Truths we dare not speak

Victor Davis Hanson takes on the politically taboo topics of illegal immigration, affirmative action, and the like:

Affirmative Action

The concept was noble, but now antiquated and mostly absurd. It requires the logic of the Old Confederacy to determine racial purity among the intermarried citizenry. Jet-black Punjabis get no preferences. Light-skinned Mexican-Americans of the fourth-generation claim privilege. Poor whites from Tulare don’t rank. The children of black dentists do. I see very little logic here.

Asians? We both claim them as minorities, and yet we discriminate against them at the University of California admissions process on the basis of their own superior achievement. (Apparently, the deplorable record of discrimination against Asians is now deemed irrelevant due to the community’s own success. Ponder the ramifications of that for a bit: should Asians have been struggling at UC, they would be considered suffering from the legacy of oppression; since they are excelling, they need to be quietly discriminated against).

As far as I can tell, here is the logic of this Byzantine system: Affirmative action in the 21st century has no logical basis in skin color, actual discrimination, poverty, class, or need. It is predicated on two archaic thoughts: previously discriminated against American minorities shall be defined as only Hispanic, Blacks, and Asians, and thus their children shall receive privilege for decades. BUT that new discrimination will not apply if such minorities on their own have prospered and are successful. (Why that would be so in some cases is again a taboo question.)

So, Japanese-Americans, whose parents were put in camps, don’t quite qualify any more for compensation seemingly because they are successful and are thus “over-represented” in the racial spoils system. But Chilean immigrants do—if they can fraudulently piggy-back upon the Mexican-American experience by virtue of a shared language and last names.

If one is of mixed race, nomenclature trumps all. Bob Wilson, the son of a Mexican-American mother, is liable to get nothing, Roberto Martinez will get quite a lot, if the son of a Mexican-American (or any Spanish-speaking) father. A Barry Soetoro is of mere pedestrian mixed ancestry; Barack Obama is not merely black, but exotically so.

In short, the system is corrupt. In our society of intermarriage, immigration and mixed ancestry, we cannot any longer determine who is and who is not a certified “minority” (cf. the con of mostly white candidates claiming some sort of Native American ancestry). ...

Read it here. I disagree with Prof. Hanson that affirmative action was ever "noble", although it is indeed absurd. What's noble about discriminating against people based on the color of their skin? Because that's what affirmative action is: legalized racism. Not only is affirmative action not noble, it's not even a good idea, because affirmative action engenders hostility against its beneficiaries from those who did not benefit, e.g., whites. In addition, affirmative action stigmatizes its beneficiaries with the nagging notion that their achievements and success were not based solely on their own merit. With affirmative action, everyone loses in the end.

Yellow: The New Black

Always a hot-button issue, race preferences are in the news again, this time in South Africa:

The High Court in South Africa has ruled that Chinese South Africans are to be reclassified as black people.

It made the order so that ethnic Chinese can benefit from government policies aimed at ending white domination in the private sector.
...
The association said their members often failed to qualify for business contracts and job promotions because they were regarded as whites.

The association said Chinese South Africans had faced widespread discrimination during the years of apartheid when they had been classified as people of mixed race.

The BBC's Mpho Lakaje in Johannesburg says the Broad-Based Economic Empowerment and the Employment Equity Acts were designed to eradicate the legacy of apartheid which left many black people impoverished.

The laws give people classed as blacks, Indians and coloureds (mixed-race) employment and other economic benefits over other racial groups.

To summarize: yellow, which was formerly white, is now black. At least in the eyes of the law.

As the article notes, its only been 14 years since the end of Apartheid, so perhaps it's not surprising to see pervasive race-based preferences enshrined into law, this time against native whites. Heck, slavery formally ended in the 1860's here in the States, and we still have some legalized race-based preferences in our educational system. South Africa probably has a much better case to argue that such preferences are needed to compensate those who lived under the Apartheid regime or their immediate family members for injustices suffered under that regime.

Of course, any racial preferences serve to divide, rather than unite, a country, and the goal of equality under the law, assuming such a goal is desired, cannot be achieved if one group of citizens are treated differently than another, solely on the basis of the color of their skin.