When discussing welfare, crime, aberrant behavior, etc., the talk is generally about black or other nonwhite participation in them. But the fact is that white Americans are over represented in these areas, but they go unmolested by that fact in our discussions. Likewise, when we talk about affirmative action, whites, the largest and most long standing affirmative action recipients in the nation, go unmolested by the Supreme Court, news media, and American institutions generally.

Why are we not talking about white affirmative action as much as we talk about ethnic affirmative action?

There is much white affirmative action, but there is little corresponding media coverage or court concern about it. Poor Ward Connerly who has made a career of stamping out nonwhite affirmative action, has never laid a hand to white affirmative action. To him, there is none.

But were there no white affirmative action, there would be no need for ethnic affirmative action. Were we to eliminate the first, white affirmative action, there would be no need for a second.

The language of affirmative action we so often hear is "reverse discrimination." And reverse discrimination is an apt name for it. To reverse the present white discrimination against nonwhites is to actually eliminate discrimination, the most widespread and comprehensive form of affirmative action that has existed and still does exist in America.

Why is there such a blind spot to standard white discrimination as being white affirmative action? Does not discrimination give advantage to whites and disadvantage to nonwhites? The question, if you don't know it, is rhetorical. White affirmative action is a legacy and gift bequeathed to them from slavery. But how long must this advantage to them and disadvantage to others exist? And how long will America pretend that this white affirmative action does not exist?

A more interesting question is this: Why do they need it still ? After all, blacks and other nonwhites were enslaved, not the whites or their children who now bath in this unfair advantage as if it were earned or as if it does not exist.

Many contend that there are laws against white discrimination, so there is no need for any further action--it's against the law. That argument merely placates the problem. With all the supposed laws against white discrimination, whenever it is scientifically measured in any sector of American society, public or private, education or housing, we always seem to discover that it is still around.

Our measurements are not really to determine if discrinination is still around; that is a given; our measurements are to determine to what intensity it is around, hence, how much unfair advantage whites still have over others. Are white really so uncertain of their competitive abilities that they need affirmative action after all these years?

As long as widespread discrimination is around, there will be a moral and economic need to reverse it through ethnic affirmative action. To neutralize this active and prolonged discrimination by whites, which is affirmative action for whites, we first need to see clearly what we are talking about when we trot out that little familiar horse of reverse discrimination.

Martin Luther King, Jr., argued that it is the moral obligation of the oppressed to resist oppression with all that is within them, lest to simply acquiesce to it is to be as morally corrupt as the oppressor. Likewise, to allow white affirmative action to go unmolested as a longstanding wrong is to further the false belief that white privilege affords white affirmative action, and nothing should be done to and about it, nor should it be revealed as white affirmative action. []

Frank A. Jones
2/2/05