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Monday, July 20, 2009

Another white guy opines on whether affirmative action is necessary
Posted by Jill | 5:58 AM
It's getting so Ross Douthat is outdoing David Brooks in the Reliability of Idiocy department. Today he says all we have to do to eliminate the need for affirmative action is wait for current senators to die off and for Latinos to continue to reproduce:
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.


Well. If it's heard on the rightward reaches of the talk-radio dial, we must make policy based on that then.

The column projects out to 2028, that magic year that former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor posited as an arbitrary turning point at which affirmative action will -- not might, but will -- no longer be necessary.

How about we fall off that bridge when we get there, m'kay?

There are certainly hopeful signs that the kids growing up today don't even see race anymore. I see packs of kids hanging out together that are white and black and Indian and Chinese and everything in between. But most of the black kids come from the other town in the school district, which still has a "black section." In my town, you can count the number of black families on one hand, which can't be purely by accident. My town gadfly, who is in his sixties, has been married for over thirty years to a Chinese woman, and when he receives hate mail for his efforts to keep our local government honest, it calls him "gook lover". Perhaps the kids will overcome this.

But this is a middle-class town in suburban New Jersey. In South Carolina, Mark Sanford was willing to spend taxpayer money of his constituents to fly business class to dip his wick in Argentina, but unwilling to accept Federal stimulus money to fix Ty'sheoma Bethea's crumbling school.

It's entirely possible that America will be so diverse in 2028 that even the best efforts of people like Pat Buchanan won't be enough to keep the white male power structure intact. But to postulate now of a day when, all other things being equal, the white guy won't ALWAYS get the job unless there's a policy reminding employers that Black and Latino and Female candidates are just as capable, is premature.

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