Tim Wise, Director of the newly-formed Association for White Anti-Racist Education (AWARE), is a white Southerner who has made a career of supporting racial preferences for blacks. He recently spoke for the third or fourth time at the University of Michigan.
Among his remarks were a couple that are wrong and one that is interesting.
Wrong:
- Wise said that “a person
Mr Wise was also wrong when he claimed:
…that people from minority groups are being punished for not having access to all the resources and opportunities that white people do, and that affirmative action was the only remedy.
because the last time I looked the book store, the library, the museum, the historical site, the theater all admitted blacks as well as everyone else. Yet, blacks, on average, have fewer books in their homes, read fewer publications, are less likely to subscribe to a newspaper, etc. What part of “white racism” keeps blacks from reading for entertainment or subsribing to a newspaper?
I think a less subtle restatement of his position provides the better counterargument:
Quadrapalegic:Walking::Minorities:Learning
John writes:
>>>Interesting: Criticizing affirmative action, Wise said, is
like driving around your campus trying to find a parking spot and getting pissed at disabled parking. That makes no damn sense.
Hmm. Does this mean Wise thinks of the preferentially admitted as handicapped and needing special help?”
It’s probably no surprise that Tim Wise is one of my FAVORITE writers on the subject of race in America.
Handicapped parking spaces are generally placed nearest to the entrance of facillities because it makes sense. Those with the greatest burdens or obstacles to overcome are given “preferential parking.” It also occurs in some mass transit, where in NYC Subways, riders are encouraged to give up their seats for the handicapped, elderly, and pregnant women.
Now, I guess there are curmudgeons out there who would be upset at the prospect of giving up their seat for for those who have it tougher than they do, but that’s human nature I suppose.
I’ve used a lot of Tim Wise articles in some of my posts here. He’s a terriffic advocate for progress in my opinion, and I encourage all to read some of his fine work.
–Cobra
I harbor absolutely no ill will towards a handicapped person who uses a handicapped parking space.
However, a more accurate analogy regarding affirmative action would be a healthy person parking in the handicapped spot because his deceased grandmother was disabled.
Without the context I’d have suspected that the “disabled parking” quote was a crack overheard at a rally of white supremacists.
At Wise’s site I could manage to get only halfway through one of his articles, in which he wrote that if Santa Claus were black he’d have long ago been shot by police who, on account of the red suit, would have mistaken him for a member of the Bloods street gang.
With friends like this who needs enemies?
More interesting to me was the article’s portrayal of Wise’s strategy statement:
Wise said the biggest mistake a defender of affirmative action can make in the fight against the MCRI is to run away from race and switch the focus to gender
Actually, the disabled-parking analogy is to the point. I don’t think anyone “gets pissed at” disabled parking unless the spaces are empty. But if there are sixty cars roaming a large parking lot looking for a space, and six unused disabled-parking spots, you bet people will be pissed off — all sixty of them, probably, even though if you made the spaces available to all, 54 people would still be left without a place to park.
Affirmative action affects people much the same way: many, many more people think that they’ve lost out on a college application or a job because of affirmative action than could actually have been admitted or hired without it. The thing is that they can’t really know who would have been admitted or hired without it, and when you know a thumb has been applied to the scale, you’re naturally inclined to speculate that the person in the other pan was yourself. The result is that AA aggravates a lot more people than have ever actually been held back by it.
And, Cobra, the difference between disabled parking and the subway is that able-bodied people can use the seats near the doors, but are requested to give them up if elderly or disabled or pregnant passengers need them. If no one of that kind needs them, you can sit down. Same goes for handicapped stalls in public bathrooms. But if no one needs a disabled parking space, it stays empty.
Without hitting the disabled parking analogy too hard, there is another key difference between parking for the handicapped and affirmative action. The people who are authorized to use the handicapped spaces are known to be physically disabled… we know that they have physical challenges to overcome and it is simple courtesy to reserve spaces close to the store so that they can come and go easily. Our tolerance for the spaces relies on our knowledge that one must actually be disabled to use the space… If we see some young person pull up a big jeep into the handicapped space and spryly hop out with nary a care, we’ll be upset.
With affirmative action as it stands, we have no way of knowing whether or not the person receiving assistance is actually in need of it. A school administrator knows nothing of the background or upbringing of the applicant, or what challenges they had to overcome in life. All they know is that they checked the “African-American” box. The person might be a “poor black boy from the ghetto”, but they might also be the child of a wealthy lawyer or star basketball player. You just don’t know. To go back to the parking analogy, you wouldn’t be able to tell if the person with the handicapped sticker was a little old arthritic lady with a walker or a marathon runner.
