If it comes as a
shock to you that affirmative action policies are not only broken, but actually
serve contrary to their intended purpose of creating a color-blind, racially
diverse America, then you are either wholly ignorant or frightfully naïve. Or a
hard-line liberal. Take your pick.
So imagine my
shock to see this
column by Richard Cohen credited to The
Washington Post (column mirrored on RealClearPolitics.com).
Needless to say,
I was purely speechless. Never before had I seen the case against affirmative
action so aptly made in one concise column. Much less a fair-minded piece in The Washington Post’s archive. But I
digress.
The column talks
about a firefighter from Connecticut named Frank Ricci. Ricci, in spite of
having dyslexia, managed to overcome impossible odds and score sixth-highest
out of 77 candidates who took the firefighters’ promotion exam to become a
lieutenant. Ricci was not promoted. What was the charge? What was the egregious
offense? Why was this man, who worked impossibly hard to build himself a better
future, denied what he deserved? And, for that matter, why were the five men
who scored higher than Mr. Ricci also not promoted? The department wanted to
promote someone of color; so all 77 scores were thrown out because no black
candidates scored high enough.
In America, the
Founding Fathers envisioned a nation where individuals fought for their own
successes and were not punished for those successes or denied the fruits of
their labor by a governing body that adhered to its own arbitrary set of moral
guidelines. In the Ricci case, the governing body decided that it was time for
some black people to get promoted. That was their “moral” decision—to meet a
quota instead of acknowledging the hard work and earned credit of a man who
himself had to overcome amazing adversity. Frank Ricci deserved better.
A government can
only see people through numbers. Which is why the US Census tries to block
people by racial category. According to 2007 estimates*, 66% of Americans were
“White persons not Hispanic,” while 12.8% of the
population was simply “Black” and 15.1% were “of Hispanic or Latino origin.”
Does this bring questions to your mind? It should. For starters, if there are
so many more white people than there are the two largest minorities in America,
isn’t it good to reason that there are more white people getting promoted or
being accepted into colleges? After all, how can a 66% group and a 12.8% group
ever be brought to 50/50 in any work force? It’s an unreasonable expectation.
But the problem goes deeper than simply the analysis of the numbers: the
problem is the numbers themselves.
Simply put: people are not numbers. One cannot
judge the work ethic of a decimal point any more than one could claim to divide
a person’s race by the square root of seven.
All people are different, endowed by their Creator
with various gifts, abilities, talents, and shortcomings. Just as there are
lazy white men, there are lazy black men, lazy Latinos, hard-working white men,
hard-working black men, hard-working Latinos, as well as women who fit into any
and all of the aforementioned categories. People are unique. To say that a
system of quotas or numerical standards would aptly embody the American ideal
of personal accomplishment is downright idiotic. Some will succeed; some will
fail. That is the nature of a free world. That is also the nature of a color-blind
world; it is where people’s successes are based on their own achievements, not
based on what some faceless bureaucracy decided their successes should amount to.
*Data taken from:
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html