"You can't find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well." - Carrie Fisher

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"Reverse discrimination is as ill-advised a course of action as any undertaken by this country in at least a century. It cannot be justified by its social benefits, since experience suggests that the consequences of this policy are proving disastrous) It cannot be justified as giving particular members of the chosen group what they would have gotten if they had not been discriminated against, since by stipulation “affirmative action” goes beyond such an appeal to ordinary ideas of justice and compensation. It penalizes a group of present-day whites — those who are at least as well qualified but passed over — without proof that they have discriminated or directly benefited from discrimination; whites no more responsible for past discrimination than anyone else...

The only possible defense of reverse discrimination represents it as an attempt to rectify the consequences of past racial discrimination. But why has society selected one kind of wrong — discrimination as particularly deserving or demanding rectification? Other past wrongs have left their traces — acts of theft, despoliation, fraud, anti-Semitism — yet society has no organized policy of rectifying those wrongs... acts of racial discrimination have no morally special status...

Consider: Mr. X, a black of today, is supposedly owed special treatment. But surely if you owe Mr. X special treatment because his ancestors were the target of one wrong — discrimination — it would seem you owe Mr. Y special treatment if his ancestors were the target of some other wrong — theft, say. Racial discrimination is not the only wrong that can be committed against someone, and indeed it is far from the worst. I would rather be denied a job because I am Jewish than be murdered. My murderer violates my rights and handicaps my children much more seriously than someone who keeps me out of medical school. So the question is: if I owe Mr. X a job because his ancestors were discriminated against, don't I owe Mr Y the same if his ancestors were defrauded? I believe the answer must be yes: there is nothing special about acts of discrimination... Indeed, a quarter-century’s preoccupation with race has created a sense that racial prejudice is not just a wrong but a sin, an inexpungeable blot on the soul. Whether this attitude is rational is an issue worth considering.

Let me start with a truism. Discrimination deserves to be halted where it exists, and redressed where it can be, because it is wrong. Discrimination is worth doing something about because wrongs are worth doing something about and discrimination is wrong. Once we grant this, we start to see that there is nothing sui generis about discrimination. It competes with other wrongs for righting. And I take it as obvious that some wrongs demand righting more urgently than others...

It is frequently but mistakenly claimed that racial discrimination is special because it involves a group... [it] is not the only kind of act that is thus group-related. Many wrongs having nothing to do with race are discriminatory in the precise sense that they base the treatment of an individual on membership in a morally irrelevant group. Nepotism is discrimination against nonrelatives. When I make my lazy nephew district manager, I am disqualifying more able competitors because they belong to a group — nonfamily — membership in which should not count in the matter at hand. Discrimination need not be racial: any time you make a moral distinction on morally irrelevant grounds, you discriminate invidiously. In a society in which racial discrimination was unknown but capricious nepotism was the norm, denial of due process on grounds of family would provoke as much indignation as racial discrimination does now.

It would be sheer confusion to argue that acts of racial discrimination are special because they insult a whole race as well as wrong an individual. When I assault you, I assault no one else — and when I discriminate against you, I discriminate against no one else... If I bypass Mr. X because he is black, only Mr. X and his dependents suffer thereby. Perhaps because color is so salient a trait, we tend in uncritical moments to think of the black race as an entity existing in and of itself, above and beyond the particular blacks who make it up. Philosophers call this “reification”. We then think that an insult to this reified race is particularly malign, either in itself or because this entity somehow transmits to all blacks the harm done by single acts of discrimination. Some such reasoning must underlie the oft-heard ideas that the harm done to a single black man “hurts blacks everywhere” and that the appointment of a black to the Supreme Court is “a victory for blacks everywhere”, remarks which make no literal sense... A racial grouping no more deserves reification than does the class of people whose ancestors were defrauded...

(Some slight sense can be made of “injury to a group”, as when we say that a traitor endangers the security of a nation. But even here the harm done is to individuals, the particular citizens. The traitor deserves punishment because of the harm he has done to each citizen, not to “the nation” as a thing apart.)

Perhaps the main reason for thinking of acts of racial discrimination as morally distinctive is that each is an instance of a pattern. My discriminating against Mr. X is part of a self-sustaining pattern of wrongs. And, indeed, we do find wrong acts that together form a pattern more disturbing than each wrong act taken singly: Jack the Ripper’s legacy is more appalling than eleven isolated murders... this intuition must be carefully assessed. A single wrong act cannot be made more wrong because there is some other wrong act which it resembles. If I discriminate against you, my act has a certain amount of wrongness. If I then discriminate against someone else, my previous act against you does not take on more wrongness...

Two factors account for our feeling that patterned wrongs are worse than isolated ones. The first is that the perpetrator of a patterned wrong is worse. Jack the Ripper is worse than a man who kills once from passion. But this does not mean that what he did, in each case, is worse than a single act of murder. Similarly, the most we can say of bigotry is that a habitual bigot is worse than a one-shot bigot, not that an act of bigotry is in itself worse than an act of caprice. The second reason patterned wrongs seem especially malign is that they create anxiety through their promise of repetition. Jack the Ripper’s actions create more anxiety than eleven unconnected murders because we believe he will strike again. But this shows only that it is especially important to halt patterns, be they of murder or discrimination. It does not mean that a particular act in a discriminatory pattern is worse than it would have been in isolation. And it is worth repeating that antidiscrimination laws without benefit of affirmative action suffice to halt patterns of discrimination.

