Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Acting White: Affirmative Action, Side Bar #2


Ward Connerly, and the whites he fights to protect, claim there is no need for affirmative action. I disagree. What there is no need for is an affirmative action that hurts blacks (and whites), while pretending to help the former, including today’s AA. According to Harvard’s Jennifer Hochschild, in “The Skin Color Paradox and the American Racial Order”(2007), for no reason other than pervasive skin-tone bias, light-skin blacks, like Connerly, continue their historical and unfair benefit in education, employment, and income, while he focuses us on polarizing AA battles. What we need is to stop helping cloaked opportunists, like Connerly, who want to vaporize, rather than fix, the gate of opportunity behind them - a gate that should be available to everyone willing to bust their hind parts in a book.

James C. Collier

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7 comments:

Dave Myers said...

For those that understand the "racism", from an etiological sense, perhaps therein rests the onus... for creating/forming a more efficient/universal "syntax"...

Anonymous said...

You are so right. It is like asking two people to run a 100 meters race. One has been on steriods for ever and training everyday. The other one has hardly had food on the table and stuck in a room. But now they are free and can run against each other as equals. No baby, they can't. First get the one off steriods and give the other guy the training - and only once everything is equal can they compete equally. As a South African I have to say that I think affirmative action in the US is not strong enough because it is too limited. They have to broaden it to the workplace. Again - you are so right brother.

Dave Myers said...

... so then... how do we communicate this understanding to a chiefly, un-initiated, un-informed white "power structure" that maintains a "myth of objectivity", which "teaches" otherwise??

James C. Collier said...

If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. For me, the problems cannot be viewed separately, but rather need review as a 'system' that acts +/-. My book project is my way of trying to understand and be persuasive too.

Dave Myers said...

...Do we "not" understand?... what more does "this" biracial man have to do?? "Who" needs to understand(?)

James C. Collier said...

Dave: I think there is much for us all to understand. Understanding black plight/white behaviors on the strength of the last 45 years is like watching the last 40 or so seconds of a two-hour movie - and then attempting to sort it all out. Utilize the last 400 years of history and you still have seen only the last 7 minutes or so. A tall task.

Dave Myers said...

I agree Jim... but I believe that this "conversation" needs to be drawn-out "long-hand", and step-by-step, for those in the white community...