The Factors That Limit Minority Lawyers' Success in Premier Firms
While interesting, Gail Heriot's "Affirmative Action Backfires" (editorial page, Aug. 24) makes one think that affirmative action is merely another government program that hurts those it is designed to help. But affirmative action is more than ineffective -- it is perfectly Orwellian. In the name of civil rights, affirmative action suspends the civil rights of those not in favored groups. While mainly liberal affirmative action advocates think nothing of overt racial discrimination against "the advantaged," they bray incessantly about the civil rights of enemy combatants "detained" during a time of war. That, in and of itself, says a lot about where the formerly inalienable rights of the culturally unclassified fall in liberals' pantheon of just causes -- somewhere below those bent on slitting our throats and what the weather will be like 100 years from now.
For more than 35 years, presumably intelligent jurists, in the highest courts in the land, have turned their otherwise sharp minds into blunt instruments when it comes to denying whites admission to college or graduate school because of their race. The courts seemed to be saying that civil rights no longer pertain to individuals but rather are derived by virtue of group membership. Those supporting affirmative action appear to view civil rights as little more than compensatory privileges for the measurably less qualified.
University of California officials passionately argued that access to bar exam records should be denied for fear of stigmatizing African-American attorneys. Can anything be more stigmatizing than affirmative action itself? It is demeaning not to give adults credit for what they have or have not accomplished by the time they present their credentials to be weighed for admission to a graduate or professional school.
To try to fit academic outcomes into the Procrustean bed of equal outcomes is morally wrong, not because intended beneficiaries may not benefit, but because individuals should be judged on their own merit, as "groups of one," unencumbered by gratuitous attributes, such as race and gender, that they may bear.
Bernard Silverman
Naperville, Ill.
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