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Argument: Laws should be "race-blind" to counter discrimination
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Parent debate(s)
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Background
- See Wikipedia's Race-blind article for background
- Also see Wikipedia's Equal opportunity article.
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Affirmative action is reverse-discrimination:
- Lisa Newton, “Reverse Discrimination as Unjustified,” Ethics, 83 (July 1973), 310. - "If it is irrational and unjust and cruel to fire someone because he is a black or she is a woman — cases whose absurdity seems obvious — then it is equally irrational and unjust and cruel to hire someone because be is a black or she is a woman. To appreciate the parallel, one has only to remember that to hire X because of color is, ipso facto, not to hire Y because of color. When inscribed in law, this is racism...Just as the previous discrimination did, this reverse discrimination violates the public equality which defines citizenship.”[1]
- Eastland and Bennett, "Counting By Race", 149.
- "[T]o those who argue that we must use race to get beyond racism …[h]istory teaches us all too well that such an approach does not work. It is wrong when the government bestows advantages on whites at the expense of innocent blacks; it assumes no greater claim of morality if the tables are turned…. Whatever group membership one inherits, it carries with it no entitlement to preferential treatment over those not similarly endowed with the same immutable characteristics. Any compromise of this principle is discrimination, plain and simple, and such behavior is no more tolerable when employed remedially, in the name of 'affirmative action' or 'racial balance,' to bestow a gratuitous advantage on members of a particular group, than when it is divorced from such beneficence and for the most invidious of reasons works to one's disadvantage."[2]
- "To count by race, to use the means of numerical equality to achieve the end of moral equality, is counterproductive, for to count by race is to deny the end by virtue of the means. The means of race counting will not, cannot, issue in an end where race does not matter."[3]
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Supporting evidence in the United States legal system
- 1883 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Joseph P. Bradley: Following Fredrick Douglass's call for what amounted to affirmative action, the Supreme Court asserted in 1883 that American society had arrived at a stage where it could treat its citizens with color-blind fairness, providing African Americans full equality with other citizens of the United States. Justice Joseph P. Bradley's majority opinion declared:
- "When a man has emerged from slavery and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rights of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the law and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary mode by which other men's rights are to be protected."
- Regents of the University of California v. Bakke(1978) The US Supreme Court formally embraced the colorblind reasoning of Justice Powell in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke(1978) that sufficient time had passed since Brown v. Board of Education(1954) to justify sunsetting race-conscious "beneficent" affirmative action polices to redress the legacy of American apartheid. In this ruling, the Court announced its intention to fully embrace the rationale of Justice Joseph P. Bradley's 1883 opinion ending Reconstruction.[4]
- Gutter v. Bollinger 2003: Sandra Day O'Connor gave the opinion in this ruling that "25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in racial diversity] approved today."
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Counter-arguments
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