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Mahasattva
Both are based on the premise that African-Americans (or other) are inferior. Racial quotas is also based on the false premise that a social justice is served by government determined percentages of the different races fulfilling the positions of some organization rather than those positions being filled based on merit.
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Since when has America been a meritocracy. What's the first lesson of business school? Form relationships, learn to play golf, be able to handle a cocktail or two. Why? Because huge amounts of success in business comes from social interaction and personal relationships. Why else do people join well connected fraternities. Why is it that family members/friends of company management have a leg up for open positions. Because relationships matter. For both women and racial minorities, no matter how qualified, this aspect of business was essentially shut out for many, obvious reasons. It's one thing to have laws that force you to hire someone, you can not, however, force people to hang out with those with whom they might have little in common due to gender or being raised in very different social circumstances. And because the leadership, i.e. promoters, within business are overwhelmingly white men, "quotas" as you describe is meant to balance out the social advantages others receive just by virtue of being white men. Remember, Affirmative action is much more to the benefit of WHITE WOMEN. You keep ignoring that. Hmmm, wonder why. So no. Now if you respond to this can you please not just repeat the claim "but it assumes they are inferior." Cause I've actually responded to that reasnoning. Can you respond to mine?
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Before LBJ signed into law the Civil Rights Amendment, with the help of Republicans, that was true. After that it became illegal for the U.S. government to engage in racism of any kind. How long ago was that?
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40 years. Systematic racism in this country began in the 1600s. Hmmm, which trend has a longer more embedded history in American culture. I'll let you do the math all your own.
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The Tuskegee experiment was a horrible event, yet the Tuskegee experiment did not include Americans (many of who were black) infecting African-Americans with syphilis or creating syphilis specifically to infect African-Americans. What other experiments are you implying?
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You claim it was "false" that there was an extensive history of these kinds of things happening. I suggest you brush up on your American history. Specifically you can check out a spectacular book from your local library
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington.
Now before you scream "revisionist history!" remember that this is a book about medical experimentation and one of the first rules of the scientific method is record keeping and documentation. Washington merely uses the records of the thousands of doctors who performed experiments on African American subjects to develop cures for white populations. Here's just a sampler of some of the things she excavates in her book.
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In 1855, John "Fed" Brown, an escaped slave, recalled that the doctor to whom he was indentured produced painful blisters on his body in order to observe "how deep my black skin went."
J. Marion Sims, a leading 19th-century physician and former president of the American Medical Association, developed many of his gynecological treatments through experiments on slave women who were not granted the comfort of anesthesia
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In case you were just thinking it was the 19th century? Wrong.
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-In 1945, Ebb Cade, an African American trucker being treated for injuries received in an accident in Tennessee, was surreptitiously placed without his consent into a radiation experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
-Black Floridians were deliberately exposed to swarms of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and other diseases in experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA in the early 1950s.
-Throughout the 1950s and '60s, black inmates at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used as research subjects by a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist testing pharmaceuticals and personal hygiene products; some of these subjects report pain and disfiguration even now.
-During the 1960s and '70s, black boys were subjected to sometimes paralyzing neurosurgery by a University of Mississippi researcher who believed brain pathology to be the root of the children's supposed hyperactive behavior.
-In the 1990s, African American youths in New York were injected with Fenfluramine -- half of the deadly, discontinued weight loss drug Fen-Phen -- by Columbia researchers investigating a hypothesis about the genetic origins of violence.
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The book goes on and on and on. And again, the records speak for themselves. Unless you are going to claim she manufactured government records despite the fact that her book was reviewed by every major press and won quite a few awards for its painstaking attentiont o detail.
Now, I bring ALL of that up to suggest that Rev Wright's suspicions on HIV-AIDS are actually based on his knowledge of the history. He's wrong, but his conclusions are neither illogical, nor unreasonable considering the legacy.
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MLK was a hero who judged people on the content of their character, rather than the acceptance of his beliefs.
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I'm not sure how exactly that proves any dismiliarity between Wright and King. If your issue with Wright is ONLY that you perceive he judges those who don't believe what he believes then...OK. But if you have any critique of Wrights ideas about American racism, then you must have a critic for MLK as well. Have you READ Kings Letter from Birmingham Jail? Have you READ King's speeches about the Vietnam War and about poverty in the United States? He draws from the same liberationist theology tradition that preaches American racism is a sin against god and that America will have to pay for her sins. You are savvy so I know you can track down a copy of the Letter from Birmingham Jail and King's various statements on the Vietnam War. Why don't you do that before you come here claiming you have some knowledge of the "true" king. I suspect you don't know anything about King's history or writings outside of "I Have a Dream." That was one moment in a lifetime of radical activism.