“Affirmative Action.” That’s a couple of words that ignite a bit of controversy, and they have seemingly been in the news more and more lately. From debates over the “wise Latina” comment made by (what looks to be future SCOTUS Justice) Sonia Sotomayor, to the vitriol of folks like Pat Buchanan that keep playing the tired “white victimization” shtick, it’s the phrase that keeps blowing on the embers of US race relations. Yet the fiery debates surrounding Affirmative Action seem to generate, to paraphrase Hamlet, more light than heat.
Take today’s New York Times editorial by Ross Douthat. Douthat writes:
Affirmative action has always been understandable, but never ideal. It congratulates its practitioners on their virtue, condescends to its beneficiaries, and corrodes the racial attitudes of its victims. All of this could be defended as a temporary experiment. But if affirmative action persists far into the American future, that experiment will have failed — and we will all have been corrupted by it.
After reading those words, I felt as though I was transported back in time. You see, my racial consciousness burgeoned in the 1980s. I remember that time frame as defined by the Reaganite era complete with Jellybeans, Star Wars (not the films), “Welfare Queens,” and a focus on Affirmative Action that was contextualized by what seemed to be a country headed toward racial Armageddon. The “culture wars” debate was beginning to emerge then, and it provided a robust meaning-making framework for the 1990s and beyond.
For example, in 1991 there was the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill controversy of a “high-tech lynching,” as well as the videotaped beating of Rodney King that was followed in 1992 by the acquittal of the accused LAPD officers, which in turn, sparked the Los Angeles race riot/rebellion. In 1994 O. J. Simpson was accused of a double homicide of his wife and friend (both White), and in 1995 the courtroom finale was broadcast to an estimated 150 million people (approximately fifty-seven percent of the U.S. population at the time) that was complete with split-screen views of predominately Black and White audiences so as to “capture” their vastly different reactions upon news of the verdict. That same year, Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam held the “Million Man March” on the National Mall in Washington D.C. Just one week after the march, journalist Howard Fineman (1995) observed:
In entertainment, advertising, sports and most workplaces, integration is the order of our day. In films, Denzel Washington commands millions for roles that having nothing to do with skin color … But in politics, the ideal of integration is a spent force. Americans of all colors seem exhausted by the effort to come this far, and embittered by the new brand of race-based obsessions that have developed along the way. (p. 32)
Throughout the 1990s, several media outlets framed the issue of “affirmative action” as a power-keg. The 6 May 1991 issue of Newsweek stated, “The problem today is shattered dreams …. people on both sides of the color line feel they’ve reached an impasse, and that things are getting worse” (Whitaker 1991:29), and the 3 April 1995 issue of Newsweek ran a cover showing two Black and White fists pushing against one another underneath the headline of “Race and Rage.” NBC Nightly News (19 July 1995) anchor Tom Brokaw said, “Affirmative Action: two words that can start an argument just about anywhere in America. … We’ll be hearing a lot more about this in the months leading to the 1996 election.” Accordingly, in 1996 a “White backlash” against Affirmative Action activated “Proposition 209” in California, that effectively abolished racial preference programs, a political action that would continue to reverberate in later years in other states, most recently in Michigan in 2003.
But here we are in 2009. And Douthat’s prose is a wonderful example of the common folk wisdom of anti-Affirmative Action logic that has withstood the test of time even as evidence debunks the logic. This narrative usually follows three (although there are many sub-points I could get into) steps:
1. Racism is dead. We live in a post-racial/color-blind/society in which “we don’t have Jim Crow racism anymore.”
2. Affirmative Action is “reverse racism.” And it makes whites angry!
3. “Class” matters more than “race.” Admit (reluctantly) there is discrimination, but that it’s class-based rather than race-based.
Let’s go over each in detail, shall we?
1. Racism is Dead?
Douthat: “… [Sotomayor's] chief Republican interlocutor, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, even has a history of racially charged remarks. But the senators are yesterday’s men. The America of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is swiftly giving way to the America of Sonia Maria Sotomayor and Barack Hussein Obama.”
If you let Douthat tell it, we now have largely escaped the days when racism stalked the American landscape. In this framing, the specters of racism still exist here and there, but they are largely “bad apples” or relics of an age now long gone.
Fortunately as a sociologist, I rely on evidence-based reasoning about race, rather than on racial-fantasy tales, so let’s go to the videotape…
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003: 9) writes in his excellent book Racism Without Racists:
… race, as other social categories such as class and gender, is constructed but insists that it has a social reality. That means that after race—or class or gender—is created, it produces real effects on the actors racialized as “black” or “white.” Although race, as other social constructions, is unstable, it has a “changing same” quality at its core …. When race emerged in human history, it formed a social structure (a racialized social system) that awarded systemic privileges to Europeans (the peoples who became “white”) over non-Europeans (the peoples who became “nonwhite”). Racialized social systems, or white supremacy for short, became global and affected all societies where Europeans extended their reach.
