BOOK MARK : Affirmative Action: The High Price of Preference
The author of “The Content of Our Character” says blacks must stop blaming racism for their problems and be more skeptical of remedies designed to correct centuries of oppression. He contends that a ffirmative action is one such remedy. An excerpt.
In theory, affirmative action certainly has all the moral symmetry that fairness requires--the injustice of historical and even contemporary white advantage is offset with black advantage, preference replaces prejudice, inclusion answers exclusion. It is reformist and corrective, even repentant and redemptive.
Affirmative action is, among other things, a testament to white goodwill and to black power, and in the midst of these heavy investments, its effects can be hard to see. But after 20 years of implementation, affirmative action has shown itself to be more bad than good and blacks now stand to lose more from it than they gain.
In the crucible of the ‘60s, whites were confronted with their racial guilt and blacks tasted their first real power. In this stormy time, white absolution and black power coalesced into virtual mandates for society. Affirmative action became a meeting ground for these mandates in the law, and in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s it underwent a remarkable escalation of its mission from simple anti-discrimination enforcement to social engineering by means of quotas, goals, timetables, set-asides and other forms of preferential treatment.
What accounted for this shift, I believe, was the white mandate to achieve a new racial innocence and the black mandate to gain power. Even though blacks had made great advances without quotas during the ‘60s, these mandates, which came to a head in the late ‘60s, could no longer be satisfied by anything less than racial preferences. These mandates in themselves were not wrong, since whites clearly needed to do better by blacks, and blacks needed more real power in society. But, as they came together in affirmative action, their effect was to distort our understanding of racial discrimination in a way that allowed us to offer the remediation of preference on the basis of mere color rather than actual injury. By making black the color of preference, these mandates have reburdened society with the very marriage of color and preference (in reverse) that we set out to eradicate. The old sin is reaffirmed in a new guise.
But the essential problem with this form of affirmative action is the way it leaps over the hard business of developing a formerly oppressed people to the point where they can achieve proportionate representation on their own--given equal opportunity--and goes straight for the proportionate representation. This may satisfy some whites of their innocence and some blacks of their power, but it does very little to truly uplift blacks.
When affirmative action escalated into social engineering, diversity became a golden word. It grants whites an egalitarian fairness (innocence) and blacks an entitlement to proportionate representation (power). Diversity is a term that applies democratic principles to races and cultures rather than to citizens, despite the fact that there is nothing to indicate that real diversity is the same thing as proportionate representation.
Racial representation is not the same thing as racial development. Yet affirmative action fosters a confusion of these very different needs. Representation can be manufactured; development is always hard-earned. However, it is the music of innocence and power that we hear in affirmative action that causes us to cling to it and to its distracting emphasis on representation. The fact is that after 20 years of racial preferences, the gap between white and black median income is greater than in the ‘70s. None of this is to say that blacks don’t need policies that ensure our right to equal opportunity, but what we need more is the development that will let us take advantage of society’s efforts to include us.
I think one of the most troubling effects of racial preferences for blacks is a kind of demoralization or, put another way, an enlargement of self-doubt. Under affirmative action, the quality that earns us preferential treatment is an implied inferiority. However this inferiority is explained--and it is easily enough explained by the myriad deprivations that grew out of our oppression--it is still inferiority. There are explanations, and then there is the fact. And the fact must be borne by the individual as a condition apart from the explanation, apart even from the fact that others like himself also bear this condition. In integrated situations, where blacks must compete with whites who may be better prepared, these explanations may quickly wear thin and expose the individual to racial as well as personal self-doubt.
All this is compounded by the cultural myth of black inferiority that blacks have always lived with. What this means in practical terms is that when blacks deliver themselves into integrated situations, they encounter a nasty little reflex in whites, a mindless, atavistic reflex that responds to the color black with alarm. Attributions may follow this alarm if the white cares to indulge them, and if they do, they will most likely be negative--one such attribution is intellectual ineptness. I think this reflex and the attributions that may follow it embarrass most whites today, therefore, it is usually quickly repressed.
Nonetheless, on an equally atavistic level, the black will be aware of the reflex his color triggers and will feel a stab of horror at seeing himself reflected in this way. He, too, will do a quick repression, but a lifetime of such stabbings is what constitutes his inner realm of racial doubt.
The implication of inferiority that racial preferences engender in both the white and black mind expands rather than contracts this doubt. Even when the black sees no implication of inferiority in racial preferences, he knows that whites do, so that--consciously or unconsciously--the result is virtually the same. The effect of preferential treatment--the lowering of normal standards to increase black representation--puts blacks at war with an expanded realm of debilitating doubt, so the doubt itself becomes an unrecognized preoccupation that undermines their ability to perform--especially in integrated situations. Preferential treatment, no matter how it is justified in the light of day, subjects blacks to a midnight of self-doubt, and so often transforms their advantage into a revolving door.
Another liability of affirmative action comes from the fact that it indirectly encourages blacks to exploit their own past victimization as a source of power and privilege. Victimization, like implied inferiority, is what justifies preference, so that to receive the benefits of preferential treatment one must, to some extent, become invested in the view of one’s self as a victim. In this way, affirmative action nurtures a victim-focused identity in blacks. The obvious irony here is that we become inadvertently invested in the condition we are trying to overcome. Racial preferences send us the message that there is more power in our past suffering than our present achievements--none of which could bring us a preference over others.
But one of the worst prices that blacks pay for preference has to do with an illusion. I saw this illusion at work recently in the mother of a middle-class black student who was going off to his first semester of college. “They owe us this, so don’t think for a minute that you don’t belong there.” This is the logic by which many blacks, and some whites, justify affirmative action--it is something “owed,” a form of reparation.
But this logic overlooks a much harder and less digestible reality, that it is impossible to repay blacks living today for the historic suffering of the race. If all blacks were given a million dollars tomorrow morning, it would not amount to a dime on the dollar of three centuries of oppression, nor would it obviate the residues of that oppression that we still carry. The concept of historic reparation grows out of man’s need to impose a degree of justice on the world that does not exist. Suffering can be endured and overcome, it cannot be repaid. Blacks cannot be repaid for the injustice done to the race, but we can be corrupted by society’s guilty gestures of repayment.
Affirmative action is such a gesture. It tells us that racial preferences can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. The corruption here is in the hidden incentive not to do what we believe preferences will do. This is an incentive to be reliant on others just as we are struggling for self-reliance. It keeps alive the illusion that we can find some deliverance in repayment. The hardest thing for any sufferer to accept is that his suffering excuses him from little and never has enough currency to restore him. To think otherwise is to prolong the suffering.
Copyright 1990 by Shelby Steele.
Reprinted with the permission of St. Martin’s Press.
BOOK REVIEW: A review of “The Content of Our Character” appears in the Book Review section on Page 1.