In 2009, following the global financial crash that re-intoduced me to unemployment, I had my hair cut by a young girl, obviously from Latin America. Her English was not as good as my Spanish and, having just returned from Peru, I was happy for the opportunity to practice. To my immense surprise it turned out that she was from Peru and not only from Peru, but from Juliaca, Peru. It is rare to find a Peruvian that has visited Juliaca let alone someone from there, so we embarked on a fascinating conversation about how “the girl from Juliaca” found herself working in Market Mall in Calgary, Canada.
I am guessing that not too many of you reading this will have firsthand experience of Juliaca, Peru. It is at about 3800 meters above sea level near the shores of Lake Titicaca and it will never be mistaken for a tourist trap. My first experience with Juliaca was to climb the rock piles and jump the trenches that had been dug into the main thoroughfare for the new water system. As I contemplated the backhoe digging its way down the street, I noticed an older woman fluff her skirts, settle in place for a moment and then walk off leaving a decidedly moist spot on the ground. Welcome to Juliaca, I thought, as I made my way into the restaurant. Juliaca is, in fact, a typical town on the Peruvian altiplano.
It turns out that my barber’s industrious parents had started a small home business making Indian arts and crafts (artesania) for sale to tourists who visit places like Puno and Cusco in Peru. Their business expanded and so they decided to leave their “factory” in the hands of a trusted relative while they moved to Lima so that they could take a stall at the popular Indian markets and sell more of their products. Then the business really took off and so, as each were ready in turn, the parents sent their five kids to a different part of the world to become “tentmaker missionaries” so that the family product could be sold worldwide.
This eighteen-year-old girl, with no English skills, left her middle class home in a familiar country to expand the business started by her mostly uneducated parents. It is an astounding story and it made me wonder if there are other nodes of Peruvian entrepreneurial brilliance and industriousness.
Peru has come a long way in the almost thirty years since I have been traveling there but it remains a stratified society with an unacceptable (to me) level of bigotry. This to say that this family was not helped along the way by the open hands and hearts of people in the upper echelons of that society. Their dark skin and Indian features would not allow that to happen. It can only be imagined what slights and outright rejections they had to overcome to become an international corporation - if, in fact, they ever incorporated. But overcome they did, and I’ll be they didn’t whine about being victims.
Vivek Ramaswamy has written a new book, Nation of Victims, to follow on his bestseller, Woke, Inc. to address the issue of victimhood in North America. It is his view that the nurturing sentiments of excellence and exceptionalism which once defined the American psyche have been replaced by a sense of entitlement and victimhood creating a moral and cultural vacuum in the people of the United States. Ramaswamy, from South Asia parents, created two successful biotechnology companies, is worth an estimated $500 million and wrote a runaway best seller by the age of 36 so he comes to his views from an interesting perch. We might do well to listen to him.
On his website, he explains “… that we’re a nation of victims now. It’s one of the few things we still have left in common—black and white victims, liberal and conservative, men and women. Victims of each other, and ultimately, of ourselves. Ramaswamy spares neither left nor right in this scathing indictment of the victimhood culture at the heart of America’s national decline.”
I have not, in fact, read the book but did listen to his views in a rather long podcast. I think he is on to something. During his podcast conversation, he explained to his interlocutor that the fixation with affirmative action has resulted in a degradation of excellence with no offsetting reduction in expressions of victimhood. About the only change in victimhood is that now all races are equally offended.
As an academic backstop to this view, an interesting affirmative action study was completed by Georgetown University in 2019 which looked at the 2009 college entrance responses and the racial mix of students at Ivy League schools. The study authors recalculated the racial mix of students and changes in entrance scores if only SAT scores were used as admission criteria1 . They determined that only 47 percent of students would still qualify under the new admission criteria, and 53 percent would not have qualified. The ethnic and racial mix of students was predictably altered as well.
Neither the study authors nor Ramaswamy are arguing for admission criteria restricted to SAT scores. However, it is Ramaswamy's view that many of the unqualified 53 percent are not being properly challenged to be excellent. Instead, they are beneficiaries of grievance and victimhood. He also makes the unsubstantiated (by me) claim that the Ivy League benefactors of affirmative action have likely benefited from previous affirmative action programs as well. If this is the case, then, he asks, how many "legs up" are such students to be given?
Back to Peru. Our small exploration company did several projects to benefit the population local where we worked. This was done under the aegis of a “good neighbour” policy because it was our belief that if we were going to walk over and disturb (however slightly) their lands then they were due some compensation. We also could not ignore such impoverished conditions. We purchased a sonogram machine for the local doctor. He told us that problem pregnancies dropped because he was better able to monitor infant development. We bought Christmas gifts for each child at the local schools every year and provided school supplies for students at the nearest elementary school. Literacy classes were sponsored, and twenty young mothers learned to read. Our biggest project was to provide materials and equipment to install outdoor biffies for two communities near our camp. What did the people do before installing their biffy? Don’t ask.
One community, we’ll call it Lucma, organized themselves to connect their biffies with piping for water and sewage so that the contents could be moved to a centralized septic tank which they provided. Some of the homeowners, at their own expense, expanded their biffy to include a shower facility. Their project was completed within two months of the materials being supplied and the community held a festival to mark the occasion.
The other community, we’ll call it Igor, complained that the exploration company wouldn’t dig the holes for the biffies and so the materials sat unused for several months. Related, but not directly, the Igor school teacher asked us for help in dealing with eight-year-old girls who were being sexually assaulted by much older male relatives. This community, comprised of cousins and relatives of the residents of Lucma, was situated two or three kilometers away. Their attitudes towards life, however, were a million miles apart.
Which community was on a track towards excellence? By almost any metric, Lucma was a safer and more integrated community than Igor. The differences between the communities were marked and a sense of tension could be felt within moments of stepping into the Igor plaza de armas.
The question of affirmative action in education is currently before the US Supreme Court and they are being asked to adjudicate whether such reverse discrimination is constitutional or even effective. I am with Mr. Ramaswamy in hoping that the justices decide to eliminate all forms of affirmative action. It is not a leg up, but rather is a justification for the toxic whine of victimhood. The girl from Juliaca and the people of Lucma would instead advise a policy which drives its beneficiaries towards excellence. I am looking forward to reading Mr. Ramaswamy’s book.
https://cewgeorgetown.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/CEW-SAT-only-Admission.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email