The Real World of Affirmative Action

By Nicholas Stix
June, 2003
Middle American News

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on two lawsuits against the University of Michigan’s use of affirmative action in admissions to its undergraduate program and law school, respectively. The mainstream, socialist media have predictably supported the continued admission to otherwise highly selective universities of unqualified black and Hispanic applicants, based on their race or ethnicity, as a means to achieve “diversity.” Since affirmative action’s 1960s’ origins, however, this plague has spread beyond college admissions, to corrupt all of America’s institutions.

In higher education, affirmative action has led to the hiring of incompetent, often openly racist black and Hispanic professors. It has further led to the creation of multiculturalism, in which entire disciplines—black, women’s, Hispanic and gay studies—exist in order to generate propaganda rationalizing affirmative action, and for the sake of hiring incompetent hate mongers.

Whereas academia had not previously been heavily bureaucratized, affirmative action has created patronage mills of highly-paid black and Hispanic administrators and staffers, whose job is to terrorize whites and protect incompetent and/or vicious minority students and employees. Historian Alan Kors and attorney Harvey Silverglate have named this bureaucratic subculture, “the shadow university,” in their book of the same name.

Perhaps the least publicized aspect of academic affirmative action, is the maintaining of remedial mills catering to “students” who increasingly function on an elementary school level. When I taught at William Paterson College (WPC) during the early to mid-1990s, administrators decided to boost the school’s “retention” rate, i.e., to keep students on the tuition rolls, no matter how poor their performance. The main impediment to retention was the remedial English Composition final, in which students had to pass the multiple- choice New Jersey Basic Skills Test (NJBST), and an essay exam. And so, the English Department chairwoman, Dr. Catarina Edinger, eliminated the NJBST altogether, expanded the time allotted for the essay exam from 20 to 75 minutes, gutted essay grading standards, and overrode instructors who failed minority students.

Most of one such 75-minute final essay, from 1994, follows.

My father is the one person who I can truly say has helped me through school and work and just life in general, he has helped me to learn how to wash my clothes by showing me in detail from what Detergent to use Down to how long it will take them to Dry, and when ever I had trouble with school work he allways sat down and showed me what I was doing wrong and then showed me the right way and made me pratice it many times over, for example when the time I didn’t know how to Do frations he showed me how to do them and then tested me on them. There was a nother time when my father tought me how to Lift weightfirst he bought a weight set then we started from the brench press to the squat, he tought me ever thing I know….

Rather than sanctioning WPC, in 1997, the State of New Jersey rewarded WPC officials for their fraud, by promoting the school to university status.

Affirmative action’s supporters in academia have suppressed exposure of their abuses through political witch hunts, in which they have gotten faculty critics fired, stolen student newspapers which even mildly criticized affirmative action, and shut down or denied standing to conservative student groups.

A more recent development has been the rise in campus race hoaxes. Since affirmative action relies on a fantastic ideology claiming that all blacks suffer under white racism, the lack of factual support for the ideology requires the constant fabrication of “evidence.” And so, melodramatic race hoaxes, in which black students—and now, even black professors—invent non-existent white-on-black racial attacks and harassment, have become part of the academic landscape.

For instance, in February 2002, white graduate student Jay Gardner made the mistake of disagreeing with black Iowa State University (Ames) professor Tracey Owens Patton, during the constant anti-white rants she engaged in, in her journalism class. Patton had Gardner expelled from class, later charging that Gardner was a white supremacist, and that campus police had warned her of white supremacist activity on campus. However, ISU campus police denied to me having ever told Patton anything of the sort, and Ames police denied to me that any such activity was present in Ames.

But affirmative action’s pernicious effects go well beyond the university. It has resulted in hundreds of thousands of semi-literate, racist, and sometimes criminal blacks and Hispanics being hired as educators, police officers, and physicians, the handcuffing of police officers in dealing with violent minority criminals, and the deterioration of news coverage of urban and ethnic issues.

With the advent of affirmative action, activists demanded that largely unqualified black and Hispanic teachers, administrators, and staffers be given control over the education of black and Hispanic children. The result has been the destruction of millions of urban black and Hispanic children’s life chances. In New York alone, for example, thousands of black and Hispanic “teachers” cannot pass the New York State certification exam, even though the exam is dumbed down anew on behalf of just those testees on a yearly basis. (A committee determines which questions black and Hispanic testees most frequently answer incorrectly, and eliminates them. You can’t make this stuff up.) As a result, impoverished New York children endure “educators” who have flunked an eighth grade-level test as many as 24 times.

In the criminal justice field, in order to increase black and Hispanic representation by any means necessary, police chiefs dropped criminal background checks of officer candidates in Washington, D.C. and Miami; chiefs in other cities have hired black and Hispanic candidates whom their own job screeners warned were a danger to society. The result has been police crime waves in Washington, D.C., Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and New Orleans. Black New Orleans police officer Antoinette Frank was hired in spite of failing the civil service psychiatric evaluation, and remained on the job, despite colleagues’ reports of her bizarre behavior. While on duty in 1995, Frank committed armed robbery and murdered three people, including an off-duty police officer. And Antoinette Frank is not unique.

Urban police chiefs also increasingly give black and Hispanic criminals carte blanche to rob, pillage, and even murder. During February, 2001 Mardi Gras celebrations in Seattle, for example, Chief Gil Kerlikowske ordered officers to stand down in the face of a racist black mob that was pummeling and robbing lone whites, and instead arrest white men for the pettiest of offenses. When civilian Kristopher Kime went to the aid of a petite white woman who was being brutally assaulted by several black men, the men stomped him to death.

Affirmative action in medicine has also cost lives. Los Angeles-area Dr. Patrick Chavis was celebrated by the New York Times and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Ma.) as an affirmative action poster boy. Chavis was an unqualified black applicant who was accepted by the University of California/Davis medical school, in the place of qualified white applicant, Allan Bakke. In 1978, Bakke sued the UC system all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and won.

By 1996, Patrick Chavis was an ob-gyn who, without bothering to complete the necessary training, performed liposuction on female patients. When three of Chavis’ patients hemorrhaged, he ignored their pain, and refused them treatment. One of the women, Tammaria Cotton, died. It was not until Chavis had killed a patient, that the Medical Board of California, citing 94 charges of gross negligence against him, revoked his medical license.

The mainstream media have largely refused to report on such corruption, because they are themselves in thrall to affirmative action. William McGowan’s book, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, chronicles how through affirmative action hiring, major newspapers and TV news organizations have installed cadres of black writers and editors who have taken over reporting on urban and racial issues, which they deliberately misreport, while intimidating and otherwise thwarting white reporters from doing honest reporting on such issues.

Thus, media watchers were not terribly surprised when in late April, the New York Times was rocked by one of the biggest scandals in the history of American journalism. Reporter Jayson Blair, a black affirmative action hire who had been at the newspaper for four years, and who had been held up by Executive Editor Howell Raines as a shining example of “diversity,” was discovered to have fabricated and/or plagiarized dozens, and possibly hundreds of stories. Although Blair had earlier been caught repeatedly engaging in journalistic misconduct that would have cost a white male reporter his job, instead of being fired, he was promoted. Indeed, Blair was hired as a reporter in spite of having failed to finish college, and having a “substandard” record as a student journalist and Times affirmative action intern.

Affirmative action, an unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral social engineering scheme, equals lies, censorship, crime ... and death.