Peter Wood, of the National Association of Scholars, wrote a piece about the Association of American Law Schools’s (AALS) recent race-focused workshop, in which the group outlined some rather incoherent ideas of the “unfairness-in-the-name-of-fairness” sort. But first, an excerpt from Wood’s preface:
“In the decades since, we have watched the rise of a racial preference industry, some of it focused on implementing racial preferences in particular settings and some of it aimed at inventing and selling ever more elaborate justifications for the whole idea of privileging members of some racial groups over members of others. The latter necessarily involves a great deal of logical and linguistic gymnastics. It isn’t easy to use the rhetoric of fairness to advance what most people recognize as a manifest form of unfairness. But some members of the legal profession have risen to the challenge.”
The AALS, a non-profit association comprised of 171 law schools, serves as an “academic society” for law professors. Incredibly, the AALS posits that colorblind policy undermines “the emancipatory potential of civil rights law.” What this means in plain language is that treating individuals as equal before the law, without regard to race, doesn’t go far enough.
The original civil rights crusaders had it wrong. Barring racial classifications from government policy was a noble idea, but such a principle interferes with the leftist obsession with promoting racial grievances and privileges. If the government is barred from treating citizens differently based on race, racial groups have no legal leg to stand as they demand special treatment based on race. Even at the cost of coherency and consistency, certain racial groups must be held as an exception to the principle of colorblind government policy. Anyone who thinks and/or expresses anything to the contrary is either a bigot or a sell-out.
“The first plenary session at the AALS meeting, ‘The Legal (Re)production of Inequality’ was to focus ‘on the role law plays in reproducing inequality, even or perhaps especially when no formal ‘racial classifications’ are involved.’ Small group sessions were slated to ‘examine how to incorporate race into non-traditional race law classes, such as tax and the basic first year curriculum.”
And from the AALS:
“The Legal (Re)production of Inequality,’ the plenary will demonstrate some of the distinctive mechanisms through which law reproduces racial inequality in areas including: criminal justice, healthcare, housing, education, employment, immigration, and constitutional law.”
Social engineering types are under the misapprehension that equal justice and equal treatment are synonymous with equal outcome and zero disparities. It isn’t. Never has been, and never will be. We could overthrow our current society and implement social change through the most profound measures imaginable, and there still would be racial disparities and unequal outcomes.
Additionally, the AALS seems unimpressed with the magnificent goal of eliminating racial classifications. Why? It is what any society calling itself free should want. What greater existence could one imagine than to live in a country devoted to liberty, fought for with blood, sweat, and tears, that promotes and protects the individual from race-based unfair treatment? I am impressed beyond words. Am I in the minority? To maintain consistent and logically sound law and policy, however, we must protect individuals against and eliminate race-based favoritism as well.
The rest of Wood’s assessment of the AALS seminar is a painful read, so I’ll leave the poking-needles-in-the-eye multitasking to you. Don’t miss part about leftist pseudo-sophisticated ideas about race. To the conclusion:
Much of the time we are like physicians of centuries past who bled their patients to reduce their fevers—leaving them worse off for the intervention. Today’s equivalent of bleeding the patients is the regime of racial preferences. The evidence is abundant that racial preferences in education have perverse effects at every level. They discourage students, mismatch them to opportunities, and diminish achievement. Racial preferences are not just unfair. They implant illusions of success that undermine students’ capacity to internalize the hard forms of self-discipline that education requires. Nor is this a matter of ‘blaming the victim.’ It is to the contrary blaming the racial preference advocates who, faced with a generations-long failure of their favorite nostrum, insist on applying it over and over. The problem is not affirmative action per se; it is the perversion of affirmative action in the form of racial preferences. Those preferences are wrong in every case, but they are at their most perniciously destructive in the world of education.
It’s naïve to expect blacks to begin protesting en masse, similar to the 1960s-era civil rights movement, against an ingrained policy that “benefits” them and likely plays little role in their daily lives, no matter how condescending it is.
Once I realized that “affirmative action” in its current incarnation was nothing more than government-sanctioned lowered standards that perpetuated notions on inferiority and victimhood, I jumped off the sinking ship. Today, I harbor no illusions that racial minorities are willing to do something about the institutionalized bigotry of low expectations.
That was a mission for a heartier generation.
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