Department of Justice

Justice Department Attack On Affirmative Action Is The Most Predictable White Man Thing Ever

This is what happens when being white is your only talent.

By Elie Mystal on August 02, 2017 1:58 pm

Of course the Justice Department is gearing up for a frontal attack on affirmative action. Did you really need a leaked internal memo to tell you that? What are you going to tell me next: Bowser has kidnapped a white princess?

I didn’t use that reference idly. The research shows that affirmative action primarily benefits white women. People who support it understand this. Intelligent people who oppose it understand this. The only people who think affirmative action is the racial injustice of our time are mediocre white men, and the mothers of mediocre white men.

And you’d be hard-pressed to find a greater collection of mediocre white guys than Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump, and the people who are running our country right now.

I get it. Affirmative action takes the low-account white man’s greatest asset — being a white man — and devalues it. It doesn’t strip the asset away; I would LOVE if there was some policy or social program you could implement that would actually strip white men of their privilege. I’d vote for it every Tuesday. But affirmative action doesn’t stop the white man from enjoying all the privileges associated with being a white man. It just devalues that currency a little bit.

Talented white men can easily overcome that minor nerfing of their white male privilege, what with having talents and such. “How can I compete with all these disadvantaged minorities on a test designed and promulgated by my own people?” — said no talented white man ever.

For mediocre snowflakes, being a white male is kind of all they have going for them. Think about it: if they were particularly smart, they’d out-compete most other white guys and get into whatever school they wanted to go to. If they had money, they’d be a legacy admission somewhere nice. If they were particularly athletic or noticeably artistic, they could scrounge up one of those “bad grades/good extracurriculars” slots every top university has. If they were, you know, INTERESTING, their experiential diversity would come through in their essays and some school would “take a chance” on them.

But, failing all that, the mediocre white guy still thinks that they can fall back on being white and male to get them where they want to go.

Which is why affirmative action rocks their world. Telling white guys with nothing else that being a white male isn’t going to help them this time, or telling those guys that being a white male might actually hurt them this time, makes them LOSE THEIR S**T. Their little brains can barely comprehend a world where their skin color and gender are not an automatic “positive.” Even the suggestion that their demographic identity could be a “negative,” and white guys start talking about how they “know how the slaves must have felt.”

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the rise of Donald Trump, it’s that the white man doesn’t feel like being white and male is worth what it used to be. Affirmative action seemingly codifies that reduction in status. From the perspective of the aggrieved white male, it’s got to go. Make Being White And Male Great Again!

But I’d caution those unimpressive white males, if they were literate enough to read this post. Once you take away affirmative action and build your border wall and chain your wives to their stoves, what’s your excuse going to be for your demonstrable lack of talent? Seriously, when you reset the world to 1950, back to a point when your privilege was protected by law, what’s going to be your reason for why your kids aren’t doing better than their parents?

You might want to keep affirmative action around, just so you have an excuse for why little Timmy didn’t get into Harvard even though he can (more or less) multiply and seems to “like books.”

Justice Dept. to Take On Affirmative Action in College Admissions [New York Times]

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.