How affirmative action, even the mere “reaching out” kind, puts everyone in a false position

Here, from 2003, is a comment by me on why even the “good” affirmative action is bad.

I’m not sure I agree with Unadorned in supporting affirmative action “in its originally-advertised sense of aggressively seeking out FULLY-QUALIFIED members of underrepresented groups.” I think the very act of “affirmatively seeking out” members of some group to be students in a school, or employees in a company, or members of an organization, is a mistake because it sets things up on an artificial basis.

Here’s an example. At a bi-annual conference of writers interested in immigration reform that I used to attend, invariably at every one of these meetings one of members would stand up and say “We’ve got to get some blacks to come to these conferences, we can’t be an all-white group.”

On one of these occasions I said something like this: “What’s wrong with this suggestion is the same thing that’s wrong with affirmative action. Each one of us is here because we had a common interest in this problem. That’s what drew us together. None of us is here because our organizer said, “Hey, I’ve got to invite a Catholic,” or “I’ve got to invite a Jew.” The meeting is a voluntary association of people who are interested in the same subject. If there was a black who was involved in the same issue, he would be drawn into the same circle of contacts, and he would end up here too. But what you’re suggesting is that we go out and deliberately look for blacks to come to this meeting, just because they’re black. Thus they would be here on an artificial basis right from the start. They wouldn’t be here on the same grounds that the rest of us are here.”

That, in a nutshell, is what is wrong even with the non-quota, “affirmatively seeking out” type of affirmative action. It puts everyone in a false position. It violates the natural process by which human associations get formed and maintain themselves.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 7, 2003 2:58 PM

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 07, 2008 08:20 PM | Send