Affirmative Action

[Pindar]

Our positions are within handshake distance, I believe.

I think so too.

a soft voice is heard: put out your hand and I will pull you to safety

Yes. But since some level of near-equity of opportunity for social advancement was (rightly, I think) deemed good and necessary, this ugly, compromise thing called AA was instituted as a temporary catch-up measure.

Opportunity discourse does not have to displace meritocractic principle nor should it. To attempt to do so is to run the risk of the swamp AA illustrates.

If we have disenfranchised group X and the source of that disenfranchisement is a socio-cultural bigotry couched in law: the more enlightened civitas can change the law, and thus remove the legal impediment, that is all. The personal failings of the soul are beyond the scope of law. Further, to attempt to redress what was through a reverse bigotry fails both conceptually and practically. We agree on the conceptual question. I have illustrated the practical issues and would therefore rather put the knife in the beast now rather than wait even another six years.

The alternatives were:
1) do nothing. Pretend discrimination didn't/doesn't exist to the significant disadvantage of one group. Or

2) take it to the courts, where there is and was jurisprudential referent for financial compensation for unwarranted damage to one party by another.

The argument the thread starter posed is basically he and his fellow voters deciding: "Have we caught up yet?". Many say 'yes', for reasons you and others have outlined. I think 'not yet'; we need to go the full course of a generation, so that a black man who was 18 in 1972, can have benefitted from AA policies, AND his son - with the AA spigot being turned off just as his grandson is coming into majority - under the assumption that Pa and Grandpa now have the resources to help.

I think this "Have we caught up yet?" is the wrong question. I think it is wrong because it violates the base role of the state. If politics includes the art of the possible then AA is not possible and a-politic. I don't think hundreds of years of bondage and bigotry can be quantified for redress under any legal schema. Attempts to do so reflect a hubris of legislation to the detriment of the presumed recipients. Aside from what I have put forward already: AA instills dependency. The dependant oft times comes to despise that which it depends on as the largess can only reinforce the sense of weakness and victimhood. I think this consequence is all too evident within the current larger Black community. AA has brought a new evil to those it sought to help to the continued shame of the nation.