-called Christian nation. A recognition such as this would also demonstrate the inadequacies of present-day affirmative action. Affirmative action is a cheap price for blacks to settle for, given he way America has systematically discriminated against them in order to preserve and protect white male, and increasingly, white female privilege.Since the Civil War and up to the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education decision, African Americans have been denied equal access to higher education and the labor market, and they have been denied by law. Starting with Jim Crow laws in the South, and later with the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, statutory discrimination became the la of the land.There is a relationship between these two systems of discrimination and the class circumstances of a group that is the object of them. Obviously, if a group is excluded from key economic and educational opportunities in a society, it will remain at the bottom of the class hierarchy. In time, it will become possible to exclude the group as effectively by invoking class characteristics: invoking the lack of qualifications. To deny a group access is to guarantee that that group ill not has the resources to qualify itself to compete wit a group that has not been similarly denied. This is especially true if arena of denial is denial of access to the labor market.However, in American labor history, whites have often begrudgingly recognized that they needed black labor. Given this recognition, the issue became to deny blacks equal policies made certain that blacks remained at the bottom of the labor market. History – that is to say historical fact – also demonstrates that whites recognized that by also denying blacks equal access to educate, they would render blacks less qualified. Consequently, they d not be able to compete for the more-prestigious, well-paying occupations. Clearly, by denying one group accesses, more oppo...
