Affirmative action leads to wondering
In a recent interview:
…[Elizabeth] Warren repeatedly and adamantly proclaimed that the law schools at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania hired her as a professor because of her scholarship and teaching abilities, not to improve diversity on their faculties.
And that, my friends, is one of the unintended consequences of affirmative action. It almost automatically puts an asterisk next to everyone hired under its umbrella, and those people must try to undo that assumption.
Back in the bad old days before affirmative action, there really was discrimination against members of many minority groups. The upshot was that those who got hired in spite of this were not just good, they tended to be super-good. I have some personal experience of this; the black teachers I had in junior high school and college were some of the best teachers—maybe even the best teachers—I ever had (I wrote a post about one of them, here).
I wouldn’t want to go back to those days, of course. But the old dream of no discrimination—of judging job applicants on an equal basis—has never really been realized. Affirmative action was never the least bit fair, replacing one wrong with another, and we all know that two wrongs cannot make a right. I don’t know what should have been done instead, but I do know that even from its inception, when I was still a liberal, affirmative action made me very, very uneasy. As I wrote here:
We all have subsequently paid dearly, including those whom affirmative action was supposed to benefit, because their achievements have forever after been tainted by the suspicion (correct or incorrect) that they might not have been able to earn them if the playing field had not been recently slanted in their favor.
So, putting aside the whole issue of Ms. Warren the 1/32th Native American, we see that she is eager to make it clear that, despite her suspect claims to minority ancestry, she was not an affirmative action hire. The beauty of it is that she may or may not be correct; it is impossible to tell. But none other than Yale Law School graduate Clarence Thomas has declared that, post-affirmative, action:
…[with] taint of racial preference…Yale meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it.
The truth is that women and minorities are hired to improve diversity on faculties. It’s absurd to claim otherwise. Some of these people have stellar qualifications and would have been hired anyway, as Ms. Warren claims for herself. Others would not have. And with affirmative action, it’s hard to tell which is which.
Warren’s flavor of lies give a whole new life to the old play, “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.”
I should no longer be amazed at the hypocrisy of the left, but . . . .
I have noted before that IMO the great outrage of the Elizabeth Warren saga is that, as all leftists, she supports affirmative action as good and necessary, she even used it as a lever to propel her career. Then when her use of AA is noticed she whines that this is an attack against her person and that only her talent was responsible for her career advancement.
Can’t have it both ways. If it’s good and necessary, why decry and deny that it helped you? If it’s not good and necessary and only one’s talent is important, why support and defend AA as good and necessary?
Therein lies the same “logic” that allows the left to claim to help the disadvantaged yet still oppose school vouchers while sending their own children to private schools. Equal outcomes for thee, not for me!
i am not a researcher and have the life i worked hard since i was 5 to have… because of affirmative action… because of similar policies, my wife and i are trying to have ea baby, but cant afford it. we want house, but they are giving away 30year mortgages without having to pay for 30 years..
yesterday i was punched in the face on the train
i sit in a 85 degree office and segregated, with 30 years experience, management experienc,e and so on. but the inexperienced incompetent woman gets to get the job over me.
i have not had a raise in a decade…
why? i am a white male.
and its so obvious here.
but alas. a lawyer wont take the case
i am a white male
cant even find one for violating the new eeoc stuff
my son, he is honors graduate in genetics. waiter… why? he is a white male and obama and other are paying off (gliechshaltung) the Volk to get votes.
how bad is it?
how about this..
we are below replacement… (which means that we have already been exterminated as no race has come back from that)
we are taxed todeath
and cant get any of that back as the programs from CRA to SBA dont allow participation
we are getting random attacks like Jews did in Germany… yesterday makes the 8th attack in two years.
right now.. for the first time in american history, there is a brain drain..
the white males who are the back bone of research, manufacturing, etc. are going ot china.
