What's Wrong With Affirmative Action?

By Dinesh D'Souza | Friday, April 21, 2006

Originally Published April 13, 1981.

The rationale for affirmative action is intuitively sound. Blacks have suffered environmental disadvantage arising from a history of discrimination and racial abuse, and even today they are accosted by racist provincialists. It seems quite sensible to institute some form of aid to enable blacks to combat the societal retardation they face, and to enjoy the equal opportunity guaranteed them by the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet the present system of black favoritism has failed. Why do blacks, with few exceptions and without the aid of the Peter Principle, rise to posts of ineptitude, waved along by militant defenders of social justice? Why do competent blacks fare badly at colleges, finally slinking away into the cocoon of protective organizations such as the Afro-American Society? Most of all, why do liberals continue to applaud the screwed-up mechanism of affirmative action?

It must first be said that any social engineering is bound to create problems, because it runs contrary to the Darwinian free-market society we live in. Favoritism may provide a leg up on the social ladder, but anything more than a slight push can be disastrous. Upper rungs demand more from the individual, and those who can’t hack it drop out. Thus even an adept black student at Dartmouth may suffer spastic grades and despondency because he is buckling under pressures he cannot endure. Perhaps he would have romped through Swarthmore or Oberlin, but Dartmouth didn’t want to get off the honor list of the authorities in Washington, and so Dartmouth it is.

Institutionalized advantage, such as affirmative action, encourages laziness and inefficiency, because there is no incentive to work hard—one is guaranteed of promotion and success. The finesse demanded of other persons in society is not asked of a black, and being almost-good-enough has become a way of life. Some blacks see affirmative action as a necessary vitamin to allow themselves to rival other people in society. But this dependency on the government—the coercive admissions and token employment—saps their confidence and pride.

Other blacks see the program as an arrogant effort on the part of the capitalists to appease their guilty consciences. This I-have-the-right-to-charity attitude becomes an excuse for social militancy, and failures can easily be blamed on inadequate social compensation for historical abuse.

The affirmative action scenario is abetted by the liberal bureaucracy, which has cajoled blacks into embracing its rationale, and is avidly pursuing the program for its own ends. Ever anxious to take on more social redemption—for a price, of course—the liberal bureaucrats find it in their interest to siphon off the public purse in the name of justice. Affirmative Action blacks have additionally been hampered by the infiltration of liberal educators into the program. At the forefront of the affirmative action march is that touchy-feely smorgasbord of homosexuals, sociologists, lesbians, and feminists, who seem to believe that the purpose of education is emotional readjustment. Their idle rhetoric and shoddy scholarship have infected the minds of the blacks they woo. Burdened with an environment too arduous to endure, blacks are driven further down the social stratum. The black student must now take courses in feminism from the guy in jeans and ponytail to survive at Dartmouth.

Although affirmative action is always hailed as a “temporary measure,” the bureaucracy it nourishes will never let it go. Remember that welfare was once intended to be a “transient” phenomenon. Moreover, the program does nothing to change the attitudes of the ignorant and racially prejudiced, who only find confirmation of their belief that blacks are inferior to whites, and clearly seeking refuge in government programs.

If there is to be a successful affirmative action program, it must be monetarily, and not racially, based. It must apply to all poor people, not just blacks. It must be at one juncture of social development only, not at every stage. The black student may be admitted to Dartmouth despite his inadequate preparation, because he is bright and will bring variety to Hanover, but if he can’t take the heat at an Ivy League school, he must be allowed to flunk out. Only the threat of failure will generate an awareness in blacks that social development is earned through hard work and struggling to overcome past inhibitions, and not by liberation marches and social demonstrations.

An affirmative action program that allows a single-stage leg up to poor people will, in any event, disproportionately help blacks. It will also dispel the notion that blacks as a race cannot survive the demands of modern American society. And the black student, when he chooses to take advantage of the affirmative action option, knows that it asks more, not less, of him. If he does not want to work extra-hard to catch up with preppies from Andover at Dartmouth, the black student will fail; this is a factor he must consider when he picks Dartmouth over Oberlin.

What's Wrong With Affirmative Action?

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