I far as I know, the advocates of Affirmative Action programs are rarely (if ever) asked to back up their assertions that Affirmative Action is responsible for the social progress of minorities. Thomas Sowell asked in Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?, that we consider trends in Black employment prior to the implementation of race based discrimination policies in favor of Blacks. He noted that the number of Blacks in “professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled” in the 10 years from 1954 to 1964. That’s before the Civil Rights Act and without Affirmative Actions programs. He noted that an immediate boon for Blacks did not result as a consequence of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. In fact:

“The rise in the number of blacks in professional and technical occupations in the two years from 1964 to 1966 (after the Civil Rights Act) was in fact less than in the in the one year from 1961 to 1962 (before the Civil Rights Act). If one takes into account the growing black population by looking at percentages instead of absolute numbers, it becomes even clearer that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented no acceleration in trends that had been going on for many years. The percentage of employed blacks who were professional and technical workers rose less in the five years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the five years preceding it.”

This implores us to ask ourselves: How can we minorities unquestionably credit, in whole or in part, our success in certain endeavors to the practice of Affirmative Action? How can we know with any certainty that we wouldn’t be where we are now without Affirmative Action?

sonrisa morena, I ask that you ponder the possibility (in my opinion, probability) that you would have been just as successful without the “assistance” of a “benevolent” people and their policies. Do you really believe that, but for Affirmative Action programs, you and the many intelligent individuals, to whom you’ve referred, would have careers in a lower paying or “less fulfilling” occupations? I’ve heard people say, to my amazement, that “minorities would still be in unskilled and low-paying jobs if it weren’t for Affirmative Action.”

I’m sick and tired of seeing many fine people of color claiming (and being told) that they owe their success to those supposedly helpful policies (and by extension to those politicians and “kind outsiders” that pushed for them), not to mention my loathing of the stigma that surrounds race-preference policies and the minority “beneficiary.”

Vicki Shabo
Editor in Chief, Volume 84
North Carolina Law Review

I think the latter group is larger.

Ya ves, it is the anti-affirmation action group that is looking out for the real interests of latinos, making us the ‘true’ latinos.

As for this specific post, I posted it in full precisely because you can no longer find it online via the link I provided.

P.S. Well-made point about how racial preference alone will backfire when made as a cover for lower expectations. It is sad that racial preferences have become synonomous with lower expectations, since they are not inherently the same.

Race is still a factor in our society - which is why this is HISPANICpundit.com, not gradstudentpundit.com or straightoufofcomptonpundit.com - but lowering expectations in the search for racial equality doesn’t level the playing field, it just shifts the potholes around.