Affirmative Action is back in the news. This time it goes under the truthful and unmarketable phrase 'racial preferences', and Michigan has a proposition on the November ballot that says no more racial preferences.
I have been somewhat blindsided and mostly non-plussed about this issue. Some thoughtful folks sent me some emails in defense of the preferences but I paid them no mind, mostly because of the exclamation points. But today I have come to learn that Ward Connorly is defending the KKK and that John McWhorter is voting down Affirmative Action as well. Connorly, I can dismiss. McWhorter I cannot. Interestingly enough I wrote just this week that colorblindness has political advantages over multiculturalism as the defacto anti-racist medicine for America. It is not strong medicine, rather it is like a good diet, it can be preventative, all things being equal. How you feel about colorblindness basically depends upon how sick you think America is and how well it needs to get. How do I feel?
I think that the Michigan legal cases about Affirmative Action several years back were decided wrongly - that the racial preferences should have been granted at the undergraduate level, not at the graduate level. And nothing has really changed about my principled stand weakly in favor of Affirmative Action. I'm basically going to watch how this goes down, and I'm not going to get exercised about it one way or another. In fact, I wish I could take a pill and not wake up until this election season was over.
Bottom line. Affirmative Action can be done smartly and economically. I have no doubts in my mind that it can be done right. But Affirmative Action, whether done smartly or dumbly will always involve a racial preference, and there's no right-minded moral political majority that can or should maintain racial preferences over more than one generation.
As a black power partisan, I will not go to the mat over Affirmative Action, it's way too weak an enabler. Since we can be sure that Ward Connorly is not going away, nor are PC multiculturalists going to concede their defense of 'diversity', Michigan won't be the end of it. It's a battle of the bozos, and I don't have much of a dog in that fight.
Since I'm thinking of Malcolm X these days, I will predict what he would have said when the Michigan proposal to end Affirmative Action wins. "The white man giveth and the white man taketh away."
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