Affirmative Action

In the larger scheme of things, Affirmative Action doesn't matter: in the academic world, it mostly meant that black studies departments were set up. They weren't hiring blacks--or women, for that matter--in engineering departments or economics departments. Not in chemistry. But they did in English departments. For me, it meant that I couldn't get a job, because, for the most part, women were hired for jobs I applied to. Does it matter? Surely, given the massive pools of applicants for jobs, those women who got hired were more than capable--many undoubtedly as good, if not better, than I. Yet the idea of imposing a wrong to right a wrong is still troubling, for the real perpetrators of discrimination got off scott-free. In a true, just affirmative action process, older, white men should have lost their jobs to make way for women, minorites, anyone in classes of people who were denied places in, say, the academic world. Why did I have to be denied an opportunity to make up for the crime of my elders? With their white, male privilege, plenty of fools got jobs: they didn't accomplish all that much, except they got to pretend to be academics. Had comfortable lives. Read books. Viewed themselves as wise mentors. There's an ecology of livelihoods: jobs are handed out for silly reasons, unjustifiable reasons. Was it Balzac who said that behind every great fortune there's a crime? Well, behind every desirable tenured position, there's a crime. But we always believe that, if we achieve something, it's because we deserve it. Deserve it? If so, we also deserve every disease that comes our way. Every failure. It has the same reality as prayer--as if some entity cares.