Russ Douthat has a fine column on affirmative action in the New York Times. He writes that a good case could be made for the need for affirmative action in the decades after the post WWII civil rights struggles, but that there needs to be a statute of limitations:
Allowing reverse discrimination in the wake of segregation is one thing. Discriminating in the name of diversity indefinitely is quite another.
After noting that by 2042 the United States will be a "majority minority" nation Douthat says:
A system designed to ensure the advancement of minorities will tend toward corruption if it persists for generations, even after the minorities have become a majority. If affirmative action exists in the America of 2028 [the date that Justice Sandra O'Connor suggested as an upper limit], it will be as a spoils system for the already - successful, a patronage machine for politicians - and a source of permanent grievance among America's shrinking white population.
For myself, I don't understand why affirmative action has continued this long, much less why it should still be around in 2028. Affirmative action was designed and justified as a means of racial reparations, a way to compensate those who had been disadvantaged by segregation. Now, going on three generations after segregation has ended, defenders of affirmative action say we still need it. Why? What evidence is there that racial discrimination is still a significant factor in American life? What social conditions, what metric, would the defenders of affirmative action accept as justification for the conclusion that affirmative action is no longer necessary?
The most frequently cited example of the need for affirmative action today is the paucity of minorities in certain fields, but racial discrimination isn't the only, or even the best, explanation for that lack. How do we distinguish between competing explanations? The argument that the shortage of qualified minorities is itself evidence of discrimination has been threadbare now for twenty years. It's time that we insisted that in this country, just as no one will be denied a job or college admission on the basis of race, neither will anyone be awarded one on the basis of race.
RLC