And that is precisely the problem with affirmative action as it stands today- it does not address the real causes of disparity in the country, most notably the bad quality of public schools in poor areas. It does not, and cannot, give preference to those “with the greatest burdens and obstacles to overcome”, because it does not decide based on disadvantage, it decides based purely on skin color. Affirmative action, while touted as a cure for social disparity and the “underpriveleged” really makes no distinction between the haves and have nots.
While a disproportionate number of the poor and underprivileged happen to be minorities, they aren’t underpriveleged because their skin is dark… they are underpriveleged because they are poor and their children have no good place to learn. To argue that all blacks, for example, are underpriveleged and require help to get into college based purely on the color of ther skin is both racist and patronizing.
Affirmative action does nothing to address these issues… it covers up the problems faced by inner city and rural poor schools in favor of a politically vogue racial salve. It is racist and patronizing in its very operation, and therefore fails not only those who it discriminates against (a truly disadvantaged white student could be rejected in favor of a rich black student), but also those it supposedly serves: Truly underpriveleged blacks can (and often are) rejected in favor of wealthier black students or even recent immigrants (who can have no claim to the “victim of a culture of oppression” argument often touted by defenders of AA) who happen to be black. Truly deserving black students who work hard to earn their way into college are still stuck living with the uncertainty of whether they were truly worthy or just an “affirmative action acceptee”. The oft-touted diversity is crushed by the divisiveness (and knee-jerk political correctness) that necessarily springs up when decisions are made not on merit but on the melanin content of one’s epidermis. It does nothing to end racism (which does still exist, though it is not as overarching and pervasive as some AA enthusiasts would have you believe) because it doesn’t punish racists, or force racists to accept minorities; few, if any, of the rejected white students have ever been in a position of authority to oppress minorities, and the vast majority aren’t racists. Additionally, as John has often stated, it’s not like the admissions offices would suddenly start discriminating against minorities if affirmative action were banned tomorrow.
We ought to correct for disparity by encouraging poor students to work hard, help them with their learning, and offer generous need-based financial aid, to truly offset real disadvantage. Instead, we have a system that works rather like this (back to the hypothetical parking lot): A new (hypothetical) study shows that 70% of people with with handicap permits have blue eyes. Therefore, we will give handicap passes to everyone with blue eyes in order to make up for all the horrible obstacles that, clearly, every blue eyed person must face. Sure, this will help some of the blue-eyed handicapped people (if the non-handicapped blue-eyes don’t get all the spots first), but is it fair for non-handicapped blue-eyed people to get to use the parking spaces when there are handicapped brown-eyed folks who have to walk all the way from the back of the lot?
cobra,
that analogy about handicapped people was to the point. You simply do not know what you are talking about.BTW, the year 2050 has already come over here in California. I had already said many times b4 that if you want to go to a university here in California where the majority of the students are whites, then you have to attend a private school or the rural campuses of the UC or Cal state systemss , Whites just make up % of the freshman class of UCLA in contrast to 50 % at Stanford even though UCLA’s freshman class is much larger than Stanford. But to a race preferentialist like you, it does not really matter. Even if the percentage of whites was reduced to 2% in the freshman class at UCLA, you would still be demanding race preferences for blacks. You see Cobra, in your race preferentialist universe there would only be justice and fairnes if the freshman class at Berkeley would be equal or exceed the percentage of blacks in the graduating classes of California publci high schools which is about 7%. The race preferentialist ilk of your kind is not really interested in equality with whites, what you are instead craving for is racial aggarndizement, in other words good old -fashioned racial hustle.
Actually, Leo, the Brown Midnight scenario in California followed the EXACT formula I described. Remember Ward Connerly’s Prop 209 eliminating Affirmative Action and his failed Prop 54, designed to eliminate all official public application of race? Those movements weren’t “accidental”. In my opinion they were calculated attempts to maintain the status quo and traditional racial hiearchy in the Golden state.
And when are you going to acknowledge that in a nation of nearly 300 million people, a college degree helps, but doesn’t GUARANTEE you a spot in the business or corporate world?
Garrrick writes:
>>>We ought to correct for disparity by encouraging poor students to work hard, help them with their learning, and offer generous need-based financial aid, to truly offset real disadvantage.”
Nice to see you posting again, Garrick. Now, at the risk of sounding partisan, your suggestion here sounds like another “GOVERNMENT HANDOUT PROGRAM”, that certainly isn’t being embraced by the current administration, or conservatives who control power in all three branches of leadership. I as a liberal, AGREE with you that MORE money should be devoted to helping in this matter, but right now, we’re apparently more concerned about funding millitary contractors and energy conglomerates.
