COLUMN: Minorities don’t need handouts
Last week was diversity week here at Utah State University. In keeping with the celebration of administrative aesthetics here at our fine university, it is only fitting that I should comment on the politically popular neo-slave trade.
It all starts with words, and diversity is a term that has, like many other politically sensitive words, been hijacked and while held hostage by the left, redefined. According to liberals, diversity is intended to promote tolerance, reconcile current conditions created as a result of past institutional inequalities and enhance our frames of mind. They claim that diversity is the higher road. We need different races because every member of a particular race thinks alike and will thus bring a certain cultural ideology to the academic environment.
The truth is diversity is nothing more than, as Justice Thomas so adequately put it, a policy of visual aesthetics. It is never about different views as the left claim. It is about skin color. It is a policy aimed at a Socratic control over minorities. So, besides the irony of fighting past racism with current racism let’s consider the effects of polices organized under catchphrase of diversity.
The noble lie that has been told to America is that minorities cannot achieve greatness or anything comparable to their white counterparts without government intervention. Liberals claim minorities, especially African Americans, are innately inferior and therefore need preferential treatment based on the color of their skin. Thus, the left has effectively created a Trojan Horse intended to sneak inequality in through the facade of equality.
These racist (defined as the belief that people of different races have different qualities and abilities) policies are implemented in various ways. Admissions to professional programs often give minorities a leg up on others who apply because of their race, often times admitting minorities with sub-par academic achievements.
As a result of lower admissions standards, minorities learn that they can rely on the color of their skin and not hard work to attain their goals. These polices even result in higher proportions of minorities washing out of academic programs because they are not sufficiently prepared to compete with others to the predetermined minimum adequate standard. The left has created policies that set minorities up to fail.
Instead of empowering minorities by teaching them they are capable of achieving greatness without Uncle Sam’s help and holding them responsible, liberals have chosen to foster an environment of entitlement without responsibility resulting in dependence. Such a situation reinvents the condition of the south’s racist societies in the early 20th century. Liberals have created a racist society complete with neo-Jim Crow laws designed to ensure that minorities never break the cycle of dependence and poverty.
The left subjects minorities to such discrimination and oppression because governmental dependence is the source of their power. The left has effectively deceived minorities by teaching that they are entitled to handouts from the government and thus further entrenching their control. It is a subtle control based on providing basic need; needs that minorities have leaned they cannot meet without the help of government. Hence liberals and civil rights advocates like Jesse Jackson have become modern day slave traders, deceiving minorities and selling them into bondage for political power as their payment. Such actions are almost identical as that of the Africans of days past who deceived their fellow tribesmen and sold them as slaves.
It is time for minorities in America to break free from bondage imposed by the left. You can achieve greatness without the left, you are capable, and you are responsible. The left only will seek to bring you down for their political gain. If you are down and out, they are up and happily in power. Break the chain, ask to be judged for the content of your character and not the color of your skin. You deserve it. Only then will you truly be free.
Jared Westbroek is a senior majoring in law and constitutional studies. He can be reached at jwestbroek@cc.usu.edu.