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Candor demands that I confess that I was once a victim of affirmative action sometime in the early 1970s when I was living in Longmont, working as a washman in an industrial laundry and desperately seeking some newspaper work.
The Boulder Daily Camera had an opening for a bottom-end reporter, somebody to write obituaries and the like. I applied and the interview went well enough to make me think I had a solid chance for the job.
Just about then, the verdict came down in a sex-discrimination suit against the Camera, and the newspaper lost. I heard through various grapevines that unless I went to Trinidad for a sex change, I should plan on staying in the washroom, dutifully going to work every day at 5 a.m. to fire up the boiler before the daily aerobic workout -- 10,000 pounds of motel sheets and hospital linens to sort, weigh, load into washer-extractors, unload into carts, and push to the ironer and drier crews.
This was probably for the best, because now I can boast that I have something in common with Stephen King -- we were both denied employment by the Boulder Daily Camera. Had I been hired there, I might today be some drone pondering my retirement benefits and calculating my golf handicap.
The mere thought is frightening. So, even as a victim of
affirmative action or some other variant of reverse
discrimination,
I'm really not angry. It may have saved
me from a lifetime of normality.
Most recently, affirmative action has been repealed by the University of California system, while it's under court attack regarding the University of Texas Law School.
The major role of these and other prestigious
universities is not to provide superior educations. You can
get all the education you can handle at the local library.
Instead, the universities serve as gatekeepers, determining
who gets the credentials to be admitted to the American
meritocracy.
So the admissions decision is actually a decision as to who deserves a lifetime of cushy jobs with great pay and benefits. Everybody else gets to scratch and hustle.
The deserving always include the children of rich alumni, and after they've been admitted, the criteria get more complex. One technique has been to lower the standards for members of certain groups, so that they will be admitted in rough proportion to their population.
That may or may not be fair, but we ought to judge a program by its results, and I've been disappointed by the outcome of the past two decades and more of such affirmative action.
For instance, if more people from disadvantaged backgrounds were admitted to law schools, shouldn't we have more Clarence Darrows in the population -- more fighters on behalf of the poor and oppressed?
But instead, we seem to have growing swarms of lawyers, no matter what their color or gender, who function pretty much as lawyers always have -- collecting handsome fees to make sure the rich stay that way.
Even Hillary Rodham Clinton, often attacked as some sort of flaming liberal, declared that when she was in private law practice, she felt compelled to represent banks rather than, say, people being foreclosed upon.
Go back 25 years when feminism was emerging as a potent political force. I believed the proponents. I thought America would be a much better place if more of the people in authority practiced those professed values of nurturing, co-operation, caring, sharing, community, etc.
But it doesn't seem to matter how many women approach or even surpass the glass ceiling. Companies down-size ruthlessly, benefits get slashed, the corporate world remains dog-eat-dog, advancement means 14 hours a day at the expense of any other values like family or community, and the bottom line is all that matters.
The federal government has been one of the main
practitioners of affirmative action. A policy of inclusion
of people who were previously excluded should, in theory,
give us some of that kinder and gentler
nation that
George Bush once promised.
But when did you last hear of a sympathetic ATF agent? Or a compassionate DEA enforcer? A benign FBI sharpshooter?
Add all this up, and it appears that no matter how affirmative the action, the result is to take people who might have otherwise been angry at the system, and turn them into corporate shills and enthusiastic oppressors of their fellow citizens.
So in this regard, affirmative action has been a colossal failure. Not because it might deprive deserving white kids with good grades and test scores of glamorous and exciting careers, but because it effectively transforms its beneficiaries into those oppressive white males.
Given that, it's really surprising that affirmative action is under attack by the Republicans. It's a program that has, over the years, successfully produced thousands of solid GOP types, stalwart defenders of wealth, authority and the corporate way of life. If the GOP is serious about staying in power, then Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole ought to be looking for ways to expand affirmative action, rather than eliminate it.
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