"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast" -Oscar Wilde |
"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself." -- Proverbs 11:25 |
The nation’s largest states, Texas and California, already have “minority” majorities. By 2023, if current demographic trends continue, nonwhites — black, Hispanic and Asian — will constitute a majority of Americans under 18. By 2042, they’ll constitute a national majority. As Hua Hsu noted earlier this year in The Atlantic, “every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.”
As this generation rises, race-based discrimination needs to go. The explicit scale-tipping in college admissions should give way to class-based affirmative action; the de facto racial preferences required of employers by anti-discrimination law should disappear.
A system designed to ensure the advancement of minorities will tend toward corruption if it persists for generations, even after the minorities have become a majority. If affirmative action exists in the America of 2028, it will be as a spoils system for the already-successful, a patronage machine for politicians — and a source of permanent grievance among America’s shrinking white population.
You can see this landscape taking shape in academia, where the quest for diversity is already as likely to benefit the children of high-achieving recent immigrants as the descendants of slaves. You can see it in the backroom dealing revealed by Ricci v. DeStefano, where the original decision to deny promotions to white firefighters was heavily influenced by a local African-American “kingmaker” with a direct line to New Haven’s mayor. You can hear it in the resentments gathering on the rightward reaches of the talk-radio dial.
Labels: affirmative action, idiocy, racism, wingnuttia
It will take generations to level the playing field - and longer if the Bush taxcuts stay in place and we keep taxes on estates and investment income at the ridiculously low levels they've been at since Reagan.
When money=speech, those with the money make the rules and hold the cards.
What a douchebag.
It was a heavily armed minority that murdered the owners and seized their land, a historical precedent they might keep in mind while they stir up the right. Wipe out the owners and seize their property, now that might be an interesting way of solving problems. Douthat and Brooks pushing shopping carts around NY city, that I could enjoy seeing.
Plus, the former owners did a hell of a lot better at maintaining the place.
Worst I have found that they did was wipe out the last of the wooly mammoths. They must have been very tasty.
vnohara