Affirmative Action: The Problem

It all begins seemingly innocent enough with Executive Order 10925 issued on March 6, 1961, by President John F. Kennedy creating the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, mandating that federally financed projects "take affirmative action" to ensure that hiring and employment practices are free of racial bias. Had I been selected to chair this committee, I would have thought my job is to make sure that “hiring and employment practices are free of racial bias.”

Almost immediately, however, the mandate was misread, and thanks to Kennedy’s successor, enforced criminally. On June 4, 1965, in a speech to Howard University graduates, President Lyndon B. Johnson wrongly defined the mandate.

“…You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe you have been completely fair . . . This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result."

Johnson had whittled a club of righteousness for the oppressed, arming and enabling them to turn the tables and begin the legal repression of their former oppressors. For Johnson the mandate was a means to correct past injustices leveled against black individuals in this country. How? By sacrificing the rights of contemporary and future white individuals.

This misunderstood mandate to ensure “freedom from racial bias” created a new kind of racial bias…this time blacks would enjoy preferential treatment. This mandate for justice would instead create a new kind of injustice. This time whites would be the victims. White individuals for generations would be made to suffer penance for the wrong-doing, not of their parents or grandparents necessarily, but for sins committed by the collective, white race. Just as the entire black race for a hundred years after the abolition of slavery was denied equal protection and equal opportunity, the entire white race would be denied.

In this way some feel the scales of justice will be placed in balance. Those who think know better.

You would think the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States would be listed among those who think. The Court has decided dozens of affirmative action cases over the years, and while it has struck down the most blatant violations of individual rights, the Court has utterly failed to recognize and protect the rights of individuals living and competing in a world “free from racial bias.” For example, in 1978, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supremes ruled that racial quotas are unconstitutional. The justices, however, surrendered objectivity when in the same ruling they declared that race may be used as a factor in college admissions, that “diversity” is a “compelling state interest.” A better decision in 1996, Hopwood v. University of Texas Law School, reversed Bakke’s diversity argument. For seven good years justice prevailed in college admissions when finally in June, 2003, the Supreme Court [5-4] upheld a University of Michigan Law School admissions policy, ruling that race can be one of many factors considered by colleges when selecting their students because it furthers "a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."

Objectivist scholar Peter Schwartz in his essay The Racism of "Diversity" published by the Ayn Rand Institute December 11, 2003, said it best:

"The notion of "diversity" entails exactly the same premises as racism--that one's ideas are determined by one's race and that the source of an individual's identity is his ethnic heritage…According to its proponents, we need "diversity" in order to be exposed to new perspectives on life. We supposedly gain "enrichment from the differences in viewpoint of minorities," as the MIT Faculty Newsletter puts it. Admissions should be based on race, the University of Michigan's vice president insists, because "learning in a diverse environment benefits all students, minority and majority alike."

"These circumlocutions translate simply into this: one's race determines the content of one's mind. They imply that people have worthwhile views to express because of their ethnicity, and that "diversity" enables us to encounter "black ideas," "Hispanic ideas," etc. What could be more repulsively racist than that?"

Collectivism, the failure to recognize the fact that there is no such thing as “group thought” or “group rights,” that only individuals have brains and there are only individual rights, is the core element of the corrupt thinking that goes into racism as well as calls for affirmative action. Ironically, proponents of affirmative action view the world through the same eyes as their former, segregationist opponents: It’s our group against theirs. So blacks caucus in Congress to do battle with whites for the rights they have been denied for so long, as if justice is possible only to either…or, but not to all. The grandchildren of the oppressed [who themselves have never been oppressed] rage on that they have been “hobbled by chains” for centuries, that it’s not enough to simply remove the chains…

You must wear them now.