Peter Kirsanow of the Civil Rights Commission has an excellent article today on the coming “Super Tuesday for Equality.”
He predicts, hopefully, that “[t]he era of affirmative action may be coming to a close sooner than Sandra Day O’Connor had expected”
The tagline of the piece is certainly misleading, and the while I sympathize with Peter on this, the last time I heard AA was “on the ropes,” it was just before Grutter. We have one hell of a LONG fight in front of us. The era may end before 2028 – but only after we pry preferences loose with all our might.
Even with SuperTuesday and 5 more success – darn, even in Michigan, California, and Washington, preferences are by far not dead, just buried deeper. The diversity business is a huge franchise. O’Connor’s vision itself was a fraud of delay – the diversity business would have continued forever had we done nothing from day one and just waited 25 years, and I suspect it has alot of fight left in it.
“Diversity” appears to mean different things in different geographic locations. I live in a border city of about 750,000 residents that is 80 percent Hispanic. Naturally, the city is proud of its “growing diversity.” Apparently, the city will become 100-percent diverse once Hispanics make up 100-percent of the population. Once the city’s African Americans, Native Americans, and non-Hispanic white females are counted, about 95 percent of the population is eligible for affirmative action. As you might imagine, affirmative action programs are extremely popular.
So, what, exactly, is it that the majority population wants with respect to affirmative action and racial preferences? For things to go back to the way they were during Jim Crow? Wasn’t one Jim Crow era enough?
I think a majority wants what the civil rights movement used to want: neutral, colorblind racial equality. Ending racial preference, which after all is a form of racial discrimination, would not return us to Jim Crow.
The problem, as I see it, is that the majority population has a problem with having to share and compete with people of color. Before the Civil Rights Movement, that wasn’t the case. If a Black person got too uppity, forgot his place, he could be lynched. Problem solved.
The majority population has benefitted, for 400 years, from racial preferences. And sitll does. So, why does the majority population want yet more racial preferences?
So, John, what is it that the majority population wants?
First, the majority population didn’t benefit from racial preferences for 400 years. The minority popluation, primarily blacks, certainly suffered discrimination because of their race, but preferences are not the opposite side of the discrimination coin. Your lynching as solution to uppityess is also a bit hyperbolic. Lynching was a great evil, but it hardly was a common and handy antidote to uppitynesss.
Thus I repeat; according to all the polling data I’ve seen and votes in three liberal democratic states, what the majority of Americans want is neutral, colorblind racial equality. The majority continues to believe in the principle that every person should be treated “without regard to race, creed, or color.” That the principle is violated from time to time doesn’t detract from the fact that most people continue to believe in it. Murder still happens, after all, but that doesn’t mean we should toss the “Thou shall not kill” principle.
John, I respectfully disagree with you re: lynching. Unless you and I have a different reading of history, lynching was used to keep Black Americans in their place. It was a form of terrorism. I also remind you that Black Americans were not only lynched, but shot, beaten, raped, and intimidated in many other ways. Being the descendant of Being the daughter of Segregation-era parents from the South, I am well-acquainted with how Blacks were kept in their place, and lynching was used more than perhaps you would like to acknowledge.
With regard to racial preferences, being White in America is not considered a racial preference? You can deny White privilege if you choose, but Causasians benefit every day, in big and small ways. So when I say that the majority population has benefitted from racial preferences for 400 years, that’s right on the money.
This ” neutral, colorblind racial equality” to which you refer: Who really benefits? And why does it need to be colorblind? That term has always made me nervous. It’s code for not having to hire people of color, or for returning colleges and universities to the all-White or nearly all-White bastions that they were.
Again: Who benefits?
Re lynching, I’m not even suggesting that it was anything other than a form of violent terrorism. I certainly do not mean to downplay its viciousness. My only point is that it was not as commonplace as a form of social control (in part no doubt due to its effectiveness) as your comments suggest. This Yale source, for example notes:
How many people know that any whites were lynched at all, much less over 25% of the total?
Re affirmative action for whites, I’ve already written about this at some length (before you started reading), here, where I quoted extensively from Jonathan Yardley’s excellent, critical review of the most thorough academic presentation of the point you’re making.
Note that neither Yardley nor I deny the existence of “white privilege,” blatant discrimination, etc., only that it is a mistake to label racial discrimination against blacks as “affirmative action” for whites. In fact, to the degree that you equate racial discrimination against blacks with affirmative action for whites, you undermine the already faltering case for affirmative action for blacks today, unless you argue that the rationale for affirmative action is really retribution.
“In fact, to the degree that you equate racial discrimination against blacks with affirmative action for whites, you undermine the already faltering case for affirmative action for blacks today…”
John, this argument is no stronger or weaker than the fact that many Caucasians believe that a person of color stole “their” job or “their” slot in the college class. As if everything has a Caucasian person’s name on it. Which has fuled the anti-affirmative action debate: the desire to “take back” what is “theirs.”
Talk about White privilege and entitlement.