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From: bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.followup
Subject: Re: American Indians - Persecution of?
Message-ID: <920@bu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 9-Jul-86 20:30:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.920
Posted: Wed Jul  9 20:30:29 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Jul-86 21:53:25 EDT
Organization: Boston Univ Comp. Sci.
Lines: 60


>...Yes, the Supreme Court just decided last week that it is  still OK to
>discriminate against white males to  make up  for past discrimination
>by white males.  Of course  the white  males that  are being discrim-
>inated against now are not the same ones that  did the discrimination
>then.
>Terry Poot

You're looking at it too personally, what would you prefer? That
people keep their precious jobs but we raise taxes to 50% for the
average white male because blacks et al can't find jobs?
(conservatives: the extra taxes go to more police, liberals: the extra
taxes go to welfare, the rest of you: choose one or a little of both
but the bill is the same.)

If you think you'll just "let em starve", think again, hungry,
frustrated people can be real dangerous, *that* can cost.

The idea is that the economy will expand over time to accomodate
all people (ya know, more paychecks, more consumers, more business,
more jobs), but someone has to break the deadlock. Even today
unemployment among minorities is staggering. Not because the
programs haven't worked, but because it hasn't done enough, and
because some of the problems aren't being tackled at a fundamental
enough level (like in our schools, and that costs too.)

Sometimes you have to take the hard road to economic health,
affirmative action is such a road. If you think the "rich" aren't also
being coerced, you're wrong, if you fail to accomodate affirmative
action programs you stand to lose federal contracts.

You've simply decided the rules were fair when they were weighted in
your favor, counting heavily things like past experience for job
hiring when people were actively preventing non-"white-males" from
obtaining such experience. Hey, I'm ON the lifeboat, pull up the
ladders, no more room...Look, there's a hell of a lot of jobs out
there that don't require much experience at all, a lot of the hiring
criteria amounted to a subtle form of "you can't vote unless your
grandfather voted"-type rules, often bent for "white-males" (hey, he
seems like an allright guy, let's give him a chance...)

I've seen these things, I've worked construction for example, you
can't tell me that a day-laborer needs lots of experience, but they
bitched about affirmative action just like you do, and always hired
their "friends" (many of which were drunks and goldbricks, but hey,
they got 20 years in the business, they *must* be more deserving!)
The fire department in Boston was full of these attitudes and it
wasn't even clear anything had happened except that they were forced
to obey their own criteria and stop swinging weight for their brothers,
cousins, nephews, neighbors, school-buddies...

This sort of thinking stems from a zero-based philosophy, that the
pie is just so big and can be only cut thinner and thinner, wrong,
the "pie" grows and grows, there's room for us all, that's the nature
of economics as long as you don't run out of or destroy all your raw
resources (like people.)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University

Sorry for the length of this, but this sort of myopia gets me
annoyed.