Does Redressing Past Harms Justify Present Racial Discrimination?
I’m sure Nathaniel Hedman, a member of a student group called the Roosevelt Institution at the University of Colorado, speaks for many of his peers.
Not only does he believe in lowered standards for certain groups to “redress harms,” he also believes the government should be allowed to discriminate against whites and Asians in favor of blacks, Hispanics, and other so-called racial minorities to achieve that end.
Our country’s history of race relations is messy, to put it mildly. America held blacks in bondage for centuries. Our collective conscience should never allow us to downplay or excuse slavery or the subsequent Black Codes and Jim Crow laws and policies designed to relegate black Americans to second class citizenship. The redressing-harms argument is often used by proponents of race preferences for such reasons.
No reasonable person would dispute that former slaves embarked on an arduous road to freedom littered with overwhelming disadvantages. But can the same be said of those slaves’ descendants in 2008? How closely correlated is the so-called legacy of slavery with black underachievement and disparities today?
Hedman contends that inequities are passed down from generation to generation, and these inequities “persist as the root cause of the glaring disparities between minorities and whites.” He’s right only to a certain extent. Children certainly are affected by their parents’ economic condition. Children also are influenced by their parents’ values, good and bad. Instead of looking at past discrimination and reaching back centuries to point the finger at slavery or Jim Crow, black Americans would be wise to keep their eyes on the present and future. In my view, the biggest obstacle to success facing blacks is the breakdown of the family.
The fact that 75 percent of black babies are born into non-intact families is relevant and should be part of any discussion on disparities. To ignore or downplay this factor and claim that the obligation to improve conditions falls on the government is to ignore personal responsibility, a value most important to success. Without building and maintaining stable, intact families for children, where they can learn, grow, and flourish in loving security, talk of closing achievement gaps and narrowing disparities don’t get us far.
Hedman says “the government should clean up its messes.” From my vantage point, the government has done so. It dismantled laws and policies created to keep blacks “in their place.” Special treatment should not be part of the goal. Remove government-sanctioned obstacles in my path, and allow me to succeed or fail on my own merits.
That’s what the Civil Rights Movement was all about, wasn’t it?
