Up Yours, Whitey

Posted by Carlos Argentino Daneri.

A civil rights group is trying to bring affirmative action to the University of California system.

Now in California, the Berkeley-based civil rights activist group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) filed a federal lawsuit in order to increase the number of African American, Latino and Native American students at the University of California.

Even though affirmative action was banned more than a decade ago, these guys want it back.

In 1996 California voters approved the Prop 209 constitutional amendment, which banned government institutions from using race as a consideration to increase the numbers of underrepresented minorities who are employed by the government or attend public universities.

I knew something was wrong with affirmative action the first time I ever heard about it. Eventually, I learned the name of this fallacy: truth is in the middle. Picture yourself walking along, and you see two $5 bills on the sidewalk. You should turn them in to lost-and-found, but you'd prefer to keep them for yourself. After all, you found them and how do you know the guy at the lost-and-found won't just keep them for himself? With this minor moral dilemma in mind, would it be right to average the difference and keep only one of the $5 bills?

Similarly, if a particular racial group is underrepresented, by prejudice or any other reason, does it balance things out to favor them over any other group? It doesn't, because it doesn't work that way because there's no such thing as reverse racism.

Connerly said it is the affirmative action policies that are actually racist. By using race as a consideration at all, the progress of the civil rights movement toward a color-blind society is threatened, he said.

"Proposition 209 is in essence the same language as the 1964 civil rights act," Connerly said, referring to the 1964 federal legislation which banned Jim Crow laws.

The activist group is called "By Any Means Necessary." Think about that, they're going to do what they think is right no matter what, regardless of how unfair or unconstitutional it is. This, I think, is the worst name for any group to give themselves because it shows flat out that they want to impose themselves where the law and the people have already spoken.