Posted by
Old Retired Fart on Sunday, December 03, 2006 10:45:56 PM
On monday the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the latest affirmative action case. One of the interesting things about being an ORF (Old Retired Fart) is that you have seen it all. My dad use do say I had mind like a steel trap (rusty and illegal in 37 states) and the fact is that I don't forget a whole lot. In this case, I remember most of the things I've been told about affirmative action.
Affirmative action started out (or so I was told) as a way of making sure that minorities were made aware of opportunities. There was no preference given to anyone...there was just a special effort to make sure that minorities were aware that things were now different...they had the same opportunities as anyone else. Now I don't see how any reasonable person could have objected to that in the 1960's.
That phase did not last too very long, and we entered a phase of "making up for past injustices". The idea then was that affirmative steps needed to be taken to "make up for" the discrimination of the past. So quota's were introduced, and we began to track numbers. That was where the problems started. In the first place, not everyone who received the benefit of affirmative action had ever been affected by "past injustices". A PhD from Kenya could get off a plane and immediately be entitled to preferences based solely on the color of his skin. That didn't make a whole lot of sense.
Apparently that one didn't make much sense to the courts after a while either, and we proceeded through a phase of having to prove an injustice was done, to developing remedies to specifically correct those injustices. Affirmative action appeared to be on the way out.
Then came the idea of "diversity". Now this may be the most singlehandedly Orwellian piece of logic I have ever encountered. Let us review the bidding. The entire idea being pursued here is that all men should be treated equally. Now, no reasonable person believes that everyone should be treated exactly equally in all respects. If you cannot bring yourself to speak to a stranger because of a phobia of strangers, you are not going to be treated equally as a sales person. If you cannot do basic math, you are not going to be treated equally as an engineer. But, generally speaking, people should not be discriminated against based on things that make no difference...like skin color.
So what is the deal with diversity? Is skin color just the color of a person's skin? If so, then what difference does it make what percentage of a school has a certain color skin? We don't claim any benefit in diversity of eye color, or hair color? Diversity proponents would argue that people of a certain color bring something else to a classroom. This something else is "diversity". But what is diversity? Its proponents would argue that persons of a certain skin color bring a different view, a different perspective to the classroom. But isn't this just saying that all of "these" people have something in common other than the color of their skin? And while it is impermissible to discriminate based on the color of someone's skin, who's to say that it is impermissible to discriminate based on whatever this "other thing" is? I would argue no one.
So, you can't have it both ways. Either skin color tells us nothing other than skin color, in which case it is as wrong to discriminate based on skin color as it would be to discriminate based on eye color. Or, skin color also indicates other things about the individual...in which case it is permissable to design a class or a school to ensure these "things" are added to the diversity of the classroom, but it is also permissable to design a class or a school to ensure that these same "things" are kept out of the class room.