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The Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in college admissions met with dismayed, hostile and sarcastic reactions from intellectuals, meaning the media, academics and others who make a living out of conveying ideas to the public.[1]This use of the word “intellectuals” comes from Friedrich Hayek, 1998 (1949), The Intellectuals and Socialism, London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, pp. 9-18. This was predictable, but why are they like this? Why do intellectuals support affirmative action?[2]By “affirmative action” this article means discrimination in favour of Black people. It does not discuss discrimination in favour of Hispanics, women or other groups.
Many do so out of an attachment to the doctrine of essential racial equality, which tells them that the races are inherently the same. Seeing that they do not perform the same, and especially that Black people do considerably less well than others, they think that Black people’s performance must have been depressed by environmental factors such as their mistreatment by Whites. To make up for this, affirmative action is needed.
This is a poor rationale for affirmative action since there is nothing to suggest that the races are inherently the same, nor is there any evidence of the supposed mistreatment. To deal with the first problem, the intellectuals call anyone who points it out a racist. To deal with the second, they go back to the Jim Crow era or even to slavery, where mistreatment can be found, and say that the present generation is still affected, therefore it must be compensated. This argument also fails, if only because it is not just Black people whose ancestors were mistreated. Everyone probably has ancestors who were mistreated in one way or another, yet we do not seek to identify these long-dead individuals so that we can compensate their living descendants.
A second rationale refers to equal opportunities. These are weasel words, which on the intellectuals’ interpretation do not denote a requirement of justice. The intellectuals will argue that not all candidates sitting a given test have the same opportunity to pass it because some of them had to stay up all night looking after their sick mothers whereas others got a good night’s sleep. The tired ones are predominantly Black, they will find, therefore affirmative action must be taken. But justice does not require equal opportunities in this sense, which would be impossible to arrange. It requires equal treatment, which can easily be arranged by having all the candidates sit the test at the same time in the same hall with the same amount of time to complete it. No more elaborate concept of equal opportunities is needed.
A third rationale refers to the presumed value of racial diversity. Black students without the test scores needed to get into college must still go there, says this rationale, so that White students can benefit from their presence. This is just silly.
The urge of Whites to favour Blacks can be strong. The purpose of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to end racial discrimination in employment. To underline this, soon after the Act was passed, President Johnson issued an executive order stating that employees must be taken on and treated without regard to race. Before long, hiring goals for Blacks were being introduced, not only at the behest of organisations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People but also by the Department of Labor itself.[3]Jared Taylor, 2004 (1992), Paved with Good Intentions, New Century Foundation, p. 126. The Executive Order was No. 11246. Already in the 1920s it was customary for Black students at New York University to be marked two grades higher than Whites for a given level of work.[4]James Burnham, 1964, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism, New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, p. 197.
On the day the Supreme Court announced its decision, Harvard officials sent a letter to the university community, which contained all the vagueness, evasion and general waste material that characterises politically correct language. It also invoked all three rationales for affirmative action mentioned above.[5]The letter is quoted in V-DARE, June 30th 2023, “Nobody Wants An 0.76 Percent Black Harvard. The Oceans Would Boil, The Earth Would Crash Into The Sun” by John Derbyshire, https://vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-nobody-wa...he-sun . “Diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence”, it said. Diversity of what? Difference between what? If it meant diversity and difference of race, how can these help anyone attain academic excellence? Doesn’t Harvard know that academic excellence is attained by talent and hard work?
The letter stated that to prepare leaders for a complex world, “Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience”. If one can live a facet of experience, what makes Harvard think that not enough of these facets would have been lived by a student body selected on merit? Black people might be especially unlikely to add to the total number of such facets since they are not known for being adventurous. How many of Harvard’s Blacks are likely to have climbed a mountain or even gone for a walk in the countryside? How many will have visited an art gallery or museum?
