White men who profited from past discrimination lack standing to protest affirmative action
Evidence
- I have a white son in graduate school who could become a professor and would probably make a good one. But he knows he has much less of a chance of becoming one than others do because of his gender and Caucasoid genes. The woman (let’s say) who gets the job he might have gotten in a blind competition did not cheat him out of his chance. I did. For generations, white guys such as I have had it easy, competing only with one another, consciously and unconsciously keeping the cream of the professional jobs within “our club.” We have undeniably prospered, because we benefited from the unfairness of the world. I think we have no right to start crying out now about “reverse discrimination” and how “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Where were we when it was just “one wrong,” for generation after generation? So if anybody “owes” my son, because his future will be less fair than it should be, it is not the long disadvantaged groups who are finally getting a little of what they are owed. It is I. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 4299
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the moral-psychology of fairness perception and how privilege shapes grievance; echoes the vault’s Christian-nationalism narrative of white grievance.
- SEED: The author’s self-implicating argument is a candor model for how writers acknowledge their own stake in an unfair system.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 4299