Affirmative Action Revisited

I wrote recently about the nature of affirmative action.

Here’s another take, from Victor Davis Hanson in an article in Townhall last week.

In the last 50 years, massive immigration from Asia, Africa and Latin America, coupled with rapid rates of integration and intermarriage, have created a truly multiracial society.  So-called whites, for example, are now a minority of the population in California, and millions of people of mixed ancestry don’t identify with any particular ethnic group.

Nor is race sure proof of either poverty or past oppression.  Asian Americans, for example, have a median family income more than $10,000 a year higher than white Americans.  And if pigmentation is proof of ongoing prejudice, why don’t darker Punjabis and Arabs—who do not qualify for special racial preferences—deserve consideration over those lighter-skinned minorities who do?

In truth, after a half-century in our self-created racial labyrinth, no one quite knows who qualifies as an oppressed victim or why—only that the more one can change a name or emphasize lineage, the better the careerist edge.  The real worry is that soon we will have so many recompense-seeking victims that we will run out of concession-granting oppressors.

Because, after all, such programs have been fatally dishonest from their inception:

…a supposedly noble lie—that to atone for past bias we must be judged by the color of our skin rather than the content of our character….

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