A black columnist named Tonyaa Weathersbee responded to a Boston Globe article about a black law student named Adam Hunter, who shunned the Democratic party to become a Republican, and the title of her column is anything but subtle: Young Black Republicans Want to Trade One Plantation for Another.
Hunter is a product of the post-Civil Rights era and says he doesn’t owe the Democratic party his vote. This is part of a trend. According to a 2002 survey conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 63 percent of blacks self-identified as Democrats (down from 74 percent in 2000), 24 percent self-identified as Independents (up from 20 percent in 2000) and 10 percent self-identified as Republicans (up from 4 percent in 2000).
Regardless of how they self-identify, 90 percent of black voters choose Democrats, the same party that created legal segregation, also known as Jim Crow, and opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
While Weathersbee concedes that blacks shouldn’t give their allegiance to only one political party, she accuses Republicans of “undoing the progress and the sacrifices that led to the opportunities that Hunter and other young blacks now take for granted.”
“Undoing the progress” is code for opposing race preferences, euphemistically called affirmative action. To liberals like Weathersbee, black progress can’t occur without it. Little did our forbears realize that as they fought to dismantle government-mandated racial discrimination, to be equal before the law, and to gain the right to be judged as individuals, 40 years later their children and grandchildren would fight to maintain government-mandated racial discrimination, acquire skin color privileges before the law, and forfeit the right to be judged as individuals. It’s a well-worn cliche, but true: those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Affirmative action is a wolf dressed as an innocent and well-intentioned sheep. The term was first used by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. President Lyndon B. Johnson followed up with an Executive Order in 1965, which stated that federal contractors were to take affirmative action to ensure that applicants were treated equally “without regard to race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” They were encouraged to cast a wider recruitment net to include in the hiring pool qualified minorities who’d been historically excluded. That, and only that, is affirmative action.
The concept as we know it today evolved from a policy set forth by President Richard M. Nixon. In 1971 he authorized the Department of Labor to set specific goals and timetables to correct the “underutilization” of blacks by federal contractors. It seems that blacks were failing employment tests in high numbers, so in some cases the tests were changed. Today, Republicans are demonized for opposing race preferences, but it was a Republican who institutionalized them in the first place. The irony is almost comical.
In violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Constitution, our government, founded upon principles of freedom and fairness, continues to discriminate against some and prefer others based on race. To black liberals, this is “progress.”
Judging the merit of an individual based on his group membership is entrenched in our government. Adolph Hitler had the same idea. He decided that Aryans were the superior race and the entire Jewish race was unfit to live, so he killed a few million. What Hitler did was extreme, but race preferences are based on the same principle: the rights of the group dictate the rights of its members.
But this isn’t Nazi Germany. Each American should be judged for who he is and not which racial group he belongs to. Embodied in our law is the idea that an individual has dignity and worth, and justice demands that we be given opportunity as individuals. Somewhere between the end of legal segregation and now, we lost sight of this fundamental idea.
America’s sordid Jim Crow history has come full circle. Racial discrimination was once harmful to blacks, and that was bad. Racial discrimination is now beneficial to blacks, and this is considered good. Why? I wish I knew. For blacks to embrace racial classifications in government hiring and admissions is to betray what Civil Rights martyrs were hoping to achieve: the guarantee of constitutional rights for all Americans.
We haven’t always lived up to that principle, but it doesn’t mean we should abandoned it. Government-mandated race preferences were wrong when they benefited whites, and they’re wrong now. America’s sordid history is repeating itself.
Update: Star Parker:
But, I was very disappointed with the president’s rhetoric about race….Permitting himself to give credence to the notion that black poverty of recent years in New Orleans reflects racial discrimination and lack of opportunity was anything but an act of compassion toward blacks. He is either uninformed, which of course is troubling, or willing to bury truth for political ends, which is also troubling.
See Bush the Sugar Daddy.