While some might agree with the aforementioned, many might also find the tone overly grandiose, alarmist, or naïvely ignorant of racial “progress” made over the past few decades. If such is the case, consider that despite the dwindling demographic dominance of whites in the U.S., many whites benefit from an array of social problems that have remained the same or even worsened over the past half-century.
For example, since Dr. Martin Luther King’s death in 1968, our public schools have become more, not less, racially segregated (Kozel 2005), and despite the “Fair Housing Act of 1968,” a pattern of “hyper-segregation” (Massey and Denton 1993) makes whites more segregated than any other racial group. So also, whites are far more likely than non-whites to receive adequate and appropriate health care, ranging from procedures such as coronary bypass surgery, kidney dialysis and transplants, diagnostic tests and treatments for stroke and cancer, and treatments that can forestall the onset of AIDS (Smedley, Stith, and Nelson 2002). In regard to employment, Devah Pager (2007, 2005) finds blacks are less than half as likely to obtain a job as their white counterparts. Perhaps most disturbing in Pager’s (2003) research is the finding that blacks with no criminal record are less likely to get a job than whites with felony convictions. In a related vein, research suggests that steady employment is one of the strongest predictors of whether someone will be incarcerated. The national incarceration rate for whites is 412 per 100,000 residents, compared to 2,290 for African Americans, and 742 for Hispanics. These figures mean that only 0.4% of whites, compared to 2.3% of African Americans and 0.7% of Latinos are incarcerated (Harrison and Beck 2006: 11).
I could, unfortunately, go on and on. To sum, it takes more than a Horatio Alger’s tale of bootstrapping to “make it” in this nation. While hard work does matter and you need to work hard to “make it,” the effects of racism seemingly mitigate many of the effects of meritocracy. Yet, in ignoring this fact, Douthat references President Obama’s recent remarks to the NAACP during their 100 year anniversary:
And you can see the outlines of a different, better future in the closing passages of Barack Obama’s recent address to the N.A.A.C.P., in which the president presented an insistent vision of black America as the master of its own fate.
Yet, Douthat seemingly ignores one half of Obama’s message. Unsurprisingly, he focuses on Obama’s call for personal responsibility among black youth and black parents, a theme many prefer to hammer home (Whether Booker T. Washington, Will Smith, Bill Cosby, or Obama, the US adores popular black men declaring that racial inequality is a problem best solved through the self-improvement of the oppressed). (h/t to Kai Wright over at The Root for this point). Douthat ignores where Obama stated, “The most difficult barriers include structural inequalities that our nation’s legacy of discrimination has left behind; inequalities still plaguing too many communities and too often the object of national neglect.”
Sounds like racism still has an effect. That kinda throws a monkey-wrench into that whole “racism is dead” thing. Moving on…
2. Affirmative Action is “reverse racism”?
Douthat: “A system designed to ensure the advancement of minorities will tend toward corruption if it persists for generations, even after the minorities have become a majority. If affirmative action exists in the America of 2028, it will be as a spoils system for the already-successful, a patronage machine for politicians — and a source of permanent grievance among America’s shrinking white population. … [along with] the resentments gathering on the rightward reaches of the talk-radio dial.”
As already evidenced, many of our social structures—from employment to health care—are racialized to promote white supremacy. Despite this reality, most have a blind allegiance to the notions that race relations are improving or that whites are on the receiving end of “reverse racism”!
We have few ways to analyze that the racial politics of our “post-civil rights era” are increasingly contradictory. On one hand we have an official racial ideology of “color-blindness,” while on the other hand we have an ongoing and comprehensive racialization of all identities, social spaces, institutions, and policies that solidify a now entrenched system of racial inequality. Events like the fundamental abandonment of (and nationwide commitment to forget) post-Katrina New Orleans, the strengthening of Nativist movements for anti-immigration, and the resumption of U.S. controlled colonial projects in darker-skinned nations on the global periphery (most notably seen in policies toward, and violent conflicts in, the Middle East, South-Eastern Asia, and various parts of South and Central American nations) all represent the indispensable centrality of white racial rule to the prolongation of racism.
