@pissyjoey Said Fine, I disagree with you. And there is a historical reason to back this up. The majority of people in the south supported segregating blacks from whites. But the federal government integrated it anyway. Was this wrong? Was it wrong for the government to force its views on the south or to attempt to reeducate them?
So you and Reiko would say that desegregation was a racist policy and was wrong. There is little difference between desegregation of yesterday and affirmative action of today. I would have been fighting for equality and where would you have been? Telling me that desegregation supports racism?
Of course there has been more than one policy that attempts to fight discrimination. I was exaggerating. But where would you have been during each of these times? Would you have fought against the anti-slavery movement? Would you have fought against civil rights legislation? Against voting rights for blacks? When it is obvious that discrimination still exists, what is the remedy? If not laws that attemtpt to eradicate discrimination, what then? Legislation helped in the past, why not today?
You miss a crucial point. When the federal government desegregated the South it wasn't reeducating people or forcing my views on them. It was enforcing the Constitutioin, namely the 14th admendment, equal protection under the law. In effect the government was putting its own house in order.
Going to a private company and telling them they have to hire a certain number of people with a certain skin color is totally different.
I support government correcting its own sins. I will never support the government forcing a particular ideology on the masses, even if its one I agree with.
To imply that disagreeing with affirmative action is the same as disagreeing with abolition or the civil rights movement is completely idiotic. You seem to have an "either or" mentality that makes you think anybody who doesn't agree with you is racist, and that is simply wrong.
It's not the role of government to play the part of nanny to make sure we get along with each other. America will not eradicate racism by using some well intentioned, but fatally flawed, laws. We will eradicate racism on the individual level, and that is achieved via the evolution of our society. The government getting involved will only muddy up the waters.
I guess thats the key difference. You still want to approach the race problem by lumping people into groups, which only reinforces the "us vs. them" mentality. I'm a Jeffersonian liberal, I look at individuals as the fundamental unit of political and social action, not groups. After all what could be more nonracist then taking race out of the equation and to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, to paraphrase Martin Luther King?