Support for affirmative action is down
Just 45 percent of respondents said they believe affirmative action programs are still needed to counteract the effects of discrimination against minorities, while an equal 45 percent feel the programs have gone too far and should be ended because they unfairly discriminate against whites…
The number of Americans supporting affirmative action has been in decline over the past two decades, down from a high of 61 percent in its favor in 1991…
Right now, I feel like it’s reverse discrimination,” said one poll respondent, a white, 69-year-old retired teacher from Rhode Island, who was interviewed for this story and did not wish to be identified. “I did support it at first, but, gradually, because of this reverse discrimination it’s gone too far.”
Note the “did not wish to be indentified” statement. It’s become a frightening thing to declare oneself against affirmative action because it makes a person vulnerable to the dread “racist” accusation. And note how careful the respondent is to say that he/she voiced early support for the program.
Well, I never supported it, and I’m no racist. I’m old enough to remember how racist things used to be (the answer is “very”), to have deplored it, and to have been around when affirmative action began. And I remember that, although I certainly wanted racism to end, affirmative action seemed to me to be the wrong way to do it.
It was pretty simple, really: two wrongs don’t make a right. Since I was a liberal Democrat back then and in the heart of liberal-land, my small little bleatings of doubt (which I thought others would share) seemed to fall on deaf ears. But I never changed my mind, and I’m glad to see that others are coming along.
How would I have redressed the racism of the era? The only solution I ever had was equality of opportunity, and the passage of time. There’s no way to know what would have happened, and perhaps this is naive of me, but I think (and hope) that racism would have died a natural death over the years, and we would have been close to where we are right now on that score but without the bitterness that affirmative action has wrought, and without the widespread doubt about the qualifications of the members of groups who are suspected to have gotten their positions through racial favoritism.
I agree completely. I would add that race- and gender-based preferences are the root cause of anti-white and anti-male biases that are expressed openly today.
I have long said that the only healthy way of addressing past injustice, in the absence of actual remaining guilty parties, is to move forward. There is no doubt that institutionalized racism, in the form of laws and public policies, needed to be overturned: all people need to be legally equal. Once that was done, there was a choice of embracing victimhood and wallowing in the past, or moving forward. When an entire policy-making segment of our country chose the former option (mainly to empower itself), what we have now, 50 years later, is regression. Racism is worse today than at any time in my Gen X memory. Whatever happened to our 70s/80s-era hopes of a color-blind future in which “people are people?”
Social engineering is rarely used for good. The same applies for dictatorships and tyrannies.
If you use the phrase “racial preference” you get even less support. Government has no business sorting its benefits by race or ethnicity. I thought the Fourteenth Amendment settled that. The real goal of lefties is equal results not equal opportunity.
Take a look at what our Dean of the college sent out regarding the upcoming SCOTUS decision on race based admissions ( I’ve edited for length but included the relevant statements):
“At , we believe that every person is unique and brings a different set of experiences to campus. Our mission — to educate students to put the liberal arts into action in a global society — demands that we educate students in a diverse living-learning community.
We have strong evidence that diversity interactions increase educational outcomes on many measures of the liberal arts. Therefore, we adhere to a holistic admission process that considers our applicants’ potential to succeed here and their ability to contribute to our diverse learning environment. This means we consider the whole person, including academics, leadership potential, co-curricular activities and interests, potential major and an array of other factors, of which race is one among many.
We are hoping that the Supreme Court upholds its prior decisions and continues to allow race to be considered as one factor among many in the admission process. If the Supreme Court says this type of holistic admission process is no longer viable, we will follow the law. We will also work to understand the law and find ways to ensure that our campus remains a diverse learning community for all.”
I read this as saying that come hell or high water, no matter what the SCOTUS says, they are going to continue to use affirmative action in admissions.
I can’t wait to retire.
The only reasonable affirmative action was against the public employee unions who blocked minorities from becoming cops or firement (or other unionized shop workers). You had an actual list of people discriminated against along with actual proof of discrimination. Remedial actions would have been implemented in just a few years then no basis for future action would have been required. The racial guilt crowd seized on this to include anyone who was discouraged from even thinking about being a fireman. That this is still in place decades later is the real discrimination.
