Faxts.com News
Wednesday, 17 March 2010 15:35
Written by Sherwood Ross
Minorities increasingly are going to have to push harder for their own advancement without affirmative action, says the cofounder of a law school purposefully dedicated to the education of minority, immigrant, and low-income students.
“The corollary is that unfair disadvantage which bars their (minority) advancement must ruthlessly be stomped upon---we must ensure that minority status is not a factor that harms,” writes Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. “It will be essential that ability and willingness to perform, to get the job done, are all that counts."
Velvel said minorities have to drop any requests for special aid “simply as a matter of the practical realities of life.” He explained, “There is a point in time at which, and a level beyond which, people will no longer assist others. This is true in nuclear families, in extended families, among social groups, and among nations” and exists today concerning “the plight of minorities.”
Rightly or wrongly, dean Velvel writes in an article in his law school publication, The Long Term View, a very large number of Americans feel that minorities must do more to help themselves and that, in the course of this process, minorities will find it empowering. “They learn that they can do much more for themselves” and it will create “a wonderful sense of independence.”
Velvel challenged the idea that racial integration is always and everywhere necessary for progress and leads to progress. “The idea seems wrong. Integration of the public school systems, for example, does not seem to have led to better education, for minority groups or anyone else. On the other side, one often reads of defacto segregated schools in the inner city which are accomplishing wonderful things.”
Full Story: http://www.faxts.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=557:affirmative-action-and-the-level-playing-field&catid=89:correspondents
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