Surprise! Sharpton Supports Affirmative Action!

In a Michigan appearance yesterday Al Sharpton both enthusiastically and misleadingly came out four square for affirmative action for … people who look like Al Sharpton.

I say “misleadingly” because his the sky-would-fall scenario for life without preferences, as well as his history, were, not to put too fine a point on it, off the wall.

Sharpton, a national civil rights advocate and president of the National Action Network, said affirmative action – which he pointed out was created to fix historical legal discrimination – is still needed for blacks in Michigan, where blacks have higher unemployment rates and where there are more black males in prison than in college.

So, the more black males there are in prison, the more affirmative action is needed? That’s a new one.

“They had laws specifically against us, which is why they have laws for us to repair the damage they did to us,” said Sharpton at New Jerusalem Full Gospel Baptist Church during a 35-minute sermon-like speech.

“If you do not keep affirmative action in place, you will not have a job at all….”

Aside from the clear implication in this “they … us” talk that blacks remain the poor, damaged, victimized wards of an alien white nation that still does not include “us,” both Sharpton’s history and his vision of the future are all wet. It’s certainly true that in the past laws discriminated against blacks. But then court decisions and civil rights laws eradicated this legal discrimination, and “affirmative action,” as originally understood, was implemented in order to make sure that both the letter and spirit of those laws were followed. For confirmation, go read the text of both presidential orders implementing affirmative action in the federal government. I’ve cited them many times, such as here.

And as for the future, if you do not keep affirmative action in place, you will not have a job at all! I don’t know which is more pathetic: the utter ridiculousness of this prediction, even by the lax standards of political rhetoric; or the sad assumption that equality is bad for blacks, that they are so damaged that evaluating them by the same standards as everyone else would condemn them all to failure.

As a powerful statement in favor of MCRI just stated,

Preferential treatment based on ethnicity or gender does not correct previous wrongs, but rather perpetuates injustice by selecting new groups of people to receive that which they have not earned. Further, there is the implication that women and minorities are inferior, that they cannot advance without preferences imposed by government. This is demeaning to them. No one should be, in effect, a ward of the state by virtue of being a woman or a minority person.

When all is said and done, views such as Sharpton’s (and he has merely expressed in more extreme terms what most opponents of colorblind racial equality believe) rest on the assumption that what was wrong with “the laws they had specifically against us,” i.e., the legal racial discrimination in the past, is not that racial discrimination was wrong in and of itself but only because it injured blacks.

The country (not just the “they” referred to by Sharpton) disagreed every time it decreed, in court opinions and legislation, that every person, not every black person, has a right to be free from discrimination based on race.