Denver Democrat Endorses Amendment 46
Shawn Coleman, a Democratic party precinct captain in Boulder County, Colorado, has endorsed Amendment 46, a measure that would bar state and local governments from discriminating against and granting preferential treatment to people based race and sex in hiring, contracting, and admissions. Coleman also was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.
Coleman, who calls himself “a person of color,” said he’s voting “Yes” on Amendment 46 because he believes race and sex preferences (he uses the misnomer “affirmative action”) set low expectations, one of my main complaints against such policies. An except of the article:
[My mother] expected excellence from us, teaching us that reliance on assistance programs is not the same as success, and that to be truly free you must be judged worthy exclusively on your merits absent of pity. These teachings, the remnants of Dr. King and the leaders of “Black America’s greatest generation” have been lost to entitlement and confusing mediocrity with prosperity…The assumption that a person who is a minority can only achieve greatness with accommodations breeds a culture that expects us to fail.
Coleman gets to the heart of the issue when he notes that having certain values lift people out of poverty. Holding oneself to a lower standard undermines the value of hard work, pride, and personal responsibility. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe the world is out to get you, that you’ll get nowhere in life because people are biased against you for whatever reason, the perception manifests itself in a victim attitude.
“Economic inequity” is the bigger problem, says Coleman. Work on that issue, which affects men and women and people of different races, and put the government out of the business of using race and sex in hiring and admissions decisions.
I hope Colorado voters, no matter who they choose as president, will give serious thought to the promise of the Civil Rights Movement. It was not to uplift black Americans by lowering the performance bar. That turbulent time in our country’s history was supposed to usher in an era of colorblind government policy and equality before the law.
As long as our government is authorized to discriminate on the basis of race, no matter who benefits, that promise remains unfulfilled.