The letter went on to say that Harvard must be a place of opportunity, “whose doors remain open to those to whom they had long been closed”. Presumably by “those to whom they had long been closed” it meant Black people of the past to whom doors were closed because they were Black. Apparently Harvard finds the historical existence of such people a sufficient reason for letting in Black people who lack the qualifications required of the other races.
But affirmative action works, say the intellectuals, and point to their poster boys. An early one was Patrick Chavis, who in 1975 was among the first Black students to be admitted to medical school when had he been White he would have been rejected.[6]William McGowan, 2002, Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism, San Francisco: Encounter Books. When he set up in practice after graduating, a journalist named Nicholas Lemann called him a living and breathing refutation of the claim that racial preferences favour unqualified Blacks over better-qualified Whites. How he thought that this had been refuted is a mystery since it is the very definition of affirmative action and its whole point. Anyway, misfortune struck Chavis when in 1997 his licence was suspended as he was deemed grossly negligent, incompetent and a danger to public health. He could not perform “some of the most basic duties required of a physician”. Two patients nearly died as a result of his botched operations; a third did. Presumably the intellectuals quietly took down that poster.
A famous beneficiary of affirmative action is Justice Clarence Thomas, who bitterly regrets accepting a place at Yale after clearing a specially lowered bar. The burden of being suspected of being less bright than his White peers is one that he had to bear for decades.
One person who escaped affirmative action is Anthony Brian Logan, who after growing up with drug addicts and criminals in his family worked tirelessly in various jobs before putting himself through a local college and starting up as a graphic designer. He went on to create a successful YouTube channel, where he puts out a video each day with excellent commentary on current affairs. In his opinion, Blacks who aspire to go to Harvard and are let in without the grades required of the other races are misguided. They find it hard to keep up and would have been better off at less well-known but perfectly adequate colleges that would not have treated them as special cases.
The fact that the intellectuals have no good argument for affirmative action does not diminish their support for it. For them it is not a matter of argument; it is a matter of fending off the thought that Black people are innately inferior to Whites, which would mean that they as Whites belonged to a superior race. To them this thought would be more than they could bear. They would think that death camps would be on the way. Lifelong programming and continuing social pressure have prevented them from being able to see that relationships of superiority and inferiority are universal facts of life and nothing to be afraid of.
Another reason intellectuals might have for supporting affirmative action is that they believe in racial discrimination on principle. They do not share the general view that institutions should treat all alike without regard to race; they think they should have a favourite race and do all they can to benefit members of that race without a thought for the others. These are the anti-racists.
Yet another reason could be that the intellectuals want to avoid Black violence. After the Supreme Court decision, the commentator John Derbyshire wrote a piece saying three times that meritocratic college admissions were unacceptable.[7]V-DARE, June 30th 2023, op cit. His first justification for taking this view was a non sequitur: “The meritocratic option is unacceptable because of race differences in intelligence”. How do race differences in intelligence mean that colleges should not select applicants on merit? Derbyshire referred to a report which stated that if Harvard selected on merit, less than one per cent of its students would be Black. He didn’t say why this would be a problem.
His second justification was that if Harvard stopped favouring Black people — and he saw a loophole in the Supreme Court ruling that will let it continue doing this — “the oceans would boil and the earth would crash into the sun”. Perhaps by this he meant that if a serious attempt were made to abolish affirmative action, there would be an outcry, particularly on the part of Blacks, who might riot. We don’t want that, so colleges had better continue discriminating in their favour.
Going back to the intellectuals who passionately believe in essential racial equality, one might wonder who they are trying to benefit. They admit Black students to college on the basis that they have the intelligence that theoretically is in them but unrealised, which makes student populations look as they would do if things were as the intellectuals wished, then point to the results as though they proved that things really are this way. “Look at all these Black students!”, they say. “Who says Blacks aren’t as intelligent as Whites?” The point seems to be to allow them to perform a trick which they can then claim was no trick rather than try to help the Black students, who can only sink or swim with the intelligence at their disposal. Perhaps their passion comes from the struggle between the two sides of their double-think.
