending it on whites alone would provide some benefits for non-whites. But how either of those results can be thought to provide any “insulation against accusations of racial discrimination” is beyond me.
Why didn’t George Wallace think of that? “Well,” he might have said, “it’s true that we’re limiting the best universities in this state to whites, but blacks will also be much better off if whites are smarter….”
Minorities can’t be racist. Where have you been? Another planet?