Back when I was a black and proud race man, around the beginning of my blogging career, I would periodically cross swords with John Rosenberg over at Discriminations. I am pleased to see that he's still in the blogging business. Good.
We seemed to go a round a bit on the matter of Affirmative Action, and I recall enough about our exchanges to reduce our difference to one simple point. I have supported Affirmative Action in many different weak ways, never expecting much of it since I did the math in the 80s. I realized then, that Affirmative Action was always cherry picking, it would never do enough work to raise the race and as Sowell made painfully clear, that it would not always be politically acceptable to the mainstream. I can't remember the last time I got into a good Affirmative Action debate, but it probably was around Grutter. But when Rosenberg and I got into it, we were on accord about one controversial point. Affirmative Action is racial discrimination. The way I worded it was this: Affirmative Action is positive racial discrimination for the purposes of inclusion - and that is what distinguishes it from racial discrimination for the purposes of exclusion. Rosenberg had zero tolerance for any racial discrimination, a position I considered hokey and impractical. My basis for that had to do with the fact that the nation had, by acclimation, determined that Affirmative Action would be the political settlement negotiated with respect to historical discrimination and 'the legacy of slavery'. So long as people would employ those careworn phrases with political currency; well, a deal's a deal. This was especially viable considering that we were in the post-Bakke regime, meaning no numerical quotas.
All of this devolved towards the verbiage of 'diversity' which I considered mealy-mouthed and euphemistic. Affirmative Action, for what it was worth, at least had some hardball edges that appealed to me as a virulent, pro-integration race-mixer. Yeah. You're going to integrate your schools, dorms, churches, armies, civil services and institutions whether you liked it or not. And then things started to get multiculturally weird.
Today, I have very little reason to give two craps about Affirmative Action. Nobody talks about it. I think Grutter was decided wrongly by the way. The exceptions should have gone to the undergraduate program not the certified graduate program. I never supported race-norming of test scores or any such actions that put meritocracy at risk. But it seems to me that supporters of multicultural diversity sunk their own ship when they opted for their identity politics that decided to traffic in more than just race.If you truly want to disable identity politics, racial or otherwise, then you must adhere to a standard of assimilation and conformity based on shared values. 'Diversity' became its own meaningless value and since the focus was almost always on young people, those values were nothing more or less than identity stereotypes. It became inevitable then that such logic and defense of such would be riven by hypocrisy.
Anyway, I dropped by his blog and am going to start tracking back and commenting over there, rather as a supplement (and countermeasure) to what I do at Respectable Negroes when I feel froggy on matters of race. What I expect will be a decent standard with some legal chops that doesn't wax lyrical or encourage speculation. We'll see.
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