Rosa Parks and the End of "Discrimination" as a meaningful word

On the day of Rosa Parks' death, I stumbled across this incisive reflection on what's left of her legacy, so I thought I'd share.  I can't say it better than Jack Roy did, so I won't:

"Discrimination" is a word that had meaning not long ago.  That definition has been much abused of late---admittedly, my own political allies bear a lot of responsibility for this. . . .

[But w]hy do conservative Christians believe they're the victims of discrimination?  I don't have a global understanding of how that could be possible, but something Ira Glass played on the radio a few months ago struck me as a bizarre, if plausible, explanation. . . .

Read the rest at his blog so he gets the hits.  (It's not long.)

•  Discrimination

  
  I don't know about the Christians whining, but something stuck out about your post. People seem to be talking like Discrimination is still a thing of the past. I think it's still alive and well today. Just because it's pushed to the fringes of society that doesn't make it less important or make it not there at all.

  Here we sit in the wake of Katrina - an embarrassing example of how African Americans are still degraded and treated as second class in our society. Does ANYONE think FEMA would have been this slow if the victims were white? And earlier this summer - that girl who disappeared in Aruba. People disappear there all the time. It was only headline news cause she was cute and blond. And of course, the first blacks they find are immediately locked away as guilty.

  It's not all racial discrimination either. Look at the way homosexuals are treated. Things that straight Americans take for granted are denied to a significant portion of our population.

  But what can we expect? America was built on discrimination: first against the natives, then against the Africans, always against the women, today homosexuals and poor, etc. It's the nature of our aggressive societal evolution. White America tears apart everything that is not them and gives it to themselves like it's just entitled to them.

  The real legacy of Rosa Parks is how little progress has truly been made.
  

  by Koldun on Tue Oct 25, 2005 at 03:27:18 PM PDT

•  There's really nothing wrong with

  discrimination.  That is, making choice on the basis of specific criteria.  What's wrong is when those criteria have no relationship to the choice. What's even worse is making a choice to exclude certain people from participating in normal social relationships on the basis of irrelevant criteria like skin color, ethnic heritage. gender or sexual preferences.
  What Lyndon Johnson, as a southerner, recognized was that merely prohibiting the exclusion would not automatically lead to inclusion.  He knew that it would take affirmative steps to invite people, who had been kept out, in.  And the reason he knew that was because he realized that, since there were no objective criteria involved in the choice to keep people out, the primary reason for this behavior was the social determination that it was necessary for the members of the majority to demonstrate that they "fit" in by keeping the members of the minority out.
  In other words, in order to counter that social pressure to demonstrate loyalty to the group by keeping others out, there had to be a positive reward for meeting the requirement of affirmative action statutes.
  The victims of arbitrary exclusion quite naturally expected that affirmative action would provide them with automatic inclusion or acceptance.  But that was never the intent.  All "affirmative action" called for was a fair consideration and review of all applicants for employment in positions that were openly advertised, instead of the positions being passed on to cronies and toadies.  Since such a process tends to restrict the power of those making the appointments, it's naturally resisted by those whose primary interest is in enhancing their power, rather than in seeing that a job is well done.
  Indeed, this preference for power relationships has resulted in some rather incompetent blacks and other previously excluded individuals to be placed in positions for which they are minimally qualified, it at all.  Justice Clarence Thomas is one such example.  Harriet Miers, if she's approved, will be another.

  While this analysis pointing out that the word describing the process is not well chosen may seem to be nit-picking, I would argue that when the verbiage is imprecise or misleading, it provides an opportunity for the opponents of that process to obstruct its implementation by feigning support for something that is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

  by hannah on Tue Oct 25, 2005 at 04:21:27 PM PDT