Letter to The Editor

I feel obliged to respond to your opinion piece, which ran on Feb. 19, titled "Affirmative Action Has Overstayed Its Welcome."

You begin the piece by relating your frustration over not getting into your "top-choice college" while your friend was accepted (into) Cornell University. Now, unless Cornell was your "top-choice college," I fail to see how you would make the connection that he/she was accepted based on minority status, while you were declined because you are white. Even if Cornell was your dream school you'd be left in the unfortunate position of defining "intellectual equal" to an arbitrary judge. This, however, is not the point of my reply so excuse my digression.

The fact of the matter is affirmative action has never been about any notion of "fairness." Affirmative action is about building power structures that contain people other than white males. Why would we want to do that? Simply to make it as difficult as possible for groups of people to be dominated in an arbitrary fashion as they have been in the past. Perhaps there were minorities less qualified than you that were accepted to your dream school. Let's remember though that by and large qualification is a function of race and income.

I would take care when using the phrase "reverse discrimination." With the connotations of that phrase you are paralleling you not getting into a college with 400 years of systematic murder, oppression and terror. When you say such a thing it leads me to believe that you have no idea what it's like to inherit such a legacy.

By the way, save "Like other things that have ended ... inequality between men and women ..." for the day you find out that you're making 85 cents on the dollar of your male peers.

Lastly, I must take exception to your quoting of the U.S. Census Bureau. I've read the report as well and I'd like to know why you only chose to mention black enrollment versus white enrollment. One phrase further and we notice a huge gap between white and Hispanic enrollment. What's more, you failed to mention that minorities were more likely (by an overwhelming margin) to enroll in public nursery schools than whites. Perhaps you didn't go to a public school, but on average they are substandard, especially when compared to private institutions. Where exactly is your level playing field? Look at attrition rates for black and Hispanic teens (who also tend to be in public schools overwhelmingly). Do you think it's an anomaly that blacks have a rate that's one and a half times bigger than whites and Hispanics have a rate that's one and 4/5 times bigger? The only thing ridiculous is your use of statistics.

Maybe you think that the job is done. Perhaps you think that without affirmative action minorities will continue to get opportunities in proportion to their societal numbers. Well, white America had on the order of 200 years to prove that was the case. The evidence shows that they couldn't get the job done.

I do agree, however, that affirmative action should be finite, of course.

The time to end this program is not now.