When will affirmative action be gone?
January 3, 2013 4 Comments
Simple question: What year will be the first year that all forms of affirmative action no longer exist in the United States?
2013? Clearly not. 2015? Hmm doubtful. Move forward a generation, so, like, 2035? Seems too soon, still. 2100 then? 2500 anyone? 3000?
What about the year 5000? If you could step into a time-machine, come out in the year 5000, and ask around, would there still be ‘affirmative action programs’ to help ‘correct the legacy of slavery’ and to help the lot of ‘other underrepresented groups’? In 15000?
How about the year 50,000 A.D.? Still? Affirmative action in college admissions, quotas/’programs’ in government hiring and contracting, all of it?
No, because that’s silly, because it’s so far in the future that everything will have changed and stuff?
Then that must mean affirmative will go away at some point. Be abolished. The last such law/policy will expire or fade out.
When, and under what circumstances, do you think that will be? What year?
I honestly cannot picture it.
Brilliant. It’s the paradox of the heap. Well played.
I don’t think it will ever go away, because there is nothing to go away. there is no law called “Affirmative Action” that can be repealed or overturned. The supreme court could declare the practice unconstitutional, but enforcement would be difficult given that there is no official sense of what exactly AA is or is supposed to be. And then racial discrimination is already unconstitutional, and AA is racial discrimination but not unconstitutional, so the whole thing is just a barrel of contradictions. Much of what we call AA is carried out at the whim of individual institutions, and they have ways of hiding and obfuscating what they are doing.
Generally you’re right, but there are probably in fact some actual laws on the books that mandate affirmative action, i.e. in government employment/contracts. As you say it’s at the whim of individual institutions, but the US government is a pretty big institution that does it too.
AA will disappear at approximately the same time as progressives declare that they have enough money for all their social programs and will never again ask for more.