[media-credit name=”Angela Van Ostran, Staff” align=”alignright” width=”300″][/media-credit]“Non-traditional casting” is getting in the way of theater, wrote Robert Brustein in his article “Lighten up, America.” Brustein describes how politics force directors to be “selectively colorblind” when it comes to casting Caucasian roles. While parts traditionally played by white actors are now being played by minorities, roles normally played by ethnic minorities are untouchable to white actors. Brustein said the politics involved in making casting decisions based on race, whatever they may be, are damaging the arts.

Art is not the only place that suffers from over-corrective, anti-racist precautions. Race-based scholarships and affirmative action, though both were created with good intentions, have delayed the healing of wounds wrought from racism.

Taking off in the late 1990s, scholarships and legislation meant to help promote the rise of minorities in the workforce and academic arena are terribly misguided. Race-based scholarships are supposed to provide financial support to underprivileged minorities to help them through college to offset the overwhelming number of white males in American universities. The problem with this kind of scholarship is that, instead of promoting equality, it further segregates young Americans. These scholarships divide Asians, Latinos and American Indians into groups and subgroups. This does not create unity or equality.

Mikhail Lyubansky, Ph.D. wrote in an article published this year in Psychology Today that race-based scholarships only further perpetuate mistrust between a generation of Americans that should have no reason to hold grudges against one another. White students who are in the same position financially as some minority students but do not have access to the same scholarships feel the system is unjust. Lyubansky suggests scholarships should be given out on a need basis, rather than a race basis.

But even worse is the effect on self-image that these scholarships have.

“For the recipients, there are assumptions that the students are somehow less qualified,” wrote Lyubansky. “This is not just a ‘stereotype’ that is imposed by the white majority. It is also a mindset that is (at least sometimes) internalized by the students of color themselves.”

After being accepted to colleges because they help fill a percentage, minorities are then subjected to affirmative action policies that further aggravate racial tensions. Caucasians claim that affirmative action unfairly gives minorities the politically correct “tie-breaker” advantage. Minorities respond with a pointed finger. Despite the fact the whites are to blame for a vast majority of history’s racial atrocities, pointing the finger at a generation so far removed from those events does nothing to heal past wounds. Creating a system that pits individuals against one another based not on talents but on color is not the answer.

The true brutality here is the unintended consequence of making diversity an end-goal, rather than letting it come naturally as a side effect of equality. Affirmative action views people of ethnicity as numbers to be filled, percentages to be met, rather than competent, qualified individuals.

“That race helps to determine an individual’s acceptance to a college is not affirmative action, it is discrimination in action,” wrote college journalist Steve Robinson in 2009. “Make no mistake, the yearning for diversity which motivates such policy is remarkably beautiful, but it has corrupted the very idea of character-based judgment embodied by the civil rights movement.”

Both affirmative action and race-based scholarships are patronizing and built on misguided perceptions of equality.

Equality is a college application form that doesn’t have a race circle to fill in. Equality is a workforce where everyone is hired based on what they can bring to the table, even if that means there are all-white or all-minority offices. Equality is where directors choose the actor who can transform into character with the most grace, not the actor who has the right skin-tone. Equality is where people are considered on their merits, are successful because of their efforts and are accepted because they are what we all are: human.