Arizona Bans Affirmative Action, Not for Rich People

Let’s get one thing straight about affirmative action before I get into Arizona’s latest brouhaha:  Minorities are NOT the only ones who benefit from it.  Except when rich or privileged people do it it’s called nicer things, given words that flow from the tongue, like “legacy” and “alumnus” and “tradition.”

To Arizona.  Voters in that state approved Proposition 107, in order to blast any doubts that they had disdain for people of a particular skin tone, “to ban the consideration of race, ethnicity or gender by units of state government, including public colleges and universities.”  Not only that, it passed with about 60% support.

Being a native of California and having played this game before (Prop. 209 anyone?) this means that, not only does Arizona want to profile anyone “reasonably suspicious” and ban ethnic studies (but just Latino and African-American studies, Jewish studies and Native American studies are okay), but now this bastion of tolerance is going to prevent all those powerful brown people from overtaking their institutions of higher learning and workplaces, too.

That’s funny.

When Proposition 209 was going strong in California it was the same kind of rhetoric — that merit was more important, that Martin Luther King, Jr., that it wasn’t fair — but what I think is odd is that this worship of meritocracy only goes one way.  It never comes back in the other direction, when people getting by because of connections, or money or legacies, or whatever other machinations go on take place.

Probably has something to do with living in post-racial America…