Saving affirmative action
By Sam Smith
From the Progressive Review,
February 1995
When talking about affirmative action it
is important to keep in mind which version of affirmative action
we are addressing. There are a number of affirmative action programs
within the government, such as those for women and minorities,
those for small business (through the SBA), those for defense
contractors (through the Pentagon), those for veterans (through
veterans programs) those for homeowners (through mortgage interest
deductions) and so forth.
If, however, one limits the topic to the
controversial forms of affirmative action, that is to say those
benefiting minorities and women, we are then left with the question
of whether we are really arguing about goals or about the route
taken to reach them. For example, conservatives have offered
a detailed critique of what is wrong with the processes of affirmative
action, but have shown little inclination to improve upon them.
This leads one to the suspicion that their concern is more with
the results of affirmation action than its methods.
These, of course, are the same people who
believe -- as the Peace & Freedom Foundation recently put
it so elegantly -- that "he that does not work, neither
shall he eat," which presumably would mean, say, replacing
the 6% unemployment rate with a 6% starvation rate. To take advice
from such individuals is a little like getting directions to
Wall Street from someone who really wishes you would go back
to Watts.
On the other hand, liberal supporters of
affirmative action have badly mingled goals and methodology,
granting to mere tactics the sanctity of principles and investing
boiler-plate legalisms with the virtue of basic rights.
In fact, affirmative action has been ineffective
in many ways. It has failed inner city residents. It has favored
middle-class women over poorer ones. Its effects on minority
participation on college campuses peaked some years ago. It has
been abused and manipulated by unneedy members of minorities
and by white business firms. And, like other aspects of liberal
politics and race relations, it has been preempted by lawyers
whose policies too often lead to the courthouse rather than to
resolution. Affirmative action needs to be restudied and reframed
by its friends before it is destroyed by its enemies. For starters,
here are some ways its goals, rather than merely its chosen tactics,
might be furthered:
· Tell people who's really
taking their jobs: As with the anti-immigration hysteria,
the attack on affirmative action is fed by real fears caused
by job loss. In fact, neither minority hiring nor immigration
is a major factor in this job loss. The real cause is white guys.
The white guys who run multinational corporations that have taken
jobs overseas. The white guys who came up with GATT and NAFTA.
The white guys who are downsizing Fortunate 500 companies. The
white guys who are automating. And the white economists who say
that high unemployment is necessary for the health of the country
and so you folks out there will just have to decide among yourselves
who's going to suffer it.
Absent a politics that clearly identifies
the real sources of economic pain -- the stateless corporation,
automation, the corporatist policies of both parties, and the
legal emigration of business rather than the illegal immigration
of persons -- many will continue to place the blame on other
victims rather than where it belongs. The Democratic Party --
even its liberal wing -- has been unwilling to do this. They
would be criticizing too many of their contributors.
· Include affirmative action by
zip-code, census tract, economic status or some other way that
adds the factor of class to those of race and gender. Every really
successful social program in this country has either been universal
or strongly cross-cultural -- including needy whites. Failing
to follow this basic rule of American politics has hurt affirmative
action badly.
· Settle more cases by mediation.
Affirmative action, like other ethnic and gender issues, begs
for dispute resolution rather than litigation. Unfortunately,
the rules have been drawn up by litigators and not by peacemakers.
· Give protection to those hurt
by affirmative action. Part of the political problem of affirmative
action has been the insensitivity of its supporters to the pain
it has caused in specific instances. One way to mitigate this
is to provide protection for an employee who loses out in order
to make room for someone else. For example, imagine a white police
sergeant who qualifies for lieutenant but is not chosen in the
interest of better integration at headquarters. That sergeant
should automatically go to the top of the list for the next hiring
round. He has already done his part for affirmative action.
· Provide incentives rather than
just regulations. For example, firms that lead the pack in improving
their hiring practices or in overall diversity of employment
could be given a federal seal they could use in advertising.
Such an icon could have increasing value as minority markets
expand.
· Provide wiggle room, especially
for smaller businesses. A big problem for small businesses is
that government regulations are too complex and unforgiving.
What if we offered these smaller firms some leeway in how they
help America become a better place? For example, what if, for
such businesses, we lumped affirmative action, energy conservation
and recycling together in such a way that a laggard in minority
hiring could partially compensate by excelling in reduced energy
use or vice versa? Such a program would be based on the principle
that while we all have our faults, we all can do something right
as well.
· Take on the discrimination we've
been ducking: The two big areas are housing and transportation.
We have failed to confront these forms of discrimination, preferring
to deal only with their results -- often ineffectively -- through
such means as school bussing and affirmative action. We would
not need to rely so much on affirmative action if we finally
faced these issues.
· Shorten the work-week and move
towards full employment. Nothing would so ease the tensions surrounding
affirmative action as jobs for everyone. As long as we fail at
this, there are going to be too many people wanting too few jobs.
Someone is going to lose. And be mad about it.
WHY BOTH LEFT AND RIGHT LIKE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
WALTER BENN MICHAELS, NY TIMES MAGAZINE
- When I asked a group of Harvard literature students about what
distinguished them from a parallel group of literature students
at [University of Illinois, Chicago], they were prepared to acknowledge
that the U.I.C. students might be even more diverse than they
were, but they were unable to see the relevance of the fact that
the U.I.C. group was also less wealthy. And this is equally true
of the students at U.I.C. who identify themselves as black, white,
Arab, Asian and Hispanic and not as poor or working class. After
all, your ethnicity is something you can be proud of in a way
that your poverty or even your wealth (since it's your parents'
wealth) is not. . .
