| You are buying what the racists are selling - the idea that progress for minorities comes at the expense of white people. Almost all affirmative action is designed to help pushing inclusion and participation, not just pushing the end goal. You set a target for numbers of candidates you interview to be minorities, which helps you get more opportunity to find capable people who happen to be minorities. They still have to be the best candidate at the end of the day. People acting without any discrimination doesn't magically fix the world - look at Chess. Sure, women could play in tournaments, but they largely didn't. It took the creation of women's only tournaments to grow a community and give role models, and now we have women who are grandmasters and play in normal tournaments very successfully. Even something as simple as your subconscious bias while hiring, if you see more minority candidates, your mental model of what someone who can do that job looks like will change, and maybe when it's borderline you don't instinctively just go with the white guy because that's what's familiar. Trying to make a world where all people have equal opportunity is important. Right now, too much of the time the opportunities just aren't there because of history. It's not as easy as saying "you can't discriminate" to someone overtly racist, it's having a classroom and getting one of the girls to try programming - something she might never try (because it's not a "girl thing"), even if it's something she might love doing, if she did. The defaults and patterns of our society are built on our history, and our history was racist and sexist. Changing that requires active thought and effort, and painting that as just trying to bring the straight white man down is the aim of these kinds of people. |
I didn't say that affirmative action comes at the expense of white people, I said (implicitly, by presenting an example) that it comes at the expense of the people it tries to help.