Wednesday’s U.S. District Court ruling in Detroit bars the University of Michigan’s law school from factoring race in judging its applicants. Soon enough the U.S. Supreme Court will be forced to rule on affirmative action at schools nationwide. If our Supreme Court makes the right decision, there will be no more po’ intelligent Irish-American brothers who desperately want to learn placing second to wealthy Nigerian-American lasses who did well on the SATs because of the Princeton Review and couldn’t care less about education.
Affirmative action is meant to help integrate a society struggling with deep-rooted racism, but as the practice is inherently racist, it ultimately preserves the sad situation. America does not want to be racist but can’t quite help itself. It is time for the thinkers of this country to put aside modernity and Plato’s forms for a while and get to work on racism.
How do we, as compassionate philosophers, responsible citizens of earth, figure out how to remove from the minds of our people the insidious idea that the color of one’s skin represents the authoritative aspect of one’s unique identity?
Subconsciously, if we continue to use skin color to define ourselves in structuring our personal identity, our outlook on the world — more precisely our perception of other people — abides and perpetuates racism without our knowing it.
Racial identification, when it is the primary characteristic that we observe when we see people, puts the cart before the horse and yields a contorted view of society. We are not primarily black or white, and then, secondarily human. The fact that gender follows skin color in everyday language (“black dude,” “white chick”) illustrates my point.
If we continue to honor skin color as worthy of identifying an individual person, we perpetuate a racial profile that carries with it vast undue generalization about this race or that. Racism, which at its heart, rages with the authority of identifying people first by skin color, and then by species, and then by other traits such as personality. Black man, white man, yellow man, red man — the colors aren’t even true! Why is it socially acceptable to refer to people from Europe as whites and people from Africa as blacks if it is not socially acceptable to call people from Asia yellows or people from India browns?
Today, in homogenized America, skin color generalizations do not signify ethnicity; at most they hint at it. What does white mean? Black? Asian? Why not Kenyan, Saipanese, Masaii, American, Vermonter, Individual? Why must the complexity of true identity, complete with unique ancestral heritage and unique personality in every case, be reduced to the barest possible aesthetic distinction? Social conventions follow the path of least resistance, and so skin color (not even actual color but symbolic color) becomes a primary identifying factor for and of human beings because it is so easily ascertained.
We yearn for unity and try to find it in everything by seeking to apply the most basic and universally obvious distinctions we can see upon the various complex issues confronting us. Driving this absurd quest is the hope of someday getting everything broken down to one distinction, one generalization, and thus finding the answer. This is vanity and insanity and will be our downfall if we don’t wise up and start recognizing who we are.
I have a complex family history of brave Scotsmen and Irishmen swinging broadswords and battleaxes for freedom and escaping English tyranny by sailing o’er the great gray Atlantic and founding a new home in the free north woods of East America. Can we reduce the many centuries of unique struggle and accomplishment my ancestors lived to the word “white”? No, I won’t let it happen.
The word white does not do justice to my identity; I am much, much more, so don’t insult my family by reducing me to a color that vaguely resembles the tone of my skin. Let us stop insulting each other right now, or I might be forced to throw on my kilt and take a broadsword to all y’all ign’ant assets.
[ Scott Miller is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. ]
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