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Want to hear what's really OUTRAGEOUS? Our money is no-longer based on anything. (certainly not on gold anymore) There is no such thing as a DEFICIT in this country. Law suits mean nothing. In fact based on the ZERO fact money is based on OUR GOVERNMENT COULD GIVE EVERYONE 5MILL AND THERE WOULD BE NO REA-WORLD EFFECT. There is nolonger an agreed upon measuring rod. It's all a JOKE. Our money is based on the AVAILABILITY OF THE PRINTING PRESS. Hmm. if you actually open your eyes you too wil also see- THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHS ON. Another thing- The amount of blacks who's families are destroyed by (not whites like yourself) but by those who have a deeply entrenced destine for blacks is extremely pervasive. I'm outraged that there is no list of those who discriminate. I would bet- the SAME NAMES WOULD APPEAR OVER AND OVER AGAIN. In fact, some corporations may getting sued due to the actions of a DISCRIMINATION TERRORIST who simply moves around. I know WHITE FOLKS who are fearful of WHITE FOLKS who are FOCUSED on HATE. Damn- I've said way more than I intended. Sorry about that.

Fogg is a dumbass. Maybe the people on his mailing list could sue him for everything he's got. That's all I gotta say.

You people crack me up,when you have a system based on greed all you can get out of the system is greed example;Federal reserve system printing money out of nothing no gold standard to back it up this is very wrong and benifits a few elitist criminals and what about the IRS MAJOR GREED entity thats not even legal that just steals money from the american citizens. We can go on and on what about lying ( our president) WHAT ABOUT RAPE !! What about murder (ABORTION) So you see weve made it all part of the system by our liberal choices.People learn what their taught Im not saying suing is right,but when a system is what people depend on and that system is corrupt you will reap corruption.

It is funny how most people who bring hardship on themselves claim that it is the responsability of the employer. Yes we all know there is reaceisim in our country, just like there are people who dislike you for not belonging to the proper "Click", or don't "Hang" with the right group. I feel that less that 10% of the people who sue for discrimination have valid cases. I see far to often that the person who sues is just a person who cannot get along with others, and needs to blame others for his faults. I too have a hard time getting along with others, but that is a result of my personality, something which I cannot help, nor can I change, but I will not go out and blame my parents for this, i will deal with it as an adult, I can deal with it, why can't you?

Dave

An introductory note: last week I received an e-mail from a participant in this discussion asking me to post a copy of an article I wrote. After having read the previous messages on the list, I decided to do so. This article orignally appeared in the Princeton Progressive Review, a student journal at Princeton, in October 1995, as a response to a letter to the editor opposing affirmative action.

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The Perpetual Underclass: An Argument and a Response

"True peace is not merely the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice."

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"

For the last several months, Republican presidential hopefuls have been jockeying to prove their conservative credentials to the right wing of their party. One of the favored targets in this John Birch-style game of chicken has been affirmative action. It is not surprising that affirmative action is under attack: along with welfare, it benefits a section of society with very little political clout. It is a convenient place for the displaced anger of working-class white men who have seen their real wages decrease for the past thirty years. It stirs up feelings of racism that politicians are quick to publicly denounce but even quicker to exploit. There is, however, very little serious discussion about affirmative action underway; more often it is supplanted by buzzwords such as "quotas," "set-asides," and "reverse discrimination." A serious discussion of affirmative action must begin by addressing the question of collective responsibility.

Affirmative action opponents firmly reject the notion of collective responsibility, claiming that it is unfair to punish those alive today for crimes committed by their parents. One letter to the editor received by The Progressive Review reads: "I never owned slaves, and have never discriminated against anyone. Why should I have to pay for someone else's sins? Slavery ended over a hundred years before I was born, and over seventy years before the first of my ancestors arrived in the United States." Unfortunately, responsibility for the effects of slavery and discrimination cannot be so easily shirked. Even if our direct ancestors did not participate in the slave trade, we are nevertheless members of a society that did; part of the "individual responsibility" so fervently worshipped by neo-conservatives must include taking responsibility for things done by our society. When a person becomes an American, he or she must accept not only the glory and honor of our history, but also the shame of our shared crimes. By the logic of affirmative action opponents, Germany should not have been forced to pay reparations to Israel after the Holocaust. Japanese-Americans interned during World War II did not deserve the meager compensation they finally received: their compensation unfairly "punishes" people alive today who were not alive when they were interned. The newly freed slaves did not deserve forty acres and a mule, since the forty acres would have come from publicly owned land and thus penalized people who were not slave owners. All of these redistributive programs are examples of societies paying for historical crimes. In no way are any of these programs different from affirmative action: each one takes money away from people alive today and uses it to compensate the victims of historical crimes or their descendants. Anyone who opposes affirmative action on the grounds that it unfairly punishes white men for something their ancestors did must also opposed Holocaust reparations on the same principle.

