waterpanther, on Oct 25 2005, 07:35 PM, said:
Howling Mad--What you're calling the "disenfranchisement" of white people is simply the abolition of the special privilege that white people enjoyed for several centuries--as a result of nothing more than being white.
Wrong. When minorities are extended opportunities
at the expense of better-qualified individuals for no other reason than that the better-qualified individuals are white, that's institutionalized racism against whites.
That's what we might call "enforced equality" -- except that when it's enforced, it
isn't equality, is it.
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Those that can't hack it without the special boost formerly given them by their skin color wind up parading down the street in brown shirts or the bed linens. The one label all these twits have in common is "loser."
Except that that's
exactly what affirmative action is -- a "special boost" based on skin color.
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The difference between the NAACP and MALDEF on one hand, and the NAAWP on the other, is that the groups represented by the two former have endured systematic and engrained discrimination in American society.
No, they haven't -- you're treating them as
groups which are collective beings hundreds of years old, instead of as individuals, most of whom have been subjected to no such
insitutional discrimination, and
none of whom have been subjected to slavery. You can talk about the history of discrimination in this country, but unless you're proposing that these people are immortals, that history has no
direct effect on them. And in any case, it's absolutely and utterly irrelevant -- the fact that so many are able to achieve such greatness
without benefiting from racial favoritism makes it plain that the favoritism is a crutch given as the short-term remedy for the
excuse of a history of persecution -- period.
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White people haven't, and aren't.
I'm sorry, but that is flat-out ignorant -- and no, I'm not using "ignorant" as an epithet, but rather on its dictionary definition. For you to define historical white institutional racism, yet claim that affirmative action is anything
but analogous to it, is to
ignore the reality of what affirmative action is and how it works, and at whose
expense it works.
Edited by Howling Mad, 26 October 2005 - 02:37 AM.