“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating based on race.”- Chief Justice John Roberts, 2007
Jon Reisman
The Supreme Court weighed in on the constitutionality of gerrymandering based on race, and the race hustlers in the Democratic Party and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Gestapo got a lecture that shattered their social justice gender and racial oppression worldview: Two wrongs don’t make a right. Racial discrimination is wrong, and using it as a reparations tool to somehow correct for past discrimination doesn’t make discrimination morally or legally OK. Race-based decision-making is unconstitutional, and the motives behind it are irrelevant. Affirmative Action and its 21st-century mutant cousin DEI are unconstitutional racial discrimination, and it is going to stop. This has sent the antisemitic, anti-capitalist, anti-American (think Graham Platner) left into a rage. Nothing aggravates a bully more than being called out and exposed as a hypocritical fraud.
I was in elementary school in Philadelphia in the mid-60s when the Voting Rights Act passed, and school integration, racial gerrymandering, and affirmative action reparation efforts ensued. I remember several slightly older Black students coming to our classroom and explaining integration efforts and the bad consequences of discrimination. I was in agreement with them til the end, when they explained how affirmative action and racial preferences would henceforth be used to redress the situation.
Even at age 10 or 11, I knew this was wrong. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Some 30 years later, I ran for Congress against incumbent Rep. John Baldacci (no one else was interested in challenging the governor to be) on the same conviction. Almost 30 years after that electoral drubbing, the systemic racism of affirmative action and DEI is finally going to be excised, unless Mr. Platner and his antisemitic progressive posse succeed.
School integration efforts across the nation often involved busing, which was very divisive and controversial. In Philadelphia, my parents enrolled both my sister and me in three years in two integration programs. A cadre of white, mostly Jewish students from our neighborhood enrolled in an almost all-black junior high school (I took the subway and bus) in exchange for completing grades 6, 7, and 8 in two years. It was not exactly integration (the white Jewish kids didn’t assimilate or mix much), and there was not a lot of cross-cultural mixing, but it was better than the segregation that resulted from our racially homogenous neighborhoods. I got beaten up and robbed a few times, but emerged relatively unscathed and prepared both academically and socially for a more diverse American experience.
Chief Justice Roberts is right. The way to stop racial discrimination is to stop doing it. It’s just hard for the race hustlers and bullies to give up their bigoted ways.
Jon Reisman is an economist and policy analyst who retired from the University of Maine at Machias after 38 years. He resides on Cathance Lake in Cooper, where he is a Statler and Waldorf intern. Mr. Reisman’s views are his own, and he welcomes comments as letters to the editor here or to him directly via email at jreisman@maine.edu.
