Discourse Will Reveal Ignorance
Fucking liberals. Thinking affirmative action is wrong.
I feel very strongly about this, so I’m sorry about the length.
It is about numbers. Maybe “quotas” as you have experience them have been fucked up (and I think the word “quota” is fucked up itself, because it implies “tolerance” rather than equality [EDIT: it has been revealed to me that quotas are in fact illegal in all 50 states]), but the general theory behind affirmative action is wholly sound and it is about numbers and about leveling the playing field and equality of opportunity. The way you talk about affirmative action is valid because it’s your experience, but it sounds like you’re projecting it onto all cases, and that’s not fair. I don’t disagree with your argument, but it can exist alongside mine, and the two don’t cancel each other out.
Framing it with regards to “reaction” gives credence to the misguided notion of reverse racism, something proven time and time again to not exist, and to be in itself racist. Racism is the systemic combination of prejudice (the spoken and unspoken prejudices of White people against people of color) and power (which is concentrated in the hands of White people); under this widely accepted, sociological definition of racism, “reverse racism” cannot exist because the people accused of it lack any systemic, structural, or institutional power. Look, would you oppose the Civil Rights Act because people (and White people in particular) reacted badly to it? Do you oppose same-sex marriages because conservatives react poorly to the very idea of it? People are reactionary. That’s how the shit rolls, but we shouldn’t necessarily pay heed to it. If all social policy was decided on the basis of whether or not certain groups of people will react poorly to it, we would be living under the same policies as we were at the inception of the Constitution. Women wouldn’t have the vote because men “reacted poorly”; the Civil Rights Act wouldn’t have passed because White segregationists, politicians, and police forces reacted violently to integration; the LGBTQQIA population would still be stigmatized because Christian Fundamentalists think queerness is an abomination (and certainly segments of the queer population or more stigmatized than others). It’s like saying women shouldn’t dress like “sluts” because men react badly to it. A politics of reaction is antithetical to progress and equality, and has no place in social legislation or practice.
The point with affirmative action is that a community that has been enslaved; disenfranchised; oppressed through Jim Crow laws and violence (see: lynchings, the widespread sexual violence directed toward Black women, statistics regarding the discriminatory policing, imprisonment, and sentencing of Black people within the police and justice systems); economically and educationally suppressed through multiple systemic and structural systems (zoning laws that prohibited Blacks and other people of color from purchasing homes in certain neighborhoods, refusal to grant credit or mortgages to people of color for the sole reason of their race, segregated schooling, opposition to integrated schooling even today); and discriminated against by various other mechanisms visible and insidious, is to minimize the unearned advantages that White people have benefited from in university admissions and job markets since the inception of the US.
