Affirmative Action

Imagine, if you will, that you are driving your 4X4 across the desert to the fabled city of Xanadu, out of view in the distance. You have set your course and have been driving for quite a while.

You realize that your steering is out of alignment and that you have been trending ever so slightly to the left, for some time. For how long?  You don’t know. Maybe for as long as you have been driving.

You fix the steering problem and now must decide what to do next. Clearly, continuing in the direction you are facing is no good, not if you want to reach your initial goal.

You can put your heading back to the original one you set but, depending on how long you were off course, you may miss Xanadu by quite a large distance.

You need to find out how far off course you are and set a new course.

The arguments about affirmative action all boil down to:

1) Does fairness even exist and is equality even possible? Or desirable?

2) Have we been off course in our attempts to reach it?

3) What are the effects of our course failure?

4) Are we obliged to correct for these effects, or just claim that we have stopped veering in the wrong direction, and that is enough.

Some people pick number one and avoid the whole problem by saying that expecting equality is absurd, because women can’t do math and black people have criminal tendencies, and they should all just shut up about it.

Some pick number two and claim that everyone has always only ever been limited by their own abilities and determination. Look at Curie and de Grasse Tyson. Doesn’t that prove that anyone can succeed no matter what their origins?

Some pick number three and say that the past is over and we have to live in the present, where minorities are treated as well as, perhaps even better than, white men, so you should stop whining about how your ancestors were driven off their land and herded into reservations and just get off the Res and get a real job at a Wendy’s.

Some just go with number four and claim that it’s not their responsibility to fix problems caused by people who are long dead. Yes, it sucks that your ancestors were treated badly, no denying that, but we can’t fix that, no TARDIS don’t you know, so we have to move forward, dusts hands together.

I personally believe that correcting injustice is the responsibility of every person who sees the injustice and has the resources to do something about it. There are children raised in a generations-long tradition of poverty so deep that it is a culture, all because their great-grand-parents were not allowed to buy a house in a good neighbourhood. It is a terrible thing to tell these children that the rest of us are now graciously allowing them to buy houses wherever they can afford to.