To have an attorney general of the United States say that the force of government must be used, forever, to enshrine into law what used to be called ‘reverse discrimination’ is for him to say that American law will always put skin color above other considerations – and pick winners accordingly.
At National Review Online on Tuesday, columnist John Fund blasted Attorney General Eric Holder for advocating permanent racial discrimination in favor of black Americans. His column is “must” reading. Holder’s position is mind-boggling. It pushes the extreme edges of racialism. Anything approaching those far edges is immoral. It must never be accepted.
Here is the “money” quote from Fund’s column:
Last month, in an appearance at Columbia University, his alma mater, Holder made a jarring statement in support of racial preferences, saying he “can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease.” “Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices,” he declared. “The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin. . . . When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”
This is rubbish. First, “affirmative action” (henceforth “AA”) and “diversity” are not the same thing. Diversity, a reasonable goal in a diverse country, can be promoted without deliberately giving preferences to one group by virtue of its skin color.
Second, even when hiding AA’s implicit quota system behind fig-leaf disguises, as the University of Michigan famously did in the Grutter v. Bollinger case, AA by its very nature denies “benefits” that otherwise would accrue to members of other ethnic groups, in order to assist blacks. This is hardly a new observation, of course, but it bears repeating because Holder’s use of the word “entitled” amounts to an insistence that some people are less entitled than others.
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