"The inequality of Affirmative Action" the greatest canard of our time

grantcart

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Fri Jul-17-09 01:12 AM
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"The inequality of Affirmative Action" the greatest canard of our time

After the conservative and the neo conservatives have spun through the threadbare closet of being afraid of communist, terrorists, muslims, athiests and comedians running for office their cynical wheel of demogogory comes to rest, like the spinning wheel of 'The Wheel of Fortune' on the greatest of canards, "Affirmative Action is Unfair".

And the message to insecure White America is that you should now be afraid that your children are going to lose their chance to compete because affirmative action is going to use 'reverse racism' to steal their hard won place in line.

Now this belies the obvious reality of the tremendous burden that ethnic minorities have had to carry simply to stay in the race. It ignores the debilitating effects of institutions that were aimed at undermining the institution of the family of slaves and then the family of freedman. It ignores the fact that the transhipment of manufacturing jobs has robbed the cities of the midwest of high paying jobs that affected the fragile emerging African American middle class at a much higher proportional rate than White Americans.

But beyond this obvious reality that even the most passive student in Sociology 101 picks up even while simply fighting off a hangover in the first three weeks of class.

There is a second, and equally obvious reality, about the real beneficiaries of affirmative action:

The main beneficiaries of affirmative action have been white males.

Now this has been very obvious to me for a couple of decades. But this rather obvious point is almost never discussed. Now that the cynical wheel of Republican fear mongering has once again rested on the 'make them afraid of affirmative action' wedge I wait for someone to point out the obviious.

Now if you were not alive 40 years ago on todays' anniversary of the first Lunar Landing then a little context is needed.

In order to understand this point you need to have this context:

Before the enactment of affirmative action laws jobs in the United States were handed out in elaborate patronage networks. Half witted sons of the powerful, like Dan Quayle, were herded down to the country club where the introductions were made that would lead these not particularly bright inheritors of privledge into key positions of power and wealth.

Affirmative action laws required that companies formalize their hiring process. In a matter of time Human Resource Departements were established and formal applications were required.

Now it is true that a few gifted African Americans were able to take advantage of this new more formal process. The greatest beneficiaries, by far, however were the huge numbers of White Males whose middle class family and education instilled the skill set that would enable them to compete for jobs that used to be handed out to the Dan Quayles.

Now human resource departments would set up more and more objective criteria and the children of privledged parents who had not applied themselves would find themselves at a competitive disadvantage against upwardly mobile white families who didn't allow weekday TV, scrupulously examined homework, enforced corporal discipline in all things school related, and expected achievement in a dozen after school activities from debate to boy scouts.

Affirmative Action opened up the hiring process to whites who had been shut out of the 'old boy network' just as much as it had African American applicants. Now even middle sized and even small companies would have applications evaluated by objective standards and not by country club connectons. It was the upwardly mobile but social unconnected whites entering the work force who would, to a much higher degree, be able to manipulate the system with the skill set that they system was looking for than African Americans who were just gaining access to the education and other structures necessary to get the skills to compete.

It is embarassing that after such a long period of brutal oppression, followed by another long period institutionalized apartheid followed by a slowly emerging era of correcting the playing field that the conservatives should now insist that it is the White applicant who must now bear the indignities of racial discrimination with 'reverse discrimination'.

That they would continue to harp on this canard during the confirmation of Judge Sotomayor simply reveals how completely barren their cupboard of issues has become.