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From: carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Affirmative action
Message-ID: <338@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 18-Feb-85 21:14:44 EST
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.338
Posted: Mon Feb 18 21:14:44 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Feb-85 06:42:52 EST
Organization: U. Chicago - Computer Science
Lines: 29

Gordon E. Banks writes:
> We can't rectify past injustice by introducing more injustice in the 
> form of discrimination.  Injustice occurs only to individuals not to 
> groups.  Racism is the doctrine that people can be judged and dealt
> according to what racial group they belong to, rather than as 
> individuals.  

Bullshit.  By this definition Martin Luther King Jr. was a racist
because he devoted himself to seeking social justice for blacks,
rather than being completely colorblind in all his doings.  Racism is
the belief that some ethnic group other than one's own should be
"kept in its place" in society because of an alleged moral or
intellectual inferiority.

> Thus affirmative action is racist.

Anyone who seriously believes this should have his head examined.
Anatole France neatly skewered this type of reasoning when he wrote
(approximately):  "The law in its majesty forbids rich and poor alike
to sleep under bridges and to steal bread."  He might have added:
"...and forbids the privileged and the disadvantaged alike to benefit
from quotas."  The standard objections to affirmative action rest on
the dubious principle that individuals should get only what they
"deserve," conceived as purely a consequence of their individual
character and "merit."  Along with libertarianism and other forms of
capitalist ideology, it is an example of how an apparently just
principle is used to defend an unjust status quo.

Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes