Ruben Navarrette makes an interesting point in his attack on affirmative action. There’s a lot to disagree with in the article which is filled with rhetorical shorthand and sloppy analogies, but in his conclusion, he takes a different tack on how affirmative action hurts minorities.
I see that Americans have again missed the chance to have the conversation that we really need to have. We need to ask whether the real victims of affirmative action are actually its intended beneficiaries: Latinos and African Americans. Those groups are woefully shortchanged by the public school system, and no one talks about it because there is a sprinkling of Black and Latino students in the Ivy League?
Affirmative action is a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. It benefits well-to-do minorities who have suffered little or no hardship while overlooking the truly needy who still need a leg up. Something that was invented to eliminate racism winds up promoting elitism.
That may not be the main point about affirmative action, but it is a substantive one.
The educational system has largely failed at its core function, and it has failed especially profoundly when it comes to minorities, and it’s disguising that fact with promotion, with equity, by eliminating standards, wrecking curriculums, inveighing against whiteness, pushing critical race theory, and assorted distractions. Those distractions can’t disguise the failure, but combined with affirmative action, it can disguise the scale of the collapse.
And that’s what it’s really about.
Most common sense people can spot a problem when they see it. What they may have trouble seeing is the scale of the problem.
Leave a Reply