Friday, July 23, 2010
Who Counts? Not Visible Minorities...
You can't argue that the federal government's employment equity laws are a necessary ameliorative program, if you don't have the statistics to compare the employment levels of whites and visible minorities of the same level of education.
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But you could argue that teaching "tollerance" by passing laws that require us to make arbitrary judgments about "race" is like beating a child to help them learn than violence is wrong.
ReplyDelete"We are all equal".. except when the census and employment equity laws say that you aren't.
The purpose of affirmative action is not to teach "tollerance" [sic]. That is, it's not for the benefit of the privileged. It's not all about you, Harvie, as difficult as that may be for you to understand.
ReplyDeleteThe purpose of affirmative action is to make sure that people of different races and ethnicities all have the same shot at getting a job, in spite of intolerance.
This country does not just recognize and promote formal equality, but substantive equality. Formal equality presumes that saying "we are all equal" makes it so. Substantive equality recognizes that positive steps must be taken to ameliorate the effects of historic and structural discrimination.
To quote LBJ, "You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe you have been completely fair..."