Replying to @NJBeisner While I recognize Slavery was a stain on history. I strongly feel the 100yrs following in some ways was bad or worse. However, we have given much to the Black Community by ways of welfare, affirmative action, preferential treatment over decades. If it taught anything to anyone, it did more harm than good. A Tweet by Mark Clabaugh @clabaugh_mark May 9Christian, Florida Resident, #AmericaFirst outdoorsman. I believe in God, Family, the Constitution, Rule of Law,

The purpose of affirmative action is to ensure equal employment opportunities for applicants and employees. It is based on the premise that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce generally will reflect the demographics of the qualified available workforce in the relevant job market. U.S. Department of Labor Website.

“I live in a box, [that says) Careful: Discuss Civil Rights Law or Law and Race Only. Warning! Affirmative Action Baby! Do Not Assume That This Individual is Qualified! Pamela Paul, Opinion Columnist in The New York Times quoting Stephen L. Carter in his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby”

Affirmative action didn’t change the ingrained racism in our culture. But it certainly benefited individuals who got jobs they never would’ve been considered for. Karen Amy in a comment on a blog post.

I started writing about Affirmative Action, and then it got lost in my very long queue of unfinished posts. When the Supreme Court judgment on Affirmative Action came out, I was enraged, and then I started to wonder why the judgment bothered me so much. I am not an Affirmative Action advocate, I don’t think it works as advertised and is actually counter-productive. I think what bothered me, and still bothers me, about the Supremes is that, although we are a racist nation and race – our relationship to race anyway – has been tearing our country apart for our entire history, the majority of the Supreme Court justices don’t seem to even acknowledge that racism still exists.

I don’t know what to do about our racism, and I don’t know anybody who does, but I do know what we are doing, including Affirmative Action, isn’t working and the Supreme Court seems to be pretending that everything is just honky-dory when they rule against Affirmative Action or for race-based gerrymandering.

While I am against Affirmative Action I want to quickly add that I also agree with Karen Amy when she says Affirmative Action certainly benefited individuals who got jobs they never would’ve been considered for. But I don’t think getting jobs for a small number of people is the goal, or, at least, it shouldn’t be the goal of the Federal Government. The goal of the Federal Government should be to ensure that all our fellow citizens are treated equally and taken as a whole, minority groups in the United States are still not treated equally. They are not much better off today than they were in, say, 1970.

The biggest problem with Affirmative Action is that it stirs up and unites a large minority, mostly White, that is already upset with their life, and they want to blame it on somebody else, usually Black people or immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants (although Jewish People seem to always make most shortlists). They already feel – with some justification – that they are getting the short end of the stick from the Federal Government and, having Black people get special privileges further entrenches their anger.

Additionally, Affirmative Action presumes that their race is the only problem that Black people have which, of course, is not true. Underserved neighborhoods, police that act like an occupying army, and systemic poverty are major problems Black people face on an almost daily basis. Actually, the academic achievement gap between high- and low-income families is nearly twice as large as the Black-White gap according to a 2011 study by Stanford and 40% of homeless people in the US are Black, yet, Affirmative Action ignores these as factors.

I like the Texas system in which the top ten percent of graduates from every high school in Texas are automatically accepted at the University of Texas which bills itself as A big-time collegiate experience at the No. 1 public university in Texas. A top-40 world university. It seems to me that this is race-neutral but does compensate, at least partially, for schools in poor – saying “poor” but really meaning purposely underfunded schools – areas.

California does not have? use? Affirmative Action, having voted against it in 1996 – and the Board of Regents voted against using SATs in 2020 – and now uses what they call a more holistic approach. By way of full disclosure, California has two University systems. The more prestigious and rigorous is the California University System – ten schools including Cal at Berkeley, UCLA, Davis, & Santa Barbara – which lost minority students when they dropped Affirmative Action in 1996 (although they are starting to get them back). Today the California University System demographic breakdown is Black students @ 5%, White students @ 20%, Hispanic/Latino 37%, and Asian students @ 34% (plus mixed race and other). By way of reference, the state’s total demographic racial breakdown is 6.5% Black, Asian 15.5%, White 36.5%, and Hispanic/Latino 39.4%.

As an aside, the less expensive California State University System – thirty-two schools including San Francisco State, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Long Beach, and the always terrific Sonoma State – gained minority students when Affirmative Action was dropped. End aside.

Our government has passed thousands of laws that are like band-aids covering wounds without actually treating the wound itself because treating the wound is too politically sensitive. Affirmative Action is one of those band-aids. We constantly talk about correcting the damage done by the legacy of slavery. Clearly, that damage is very real; it is the damage purposely caused by destroying the enslaved people’s language and their culture, by breaking up their families to destroy a people’s history, to put them out of any context. Still, as staggering and comprehensive as that damage is, it is not the only problem Black people face today.

Additional damage is caused every day by the way Black people in the United States are treated in 2023. I read that the main reason the University of California is having a hard time getting Black students is because they still feel discriminated against partially because there are so few programs and facilities to support Black students. The state does seem to be improving the support for Hispanics/Latinos who are, after all, the majority population group in the state (and probably have been since we became a state in 1850).

To end this, I want to tell a story and add a link to an inspirational story in the LA Times. My story starts when I checked in to my newly assigned Battery at Fort Bliss, Texas, having just transferred from a Battery in Namyang, Korea. When I checked in, the Battery Clerk asked me what race I wanted to be listed as on the roster. The choices as I remember them were, Caucasian, Black – probably Negro, actually – some definition for Hispanic, Asian, and Other. The clerk was a draftee – an irreverent draftee, I should add, which was not unusual in the conscription Army of the 60s – an East Coast Jewish guy named T. J . Yanik (which I now find out is a pretty common name). It turns out that The Department of Defence requires that each unit, down to the Battery level, report the racial breakdown of the unit. Yanik had been putting himself down as Other for the preceding couple of months, and he wanted to know if I wanted to join him, I said “Sure, why not.”

A month or so later he asked me which Other I wanted to be. It turned out that the report first went up the chain of command to Battalion Headquarters where some clerk attached a form that said something like OK, or Accepted, then up to Ft. Bliss Headquarters where another clerk did the same. From Ft. Blis, it went to Fourth Army Command, then the Department of the Army, and, finally, to the Department of Defense where some clerk asked, in writing on a separate form, what Other meant. It then came back down the Chain of Command, from DOD to the Dept. of Army, to 4th Army, Ft. Bliss, the 6th Missile Battalion (HAWK), and then down to “C” Battery. The original form now had something like twelve additional papers stabled to it the top half asking what Other meant.

Yanik said he was putting down Jewish, did I want to join him? Although I thought this was becoming a joke and he was having a hard time keeping a straight face, I still said, “Sure” and up the chain of command it went. Shortly thereafter, the 6th Missile Battalion shipped out to Viet Nam, and I transferred to an Instructor Unit where I taught HAWK to German Luftwaffe personnel at the Orogrande Missile Range. I lost track of Yanik and the 6th Missile Battalion, but I did hear that I was being changed from Jewish to White by the DOD.

It seemed to me that there was just so much paper being used, so many people doing, essentially nothing, all pretending it was fixing the problem. I best remember my unit in Korea, in which we had a large group of Black soldiers but all of them were in the launcher platoon as I remember, none of them were radar mechanics or operators, and all the officers were White. We looked integrated on paper, but we weren’t really.

Lastly, The Los Angeles Times had a touching/interesting/inspirational story about a gang member who turned his life around and ended up at Cal. I heartily recommend it.