Is the End Near for Racial Preferences?
With a preferences supporting biracial president in the White House and a preferences supporting “wise Latina” judge awaiting confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, there’s no time like the present to openly debate the fairness of so-called affirmative action and the means by which to end it once and for all.
The National Policy Institute (NPI) notes that Democrats are worried about how their support for preferential treatment for minorities will affect Democrat-voting white working class voters, and rightly so. With a biracial man sitting in the Oval Office, it’s difficult to argue that Americans should keep the bar lowered for black Americans in perpetuity. An excerpt:
During the 1970s and ’80s, programs to increase representation of minorities in public- and private-sector hiring, college admissions, and government contracting ignited many of the most searing arguments in American politics and helped remake the Republican and Democratic electoral coalitions. But since then these issues have provoked only rare skirmishes, as a combination of political, economic, and cultural changes have reduced their visibility and immediacy to all but a handful of activists on each side. “You had an environment where it wasn’t on the top of the radar screen for anybody,” veteran Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio said…Now Sotomayor’s nomination is forcing these issues back into the spotlight. And they have quickly proved as polarizing as ever.
NPI points out something that will impact the “affirmative action” debate as well as Sotomayor’s confirmation. Republicans may be reluctant to strongly challenge Sotomayor for fear of being called racists (which people call them anyway). Republicans have tried unsuccessfully to woo Hispanics, so offending them should be the least of their concerns. Defending what is right should be the focus.
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Linda Chavez isn’t hopeful that Republicans will do the right thing. “I regret to say that it is probably going to be one or two short questions, that they have no appetite for this.”
