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“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Martin Luther King spoke these words in 1963, and they still resonate today. Affirmative action programs were established to create this very type of equality, but have they brought us closer to Dr. King’s dream or hindered it?
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Affirmative Action - Point Isn't If It Works
Arrested Development
Minority preference is the meagerness recompense for centuries of unrelieved oppression. In America, many marginally competent or flatly incompetent whites gain employment every day, some because their white skin suits the conscious or unconscious racial preference of their employers. Worse, white incompetence is always an individual matter, but for blacks it is often confirmation of ugly stereotypes. Given that unfairness cuts both ways, does it not only balance the scales of history, does this repay, in a small way, the systematic denial under which African-American ancestors lived out their days?
In theory, affirmative action certainly has all the moral symmetry that fairness requires. It is reformist and corrective, even repentant and redemptive.
The idea that affirmative action violates the rights of white citizens confuses a right with an expectation. We all have a right to be “seriously and fairly considered” for a job or a position. In the past, blacks were not even considered for a job had their rights violated; in the present, whites are seriously and fairly considered, yet still not selected. However, their rights are not violated, but rather had their expectations frustrated. If affirmative action disappears from the American scene, many blacks will continue to excel and succeed. However, that will be “the signal” that would prove to be lethal for our country. That is, white supremacy now has one less constraint and black people have one more reason to lose trust in the promise of American democracy .
- almond
October 12, 2009 1:07PM
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