Editor:

I was delighted to see Ryan Darby’s article on affirmative action (Jan. 27 issue of the Guardian), his latest attempt to bully people into his logic through sheer erudition.

I am too uninformed to call myself a supporter of affirmative action; the idea I’ve always had of affirmative action is of an imperfect solution to a terrifyingly complex problem, like the AIDS patient’s cocktail of medicines. It’s no cure, but rather a desperate attempt to pro-actively fight the disease, and without it, the patient might as well give up and die.

The thing is, there’s such thing as affirmative actionfor whites too, it’s just so ingrained into the American world that nobody notices it, and it’s not exactly a law – it doesn’t need to be.Affirmative action may not be the way to cure the United States of racism, but this uninformed observer cannot at the moment think of a better treatment of the problem.

As for Darby’s statements about the 14th Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education, it’s all a bunch of hooey. See, the Fourteenth Amendment provides for the equal protection under the law of all rights and privileges of a citizen. The ruling in Brown v. Board of Education is that secondary public education is a privilege of citizenship and segregated schools do not equally protect this privilege. On the other hand, university education is not a privilege open to all,since even public universities are not required to admit all students, regardless of qualifications; furthermore, there is no evidence that a school not employing affirmative action is superior over a school that is.

I am surprised and horrified to see a thoroughbred republican dishonor his vow of conservative Constitutional interpretation and squeeze such tripe out of the 14th Amendment, all for the sake of a Guardian article. I will now proceed to wag my finger accordingly.

As for the Martin Luther King Jr. references, King had a dream: “”that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”” This is clearly an argument against affirmative action.

King’s dream represents the ideal, final paradise that we all hope for; it is the desire that stirs our hearts, the motivation that keeps us fighting, a word-painting of everything worth achieving: brotherhood, peace, union and glory. But it must not be mistaken for the reality of today — what we have today is no paradise, but rather an invitation to a struggle, a struggle to better our world and eradicate racial inequality.

What King dreamt of was not colorblindness, but freedom, the freedom to see each other’s race and not judge. In his paradise, there were no grounds to connect color with the ghettos, no reason to look at race on a college application, no tangible difference between races other than color itself. But this can only happen if we work for it. I seriously doubt if affirmative action is the best possible course, but it is action, and only action will turn our dream into reality.

— Ted McCombs,

Revelle Junior