Equality of opportunity and the passage of time may have worked before the era of television, but I don’t think after. TV just made everything more immediate and real.
I also think this applies to the Vietnam War. It was seeing those dead and suffering soldiers night after night on our living room TVs that did so much to turn us against it.
Kyndyll wrote: “Whatever happened to our 70s/80s-era hopes of a color-blind future in which “people are people?”
It seems to be alive and well in the present college kids. I’ve talked to many of them, and once they have a sense of trust they have opened up to me. There is very little racism there, and generally they do not even acknowledge a person’s race. What gets to them is what the faculty who are obsessed with race are telling them. They have told me they know if they disagree with certain faculty (humanities, social studies) that their grade will suffer, so they nod their heads and just to get through the class.
This bunch of kids (from about 2007 to now) truly seem to be color blind, and they get very annoyed when faculty do nothing but harp on race…. it’s irrelevant to them.
That the country is still equally divided about something so obvious, and that physicsguy’s college/univ Dean should pontificate something so obvious (“every person is unique”) in the first paragraph cited, proves beyond all doubt that “We the People” are Stoopid, and are not getting smarter, though we are all degreed up.
And the fear of retaliation is well-founded, because all those tolerant liberals just hate anyone who disagrees with them.
Physics guy your dean said: “We have strong evidence that diversity interactions increase educational outcomes on many measures of the liberal arts.”
If such research exists, it’s well hidden. Research on test scores of K-12 students shows quite the opposite. As the percentage of blacks in a school goes up the performance of both blacks and whites goes down.
When blacks are mismatched to a university by affirmative action, they suffer academically. That outcome is well documented.
Administrators like affirmative action because it makes them look good.
Affirmative Action started out similar to seniority in unions.
The national contract (UAW) used to say when all else was equal, preference would be given to seniority.
Then seniority became all that mattered.
Same with race.
I’ve always seen Affirmative Action as a base betrayal of MLK’s famous “dream”. It also tends to do similar damage as welfare; it perpetuates an unjust system as it purports to fight it. What’s amazing to me is that so many people buy into it.
There’s a historical parallel — bear with me on this one.
After the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination (I believe he would have checked the more virulent punitive measures), the Republicans were thirsting for vengeance and instituted Reconstruction, or as Southerners called it, “Re-Destruction.”
All white men who had ever served in the Confederate Army, or who had “given aid or comfort to the Confederacy” (IOW, damn near everyone) was disenfranchised: stripped of the right to vote. Union profiteers descended on the prostrate Southern states like vultures. And they installed black men, freed slaves, in the state legislatures: most were illiterate, and all did their new masters’ bidding.
The South was under military rule from 1865 to 1877, and the terms were savage. Southerners couldn’t fight their old Yankee enemy any more — so they turned against the blacks in great bitterness.
(A couple of telling facts: after the war, one-fourth of Alabama’s budget went to pay for prosthetic limbs. The whole region was destitute and burned out; famine was commonplace.
Only 2% of all white southerners owned slaves. They were fargin’ expensive to buy, and a yeoman farmer’s annual cash income [per the 1860 Census] in the South was $50. The least expensive slaves, elderly females, were about $200 — do the math. Rich man’s business.)
Was it fair that the blacks were blamed for the South’s misery? Hell no — but it was human nature. The Radical Republicans were able to steamroll Andrew Johnson after Lincoln died, and give it to the South good and hard, and using the privileging of the blacks as their weapon.
The people who suffered the longest for that orgy of retribution were the blacks.
Think also of the terms of the Versailles Treaty. And compare that with the Marshall Plan and its effects.
Anyway, what I’m talking about in a late-night, long-winded way, is Backlash. I did think affirmative action was necessary in the beginning: just to get a few of us women and “ethnics” into the door and give us a chance to prove our mettle, but I never agreed with the idea of promoting people who were Not Qualified, or dumbing down tests, or making the firemen’s physical fitness tests easy enough for girls to pass. If you want to play with the big boys, you have to be able to cut it.
Affirmative action is soft racism in play. Those in power are basically admitting that blacks can’t do as well on schoolwork and standardized tests and need to be given a leg up, a”golf handicap”, as it were.