Granted, racial wrongs have gone beyond discrimination in hiring or the use of public facilities, extending all the way to lynching. But to acknowledge this is to bring racial wrongs under independent headings — denial of due process, assault, murder. Lynching Emmet Till was wrong not because Emmet Till was black, but because lynching is murder... State sanction in itself can make no difference. Even if “the state” is an entity over and above its citizens and their legal relations, the wrongness of an act (although not the blameworthiness of an agent) is independent of who performs it. So if discriminating is wrong, it is wrong, and to the same extent, no matter who performs it. Therefore, state-sanctioned past discrimination is no stronger a candidate for rectification than any other discrimination. In any case, even if we did consider state sanction to be morally significant, to be consistent we would have to apply this to all other state-sanctioned wrongs. We would have to say, for example, that we ought to give special treatment now to descendants of people who were harmed under the terms of a statute repealed decades ago. But I take it that no one would support affirmative action for th grandchildren of brewmasters bankrupted by the Volstead Act.

Finally, it has been suggested that grave discriminatory wrongs, such as the lynching of Negroes, were special because done with the intention of intimidating the other members of the terrorized group. Quite so: but again this makes my very point. To call an act of lynching wrong for this reason is to bring it under the umbrella of intimidation: a precisely parallel nonracial act of intimidation is just as wrong (although we might have reason to think the perpetrator is not as vicious). Many years ago, unions were in the habit of wrecking restaurants that refused to be unionized as a warning to other restaurants. Even today, Mob enforcers will kill an informer, or a retailer who refuses to pay protection, in order to intimidate other potential informers or defaulters. So if we treat Blacks as special because they belong to a class other members of which were terrorized, so must we treat restauranteurs as special, and indeed all small businessmen in businesses once victimized by the protection racket. And I take it that no one would suggest affirmative action for restauranteurs. Nor will it do to sy that this is because today no restauranteur is in danger from union or Mob goons. In fact, a restauranteur is in considerably more danger than a Black. The last lynching occured in 1954, while union vandalism and criminal extortion are the stuff of today’s sensational press...

It is impossible to rectify the consequences of all past wrongs. Consider how we might decide on compensatory payments. We trace the world back to the moment at which the wrong was done, suppose the wrong not done, and hypothetically trace forward the history of the world. Where I end up under this hypothetical reconstruction is where I deserve to be. I am owed the net difference between where I am now and where I would have been had the wrong not been done. But for most wrongs, it would take omniscience to say how the world would have turned out had the wrong not been done. If you wanted to make up to me for the theft of my grandfather’s watch in 1900, how on Earth do you propose to reckon the position I would have been in had my grandfather’s watch not been stolen? I might have been richer by a watch. I might have been poorer — since, being in fact deprived of a watch, I have worked harder than I otherwise would have. I might not have existed — if my grandfather met my grandmother while hunting or his stolen watch. Indeed, if you suppose yourself under a general ameliorative obligation, you will have to calculate simultaneously how well off each and every one of us would have been had all past wrongs not occurred...

Take Mr. X, an American black, who we think is worse off than he would have been had there been no slavery. Yet he may now be better off than he would have been had his African ancestors not conquered a neighboring tribe that was then raided by slave traders; had his ancestors respected territorial boundaries, Mr. X might now be a sickly native of Uganda. So unless we quite arbitrarily decide to rectify only some wrongs, we are undertaking a quite impossible task. What about limiting ourselves to rectifying wrongs we know about? But then we should surely try as hard as possible to find out about other wrongs, and trace their consequences. Once again, if we set out on that path, we will find ourselves with obligations that cannot be discharged. And an undischargeable obligation is no obligation at all. Indeed, it is far from obvious that the consequences of discrimination are easier to trace than those of other wrongs. I know victims of theft who have nothing to show for it. Why not benefit them? It is clearer that they are worse off from a past wrong than that an arbitrarily chosen black is...

Who knows but that all of us are in this room because of some dirty Hellenic trick on the plains of Marathon. Perhaps we should award Western Civilization to the descendants of Xerxes, or give them its dollar equivalent! Each of us lies on a “competition curve”, which graphs jobs against our chances of getting them. These curves are connected: I can’t move to a better one without bumping someone else down to a worse. If we try to put each person on the curve he would have occupied had there been no relevant wrongdoing, we will be raising and lowering everybody, sometimes at the same time, with no end in sight. Perhaps God is sufficiently powerful, well-intentioned, and well-informed to put each of us on his proper curve. But no lesser power — not ITT and not HEW — can undertake the task without absurdity."

--- Is Racial Discrimination Special? / Michael E. Livin, Journal of Value Inquiry (1981)