A final speculation is that contributing to these intellectuals’ inability to tolerate the thought of innate racial differences is the fact that they belong to a spoilt generation. They want the races to be the same; they don’t want to be superior. No one has ever told them that you can’t always have what you want.
Notes
[1] This use of the word “intellectuals” comes from Friedrich Hayek, 1998 (1949), The Intellectuals and Socialism, London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, pp. 9-18.
[2] By “affirmative action” this article means discrimination in favour of Black people. It does not discuss discrimination in favour of Hispanics, women or other groups.
[3] Jared Taylor, 2004 (1992), Paved with Good Intentions, New Century Foundation, p. 126. The Executive Order was No. 11246.
[4] James Burnham, 1964, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism, New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, p. 197.
[5] The letter is quoted in V-DARE, June 30th 2023, “Nobody Wants An 0.76 Percent Black Harvard. The Oceans Would Boil, The Earth Would Crash Into The Sun” by John Derbyshire, https://vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-nobody-wants-an-0-76-percent-black-harvard-the-oceans-would-boil-the-earth-would-crash-into-the-sun .
[6] William McGowan, 2002, Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism, San Francisco: Encounter Books.
[7] V-DARE, June 30th 2023, op cit.
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Perhaps if John Derbyshire had inserted a large, bold-faced “/SARC/” every few lines in the quotations of his which you cite (drawn from the article https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/nobody-wants-an-0-76-percent-black-harvard-the-oceans-would-boil-the-earth-would-crash-into-the-sun/). you might not have so completely misunderstood his stance on affirmative action and DIE. However, I suspect that not even this might have prevented your misapprehension.
Derbyshire is certainly an intellectual and an exceptionally accomplished one–a gifted amateur mathematician with several important books on mathematics under his belt, a man with some fluency in Chinese, a very knowledgeable writer on topics as diverse as human diversity, mathematics, human intelligence, immigration and border control, et al.–however he is the exact opposite of the kind of public intellectual, i.e. a member of the USA’s lumpen intelligentsia, which you seem to take him for.
Intellectuals are certainly not of the entrepreneurial type. But from this article, in my experience, interlickyoualls generally operate from a position of cowardice, power seeking at someone else’s risk, easy sleasy appeasy gain in reputation, and the need to embrace a collective movement or crowd-gang.
They are not like orcas, but like schools of sardines. There are exceptions, but they are relatively few.
We need to examine this term “intellectual”. Does it mean “smart person”, “genius”, “philosopher”, “inventor”, “great artist”, “scholar”, etc.? It means none of those things.
“Progressive political activist”, “utopian”, and “leftist” would be the closest equivalents. There is no need for great intelligence. In fact, intelligence is a handicap.
“Philosopher” doesn’t work because a philosopher tries to look at things impartially and arrive at the truth. An intellectual has no interest in impartiality or truth.
That disqualifies him as a scholar, artist (seeking to represent the objectively beautiful), scientist, historian or inventor.
The occupations most likely to attract and nourish intellectuals are community organizer, social worker, schoolteacher, professor (social sciences, arts, humanities), journalist, politician and lawyer. He may also try to wield his influence in government and business, filling HR departments and DEI positions.
The intellectual will always be a man of the Left, standing in opposition to what he perceives as non- or anti-progressive. Secular Jews are disproportionately represented in this group.
The birth of the intellectual as a phenomenon took place during the French Revolution. That is when progressivism began in earnest.
It evolved into communism (helped along by Napoleon’s emancipation of the Jews), which now promotes BIPOC and LGBTQ as the new Proletariat.
As with the French Revolution and communism, equality is the highest value — with the exception, of course, of the leadership, who constitute a privileged ruling class.
Individual freedom must be destroyed, and individual rights taken away, because people left to their own devices will not conform to the progressive system, which is contrary to human nature.
Capitalists used to fear communism, but they have allied themselves with it. As part of the elite, they have no reason to fear losing their privileges. And there’s plenty of money to be made exploiting cheap labor. They learned this in China.
