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发帖数: 29846 | 1 by Jerome Hudson
ExposingLeftists.com arrived on the campus of the University of California,
Merced, last May to gather signatures on a petition calling for a
redistribution of grade-point averages. Not surprisingly, few star students
wanted to share the fruits of their academic labors.
But the logic was liberally sound. Students who worked hard and studied
longer than their peers—in the spirit of fairness—should be willing to
sacrifice their higher GPAs to benefit those whose grades weren’t so high
due to laziness or ineptitude (or both).
Ironically, many of the same A students unwilling to take a B so someone
else could be saved from an F, endorsed a progressive tax code that
essentially spreads wealth from people who earned it to those who did not.
The same crew recently showed up at the University of California, Riverside,
to see whether the student body there would sign a petition demanding that
the athletic department consider race as a determining factor in team
rosters.
Its findings were similar to UC Merced. While UC Riverside students said
they supported affirmative action laws to promote diversity and that race-
based preferences “level the playing field” for disadvantaged minorities,
they nonetheless refused to sign a petition to apply quotas to the UC
Riverside basketball team. At UC Riverside, 10 out of the 11 active players
on the basketball team are black. Blacks make up only about 20% of the
student body. So why not use affirmative action to promote diversity there?
ExposingLeftists.com’s Oliver Darcy figured this disparity was a natural
place to promote diversity. After all, affirmative action rules UC
Riverside’s hiring policy and minority-specific outreach is not so vaguely
couched in college advertising.
Diversity and equality are desired in our society, but the glaring double-
standard found by ExposingLeftists.com shows where progressive policies
promote problems.
Indeed, America walked out of the 19th century of slavery into segregation
and Jim Crow. And while American exceptionalism is responsible for so many
of humanity’s historic steps forward, almost a century of post-Civil War
discrimination disfigured our republic. Until the civil rights era, a moral
disconnect ruled the day. But an ensuing onslaught of court rulings and
bureaucratic fiat comprised the noble effort to reconcile America’s
egalitarian idealism and its discriminatory reality.
Herein lies the rub.
In the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, segregated
facilities for blacks and whites were overwhelmingly deemed constitutional
as long as they were equal. It took 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education
decision to determine that “separate, but equal” was “inherently unequal
” because a segregated education “generates a feeling of inferiority.”
Ending segregation was a good thing, but the Pandora’s Box of reforms such
as President Kennedy’s executive order that led to affirmative action and
the forced busing laws passed to enforce Brown created mixed results.
Born of moral intentions, these remedies were never properly scrutinized for
their immoral results.
Busing ultimately—and unfortunately—left too many school districts more
segregated than ever. “White flight” saw large numbers of white families
de facto segregating their children to private schools and suburban
neighborhoods.
Affirmative action and its tentacles—quotas, minority-based points systems,
group-based preferences, loosened testing and admissions standards—are an
affront to our most sacred democratic principle: that all men are equal in
the eyes of the law. For too long, our laws and court rulings have
contorted this value. And the belief that career opportunities and
educational successes should be the reward of individuals’ merit and
unwavering work ethic has eroded over time.
Tragically—for blacks, women and other “oppressed” minorities—
affirmative action indirectly communicates a demoralizing message of
inferiority that reinforces the same separatism it set out to solve. It is
pure illogic to think that you can fight fire with fire and get anything but
scorched earth. Reverse discrimination simply cannot cure discrimination.
Today, two mutually exclusive Americas exist. We are either an affirmative
action America, where some among us are held to a lower standard based on
skin color or we are all equal under the law, free to fail or succeed no
matter what group we happen to be born into. Both cannot be true.
Be it basketball or big business, allowing the best to advance is the true
moral path. |
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