Poll to follow
Feel free to elaborate on your choice
I wavered between one and two. I finally picked two.which not too surprisingly is the most often selected at 47% when I voted.
The "you can't cure racism by using racism" and "no one alive today was a slave" crowd can't face up to two simple facts, there is still a lot of structural, institutional racism in the US today and that the twin outrages of slavery and then Jim Crow echo through the generations and still negatively impact people today.
Since the problems manifest themselves by race so too must the solutions be applied by race.
My objection to affirmatives action is the obvious one. It is not very effective. It is not accomplishing what it needs to accomplish and the little bit that it does it does at a glacial pace.
And I might add it is obviously, and for me inexplicably, divisive.
I can understand the desire to keep this bread crumb of justice. But if it was up to me, and believe me I don't for one minute think that it is, (Justice Scalia apparently feels that it is his place to do it,) I would give it up and instead I would fight to eliminate poverty completely, for all of the poor.
My now compulsory derail hidden below.
This is an obtainable, realistic goal. It doesn't require an infinite pool of profits to accomplish. Depending on how you define poverty it requires only about $400 billion dollars a year redistributed from profits to wages to do it. An almost trivial sum in this, the richest country on earth. And now, thanks to the more than three decade long, neoliberal economic experiment in income redistribution to enrich the already rich, we know the best way to eliminate poverty. Not with some massive government program like the war on poverty or the reverse income tax, but by simply raising the wages of the working poor, slowly, over time. Raising the minimum wage might be enough to do it, no one knows right now. But if it is not then we would have to work on improving workers bargaining position with their employers.
Conservatively the neoliberal economic policies of the last thirty five years shifted about twenty trillion dollars in total income from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy, with no massive disruptions in the economy, except for appearance every few years of different asset bubbles caused by the huge amount of money involved. But most of the twenty trillion dollars or so is locked into US Treasury Bills, debt that ironically was caused by the main feature of those neoliberal policies, tax cuts for the rich.
We will never have a better time to do this. The main problem with raising the wages of the poor and in turn of the middle class isn't the massive debt caused by the neoliberal policies, it is inflation. Transferring money from profits to wages will increase demand in the economy, because the people who spend much more of their incomes buying things will have more money.
But inflation is currently at historic lows.
Sorry for the derail. Back on track.
We still have a battle to end racism, to wring it out of our justice system. A system that stops a disproportionate number, shoots a disproportionate number, arrests a disproportionate number, convicts a disproportionate number, imprisons a disproportionate number and executes a disproportionate number of blacks. We need to fight the neo-Jim Crow laws that threaten voting rights, to fight zoning laws that exclude and increase the cost of housing, and many more.
It would help massively if the Republican party would stop providing a political home that supports racism and helps to keep it alive.
But none of these are helped by or dependent on Affirmative Action.