Forbes: Should You Look For Work In China?
i am hoping to leave..
record numbers are giving up their US citizenship… obama just copied the money flitght laws of the nazis to prevent the scapegoats from leaving and taking their money with them!
and guess what? we have docs here who cant spell.. imagine that. specialists who cant read, comprehend, and spell.
oh.. and the incompetents are great to work with as they have all these secondary skills to avoid anyone knowing they are so incompetent. like foisting blame, lying as to others, isolating them, getting others to help and let them do the work. etc.
nothing i can do to get my live back
nothing i can do to have one either
personally, i just hope one of those attackers finishes the job hitler and stalin started with my family last century. a life with no hope is not life at all.
(and this temporary prison in complete isolation every day is a form of torture… )
How many generations will it take, after affirmative action is stopped, can someone look at a “chosen” class in a position of authority and not wonder if they were hired/promoted by ability and qualifications, rather than by preferance?
“How many generations will it take…”
5-4-3-2-1…. begin now; judge by what can be observed and your instinct tells you is true. BTW, I am of the opinion that the days of affirmative action should have ended many years ago.
Artfldgr: Your trials are yours and for you not against you. Orthodox Judaism demands that one credits all experience and events as approved by G-d. Certain Christian circles demand praise for all trials, for instance, “Prison to Praise;” Buddhism basically sidesteps the question by not allowing an ego which may ask it; Hinduism says you are both the bad and good. The point is almost all societies and religions know that bitterness and acceptance of victimhood leads to bondage as you state, “a form of torture.”
In your mind and not subject to anything else, there is a key to freedom.
I was working for the feds in the late seventies. At one point our organization was told that the next new hire would be a minority. Education, experience, and competence were hoped for. But skin color was to be the determinant factor.
The next job opening involved working with extremely powerful equipment and high voltages. The new hire for that position was intelligent and a very nice person. But he had no mechanical or electrical abilities at all. He wasn’t only ineffective. He was a danger to himself and anyone adjacent.
In this instance affirmative action put this young man’s health and safety at risk. His performance served to reinforce the most negative stereotypes held by some of his co-workers. And finally it was a burden for those near him who had to watch carefully to prevent an accident.
But some mid-level manager was able to tout his support of affirmative action on his resume. And another statistic was added.
So, in the last few days we learned from the Warren campaign that Warren was the” first nursing mother to take the New Jersey State Bar exam.”
Yesterday it was, “my parents had to elope because my family didn’t like my mother’s Indian heritage.” but Brieitbart.com quickly produced marriage/wedding documents showing that Warrren’s parents married in a conventional church wedding at a church 14 miles from their homes.
Now, today we learn that multimillionaire Warren—who has positioned herself as the champion of the middle class and the little guy, and who has railed against foreclosures and flipping, had herself done some very profitable flipping of foreclosed houses she bought cheap and sold dear (see http://news.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view/20220601flipping_lizs_credibility_flops/srvc=home&position=0) .
One way to end race- and sex-based quotas is to apply them in reverse. Laws that favor ‘diversity’ should apply equally to men and whites. If blacks make up more than 13-14% of a pro sport, they are clearly overrepresented. How fast would feminism fold if mothers start losing custody of their kids?
“Laws that favor ‘diversity’ should apply equally to..”
Of course the left is not interested in true diversity. For them its about gender, race, and ethnicity. On the right we should be focused on diversity of opinion and philosophy because (hopefully) we realize we are not aways correct and we are willing to learn from others AND from our mistakes.’
I made this same point on a blog comment a few years ago. I tried to find it just now but I couldn’t. I wish I could.
The gist of it was a response to a commenter who said something along the lines of if you were a racist you could use AA as an excuse to question someone’s qualifications (in a job interview, I think). My reply was that you didn’t have to be a racist at all. AA practically forces you to question someone’s qualifications if you know that candidate wasn’t judged by the same standards as everyone else. If you can’t compare two people in a job interview on the same criteria how will you know if you’re getting taken? AA might be really well-meaning but it’s incredibly insidious. It forces people, people of good will, to look at other people differently based on their skin color. You have to protect yourself if you’re hiring someone and going to invest valuable time and money in them.
