Anyway, one of the case studies taught was that on Affirmative Action. As one might suspect, most of the white students were against it without knowing what it prescribed, parroting the claim of Ed Meese in the Reagan administration that it was "reverse discrimination" (which opened internecine war in that administration between him and George Schultz, the architect of AA in the Nixon administration!--like, Oh, Yeah, old Republican White Guys are going to concoct a plain to discriminate against themselves!).
I put together what another, very incisive, Ph.D. pal asserted was an airtight argument why AA was not so-called reverse discrimination (I'll spare you the details; trust me, it was airtight!). Of course, after presenting it, I humbly asked students to find the flaws in my reasoning. None did. However, what became readily apparent was that even with the understanding that AA was predicated on census numbers, encouraging that any organization at all levels reflect the make-up of its hiring pool, and even with the understanding that anyone hired must be deemed able to do the job, many students simply assumed that, regardless, any person of African descent could not be capable of doing a given job; they continued to see it as a 0-sum game in which a job filled by a person of color, e.g., was one not filled by a White. This, even when I pointed out that a person of color could claim, as many Whites did, that they did not get the job because they were of color, i.e., their percentage had been met, even as many Whites claimed that they did not get jobs because they were White. Of course, both claims were and would have been spurious if the White or Black percentage slice of the pie were full.
What became apparent as well was that many White students just wanted the whole pie, as they had been eating it for generations. This propelled me into adding explorations of the historical genesis stereotypes of African-American inferiority in a number of respects, showing how these might be deconstructed in order to take a fresh look once also the playing field was continuously leveled, something AA played a small role in doing; obviously, it didn't remediate or repair generations of systematic economic set-back for persons of African descent, throughout Segregation up to the present. How much this historical analysis helped, I cannot say. Those with the courage to look and see and understand do so, many do not have that courage. In fine, what became apparent to me were the practical limits of reason and Reason. You can't reason with people too scared to examine and jettison prejudgments and assumptions they've imbibed with mommy's milk, or formula, or whatever. Hence, today, I subscribe to the view of an old friend who was part of the SDS uprising at Harvard College: the left and Left must learn how to wield power and, before that, take power. It is up to us to do so, incrementally or catastrophically, and create a dispensation in which it is easier for people to be reasonable. Perhaps we should force them to study the Liberal Arts!