We are often reminded of how white our
classrooms would look if we did away with affirmative action.
But imagine what Harvard would look like if instead we replaced
race-based affirmative action with a strong dose of class-based
affirmative action. Ninety percent of the undergraduates come
from families earning more than $42,000 a year (the median household
income in the U.S.) -- and some 77 percent come from families
with incomes of more than $80,000, although only about 20 percent
of American households have incomes that high. If the income
distribution at Harvard were made to look like the income distribution
of the United States, some 57 percent of the displaced students
would be rich, and most of them would be white. It's no wonder
that many rich white kids and their parents seem to like diversity.
Race-based affirmative action, from this standpoint, is a kind
of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic
inequality. The fact (and it is a fact) that it doesn't help
to be white to get into Harvard replaces the much more fundamental
fact that it does help to be rich and that it's virtually essential
not to be poor. . .
In the end, we like policies like affirmative
action not so much because they solve the problem of racism but
because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve.
And the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving
it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving
the problem of economic inequality might require something more
-- it might require us to give up our money. It's not surprising
that universities of the upper middle class should want their
students to feel comfortable. What is surprising is that diversity
should have become the hallmark of liberalism.
This, if you're on the right, is the gratifying
thing about campus radicalism. When student and faculty activists
struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling
over what skin color the rich kids should have. Diversity, like
gout, is a rich people's problem. And it is also a rich people's
solution. For as long as we're committed to thinking of difference
as something that should be respected, we don't have to worry
about it as something that should be eliminated. As long as we
think that our best universities are fair if they are appropriately
diverse, we don't have to worry that most people can't go to
them, while others get to do so because they've had the good
luck to be born into relatively wealthy families. In other words,
as long as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right
won't have to worry about inequality.
AN INDIAN WRITER TELLS SOME TRUTHS ABOUT
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN THE U.S.
MEERA NANDA, FRONTLINE, INDIA - THE United
States hardly ever gets good marks from Indian intellectuals.
Its dog-eat-dog capitalism, its trigger-happy foreign policy
and even its highly seductive and much imitated popular culture
are held up as examples of what India should not emulate.
But at least on one issue of great public
interest and debate in India - namely, the best way to provide
upward mobility for historically oppressed social groups - America
has found many admirers. Its affirmative action program in particular
has become an object of much admiration lately. . .
Everyone in India claims to be in favor
of AA these days. Many are looking at it for fresh ideas for
"Dalit capitalism" which will embrace "caste diversity"
in the private sector and in the institutions of higher learning
that feed into it. . . This article will argue that this rosy
picture of AA as voluntary and quota-free is only partially true,
as are the rosy scenarios for the potential of Dalit capitalism
to pull up the many historically oppressed castes. . .
The American experience must also serve
as a warning about the limits of identity politics and group
rights. The color-based inclusion of blacks in the great American
middle class has been purchased at the cost of turning a blind
eye to class-based exclusion of millions of poor blacks and whites
from decent education, adequate health care and jobs that pay
living wages.
Yes, race-based positive discrimination
has created a substantial black middle class. But it has also
contributed to the creation of a desperately poor and deeply
alienated black underclass living under the American version
of apartheid. It has also created a large mass of poor whites
who are simmering with resentment against the advantages they
are denied. Those concerned with social justice cannot afford
to close their eyes to the shadow side of identity-based redistribution
programs. . .
It is true that, thanks to AA, blacks have
made substantial inroads into the corporate world in America
and the number of black people in the middle class has grown
tremendously. As Chandra Bhan Prasad, the tireless champion of
Dalit capitalism, has documented carefully, major American corporations
have indeed created boardrooms that reflect the racial diversity
of America. . .
Yes, AA has "worked" for black
people, but not for all of them. Nearly half a century after
the passage of preferential laws, black people today are divided
into what has been described as an "Afristocracy" of
black elites and professionals, and a "ghettocracy"
of desperately poor blacks trapped in menial, minimum wage jobs.
. .
The tragedy is that the black elites, as
they move into the middle class, tend to adopt white middle-class
stereotypes regarding the poor blacks: like most middle-class
whites they, too, begin to blame the culture of poor blacks for
their own poverty. The chasm between the Afristocracy and the
ghettocracy has become so bad that in 2004, Bill Cosby, the legendary
black entertainer, in a major speech supposed to celebrate civil
rights, openly used negative and insulting stereotypes of poor
blacks to blame them for their own backwardness - while his mostly
rich black audience laughed and cheered. . .
Most American scholars, black and white,
agree that AA has helped enormously in creating a substantial
and growing black middle class. But one must not lose sight of
the fact that AA is color-conscious but class-blind. When the
proponents of Dalit capitalism cheer American corporations for
embracing racial diversity, they forget that these companies
are perfectly free to fill the diversity quota from the so-called
creamy layer: American businesses and universities are under
no legal obligation to look for, or nurture, black talent in
the poor inner-city schools, which are literally falling apart.
. .
A state of apartheid exists between financially-strapped,
resource-starved, technologically primitive schools that serve
the poor inner-city districts with higher concentrations of blacks,
and the fancy five-star public schools that spend more than 10
times as much money per student as the inner city schools, and
which serve the richer suburbs where the professional and upper-middle
classes of whites, blacks, Indians, Chinese, West Asians and
every other nationality live. For all the growth of diversity
in larger society, the harsh reality is that American schools
are becoming more, not less, segregated on class lines which
still, after all these years of AA, overlap the color line.
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2311/stories/20060616003502700.htm
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