“The Court’s decision most immediately affects institutions of higher education — and sends a clear message to the mostly Black and Hispanic students who have been shut out of elite schools.” – Forbes, Corrine Lestch.
The other day, the Supreme Court decided to effectively end the use of affirmative action for universities, an action which will trickle down into businesses and other areas. This is something that I’ve long felt was overdue. The ability for Blacks to force schools and businesses to accept and/or hire those who are not qualified for the job is racist to the Nth degree. It’s also not necessary, and harmful for PoC to be treated differently. That’s literally why we added the 13th Amendment.
I come from Canada originally. My formative years were spent in a school system that was incredibly multi-cultural. On my little cul-de-sac alone, we had a Hindi family, an African (ie from Africa, and skin so black it was almost blue) family, an Irish one, and an assortment of mutts who came from all over the place. I remember playing during the summer, outside before the street lights came on, and my Hindi friend’s mum would invite us all in for samosas, and we all loved it. I tried my first African food at Spencer’s house, and immediately fell in love. It was wonderful. At no point did I ever think of those children as African or Pakistani, though. They were just Canadian, same as me.
I remember a notable time when I was showing a friend’s daughter my yearbook, after I’d moved here to the States. I was staring at an image of a young lady named N’keena, who I’d been rather close friends with during elementary school. “She’s Black,” I commented, surprised. My friend’s kid snickered and asked if it was the name or the skin color that gave it away. I had to explain that I’d never thought of skin color before I moved to the States. It had never been an issue, or even a thought. It was an interesting conversation, to be sure.
It’s been over 20 years since I’ve been in Canada. My understanding is that Black people there are now claiming the same kind of racist treatment that Black Americans claim here. It confuses me, because I spent a good chunk of my life in Canada, and never saw or heard an episode of racism. My personal experiences ranged from middle class to extremely poor, so I’ve seen “across the aisle” so to speak. That means that in the 20 years since I left, someone has managed to convince an entire group of people that they’re being oppressed. It makes no sense to me.
Affirmative Action was designed to allow (mostly) Black students and workers to get into jobs that they may have been kept from due only to their skin color. On the surface, it looks like a good thing. I’m personally on the fence about whether it was a good thing 60 years ago. I know for certain that there’s no reason for it to be in place today. When I was discussing this topic with friends, I asked a native American person, “Why can’t they just take everyone’s names, ages, and genders off their applications for work and school, and hire on merit alone?” I got laughed at. Apparently, some people had tried that, and it was mostly middle class white people who got hired or accepted. This was considered “racist” because group theory says that if all those informative points were removed, there should be a similar percentage of races hired at any given company, as there are in the area they live in. If that was not the case, someone somewhere was being racist. It was explained to me that since a blind hiring plan resulted in mostly whites being hired, there had to be systemic racism earlier, which poisoned things to the point where it was unfair to Black people.
I had a hard time following all that.
I look at the Constitution and I see that we’re all promised the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself. As a country, America has chosen to provide people with opportunities, not end points. I’m a white, pretty normal female, and I didn’t complete high school. I worked in menial jobs for a long time, secretarial and answering service work, at factories, etc. That isn’t something I can blame on others. The fact that I left an abusive home early, and that was the reason that my “straight A student” body didn’t graduate doesn’t matter. I was the one who didn’t take hold of the opportunities I was offered. Leaving my parents’ home didn’t stop me from finishing school. I chose that, all on my own, to my own detriment for a very long time. Because I’m white, that’s accepted as stated. Were I dark-skinned, I would have been told that it was NOT my fault, that I had been set up to be the way I am (was).
“Perhaps the most tragic side effect of affirmative action is that very significant achievements of minority students can become compromised. It is often not possible to tell whether a given student genuinely deserved admission to Stanford, or whether he is there by virtue of fitting into some sort of diversity matrix. When people do start to suspect the worst — that preferences have skewed the entire class — they are accused of the very racism that justifies these preferences.” – Stanford Magazine, David Sacks and Peter Thiel.
The problem that I see with Affirmative Action is that, whatever it intended when originally penned, it now creates a special class of people who receive special treatment. This goes counter to everything that America stands for. As David Sacks says above, you can’t tell if someone actually deserved to be at Stanford. Consider that statement. It makes a very strong point: during Affirmative Action, there absolutely were students who did not “genuinely deserve admission to Stanford.”
Taking things one step further, it has created a group of people who don’t work as hard as others, because they simply do not have to. We know that kids and young adults generally aim for whatever bar we set in front of them, and only a minuscule number work for something beyond that bar. The bar for Blacks has been lowered, not just to the point where it harms schools and companies, but to the point where it actively causes damage to the people with darker skin color.
