I was very happy when I heard Affirmative Action was ending. The only friend of mine who was happier was the one whose husband is from Africa, and whose kids have even more to lose than my little (huge) mutts.
“To lose?” You say. “But Affirmative Action gives preference to people of color! Surely the fact you were so happy means you want to hold minorities down!”
You — the imaginary voice in my head, or the liberal reading this post to try to figure out the depths of my evil — really need to stop making me hit my head so hard on this here desk that I leave dents.
Affirmative Action meant that people were advanced on the basis of color or declared/perceived ethnicity, yes. But what that meant, in actual fact, is that people got advanced without the least interest in their competence.
And because this started with colleges — or earlier, to look good on paper — it was harder for people who tanned to get decent educations. (Or women. Of course women — white women — were the largest contingent to benefit from AA! Which is how “the lady’s A” became a thing in a lot of places, and women crumpled when faced with a real challenge. Put a pin in that.)
The truth is that Affirmative Action, being a numbers game, isn’t a matter of giving preference to someone who is otherwise the same as every other candidate but has a slightly deeper tan or happens to be a woman.
No, being run by the government, it is the bluntest of instruments, so they will promote anyone with the irrelevant characteristic and since the random person isn’t particularly competent well, there you have it.
So what it does is sort of establish a nobility of birth — anyone born with this characteristic gets a leg up despite merit or lack there of — reduce the overall competency EVERYWHERE, cause resentment in people who know they are more competent than those advanced above them (whose work they often have to do) and oh, yes, multiply “victim categories” as everyone wants to get a piece of the AA pie. As part of it, of course, since the people advanced are unlikely to be competent (picking for any reason other than competence dilutes competence) it also increases racism and racial tensions. And of course those who feel themselves resented will attribute it to racism — which it is, even if incited by the stupid rule.
What it does, in fact, is fracture American society, men against women, people who tan against the pale, the pale against those who tan, the varying shades of tan against each other. It also makes everyone concentrate on everything BUT the mission. if you’re counting heads, you’re not thinking about your main work objective.
Look, we’ve had over sixty years of this. If it were going to bring about magical integration and an erasure of race, we’d know by now.
Instead it has multiplied “ethnicities” and a sense of resentment, victimhood, and people hating each other as general classes of human widgets.
Turns out the way to make sure there’s no racism is to stop talking about race, thinking about it, or even considering it. And if you are a liberal and thinks not noticing race makes one a racist, you’ve been so thoroughly brainwashed you have not a hint of a glimmer of a link to reality.
Yes, I do know that a lot of people are scared by the end of AA. That’s because they’ve been extensively lied to.
As my friend told me when we heard of this, “Finally, Dr. King’s dream is coming true, and people will be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.”
And it’s about d*mn time.
Free of being lumped into arbitrary categories at last. Free of thinking of each other as arbitrary paint chips or what is between our legs. Free of the soft bigotry of low expectations. Free to advance as far as our minds and ability and willingness to work at last. Free to be Americans at last.
Thank G-d Almighty, all of us, free at last.
