VDH has an excellent article on Affitrmative Action and race today. HE is, as usual, spot on. His take: end it, it is beyond mending. Some excerpts:
First, what exactly is race today in America in which intermarriage and immigration have increasingly made it — and its ugly twin racial purity — often irrelevant? We are no longer a country largely 85-90% “white” and 10-12% “black,” but something almost hard to categorize in racial terms. Do university admission officers adopt the 1/16, one-drop racial rule of the old Confederacy? Does being one fourth African-American qualify one for consideration; three-fourths Japanese; half Mexican-American? Does a simple surname add — and often by intent — authenticity and credulity?
Indeed. I may have enough Native American heritage to qualify for Affirmative Action consideration, ifg I wanted to dig deep enough in my genealogy. Soimeday I would like to, but not for Affirmative Action purposes. He goes on:
We are reaching the point in a multiracial and intermarried America where admissions officers and employers simply would have to hire British genealogists to trace our bloodlines — and instead, in millions of cases, therefore resort ad hoc to what Americans profess or think they are. Plenty of societies in history have predicated preferences on race — apartheid South Africa, Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, and the Confederacy are the most obvious — but all at some point had to codify their prejudices by some sort of repugnantly explicit genealogical science. We differ only in that our racial categories are said to be for preferences and recompense rather than for discrimination and punishment, and that we believe in our intellectual and moral arrogance that racial biases can, in our careful hands, be used for good purpose.
That is damning. It is also 100% true. Affirmative Action is racial discrimination. There is no other way to put it. And it is discrimination based on, as he say, increasingly irrelevant criteria. It is a long article, but read the whole thing. VDH is one of the best Conservative minds out there. He deserves more widespread dissemination of his writings.
Tags: VDH
