Affirmative action most greatly hurts precisely those whom it is allegedly intended to help: intelligent, hard-working, meritorious individuals who happen to belong to some kind of minority group. Affirmative action policies encourage condemnation and discrimination leveled against such individuals from virtually all sides.

             Mark, a hypothetical individual, is a highly intelligent, undoubtedly qualified African-American professional who has always worked industriously and studied diligently. He passed the admissions exam to his professional school with flying colors and earned the top grades in all of his classes. Yet his was a school that practiced affirmative action and simultaneously admitted numerous less-qualified students than he, simply because they happened to be African-American. These students were judged by a much lower academic standard than the typical criteria for admission; while Mark far surpassed the institution’s conventional standards, the applicants admitted on the basis of affirmative action fell short of even those.

            In order to appear “respectful of racial diversity,” the school often treats the students admitted because of affirmative action more leniently than the rest. While Mark willingly takes on all the rigor that a good professional training offers, some of his peers are allowed to slide by in their classes, merely on account of their race. When it comes time to graduate, Mark gets his hard-earned degree, but the affirmative-action students also get theirs.

            As a result of hundreds of schools practicing affirmative action, the world of work has been inundated with holders of professional degrees who lack an adequate degree of skill. The vast majority of these individuals are members of minority groups who were favored by affirmative action. As a result, the performance statistics for these entire minority groups have been consistently below the performance statistics for groups that do not receive special privileges.            

            In the world of work, employers or other business associated seldom have the opportunity to come to understand a given applicant enough to determine whether he is an exception to prevailing trends among people of his racial, ethnic, or educational background. Often, simply to save time, stereotypes based on these group attributes are formed – which serve as a great hindrance to the exceptional individuals who do not meet the stereotypes. Potential employers see that Mark has gone to a school that practiced affirmative action. They know that many of the African-American graduates of that school do not have adequate skills for the job. Despite their intentions to judge people on merit alone and not on race, it is easy and tempting for these employers to assume the same about Mark.

            So Mark, when applying for a job or seeking to do business services for an organization, has an uphill battle to fight. The prevailing stereotype he must face is that, because Mark is African-American, at least part of his success must be due to affirmative action. Through quality work, Mark can disprove this notion in the eyes of some individuals, but he will always have the stereotype as an initial hurdle to overcome whenever he tries to form new business connections.

            Do people like Mark get help from members of their own minority groups? Hardly! One of the devastating cultural effects of affirmative action is the formation of stereotypes of victimhood within the favored minority groups themselves. The presence of affirmative action policies makes it far easier to cry “Racism!” with regard to the prevailing state of society. “After all,” many minority-group social and political leaders argue, “if there were no widespread racism, why would the government and the universities need to practice affirmative action to combat the racism?”

            Of course, people like Mark do not like to play the oppressed victim. They see real opportunities for which skin color is irrelevant, and they seize those opportunities by means of industry and ambition. In the process, they become more skilled, knowledgeable, disciplined, and morally upright than many of the members of their minority group.

            But those who accept the view of their own victimhood have names to call Mark. He is an “Uncle Tom,” an “Oreo cookie,” a “traitor to his people,” or a “collaborator” with some kind of oppressive “establishment,” simply because he does not see himself as inherently limited or bound to suffer on account of his race. To those who constantly revive the specter of racism, Mark is a living counterexample – a man who prospers by diligently working alongside individuals without giving consideration to their skin color or ethnicity. He must either be ignored altogether or transformed by sophistries into one of the enemy.

            It is essential to note that this condemnation within a minority group of its most successful and moral members only exists among groups favored by affirmative action. Jewish-Americans do not do it; Irish-Americans do not do it; Japanese-Americans do not do it; German-Americans do not do it – even though individuals in each of these groups have faced substantial discrimination at some time during the 20^th century. Mostly, the phenomenon of hating those who ought to be one’s role models only exists in today’s African American, Latino, or Native American communities – precisely the groups which are today beneficiaries of affirmative action.

            We all know bright, productive, and exceptionally good individuals from practically every minority group. Yet many of these people face injustices today, not despite affirmative action, but because of it. It is time to abolish racial preferences in workplaces, governments, and academia, and to allow the people of merit – whatever their racial or ethnic background – to rise to the top. 

Read Mr. Stolyarov's new comprehensive treatise, A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light, life, consciousness, and volition, here.

Read Mr. Stolyarov's new four-act play, Implied Consent, a futuristic intellectual drama on the sanctity of human life, here.