"Racism and the Reverse" Response

This post is a response to Racism and the Reverse. In the previous post George defended the "current approach" for dealing with racism. The current approach often comes in the form of affirmative action and is meant to reverse the effects of racism. I disagree with George's defense of this approach to battle racism and I disagree with the idea of affirmative action.

I agree with George that racism is most certainly still a problem in the United States. I do not believe affirmative action is the correct way to counter current discrimination problems. George raised three arguments that support the use of affirmative action today. I believe these are valid points but each of these points can be solved by means other than affirmative action.

George's first point brings up the idea of battling racism at the individual level. This point is applicable when an admissions, recruitment, or hiring officer of a school or business is racist. The problem with assuming affirmative action can fix racism at the individual level is that more than half of the hiring officers need to be racist for this method to be beneficial at all. If less than half of the hiring officers are racist then the extra leeway given in favor of one race will statistically allow less qualified employees of that race to be hired.* This creates a flaw in the system in favor of one race, just as racism itself does and the problem then exists in the reverse. Instead of using affirmative action, this "individual racism" problem can be battled by administering tests to ensure these hiring officers are racially unbiased to a reasonable means.

The second point George made was that flaws in the hiring or admissions system of a company/university may encourage racism. The example given in the previous post was a test biased against minorities. I think systems that encourage racism are special cases that need to be fixed on a case-to-case basis. Most of these systems are probably due to minorities not receiving the opportunity to seek the education or credentials they need. This situation cannot be helped by lowering the bar slightly for certain minorities that tend to lack the opportunity to seek the qualifications needed for a certain job.

Any non-discriminatory system should ensure that everyone is given the opportunity to learn, especially poor inner-city children whose school systems may be of a poor caliber. This problem of uneven education opportunities is the root of the racism problem and it is the major reason that a low number of minorities are admitted into colleges. If affirmative action were used to solve this problem instead, employers would be required by law to hire potentially under-educated people. This could lead to people making the assumption that employees of that particular minority are not up to par and de facto racism will occur.

The third point brought up was that minorities may not be hired because customers and statistics are biased against them. This point is strongly linked to the second point of flaws in a system that encourage racism. This problem can only be solved over time by ensuring that all minorities have the same opportunity for an education as the majority has. Once this is true the average education levels of minorities will increase and reverse this trend of racist thinking. An opportunity for education is the most important factor to ensure equality among all demographics of people and it is the only way to properly combat racism.

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* Explanation: Imagine a scenario where three out of ten admissions officers at a college are racist. Affirmative action is practiced at this school so being a minority boosts your chance of getting in slightly. This may help counter racism of the three racist officers but the other seven officers will also be letting in more minorities than they would have without affirmative action. Assuming each official evaluates an approximately equal number of minorities, this system will ensure that seven out of every ten minorities that entered the school had too much preferential treatment.