Compensation for historical crimes, however, is not the sole justification for affirmative action. It is also a method of countering the benefits that racism and sexism continue to provide to every white male American. The economic prosperity we enjoy, the relative peace in which we live, and the political institutions we revere were all built on the backs of slaves and housewives. There is not a moment of our lives that we do not benefit from the work of the oppressed. Affirmative action does not attempt to punish white men; it merely seeks to transfer some of the benefits from the work of slaves from the descendants of masters to the descendants of the slaves themselves. If the promise of forty acres and a mule had been fulfilled, how many of us might not have gotten into Princeton because a more qualified black candidate was admitted instead? When you are the one who did get into Princeton, it's very easy to dismiss this injustice as someone else's problem about which we have no responsibility. Opponents of affirmative action say that history is as it is, and that no one is responsible for that. The fallacy of this argument is clear: we all share responsibility for the sins of the past, and no one can escape his or her share.

Affirmative action, however, does not seek to right wrongs that reside entirely in past history. The claim made in the letter to the editor that "I have never discriminated against anyone" suggests that racism is extinct today, or that it exists in only a few rare specimens (several of whom seem to reside in the United States Senate). Nothing could be farther from the truth. Every single person alive today, without exception, is a bigot. Everyone. We have all grown up in a race and sex-obsessed society, and it is inevitable that the effects of constant bombardment by racist imagery take their toll. Even those of us who have never been party to an overt act of discrimination are constantly surrounded by racially charged imagery, from television, from movies, and from countless other sources. If you do not believe that you are a racist, try a thought experiment: what is the first picture that comes to your mind when you think of "the most honest person?" Then picture "the best scientist." Picture "the most beautiful woman" and "the most handsome man." If you are white, the odds are that at least three out of four of these pictures were of white people, and that "the best scientist" was a man. Even the most bleeding-heart liberals (such as myself) fail this simple test because we have grown up in a society that has taught us stereotypes all of our lives. Color-blindness is not the default in our racially charged society: it is achieved only by a constant struggle against the racism around us, by forever asking ourselves whether we would treat someone differently if he or she were of another skin color.

Although the majority of people do make an effort to insure that their behavior is truly color-blind, no one is entirely successful. The subliminal racist in all of us colors our thoughts and actions, and it makes itself felt every time someone applies for a job or has a college admission interview; it causes damage that is hard to estimate because the people involved are not consciously acting on the basis of race. Nonetheless, it has probably cost many promising minority candidates their admission to an Ivy League university. Affirmative action, therefore, is partially an attempt to balance the effects of subliminal racism. Every time someone claims that he lost a job because of affirmative action, we must ask how many previous jobs he has gotten because of racism, either conscious or unconscious. The "wronged" white man at least can appeal his case in the courts; those harmed by subtle, invisible racism have no such recourse. In the end, affirmative action must be based on race and gender because it seeks to combat prejudice based on race and gender. As Prof. Gerald Horne of UC Santa Barbara notes in his book Reversing Discrimination, "Affirmative action is a group remedy for a group wrong....The discrimination is visited upon the individual because he/she is a member of a group. The essence of bigotry is this kind of collective punishment." Prof. Horne's point is accurate: affirmative action must exist as a race based collective remedy because it is attempting to combat a race-based collective problem. All individuals who are members of a minority suffer this collective punishment, and thus all must receive compensation.

Most importantly of all, affirmative action is the only method by which minorities will ever be able to achieve real equality in society. Judging from the neo-conservative rhetoric, their position seems to be that if government eliminates affirmative action and other anti-racism programs, racial equality will eventually happen on its own. Right-wingers claim that America will naturally eliminate the last vestiges of racism if left to its own devices. This argument, however, shows a profound ignorance of the self- perpetuating nature of power. As Prof. Horne points out, "It is well known that 'who you know' is often more important that 'what you know' in obtaining a position. The notion of meritocracy is just another myth." One particular example of the myth of meritocracy is familiar to many of us: standardized tests. Prof. Horne observes that "...there are a number of companies, e.g. Stanley Kaplan, Inc., that for a pretty penny will instruct those who can afford to pay on how to do well on these tests; this means that many of these tests do not measure the scope of the intellect as much as they measure the depth of the pocketbook." The end result of this sort of "stacking the deck" is that those who lack money and power tend to stay down.

