Daily Wire podcast personality and conservative firebrand Candace Owens blasted affirmative action policies as “harmful” and degrading during a “Dr. Phil” appearance on Wednesday.
Owens appeared alongside two academics, who were defending the controversial policies. She, however, presented the more convincing argument and managed to turn the traditional narrative about affirmative action, which is that affirmative action helps minorities, on its head by arguing that, really, affirmative action policies do more harm than good.
Speaking on that, she said, “When you artificially place a black American into a school in which they do not belong based on their knowledge, it doesn’t mean that they go on to get A’s. In fact, there was a black adjunct professor, you guys have definitely heard of him, Dr. Thomas Sowell, who was teaching at Cornell University and he found that the majority of the black American students that were there were on academic probation.”
Continuing, Owens added that, while those black students were some of the smartest of their demographic in the nation, they hadn’t earned the positions they found themselves in and so ended up on academic probation. In other words, they weren’t at the level required to do well in the environments they were placed in, and so failed to succeed.
The result of that, she said, is not successful minorities but instead harm to most of those affected by the policies and a crop of politicians or administrators who claim victory for “feel good” policies that lead to failure in reality.
She also fought with panel member Dr. John Pascarella an advocate of affirmative action policies for “institutions that have historically excluded people of color.” Owens pushed back on the narrative he promulgates, asking Professor Pascarella how he could hold that viewpoint when she and others point to affirmative action being “factually, in effect, a bad thing for the black community.”
Owens then asserted that the premise of affirmative action is degrading, as the impulse behind it comes from the idea that minorities are incapable of achieving certain objectives without help from white benefactors. Giving an example of how affirmative action policies lead to absurd outcomes, she added, “I don’t think Sasha and Malia Obama are people that have struggled, and therefore should be allowed to get into the college, universities on a higher basis than white kids that have worked harder than them.”
She also said, “We can fantasize and say ‘maybe they just don’t feel good,’ but that’s not the case. We’re talking about a cultural problem, what’s going on back at home, as was in my circumstance. None of that is because of institutionalized policy.”
Whether Owens was able to convince either of the leftists with whom she was arguing is doubtful, but hopefully, her powerful arguments against affirmative action policies planted seeds of doubt about affirmative action in the minds of those average people who watched the program.
Watch her here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded YouTube video of Candace’s appearance on “Dr. Phil”
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