Of course, this will continue until the end of time (or Muslim conquest of the West), as unspoken genetic differences will always maintain the inherent gap in average intelligence between the races.
I am in agreement with all of the arguments against affirmative action stated above. If I were a judge, college trustee, employer, or legislator, I would oppose it. And yet–
I have the nagging realization that life is like a game of billiards. Each time you pocket a ball, you get another shot. Each time you miss, your inning is over and your opponent begins. The experienced player gets more shots and, thus, more practice; the inexperienced player keeps falling further behind.
I can not think of a good way for the player without skills to get the practice without being given extra shots that are not earned by pocketing a ball. Extra shots within a game? His or her own table without an opponent? Either is special treatment, paid for by others.
I have not yet been able to reconcile my two sets of ideas.
“The Radical Republicans were able to steamroll Andrew Johnson after Lincoln died,”
Not quite.
Most of the legislation the Radical Republican slave freeers wanted to pass for the South, were vetoed. They were able to override it even then, but that just goes to show that the fight was within the US’s own federal management, not just in Reconstruction.
It has always been natural that the loser of a total war face dramatic shortages and economic destruction. Japan and Germany also faced it. If people don’t like the consequences of losing, they shouldn’t be starting wars for their master’s bidding.
The overwhelming majority opinion in the South was that blacks (and women) were inferior races and sexes. There was often no real evidence to counter that, other than in the special women and blacks who overcame the stereotypes. But for the most part, people lived under the expectations and rules of their society and culture.
The overwhelming majority opinion in the South also contributed to the concept that NOrtherners were weak, cowards, dishonorable, or otherwise easily fought and killed. This made a lot of sense if you considered how the South treated duels and property.
Years after the Civil War, Democrat politicians took advantage of the SOuth’s economic ruin (a ruin caused almost wholly because of Northern and Southern Democrat opinions on how good it would be to keep slavery) just as Democrats take advantage of illegal aliens and the second class citizenship status of inner city ghetto blacks.
The point is, any economic or political progress the Radical Republicans attempted to install in the South were burned. Both by insurgents in the South as well as insurgents in the Northern congress. This led to no real progress, and thus it was easy to stoke up rage. It was easy for the political leaders who ordered the war, to say “well, it’s those Northerners fault we are in this situation, if they hadn’t tried to take our property the slaves, none of this would have happened. Now they want to put the slaves into positions of power”.
Thus Democrat – > KKK was created.
Even to this day, Robert Byrd is a hero. Even to this day.
Southerners didn’t start voting Republican until Reagan, at least openly.
The Democrat party has always had a strong sense of eugenics. Class hierarchy. People often talk about “good Germans” that were patriotic and thus fought for the Nazis, eventually, in WWII.
Few people talk about or admit all the good people, those like Robert E. Lee, who had personal virtue and disliked slavery, but nonetheless answered the call of his home state to go to war. Obedience and loyalty over dissent and disagreement.
And who was it that used these people’s virtues to make ruin happen? When Lincoln was elected, he didn’t care about freeing slaves or taking the property of the South. Yet the SOuth saw that as the trigger point for secession, that it would be “easy” to do so because the NOrtherners were lacking in spine and were not Southern gentlemen deserving of equal respect.
This is a very good example of when people are too quick to go to war. Whereas we live in an era where people don’t even recognize that an enemy has declared war on them.
We can be sure from the tone of that idiot dean’s nonsense that straight, white males won’t have any holistics.
It seems pretty likely from their comments that Ymar is a Yankee and Beverly is not.
FWIW (nothing), to me, the War was principally about States’ Rights, with slavery as a fulcrum issue. The Union (the Federal State) won, the States lost, and that is the enduring heritage.
I was on the wrong side of a racial preference policy. I recall vividly my two supervisors telling me that I could not apply for a promotion because of the company’s affirmative action policy. They had trouble looking me in the eye.
Even defenders of preferences know it is fundamentally wrong. They comfort themselves with the thought that the betrayal of their sense of fairness is only temporary, and justified to right historical wrongs.
