Affirmative Promotion

Affirmative action: is it a valid tool for establishing equality or a social stigma? Isn't that the question? Another question is who doesn't get help from somewhere? Should we consider everyone who inherited wealth or who benefited from the wealth of their parents to be somehow inferior in capability as compared with someone who emerged from nothing but a pair of bootstraps? There are some excellent examples of this sort of inadequacy that arises from being the recipient of nepotism, the current president springs to mind. On the other hand, there are a lot of individuals whose character benefitted from favors, this is especially true of those who's prior situation rendered them more appreciative of the favor itself.

Historically, heredity was the sole route by which wealth and means were transferred. The Patricians of the Roman Empire, for instance, the Royal or Feudal families of France and Britain, or China are or were also examples. In fact, the only means by which individuals have achieved notariety in lieu of hereditary wealth (other than sheer luck) is through academic achievement. But if academic achievement is increasingly limited to those beneficiaries of inhereted wealth, even academic achievement is off limits as a means to establish social merit. Athletics are one possible way to shunt the social merit chasm, but even that is predominantly hereditary and is quite often dependent upon family means to support the burgeoning young star. In addition, athleticism as merit closely parallels Aristotle's rational for why some should be slaves.

One habit of aristocracy is that it forms a clique of its 'kind' and is averse, often aggressively so, to the introduction of new-comers. In the United States there are a few racial groups that really do not deserve the stigma of 'new-comers', one such group is the African American and the other is the Hispanic, Both of these groups have been here since the beginning of European occupation, in the case of the Hispanics, even before so. In fact, most African Americans have been here much longer than a lot of white races. So, what percentage of African Americans and Hispanics make up the Executive class of businesses in this country, what percentage of University professors are African American or Hispanic? Does it match the general demographics of the population? No it doesn't!

So the real stigma is that of being perceived as a member of a slave class, who is somehow inferior to the dominant white class, and if there is anything more dehumanizing in the world than being stigmatized implicitly as a member of a slave class, when one is no longer a slave, I really can't imagine it. Aristotle was responsible for asserting that some are better suited for slavery and others to rule (This was when Greeks were enslaving other Greeks and African slaves were still 1000 years in the future), but thinkers on this side of the dark ages have nullified that assumption. For instance, ancient Africa had written language just like its Greek and Roman counterparts, while most of Europe was still composed of illiterate barbarians. So any pretention to an intellectual superiority is another 10,000 years in the future, should the schrade be perpetuated that long. Most perceived racial intelligence differential is due to economic and socionomic disparities, which is what Affirmative Action is established to rectify. In other words, intellectual disparity is a self fulfilling prophesy and not a real phenomenon.

As for the claim that educational achievement should be addressed in the primary educational phase of a childs life, the socionomic and economic properties resulting from insufficient Affirmative Action are sufficient to trump that claim. Culture is that set of behaviours that an individual is raised to be accustomed too. When the teachers are of one culture and the students of another, a learning hysteresis is set up which, all knowledge of systems show, requires much additional energy to render equal and generates a lot of wasted heat. If money represents that extra energy input necessary to establish equality and school violence or teen frustration represents the wasted heat, then additional money really isn't the solution. The real solution is to promote a wider diversity of cultures into the class of qualified academics such that the level of cultural difference in th classroom diminishes. That requires that individuals who are currently perceived as underachievers by the dominant class, be given assistance and promoted throughout the entirety of academic fields.

So who does this really stigmatize? Is it the individuals who are freed to express their cultural self in society as constructive human beings of value to society, or is it the dominant rote culturalists who must face up to admitting that theirs isn't the only sun in the solar system? Freedom is the quality of making choices in the present that have a payoff only in the future. This is also the definition of morality. Choice is not a word that has any meaning in the immediate present, as even faced with two oranges, whichever one you reach first is just fine. A choice is made based upon criterion, which only have relevance with respect to a future pay off.

When choosing between two candidates for university students, the academic achievements on their application represent only an immediate snapshot of the individual's potential taken with respect to their personal goals. If the horizon of one individual is more limited than that of another, their achievements may actually represent a greater effort, though of an emotional and creative kind, which would represent a greater pay off in the future for society, with the stronger character representing the greater benefit, as compared with the individual who had social and emotional support throughout their early career. The moral choice and the choice that actually exercises the freedom that this nation is supposed to represent is the choice that promotes the cultural minority as opposed to the cultural majority. Only when societies are balanced can there be any claims of liberty made. Liberty must be for all if it is for anyone, and liberty is the process of preventing harm to persons and property. When entire races are deprived of adequate education, that constitutes harm to: first their guaranteed intellectual property, which public education promises, second their economic property, as they will not have the full compliment of opportunities offered them as is offered the norm, and it hurts the individual physically when the specter of poverty deprives them of adequate health care, increased violent crime and the consequences of apathy.

Liberty for a majority, that is, slightly more than half, is not liberty for everyone. To correct for that imbalance, physical steps and not ideological steps must be taken. Individual merit can not emerge from the idea of a college education, it must emerge from the college education. Until the percentage of minorities attending our nation's universities is equal to the percentages of minorities comprising the population, the imbalance has not been corrected for. In fact until the demographics of our nation's executive board rooms match the demographics of the population, the imbalance has not been corrected for.

Peace