From: richard@auvax1.adelphi.edu
Subject: Read This! Another Article By The ACA
Organization: ADELPHI UNIVERSITY
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 00:15:47 GMT

Afrikan Concerns Association

On Affirmative Action

	I am often amazed by the fact that a concept as simple as affirmative
action is, is misunderstood to such great degrees.  It takes no great genius to
figure out why it was implemented and to what purpose, but once again certain
Americans want to cloud a morally correct issue with charges of unfair bias and
reverse racism.  I often recall the incident in the bookstore where a Latino
friend of mine was talking in line with a White student about getting into a
certain Ivy league school.  The student stated that it would be very difficult,
to which my friend responded by saying "I think I may get in - I'm a minority". 
I observed every White person in the bookstore visibly cringe at the utterance. 
Perhaps they think unfair bias.  Let us see what grounds they have for this.
	Four score and seven years ago the founding fathers brought with them
African servants, who taught them among other things the art of enclosing
animals in pens to protect them from wild predators, as their ancestors had
done in Africa.  These people, for greed, were not repaid in kind for their
services.  Through four hundred plus years of you-know-what since then, people
of colored skin (the bigot's basis of racial identity) have been used to make
America the great nation that it now is.  Just imagine if all those millions of
people were paid for their labour!   
	Slavery allowed for profits undreamt of, and paved the way for early
America's economic strength.  A man's wealth then was generally measured by the
number of slaves he owned.  Some masters were of some heart, and granted
faithful slaves property in their wills while others, once a slave became old
or incapable of work through some mutilation, put them out alone somewhere to
die if they did not shoot them first.   Slaves were literally worked from sun
up till sun down, and just enough money was spent on them to keep them alive to
work - often they had to find time to grow their own food!  So the rise of the
plantocracy of the South came on many whip-scarred backs, but was forced to
give way to a higher form of slavery - Industrialism.  
	Many think the Civil War was fought to free the slaves, a
mis-conception the government likes to promote in its b.s. moral charades.  The
fact was that slavery was not efficient enough in its ability to exploit
colored labour.  No matter how much you whip and maim, forced labour is not as
efficient as a labour form in which the worker motivates himself.   So the
industrial North sought  to bring the plantation South up to date, in order to
expand its market there, but by then slavery had become a way of life.  The
most bloody civil war America had ever seen was waged,  simply for economic
reasons.  Freeing the slaves was a by product,  a spin off,  one that many
Northerners vhemently stated they would never fight a war for.  Slaves, running
to the North, were simply choosing between worse and bad situations, as racial
bias and hatred followed them there too.  
	The economics of injustice is straightforward, as the early American
industrialists knew and practiced.  Blacks were always paid less than whites
for the same job, or sometimes not paid at all, cheated, a good excuse for
cheap labour.  Doing the job better than a white person meant nothing.  If they
tried to form labour unions they were threatened with death or blacklisted. 
Last hired, first fired.  If they did not work, the option was for them and
their families to starve to death.  So they worked.  Sun up till sun down, now
for cents a week.   
	The goods produced cost far more than the plantation crops, and proper
education became necessary to rise in the work place.  Blacks were outright
denied access to proper education, and those that miraculously managed to
achieve education and even wealth had to face racial prejudice and lynching.  
In vain, Blacks worked harder than ever to prove that they deserved the right
to be treated as equal citizens under the same Constitutional guidelines that
were upheld (really?) by their oppressors.  It was only after Blacks had to
fight for America in the first and second World Wars that asking became
demanding.  Enter, the civil rights struggle.
	    Affirmative Action was born of the civil rights struggle of the
sixties.  It was the drop to counter the ocean of decades of oppression.  Here
you had a population of millions of Blacks and colored peoples stuck in
poverty,  living in an America made great on their labour while working for
pittances, with little education, as the result of what White America had done
to their fathers and their fathers before them.   It was decided that the
children of those White ancestors should, while enjoying the benefits of
history, do something to repay the children of those who has laboured for the
stolen services of their ancestors.  Also, to make law these repayments so as
to counter present day bias.  For example, without a basic percentage (by law)
minority population in a work place, White employers could easily hire Whites
only, over equally or more qualified Blacks - as they were doing!  No amendment
was written stating that under-qualified blacks HAD to be hired, as the KKK
likes to gripe about. 
	1992 approaches, and still sees a grand majority of blacks below the
poverty and education lines.  Obviously, affirmative action has not been enough
to counter racism.   For people such as Judge Clarence Thomas to knock
affirmative action when it was quite likely that it aided him in his career is,
to me, disgusting.  There are so many intelligent and motivated Black and
Latino students who dream of attending college, but are too poor to afford it. 
Poor, like their fathers and their fathers before them, unable to break free
from the grip of poverty.  
	One has to wonder too what role industrial corporations have to play in
the whole mess, as they will use any means to get cheap labour so as to
maximize profits and earn more money, their god.  Indeed, the market for cheap
labour has expanded on a global scale.  Making stable nations unstable (a-la
CIA) helps to provide a constant influx of political refugee immigrants into
the U.S. for cheap labour, many of whom are conveniently non-White and fit
right in to the racial bias system.  Or, the cheap labour can be exploited
right in the destabilized country itself.  Labour, approximating slavery is
present this very day, this very hour.  In countries around the world including
America people of color and Whites are being cheated quietly by corporations
and sub-corporations.  The sugar you put in your coffee, the sweet taste in
Pepsi or Wrigley's gum, is brought to you via the cheated labour of Jamaican
sugar workers losing arms and feet to machetes in Florida, and the child labour
of Dominicans who are often abducted from their homes and forced to work on the
plantations, sun up till sun down,  till they are old and without a pension,
they die.
	If you consider yourself a believer in the Constitution and what it
stands for;  if you consider yourself a Christian who believes in the eternal
laws of God; if you are a human being who can feel any compassion for your
suffering brothers, I hope you by now realise the need to keep affirmative
action alive.  It is the only fair and just thing to do, if a race war is to be
averted in America.  How many times must the killing of Yusef Hawkins or Yankel
Rosenbaum be acted out?  How many cities must fall to the ravages of crime that
poverty creates?  How far will Whites run to not live next to a colored person? 
How many young Black men must spill red blood to the bullet or the knife?   You
can act to save the future of America from a downward spiral to desolation. 
Support Affirmative Action!


Written by Richard Dennison,
President, Caribbean Cultural Awareness Club
Chairman, Afrikan Concerns Association

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