Victor Davis Hanson on the Absurdity of Racial Preferences
“One of the unexpected results of the Sotomayor nomination is a refocusing on the politics of racial identity and the fossilized institutions of affirmative action-or the belief that the U.S. government should use its vast power to ensure an equality of result rather than a fairness of opportunity.” (Source)
So begins an excellent op-ed by Victor Davis Hanson. He summarizes what we anti-preference folks have been saying for many years and in many different ways: given varying levels of talent, drive, and motivation among individuals, it is impossible – impossible – to ensure that everyone ends up with the same stuff. The best we can hope for in our wonderfully free and wealthy society is to ensure that individuals have opportunities to succeed. The process cannot be forced, and failure to succeed is not proof of racism.
Hanson points out the glaringly obvious. With America’s multiracial make-up, who is considered black enough to qualify for preferences? If someone has a white parent and a black parent and checks the “non-Hispanic White” box, he doesn’t qualify for special treatment. If he chooses to self-identity as black, he receives preferences. Right? (He could always check “Other” or write in “American” just to be rebellious.)
Hanson asks, “[W]hat constitutes racial authenticity? Lack of income? An absence of success in the American rat race? Is the fourth generation upper-class Cuban an ‘Hispanic’ who should qualify for affirmative action because his name is Hillario Gonzalez? Does the one-quarter aristocratic Jamaican qualify for American redress on account of his partial blackness?”
See how muddled it gets? It’s rather distasteful to have the government making these determinations to begin with. We were naive to think the civil rights movement ended such practices. The government is still up to its eyeballs in racial categorization.
Hanson does an admirable job illustrating the absurdity of racial preferences by asking a series of rhetorical questions to figure out why preferences exist. Past discrimination against a collective? Then Barack Obama, born of a white mother and Kenyan father, should not have received preferences. Present racism against an individual? Do dark-skinned, non-blacks who face discrimination qualify for “affirmative action”? Is poverty a criterion? Then poor whites should benefit from preferences, right?
The slope becomes more slippery.
“Indeed, creating, recreating, and emphasizing racial identity, especially among elites, currently involves so many contortions that it has descended from the absurd to the outright pernicious-and is becoming a sort of racism itself.”
And lowering standards for blacks instead of expecting them to compete with everyone else is also a sort of racism.
