Harold Jackson is identified as an opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Based on this column maybe that’s appropriate, for he certainly seems to have far more opinions than facts. Here are some of them:
1. Affirmative action was and is justified because, well, just look at him.
…. I owe my first job as a newspaperman to a white Southern editor who had made up his mind that he needed a black reporter on his staff. Having recently graduated from a small college that produced a weekly student newspaper, my skills were limited, but he gave me a chance.
Were Duard LeGrand alive today, I think he would appreciate the return he got from his investment 34 years ago.
2. Affirmative action is designed to combat current bias.
But for every story like mine, there are countless in which qualified minorities were denied a job or promotion due to bias.
3. Affirmative action is designed to correct historical bias. It is justified today because
historical discrimination against minorities was so egregious in this country that they should be provided special assistance to overcome the vestiges of that bias, even if such assistance temporarily disadvantages whites.
4. There is no alternative to admittedly unfair racial discrimination.
Critics of affirmative action have long screamed that such an approach is unfair. They’re right, just as the original biases that made affirmative action necessary were also unfair. But no one has come up with a better way to open previously closed doors to opportunity.
5. Today’s blacks are still crippled by slavery, etc., and thus deserve special treatment until, you guessed it, “the playing field is level.”
That’s ancient history, say affirmative action’s critics. It’s time we judged everyone on the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. They want to act as if skin color, or ethnicity, had nothing to do with where a person grew up, how much money his parents earned, his health, or the education he received.
They want to pretend that all the baggage that comes with being the descendants of slaves has been tossed into the trash heap just because a particular African American, whose own ancestral history doesn’t include that same baggage, has ascended to the presidency of the United States.
6. Prohibiting New Haven from failing to promote firemen because of their race, as the Supreme Court did in Ricci v. DeStefano, is the legal equivalent of a hit and run.
The court said it was wrong of New Haven, Conn., to make white firefighters wait to be promoted until they could take a new test that was less likely to discriminate against blacks who had also applied for promotion. No blacks qualified under the old test, but the court said that by itself wasn’t evidence of the exam’s bias.
In other words, just because a man walking across the street is hit by a beer truck, it doesn’t mean the collision caused his broken arms, and legs, and ribs, and smashed his face. So, go on with your business as usual, Mr. Truck Driver, while we pillory this fellow for trying to delay your journey.
With opinions like these, who needs facts?
What about the truck that hit many white males’ careers? That truck had an “affirmative action” banner on its side!