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Richard Dawkins: “Affirmative Action is Racism”

by Amber Muhinyi
7 June 2023 11:26 AM

The excellent Freddie Sayers from UnHerd recently interviewed Professor Richard Dawkins, and here is what he had to say on the topic of race-based ‘affirmative action’. It’s well worth watching.

Dawkins is firmly in favour of equality of opportunity. He does not support the idea of selecting individuals on the basis of race or skin colour. In fact, he calls it out for what it is: racism.

I’ve spoken to many fair-minded and compassionate people who share his view. But few dare say so publicly – for understandable reasons. Who wants to risk losing their job, being misunderstood, ostracised and smeared as racist? Our institutions must be in a sorry state indeed if saying something so strikingly obvious to many carries such personal and professional risks.

I loved Dawkins’ unapologetic response when in the interview Freddie suggested he may be in the minority for expressing such a view: “Well then, I’m proud to be in a minority.”

So am I, if indeed it is a minority. And it is so good to hear someone in Dawkins’ position speak up on this issue, which has affected many of us personally. It’s an issue about which there has been no debate, and frankly a refusal to acknowledge and respond to concerns and arguments raised.

On my Substack, I’ve tried to highlight some of the costs that preferential treatment based on race can present for someone from a racial or ethnic minority background – how it can undermine human dignity and removes the right to equal treatment and fair competition with others without regard to race. In my view, this is totally unacceptable. A person’s or group’s dignity and rights as equal citizens should not be sacrificed and overridden in an attempt to achieve set proportions of racial characteristics in different settings. There is something wrong with that kind of ‘social justice’. And besides, racial discrimination simply cannot be the normal state of affairs in a liberal democratic society. The two are incompatible.

I truly hope that the tide is turning and more people from within our institutions will begin to voice concerns over this issue, and that those in positions of power will begin to listen.

There are better ways to address disadvantage and create a fairer society.

For now – thank you, Professor Dawkins.

This article first appeared on Amber Muhinyi’s Substack.

Tags: Positive discriminationRacismRichard DawkinsWoke GobbledegookWoke Racism

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14 Comments
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Mogwai
Mogwai
1 year ago

Well this is a corker from the HART team and I can think of one particular person who might appreciate this piece… 🙂

”The word pandemic used to have a very specific meaning. It was used to describe a scenario where there was extensive incapacitation of key workers and large numbers of deaths, including young people. A genuine pandemic is not something that would have needed billions of dollars in advertising for people to even notice and fear. Using this long-established definition of the word, we conclude that there was in fact no global pandemic in 2020.
The word was deliberately misapplied and weaponised against an unsuspecting public. Let us be clear, this article is not questioning the existence of a virus SARS-CoV-2 or an illness named Covid-19, but even the choice of ‘SARS’ (Severe Acquired Respiratory Syndrome) as the name for this coronavirus was already setting the scene for systematic fear-mongering.

The notion of a ‘pandemic’ was relentlessly promulgated through mainstream media to ramp up fear in the population, to help enforce unprecedented lockdowns and other extremely harmful policies (e.g school closures and universal mask wearing) and to push through Emergency Use Authorisations of novel technology mRNA and viral vector DNA products.
This would not have been possible were it not for three false premises that covid was: 

  1. novel; 
  2. lethal; and 
  3. unprecedented. 

It was none of these things.”

https://www.hartgroup.org/pandemic-definitions/

99
-3
DomH75
DomH75
1 year ago
Reply to  Mogwai

Yes, the definition was changed a few years ago. Under the original definition, there was never a pandemic. I never use the word ‘pandemic’ in the context of the last few years: I always say ‘lockdowns’.

47
0
Mogwai
Mogwai
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

Yes quite. The only things that were novel, lethal and unprecedented were the restrictions + death jab combo.

35
0
The Enforcer
The Enforcer
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

Me too. I have refused to use the word and have always called it the ‘Covid debacle’.
Dawkins is right about affirmative action is racist and one only has to look at the awful outcome of that policy in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

9
0
Smudger
Smudger
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

Pingdemic?

2
0
RW
RW
1 year ago
Reply to  Mogwai

That was plainly obvious to everyone with a working mind once the name SARS 2.0 had coined (the real meaning of SARS-CoV2) by a guy who had spent a career with SARSing and who now finally wanted to make some real money from that. That was Christian Drosten of the German RKI, co-inventor of the COVID PCR test, together with a guy who owned a company selling such testkits! That was the original scam at the heart of this pan-blame-it which grew to really monstrous proportions as more and more people who also wanted to assign blame to other people realized that they had just hit the jackpot: Whatever your fellow humans happen to do you really hate and always wanted to see prohibited, just wield the pan-blame-it and all your wishes will be fullfilled — from outlawing fireworks to hospitality curfews, from wrongly declaring people public health risks because they’re sweating to bans on visiting relatives in nursing homes, from stopping supermarkets selling improper goods to closing down cinemas. Truly Alice in wonder-verboten!-verboten!-verboten!-land.

