Posted by: McQ on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 Eugene Robinson, in an WaPo oped, talks about an Obama interview broadcast Sunday on ABC's "This Week" in which affirmative action came up. Ignoring the bigger issue, Robinson asks: Stephanopoulos was driving at the question of whether race-based affirmative action programs are still needed. Another way to frame the issue is whether race or class is the more important factor in our society. Are minorities who are raised in middle-class or wealthy homes still held back by racism? Or should we now focus on socioeconomic status as the principal barrier keeping people from reaching their potential?How about neither? The only crew still injecting race and class in the process are those who still believe you have to fight discrimination by creating special classes and then discriminating against everyone else in order to favor that class. All a part of the fairly recent phenomenon of the "victim" class and the use of government to assuage the past wrongs that class has suffered. A perfect example can be found here. What Robinson is doing is shifting the goal posts. Or perhaps a better analogy would be, expanding the field, since racial preferences are getting harder and harder to justify (not that there is really any justification to begin with). What he isn't doing is giving any consideration to ending the practice of affirmative action completely. It is a modern day absurdity which continues to amaze me. Regardless of how sympathetic you are to past wrongs, committing public policy to another version of precisely what you claim was wrong is an untenable moral and social position. We have multiple ways, other than race or class, to determine merit, and it should be merit, i.e. what someone has done and accomplished, which should be the primary, in fact the only, criteria for admission. And for the radical egalitarian crowd who claim to value fairness above all else, affirmative action seems completely inconsistent with that position. Despite its euphemistic and politically correct name, it is governmental and societally sanctioned discrimination. It is time to end this nonsense once and for all. The question, Mr. Robinson, isn't should we change the criteria for this method of discrimination, but instead shouldn't we do away with it if we want to call ourselves a country which doesn't sanction discrimination for race, sex, national origin or religious belief? |
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