Hudson: Affirmative Action Has ‘Destroyed People’s Lives’

Racial and ethnic quotas for post-secondary admissions– and “Affirmative Action” policies, more broadly — have “hurt black and Hispanic college-bound Americans more than [they] have helped,” said Breitbart News Entertainment Editor Jerome Hudson in a Monday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Subverting meritocracy in pursuit of racial and ethnic quotas harms those belonging to groups ostensibly being assisted by “Affirmative Action” policies, explained Hudson, drawing on research he conducted in writing his bestselling book, 50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know.

“In the four decades since colleges and universities have started to include the racial make-up of an applicant … as a marker for admitting them into college, there are actually fewer black and Hispanic students on America’s top college campuses today than when Affirmative Action began four decades ago,” Hudson noted.

LISTEN:

Granting advantages to black and Hispanic applicants to colleges and universities on the bases of race and ethnicity put the ostensible beneficiaries of “Affirmative Action” policies at increased risk of educational underachievement, explained Hudson.

“What has happened with Affirmative Action over the last four decades is really painful and … disastrous for several reasons,” Hudson said. “To achieve the goal of making college campuses a more representative microcosm of the United States, what we saw happening — and the details and the data I dive into — is that black and Hispanic students, in many cases, were being put on college campuses. … These are smart individuals — they study hard and they work hard — but they were put on college campuses where they did not succeed to the level that they would have succeeded if they had just gone to a tier-2 or level-B college or university.”

Hudson determined, “This policy has — in no uncertain terms — destroyed people’s lives, all because of this ridiculous pursuit by liberals who cooked up the idea that we could just put people on college campuses and they would succeed, and it has not worked.”

Marlow invited Hudson’s remarks on Planned Parenthood’s claim — uncritically relayed by news media outlets such as CNN and the LA Times — that abortion composes three percent of its offered services.

Hudson explained, “What [Planned Parenthood] does is, a woman comes in, she wants an abortion, but they’ll give her condoms, they’ll give her a pregnancy test, and they’ll count that as three services. But the main point is that the woman was seeking an abortion,” noting how abortion is disproportionately used by pregnant black women relative to their share of the population. While black women aged 15 to 44 composed between three-and-a-half and four percent of America’s population in 2015, they accounted for 35 percent of all abortions in the same year, noted Hudson.

“That stark number actually aligns with many of the things that Margaret Sanger wrote about,” said Hudson of Planned Parenthood’s eugenicist foundations. “I link to her writings. You can go and see how this woman — who went on to found the organization that became Planned Parenthood — in many ways, she got her wish and she got her dream to eradicate the black population. … In New York City, between 2012 and 2016, more black pregnancies ended in abortion than live birth. … You have organizations and groups like Black Lives Matter — they’re marching up and down in the street — they’re arguing about the, quote, ‘value of black life in the America,’ and I ask the question, ‘Where is Black Lives Matter on the value of black life in America?'”

Hudson stated, “It’s only us, it’s only Breitbart and organizations on the right that are speaking up for the value of black life.”

Hudson reflected on his upbringing, crediting his parents’ marriage with helping shape his character. “Growing up in Savannah — I’m not a sideline commentator to this — I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood, but on a December morning in 2001, I was looking down the barrel of a shotgun in broad daylight that was being held by a man that I went to middle school with. By the time I graduated high school in 2004, half of my graduating class I came in with were either in jail, dead, or the young women were pregnant, and were certainly not on the same course to college that I was on.”

Hudson also reflected on the legacy of Lyndon Johnson’s left-wing Great Society vision and the “welfare state.”

“One of the more searing points is that the poverty line in America had been decreasing 20 years before President Lyndon Johnson launched his quote-unquote ‘War on Poverty,’ and if you have the book — you can see the chart — poverty was taking a nosedive, and leave it to Democrats to create a situation where there is actually no crisis of poverty in America, and in fact, something amazing happens — particularly with black people — between 1910 and about 1955. You had, on scale, more blacks being married and having kids than whites for about four or five decades. I’m not the first person to argue that welfare has basically replaced the father in the black home.”

Hudson went on, “I’m writing much about the failure of the welfare state, and how, at this point, we’ve spent over $22 trillion to lift people out of poverty, and it’s been an unmitigated disaster.”

A comprehensive understanding of social dysfunction driving poverty must include cultural analysis, remarked Hudson, warning conservatives against reductionist and myopic paradigms of economic determinism toward this end.

“I really wanted to make the point [that] many people — good conservatives even — argue that this is an economic issue,” said Hudson of poverty. “This is a cultural issue. When we’re talking about the violence, when we’re talking about the shoddy school system, when we’re talking about poverty, we’re not talking about so much an economic poverty as much as we’re talking about a cultural poverty.”

Hudson continued, “I did want to … celebrate the fact that just 30 years after the Civil War, literacy rates went from 20 percent to 70 percent in this country for African-Americans. I wanted to celebrate the fact that 50 years before the Civil Rights movement began, as early as 1903, blacks were graduating from schools like Dunbar High School in the DC area and going on to graduate from Harvard and other Ivy League schools.”

“I wanted to make it clear that at a time when Democrats were hanging and beating [blacks], and burning black businesses, black people in this country strived, and to think that racism is now this one-size-fits-all excuse and answer for this supposed racial cloud that’s hanging over America and stifling black success, it’s absolute nonsense and it’s absolutely ridiculous,” added Hudson.

Hudson said of his book, “It’s a primer for people, anybody who would believe that life in America is somehow worse for black people than it was 50 years ago in this country.”

Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.