Affirmative Action

Many are loathed to opine on the subject of Affirmative Action but this is the freedom a blog provides…to lave our dirty laundry. How could I as a Christian decide that those fire
men in Connecticut did not deserve their promotion in light of their test scores; yet, I would be hypocritical because I too have been a beneficiary of Affirmative Action. To attend law school, it requires good grades—of which I had—and a good LSAT score—of which mine was average, yet I was accepted into law school. Now, I met the criteria of my law school by maintaining my 75 average and wrote what amounted to a dissertation to graduate…the later is only required in a few law schools. I surmised that because I graduated, the template to get into law school is not a definitive barometer as to success….In law school, I studied Bakke, the seminal case on Affirmative Action and the fur flew and the Socratic debates on the subject matter were spirited. Now, before some of my white brothers/sisters start engaging in the merits of eugenics about whose mental faculties are superior-incidentally, we are told now that East Indians and Chinese students are being discriminated when it comes to entrance in our Ivy League schools even though they are consistently scoring hire than others-is it because they have superior faculties than whites or blacks or is it that they have figured out a way to take the tests and are simply more discipline.…In Connecticut, the substance of the test was given to all the potential candidates and the scores reflected the diligence that each candidate put in…To punish those who studied hard is just wrong…but someone also must explain and provide a remedy on how to address an all white fire or police department…in New York, I am reminded that an Irish man in the fire department is said to be partaking in “Irish welfare…”are we to believe it is not who you know, sometimes. I have a lawyer friend in New Jersey, who gave me my first job out of law school as a legal consultant. I watched this Black man, who had passed the respective bars of New York-a feat I have yet to conquer—New Jersey and Florida, and still wasn’t hired as an associate, yet he had to teach many whites, who were hired as new associates, the duties of the position...The reason this was so was because he did not know the right people. We cannot look at Affirmative Action in a vacuum…I watched a Sixty Minutes episode where this law professor was saying how immoral Affirmative Action was with respect to entrance into the University of Michigan…this may have been so but the Michigan basketball athletes, who were 95% Black, were providing hundred of millions of dollars to the university and they were not paid…I wondered how much that law professor salary was dependent on the revenues brought in during March Madness….I do not recall the case in Law school, but I know it dealt with Pornography, where one of the presiding Associate Justices, Potter Stewart, opined on porn, saying, “I cannot articulate what it is (Porn), but I know it when I see it.”…It is the same situation I am in when I look at all the current remedies for addressing past prejudice…I’ll know it when I see it….
-Verily Prime