On Affirmative Action

Ok I've finally going to sit down and write a serious post. (Yes, there are other things I should be doing, but they can wait).
Why is this appearing here instead of crazyivan.org's essay page? Two reasons
1) I have higher "standards" for what goes on the essay pages, and while they may not be much they are higher than what's here
2) The format of this post, and the antecdotal stuff contained herein fit better in the blogsphere
3) history has proven that stuff posted here is much more widely read than the essay page (yes, I'm extrapolating from a single case).

Background:
So what made me want to do this post? Well, Affirmative Action is an issue that's bothered me for a long time as a program with good intentions, but a horrible philosopical basis. I mentioned it as an example when I discussed Social Duct Tape. I decided to devote a seperate piece to it when I was reading Al Franken's (once again, excellent Lies(And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): a Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Therein, he mentions Affirmative Action in passing and he is like most liberals, in favor of it. This is something I've never been able to understand, why is opposition to Affirmative Action a "conservative" or "racist" position? So here's an argument from an unabashed hardcore liberal who's unabashedly against Affirmative Action. Read On.

What My SATs Scores Have to Do With Affirmative Action:
At points in the section it may seem like I'm bragging and I am to a small extent, but more importantly, I'm trying to show the value of actual attainment vs artifical attainment. To anyone reading this who's not aware, I'm a cripple(a spastic diaplegic with cerebral paulsy from birth, if that means anything to anybody) and as anyone who knows me will confirm my handwriting is pretty much unreadable to anyone but me. Therefore, on any exam where more than a trival amount of writing is required I typed the answers. This both improves the readability and brings me up to a reasonable output speed. (This is probably a slight speed advantage, but I don't think it's too much outside of the nautral variation in how quickly people write). During my sophomore year of high school, I requested such an accomendation from College Board/ETS for my AP Euro exam(which incidently, I kicked the ass thereof). It turns out, the College Board grants a 50% time increase to anyone recieving any kind of accomendation. Thus, for every hour of test time, I was permitted to take an hour and a half. Now on any standardized test, time is a huge factor. To take that much extra time, I would be seriously distorting the test results(In most cases, to the point of invalidation). Now comes the SATs for which, I'll point out, I wasn't actually recieving any accomendation at all.
The first time I took the test, I got a 1240, which isn't a horrible score, but I knew it should be higher(based on PSAT results, I should have been at like 1350). Now you'll recall that I could take, at my option, 50% extra time on any ETS test. I had numerious people, including my beloved guidance counselor, ( I mean tha literally, he's one of the few people I've ever heard of actually live up to the name and provide guidance) to take the extra time and improve my score to get into CMU and get scholarships. Note that no admissions person would even know I took the extra time. I refused as a matter of principle. I got a 1490.
Now I could have taken the extra time I probably would have scored a little higher on the math section (my verbal score, unlike the first time was literally perfect, i.e. I not only got an 800 but did not miss a single question) and would have ended up somewhere in the low 1500s. However, I never would have known if the score was due to my own ability or to the unfair advantage I was granted. Futhermore, it would have undervalued all the other achievement that score garnered me, including the initial fliter stage of my scholarship (which I subsequently earned by demonstrating non-standardized intellectual merit).
What does this have to do with Affirmative Action, you ask? My point is that artifical advantage undervalues achievement, not only of those not given the advantage, but even more so to those who recieve the advantage. This has two implications. First, it says to America's minorities(which is a set apparently including women who comprise 52% of the population, another thing I don't understand)., that clearly you aren't good enough to be judged by normal "white" standards. Besides being horribly insulting, this encourages minority youths achieve less than their full potetial and let their skin color carry them through. Second and more importantly, it creates the stigma that every sucessful minority person got where they are because of their race. I often wonder how many people I meet who don't know me and hear I have a scholarship assume it's due to my cripplehood. I'm sure there have been some.

Now let's look at why people say we need Affirmative Action, all of the agruments I've heard essentially boil down to two issues.

The Racist Argument:
Somewhere along the line it got into people's heads that affirmative action was a tool to combat racism. I'm not sure why this is. I mean there exist perfectly good anti-discrimination laws which serve to prevent denial of admission or empolyment on the basis of race, sex, religion,cripplehood etc. Now whether these laws are as effective as they ought to be is another issues. The way to increase their effectiveness is not to hold a guy to employers' heads forcing them to hire minorities. From from what it being claimed this only serves to engender racism as this is seen as an unfair advantage. I also am going to take the bold step of pointing out that forcing a scavenger hunt for token minorities in order to seem "un-racist" is not particularly good for the economy as it often forces away more quanlified non-minorities. It's also not particularly good for the token, for reasons discussed above. Reducing racism is a great goal, Affirmative Action isn't the way to do it.

The Socio-Economic/Advantage Argument:
The thrust of this seems perfectly reasonable at first. Since minorities are disportionatly disvantaged(that mean poor, for those of you who forgot their English-Politically Correct Babble Dictionary), they ought to be accorded a bit of leg up. However, this misses two important facts:
1) The millions of poor white men who are not being accorded this and 2) The fact that the reason they are being given the advantage has nothing to do with previous advantages, but with race. Have these people spent so little time in rural America that they seriously think poverty is confined to the inner-city ghettos? I submit to you that a poor white boy and a poor black youth have much more in common than their suburban counterparts of the same race as they. I have no problem with, say an interviewer looking at someone who pulled himself up from nothing versus someone who had everything given to her from birth and developing a preference for the former (assuming other qualifications were roughly equal). If you'd like to propose a program to helo do that, I'll listen. It's not what Affirmative Action does. Again, the real solution is to bridge those advantage gaps by fixing the holes in public education (no, I don't know how to do that, though I'm damn sure vouchers aren't the answer).

Final Thoughts on "Reverse Racism":
For most people, "Reverse Racism" is about white men losing jobs to black lesbians in wheelchairs. Considering how many incompotent white men still seem to be able to find jobs, I think this is less of a problem than it's made out to be. My real issue with it and the reason Affirmative Action effects in my such a visceral anger is that it reduces the Civil Rights Movement(and the unsung struggles of various minority groups in America) to the purpose of simply bettering the lot in life of minorities. If you want to be judged "not by the color of [your] skin" but by "the content of [your] character," then it ought to appal you too.
Comments and counterarguments welcome.
-CI