From time to time it is necessary to criticize the arguments of our allies in the affirmative action fight as well as our opponents. With that in mind, let’s look at the argument against affirmative action by Andrew Coulson of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan.
So before we get completely lost in the fog of affirmative action warfare, we should ask ourselves: is this even the right fight? What is the fundamental problem we are trying to solve, and is affirmative action really the right solution at the right time?
The problem, clearly, is that too many minority students leave high-school unprepared for college or the modern labor market. Affirmative action’s solution is to gloss over these students’ educational shortcomings and usher them along as if they were adequately prepared.
Is that really the best we can do? Aren’t we just acquiescing to our own failure to teach these kids elementary- and high-school subjects when they are actually in elementary- and high-school? Wouldn’t it be better to fix our K-12 education system so that it doesn’t fail so many students in the first place?
I have no problem with Coulson’s identification of the problem — ill-prepared minority high-school graduates — or his proposed solution, fixing K-12 education. His argument fails, however, whenever preferentialists are able to demonstrate that preferentially admitted minorities are in fact “adequately prepared.”
In those cases the problem is not that the minorities are unqualified; it is that they are less qualified. The problem, in short, is one of double standards, which are doubly unfair. They are unfair to the non-minority applicants who would have been selected but for the racial preferences, but they are arguably even more unfair to minorities, from whom less is expected and whose real accomplishments are tainted by the suspicion that they were not fairly earned. Not to mention — scratch that, since I always do mention it — the enormous social cost of undermining the core value that every person has a right to be judged without regard to race, creed, or national origin.
Michael Moore & Intellectual Honesty
I’ve been told I should see Fahrenheit 9/11. I had planned not to, as I’d rather not give Michael Moore any money. However, in light of recent comments by the man, I may simply download it and watch for free. These suggestions that I watch …
Clearly AA at any given level is just a response to failure at some earlier level.
No, the fundamental problem is that it is WRONG to base governmental action on skin colour, eye fold, genitalia, or any other biological characteristic.
It is just WRONG. No matter whose prejudices are advanced, whose desires are met, whose motives are purest.