Clarified and Enlightened on Positive Discrimination: Antiracist Racism Goodbye!

class=”sc-29f61514-0 fQbOYE”>

Imagine that smart Martians come to visit us. I’m sure you’d be especially surprised by the people on Earth at the moment: all the different people who think they’re so advanced are just dividing their own kind according to race and gender.

Individuals, each unique and individual, are obsessively sorted into collective categories: skin color, gender, sexual orientation. Anti-racism and anti-sexism are sung in hymns, but Martians don’t let themselves be fooled. They know that in the adult world, not words are important, but actions. All social classifications mean nothing less than a new apartheid, albeit well disguised in the name of anti-racism. Could it be even more absurd?

The human world, observed by the Martians, has long become our world, but not everyone has realized this yet. This development was pioneered by the United States, which in the 1960s – 100 years after the abolition of slavery – again officially began to classify people along racist and sexist lines. First, it was about skin color, then gender, and finally, sexual orientation. The idea: in the future, the state should give preference to disadvantaged minorities. Negative discrimination must be eliminated by positive discrimination (“affirmative action”).

The critics came early, but the spirit of the times was against them. But now the US Constitutional Court has ruled that university preference for blacks, Hispanics, or Native Americans violates the constitutional principle of equality. This judgment is not conservative, as some complain, but wise.

First, injustice cannot be remedied by further injustice. Or, as my mother used to say: if you react wrongly to something wrong, you make a second mistake. Everything else is magical thinking. Secondly, positive discrimination, that is, deliberate preference for certain groups, perpetuates their unfavorable position. Because in our minds, the conviction has firmly established itself that the disadvantaged made their way to the top not by their own efforts, but only thanks to the favoritism of others.

A just society works differently. She gives everyone a chance, but doesn’t discriminate. She is attentive to individual characteristics and other color blind people. And she doesn’t need Martians to explain it to her.

René Scheuil is a philosopher and director of the Swiss Institute for Economic Policy (IWP) in Lucerne. He writes to Blick every second Monday.

Source: Blick