Michael Barone on racial quotas

Michael Barone has an eloquent commentary on racial quotas that's a must-read.

I can only add this:

Racism is wrong. The race of the perpetrator and the race of the target are irrelevant to the morality of racism.  People should be judged only by the content of their character,  not by the color of their skin.

It might reasonably be asked: how did the Democratic party,  ostensibly the party of civil rights,  come to be such advocates of racial discrimination?  Why does a party that claims to promote equality incessantly play one race against another.  Why not insist on a color-blind society in law?  Equal protection of the law is already in the 14th Amendment,  and statutory racism is banned by the Civil Rights Act.

Why does the Democratic party incessantly play the race card?

Perhaps some perspective can help to answer.

Historically,  the Democratic party was the party of racism.  It was the party of slavery,  of Dred Scott vs Sanford,  the KKK,  of Jim Crow,  of Plessy vs Ferguson,  of segregation,  of George Wallace,  Lester Maddox,  and Bull Connor.  Democrats all.  The Republican party was formed as the abolitionist party,  and has a 150 year history of opposition to racial discrimination.  It was Republicans, not the Democrats, who provided the Congressional majorities needed to  pass the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960's.  Martin Luther King was a Republican.

So how is it that blacks vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, and that the Democratic party, the party of racism in America,  is widely viewed as the most racially enlightened?

There is no question that some Democrats have supported Civil Rights. Harry Truman's desegregation of the Army is a good example.  But the focus of racism in this county has always been in the Democratic party. By the early 1960's,  Democrats realized that their  Jim Crow America was dying, and they needed a new tack. They realized that people dependent on government largesse would be likely to vote for the party of government largesse-- the Democratic party.

So the Democrats enacted the Great Society,  which devastated poor families by replacing the father with a government check. A disproportionately large portion of these demolished families were black-- a tragic irony, given that historically black families tended to be more stable and cohesive than white families.

Democrat politicians became champions of racial discrimination-- Affirmative Action-- for two reasons:

1) The Democratic party is the party of racial discrimination,  so why change?

2)  The Democratic party exists by rewarding interest groups. It rewarded whites at the expense of blacks for a century and a half.  Now it rewards blacks.  Whatever gets votes.

The damage that the Democratic party has done to racial relations and to the black family in America is incalculable.  The KKK could only dream of destroying the black family and making black neighborhoods incubators of crime and misery.  But perhaps the KKK did accomplish it anyway,  via the party to which it was always violently loyal.

This explains the racial policies of the modern Democratic party:  several decades ago, the Democratic party realized that black people were more valuable in a voting booth than on a tree limb.