The Damage of Affirmative Action

America is not a fair nation and never will be.

Hi all,

I wasn’t expecting to post again this soon, but things move quickly these days. This morning, I quickly composed my thoughts on Trump’s recent move on Affirmative Action in a thread on X (Twitter). I’m copying and pasting below:

With a stroke of the pen, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that removed President Lyndon Johnson’s executive order 11246 —which established Affirmative Action — from the books.

The damage done to our nation by Affirmative Action was profound.

The great sin of Affirmative Action was that it kept the idea of race alive in our minds. It turned everyone into an identity of immutable characteristics. It deluded us into thinking we could use the poison of race to engineer redemptive innocence from America’s racist past.

This is not what many foot soldiers in the Civil Rights movement wanted. They sought to abolish the racial categories that undergirded the white supremacy racial order. White meant supremacy, black meant inferiority, & that had to be destroyed. Becoming an American was the goal.

At the time of the civil rights victories, a population that had been racially oppressed for centuries was now entering into full equality of the law with their just recent oppressors. The prevailing question was how does one prevent present and future discrimination?

There were Americans who believed that the way forward was through the development of the oppressed, black population— upgrade the quality of schools, increase job-training, increase awareness and access, and the like.

However, as my father, Shelby Steele, has pointed out, the sin came when white liberals decided that pursuing racial diversity was racial innocence from America’s racist past. If they could prove their universities or workplaces were racially diverse, they were innocent.

In this cold, self-serving pursuit of innocence, they turned blacks and other minorities into racial preferences and, in doing so, ushered a new era of racism. Black development was largely sacrificed in the pursuit of white innocence.

In fact, arguing for black development became taboo to the point that Steele, Thomas Sowell, and any other black who argued for it were called Uncle Toms. Whites that argued similarly were called racist.

Today, we have permanent black underclasses in cities all over America. Black students who descend from America's legacy of slavery still touch the bottom of nearly every education statistic. We also have the rising white identity politics and we are more tribal than American.

The cruelty of this pursuit for white innocence was that there was no accountability or responsibility from the liberal whites as well as the liberal blacks who derived great power from milking white guilt -- from academia to the streets.

Instead, white supremacy was blamed. Books were written about red-lining, block busting — which my own family suffered from — and those evil racist Republicans.

Then we heard America was a systemically racist nation. Jim Crow 2.0. Mass incarceration. Respectability politics. Intersectionality. White privilege. White fragility. Implicit bias. Defund the police. Black Lives Matter. Then the summer of George Floyd that paralyzed USA.

(I do have to give my father, Shelby, credit here. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, he stood alone -- except for Sowell and few others -- as people called him a fool for saying that systemic racism is a lie and that America is not a systemically racist nation. He kept saying, "I grew up in segregation. I know systemic racism and this is not it." When we announced in 2016, in the height of protests, that we were going to make our documentary, "What Killed Michael Brown?" people told us we were insane.)

The white liberal -- the PC thing now to say is Leftist -- still has yet to have his or her day of reckoning. White segregationists like George Wallace had theirs, realizing that race had poisoned America.

Racism is never done in the name of evil — it is always done in the name of the good. But if race is poison, how can it cure centuries of poison?

There are many Americans that have understood this truth, especially blacks who now realize that the greatest mistake of the last 60 years was to put their fate, partially or whole, into the hands of the white liberal. They have already moved onto the path of development.

On the South Side of Chicago, Pastor Corey Brooks is in the middle of building a 90,000 square foot community center to provide pathways to opportunities in his impoverished neighborhood.

Pastor Brook’s new community center.

Ian Rowe opened the Vertex Partnership Academies in the heart of the Bronx to provide a high quality education to the youths there . These students have taken trips to DC where they met with Justice Clarence Thomas.

School kids from Ian Rowe’s Vertex Partnership Academies

Even down in Albany, Georgia, a young 24 year old man named King Randall opened the Life Preparatory School for Boys. Its mission is "to teach boys the true meaning of manhood & to be protectors and providers for their communities."

Students at the Life Preparatory School for Boys.

Time will tell whether these efforts will bear fruit or not. But I am an optimist and I believe they will.

The greatness of America has never been her racial groups but that she is the first nation in the world to be the guarantor of the individual.

When Trump signed away Affirmative Action he weakened the power of racial tribalism in favor of the American individual.

America is not a fair nation and never will be. That is the price of living in freedom. But it is this freedom that makes it possible to pursue our own path through life, whatever obstacles may come, and what greater gift can a nation give than that?

My best,

Eli