I grew up in a town with a large hispanic population. I had to worry about walking down the street and being hassled (or shot) by hispanic gang members. I was constantly judged based on the color of my skin. Where’s my affirmative action?
Seriously, though, you go on to say that you have a dream that someday, affirmative action will not be necessary. That we’ll achieve MLK’s ideal of color-blindness. You do realize, though, that it is impossible to achieve color-blindness as long as we have affirmative action? That the constant attention that AA forces us to allot to everyone’s skin color will someday hinder, rather then help, our progress towards this goal?
Someday, we’ll need to abandon these policies. Someday, we’ll have to recognize that government mandate has taken the journey towards colorblindness as far as it can, and the rest of the trip is going to come down to the simple passage of time. So how will we know that we’ve reached the point where AA is doing more harm than good?
Irrational prejudices, such as racism, go away over time. Every batch of immigration that the US has seen has had to deal with racism or prejudice of a sort. The Irish dealt with it. The Chinese dealt with it. The Italians dealt with it. In these cases, there was nothing like AA to help guide them through - the prejudices just gradually evaporated over time.
Of course, the case of blacks is unique - no other race or nationality had to deal with slavery in quite the same way. (I think the Chinese came the closest, but they were still free, even if only nominally.) Thus, the blacks had a lot more ground to cover in trying to achieve parity with the majority in America. But even without a concentrated effort the likes of AA, they achieved remarkable progress. While being a black person in 1960 was no picnic, it beat the holy hell out of being a black person in 1870. That progress would have continued, AA or no AA.
And really, the “ushering in acceptance” aspect of AA has been minor. It was really more of a Band-Aid, to make the integration process more tolerable. To the extent that some people got over their racism because of the forced proximity that AA required, it helped some in overcoming racism, but largely, the decline in hostility - overt or otherwise - towards blacks has been a result of the old maxim, “Time heals all wounds.”
But someday - and it’s my contention that “someday” has arrived - AA is going to get in the way. The hallmark of AA today is that sometimes - too often - less qualified people get jobs based solely on skin color. It’s impossible for this to not have a negative impact on race relations. No matter how open minded and enlightened you are, if you see someone get a job, or get into school, or whatever ahead of you - and not because they’re more qualified, but because they’re more pigmented - it’s going to breed resentment. And that resentment will keep race relations from progressing any further.
I think it’s time to put AA to rest. It was a useful program that served its purpose, but it’s now just a troublesome relic of a less enlightened era. We’re not out of the woods yet in terms of the eradication of racism (and likely, there will always be some vestiges of racism to rear their unsightly heads), but we’ve come a long way. I think it’s time to rev up for the home stretch. And a program that answers past unfairness with present unfairness isn’t going to do our engine any good.
Jeff
