The original movement to open the universities was pushed by people who claimed they wanted to overcome the idea of melanin-based determinism, if you will. The whole idea that your race should determine your success in life was defeated because we as a society became rather quickly convinced that it was irrational. Surely the idea does not suddenly become rational just because the person preaching it is Al Sharpton.

Doing your best to create exploitable differences between people is just common sense. That way you can offer special privilages to special people and everyone is special in their own, little way.

Much better to be part of a group that gets special privilages, which are richly deserved due to a long history of (insert convenient justification here), then to accept the boring thesis that “all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights”. What’s the fun in that?

More importantly, what’s the political value in that? If you can’t make promises of special treatment in return for political support what do you have to offer? You can’t offer equality, that territory’s already taken. You certainly can’t allow any greivance, real or imagined, recent or ancient, to lie unexploited so you exacerbate the differences.

Update: Blogger Ed, who says he’s half Korean, writes:
“Frankly I think the black community is overly fixated on race as an issue instead of actually concentrating on fixing problems. And I think the whole race issue tends to lead blacks…

And here I had this crazy, crazy idea that college was about academics, at least in theory. (I know, I’m hopelessly reactionary and old-fashioned. But then again, I’ve also got the idea that people matter more as individuals than as Examples Of Their Ethnicity, so I might as well give up even talking to people like Professor Orfield, if experience is any guide.)