May 10, 2012

PC and AA

By Don Kirk in Social Regress & Social Progress

Harry Stein has an article in the May 8th on-line City Journal that expresses dismay at the firing of education author and blogger Naomi Riley by the Chronicle for Higher Education, a major publication for the academy. Mrs. Riley’s blog was highly critical of the quality of research being submitted by graduate students in Black Studies. Married to a black man (Jason Riley, who sits on the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board), nevertheless the Left-liberal outcry against Mrs. Riley’s views accused her of being racist.

Clearly she is no racist, so let’s just throw out such a criticism as knee-jerk hate.

The hate is ideological. The effort to save the reputation of Black Studies adopts ‘political correctness’ (PC for short) to embarrass, humiliate, or otherwise discredit the critic. It is a sure sign of the weakness of an argument whenever it uses the straw-man fallacy to deflect a valid criticism back upon the critic.

Let’s take as moral that discrimination against race is wrong, because the discrimination diminishes the value of human life, promotes Exclusion, and thus feeds hate. However, notice that discrimination FOR race accomplishes the same deleterious effects. Thus the promoting of discrimination in favor of race by Affirmative Action programs merely perpetuates the hatred of racial discrimination by simply flipping the object of discrimination. This, in the name of social progress to end racism, Affirmative Action is actually social regress by perpetuating racism.

If discrimination against race is immoral, then discrimination in favor of race is immoral. And if the research being done in a favored-discriminatory academic discipline is weak, then the criticism is valid. Mrs. Riley should sue…for discrimination against telling the truth.