Shawn_Coleman's Blog

As  you are all aware aside from the Presidential contest, Senate races and all the congressional and other local races. There are 18 statewide ballot questions. Let's discuss these issues on this forum as well. This is a recycled post from early this summer on my blog,The Routt Report regarding the competing affirmative action measures. I wrote this back in July, and so far I'm sticking to it. I'll try not to be so long winded on the other measures but as you can imagine this is a little personal.

   For the past 30 years I've been a Black guy in America. When a person is born black, male, to a single mother, living in Harlem, at the lower end of the tax bracket, in 1978, well society didn't have very high expectations. Nonethless there I am floating in a pool at the condo that I own in Boulder, CO. Not to say that I am some pinnacle of success and prosperity, I asure you that is not the case, but if a stock beat market expectations by such a large margin, and still only cost $10 a share, well that firm would probably have an easy time raising capital. How did I beat the odds? I didn't, there was a wild card. Now there was luck and opportunity like in every life, along with setbacks and dissapointments. But the only factor of consequence was my mother. Sharon Coleman decided that the cycle of generational poverty ends with her. She succeeded where affirmative action and philonthropic organizations failed. Good parenting is the only effective cure to what ills not only the black community but every community that suffers from the disease of generational poverty. Programs like affirmative action which only treat the symptoms serve to distract us from the common struggles that transcend race and gender. Over time our heavily medicated malaise only deepens the infection. If you are born in a New York housing project or an Alabama trailer park , you have every important baramoter of success in common, and an equally bleak prognosis. 
  

 While affirmative action soothes the symptoms and gives the apperance of social health to those fortunate to view it from the elite and therefore distant vantage point, it does nothing to cure the disease at the site of infection. Poor America, rural and urban suffer from the same lack of educational opportunity that is perpetual, and therefore it defies logic that because one is Black and the other White that one should recieve preferrential college or employment when both are equally under-qualified.
  

This fall Colorado will have two competing ballot measures regarding affirmative action. I don't know which I intended to vote for, but if the langauge of the measure is appropriately neutral I will vote to end affirmative action in Colorado. I am not so naive as to think that I have never benefited from affirmative action or to believe that there are some proponents of ammendment 46 that are racist in their support. What is clear is that since the inception of affirmative action poverty has increased in minority communities, and education has only increased marginally, just shy of keeping pace with "educational inflation" (i.e. 150 years ago you didn't even need high school,30 years ago H.S. was essential to success and today try working getting a decent job without at least some college level education.) When you factor in educational inflation and inflation inflation, the urban poor are slightly behind where they were at affirmative action's inception and rural poor have seen a dramatic decline. Yet we continue to use arbitrary solutions when it's far too late. 

  Affirmative action's fatal flaw is it's inherent reliance of mediocrity. Further the low expectations it sets for society as a whole are at best problematic. Good parents like my mother know that the only way to break the cycle would be for her children to do something comparitvely extraordinary. She offered the personal sacrifice required to move from the projects to the surburbs. In return she expected excellence from her children. She taught us that reliance on assitance programs is not the same as success. That to be truly free you must be judged worthy exclusively on your merits absent of pity. These teachings the remnants of Dr. King and the leaders of "Black America's greatest generation" have been lost to entitlement and confusing mediocrity with prosperity. 
My mother was wise enough to know that the gravity of generations of inequity is too strong to escape without a quantam leap. Affirmative action's problem is it encourages baby steps. Sure affirmative action can get you a mediocre job, or decent education, but that is not enough to break free of the gravity. The only way to get into Juilliard or Yale Law, become a CEO or Congressman is unquestionable personal excellence. The assumption that a person who is a minority can only acheive greatness with accomodations breeds a culture that expects them. Good parenting that instills the values of pride, self worth, and personal responsibility is what allows people of all ethinicties to rise out of poverty. These values are no more a guarantee of success than affirmative action, but unlike affirmative action those values are a pre-requisite for enduring prosperity. 
  

Affirmative action ironically cast a shadow on the success of minorities that is deleterious to enduring prosperity. It also allows us to take the easy way out as a society by focusing on race rather than the real, but more serious and more challenging problem of economic inequity. The biggest barrier to higher education whether you Black or White is the financing. And the biggest barrier to long term employment success is education. 

  Affirmative action had it's time. We are in a different albeit imperfect world now where economic disparity is shared across races and to the end that we continue to distract ourselves from real progress on an economic plan, investing in commuties and having personal responsibility for our families, we will continue this path of degredation masquerading as stasis. A White person saying exactly what I'm saying now would probably be viewed as a racist. That is part of the problem. We must stop walking on eggshells and have a real dialogue on the issues of race and economics based on the assumption that we all recognize the inefficiency of poverty and biasis, and be prepared to actually listen to each other without assuming a persons position translates to their personal character. Being progressive for the sake of being progressive is just as bad conservative for the same reason. We have to stop making issues like affirmative action divisive down party line. Proponents of affirmative action are generally liberal minded people, but the question is; what is more important, taking positive steps towards equality or being "right". We spend so much time as a society deciding how we accomplish goals that we loose sight of if we have accomplished anything and finally loose sight of the goal itself. 
  

Our society is not perfect, but it has made trenedous strides. Today, with hard work and personal responsibilty a person has relatively equal opportunities with those in their economic class. Let's work on leveling the opportunity playing field so that a person has the opportunity to succced or fail on their merits. Let's not continue a policy of lowered expectations and dimished returns on investment.

Oh and thanks Mom for being generally awesome. Your achievments as a parent are extraordinary and you embody the proof that success is possible with determination, even absent public or private assistance or accommodation.