A debate on affirmative action between two liberals has gone viral after the quiet part was finally said out loud. Proponents of the policy don’t seek to end racism — they only want to end racism against certain groups while actively championing it against others.
The Argument host Jerusalem Demsas took the affirmative position on affirmative action, while her guest, Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, took the commonsensical stance that racial discrimination is wrong.
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The most viral clip from the debate, which The Argument somehow felt comfortable sharing online, came when Yglesias used a real-world example of affirmative action’s unfairness. Magic Johnson owns 51% of a subsidiary that is otherwise just a relabeling of Sodexo’s cafeteria services. The kicker: because Johnson is black, the company qualifies as a minority-owned business, making it eligible for District of Columbia Public Schools contracts that it would not be able to get if he was white.
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Demsas’s response: “Who cares?”
Here is a foolproof test to determine if something is racist: If you reverse the races, would there be riots? Putting this case to the test: Imagine if DCPS announced it was reserving certain contracts for white-owned businesses, so minority-owned companies would have to partner with a white entrepreneur in order to qualify. Seeing Minneapolis circa 2020? I am.
The issue isn’t that affirmative action, leftist code for legal discrimination on the basis of race, is racist — of course it’s racist — but rather who it is racist against. In the case of college admissions, Demsas admitted elsewhere in the debate that the “core problem” was that schools were “being racist to Asians.” But was it also a problem that it’s racist against white people? Evidently not.
Desmas’s comments on the matter reveal what everyone should have already understood about affirmative action: Its proponents do not care about racism when it benefits minorities. I was brought up to believe that racism is inherently wrong, not just anti-black racism or anti-Asian racism. The radical Left sees things differently, believing that discrimination against white people is the only kind that doesn’t constitute racism, and that treating people the same regardless of their race, or colorblindness, is a form of racism.
If you, as an individual, choose to do business with a company because it’s minority-owned or woman-owned, you have the right to do that. Racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry, while dumb and immoral, are not illegal — otherwise, that would be a thought crime. But for the government or any publicly funded institution to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, or any other immutable characteristic should be illegal. Taxpayer dollars have no business being used in such a way.
It doesn’t matter who is being discriminated against — such discrimination is wrong, period. As evidenced by Yglesias’s stance on affirmative action, even the Left is not in unanimous agreement on the contrary. That’s a good sign that people are starting to wake up. Even still, a majority of Democrats support the policy.
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Because of affirmative action, opportunities flow to people based on racial checkboxes rather than earned qualifications like good grades, proven competence, or actual value delivered. We lower standards across the board, all in the name of fighting an oppression that doesn’t even exist.
And when someone points out how corrosive this is to fairness, competence, and even the long-term interests of the very groups it claims to help? The answer we get: “Who cares?”
