shakran

I'm not complaining about shifting the imbalance. I'm complaining about imbalancing it the other way, and I'm complaining about businesses not being allowed to always choose the best-qualified candidate for a job.

If a black and a white guy apply for a job and the white guy is a little more qualified, but the business hasn't met its AA quota, guess who gets hired? That's bad for business and it's bad for the concept of racial harmony.

If a white guy finds out he lost out on a job because of the color of his skin, he's gonna be every bit as pissed off as the black guy would be. That pissed off attitude is NOT going to result in him embracing diversity.

Plus, AA is just plain damn insulting to minorities. What it says is "You're black and that means you're incapable of getting jobs by yourself, so we're gonna force businesses to give them to you."

That may have been necessary decades ago, but it's not only unnecessary today, it's downright inflamatory.

AA will work if minorities just want a small percentage of the jobs out there and don't care about race relations. But it's gonna fail for three reasons.

1) Eventually whites are going to be a minority because of the number of immigrants. This is already happening in several citites. What happens then? Let's say we have a mix in a city that's, for simplicity sake, 40% white, 60% black. Let's take the most generous AA quota that I'm aware of which requires 25% of a businesses upper management to be black. See the problem here? Theoretically there should be more than 25% of the staff being non-white, but under AA the business can get away with a minority control of a majority population. South Africa tried that and it didn't work very well.

2) Whether you agree with it or not, AA is causing a great deal of rage amongst the white male population. This rage is not conducive to good racial relations, and eventually it's gonna boil over and cause major social problems.

3) AA is inherently flawed. By FORCING diversity on a business you almost guarantee that the business will meet the letter of the law and no more. i.e. "well this black guy is more qualified than the white guy but I've already met that goddamn AA quota and I'll be damned if I go any farther."


It is possible for different races to coexist without constantly thinking about their differences, but it requires steps from both sides. We have to educate the whites that still believe blacks are inferior (their numbers are dwindling rapidly btw) and we also have to stop with the constant cries of racism every time something happens that we don't like.

That stir up over the black and white looter photos during the Gulf Coast flooding is a great example. You'll recall that one was from the AP, the other from the AFP, yet because the black guy was called a looter and the white guy was called a finder, never mind that it was done by two seperate reporters working for two seperate news agencies and uploading their caption to two seperate newswires, people howled that it was racist. I saw it appearing everywhere. Comedy shows, NPR broadcasts, TV, here, and each time you had people who were only too happy to call it racism even though it clearly was not. You can only do crap like that for so long before someone tells you to shut the hell up and stops listening, even when your cries of racism are accurate.

A few months ago we ran a story on my station about a black guy who had killed his daughter with a shotgun. We ran a 40 second story saying he'd been convicted. We got tons of letters telling us we were racist because we hadn't run any stories about white guys being convicted of blowing their kids away with shotguns. Never mind the fact that there werent' any white guys who had done that for us to report on, we're still racist.

It's crap like that that begins to piss people off, and that is not the way to go about furthering racial relations.

If we could just get past this stupid concept that race matters at all, our society would be a lot better off, and that's where the AA apologists who say "well that won't happen so we're going to force people to think about skin color" are creating a self fulfilling prophecy. It's NOT gonna happen as long as you force people to think about skin color. AA embodies the concept that "people suck too much to ever make strides toward real equality, so we're just gonna lock the situation down at the atrocious level it is now and never let it improve."

Appallingly stupid if you ask me.