Affirmative Action Is Institutionalized Injustice, with a Direct Victim for Every Direct Beneficiary; Antidiscrimination Laws Interfere Arbitrarily in Normal Social Functioning and Create Entitlements

Inclusiveness creates losers no less than exclusion does. Affirmative action is institutionalized injustice, with a direct victim for every direct beneficiary. Frank Ricci, the lead plaintiff in the famous lawsuit over a written fireman’s test in New Haven, is one of the few victims who successfully fought back, and he had to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Nor is it just those displaced by the less qualified who lose. Institutionalized lying and favoritism hurt everyone, especially when driven to ideological extremes. Who wants a bumbling fireman? Who wants to ride on an airplane flown by an affirmative action pilot? And who can doubt that medical school admission preferences kill patients? We all do better in an intelligently run society, and inclusiveness makes it impossible to discuss human affairs realistically. It has made obvious and important features of social life unmentionable. . . .

Antidiscrimination laws interfere arbitrarily in normal social functioning and create entitlements based on a few characteristics, principally race. The result is to destroy normal patterns of cooperation and set people against each other. Those disadvantaged by the system resent it, while beneficiaries justify it by keeping real or imagined grievances alive.

--James Kalb, Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime Is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It (Tacoma, WA: Angelico Press, 2013), e-book.