As if the bar for children these days wasn’t low enough, places of higher education were being forced to consider race as a qualifying item in applications. We’ve all seen the memes where an HR guy is talking to the boss over the water cooler about a new hire: “Yeah, she’s great. She’s female, black, and in a wheelchair! Three boxes ticked in one. We just need to keep her out of the business.” In other words, the new hire was brought in not to actually do a job, but to fulfill the business’s affirmative action hires. In lieu of finding someone who could actually do a job, they hired someone because of their inability to do it, and shoved them into a menial position.
In this country, there are very few people who aren’t afforded the ability to pursue a lofty goal. Pretty much anyone can become a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, the President. No one is barred from doing so by the color of their skin or their religious beliefs. Whether the people actually choose to pursue their goals is another thing entirely. No one can force someone to go after a school or a job that they don’t want. No one can force someone to believe they’re capable… but it’s entirely possible to convince someone (or a group of someones) that they’re NOT capable. That is the definition of enslavement, really, and it’s time to end it.
I know a lot of people who are emotionally bereft because of this ruling. They believe that applying the same admission and hiring standards to Blacks that are applied to everyone else is going to cause racism to explode. People like Gov. Newsom of California.
“The California governor decried the ruling in a statement on Thursday, despite affirmative action being illegal in the Golden State for state institutions.” The Washington Examiner, Jack Birle.
His state, a very deep Blue state, got rid of Affirmative Action in 1996. They did so because it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. And Newsom is upset that the rest of the country wants to be the same as California. You can’t make this sh*t up.
TL;DR: The pros of ending Affirmative Action far outweigh any possible cons. It’s time to work towards actual equality, and real justice.
A long time ago, I was the head of one of the divisions at a small company. As bad as those jokes are, the reality is worse. Since we had government contracts, it was important to us to have those checkboxes ticked.
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We had a number of female employees. Most of them were office workers. My division was the only technical division that had a female employee. She was hired because she was capable of doing the job, and she worked hard. She did her job.
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We had a black woman apply for a position. Even though she was not qualified for the position she was applying for, the head office said, “hire her”. We did. We then spent the next 5 years attempting to find *something* she could do without costing us time or money.
“Affirmative Action was designed to allow (mostly) Black students and workers to get into jobs that they may have been kept from due only to their skin color. On the surface, it looks like a good thing.”
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On the surface… but like every other path paved with good intentions, we all know the destination.
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Every effort to equalize ends up tilting away from equal to unequal in the opposite direction. I agree totally that discriminating against someone because of their physical attributes is wrong. However, discriminating FOR someone because of the same reason is equally wrong.
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If affirmative action were to be successful, it would take into account actual data about race, sex, religion, etc… For example. My experience was only about 1-2% of my engineering class was women. For whatever reason, women were not drawn to electrical engineering, preferring civil or mechanical engineering. (they represented maybe 5% of those disciplines). So far, not a problem.
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But, affirmative actions say women make up 50% of the population, so government and private industry should have women represent 50% of their engineers. What? Women represent maybe 10% of engineering graduates. (Based on my personal experience, I do not know the real stats.) So, in what bizarre world do you ignore the number of graduates in a field in favor of a generic nationwide statistic? That’s right, you ignore it in a world of affirmative action.
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I am really happy it was struck down, and I hope more of these preferential treatment systems get the axe. Equity is nothing more than lowering standards.
CBMTTek, I agree. I know a lot of women who bitched about wanting to be on the high school football team, but then were pissy because they had to compete to get it. Women and men are not the same, and we shouldn’t be treated the same. I can show you hella great statistics saying women with certain types of handguns and most rifles are “in general” much more accurate than men at the same level of training. That doesn’t mean women should be sharpshooters and men shouldn’t… it means that those who want to be sharpshooters are going to have to work at it, but that some statistically significant number of women probably won’t have to work quite as hard. Some men might have to work harder. Same when it comes to women and STEM subjects. It might be that women have to work harder at making it in engineering (which, funny enough, I was an ace at in high school LOL) or fire fighting, than in secretarial or teaching. Who cares? If it’s what someone wants to do, then they must provide their own internal push to get there.
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I did not think that I was ever going to be a good writer, even though I loved doing it. I knew too many failed writers. So I did other things, EASIER things. Things I wouldn’t fail at. Which was fine… but didn’t fulfill me. Now I’m a very good writer, making a bit of a living off it, and I’m happy with that. But I had to apply MYSELF to the job.
Interesting you mention the shooting. If I remember correctly, the Olympics at one point decided there was no reason to have separate men’s and woman’s shooting (skeet/trap) competitions. And, the women pretty much won across the board, so they went back and separated the sexes.
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Another thing that I have noticed, not sure if you have seen it.
