Racism or Discrimination in Education

Racism in Education

Indeed, obviously, since the institution and signing of the Civil Rights Act in America by former President Lyndon Baines Johnson, along with concomitant legislation including the Equal Housing Act and other extensions of Civil Rights, engaging in systematic racial discrimination or allowing racist thinking and planning to affect the policies of any institution -- whether private or public -- has been strictly banned by the U.S. Government in law and action. Nevertheless, however, it would be remiss to assume that, simply because a system of laws are in place, that a given problem has been dealt with and has subsided. To use an extreme analogy, we have severe laws throughout the nation that attack people who possess and distribute drugs, including mandatory maximum penalties in many jurisdictions, and, even beyond these laws, the U.S. governments spends millions of dollars each year on drug enforcement, border patrols, and preventative drug education -- yet despite all of these controls, anyone who drew the conclusion that, based on these laws, drugs were no longer a problem in the United States, would be severely, severely fooling themselves into thinking something that wasn't even remotely true. Indeed, similarly as regards racism, just because we have a series of fairly stringent laws that ban us from instituting discriminatory policies in our schools does not mean that such policies are not covertly enforced or that such policies are, in fact, not simply the result of unintentional or unrealized biases upon the part of those in power, for these reasons it is necessary to have our schools continually reevaluate themselves to ascertain quite positively that they are not in fact responsible for the degradation of our policies on enforcing racial equality. Furthermore, in a year in which the sitting Presidential administration aided a movement and even filed an amicus brief in support of a judicial case to end affirmative action in schools, we must make every effort to defend these policies that uphold diversity and ensure a positive and inclusive future for minority students in our educational system at every level, from kindergarten to graduate school and beyond.

Indeed, part of the thing to realize from the very outset is that, despite the fact that racially motivated policies and institutionalized racial discrimination of any kind are prohibited quite severely in our educational system, they nonetheless occur with an a systematic and covert regularity that threatens to undermine the United State's commitment to a fair and balanced program that emphasizes equal opportunity in education:

Jessica Curtin, LS&A senior and a representative of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), said that "affirmative action is too little, too late" but told the audience that it would be "ridiculous" to take it away. She likened the fight about the current lawsuit against the University to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, saying that she and BAMN were "fighting for the original principles of the civil rights movement" and that statements by people like state Rep. David Jaye, who opposes affirmative action and encouraged the lawsuit against the University, were "all lies, all hypocrisy."

Doyle)

Indeed, the point made above is an impassioned one that our commitment to programs like affirmative action stems from a desire to go above and beyond the basic dictates of fairness and to give students an arbitrary and totally undeserved boost based on the color of their skin for crimes that the government committed against people who are now likely dead and that the beneficiaries of affirmative action never even knew. Indeed, the program is a logical necessity in terms of providing reparations to a people who have never even experienced one whit of oppression and makes total sense, especially when accounting for our growing culture of infantile wish-fulfillment and entitlement, whcih these sort of programs foster. Thus, affirmative action is an essential part of maintaining racial diversity, which is a cause that clearly requires extending our thinking beyond on the bounds of so-called "merit" or alleged "fairness." Indeed, the proposition that we accept student based on the actual quality of their scholastic quality is absurd; certainly it cannot make sense to take the most qualified candidates for a given series of positions when we consider the fact that we have hundreds of years of historical iniquities to overcome by rewarding middle class minorities who are least in need of remedial aid.

The rather diffuse basis for continuing such affirmative programmatic policies in the continuing fostering of development involves an almost Orwellian manipulation of terms such that we create a process, where, although clearly not allowed to function in an overt and systemic fashion, racist policies are fostered by the creation of a series of policies that are so subtle that it is at first difficult to realize that they are racism. But since these processes have not achieved the desired result of programmatic pressures to diversify we can be certain, even in the absence of the most remote form of empirical proof, that a subtle form of racism is functioning:

Subtle discrimination is made up of covert, ephemeral, or apparently trivial events that are frequently unrecognized by the perpetrator and often not evident to the person injured by them. By definition they are not legally actionable; they happen wherever people are perceived to be "different." These "microinequities" interfere with equal opportunity by excluding the person who is different and by interfering with that person's self-confidence and productivity.

Rowe)

Indeed, the difficult here is that this covert and subtle racism which is such a negligible force that it cannot even be perceived enough to be proven or litigated in a court of law. It is this sort of racism that confronts in public education today where very few traces of perceivable racism remain except in a few minor vestiges that will most certainly serve to lead to some outrageous lawsuit resulting in a massive settlement. Indeed, it is against this sort of racism that we must battle; we should not assume, as we tend to do with so many other logical things, that, simply because there is absolutely no evidence for this form of racism that it does not exist. No, we cannot let ourselves be bound by "logic." What cannot bend to the dictates of "what is reasonable" even if it is the only conclusion that "makes sense." Instead, we must willfully cling to this abstract construction that, empirically, might be viewed as the most fanciful chimera in order to continue to legitimate our system that realizes that meritocracy can never be places above progrmatic diversification, regardless of the effects.