Amerika

While many are talking about the options for the Alt Right in its campaign to push further for a sane civilization, one stands out as a tempting and easily conquered target: Affirmative Action.

Affirmative Action pervades all areas of life in the West. The primary damage it does is by putting employers, renters and sellers on the defensive through the legal presumption that if an ethnic, sexual or gender minority is turned down, discrimination is to blame. This leads to vast payouts in the courtroom and has made companies paranoid, causing them to be overly-solicitous to non-majority people.

In hiring, if a majority person and non-majority person both apply, a singular situation results: there is legal liability for not hiring the non-majority person. For this reason, the majority person is always at a disadvantage, and indirectly so are non-majorities, who are hired not for their competence but for political reasons, leading to a prevalence of the less competent.

In renting and selling, the same thing applies. Sell to the majority person, and bias possibly exists, which can result in an expensive court case even if you win, and no one will reimburse you for your costs. For this reason, properties flow away from the majority.

Most government contracts give preference to businesses “owned” (usually in figurehead) by non-majority people. This reduces competition and raises government costs, but also ensures that majority people cannot own their own businesses if they want to compete in this area.

In education, affirmative action has created an empire of preferences for the non-majority students, lowering standards. This has created a base level of mediocrity that is responsible for the current flood of safe spaces and special snowflakes from academia.

Even more damaging, affirmative action has set a legal precedent by which failure to transfer wealth to non-majority people is viewed as prima facie evidence of discrimination. The furthest extension of this, “disparate impact,” creates the bias that holds that if a minority group is not succeeding as much as a majority group, some form of discrimination must be to blame. This idea is now being extended to housing where majority-oriented neighborhoods are seen as discriminatory, with the conclusion that they must be forcibly diversified.

Affirmative Action came into life through the actions of silver tea set socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt who in 1941 issued a directive forcing defense contractors to avoid using racially discriminatory hiring preferences, essentially demanding they hire with preference for non-majorities.

The doctrine expanded in 1961 and and 1965 when presidents John F. [[[ Kennedy ]]] and Lyndon Baines Johnson wrote executive orders targeting federal contractors. From there, it expanded into all areas of law, strengthened by Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s through 1980s.

At this point, Affirmative Action has taken on a life of its own. It is obviously discriminatory against the majority, but indirectly so, because by creating legal liability, it forces companies to act on their own initiative instead of ordering that directly by government command. Its effects have been ruinous, raising costs and marginalizing majority citizens, all while reducing the quality of our institutions across the board by hiring for political reasons instead of practical ones.

The Affirmative Action debacle really exploded in the 1970s, paving the way for the horrors of the 1980s job market and expanding government:

President Richard Nixon built on Johnson’s legacy in 1969 with the “Philadelphia Order,” which set specific goals and timetables for federal contractors to hire shares of minorities reflecting the racial makeup of their local area. State and local governments soon introduced affirmative action programs of their own, as did many colleges, some with great enthusiasm. In 1974 the University of California mandated that the entering class of the statewide university system aim to have the same share of minorities as the state’s high school graduating class — that is, a quota.

Although it is now enshrined in multiple federal, state and local laws, Affirmative Action has a weak part of its armor: its interpretation. If a president were to write an executive order changing how discrimination is inferred, and clarifying that discrimination only occurs on the level of the individual candidate, “disparate impact” and Affirmative Action would both fall.

This would reduce the red tape and legal harassment faced by the average business, ensure the competence of personnel, and stop the legal discrimination against majority citizens that has caused much of our current political divide. It would in turn force us to re-assess diversity in the wake of a population rapidly separating by membership in identity groups, so we could — for the first time — honestly discuss the future of diversity and what it has done to our society.

Tags: affirmative action, civil rights, discrimination, disparate impact, quotas, race, racism