This effect also contributes to the overall racism and bias of society. We are racists not because our parents were racists, but because if you see someone being arrested for a crime on the television news, the odds are that the criminal is a person of color. Indeed, the proportion of African-Americans in our jails is huge compared to their numbers in the overall population. Statistically, a young African-American from inner-city Los Angeles is more likely to end up in prison than in college. Bias is the inevitable result of constant exposure to facts such as this, and in turn this bias harms the chances of the next generation of African-Americans. Thus, the natural trend of capitalism towards class immobility combines with the slow poisoning of the American mind to form a deadly cycle for minorities. They cannot break out of poverty because they lack opportunities; in turn, their poverty contributes to racism and further decreases their chances of escaping poverty. Statistics clearly confirm the effects of racism on minority opportunities: a 1992 Federal Reserve report found that Bank of America and Security Pacific Bank together held $631 million in deposits from (predominantly black) South Central, L.A. but made only $11 million in home mortgages there. Manufacturers Hanover had more than $100 million in deposits from Harlem, but lent only $100,000 per year for mortgages there. A study reported in the March 1992 New York Amsterdam News found that African-American farmers were loosing their land ten times as quickly as their white counterparts. Given these odds, it is not surprising that African-Americans have faired poorly in the economic sphere. Furthermore, banks see these failings and in turn are reluctant to lend money to African-Americans. This cycle can only be reversed by active intervention. It will not correct itself. Affirmative action attempts to do just that, by creating positive examples of success for minorities; these images are beneficial not only to minority children, but to all of us. The more often we see images of African-American bankers, female scientists, and Latino attorneys, the more it challenges our own prejudices. Affirmative action is the only program that seeks to combat not only the physical but also the psychological ramifications of our history of oppression.

Thus, even if affirmative action is clumsy, imperfect, and unfair in a few cases, that must be balanced against the inescapable subjugation of a whole segment of the population offered up as the conservative alternative. The letter to the editor claims that "The whole point of the Constitution, particularly that Bill of Rights part, was to guarantee that the rights of an individual would not be trampled when a majority found that trampling would be in its best interests." This is partially but not entirely true: the Constitution does exist to safeguard individual rights, but it does assign some weight to the collective good. A clear example of this is the power of eminent domain, which holds that the government can use private land (after fairly compensating the owner) to fulfill an obvious public need. Without this power, many hospitals, national parks, and the Long Island Expressway would not exist. This is, indeed, as the letter to the editor alleges, a form of "utilitarianism." Unfortunately, societies have to be somewhat utilitarian. That's why there is a draft, that's why even people who send their children to private school have to pay school taxes, and that's why even the victims of crime have to help pay for a public defender to defend the people who victimized them. The question is not whether individual rights will be limited; no society can function without being unfair to some people some of the time. Instead, the question is whose rights will be limited and to what end. The small injustice suffered by a few individuals unfairly harmed by affirmative action cannot balance the tremendous injustice created by its lack. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that affirmative action ever harms white men more than racism and sexism help them. The vast majority of corporate executives are white. In the 1991 case Ann Hopkins v. Price-Waterhouse, Price-Waterhouse passed Ann Hopkins over for partnership despite the fact that she brought in more business than 87 percent of the men being considered for the partnership. In 1988, a study conducted by the American Medical Women's Association found that men constitute 98 percent of department chairs and 79 percent of faculty members at medical schools, despite the fact that 36 percent of medical students are women. The Feminist Majority Foundation concluded in 1990 that less than 3% of top jobs in Fortune 500 companies were held by women. Eleanor Smeal, head of the Feminist Majority Foundation commented that "At the current rate of increase in executive women, it will take until the year 2466--or over 450 years--to reach equality with executive men." If, as affirmative action opponents claim, whites are constantly losing their jobs due to affirmative action, why aren't American workplaces teeming with women and minorities? In fact, the opposite seems to be true: despite affirmative action, white male dominance of the most powerful positions in society remains largely unchallenged. In the light of statistics such as these, it seems hard to defend the position that white men suffer unfair discrimination, even in a society with affirmative action.

In the end, affirmative action is a conscious choice to favor social justice for many over maintaining power for a few. As Prof. Horne observes, "Affirmative action is an absolute necessity if the struggle for democracy is to survive. Excluding categorically racially oppressed and ethnic minorities and non-minority women is a blow to the future of this nation, not to mention a crime against those who have to endure bias." Without active intervention, minorities will be condemned to exist as a perpetual underclass, trapped in poverty by the racism to which their poverty gives rise. Racism will not eradicate itself; in a society ruled by the almighty dollar, one cannot separate legal equality from economic equality. That is the most fundamental flaw of conservative opposition to affirmative action: the belief that those who live under bridges have the same rights as those who do not. Unless we make an active attempt to undo the effects of three hundred years of oppression, there will never be a color-blind society. The complaints of a few white men who miss their traditional ascendancy seem insignificant in comparison to the alternative: an unbroken cycle of misery for everyone else.