Yesterday I quoted Matt Bai, writing in the New York Times, arguing that anyone who “question[s] the responsibilities of government and private entities when it comes to race” is an “ideological outlier” but that, even so, “Americans the president’s age and younger are inclined to assume that one can question” those race policies “without necessarily being dismissed as a racist.”
I of course questioned Bai’s argument about the assumption of those youngish Americans. Today I’d like to point to one of them: Matt Bai, meet Irene Monroe, whose picture on HuffPo reveals both that she’s not only an American the president’s age or younger but that she also, as liberals would say when they’re setting about their regulation of racial markets, looks like him.
She writes today:
As we all know, affirmative action is a hot-button issue. At a basic level, it’s an attempt to take race, gender and ethnicity (to name only a few factors) into consideration to promote a level playing field for all. But the sub-text in all affirmative action debates is the fallacious belief that blacks selected to benefit from it are hopelessly and helplessly genetically inferior — that their DNA is chromosomally deficient, if not defective.
Leave aside the contradictory argument that affirmative action burdens some and benefits others based on race, ethnicity, and gender in order “to promote a level playing field for all,” which is rather like saying that blacks and Hispanics have to run only 87 yards in the 100 yard dash while whites must run 100 and Asians 110 “in order to make the race equal for all.”
What really interests me is not that ubiquitous absurdity but the offensive, and incorrect, accusation that “the sub-text in all affirmative action debates” is the belief of critics that blacks “are hopelessly and helplessly genetically inferior — that their DNA is chromosomally deficient, if not defective.”
I’ve written quite a lot of text here since 2002 criticizing affirmative action. Some readers have read quite a lot of it. I doubt that Ms. Monroe has read any of it, but nevertheless she’s sure that the “sub-text” of all of it is my belief that blacks are inferior. Either she is not American or she is not younger than President Obama or Matt Bai is in a bubble and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Actually, proponents of affirmative action no longer justify it on the basis of leveling the playing field- the diversity mantra has replaced compensatory “justice” as the explanation. In addition to aligning support for racial preferences with the latest jurisprudence, it also relieves those supporters of confronting their own “fallacious beliefs” that are intrinsic to racial preference.