All Them* have been railing a lot about affirmative action lately. Frankly, I know nothing whatsoever about affirmative action, and I’ll leave it up to those who know more about it to speak to its efficacy or lack thereof. But I have to admit, I make assumptions about people getting into colleges for reasons other than personal merit. I admit it, it’s wrong of me, but . . . I think that Claire Danes probably got into Yale above many other, more qualified candidates just because she’s Claire Danes. I assume that she wasn’t selected sheerly on the basis of her outstanding merit. And when I hear that, say, Natalie Portman went to Harvard, I make assumptions about that. Now, I’m not saying that Natalie Portman is a total dumbass, but I’m just saying I don’t think she deserved her spot more than other people, who maybe weren’t famous and wealthy. And when I hear that George W. Bush went to Yale…well, I make some assumptions about possible considerations other than merit that may have gone into his admission, as well.
I know it’s unfair of me, since clearly, all selections for everything are entirely based on personal merit, except when the person selected is a minority. I’ll try to correct my thinking.
At any rate, here is a helpful little time line of affirmative action policies in the U.S. – if you read that, you now know as much about affirmative action as I do!
I took a race and ethnicity course in college, which basically consisted of an exasperated African professor explaining over and over again, day after day, to a classroom full of mystified young Southern Republicans that what we were discussing in class when we talked about ‘racism’ was institutional racism and not incidental racism. Trying to get this classroom full of students to grasp this concept was an impossible task. It just wasn’t going to happen. I really hope that professor has since transferred somewhere else; by the end of the course, I began to fear he was going to suffer a Jerry McGuire-style meltdown in front of everybody.
He couldn’t get across the concept that, while racial prejudice may be obnoxious and harmful on a small scale, it’s not nearly of as much concern as the fact that black people live in poverty at nearly twice the national rate, and that this poverty rate was in itself racist – that the racism of real concern was the racism built into our societal structure. He kept trying to talk about the economy, and they kept replying that no one in their families would ever use the n-word. One thing that I learned from this class is that before ‘diversity’ can ‘foster a dialogue,’ people have to stop being maddeningly obtuse.
All of this is discussed much more eloquently in this New York Magazine article on racism:
The tendency to turn the commitment to racial liberalism into sheer denial is strong. “I don’t see race” becomes “I don’t see racism.” . . .
Then there are the real-life, on-the-ground, disastrous statistical disparities that burden the lived experience of the majority of blacks, people of color, and the poor in this country: from the still-unrepaired wake of Hurricane Katrina, to the greater infant-mortality rate and lesser life span, to near double-digit rates of unemployment, to cuny professor Harry Levine’s study of stop-and-frisk statistics in New York City (blacks are eight times more likely than whites to be stopped for marijuana possession, for instance), to disproportionately high national rates of foreclosures and homelessness among blacks, Native Americans, and Latinos, to the almost complete resegregation of schools across the land, to a war on drugs so shockingly racialized and so aggressively executed that our rates of incarceration place us first in the world.
And man, if it’s hard to get people to admit we still have a problem with racism now, imagine how difficult it will be when we have our first black President.
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*Frequently, when I’m composing blog posts, I write a sentence like this and want to say ‘everybody,’ and then realize I need to specify who I’m talking about when I say ‘people’ or ‘everybody.’ I mostly mean that, among all of the various blogs and news sites I read, skim, or glance at, bloggers, pundits, journalists, politicians and various media types seem to be frequently discussing whatever the issue is, in general, recently. This takes a long time to type. So from here on out, I am going to use the term ‘All Them’ to mean ‘people who speak from public platforms that I have been hearing a lot from lately, and that you may or may not also have read and/or watched.’
