The latest battle over race-conscious affirmative action policies is taking place over a loan forgiveness program in the Providence, Rhode Island, public school district.
The Legal Insurrection Foundation is suing to overturn an “overtly racist and discriminatory” program being implemented by a district that receives millions in federal funding. Which means that all taxpayers are indirectly subsidizing this sort of thing.
According to the district’s new policy, an applicant for a teaching post can get up to $25,000 in college loans paid off if he teaches for three years in a row in the district. The incentive seems innocuous enough until you learn that beneficiaries of the grant, being funded by a Rhode Island charity, must “identify as Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latino, biracial, or multi-racial.”
The specification that one must “identify as” a member of one of these races may sound as if persons of unambiguously blanco tint need merely “identify as” Black or Indigenous or the like to get around the whites-need-not-apply exclusion. But such a mode of circumvention — even if, as seems unlikely, it could succeed to the extent that officials pretended to believe the claim — would require applicants to lie or become delusional.
To match this delusional policy, no doubt.
But the policy would still remain racist and discriminatory.
The Foundation’s filing quotes a dictum that if universally accepted would put an end to all this nonsense: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “Right Color Only”
There’s no need for anyone to lie. We should all identify as multi-racial, since homo sapiens emerged from Africa. We may have a dominant ethnicity, but we’re not purebreds. Skin color should play no role. It’s not anyone’s fault that some of our ancient ancestors left Africa and moved away from the equator.
For the time being, I’ve decided to identify as a Hispanic lesbian, which seems to require no differences in my modus operandi yet opens up lots of federal largesse options