The influence of leftist professors and schoolteachers in American education has led to an upper-middle-class population that thinks “being intellectual” is a good thing and that only low class, bigoted, uneducated people do not support intellectual ideas (left-wing causes). Even conservatives feel obligated to pay lip service to those ideas and they never seriously oppose them.
Clerico-fascism is what intellectuals fear most. It would take another Franco to put an end to their mischief.
Because they have been trained, since birth, by people who believe that all people are created equal, and that any resultant inequality must be because of discrimination.
And some make money doing so.
may i suggest piranhas instead of sardines?
You’re over-complicating what is really a rather simple situation.
The Prime Directive is: If it harms white goyim, then it’s good for the Jews.
Affirmative action clearly harms white goyim, who have effectively been completely purged from the institutions they built — which have been stolen, lock stock and barrel, by the Jews.
Therefore MUST have ever-more Affirmative Action, which harms white goyim, further weaponizes negroes against America, helps destroy everything, and takes everyone’s eye off the ball. All very good for the Jews, which is really all that matters.
Boss, you’ve got me laughing. “Experts”, you know the financial, economic, military, political (Russia will be a pushover; the Russians are so stupid and backward). Every financial prediction I have read the past year save one or two is wrong. Too high or too low. Unexpected…..etc. are the same as intellectuals. I mean a pig turd is so much different than a hyena’s?
it all depends on how highly you “polish” it.
“Intellectuals” – and people who wish to be considered as such – fall for every fashionable cause proposed by other “intellectuals”: communism, transgenderism, affirmative action. By following unjustifiable fashions, they are no better than teenage girls – in fact they are worse, because they do not change fashion every six months and eventually grow up, they support each fashionable cause for life, long after it has been shown to be damaging.
Most “intelectuals” are like words-players who are selected only by or because their verbal IQ and willingness to conform to radical and pretentiously sophisticated thoughts and ideas. That’s why. They are exactly like chess-players not really independent-minded and rational thinkers.
Wrong. “Intellectuals” support affirmative action because not doing so would be career suicide. Ditto for transgenderism, open-borders immigration, etc.etc. It’s all a response to overwhelming top-down pressure. “Intellectuals” would cheerfully support the exact opposite, if the ruling class decided to support it.
Most ‘intellectuals’ are commissars.
And even real intellectuals are into idolatry, and they idolize blacks for whatever reason.
AA is really about blacks, and intellectuals, who feel soulless, feel redeemed either by rubbing shoulders with the smarter blacks or doing favors for the blacks(regarded as the magical race).
It appears man cannot live on books alone. They need to believe in something, and for intellectuals, it’s blacks and homos(and yes, the Jews).
Intellectual is a euphemism that encompasses the dimwits that emerge as PhD’s from the humanities and social sciences. These are people that have no identifiable verifiable skill sets, just lots of emotions and theories.
Take Jordan Peterson for example. When he was on his free speech tirade, he was terrific. As soon as he puts on his clinical psychologist hat, he’s incomprehensible. I tried listening to his spiel but couldn’t stand more than a few minutes of it.
The same holds for the entire political class. These people have no real skills. Their only skill is getting enough fools to elect them and then live under their edicts.
In former Soviet Union, some form of affirmative action was mandated in education. It works like: percent of students of every nationality must more or less be equal for the percent of this nationality in population.
It’s counted on enture USSR, so required to build universities/institutes in every national respublic. Sometimes it cause unexpected results, and make a source for anekdotes.
For the central, located in Moscow universities, some number of places was reserved for “national students”.
The most public outcry for this affirmative action was from jews: the number of jews in high education was “limited” to approximate number of jews in population, 3%. Actually, this “limit” doesn’t work – it seems like every jew in USSR have high education.
I mostly agree with this, except for those like Richard Lynn, who has strived to gain knowledge of intelligence distribution across humanity’s reaches. Hopefully, in the future, more attention will be paid to other human traits.