It’s a problem inherent to AA. The two can never be divorced. One begets the other.
“The truth is that women and minorities are hired to improve diversity on faculties.”
No one who has been on the inside of higher ed (well, most higher ed) could deny this without telling a deliberate lie. I mean, it is so openly emphasized that I can’t see anyone being innocently mistaken about it. It would be like claiming not to realize that the military services teach people to kill.
I wish somebody here with some connections could help Art get another job….
Yes to all the above, and there is also a pent-up resentment of the “wogs and wimmen” that will have bad consequences in years to come. Who has not experienced the unqualified colleague who uses dirty office politics to keep their position when they don’t have the chops to play it straight? AA makes this more likely than not, and guess what: everyone knows it, even if they don’t let themselves think about it consciously.
Artur Davis is right, it’s time to get off this bandwagon. We needed it for a while to get people used to seeing women and people of color in certain types of jobs (though I would draw the line at hiring UNqualified people, no matter what). But now it’s detrimental even to the groups it’s supposed to help.
Hopefully, the last comment I will make on Elizabeth Warren, who has at this point, I would hope, lost all credibility.
Of course, your evaluation of Warren, or any other politician or candidate or, for that matter, anyone else in the public eye, depends on what sources you look to for your news, and whether those news sources–depending on their political ideology and agenda (and they always have an ideology and an agenda)-either deliberately ignore, downplay, or report on something, and if they report, will-report fully and fairly on what is happening as regards a public figure like Warren, and her statements and claims.
In this case, as in almost all such cases these days the Internet, what has been termed the “undermedia,” has far more coverage than the MSM.
Breitbart.com is really on Elizabeth Warren’s case, and is “taking her inventory,” and from what they keep finding, it appears that Warren can’t help but lie about just about everything, and to make up or inflate stories to aggrandize herself.
Late yesterday Breitbart.com reported on the video they found of a speech that Warren gave early in her election bid, in which she told her audience about how her grandma, aged 15 in 1889, was driving a buckboard West as one of the early settlers during the Oklahoma land rush, and the touching story of how she lived to be 94, and was able to see Warren graduate from college.
Well, we each have a grandmother on our mother’s side and a grandmother on our father’s side. The only problem with Warren’s tale is that, according to Breitbart’s research, in the year Warren says ol’ granny was driving that buckboard West her paternal granny was not 15 but 2 years old, and she died at age 88, five years after Warren graduated college, and her maternal granny, who was 15 in 1889, and was, indeed, aged 94 when she died, died several months before Warren graduated. So, a “composite” granny? (see http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/06/01/Exclusive-Video-Shows-Elizabeth-Warren-Telling-Tall-Tale-of-Composite-Grandmother)
If fully expect that, any day now, Warren will be found buttonholing people on the sidewalk, and shoving a grocery receipt in their faces saying, ”see, see, look at this special thing I have.”
With affirmative action we replaced exceptional discrimination with pervasive institutional discrimination based on skin color, gender, etc. It may have been justified for one generation, but beyond that it is a form of corruption.
The only minority of consequence is the individual. The only diversity of consequence, other than for reproductive purposes, are individuals. Any other definition only serves to denigrate individual dignity and devalue human life.
The way it should have been handled is through ex post facto review when there was probable cause to suspect extraordinary discrimination. This is the only process which is capable of preserving individual dignity. The way it was processed was based on the assumption of guilt. This is a perversion of justice and equality, and reflects an extraordinary prejudice and selfish interest.
not actually curtis…
in my apartment is the artwork, the sculptures, the music, the writings, the photography, the designs, the inventions, the circuits, and on it goes..
stuff that would amaze you..
all destined for the garbage heap…
never to get where they were to go
and your points are useless, i have been erased