Back in 1996, the voters of California overwhelmingly passed a measure to ban the racist so-called "affirmative action" procedures that were favoring one person over another in hiring, university admissions, and government contracts. This was a positive move which would have benefitted both whites and minorities. But many of the government and university officials in California have done everything they can to flout the law. Heather MacDonald writes of the attempts to re-install racism in California since then:
When Prop. 209 passed, a few politicians, such as San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, loudly vowed to disobey it. Most public officials, though, were more circumspect. Doubtless they counted on a highly publicized lawsuit, filed the day after the election, to eviscerate the new constitutional amendment before it affected their operations. A coalition of ethnic advocacy groups and big labor, represented gratis by some of the state’s top law firms, had sued to block the amendment from taking effect. The plaintiffs argued, remarkably, that requiring government to treat everyone equally violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Here is what one philosophy prof had to say about conditions back when affirmative action was in place at UC-Berkely:
Renowned Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle, who judges affirmative action “a disaster,” recounts that “they admitted people who could barely read.”
The downward trajectory of those students was inevitable, Searle says. “You’d be delighted to find that your introductory philosophy class looked like the United Nations, but that salt-and-pepper effect was lost after six to eight weeks,” he recalls. “There was a huge dropout rate of affirmative-action admits in my classes by mid-terms. No one had taught them the need to go to class.
If you have the time, be sure to read Heather's article. It is long but worth the trouble.
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