Minority it is a pretty high charged word these days.
In has been so for as long as we can remember and probably longer still.
We remember a joke from a 70’s sitcom where a white woman was denied a job because the only opening available was reserved for a half black half Hispanic gay man.
Funny joke.
When our kids were entering school we joked around about claiming minority status for them by virtue of their mother’s Spanish Jewish heritage. Sure it had been 500 years since the expulsion but her family still spoke a kind of Spanish at home. And home for most of those 500 years was North Africa which made them, although lily white, Africans as well.
We decided against it because there is a line where a good joke ends and bad taste begins.
We have been think about it again however with the birth of our grandson Oz Avraham Mowzowski who despite his name, strawberry blond hair and sky blue eyes is three quarters African thanks to his father’s South African birth.
Our little Ozzie can also claim to be three quarters Asian since his mother and paternal grandfather were both born in Israel.
The one fact about Ozzie’s identity that will not do him any good at least when it comes to college admittance, financial aid, or job placement in America is the central one. Our little man is Jew.
This might come as a surprise to many of our readers but Jews along with Chinese, Hindus, Japanese and every European ethnic group even if they fled here for their lives are not among the “minorities” in America. To which we say “Thank G-d”.
Sure the perks look good, easy admission reduced or waived cost perhaps even a guaranteed job in some government office or non-profit NGO or maybe even private enterprise.
But after more than of a half century of results of so called affirmative action prove that set asides for our “minorities” has proven a disaster. Perhaps not for a few individuals but in terms group dynamics the numbers paint a depressing picture. Instead of leveling the playing field for the formally repressed minorities, racial and ethnic preferences have resulted in more poverty and less achievement than the days before affirmative action was implemented.
We should have known.
Giving advantage to one group over others never works out.
There is a reason why when a white man speaks with a southern accent we reduce his perceived IQ by 20 or 30 points and it is the same reason why the same deduction is made for the landed aristocracy of Britain.
It is not that all those people are morons it is just that after generations of preferred treatment more than a few morons have slipped threw the cracks.
Luckily for southern whites and English aristocrats they are still more or less in charge or at least still at the table.
The same cannot be said for the Afrikaners descendents of the original Dutch settlers in South Africa.
After generations of being given set asides, protected jobs, and affirmative action these Boers once at the top of the apartheid pyramid fell to the bottom of the new South Africa and they are still there.
Funny thing other South African whites who had to make it pretty much on their own even in the days of apartheid are doing just fine economically even though many are leaving because of increase violence and hooliganism.
Just how a helping hand turns out to be a foot on the neck has been debated until the cows come home.
We think it is very simple.
It is a question of dignity.
Whatever you call it, affirmative action quotas or set asides, pervert the old saying– give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish he eats for life- may be true. But to guarantee our fisherman a catch robs him of his dignity.
And a man black, white or indifferent needs his dignity, a people even more so.
Declaring them so damaged or so privileged that cannot make it on their own is demeaning and destructive.
It is to shackle them to whims of history, which sometimes as the Boers will attest has a way of changing.