Time To Stop Taking The Poison
By Margaret Snyder (06/24/03)
Author Dinesh D’Souza writes of when someone told Ronald Reagan that if we didn’t have affirmative action, the entire student body at Berkeley would be Asian. Reagan shrugged, “So what?”
In those two words he articulated his inclusive, magnanimous, encompassing vision of a society free of racism.
This is a vision of a nation with no hyphenated Americans. Of “We’re all just Americans here”. Some of us were born here, some of us came from elsewhere, some of us are descended from refugees from injustices in Europe and other continents. Some of us are descended from people who were brought here against their will. All of us are glad to be here. (Even the ones who grumble a lot: rare is the Castro apologist, for example, who packs up and moves to Cuba.)
This is a vision where race is just one of myriad differences between people, of no more political or social significance than how tall you are or what color your hair is.
It is a vision where, when cultural differences attach to race, they are not of a different order than all the other cultural differences we have, including between members of the same “race”.
It is a vision where, in fact, we would regularly use distancing quotes around the word “race”, indicating its relative uselessness as a category.
How far have we traveled toward this vision since the Civil Rights legislation of forty years ago? Well, not very far at all.
The Civil Rights legislation of 1964 was passed by an entirely white Congress at a time when there were few black voters. (Aside: more Republicans than Democrats voted for it.) What on earth impelled them to pass this legislation? Was it political suicide?
They passed this legislation because they knew it was the right thing to do. It was not political suicide because as a society we recognized the injustice of Jim Crow and were appalled at its blatant discordance with our founding ideals. They passed it out of a vision like Ronald Reagan’s.
What happened to this vision? Affirmative action happened.
In a society where bright young black people were automatically encouraged to go into the trades rather than pursue higher education or a profession, affirmative action was intended to jumpstart new aspirations in blacks and new ways of thinking in whites. In this it succeeded quite quickly, but it was soon perverted into a racial spoils entitlement program.
It was hijacked by people who stood to gain by keeping race the defining attribute of individuals. It was hijacked by people who stood to gain by keeping black people down, ignorant and easy to lead. It was hijacked by people who succeeded in fostering a sense of guilt in white people so that they would agree to anything in order to feel good about themselves.
The toxic results of affirmative action are well documented. Surely it has been poisonous to the thousands upon thousands of talented and gifted black people who must spend their entire professional lives proving over and over that they deserve the success they have earned. (Unless they are in a field that does not practice affirmative action. Such as sports, where only one thing counts. Nobody whispers that Michael Jordan only got where he got because of affirmative action.)
It has also kept millions of its intended beneficiaries from reaching their potential by telling them they can’t and needn’t achieve on their own, so why would they try?
Its underlying assumption of the inferiority of the favored groups works to foster rather than eliminate negative racial stereotypes among the majority population.
And it has been poisonous to race relations. Like a potent medicine for a dreadful disease, it may have been necessary to stop the disease but its side effects will kill the patient it we don’t stop administering it. It is way past time.
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