Ask a liberal if he'd give up a job so an AA ape can take it. Bet you don't get an answer...
Whenever I encounter those who advocate AA, I suggest they move out of their house so a homelss person can move in and have true affirmative action. For some reason they never agree.
That's a good comparison, albeit an extreme metaphor for affirmative action. Here are some other good ones too:
"Trade in your Mercedes for a Ford for the poor black people who can't afford a luxury car"
"Take a trip to Oregon instead of taking your trip to Paris and let the poor black people who have never been out of the U.S. have the chance to go abroad."
When affirmative action is proposed as a sort of general concept, people can agree to it because it doesn't have any direct material cost to them. People don't associate education or job opportunities with hard cash, but education and hard cash are assets that are basically converted into hard cash. They are almost material assets like an investment in land or other goods. When people are denied to better schools because of affirmative action people filling up the slots of the school (and this does happen) in essence that person is trading a bit of wealth with an Affirmative Action person. He might as well go hand him some cash, because even though he can't see it now, and he may not even be able to realize that it happened, he was downgraded to another school which, even being a small amount of money, still has financial consequences. The problem with affirmative action is because there is such a disconnect of the school and the rewards, the rewards come over a person's lifetime, so a person is unable to see the losses that he sustained. But when you translate affirmative action into a real life metaphorical situation, shorten the scope of time from investment in asset to reaping financially from the asset, such as with the house example, people won't support it because people don't want to support something that's not in their interest.
The problem with people who support affirmative action is because it doesn't matter to them whether they support it or not. It has no negative or personal consequence on that person because he's probably out of school and doesn't need to worry about it. Affirmative action is people who don't have anything to lose from affirmative action, supporting something that effects other people. It's like a rich taxpayer supporting an increase in tax for poor people. Isn't that inherently unfair and unjust?
Ask most people if they wouldn't mind if they personally would agree to be the victim of affirmative action in being downgraded to a lower college and graduate school and then being downgraded in their job. The support for affirmative action would plummet so much, only the completely insane people would support it. I'm guessing not even 5% would support it if that were the situation and they were faced with something that would affect them personally.
First of all, that article by Southern Avenger was great. I agree that we tend to hunker down when we're surrounded with people who are different than us. I honestly think that if everyone were white people, I would be a more social person, and indeed that is the feeling you get when you are in Israel in a predominantly Jewish area. It's a feeling of safety, of belongingness, of perfect peace. Also that's how I felt when I was living in Idaho where everyone was white. Even though I'm Jewish and they're all Christian, it's just the similarity of culture and behavior that binds you together. It doesn't matter what ethnicity people are whether they're Jewish, German, French or Italian, it's their behavior that makes one feel comfortable in society and the behavior of other races is very different than the behavior of white people. Of course you could never try to explain that to a politically correct person because no matter how much you tried to tell them that it's the way that the people act that's important, they would always stick to the notion that it only has to do with race. Well, much of the time, race is behavior.