“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” —President Lyndon B. Johnson, Commencement Address at Howard University, June 04, 1965
When LBJ addressed the 1965 graduating class of historically Black Howard University, he kicked off racial (and eventually gender) preferences in college admissions in what could be characterized as the Oppression Olympics. Immutable characteristics such as race and gender would, decades later, arguably overshadow merit and competency as primary college admissions and employer hiring criteria.
A few short years later, then-Xerox CEO Joseph C. Wilson issued a directive ordering his hiring managers to hire underqualified and outright unqualified minorities in a case of extreme corporate virtue signaling. Many other Fortune 500 companies praised Xerox for its “vision” and “social responsibility.” Merit and qualifications have been degraded ever since in what has become known now as “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”
Getting back to the Oppression Olympics, it must be pointed out that no group, except possibly for Native Americans, comes close to the amount of discrimination and violence that African Americans experienced before the modern civil rights era. Having said that, though, they were not the only groups on the receiving end of discrimination in America. Several European ethnic groups, all of whom the government classified as “white” once LBJ ushered in affirmative action preferences for “non-whites”—groups such as Irish, Italians, and Jews—suffered severe discrimination, including lynching, in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
It's true that, if affirmative action had applied solely to African Americans, the impact on the opportunities of others would have been minimal. However, beginning in the 1970s, the left kept pushing to expand affirmative action to other “non-white” ethnic groups and to women. Today, “white males” comprise roughly 30 % of the U.S. population. This means that approximately 70% of the U.S. population is eligible for affirmative action preferences (that is, anyone not classified as a “white male”).
Given the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action decision, we are at a crossroads. Will we as a society attempt to reorganize as a meritocracy, or will we permit our institutions to circumvent the ruling and continue “diversity, equity, and inclusion” practices by using an end-around such as the “application essay” that academia now wants? The application essay will be used to identify applicants’ race in relation to the hardships they allegedly have faced because of racism. This sleight of hand is unfortunate and needs to be strongly opposed.
LBJ’s point about those groups hobbled by racism being brought to the starting line “with the others” is valid if and only if “the others” aren’t themselves hobbled in the pursuit of “equity.” Joseph Wilson’s directive imposed exactly that hobbling at Xerox. He admitted that hiring standards had to be lowered so that well-qualified “white male” candidates were turned away to make way for the underqualified and outright unqualified to pursue a Twilight Zone standard of equity—and maybe that was reasonable in the beginning. However, despite 60 years during which minorities should have the wherewithal to make it to the starting line under their own steam, these corporate policies have never been rescinded; on the contrary, they have been enhanced over the decades.
Saul Alinsky used my hometown of Rochester, New York, as a beta test for a national rollout of his coercive affirmative action demands directed at Eastman Kodak Company. Amid protests, threats, and lawsuits in the mid-1960s, Alinsky eventually wore Kodak down and brought the company to its knees by substantially lowering its hiring standards in pursuit of “diversity.” After seeing the havoc and turmoil that Alinsky brought to Kodak, Wilson’s change to Xerox’s hiring was his preemptive surrender to Alinsky’s diversity mob without a fight.
If we are ever to truly pursue equal opportunity, it needs to start with schools returning to the basics and retiring the social justice woke propaganda. Our foreign adversaries laugh at our students’ pathetic performance in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and our emphasis on cultural Marxism in the form of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). We need to turn this alarming situation around—and quickly.
Michael A. Bertolone, M.S. is a freelance writer in Rochester, NY. His eBook The War on Equality: How Equity is Destroying Our Society is available on Amazon, and also posts on Substack.