Anathstryx: Christian Foundations and Abolition of Slavery

[podfish]

The "powerful" are those who enforce affirmative action and other racist institutions. The "weak" are those harmed by it who can do nothing about it but suffer the injustice.

man, if feeling weak helps you get by, who am I to argue? sure seems like a lot of energy expended in maintaining that perspective.
somehow I doubt that the level of disadvantage suffered by those impacted by affirmative action ranks all that highly when compared to those it's attempting to redress.

[Iolchan]

Towards A Level Playing Field

podfish wrote:

Iolchan wrote:

.. Why Not a Level Playing Field?

it -would- be nice were it so.

Podfish, why must we, as folks who were accidentally born into the so-called "dominant ethnicity," just stuff the injustice that was produced by Affirmative Action?

you don't need to "just stuff it". But you were indeed born into the dominant ethnicity, you benefit from it frequently, so excessive whining about the times when it's not an advantage is unbecoming.

to be fair, of course not all objections to affirmative action programs can be dismissed as whining. However, we rarely see measured and well reasoned discussion of how best to overcome historical legacy without imposing excessive burden on individuals who usually weren't personally responsible for creating such a legacy. We see instead impassioned rants about how some blameless individual is suffering, with often specious claims that the real goal here is simple fairness for all. How many people who are enraged at affirmative action policies are equally concerned about other fairness issues?

It also seems that there are people drawn to this issue because it is indeed a clear example where rules intended to benefit all society can sometimes negatively impact individuals. I get that for many that's a concept that they hate. It still strikes me as a foolish issue to get so invested in because it reeks of the powerful resenting the weak.

In the first place, we agree that there isn't a level playing field. That is basic, right? But we can talk about the Ideal World, here, as philosophers discussing the Realm of Ideas, and that is really a beautiful thing, I think. It's like Robert Kennedy's slogan about dreaming the world that never was, and asking, "Why not?"

I don't think that what I have written here about Affirmative Action here should be dismissed as either "excessive whining" or as a foolish issue in which to invest my time. This is the first and only time I have ever made a public statement on the matter. It's not my issue - Monetary Reform was my issue - and since we have once again witnessed another round of the old "Debt-ceiling" game, I have thought fit to comment on that score, elsewhere on this site.

All issues are related, however - and the thread that binds this issue with the Money Issue, is the Reality of Class War. Although I may have been born with the same pigmented skin as the White, Anglo-Norman Masters of the Global Plantation, I can assure you that I am not one of them. As a Scots-Irish, Welsh, French-Huguenot, Austrian-Bohemian-&-Swedish- Jew, as well as a Cherokee, I am a member of, and descend from, a Collection of persecuted minorities.

All of the suffering entailed in the history of the collective sufferings of those various people's is encoded in my own DNA. Furthermore, I have had a hard enough life to say that I would not relish having to live it over again.

As a male, who just co-incidentally happened to come into this world with a pale, freckled complexion, I have also been the beneficiary of a number of advantages - but I would say that the cultural advantages of my family outweighed the social advantages of my caste, to say the least.

My own tendency, as a lad of fourteen, by the way, was to work in the "No on Proposition Fourteen" Campaign at Twentieth and Telegraph in downtown Oakland, in the Summer of '64. Had I been just a little older, I would have gone on down to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders, for Freedom Summer. That is what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to be; but Mom wouldn't let me; I was too young.

Proposition 14 was a reactionary measure, conceived by Racists and Realtors - which would have given property-owners the right to refuse to sell their houses to a family, or person of color. All of my friends were against it. It was the first political campaign - besides the Ban the Bomb marches - we ever worked on; and we poured our hearts and souls into it.

Affirmative Action, on the other hand, as practiced just a few years later, in the Berkeley, California office of the E.D.D. - did not help any of the job-hungry, male, pale-skin, "white" kids who were my peers in Berkeley, when it mattered most. They became victims of Class War and malevolent social engineering disguised as "Social Progress" and "Civil Rights." That this was true, is still a deep and downright tragedy. Children - Adolescents - failed on account of it. Many turned to drugs; as I have written - and most of the male members of the Class of '67, the ones who did not escape out of the orbit of Berkeley, are now dead. These are Facts.

Sincerely,

Mark Walter Evans
www.paleoprogressives.org