Posted on 01/24/2003 2:16:17 PM PST by mrustow
This may require 20/20 hindsight on King's part, but I don't think it's possible to support a government program as a temporary measure. Once instituted, it is so difficult to end a program, that we have to look at every one we support as permanent.
Note too that virtually all civil rights leaders supported quotas, without any notion of them being temporary, and Justice Thurgood Marshall privately told people 30 years ago, that AA would be necessary "for 100 years," which is just another way of saying, "forever."
G.W. has been dead for 203 years, but people still care. Hey, you're dead, but I still care.
Apparently, millions of people do care.
I'm sorry, sneaky, but I can't understand you when you talk with marbles in your mouth. Just spit out what you want to say, and stop beating around the bush!
I don't have any argument with this. The people on this board who attack MLK so much should learn a little more about George Washington.* Heros are rarely perfect and shooting them down is not a conservative enterprise.
Re King and AA, there was just a bit on this in an autobiography which I read many years ago, and I am almost certain it was that of Ralph Abernathy. According to Abernathy, at the end of his life King had to decide whether to concentrate on getting what he had won actually enforced, or move on to new issues. According to Abernathy, he chose the latter in part due to fear of being seen as an irrelevant has-been within a new more militant black America. This earned Abernathy predictable denunciations as a race traitor, even though the book was mostly sympathetic to King.
* If anyone really must know about this allusion, check out the Washington book by Marvin Kitman. And anyone who wants to denounce the book (even though it is mostly in Washington's words) is free to do so and will get no retort from me.
Hindsight? King lived in a time (as did my parents who grew up in Miss.) when there was NO justice for a black person. To them, injustice was just too real. King's generation took the best chances they could get to seek any sort of balance.
Marshall was radical. But remember, that generation SAW things that would absolutely unacceptable today (ie. James Byrd's murder) and often nothing was done at the time.
He's been real quiet about it for some time now.
So, maybe, just maybe, you are looking at King's generation through pc blinders.
Look how many times Byron De La Beckwith had to be tried in order to convict him of a crime everybody knew he committed. De La Beckwith (I still can't figure out what the deal is with that name) was the O.J. of the sixties!
Maybe, just maybe, you are blind to the realities of that time.
But what did "affirmative action" mean? My understanding is that at the time it merely meant ensuring that whites with inferior credentials were not given preference over blacks with superior credentials, not that blacks with inferior credentials should be given preference over whites with superior credentials.
I would expect that King would support the former and oppose the latter.
I've read that when "Affirmative Action" was first introduced, its purpose was purely to ensure that blacks weren't discriminated against. Its purpose was later corrupted to discriminate "in favor" of blacks [I use the quotes because such discrimination in the long term benefits neither blacks nor whites].
And George Washington kept slaves, so what. In both cases the good these men did far outweigh their wrongs.
Maybe, just maybe, you are blind to the realities of that time.
That's why I know about all the economic progress blacks made prior to pc, and their lack of progress since.
I've read that when "Affirmative Action" was first introduced, its purpose was purely to ensure that blacks weren't discriminated against. Its purpose was later corrupted to discriminate "in favor" of blacks [I use the quotes because such discrimination in the long term benefits neither blacks nor whites].
When AA was introduced, its cover story was that it functioned as a tie-breaker method, "all other things being equal," and also as a form of "outreach" for qualified blacks. However, it quickly became clear to people dealing with federal officials from agencies like the EEOC, that their real agenda was "Just hire the black [or as folks said in those days, Negro] candidate." The EEOC bean-counters set up dual standards for blacks and whites, respectively. Political scientist John Bunzel, who ca. 1970 was the president of a Calif. State U. system campus (San Francisco State?), wrote about this in The American Scholar around 1990.
Since "outreach" was already a fraud thirty-odd years ago, anyone who supports it now, is just a phony pulling a Bill Clinton on race -- or has no idea what he's talking about.
And George Washington kept slaves, so what. In both cases the good these men did far outweigh their wrongs.
Most of George Washington's good deeds have stood up to the test of time; but with every year that passes, MLK's legacy becomes more tarnished. Or do you know about a bunch of MLK's achievements that I'm not aware of? Or are you just echoing the official story on King?
BTW, did you bother reading the article at the top of this thread? I mean the whole article, not the first few sentences.
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