The continued existence, significance, and expansion of white supremacy, does not fit well with our dominant narratives of racial reconciliation and our ability to “move past” or “beyond” race. This contradiction is stated perhaps no better than by Leslie Houts Picca and Joe Feagin (2007: vii-ix):
Since the 18th century many Americans have heralded this country as the “cradle of freedom and democracy.” “Equality for all” and “liberty and justice” have frequently been asserted as the country’s highest ideals …. Nonetheless, for much of the time since the 18th century, this equality-and-justice frame has constantly been trumped by a white racial framing of society. This generally racist framing has been aggressively propagated and adopted by whites, yet has also to some degree penetrated the minds of those in all other U.S. racial groups …. although the white-racist framing of society targets all people of color, an aggressive antiblack perspective is central to and deeply embedded in this frame …. The frame has been so pervasive now for several centuries that even those oppressed by it have to resist its planting in their own heads and inclinations as they too are substantially socialized within a systemically racist society.
In fact, many of the policies, laws, and procedures put into place are based on a pro-white form of Affirmative Action. As Ira Katznelson (professor of political science and history at Columbia University) writes in his text When Affirmative Action Was White (2006), we see that social programs like FDR’s “New Deal” and Truman’s “Fair Deal” not only discriminated against blacks, but actually contributed to widening the gap between white and black Americans — judged in terms of educational achievement, quality of jobs and housing, and attainment of higher income. Considered revolutionary at the time, these programs included the Social Security system, unemployment compensation, the minimum wage, protection of the right of workers to join labor unions and the G.I. Bill of Rights. And even though blacks benefited to a degree from many of these programs, Katznelson shows how and why they received far less assistance than whites did. He documents the political process by which powerful Southern Congressional barons shaped the programs in discriminatory ways — as their price for supporting them. (A black newspaper editorial criticized Roosevelt for excluding from the minimum wage law the black women who worked long hours for $4.50 a week at the resort the president frequented in Warm Springs, Ga.). At the time, most blacks in the labor force were employed in agriculture or as domestic household workers. Members of Congress from the Deep South demanded that those occupations be excluded from the minimum wage, Social Security, unemployment insurance and workmen’s compensation. When labor unions scored initial victories in organizing poor factory workers in the South after World War II, the Southern Congressional leaders spearheaded legislation to cripple those efforts. The Southerners’ principal objective, Katznelson contends, was to safeguard the racist economic and social order known as the Southern ”way of life.”
Today, just as then, cultural forms of discrimination pervade everyday life to give (not take away) Affirmative Action to whites. As Bertrand and Mullainathan show in their study, “Are Emily And Greg Ore Employable Than Lakisha And Jamal? A Field Experiment On Labor Market Discrimination,” “White-sounding names” (like Emily and Greg) receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews than do “black-sounding names” (like Lakisha and Jamal). The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and industries. … and this study provides a great segue to the next point:
3. Class matters more than Race?
Douthat: “As this generation rises, race-based discrimination needs to go. The explicit scale-tipping in college admissions should give way to class-based affirmative action; the de facto racial preferences required of employers by anti-discrimination law should disappear.”
I’ll keep this one brief. As Bertrand and Mullainathan write of the aforementioned study, “We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market.”
So study after study shows that race still matters. And so does class. But the point is that they interact or intersect with one another, so that one does not matter more than the other, but their effects are mutually constitutive.
Until we recognize and admit that racial identity, racism, and discrimination that generally functions to promote white supremacy, are part and parcel of the US social order, we will be unable to have honest dialogue about race. In so long as quasi-scientific “studies” from white nationalist organizations proliferate, non-whites’ supposed “culture of poverty” are cited as causal variables for inequality, and uninformed diatribes about race in our mainstream newspapers abound, we’re not going to get very far. Rather, racialized inequality is likely to widen at the same rate that we disallow our ability to recognize its very existence.
References
Bertrand, Marianne and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2004. “Are Emily And Greg More Employable Than Lakisha And Jamal? A Field Experiment On Labor Market Discrimination,” American Economic Review 94(4): 991-1013.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2003. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Fineman, Howard. 23 October 1995. “Grappling with Race,” Newsweek.
Harrison, Paige M. and Allan J. Beck. 2006. “Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2005.” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Katznelson, Ira. 2006. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Co.
Kozel, Jonathan. 2005. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press.
Massey, Douglass S. and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pager, Devah. 2007. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press.
Pager, Devah. 2005. “Walking the Talk: What Employers Say Versus What They Do.” American Sociological Review 70(3): 355-380.
Pager, Devah. 2003. “The Mark of a Criminal Record.” American Journal of Sociology 108(5): 937-975.
Picca, Leslie H. and Joe R. Feagin. 2007. Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage. New York, NY: Routledge.
Smedley, Brian D., Adrienne Y. Stith, and Alan R. Nelson. 2003. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. Washington, DC: Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.
Whitaker, Mark. 6 May 1991. “A Crisis of Shattered Dreams,” Newsweek.
