Wednesday, June 26, 2013

"White Men Need Not Apply"

Multiply this by a few million times.

One of my friends has an undergraduate degree in Education (and was a teacher), then got a M.S. in Economics (and taught as a graduate assistant), so he applied for a position at a local community college. He was convinced he would get the job since he was more than qualified for it.

He didn’t get it. Instead, it was given to a woman. I told him the reason he did not get the job was because of Affirmative Action, which means “White Men Need Not Apply.”

When he sat in on this woman’s class, he was shocked to see that she made mistakes on the blackboard. “She didn’t really understand the material,” he told me. And she had (read: was given) an M.S. in Economics.

When he investigated, he found she was a newly-minted M.S., with no teaching experience whatsoever. The job should have been his, but he realized he was passed over because he was a white male – even though the woman was unqualified for her position.

The problems continued. He moved out of state and finally got a job at a community college teaching economics. The position was part-time, with no benefits. He figured sooner or later he’d be offered a full-time position.

After seven years he was never offered one, even though his student evaluations were always very good. He again ran across another unqualified woman who had a full-time position. “She couldn’t figure out how to do the math on the blackboard,” he told me.

Bizarrely, there was an African teaching at this college, which was in the Southwest. Students would go into my friend’s office and ask if he was teaching a certain class next semester, because they wanted to avoid the African, who, they told him, was a terrible teacher.

When I asked my friend if this African was incompetent, he said, “Yes.” Apparently this buffoon’s idea of teaching was to tell the students to read the entire micro- or macro-economics textbook (Intro to Micro/Macro are the beginning economics classes).

After seven years he just gave up, realizing he was never going to get a full-time position anywhere. Fortunately he inherited enough money to not exactly retire, but he did buy for cash a three-bedroom condo in the foothills of the local mountains. These days he works part-time at a local bowling alley as a mechanic.

“I worked my butt off,” he told me, “and what did I get?”

As he was moving out of his apartment into his condo, he met a man from California moving into his complex. He said he had taught economics for eleven years in California and was never offered a full-time position. Finally he left the state.

That's not the only story I've heard about Affirmative Action. One man, with an M.A., who had been an officer in the Army, told me that when the promotion list came out there were eight white woman, one black woman, and one "Hispanic" woman. He and all the other white men, he realized, did not stand a chance of getting promoted.

How about another one? A friend of mine loves the law. He inquired about being a law professor and was told by the dean, "Forget it. You don't stand a chance because you're white."

One of the main problems with Affirmative Action is that it promotes the unqualified and keeps the qualified under-employed or unemployed. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but how things are supposed to be and how they turn are usually not the same thing – especially when the government gets involved.

Another problem with AA is the contempt that men end up feeling towards unqualified women (or unqualified anyone). This contempt is intensified when men have to carry the burden created by the unqualified who have been promoted beyond their level of competence.

What I have found is these men are now moving into being self-employed. Who wants to work for anyone when you are not being given the raises and promotions you deserve, and instead have to work for the inept, and worse, do their work for them?

Some years ago I read an article by a retired professor who wrote that there would be a reaction to qualified man being shut out of academia and their jobs being given to unqualified minorities. He's right, and one of those reactions is the Manosphere. It is, however, just the tip of the iceberg.

In the long run this abuse of men (and it is abuse) will only damage society. Men created both civilization and technology. Specifically, white men created them. As Camille Paglia commented, if civilization had been left in the hands of women, we’d still be living in grass huts.

As Charles Murray (and many others before and after him) demonstrated in his Human Accomplishment, European men and their descendents throughout the world have created about 98% of everything.

This is not, contrary to the hallucinations of leftists. because of "patriarchy" and "oppression" and "sexism." It is because men and woman have different brains.

I've met some women who were gleeful about these things. Every one of them lacks the imagination and critical and analytical ability to see what a society without men's contributions would be like. It wouldn't be worth living in.

I believe Affirmative Action - and leftism itself - is based on the envy of white men. The terrible thing about envy is that the envier with bring down those they envy, even if they destroy themselves. And that is what is happening.

Civilization is already going backwards, not technologically but morally. Envy is rampant, along what always goes along with it - hate and devaluation. This is what invariably what happens when the government exceeds its proper bounds – as in the case of Affirmative Action, which is government-enforced.

In fact, ultimately all governments turn leftist, which means they try to make everyone equal (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his Leftism Revisited, said one of the purposes of Leftism was "the overthrow of the Father.") It never works, and unfortunately destroys everything in its attempt to do so.

6 comments:

Franco said...

This might be interesting, but I am sure you get your post is anedoctal.
If the problem is so overwhelming, I am sure you could at least find some correlation between affirmative-action and efficiency-of-organization-a.

Do you find you can collect such data?

Anonymous said...

although technology is not reversing, it is stagnating. In recent years the only "progress" that has been made the merely refinement of already existing technologies and most are for entertainment

Take The Red Pill said...

Just read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" to see what the future holds for the West.
But as far as I can tell, there is no real-life counterpart of the fictional John Galt alive now who will lead this society back after everything crashes.
Most likely, he was aborted before he had a chance to be born.
Or he became so disgusted with modern society, he has GHOW.

Anonymous said...

Women do not 'envy' men. We wouldn't trade places with them for the world. We acknowledge their build-and-destroy mindset, and we do appreciate the good and the progressiveness (architecture, say...)they provide the world. You're being punished for what your ancestors did, and I agree that that's not fair, but when the pendulum swings, it'll land for a while at an extreme before it finds a middle. Now you know (ever so slightly) what it has been like for women, although we weren't allowed in universities for a very long time. I wouldn't give up on teaching. Crisis and opportunity are wedded. Perhaps you can be a little more industrious and create your own online teaching course affiliated with X college.
To be angry distracts and subtracts. My first job after my bachelor's degree was as an assistant editor for a transportation trade magazine. When the marketing analyst quit, I took on her job as well--all to the tune of $14k per year. When I quit to work on my Master's, a male was hired and hired at $27k per year...for one job as an editor (they had hired a marketing analyst). Join the club....

Socio said...

I had the same experience in Missouri. The community colleges there were only hiring women with NO teaching experience and only the minimal amount education. In one community college system in particular, all of the full time positions were held by white women even though they claimed to value diversity. I would urge men not to even think about going into teaching.

Unknown said...

"Women do not 'envy' men. We wouldn't trade places with them for the world."

You certainly do envy men, otherwise you wouldn't have the comment about disparity in wages.

Speaking of the world...men created/discovered everything in it. Specifically, white men.