The Supreme Court Has Killed Affirmative Action. Mediocre Whites Can Rest Easier. — thenation.com
The author of that piece really hates white people. I don’t recommend reading it, you will not be a better person for having done so, as it consists solely of sweeping generalizations, broad judgments, unfounded inferences and racial insults.
Even if five points (out of a possible 100) were deducted for each verifiable fact, it still scores at least a 95. Grammar and spelling are passable.
The only “fact” I remember being cited in support of affirmative action is actually false:
In California, which ended its affirmative action policies over 25 years ago, the studies show that, without affirmative action, Black enrollment plummets, Latino enrollment plummets, AAPI enrollment goes up a little bit, and whites flood the remaining opportunities.
The article that the author links to doesn’t even say that. Black and Latino enrollment in the UC system has gone up, not down. A snippet from that article:
Black and Latino students increased to 43% of the admitted first-year class of Californians for fall 2022 compared with about 20% before Proposition 209.
(Proposition 209 is the law that ended affirmative action.)
What did happen after Prop 209 was a significant redistribution of black and Latino students. Their enrollment at the most elite UC schools, Berkeley and UCLA, dropped — by a lot — but went up at the other UC campuses.
After this redistribution, there was an increase in the number of black and Latino students graduating, including an increase of 55% in the number graduating in four years, an increase of 63% in the number graduating in four years with a grade point average of 3.5 or higher, an increase of nearly 50% in the number graduating with degrees in science, mathematics, and engineering, and an increase of about 20% in the number of earned doctorates.
Everybody talks about admission, no one talks about graduation. If you’re admitted to an elite school as a diversity admit, rather than because you’re academically capable of being there, your chances of graduating are not great.
That’s what was happening in California. Students who could have done well at another UC school were being affirmative-actioned into Berkeley and UCLA and never graduated.
Affirmative action supporters should be asked straight up why they don’t believe black Americans have the capability to overcome obstacles that other marginalized groups (Asians, Jews) have overcome. It amounts to the same thing.
Racism isn’t dead but it’s not stopping people from doing anything they want to do. We elected a black president (twice), so what is there that a black person can’t accomplish because of their race? (No Asian or Jewish presidents, FYI.)
Speaking of which, Obama and all the other affirmative action hucksters, despite many of them being black and having accomplished notable things in life, are permanently damaging the black race by telling kids, “People don’t like you because your skin is too dark. They don’t want you to succeed. You will not be treated fairly in life and your efforts will not be rewarded.”
What will happen to kids raised that way? They will fail. It’s child abuse. You want to raise kids to believe in themselves and their power to accomplish what they set out to do.
But kids can’t vote. If you preach the same message to black adults, i.e., that your failures in life are not of your own making, that you are not as well off as you should be because of white supremacy and structural racism and systemic racism and unconscious racism and all kinds of racism, they will give you money and votes and power, if that’s what you want, but again, at the expense of destroying your own race.
Thomas Sowell said this in 1964 and I think he was right (as usual):
To me the psychology of blacks is the single biggest obstacle to racial progress. It isn’t fashionable to say this, and it certainly isn’t pleasant, but truth does not depend on these considerations. With all due respect to the courage and dedication of the various civil rights groups, I think that when all the laws have been passed and all the gates flung open, the net result will be one tremendous anticlimax unless there is a drastic change of attitude among blacks.