When these people are currently not busy with riding wave after wave of some pan-blame-it, they usually do climate change politics. Unsurprisingly, that’s supposed to be fixed by an exactly identically unhinged orgy of prohibitions.

28
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nige.oldfart
nige.oldfart
1 year ago

The active promotion of one entity/ person/ peoples above that of others is discrimination. The drive towards equality is causing inequality, and division, the very antithesis of what they purport to desire. Or is it?

43
0
DomH75
DomH75
1 year ago

Dawkins is reaping the whirlwind he helped create by undermining the Judeo-Christian roots of our civilisation. There’s a fundamental difference between the religious God and the constitutional ‘God’ whose existence limits the reach of governments. By helping undermine God in general, he helped reduce the impact of natural law. In a society that respected the constitutional God, we would never have allowed lockdowns to happen.

I appreciate Dawkins speaking out on this subject – it’s possible to be allies on one issue and opponents on another in a sophisticated society – and his view is the majority view, however a minority dare say it out loud, because a small cadre of extremists hold the levers of power right now!

Last edited 1 year ago by DomH75
48
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DomTaylor
DomTaylor
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

Curiously his web-site (https://richarddawkins.net/) leads with the link ‘Combat Misinformation: for information about COVID-19, please check out our Coronavirus Resource Cente’ (https://centerforinquiry.org/coronavirus/?_ga=2.226230426.1043099632.1686154517-828840931.1684836977), where the ‘misinformation,’ ‘falsehood,’ ‘unfounded rumour’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ that we indulge in on the Daily Sceptic are angrily refuted in favour of articles explaining ‘How to properly wear a mask,’ why COVID jabs are ‘A lifesaving product’ and ‘Where to find your state health department’s guidance’ or ‘COVID-19 Testing Site.’ An ally against Wokeism he may well be, but, with a fervour that even the Medieval Inquisition would baulk at, he continues to denounce any view that contradicts the approved Dogma of the Scientific Establishment, regardless of actual scientific evidence, reason or (Darwin forbid) consideration of Conscience or the wisdom handed down to us through religious tradition.

19
0
RW
RW
1 year ago

The very notion of historic crime is absurd. A crime is some action which is against the law at some point in time. That wasn’t the case for any so-called historic crime, otherwise, it had been regarded as crime at the time when it was current. I really disapprove of some things long dead people did in the past! may form a foundation for developing some kind of philosophical ethical system concernedn with what people should or shouldn’t do in future. It’s not suitable for anything else.

One should also take the origin of this idea into account: It’s principally the notion that wars of conquest are considered a crime and this idea was invented by the Entente powers after their great war of conquest against central European states not seeking any quarrels with them had succeeded and said states had been either been crippled or completely dismantled. That’s clearly just a self-serving pretext: We won. Hence, the right was on our side and our rearrangment of the world must not ever be questionened or changed! As such, this notion is to be discarded, especially since all of these powers have since engaged in more wars of conquest with more-or-less success.

Uncreative as they usually are, the wokesters just borrowed the notion to see if they can’t somehow make it useful for their cases as well. That’s why disagreements regarding male dress code are nowadays described as genocide by the people who aren’t willing to tolerate disagreeing opinions on anything they favour. That should really be enough to bury the whole idiocy and everything that’s attached to it.

17
-1
NeilParkin
NeilParkin
1 year ago

We have three children, born and raised under our roof, sent to the same schools, given the same or similar experiences, and with continuity of parents and grandparents. They’ve all had good outcomes, but not equal outcomes. If we can’t achieve it under one roof, then how on earth are we supposed to do it across society. Another piece of ‘socialist compassion’ taken to their hearts and implemented without recourse to thinking about the practical or economic reality.

32
0
stewart
stewart
1 year ago

Woke culture with it’s loopy morality is what has emerged to fill in the gap left by traditional religions, which Dawkins was so enthusiastic about condemning to the scrap heap of history.

I hope he puts as much energy into fighting woke stupidity as he has into attacking traditional religions.

21
0
Claphamanian
Claphamanian
1 year ago
Reply to  stewart

The woke believe that they are awake. In reality their use of morality demonstrates that they are in the dream of self-excuse.

6
0
Alan
Alan
1 year ago

I agree that science is the way to the truth, but how do we recognise the truth when we have so many opposing views. There are three topics that fall into this category where the majority seem to believe utter nonsense – climate change and alarmism, the covid pandemic and vaccines, and gender issue. Only last night Rees-Mogg said that he had researched the covid vaccines and discovered that they were safe and effective. I would like to know where he found the evidence because it was not in the Randomised Control Trials published before the vaccines were approved.

4
0

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