A "eulogy for affirmative action?"

Juan Williams Writes in the Washington Post about the death of affirmative acction and essentially the middle ageness of discrimination, a sample of the essay:

"It is a death that has come too early, as even the nation's latest unemployment numbers show. African Americans have close to double the joblessness of whites, while the unemployment rate among Latinos is a third higher than that of whites. In a nation that is rapidly becoming more racially diverse, these are destabilizing disparities in power and class. In the professional world, blacks and Hispanics make up a mere 4 percent to 6 percent of the nation's lawyers, doctors and engineers. These gaps are exacerbated by differences in education and income and, more important, by the history of government-enforced segregation that long denied African Americans entry into schools and the business world.

So, why now? More often than not, it is the American left that gets lost in absurd fantasies about race in this country. They pretend there has been no progress in recent decades, even when they see the rise of a black middle class and witness the election of a mixed-race president and the likely confirmation of a Hispanic woman to the Supreme Court. But today, it is the right wing and its supporters on the high court who are making stuff up. They pretend that the nation is already so transformed that a colorblind America is a reality and that affirmative action is superfluous, so much so that white employees in a city fire department -- an arena long dominated by Irish and Italian Americans -- need help from the Supreme Court to get a promotion."

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Is The Majority "Minority" The Finish Line?

Is a demographic majority enough to end racial affirmative action? Ross Douthat thinks so. I am not sure that he is correct.

Douthat argues in his NY Times column that a “minority” majority populous can’t rightfully sustain an affirmative action policy because it will become a “spoils system for the already successful.”

I agree with the broad idea of Douthat’s column that a system of racial affimative action is unsustainable. But as a society we need to discuss when race based affirmative action should end. But I don’t think a simple racial headcount is enough. When there is one more “minority” person than there is white people is that enough? That seems entirely too shallow and without any real assessment of the issue.

We need to determine how to measure equal opportunity for all people. Along with when the power used to distribute that opportunity is broadly dispersed to all types of people. It seems indefensible to claim that the white New Haven firefighters were denied a promotion because of the power of an “African American ‘kingmaker’” while the history of insularity of the profession assigned points for a lineage “including nepotism or political patronage.”

Will that de facto affirmative be completely erased from our society before the "minority" majority?

These are tough questions to answer and I hope we can answer them and reach a goal before 2028.

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