Last Among Equals
By Michael R. Bowen (06/28/03)
President Lincoln was once involved in a debate with a man who insisted that the thing they were discussing be called by a different name. After frustrating himself trying to make the man see that this was mere sophistry, Mr. Lincoln finally said in exasperation, "Look here. If you call a dog's tail a leg, how many legs would it have?" "Why, five, of course." "No", Mr. Lincoln said. "four. You can call it a leg, but it's still a tail."
Message to minorities from the Supreme Court: your college diploma doesn't mean squat.
We know you got into college because of your skin color, not your academic achievement.
We know that your grades in college were inflated. How? Well, your professors probably felt pressured to inflate them. After all, your college president was willing to go all the way to the Supreme Court to impose racial favoritism.
We know that after college you will be hired despite the knowledge that your diploma is meaningless, and your employer will know that he has to teach you things you should have learned in high school before you can begin your job.
You may think that your education, your job, and your achievements reflect effort and determination on your part. We know better. We know you couldn't really have done these things on your own, and so we have jiggered the rules of the game.
But then there's the good news: we, in our wisdom, have also determined that the pigment in your skins causes the principles of calculus, the lessons of history, and the insights of philosophy to become intelligible to unpigmented people around you. In years past, students graduating with degrees in biology, music, history, or literature, didn't really receive an education after all, because there weren't enough people of your particular shade in the room when it happened. We're still trying to figure out how they got the answers right on their examinations, and how they managed to go on to make brilliant scientific discoveries, write masterful literature, and steer the path of nations; however, we begin to suspect that all those discoveries, masterpieces, and wise government policies probably didn't really happen.
Anyway, we've figured out that a) you're not good enough, or hard-working enough, to make it on your own, and yet b) everyone else can't make it on their own without you around.
This must mean that our Constitution requires that a certain percentage of your classmates come from certain racial and ethnic groups, and that a certain percentage of college applications from these groups must be accepted, even if they are below academic standards. Now we all know that discrimination on the basis of race is clearly forbidden by that same Constitution, and the same is true of quotas. But you see, we're not really discriminating or using quotas, even though that's what we're actually doing. No, we are practicing diversity. See? There's no problem: the only problem was those silly names. Quotas and Discrimination, indeed! We've fixed all that.
So run along to college, boys and girls. Between now and graduation, we figure there's plenty of time for us to find a Constitutional mechanism requiring everyone to pretend you're really educated. You may or may not be last among equals, but we'll make everyone call you first.
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