John Fund has a superb article in today’s Wall Street Journal/Opinion Journal on the aftermath of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI). “From the outraged cries of affirmative action diehards,” he writes, “you would think the dark night of fascism was descending with the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative.”
In addition to his own persuasive interpretations, Fund showed very good judgment in his choice of sources. For example, after quoting the George Wallace imitations coming from University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman and Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrict (discussed here and here), Fund writes:
Another leader in Michigan’s massive resistance is Karen Moss, the executive director of the state ACLU. “I do think it’s necessary for the courts to slow this thing down and . . . interpret some of the language,” she told the Washington Post. That “thing” is an amendment that simply states: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” As the blog Discriminations.us notes [here], “What part of that language does the ACLU find vague or unclear and in need of “‘interpretation’?”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Oh, wait….
But if the WSJ is opposed to preferences, why does it support massive immigration by ethnic groups who insist on and are eligible for such preferences?
Carol Iannone on NRO online made the connection
“I don’t think it’s possible any more to contend that this development of “diversity” as a guiding principle of American domestic policy had nothing to do with the mass immigration of recent decades. Yes, I would agree that it didn’t have to turn out this way, if America had insisted on the assimilation it demanded from previous waves of immigrants. But for whatever reasons, and we could argue over those reasons, we did not make this demand, and the demographic shift has thus been used to demand a new definition of America as a nation of “diversity.” As a corollary of this, the preferences that were originally intended for blacks have been extended to other non-white groups as well. Even the super-successful Asians have joined the preference brigade for areas where they do not naturally excel. (There is even a group called Chinese for Affirmative Action.)
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