“There’s nothing ‘equal’ about employment when affirmative action is in vogue.”
As a guest on a radio talkshow, I was asked for my view about SB 1070, the Arizona law featured in headlines across the nation. I said that I approved what the Arizonans had done because the federal government wasn’t doing its job and the people were simply demanding relief from the flood of illegal immigrants who had poured into their state.
Talkshow co-host number one was aghast. Asked why, she swiftly offered, “It’s profiling!”
Though I could have correctly countered that it isn’t profiling, I decided on this occasion to take a different tack. “So you don’t like profiling?” I said.
“Not at all,” came the reply.
“Then you must be opposed to affirmative action, which is profiling on steroids.”
Dead silence ensued, interrupted a moment later by co-host number two who offered, “That’s a great argument.”
Naming the radio personalities isn’t necessary. The point about profiling having caused co-host number one some deep embarrassment, the program moved on to another topic.
Affirmative action is nothing without profiling. It has been enforced by government decrees for decades. In the upside-down world in which we live, it’s perhaps not surprising to know that the practice grew from a 1964 law whose wording emphatically barred the practice. That’s right; the 1964 Civil Rights Act specifically forbade relying on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin when hiring. Henceforth, employers covered by the act (meaning most throughout the nation) were forbidden to discriminate in any of these manners when hiring, promoting, etc. One of the act’s most outspoken promoters, Minnesota’s Senator Hubert Humphrey, offered to “start eating the pages one after another” if anyone could show that an employer would have to hire on the basis of skin color, national origin, etc.
But here’s what happened: The act spawned creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency given power to interpret the law, encourage compliance, and bring charges against an employer deemed to be in violation. One year later, President Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 mandating the very opposite of what the 1964 act had forbidden. Now, employers were forced to consider the very human attributes they were forbidden to note one year earlier. A madhouse had been erected. Affirmative action, merely talked about for several years, was now law. Its legacy has emphatically heightened race consciousness all across the nation. And Senator Humphrey never ate any of the act’s pages.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/opinion/953-john-f-mcmanus/4008-profiling-on-steroids