Are we racist/prejudice?

[theapportioner]

Here is my beef with programs like affirmative action and the justification that it somehow rights social ills.

Agreed, I don't think affirmative action, if you go by its original rationale, does its job either. However the reasons for it have evolved, and at least in the universities, affirmative action is not so much a means of achieving racial justice, but a means of achieving diversity. At least this is the position of Bollinger and the University of Michigan. A bit subtle, but pretty different ideas. Greater diversity in the universities is something that I do favor, especially since our age is a greatly interconnected one.

That being said, if diversity is the goal, then affirmative action has in a sense become obsolete. Race is only one part of the diversity equation, and a.a. (if we should even call it that) needs to similarly evolve. This should be more palatable to organizations like the NAACP than alternative plans like "affirmative access", which some of the original designers in Texas say simply doesn't work.

by showcasing these issues or suggesting it's a seperate history, or education we just put these issues in their own ghetto.

That's always a danger, but one would hope that as cultural awareness increases, peoples' identities evolve appropriately. Remember it's peoples' identifications of themselves and of others that create the compartmentalization of history (and tensions); I doubt there is nearly as much vice versa reinforcement of identities from Black History Month.

Point is, what is lost when Black History Month is trumpeted is the perspective of how black history relates to other history, how these histories are not essential entities but creations with a temporal context to them. That there are "black" and "white' histories is itself a creation, with the tendency to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you want to get really deep and insightful, the theory of evolution as created by Darwin gives us evolutionary rights to be racist, considering in that time, the thinking was that whites, Chinese, blacks, Australians, and another group were all seperate from each other, with whites being Homo sapiens.

Asinine. Die.