HOW REVERSE RACISM SPREADS OUTWARD FROM CAMPUS: Racial preferences launched in the 1970s for Black and Hispanic students seeking admission to elite schools like Harvard have put more minority kids in the classrooms, but that’s just the beginning of a destructive cycle for everybody involved.

Writing for RealClearPolitics, Linda Chavez points to the next step in the story:

“But blacks do not necessarily benefit, either, from the widespread adoption of racial preferences in admissions on their behalf. As Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., pointed out in their comprehensive study of the effect of racial preferences in college admissions on black student performance, “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It,” schools using racial preferences end up admitting students who often place in the lower rankings of their class and struggle to finish college or pass professional exams.

“In turn, these students struggle more even after they graduate, failing to advance in their chosen careers if their college grades are subpar, which becomes proof for some not that preferences fail to achieve their goal, but that systemic racism follows blacks into the professional world, requiring yet more racial preferences in hiring and promotion.”

That in a nutshell is how legally sanctioned racial discrimination spreads from campus to government to corporate boardrooms. Once the official steps are taken away from the conviction that all men are equal to the fable that some are more equal than others, corruption spreads.

Or, to put it another way, if you begin with a fundamentally flawed understanding of the problem — think “systemic racism” or “Big Government” — your solutions won’t work, and you will be trapped in an endless cycle of failure that continually reinforces the original misconception.