On 22/04/2016, at 10:44 PM, Charles Brown <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Wojtek: Affirmative action is the Don Quixote of neoliberalism. It sets ups the spectre of discrimination based on birth and fights that straw man to cover up the discrimination it promotes - that based on supposed merits. In this neoliberal world token measure such as affirmative actions scholarships etc. are taken to help a select few women or minorities to attain the elite status through educational credentials, while robbing the great majority of them of decent standards of living by mechanisms such as market competition and pay discrimination based on college credentials. That is why am not unfazed by this whole affirmative action debate - affirmative action may have played a positive role when ethnic/racial discrimination was rampant, but it is a ruse when the discrimination became based on the market and college credentials.
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> CB: This is still a white supremacist system with people of color on average worse off in every statistical category of quantity and quality of life , life expectancy, wealth and income, educational level, status of all types. You should know this as a sociologist ,Wojtek Wojtek Sokolowski. "Racism do exist, still." Thus, affirmative action is still necessary . You're the Don Quixote of Reaganite denial of racism , professor.
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I don't think wojtek is completely wrong. Note he is not saying affirmative action is entirely a bad thing, in fact he concedes it may play a positive role to the extent that discrimination is widespread. I don't agree that ethnic/racial discrimination has been largely eliminated, as he seems to imply. (Or gender and other discrimination for that matter.) But it has been largely outlawed in western jurisdictions, so he has a point. Of course it is one thing to outlaw such things but actually eliminating them will take a bit longer. All the same, there is some validity to his claim that a lot of the disparities can be attributed to historical discrimination. Non-white people, on average, started the race with a handicap, so a relatively smaller percentage have managed to join the ruling class. Thus less have been able to propagate their privilege to future generations.
I actually don't think the working class can be blamed for not losing much sleep over the fact that racial/ethnic minorities are not proportionately represented within the ruling class though. The historic mission of the working class is to abolish class rule, it is the capitalists class's job to eradicate discrimination and embrace capitalists from all backgrounds. They are, after all, quite a bit more class-conscious that us workers as a whole. They know who their allies are and who their enemies are. But while we can expect them to embrace the concept of exploiting people of all ethnic backgrounds equally, it is probably a bit much to expect any white capitalists to nobly sacrifice their class position in in the interests of increasing ethnic representation in the ruling class.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas