It is amusing to watch people squirm to find a middle ground between racist policies and non-racist policies. That job fell to Journal Times columnist Mike Moore today.
Moore weighed in on the debate about race based admissions at UW schools.
One of the opponents of race based admissions, State Senetor Glenn Grothman, quipped that if diversity is the goal, they could seek to get "a good mix of hunters and non-hunters."
Moore sought the impossible middle ground, suggesting that "somewhere between those racial categories and blatant racial preferences lies a real solution. Yes, it would be an injustice for somebody's race to vault them over the combat veteran or the girl who was class president all four years. The things a student accomplishes as an individual should always come first."
But Moore's "real solution" remains elusive. OK, so ones race should not vault you over the combat hero. But should it vault you over the white guy who's grades and test scores are slightly better? Is a little bit of racism the answer?
The minute that you decide to use race as a factor to admit one student, you have decided to use race as a factor to deny another. That meets my definition of racism.
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9 comments:
more of the same rhetoric and just another one of the hundreds of other legal tactics implemented over the past 300 years to maintain racial division and economic disparities. Same thing that's been going on for centuries, no different.
But as history has demonstrated, these tactics will pan out to not only become unrealistic, but expensive and eventually become a lost cause.
Do you have to totally ignore the effect of previous mistakes that were made based on racial prefernces, or do you seek a remedy, and how?
If racism was wrong then, it is wrong now. The remedy we should seek is to eliminate racist policies. Of course that includes racist policies that use euphamistic names like affirmitive action. The best we can do is to correct todays injustices. When we start trying to correct yesterdays injustices by creating new ones that punish the innocent, we will only create divisions and hostility between people.
Denis-
Thanks for the dose of sanity. It seems so rare on the internet.
Racism is wrong, period. Justifying it, based on past racism is like justifying torture based on past torture.
Thank you Mike and please visit FreeRacine again.
Awfully easy to dismiss yesterday's injustices if we weren't on the receiving end - it's easy to move on when we weren't a part of the group that was set way back. Our justice system typically provides for a remedy to a wrong, the greater the scale of the wrong, the greater the remedy. The challnge, as you have alluded to, is to not wrong anyone else in providing the remedy.
You nailed the problem. The perpetrators are dead.
Some would argue the perpetrators were the federal and state governments
Well that is true, but they are made up with people, who are now dead.
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