When it comes to sports, professional sports specifically, some of the loudest advocates for equity are surprisingly silent. No one is saying Tom Brady and/or Aaron Rodgers should step aside and let a black man have a chance. For whatever reason, professional sports ball is exempt from DIE requirements.
Funny thing re rising to challenges.
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Mrs B told me about a survey of New Mexico highschool dropouts. (NM, by the way, is one of the worst states for education, both quality and HS completion rates.) Seems a lot of kids are dropping out not because it’s too hard, but because they get bored. If there’s no challenge, there’s nothing to keep them engaged.
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Food for thought.
Boris, I can totally believe they’re bored. I know that I was a kid with high intelligence, a need to please (which usually equals to excelling in school, where you get frequent pats on the head for work well done), and a middle class family that had just enough money to inspire me but not enough to pay may way (meaning I had to do SOME work to get what I wanted). In school, I skated. I never worked at anything except math, and that’s a whole other story (a bad one). When I ended up taking my first college level course as an adult, I did TERRIBLE for the first semester, because I’d literally never had to “work at it” before. But I learned… unlike so many. I often think that college and university are wasted on young people.
Totally saw that in the years I was teaching. In schools w/ (academically) integrated classrooms in lieu of a tiered system, the concept was that the average and higher performing kids would ‘help’ the lower performing ones. Obviously this generally does not happen. The teacher ends up having to teach to the lowest denominator. Most of the lower performing kids don’t want to do the work in the first place and keep getting low marks. The average students get bored and start getting lower grades/causing issues. The higher performing kids (the geeks and nerds 😉 ) do their own thing and pursue their own interests anyway.
Then the teachers unions push for more money which typically goes towards administrators and/or pensions because of the lowering grades.
I don’t ever call myself smart. My wife says I am, but I always disagree. Highschool was obvious daycare pandering to the lowest common denominator. It was extremely easy to game the system once you saw how it all worked and it was boring. Only ap classes were challenging and you couldn’t fuck off if you weren’t very smart. I was absent and late the exact number day I could be without consequences; it was very satisfying waltzing in at 10am with 5 of my buddies because we wanted to go out for breakfast and play pool. I never did homework and barely studied, home work was 10% of my grade, why waste 90% of my time on it? Studying was done to cram for tests when needed. I figured out technique to bullshit and fill my essays with sophistry and words to actually say nothing but to at the same time fill a page; it was basically academicese and looked good but I just winged it. That got me through lots and lots of stuff in the b range. College was rude awakening after 4 years of barely doing shit in highschool because I figured out how to game my grades, my time, and the teachers to the detriment of learning how to actually study and do work.
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Nail. On. The. Head.
I’ve had to compete against people with lower requirements and lower cutting scores while mine continue to raise in almost every adult job I’ve had. Nothing like missing promotion points by a single course while someone who requires almost 50 points lower than you sleep walks their way across the finish line.
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My given name is very Angelo but I look like The Rock and Chief Running Bear had a love child and glued a mountain man beard on for good measure. I know what my time and work is worth and never doubted it until I was asked to speak about my “lived experiences” as an AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) and a indian. Never thought of myself as anything but Bad Dancer, have the tribal card sure but that was mostly an excuse to try something new and learn the lingo while learning about my family.
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Much like you I grew up during a time that race wasn’t really a factor. Fort Rucker brought in families from all over the nation as well as our allied nations. We had probably the best mom and pop restaurants in all of the Southeastern US cause people retired there and brought their families. German, West and North African, Korean, German, Italian, German, even a few Indian from the vegetarian area, German, and a small smattering of Japanese. (Can you tell I have a healthy love of Germanic food?) Neighborhoods and schools were not really segregated by race so much as if you were an Alabama (yay) or Auburn (boo) family and your service branch. Economics played a factor but that mostly affected how far we had to ride our bikes to go play.
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That started to change in the mid 90s and people began to self segregate. The bad parts of town got worse. Happened again in the 2000s and my generation that had truly been raised not to see race got pushed back into it by our gleeful elders. Kids wearing My President is Black shirts and being outright hostile about it, who had played with us and been on the same teams now saying how everyone else owes them stuff.
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What is especially telling are the people who said that without affirmative action no poor minorities will ever become a doctor, lawyer, nurse, whatever. Gee way to show off their racism there white savior. Tell me what else I can’t do why dont they.
I recently listened to a podcast addressing this issue, and a few more related subjects Hagar. Because you are a very objective reasonable person, who is a secret conservative (I won’t tell anyone, I swear) with a brilliant mind…..I’ll post the link to the said podcast but with a warning, it’s from a source you said in the past that you didn’t particularly care for because she was overly rude in her delivery. So hopefully it’s ok. I promise you you’ll love her guest, Nadine Strossen, the ladies rock, like you, imho — https://anncoulter.substack.com/p/free-speech-champion-nadine-strossen?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#play