Ending Racial Discrimination By Ending Racial Discrimination
Whoever thought that 40-some years after the civil rights movement, whites would be suing the government for racial discrimination?
Ricci v. DeStefano, the New Haven firefighters case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, is the latest in a line of so-called reverse discrimination cases. Although mainstream media use the term “reverse discrimination,” racial discrimination is wrong no matter which group is the target. We can’t make amends for racial discrimination against blacks by permitting racial discrimination against whites. The government must get out of the skin color business if this country has any hope of moving forward in race relations.
Perhaps it was President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s commencement speech at Howard University in 1965 that convinced institutions that discriminating in favor of black Americans was in order. An excerpt:
But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities–physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness.
To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough.
In these words lay the foundation of racial preferences, race norming, and other practices that lower standards for blacks in order to satisfy an arbitrary skin deep-only diversity requirement, alleviate the burden of historical guilt, and penalize non-blacks who had nothing to do with past discrimination. Inevitably, doling out race-based perks to minorities harms members of non-preferred races, a practice obviously unconstitutional. The government’s quest to narrow educational and employment gaps between the races and increase minority representation may be noble in theory. In practice, it’s repugnant. As long as it continues, strained race relations and cases like Ricci v. DeStefano will exist.
This Associated Press article highlights the “reverse discrimination” issue and quotes Roger Clegg, of the Center for Equal Opportunity:
“The laws that Congress wrote are clear — everyone is protected from racial discrimination. Not just blacks, but whites. Not just Latinos, but whites…Quotas do not end discrimination. They are discrimination. The law makes clear that race, ethnicity and sex are not to be part of who gets a government contract or who gets into a university or where someone goes to school.”
