Diane Carey Responds to Jack Lessenberry

In today's Metro Times Op Ed writer Jack Lessenberry wrote:

I am totally in favor of affirmative action, always have been, and I am a middle-aged, white, Anglo-Saxon male, of class origins lower than those of that intellectual pinup girl for today's trailer park, Jennifer "Adenoidal Whine' Gratz.

I fought against Proposal 2, knowing all along that it would pass, that every laid-off metal bender in Center Line was just itching to stick it to the blacks, who, some of them really do think, get an automatic free ride, full scholarship to the University of Michigan, just for being Negroes.

And indeed, the voters of this state overwhelmingly and disgracefully chose to outlaw affirmative action in college admissions and government hiring. Affirmative action lost by a landslide everywhere except in Detroit, and the two counties surrounding Michigan State University and the University of Michigan.

But it isn't over till it's over, and, last week, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP filed suit in federal court asking, essentially, that the courts overturn the will of the voters. "We have come too far to allow the doors of opportunity to be shut in the face of the American promise of liberty and justice," intoned the Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit NAACP.

He claimed that "affirmative action is still the law of the land." He was joined by Kary Moss, who is executive director of the ACLU of Michigan.

She referred in a press release to the twin U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the U-M cases. She said those 2003 rulings "made it clear that it is entirely within the law for universities to consider race and gender as one of many criteria in selecting their student body."

Now, full disclosure on my part. I firmly believe in the American Civil Liberties Union. I give them money. I am on Kary Moss' advisory board. I think she is one of the best things Michigan has going for it.... (Lessenberry continues from this point to agree that the basis of the lawsuits brought to prevent the implementation of the MCRI are nonsense, but this is a legal argument for him. His true beliefs are stated above.)


To the above paragraphs Diane Carey responds:

To the Metro Times,

Please re-think your use of James Lessenberry's "opining." It's not "opining;" it's "Oh-whining." Lessenberry's membership in the socialist/affirmative action strike team diminishes his credibility. He calls names but misses points, displaying a journalistic liar of the first degree.

His tirade against Proposal 2 is faulty, and his reducing the voters of Michigan to "laid-off metal benders in Center Line" is a gross misinterpretation of what happened. I am the mother of a multi-race family and aunt of four mixed race (part black) children. I helped lead the charge against race preferences because my children are Americans and shouldn't have different rights from each other based on skin color.

Lessenberry merrily ignores the fact that 52% of women, 50% of labor households, 50% of non-labor households, and even 14% of blacks no longer want to be judged by race or gender. If the vote had happened in a conservative- slanting year, Lessenberry would have said that "rich white revenge" was at work, but since clearly that's not what happened, we're now all "metal benders" trying to "stick it to blacks." Can he explain why I would want to "stick it" to my own children?

Affirmative action is not the law of the land, despite the Lessenberry tantrum. Equal opportunity is the law of the land. Affirmative action (sorting people by race) is the opposite of equal opportunity (everyone the same before the law). Affirmative action is a corrupt political disease. As the next step in the Civil Rights march in America, we must dismantle it.

Diane Carey
RaceFreeZone.com
Owosso, Michigan