Every time the government insists a person’s racial identity to be significant, it foments a malign form of racism. Some say we cannot give up affirmative action because we have not yet achieved a colorblind society. Affirmative action itself demands acute awareness of color, and, so, in a circular fashion, perpetuates its own justification and never will allow us to approach color blindness.
Martin Luther King, Jr., hoped for the day when his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. That suggested to me an argument for being color-blind.
Being color-blind is exactly what we should be seeking. We should not judge a person by the color of their skin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender, etc, but simply accept them as individuals.
I find Herman Cain’s background fascinating in that it seems as if his only hand up was hard-working parents who gave him a desire to work and strive to succeed. In other words, his success is the type visualized by the Constitution and not by a special interest group telling him he needed government help to get ahead.
Nowhere is affirmative action more virulent than in higher education. Almost every college and university now has a “chief diversity officer” pulling down a large salary and backed by a large staff. They contribute nothing to education of any student, but thrive, even when budgets are being cut elsewhere, because they are a sacrifice to the gods of political correctness.
The mania for “diversity” simply shuffles a small number of students around. Some students who happen to have the preferred ancestry get moved into supposedly elite colleges and university, while an equal number of students who don’t have the preferred ancestry get shuffled down into their backup schools. This doesn’t actually help the preferred students because the education at the “elite” schools is no better and is often markedly worse than at smaller schools where the faculty aren’t immersed in their research work. But it makes the diversity zealots feel good to claim that they have made society more just by getting selective colleges to establish admission quotas based on the educationally irrelevant factor of race.
Sadly, the diversity zealots are now pushing to expand the scope of preferences to include socio-economic diversity on the assumption that the poor are “underrepresented” in the student bodies at the top schools. The lunacy keeps growing.
Unfortunately the university staff members (academic AND, especially, administrative) will nod their heads in sage agreement that their system of enlightened affirmative action is in the best interest of their school, their students and their country.
The fact that these supposedly well educated elites can be so delusional is frightening, when you consider the influence they have over the young minds in their charge.
Enforcing inclusion implies that inclusion will only happen by force, and thus that inclusion will have nothing to do with whether the individual is qualified for. By enforcing inclusion, the authorities imply that the included person was less than qualified. That’s a very unfortunate message to send to anyone.
And it continues to get much worse than that. They are not simply complying with government directives, they are continuing to build and expand a network of bureaucrats whose sole function is to encourage and maintain a sense of victimization in both students and faculty.
Nearly all of today’s students, and quite a lot of today’s faculty members, were born after the Jim Crow era, and the assassinations of JFK and MLK. They were not watching TV news in the 50′s and 60′s.
In 1957 President Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas national guard and ordered them to stand down from their previous assignment to prevent the desegregation of Arkansas schools as ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court. Eisenhower then sent the 101st Airborne Division to escort a handful of black students to Little Rock’s Central High School in the face of the determined opposition of Governor Orval Faubus (a Democrat). Faubus was generally viewed as “progressive,” and later “moderated” his views. Faubus’ wife was subsequently the first woman to run for Governor of Arkansas.
Today’s students and many of today’s faculty and staff were not glued to the TV in 1963 when Alabama Governor George Wallace stood in “the school house door” in an effort to prevent two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. In his inaugural address earlier that year, Wallace said “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”
Governor Wallace was a Democrat. He subsequently ran for President as an independent. His first wife Lurleen was the first female governor of Alabama, running when her husband was prevented by term limits to run again. Mr. Wallace also, so we have been told, moderated his views, and was forgiven by (at least according to polling data) an astonishing number of blacks for his determination to maintain segregation of Alabama schools and colleges and his overall racist views. Of course, though he ran for President in 1968 as an independent, Gov. Wallace remained a Democrat.
Conservative Democrats who left the Democratic Party in the 1960s, because the Democratic Party was moving way too far toward socialism and anti-Americanism, have been assumed to be racist. Racist Democrats who remained in the Democratic Party have been forgiven — Faubus, Wallace, Senator Robert Byrd (a KKK grand wizard) are always excused. Among other seriously racist senior Democrats, I mention President Woodrow Wilson and Senator William Fulbright.
For anyone who doesn’t have a clue, I offer this congressional datum. The only Republican Senator who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. He did not disagree with equal rights and access, but he believed that the issue was not the province of the federal government.
Another datum. Congressional Republicans, during the Eisenhower administration, tried to pass a civil rights act. More than once. Those efforts were blocked by Democrats. Lyndon Johnson, who is usually given credit for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, could have had a big head start in the ’50s. But Majority Leader LBJ planned to run for President in 1960, so he was not about to spend any political capital on the problems of segregation in those years! Oh, no, not a chance!
So, now, here we are. “Persons of color” believe that Democrats have always been their allies, and that it is better to press for “diversity” rather than to compete on competence and experience. In any case, the diversity personnel in universities, protecting their individual fiefdoms rather than students or faculty members, will go on culling out (well, no, in!) and combing the anointed members of protected groups.
I believe that America is a lot more divided by ideology than it actually is by race. Personally, I think “encouraging inclusion” is a better plan, and “being color-blind” should absolutely be the ultimate goal!
Cross posted at High Plains Pundit.
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