California is the poster child for failed socialist policies. It’s the place where hippies and communalists went to create their idea of utopia, but, instead, ended up with a hyper-dystopian society. Quoting George Kelly from his book on Personal Construct Theory, the problem, for them, these many years later is “Any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation is a psychological disorder.”
Thus, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, State Senator Edward Hernandez, a California Democrat, has proposed a constitutional amendment “that would repeal prohibitions on the consideration of race or gender in public education programs.” Senate Constitutional Amendment 5 (SCA 5) is another transpicuous attempt to remove the garlic from the coffin of the race-based affirmative action vampires. In this case, the garlic is Prop 209, the 1996 California ballot proposition which prohibited state government institutions from using race, sex, and/or ethnicity specifically in the areas of public employment, public contract, or public education.
It was modeled on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and originated from Ward Connerly based on his belief that race-based discrimination is wrong regardless of how it is being employed and the empirical data that race/sex gender-based affirmative action does not enhance, it retards. Equally as important is the fact that California voters approved of the Prop 209 by over a nine percent margin making its victory even more dramatic.
As is the case with every good socialist liberal, they need a tangible to promote as a scapegoat which in turn allows them to garner support for their Erebusic agendas. Typically and historically that scapegoat has been white people, but Hernandez has come up with a new bugga-boo to cast as the devil. Hernandez claims that it is unfair (read: racist) for Asian students to be so heavily represented on the campuses of California’s state universities. As reported by the Global Times, Hernandez “said publicly the reason for the bill is that there are too many Asian students in colleges and not enough black and Hispanic students.” (Affirmative Action Irks Asians In US; Rong Xiaoqing; 3/6/14)
DARN IT!! The nerve of those doggone Asian students to dare to study and sacrifice for good grades and academic achievement. How dare they?
But as usual, the devil is in the details, and the details are that following the logic of Hernandez there should be more Asians in jail since the California prison population is disproportionately black and Hispanic. Shouldn’t we have equitable diversity in the California penal system? Shouldn’t there be more Asian junkies, dope dealers, pimps, and hos? Because blacks and Hispanics definitely have the corner on those areas of enterprise. And what about the NBA and the NFL? Shouldn’t there be more Asian point guards in the NBA and more Asian quarterbacks in the NFL? In fact, shouldn’t there be an Asian quarterback in the NFL period? And why aren’t there Asian head coaches in any of the professional sports? Why aren’t there Asian head coaches of teams in Division One colleges? Why aren’t there more Asian college presidents – specifically in California schools?
If Hernandez and those like him are so concerned about diversity and race-fairness then why is he openly discriminating against Asians? Why does he cast Asian students as worthy of demonization because they dare to invest themselves in the pursuit of academic achievement juxtaposed to punt, pass, throw, kick, gold chains, gold teeth, baby mammas, baby daddies, and tattoos?
Hernandez and those who advocate for rewarding under-performance with scholarships that result in fewer scholarships for those who have better grades and better test scores would like us to overlook that “giving” a person something they are not qualified and/or prepared to handle or maximize benefit from is further sentencing that person to diminished capacity pursuant to life preparation, inferiority complexes, and self-loathing that is acted out in hostility. A person placed in a position in which they intrinsically are aware they are not prepared to succeed reasonably will invariably find anti-social avenues to mask their anger at not being prepared to achieve.
Hernandez makes no secret that SCA 5 isn’t about black and Hispanic students succeeding in higher education; it is about having a balance of color on the campuses that is pleasing to socialist-liberals. To which I offer, since that is their primary objective why not just paint a few statues around campus? Why not invest in cardboard standies of blacks and Hispanics?
As Xiaoqing noted: “According to the latest data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, among students graduating from high school in 2012, the college enrollment rate for Asians was 82.2 percent, 16 percentage points higher than the average and the highest among all races, including whites. ... Translated into reality, the data means that at some colleges in areas with relatively high Asian populations there are more Asian students than from any other groups. For example, among the freshman admitted to the state university system of California in the current school year, 36 percent are Asian, 28.1 percent are white, 27.6 are Hispanic, and only 4.2 percent are black. … This is not only a California phenomenon and it doesn’t only happen to colleges either. More than 70 percent of the students at New York’s Stuyvesant High School are Asian. It is the best public high school in the city whose admission is based on a single entrance test. The proportions of Hispanic and Black students are both only in single digits.”
What is obvious to those of reasonable and rational minds is that black children are not driven to pursue academia with the same intensity as we witness with other children. The statistics do not lie. It serves no useful purpose to vilify those students who are purpose driven in their pursuit of academic achievement. And it is an absolute canard that to have a color-coded campus somehow enhances the academic environment.
It is clear that Hernandez is not concerned with academic performance nor is he consumed by the bigotry of racial preferences. If said were not the case he would acknowledge that the number of colors enrolled in the college system is not the primary concern. The primary concern is the number of students who graduate from the system and are equipped to pursue careers. It is an undeniable fact that precisely because of Prop 209, while the number of color-coded enrollments is down the number of color-coded graduates has dramatically increased in the years since it was instituted.
It’s not that Hernandez and those like him do not understand that they are discriminatory; it’s that they doesn’t care. Race-based affirmative action is not synonymous with fairness; it is the transmogrification of a merit-based, skilled nation into a color-coded, government-dependent one.
Mychal S. Massie is the former National Chairman of the conservative black think tank, Project 21-The National Leadership Network of Black Conservatives; and a member of its parent think tank, the National Center for Public Policy Research. You can find more at mychal-massie.com.
