I was asked to explain why I believe race preferences are immoral.
Immorality is the state of being immoral. An immoral thing is that which is contrary to accepted principles of right and wrong. Morality is conformity to ideals of right human conduct. For a primer on right human conduct, I direct you to God’s word, the Bible.
Natural rights, as well as those found in the Constitution, belong to individuals, not groups. If an individual is discriminated against because of his race, he should be compensated, not his entire racial group. There is no such thing as Group Rights. An individual has a right to seek redress from injury from a particular institution, not an entire race.
Skin color preferences bestow undeserved advantage on some and undeserved burdens on others. Such an idea is anathema to democracy and freedom. Why should people be compensated for a wrong they did not suffer? Why should some be penalized for a wrong they did not commit?
A person’s sex or skin color doesn’t entitle him to special favors or treatment. Skin color or sex doesn’t entitle anyone to receive less or more consideration. Giving one group preferred status over another group is unjust, especially when done by our own government. It is against the law and in violation of the U.S. Constitution, regardless of intentions.
The idea that we can “fix” history by preferring the race once discriminated against over the race once doing the discriminating is flat out wrong, not to mention counterintuitive.
In his brief for the Brown v. Board of Education, the case that declared government-sanctioned race discrimination illegal, Thurgood Marshall wrote, “Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state, bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere.”
I’ll concede this: I believe social engineers’ hearts were in the right place, but they had no idea what their skin color schemes would look like thirty years out. Thanks to them, we’re still entangled in race debates and race politics. These things will not pass until individual rights regain their proper place in this country.
Any questions?
Addendum: “Affirmative action tends to undermine the spirit of individual initiative. Such is human nature; why struggle to succeed when you can have something for nothing?” — Arthur Ashe, Days of Grace
“There is no logical reason why conditions today, so obviously very much better than they were for our forebears, somehow call for Victimology where conditions for people two steps past slavery did not. Victimology is, ironically, a luxury of widened opportunities.” — John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