–Cobra
Without hitting the disabled parking analogy too hard, there is another key difference between parking for the handicapped and affirmative action. The people who are authorized to use the handicapped spaces are known to be physically disabled… we know that they have physical challenges to overcome and it is simple courtesy to reserve spaces close to the store so that they can come and go easily. Our tolerance for the spaces relies on our knowledge that one must actually be disabled to use the space… If we see some young person pull up a big jeep into the handicapped space and spryly hop out with nary a care, we’ll be upset.
This is exactly right, except the last point is written in the wrong tense. This happens regularly though infrequently (as people learn to game the system to get handicapped tags, for instance), and people do get upset.
————-
Cobra: Nice to see you posting again, Garrick. Now, at the risk of sounding partisan, your suggestion here sounds like another “GOVERNMENT HANDOUT PROGRAM”, that certainly isn’t being embraced by the current administration, or conservatives who control power in all three branches of leadership
Yeah. It’s not like President Bush drastically increased federal education spending, and required schools to demonstrate that they were educating all racial groups rather than a select few in order to obtain this funding. Oh, wait, it is like that.
In any case, perhaps if Democrats/liberals were willing to offer a tradeoff: abolish all race preference programs and the vast bureaucratic machinery which goes into administering them, and funnel all the money saved into financial aid. (Gee, I wonder if they’d accept that?)
Cobra-
Well, regardless of what the current administration, or any administration’s, take on the issue is, I still believe that my proposal would be preferable to the current system. My point is that the people who currently support racial preference based affirmative action ought to support a plan more like mine, since it does more to address the actual issues that are holding back minorities. The only reason I see not to is that race based AA plays better politically with today’s liberals, plus it’s easier- just check the box and we can all get warm fuzzies accepting those poor underpriveleged (of course they are, all of them are on account of their darker skin, don’t you know?) minorities.
As far as opposing handouts, I have nothing against government handouts if they are well administered and given to deserving people in a way that will help the economy. For example, I support welfare, as long as it is paired with programs that encourage/require searching for employment rather than simply “living off the dole”, to borrow a British phrase- just like handicapped stickers are good as long as they aren’t abused. Affirmative action in the form of targeted aid and educational assistance to actual underpriveleged people, minority or otherwise, could really benefit our economy by encouraging more poor youths to seek higher education and escape the “poverty cycle”. If diversity is your thing, it would increase that as well, by bringing in more (disproportionately minority) students from outside the mid-upper classes with diverse backgrounds. This would be far better than selecting purely by race and then just dumping people into colleges they aren’t prepared for.
Cobra the ignoramus,
You never described anything, your formula does not apply , got it? what status quo are talking about? ha, ha, ha,…… if you don’t know it yet, there are even fewer whites anrolled in the fall 2004 freshman class at Berkeley than in fall 1997 the last year b4 Prop 209 was implemented. Do you see the point? if Prop. 209 was designed to help whites and preserve the status qou, it did not help whites at all. What kind of perverse logic do you have Cobra? Remember an older post that I made here ? I said that in the city of San Francisco, whites basically abandoned the public schools for the private schools but that did not help them get their kids into Berkeley? Brown Midnight is already here boy, in the case of California and the big cities of this country you CAB SEE THAT IT IS NOT HELPING WHITES THAT MUCH. bANNING RACE PREFERENCES WON’T HELP WHITES THAT MUCH EITHER, HUH? btw, IF WE MOVE um – ANN aRBOR HERE IN LOS ANGELES, THE FRESHMAN CLASS OF um – ANN aRBOR WILL JUST BE 32% JUST LIKE ucla NOT THE CURRENT 60 % OR MORE. iN THAT KIND OF SITUATION ARE YOU STILL GONNA DEMAND RACE PREFERENCES FOR BLACKS? i BET YOU WILL.
iN MY PREVIOUS POST, i MEANT THAT IF WE MOVE um – ANN ARBOR HERE IS LOS ANGELES , FRESHMAN CLASS AT um-ANN ARBOR WILL ONLY BE 32 % WHITE UNLIKE THE CURRENT FRESHMAN CLASS OF um – ANN ARBOR WHERE IT IS 60% OR MORE WHITE.
Cobra,
Now, at the risk of sounding partisan, your suggestion here sounds like another “GOVERNMENT HANDOUT PROGRAM”, that certainly isn’t being embraced by the current administration, or conservatives who control power in all three branches of leadership. I as a liberal, AGREE with you that MORE money should be devoted to helping in this matter, but right now, we’re apparently more concerned about funding millitary contractors and energy conglomerates.
Cobra, I guarantee you that if you were to ask conservatives about Gov’t-supported class-based AA, you’d see a lot of support.