The Merit System (Malik Speaking)
						MAIN PATH: John
			John

I'm undecided about a right to be judged on the basis of competence, but I can give you one reason why discrimination was wrong. Discrimination was written into law in this country. Black people were in a situation in which their own government --a government they supported with the taxes they paid and which owed them the equal protection of the law-- supported a system of discrimination that kept them in the lowest paying jobs, provided them with inferior schools, limited their ownership of property, and usually kept them from voting. Isn't it unjust for a government to turn on a group of its own citizens in that way instead of treating them like everybody else?

What government did in this country was to erect a framework that allowed one group of citizens to exploit another group as cheap labor.

At the same time, it made it very difficult for the exploited group to escape. Public schools, one of the main keys to progress for a people who owned very little, were deliberately underfunded for black children. And, here's another example, local governments in the south tried to stop outsiders from coming into the area to tell blacks about jobs in other parts of the country. Surely that kind of government policy is unjust.

Ariadne Home	Affirmative Action Bibliography	Affirmative Action Home