There Is No "Good" Discrimination

My Liberal friend Xerxes writes that he rarely hears protests against “affirmative action” any longer.

That may be so. But it remains a grave injustice. He takes this instead as a sign of progress.

“Affirmative action” is a euphemism. The words “affirmative action” literally mean almost nothing; or might mean anything. Who can be against “affirmative action”? Like all euphemisms, it seeks to conceal an ugly reality. It is used as code for, literally, discrimination on the basis of sex or race. Discrimination on the basis of sex or race is always wrong.

Of course, Xerxes would justify it as “righting a previous wrong.” This is untrue. You might pretend it is significant and meaningful that someone else with the same skin tone or of the same sex as the person you are favouring now was discriminated against somewhere else in the past. But that is irrelevant. A skin color is not a person. Obviously, it is not the same person, and the person you are discriminating against now had nothing to do with the original discrimination. To argue “I am told a Jew once robbed one of my ancestors; so I have the right to take from any Jew now as a result” is extreme racism.

It is not justice to endlessly repeat a wrong with new people; a million more wrongs can never make one right. Each compounds the injustice.

And there are futher problems. Any claim of discrimination in the past is generally at least debatable, and should remain open to debate. How certain are we of our sources? Yet the present discrimination, by contrast, is beyond question; it is systematic, written in law, and openly professed. There is nothing we can really do about apparent discrimination in the past, at least past the death of the ones discriminated against. But we can end discrimination now. AS US Chief Justice Roberts put it, “The bes way to end discrimination is to stop discriminating.”

Historically, whenever and wherever discrimination has been widespread, it is always justified as “reverse discrimination,” exactly as is “affirmative action” now; there is nothing novel about this discrimination, and there is no special category of “reverse discrimination.” It is always advertised as helping out some group that has been previously oppressed. That, for example, was the standard justification for discriminating against Jews for generations. The Jews, after all, controlled all the banks and secretly owned everything, right? They were an international power conspiracy. Just like “Anglo cis males” supposedly are today.

That was also the standard justification for Jim Crow laws in the South: it was a matter of oppressed poor Southerners trying to protect their rights and their culture against an onslaught by the rich and powerful Northern carpetbaggers, who had crushed them militarily. If the main target in practice was local blacks, it was because they were feared as a fifth column. Almost exactly the same situation led to apartheid in South Africa. The poor Boers had been crushed militarily by the mighty British, denied their freedom, even herded into concentration camps. They naturally feared the African blacks as weapons of the oppressor to be used against them.

And so too with all the awful genocides in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Korea: all in the name of defending the poor oppressed proletariat from the rapacious rich and powerful.

On top of all that, it is almost self-evident that any government-enforced or legally-mandated or even strongly socially-enforced discrimination like “affirmative action” will automatically discriminate in favour of those already socially favoured, and against those already discriminated against. Is social pressure likely to pull two ways at once?

So any new social discrimination, however justified, will always make the existing discrimination worse, never better. But it is really insane to even have to point this out. Few propositions come closer to being self-evident.