…and its immorality. People who advocate it are the true racists. As Glenn says, it’s all about exploiting ignorance, and the difference between that which is seen, and that which is unseen. Of course, as a commenter notes, the most devastating impact on the nation of affirmative action to date is that it put a mediocrity in the White House.
[Update a while later]
Debates and racial preferences.
If Affirmative Action was viable or really worked to push good people to jobs they could do, sans discrimination keeping them out, we’d have a 4% unemployment rate, personal money flowing, mortgages and business loans flowing and plenty of other things we currently lack.
Because BHO should be THE poster child for Affirmative Action in the 21st Century.
Affirmative action gave a whole generation of young white (and Asian) people, who had never even had a racist thought in their lives, at least until they started applying for college and financial aid, a reason to be angry at preferences given to people based on the melanin level in their skin, even to those who were wealthier and had better social connections than their paler competitors for scholarships and jobs.
And for objecting, even while quoting the famed words of Dr. King, people with paler skin who are forced to settle for less are called “racist”.
Racism WAS dying out. Many Americans under 40 not only don’t rememebr, but are not even aware of the Jim Crow laws and the Civil Rights struggle that only yielded some true equality in relatively recent US history. Affiramtive Action helps rekindle racial tension… and isn’t that the mission of advocates for such things as AA? If racism dies, they are out of a job. AA seems almost designed to create new young racists. Unfortunately for AA advocates, most are smart enough to figure out that the legitimate target of resentment is AA advocates, rather than the beneficiaries of AA programs.
AA doesn’t create more racists (as it was semi-consciously intended to do).
It creates more Libertarians.
In my experience, AA and a host of other left-wing social engineering and education techniques (group work, the “everybody wins” style of “education”) helped create a good chunk of young Libertarians, experiencing first-hand at a young age just how much government and left-wing idealism can screw up your life for no just reason, punish you for being pale, and enslave you for the sin of being more talented than your peers. We have known this for decades.
But now, every unemployed American knows the sting.
AA has yielded the ultimate backfire, putting an incompetent in the White House.
President Obama: Affiramtive Action meets the Peter Principle.
Obama didn’t get elected through AA. He got elected by promising young people that, if elected, he’d make sure they wouldn’t have to actually put their lives on the line. In short, he played to their cowardice.
That much said, it didn’t hurt him to have the Lehman Brothers collapse right before the campaign either.
He got a lot of votes in both the primary and the general that he wouldn’t have gotten if he’d been the white guy Barry O’Bama. I know that having the first black president was the only reason that I could see to vote for him.
A great many people who would have written him off as the Democrats’ Dan Quayle if his father hadn’t been from Kenya, did vote for him in 2008 — and have since given Glenn Reynolds and others fodder for the “another rube self-identifies” meme.
If racism dies, they are out of a job.
Sickening isn’t it?
There are many complexities associated with affirmative action programs and policies. However, one issue which we continually ignore, as is the case with most government related programs and initiatives, is whether it is effective in addressing past wrongs. Think about this: How many beneficiaries of affirmative action programs have actually shared their good fortune with other members of their particular ethnic group, as opposed to using their increased opportunities and wealth to distance themselves from the masses of minority citizens?