A Sensible Alternative To Affirmative Action

The striking down of affirmative action by the Supreme Court has led, predictably, to hysteria by the extreme left and members of the so-called Squad in the Democratic Party. In Britain, affirmative action was called positive discrimination; whatever it is called, it is a practice that should never have been introduced. 

The full title of the 6-3 judgment is Students For Fair Admissions, Inc v President And Fellows Of Harvard College. If you want to read it, it runs to 237 pages. The bottom line is that the nation’s race hustlers claim there ought to be a proportional representation of blacks and Hispanics in institutions of higher learning with any deviation from that proportion being something called racism. 

They apply the same specious claim to other things, prisons for example, so if there are far more blacks in prison than whites…racism. Feminists make the same claims about the workplace, which is why in Britain we have legislation related to an imaginary gender pay gap.

While feminists are fond of whining about the glass ceiling, they have nothing to say about the glass basement. Men far outnumber women in prison, in homeless shelters, and many other negative areas.

The reason for such disparities is, in a nutshell, that human beings are not statistics. With regard to higher education, there are so few blacks at Harvard. Does this mean blacks are less intelligent that whites, and especially Chinese? They are certainly not less intelligent than mainstream Democrats and the Party’s media poodles who look the other way as the corrupt Biden Administration continues to drag a once great nation to disaster. Let us though not mention IQ and SAT scores but focus on something positive, namely that American blacks especially have other talents. If there is a paucity of black engineers there is no shortage of especially black sportspeople and musicians.

Many blacks go to college on sports scholarships, and not a few of them end up as members of the top point one percent. George Floyd went to college on a sports scholarship; he excelled at football and basketball. Unfortunately, he picked up a cocaine habit, and unlike Hunter Biden he didn’t have a rich daddy to make the charges go away.

Regarding music, there is one tale that is so extraordinary it can never be related too often. Ray Charles was born in 1930 to a single mother. He started going blind at the age of four and was totally blind by the time he was seven. In 1937, his mother sent him to a special school where this dirt poor black boy was taught by the racist, segregated Jim Crow South to read music in Braille. There is no doubt Charles had a lucky break or two, America’s so-called meritocracy isn’t that kind to everyone, but when he died in 2004 he was both a legend and a millionaire many times over.

Ray Charles never benefited from affirmative action, but without a lot of help especially in his formative years, what kind of future would he have had?

The lesson to be learned from this is that some people need help, indeed we all do, none of us is born literate, numerate and walking upright, but some of us need a lot of help. That does not include prospective students at elite universities. 

Both Joy Reid and Michelle Obama were affirmative action students; if you read Mrs Obama’s thesis you might wonder if she would have got into college without it, unlike her husband.

If American blacks don’t need affirmative action, like the rest of us, some of them need some help. Donald Trump recognised this which was why he guaranteed funding for historically black colleges. He also championed the First Step Act which gives convicted criminals from all backgrounds a second chance, and he also set up opportunity zones. If American blacks excel at sports and music, business is their third strength. Helping people from all backgrounds to go into business with such things as tax breaks and access to capital is a lot more important than enabling a few middle class blacks to enter elite colleges where they are doomed to fail, especially with some of the garbage these colleges have been teaching for decades, like critical race theory and gender studies.

American politicians of all stripes should promote policies that lead to the advancement of ordinary people from all backgrounds and consign affirmative action to the dustbin of history where it belongs.