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Originally Posted by AngelicVampire
alansmithee, you find non-discrimination to be ridiculous, absurd and offensive? Whats wrong with having a society built on fair and just treatment where ability rather than race or religion?
Surely affirmitive action is wrong because it is discrimination just because its against a different group of people doesn't make it right.
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Where did I say I find non-discrimination ridiculous, absurd and offensive? I said I found white's complaining about racism to be those things. Because they are fine with racism as long as they're the beneficiaries, but if anyone else might get any benefit from their race, whites want to throw a fit. And there is nothing wrong with a society based upon ability and fair and just treatment of it's members without race or religion being involved. Unfortunately, in America we have a society built upon racism and whiteocracy.
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Originally Posted by 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.
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Tough. Chances are that white guy didn't care much about diversity in the first place. And there's hundreds of places more than willing to hire qualified white people. The same cannot be said for blacks. I don't care about racial harmony. That's a pipe dream. I care about making sure that if a black person fail, it's because of their lack of ability/effort/whatever and not because they are black.
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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.
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How is it unnecessary now? The economic inequalities between blacks and whites aren't much different now than they were in the 1960's.
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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.
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In this example, if a business is happy only hiring 25% blacks to meet a quota (and if they are willing to practice minority control of a major population) that's probably 25% more blacks then they would hire without a AA program.
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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.
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Of course it's causing rage. Where before being white was enough to ensure that you had an advantage, now it might also be a detriment in certain situations.
The majority of whites have never been worried about "good race relations". Good race relations to most whites is tipping your shoeshine boy around hollidays. Good race relations will never be present as long as the concept of "race" exists. And there's already a bigger social problem, in that a black male is more likely to be in prison than in college.
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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."
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Again, that's essentially your first point. If a business is going to do this, it's most likely that they wouldn't have hired ANY blacks in the first place. This is a reason why AA is needed.
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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.
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I think you would be supprised to find that the numbers of people who think blacks to be innately inferior isn't dwindling anywhere near the level you believe. And I agree that there is alot of misuse of the cry of racism. Like when whites complain about AA, that is a misuse of the cry of racism.
Again, it doesn't require steps from both sides, it requires the side with the power to change. Those in the inferior position aren't there by choice.
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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.
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Oh, how the white man's burden weighs heavily upon his sholders. He must simultaneously control the savages, while being assaulted by their nonsense. Makes you yearn for the days when the problems could be solved with a tree and some rope, doesn't it
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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.
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I've never said AA created a situation where skin color wasn't looked at. But without AA, you will have a situation where skin color won't be looked at, because whites will all be in their nice suburbs and go to their nice jobs in thier nice cars, and the blacks will all be in ghettos and continue in a downward economic spiral. There's you "colorblind" society. Whites will get past the race issue by making sure they never come into contact with blacks (this can be seen currently, as the latter half of the 1900's whites increasingly migrated away from cities toward suburbs as blacks moved into the cities).
Again, whites don't complain about AA because it creates unfairness, they complain because they are no longer the sole benificiary of unfairness.