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I think it was a foregone conclusion that this was going to happen. The whole point of the affirmative action program was to artificially raise the number of minority students by accepting less qualified ones in preference to better qualified majority (read "white") applicants. When that program was terminated and when the universities switched to using qualifications to make the decision, in some cases they were going to take those white applicants instead. It really would have been quite surprising if the number of minority students hadn't fallen. That is not the issue. The actual issue is twofold: is it ever legal to discriminate on the basis of skin color? Surely few would contend that it's legal to discriminate in favor of light skin color, but is it legal to discriminate in favor of dark skin color and against light skin color? For that is what "affirmative action" amounted to. "We'll discriminate against 20-something whites in order to make up for the fact that we discriminated in favor of 40-something whites and 60-something whites." The reason that is illegal is that the 20-somethings are not the same people as the 40-somethings, and this violates the 14th amendment rights of the 20-somethings. Nathan got an unreasonably good deal, so we're going to screw over his friend Jeremy just to make it even. It's only fair, right? Well, not to Jeremy. There's also the moral question of what this was attempting to accomplish, and it came down to global versus individual treatment. The goal of affirmative action was to accomplish a greater goal of moving minorities into the professional class, and to do that those in favor were willing to accept that individual white students would lose out. Some opponents of affirmative action are racists, but many are simply interested in seeing individuals treated fairly irrespective of the global results. I believe that admission into universities, and indeed everything, should be race-blind. I certainly don't think that there should be discrimination in favor of whites, but equally I don't think it is right to discriminate against them. And it is impossible to discriminate in favor of any group without discriminating against at least one other. If there was illegal and immoral discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in the past, the solution is to eliminate discrimination, not to discriminate the other way for a few generations "to make it even". A white baby born in 1983, who is now trying to enter college, had nothing whatever to do with apartheid in the 1950's or the KKK in the 1920's, and she shouldn't be punished because her skin color happens to be the same as that of the people who really did do those things. Punish her when she does something wrong; don't punish her because she's part of a group. (discuss) |
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