I’m a conservative. I’m not white. I am acquainted with many other conservatives who are not white. I can say based on my anecdotal experience that affirmative action is generally frowned upon by conservatives regardless of race. As a matter of fact, I know of some progressives who accept that affirmative action is no longer necessary.
It shouldn’t have annoyed me so much that a NY Times article singled out “white conservatives” as opposing affirmative action for decades. As with the vast majority of liberal writers and publications, singling out a perceived negative about a race is only acceptable if the race is Caucasian. I’m not surprised they went there, but it still got to me.
Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Affirmative Action Win Justice Dept. Support
But the Trump administration is turning the same tool against affirmative action in college admissions, a major — and highly contentious — legacy of the civil rights era, and one that white conservatives have opposed for decades. In the past few years, the anti-affirmative action cause has been joined by Asian-Americans who argue that they are being held to a higher standard, losing out on coveted slots at places like Harvard as African-Americans, Latinos and other groups get a boost.
As the Justice Department’s statement of interest indicates, the use of affirmative action by Harvard to reject qualified Asian-American students is discriminatory. Harvard’s policy basically says someone more deserving of enrollment must be passed over in order to fill a diversity quota.
Imagine if these limits and quotas were applied to other types of people. Would Harvard get away with this practice for decades if they capped the number of women who were accepted? What if they said they would only accept a certain number of homosexual students?
Let’s use a direct parallel. What if Harvard said they would only allow a specified number of African American or Latino students every year? Do you think that practice would still be in place for the class of 2022?
Caucasians and often Asian Americans are now the victims of a pendulum that has swung too far in the other direction. Affirmative action may have made sense in the past when diversity needed to be forced in order to get older generations to comply. Those days are gone. The combination of a general embracing of diversity in America and the fear of anything that smells discriminatory (nobody wants to be known as a bigot in 2018) has made affirmative action unnecessary at best and harmful at worst.
For some reason, discrimination doesn’t have the same foul odor to leftists if it’s applied to Caucasian or Asian American students. This inconsistency in their moral compass continues to be a fatal flaw in their overall worldview.
