Hoover Digest
Too often the race dialogue centers on what “;white America” must do, totally neglecting the role of black people.
...
Why did the voters of Washington ignore the advice of politically correct big corporations, politicians, the media, and race advocates, who hid behind the moral fig leaves of “diversity” and “inclusion,” and end the system of preferences and de facto quotas that has come to define affirmative action?
Preferences based on race and ethnicity diminish the value of the individual in ways too numerous to mention. |
The answer is simple. There is a deeply rooted culture of equality in America that transcends political correctness, partisanship, and ideology. We can trace this culture back to the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
This culture of equality was underscored by Abraham Lincoln: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” When Martin Luther King Jr. led the nation through the tumultuous civil rights era, beginning with the public bus boycott in Montgomery in 1955, he invoked that culture of equality in calling on America to “live out the true meaning of your creed.” The principle of equality has been embraced by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike, from Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan.
The debate about affirmative action preferences is fundamentally about the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship. It is about whether we will have a system of government and a social system in which we see each other as equals. Although often lost in the rhetorical clamor about its benefits, race-based affirmative action as a concept is, at its core, a challenge to the relationship between individuals and their government. It is a direct threat to the culture of equality that defines the character of the nation.
Those who support affirmative action programs contend that such programs are necessary to provide equal opportunity for women and minorities. The argument is routinely advanced that without affirmative action women and minorities will be subject to the vagaries of the “good old boys network” and will be denied the opportunity of full participation in American life. But when you strip away all the rhetoric about “leveling the playing field” and “building diversity,” preferential policies reduce themselves to two essential questions.
First, are white males entitled to the same assertion of civil rights and equal treatment under the law as women and minorities? Second, how much longer is the nation going to maintain policies that presume that American-born black people are mentally inferior and incapable of competing head-to-head with other people, except in athletics and entertainment? We cannot resolve the issue of race in America without coming to terms with these two questions. And we certainly cannot reconcile the conflicts about affirmative action preferences without answering these questions. More than anything else, however, the debate about race-based preferences has focused the nation’s attention on the politics of race.
...
American society was conceived and has been nurtured through the years as a society of individuals. At the center of our society is the concept that we are all a minority of one. Obviously, policies that herd the American people into groups, or political enclaves, are in direct conflict with the spirit of individualism that characterizes the nation. The phrase “people of color” has come to describe the way in which race and ethnicity are being politicized in America. Implicit in this phrase is the coalescing of minorities into a coalition or political caucus, which, together with white women, constitutes a power base of sufficient magnitude to preserve race- and gender-based preferences and to achieve other political benefits for the coalition.
...
When Thomas Jefferson and the other founders laid out this adventure, they gave their new nation a moral blueprint to make the adventure a success. The centerpiece of that blueprint is our system of moral principles. Moral principles do not change with the seasons. That is precisely why the founders proclaimed that certain truths are “self-evident” and “endowed by our Creator.” They are not meant to change or to be bargained away. Our inalienable rights are the centerpiece of that moral system, and the principle of equality is central to our system of rights.
But what can the average citizen expect from such a morality-based society? The citizens of America present and future had (and have) a right to know what benefits would obtain from an adherence to fundamental moral principles. The founders did not disappoint. They envisioned a more perfect union with freedom, liberty, justice, and equality for all Americans.
...
So equality is directly linked to our freedoms and to our system of liberty and justice for all. Giving someone a preference, lower academic requirements, contract set-asides, or employment quotas betrays that system. Preferences based on race and ethnicity diminish the value of the individual in ways too numerous to mention and have consequences far beyond their effects on the nation’s character and the harm that they do to those who are not the beneficiaries of such policies. Preferences unwittingly damage the perceived beneficiaries more than one can ever imagine, despite the denials of preference advocates. This occurs in two principal ways.
...
We must end the preferences that differentiate on the basis of race, ethnicity, and gender. Only by doing that can we rededicate our nation to the principle of equality.
...
The second effect is equally as consequential: preferences create their own “glass ceiling.” I don’t know why the defenders of such policies fail to acknowledge or admit the enormous effect that such policies have on the attitudes of others. Does it ever occur to them that the reason black people and other “minorities” are not considered for more upper management positions, even in corporations that pound their chests about “celebrating diversity,” is that such corporations still consider “minorities” to be inferior and noncompetitive for higher positions? Giving people who are classified in a certain group a “leg up” stems from the view that those individuals have limited capacity and cannot succeed without someone else’s generosity. Simply put, affirmative action marginalizes its beneficiaries. (more)
