The disaster of Affirmative Action
By Bruce Walker
web posted February 23, 2015
We are today with the dumb bunnies "governing" America in this very dangerous time, reaping the full measure of the disaster of Affirmative Action. This direct discrimination against whites and men, innocuously called "Affirmative Action" was always a morally hideous regime. The distinction between this form of affirmative discrimination against the most talented and hard-working and the odious numerus clausus used before the Second World War to limit the number of Jews admitted to college.
When American universities and businesses were coerced into admitting less qualified blacks perceived to be, as a class, victims of past discrimination, the practical effect was always to punish poor white males and reward affluent black women.
It is a crude joke that Affirmative Action today ruthlessly purges the most gifted and hard-working Asian applicants in states like California in ways that as repugnant as the vilest anti-Semitism in Poland or Hungary or Rumania eighty years ago.
Affirmative Action has other effects more subtle but no more calamitous for our nation. Because Affirmative Action only works in large institutions, it channels those who seek to reap the rewards of its unfair benefits into career paths otherwise wasteful and foolish.
Every young black high school student, for example, is encouraged to attend college. There are many reasons to doubt that this scholastic dinosaur has any real value today. College graduates often have poor command of English, minimal knowledge of math or science, and vast ignorance of history and culture. Indeed, the vast majority of these college graduates have majors in soft (sometimes very soft) subjects which can gain good grades by taking pleasing ideological postures before Leftist professors.
Yet because so many unfortunate young blacks have been urged by people like Mrs. Obama into going to college, these millions waste the most vital part of their lives and pile up student loans while learning nothing useful and then entering the job market with no real skills. These young adults, already raised on the toxin of invented victimhood, now feel slighted that their degree means to little to so many employers.
This naturally channels Affirmative Action college graduates into jobs in government, where their degree, no matter how empty, still fills a minimum job qualification, or into big companies which are effectively coerced into hiring and promoting black employees.
This, in turn, means that lazy mediocrities rise in government (where promotion is a function of tenure or political influence) and big corporations, which are often only slightly less political than government agencies. This makes these already sluggish and dull institutions even less efficient, less responsive and less flexible.
A "qualified" applicant soon replaces the idea of the "best qualified" applicant when an asterisk by a promotion list hits one or, better yet, several Affirmative Action goals. Soon even "Qualified" droops into barely qualified or even unqualified as these excruciatingly average folks float up in government and in politics.
We all see this depressing fact, even when we lacked the courage to state the obvious. Obama and Holder, for example, sound over their head a good part of the time. Careful scripting, orchestrating appearances only with sycophants, mouthing the dreary cant of orthodox Leftism, hides the pathetic ordinariness of these men.
Our president seems more hopelessly over his head than any president in our nation's history. There seems little real doubt today, after six long years of descent in almost every area of international affairs, that Obama fancies himself in full command of his office.
What is scarier is the fact that no one has ever told disabused him of that notion. Part of this is because so many of the people around Obama seem to be there because they are black or female or both – they, like he, are the lost waifs of failed Affirmative Action. If he is obviously out of his depth, then they probably are too.
When we wash out the debris of this awful administration in two years, it would be a good time to expose the suffering and loss caused by Affirmative Action and to do what should have been done fifty years ago: restore merit, and merit alone, as the basis for success in our society. Let us, once and for all, bury the disaster of Affirmative Action. 
Bruce Walker is the author of book Poor Lenin's Almanac: Perverse Leftists Proverbs for Modern Life and a contributing editor to Enter Stage Right.