I survived my race-based rejection. In fact, if it hadn’t forced me to leave the city I grew up in I would not have met my wife. But how many white males were made bitter by the exclusion? How many racists did affirmative action create? We know if must have created some, the only question is how many.
I agree with Neo-Neocon…racial progress would have happened without affirmative action, and we would be a more healthy society if we hadn’t taken a shortcut. The same holds for forced school busing. Schools should reflect their communities. Schools would be racially mixed when the communities were racially mixed. Judges and politicians used their power to force white and black children to do what their parents would not: live together. Today, the racial education gap remains. What did we gain by forced busing and was it enough to justify such social engineering? The answer is clearly, no.
When I was applying to law school in the late 80s affirmative action was in full force and at that time the excuse was to ‘remedy past discrimination’. Of course some Asians in California (and elsewhere) were soon saying WTF?? when they were getting turned away in higher numbers to colleges, despite facing severe and recent overt discrimination (FDR’s internment camps, anyone?).
Realizing that this made the whole house of cards fall down, leftists soon turned to ‘diversity’ as their rationale, and here we are. Of course the advantage of ‘diversity’ to the ‘remedy’ rationale is that the latter lets you continue to practice reverse discrimination against some groups in perpetuity.
I live in Georgia, what is considered by some to be the Deep South at times, for more than 10 years.
What would really kill Don Carlos’ common sense perception (which is wrong because the history of the world is written by propagandists, not honest folks), is if Beverly lived in the North or North West or Middle Kansas.
There’s a strong cultural motivation not to look at one’s own problem people and mistakes. Fear of an enemy taking advantage of it. Fear of facing their own demons and fighting their worst enemy, themselves. Fear of betraying the memory of their ancestors by bad mouthing what they did, when they did it, and what they knew and when.
These are human weaknesses. It’s why blacks say someone is a race traitor or wannabe whitey if they go Republican (off the plantation).
Human weaknesses are the easiest way for totalitarian systems to maintain control
Those who live in the US who think they are immune because their “culture is strong”, have no conception of the power of Weapons of Mass Deception.
Ymar- your zip code does not tell who you are! I lived in NC decades ago and there is no doubt in anyone’s mind it has since become Yankee-fied largely by in-migration.
Of course most history is written by the winners.
What really drives me crazy about the race-card- playing lefties is that they are also supposed to be for empathy. Yet They tell blacks and let blacks tell everyone else that they are the only ones in the world who have ever suffered. Is there any effort to teach kids about what Ukranians went through under Stalin or the Chinese under Mao, or the Jews in Europe? I’m not saying blacks didn’t suffer discrimination, but it would be nice once in a while to hear a kid say how lucky he is to be in today’s US. What are they thankful for on Thanksgiving day?
Ah, affirmative action…
I never understood how that term was devised in English. To me, “affirmative action” is a better description of nodding one’s head in agreement than setting up racial quotas. I like the Hebrew term for it better: aflaya metakkenet, literally “corrective discrimination”–an acknowledgement that, although the measures may be corrective, they’re still discrimination.
They’re not even corrective, though. I’m glad to see that I oppose affirmative action on the same grounds as most commenters here: Because it goes against the ideal of a merit-based society. The best person for the job, the content of one’s character, etc. Ideals that run contrary to the lazy opportunists (those who want to be rewarded without working for it–hey, that reminds me of somebody… oh, bummer, I can’t remember who it is…) and the genetic determinists (those who think DNA is the same as destiny).
It all goes back to the issue of moral character, then. A moral nation needs no affirmative action to be free of racism; with an immoral nation, affirmative action will quickly become a form of institutional racism as bad as, sometimes worse than, the one it was supposed to correct.
Georgia culture is a lot more robust and superior than where your live, Don Carlos.
The blood is thicker here, you could say. So is the heat.
By “victor writes the history”, I would interpret that to mean Democrats in the South.
Just as the victor after the Cold War were the ones teaching American kids how Marxism and Communism was pretty good.
Southerners couldn’t stop voting Democrat until Reagan, at least out in the open. Jews, minorities, some women, inner city blacks… really can’t help themselves but vote Democrat.
It’s all that fear and cultural loyalty.
The ones who rewrote the South’s own memories of their war… were the Democrats.