Catnip for intellectuals:
“Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment for its realization was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world has failed. It guarantees no place from which theory as such could be concretely convicted of anachronism, which, then as now, it is suspected of. Perhaps the interpretation which promised the transition did not suffice. The moment upon which the critique of theory depended is not to be prolonged theoretically. Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation but, for the most part, the pretext under which executives strangle critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs.” — Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics
“How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself and without my being able to see him in me? If my secret self, that which can only be revealed to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect upon, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that this secret belongs to, that it is the property of, or belongs to, someone or some other who remains someone? It is, perhaps, here that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing, and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn’t belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self – who am I, not in the sense of who I am, but rather who is this “I” that can say ‘who’? What is this ‘I’, and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the ‘I’ trembles in secret?” — Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death
Fucking over White men is a feature not a bug
Here’s a media intellectual.
Video Link
So called intellectuals, and liberals, etc., all support affirmative action because despite everything they say, they know that the minorities they are fixated on trying to help, are inferior.
They rarely say it out loud (although sometimes they slip up and do), but they know it, just like everyone else knows it.
Hence- affirmative action, section 8 housing, welfare, food stamps, WIC, etc. They know they have to cheat to get them into white schools, or college, or good jobs.
They know that every merit based system will stratify in the exact same way that it always has.
They know race realism just as well as their opponents on the right.
The only difference is that the Lefties feel guilty for knowing it, and so they try everything they can imagine to assuage their guilt.
They also twist their brains into knots trying to blame it on past slavery, red-lining, poverty, bad neighborhoods, crime and gangs… you know… all the things inherent to black existence.
At the root of their psyche is the truth- blacks are inferior to whites, and just like retarded children, they will never “make it” unless all the white people around them “help”.
When they failed at schools, they said “what if we bus them to learn with the white kids?” It didn’t work.
Affirmative action was “what if we force them into the colleges to get the degrees that whites get?” It didn’t work, they just failed. Then “well, let’s just let them pass, and get those degrees anyway, then they will get them good “white” jobs”
It didn’t work.
So, now it’s “let’s force places to hire them, and pay them, just like the merit based whites that earned their way, and then they will have the same jobs, and maybe then their lives, societies, and culture would improve!”
It still doesn’t work!
Yeah, that’s a good point.
There are some really smart intellectuals, no doubt about it, but being an expert on abstractions can get a bit tedious too.
It’s another sign of our times, that people can spend their entire lives navel gazing, and make a living by doing so.
I like Peterson, he’s okay, but I think psychology is a fake jewish construct, and at least 85% total and complete bullshit.
Also, as an aside… I have a theory that YouTube is trying to make me hate Jordan Peterson. I watch a lot of counter culture “stuff”, and then sometimes just let the algorithm take over when I’m doing other things. It switches to a Jordan Peterson video, RELIGIOUSLY!!
I’m not subscribed to him, I don’t search for him, and I don’t “like” any of his videos, but for some weird reason, YouTube just keeps pumping me his videos. Thus, now, I’m getting sick of hearing his voice… even though he often makes some great points and offers some amazing insights.
Seems awfully fishy to me…
When Peterson is just being an average human being, he makes sense. I also get his videos and shorts as offerings for consumption from YT and as long as he’s not befuddling students in some class, I might take a listen.
When he took down that witch in England, Cathy Newman, he was fantastic.
Video Link
I like his taking on the Canadian psychology priesthood as well as the Canadian gov’t by being so outspoken. But in the end, professionally, he’s full of shit.
Interesting spins being applied. Anyone have a feel for what is really happening there?
Former ABC reporter and subject of right-wing conspiracy theories pleads guilty to transporting child sex abuse material
https://news.yahoo.com/former-abc-reporter-subject-wing-205737914.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gordon_Meek
Failure of Ctrl-F “pizza” at those links perhaps notable?
“Why, you fool, it’s the educated readers who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem: we have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.” — C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength