Adams and Cuomo rip Mamdani for identifying as African American on college application

[Hekate]

57. If you are referring to quotas, yes, that worked very well for generations of white men...

Last edited Tue Jul 8, 2025, 07:05 PM - Edit history (1)

Women need not be admitted/hired, they’ll only get married, then pregnant, and waste their education. African-Americans, certainly not. As for Jews, sooner or later the institutions had to recognize the exceptionalism of a tiny fraction, enough to have a quota that admitted a few of these competitors, but only a few and no more.

Ruth Bader-Ginsberg was one of only a very few women admitted to her law school — one of her professors (maybe the Dean himself) made her, during the introductions, stand up and justify why she, a woman, deserved to take a man’s place there. Quotas — because those places belonged to men, specifically white Christian men (but not Roman Catholic, because that would mean Irish and Italians and the Pope in Rome) .

Affirmative Action, on the other hand, does not operate on a quota system. The simplest possible explanation, the easiest to grasp, came to me from a County manager. County is civil service, and requires an exam as well as a resume. The exam has a range of acceptable scores. In a county with about 50% Latinos, how is it possible for the County employment roster to have almost no Latinos?

Well, back before LBJ, there used to be no requirement for open recruitment, so a supervisor was likely to simply tell his (his) current staff that an opening was coming up, and they would tell their relatives and neighbors. Interested persons would take the exam, and if they scored anywhere along the acceptable range (even the bottom of acceptability) they were hired. Long-time employees would say it was “just like working with family” — to which I say, “No Duh.”

Affirmative Action changed some laws (requiring open recruitment being one) and changed the County employment culture, too, at least in my county and at least until it was outlawed. Across the whole nation (in hiring and in education) the very concept was always tarred with the Right Wing accusation that AA was quotas for unqualified POC and women. “Unqualified women and POC” who were unfairly taking places that were rightfully those of white men.

The Right Wing has won. But AA, which I worked on for over a decade, was not a quota system. The Right Wing, in its insistence that AA is soooooo unfair, is simply admitting that their white sons cannot handle competition.