Affirmative Action

[muon2]

I support race based affirmative action at present, but would support quotas if a critical mass cannot be met. I picked option one.

Brown v. Board of Education is fifty. The Civil Rights Act is forty. Before then, there were 350 years of brutal and ugly history, spanning from the first slaves brought to our shores, to Jim Crow's obnoxious prescence. Considering that the barriers to overcome that tragic legacy only fell within living memory, and racial discrimination still lives in the hearts and minds of many, I cannot expect the situation to be the same for people, regardless of race. That is why affirmative action is not yet obsolete.

It never fails to mystify me how some will insist on rigid, pure equality in one area, and ignore the broader inequalities it remedies. That shows a complete failure to see the forest for the trees. In order to treat some people equally, we must treat them differently. It doesn't work in any other fashion. We cannot let the spirit of equality give license to a long and sorry history of bigotry. We mustn't let our society's materialists forget that no matter how abject their poverty, the burden of being a minority is not one they will ever have to bear. Because of all of that, the work continues.

There are two separate points you raise. The first point is easily stated. Discrimination on the basis of race is wrong, and the law should make that clear. I wholeheartedly agree.

The second point is also easy to state, but does not so easily follow. Your statement could be that "certain racial groups should be punished for the reason that unrelated members of their group acted wrongly and went unpunished in the past". On this I must disagree. I feel that rights belong to the individual not to groups. If some person has done wrong then they should be responsible. Races become arbitrary classifications that unfairly group people.

Let me go one step further. To current science, race is not a very meaningful concept since it is based on ideas from the 16th-19th centuries. I believe that the use of race as a descripion for someone only reinforces that distinction with each generation. If we truly wanted a more equal society, we would avoid the use of race entirely.

[muon2]

You're right, Muon2. Our concept of race has very little factual foundation. In fact, it is primarily social. But that is how virtually every person in our nation understands race. Since affirmative action is addressed to the society at large, it must be in reasonable conformity with how society views race. It would otherwise be incompatible. I have optimism that for many people, exposure to other races will show to them that they're really not that much different from you and me, and the old ideas about race will lose their powerful hold.

But the labels we use become the tool for discrimination. As long as the law supports racial labels in any capacity, their use in wider society will result in people making generalizations based on those labels. The law should be written without regards to race, even if some might think there is a social good from it.