Affirmative Action : A Most Unkind Karma
By Miguel Guanipa (12/21/05)
Recently I went to a mandatory diversity seminar designed to raise awareness about the problem of discrimination in the varied areas where we conduct our lives. This ambitious program involved watching a video which, by the looks of the hairstyle the teacher was sporting, was made probably around the 1950’s, and was about a real life classroom of what appeared to be third or fourth graders.
In the video the teacher separated the children by the color of their eyes and then instructed the blue eyed children to deliberately ignore the brown eyed children. She also enumerated a list of privileges that only the blue eyed children were entitled to.
As was to be expected, it didn’t take long for the experiment to cause very visible distress in the children who had not been given privileges.
The experiment was designed to paint a picture of how people react when they are treated differently by the rest of the population or when they are intentionally marginalized because of their benign physical traits. It also purported to illustrate how those who are treated unfairly presumably develop a low self-image which forsakes them to a life prone to failure. At least this was basically the focus of the discussion which took place after the movie had ended.
The premise that those who bear the burden of unfair treatment in our society are doomed to fail because of the devastating effect this treatment has on their self-esteem seemed to weigh heavily on the discussion, but no one seemed to fathom that it was the fact that some had been singled out for preferential treatment which created the conditions of unfairness in the first place.
Eventually the children who were being treated unfairly began to show signs of resentment for their peers who had been singled out for special treatment, and the awareness that preferential treatment was denied to some and conferred to others had a more powerful negative effect on the children’s behavior than the obscure reasoning behind the new protocol.
When you think about it, this is essentially the legacy of the affirmative action experiment.
Affirmative Action has always meant that steps should be taken to increase the representation of those who are described as minorities in areas of education, business and employment. As a result of this noble crusade most institutions in today’s society have to take aggressive measures to include in their roster a fixed percentage of people of different gender or ethnic background in order to accurately reflect the minority ratio of the general population.
These measures have inevitably become determined efforts to extend benefits to groups socially identified as minorities because they possess immutable characteristics which cast them as such, and sometimes even characteristics which should arguably not be classified as immutable, namely sexual orientation or religious beliefs. Thus for those who do not possess those specific characteristics the process seems highly capricious and unfair because, obviously, it is not their fault that they are not minorities. And in that sense the video provided an interesting microcosm of what tends to occur in a larger setting such as the society we all live in.
The children in the video felt that their peers who were given privileges had been elevated to a superior status by means of an arbitrary choice from a figure of authority. This treatment was not predicated on any form of discernible talent but merely a native physical characteristic.
But the experiment did not readily prove that the children who were not given privileges began to experience feelings of low self-esteem. The sentiment of resentment towards their peers seemed to override the notion that they were perchance beset with a low-self-image. The notion of a low self-image resulting from the lack of attention appeared to be a purely subjective assessment from the teacher.
After the viewing most people kept talking about how easy it was to create a society in which some people were discriminated against by simply denying them the same benefits that all should enjoy. But they failed to recognize the inherent problem with ascribing special benefits to some for no veritable reason other than their distinguishing physical features, and how this approach simply begets a new class of elites and deprives others who do not have the same coveted physical features that entitles some to special treatment. This was an analysis which seemed to have escaped those who engaged in the post-video discussion.
I believe the reason why this type of debate was conspicuously avoided is because we are afraid to publicly admit that affirmative action no longer works in today’s society in spite of our obsession with the concept of diversity. Contrary to conventional wisdom, arbitrarily decreed preferential treatment in order to address social inequities is not necessarily conducive to harmony, but is in fact the unintended catalyst for hostilities and resentment.
Obviously it is impossible to give everyone preferential treatment. The concept of preferential treatment in itself implies an inequality in the dispensation of the very manner in which we deal with different people. But that is precisely the point.
All should be given the same opportunities, and the same treatment, unless extenuating circumstances such as a disability which puts one at a clear disadvantage is present, in which case the preferential treatment is to some degree warranted.
Ironically, in order for Affirmative Action to work as it was originally designed, even benign physical characteristics will necessarily have to be perceived and catalogued as handicaps in the long run.
I doubt that those who are receiving preferential treatment truly believe that those immutable characteristics represent a kind of disability in this day and age. One could argue that even implying such is the case sounds more like an insult. In fact many people who do suffer from some kind of legitimate disability often wish to be treated in the same way as everyone else and refuse to be cast as the object of pity.
Ultimately, when society confers preferential treatment to some because of qualities like race, gender, age, or whatever new minority status not rooted on merit liberals may be able to conjure up in the future, it eventually gives rise to a brand of elite misfits who are alienated by virtue of their own government assigned status as deserving victims of special entitlements. A kind of government sponsored karma if you will, for those who happen to be born under a foreordained social class set apart by attributes based merely on distinguishing physical features.
But anyone with an ounce of self-respect will naturally take more pride in the assurance that they were hired by a company, accepted at an educational institution, or welcomed into a particular club simply because of their personal qualifications, rather than live under the gnawing suspicion that they were only chosen because of physical characteristics bestowed upon them by a serendipitous stroke of heredity and blind fortune.
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