Affirmative action seems to promote conflict and division wherever it appears, whether it waylays Malays or ditches Manitobans.
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Affirmative action seems to promote conflict and division wherever it appears, whether it waylays Malays or ditches Manitobans.
I often wonder … just how useful are Racial Preferences to minorities? I am yet to see an impartial empirical study on the issue.
Proponents of Preferences like actus and Cobra usually just point to the increase in the number of black professionals (i.e. engineers, physicians, lawyers, etc.) and the attendant rise of the black middleclass from the 1960s and claim that this is all due to Racial Preferences.
I remember Coleman Young (I think) saying that there is not a single successful black man in America who does not owe much of his success to Racial Preferences.
But doesn’t this leave out one or two things? I mean, what role did the righteous disemboweling of Jim Crow (Civil Rights Acts) play in this? How much of this progress do we owe to the legal prohibition of racial discrimination.
Does anyone find it inconcievable that absent Racial Preferences, the same progress, or even more, could have been made?
Yes, Martin, and another very interesting historical question is: “If we had not brought the slaves over from Africa, would we have had a race problem in America?” The question at hand is: Do racial preferences have a place in Society TODAY. The soup line was great in 1932; not so much use for it today.
Given the universality of intensifying intercommunal conflict which follows from antimerit quotas in recruitment, the intentions of those who support them urgently needs to be called into the gravest sort of questioning. There has been a free ride given on this point, as in the standard conservative line which exclaims how noble were or are the intentions behind some obviously divisive policy, yet somehow someone blundered. It is not clear that we have even one example out of the many dozens of polities which have used such quotas, usually under the name of decolonization, where there was not made a partition of that polity around the same time. That is to say, years or decades at the most. Therefore, antimerit quotas, from historical experience might be called not only divisionalism but decolonizationism. Scholars in particular, cannot claim to be ignorant of these tendencies from quotas. Officials have more excuse for ignorance, but the higher levels of officialdom show high intelligence and education often enough. Therefore we are most likely dealing with deliberate and cynical malice.
I’m about as white and as Southern as can be, although my kids are anglatinos. I’ve been a Legal Service attorney in East Arkansas within the last 15 years. If anyone thinks the time for affirmative action is over, they’re kidding themselves. Discrimination is still out there, strong as ever, the law notwithstanding, and we need the time and mechanisms affirmative action provides to help heal our society.