Affirmative Action: A Culture Healing Itself

Passed over, lied to and fed up, an Angry White Male is being race-baited in opposition to affirmative-action programs. His Republican defenders in Congress and state legislatures have vowed with sound and fury to make the evil of race- and gender-based preferences a “wedge” issue until its inevitable conquest in the 1996 elections. Privilege ignored and truth be damned, the appeal to electoral prejudice is back with a vengeance.

Pacifying the Angry White Male will be difficult, because, in truth, he has much to be angry about. Between 1979 and 1993, the inflation-adjusted value of his median income dropped 10%, according to the Census, and the medium net worth of his family declined, too. Yet, his work day is longer, his satisfaction diminished. Most American workers share this objective state of economic malaise. But somehow his is blamed on 30 years of affirmative action, prompting even President Bill Clinton to concede, “We shouldn’t be defending things we can’t defend.”

But we can defend affirmative action, proudly. Because these programs, contrary to hysterical perception, represent an extraordinary potential in the American political imagination by laying a foundation for future equities in spite of continued biases favoring whites.

Affirmative action is a “wait a minute” in the minds of decision-makers before they indulge a reflex for sameness, and it gives them pause to consider promoting group members whose historical economic deprivations continue to exclude them. It forces recognition of the fact that racial and gender discrimination leaves a legacy of inequality. Affirmative action encourages the majority to think positively about minorities in ways they might not otherwise.

Moreover, we must defend affirmative action, because in doing so we also defend the accomplishments of those intended beneficiaries who may be too quick to feel shame and too quick to forget. Though not reflected in opinion polls, personalized attacks can project a private shame onto many women and people of color. “Angry White Male eyes glare down at my worth for being here,” says one voice inside; “I will accept nothing that earns that stare,” resolves another.

The effect may be to withdraw or to reject. Yet, both reactions forget the right each has to participate and the fact that few like them ever participated before.

We might see affirmative action as the slow process of a culture healing itself. Societies that, for hundreds of years, systematically enslaved sub-groups, forced their labor, raped them, lynched them, denied them education and the resources for independence, disenfranchised them for generations and demeaned every aspect of their human character do not dream up remedies for reconciliation and inclusion. Affirmative action, together with anti-discrimination laws, is just such a rare impulse. But healing takes time.

The popular argument, that affirmative action has subverted the original intent expressed, in 1964, by President Lyndon B. Johnson in Executive Order 11246, wrongly assumes that the “idea” of affirmative action was static, never to be altered by the necessity of experimentation and practice. Instead, it has evolved in proportion to the endemic inequalities it addresses. Through numerous federal statutes, such as Title VII, affirmative action demands that companies doing business with the government meet goals in contracting and employment that promote underrepresented groups--women, blacks and other nonwhites.

The principle embraced in such mandates was applied by courts to other fields where the same groups were denied the raw materials of economic advancement--primarily higher-education admissions and hiring policies. Forced by the combined threat of lawsuits and direct-action protests, many institutions voluntarily implemented programs to extend benefits that for centuries favored only white males. These efforts are broadly characterized as “diversity.”

Preferential treatment is more complicated. Seeking to launch the “wedge” issue into his prospective presidential campaign, Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) may have believed he was speaking to an audience of Angry White Males when he said recently, “People in America now are paying a price for things done before they were born.” He was right--except those people are mainly African American, Latino and Native American, which is why making race, ethnicity and gender a factor in awarding economic benefits will remain necessary for some time to come.

Before white voters again yield to the anecdotal manipulations of racial hysteria, they might consider preferences and privileges enjoyed over a lifetime. The assumption of competency that greets a white college student or job applicant, compared with the presumption of incompetency that his black competitor faces, is preference. It is a privilege not to be thought stupid at the sight of your face. It is a privilege to live in communities where property taxes will afford public schooling equal to private schools. It is a preference to be able to deduct that tax as well as the interest on your mortgage. It is a privilege to have a higher life expectancy than everyone else and a preference to receive Social Security earned by a work force that is increasingly female and nonwhite. Privilege permits you to leave a great deal more to your children. Preference makes election results turn on your anger.

These privileges and preferences are taken for granted by the Angry White Male who, for reasons having more to do with GOP economic policies of the past decade than with affirmative action, has seen his wages fall and his net-worth slip.

Against this backdrop of unacknowledged privilege and misdirected anger are the hard numbers of marketplace disparity. Despite the heralded gains of a growing black middle class, median black household income is about 56% of whites.

While some white men may be feeling a wage pinch, they remain the industry standard--black men earn 74 cents for every dollar earned by a white man, white women 71 cents, Latino men 65 cents and black women just 64 cents. Though gains for women have been greatest under affirmative action, nonwhites have hardly raided the national economy, especially in the Midwest and the South.

More important than income, however, is wealth. Income obviously contributes to wealth, but wealth is what sustains us over generations. The new black middle class is encouraging, but one’s ability to borrow money to send children to college or invest in a business is a matter of the value of one’s assets minus liabilities. The typical white person’s net worth is 10 times what it is for blacks. More than half of American’s net worth is tied to the value of their homes, which reflects where they can afford (or are allowed) to live. In 1993, the median value of black people’s homes was less than two-thirds whites’; and blacks’ savings accounts were one-quarter whites’. Such inequities are the silent measures of generational inequality. They only hint at the qualitative differences behind the numbers.

You could chalk up such disparity to personal responsibility if we didn’t live in a culture where the whole point of privilege is perpetuating it. Wealth sustains because it may be passed on. The homeowner foothold that is the American dream was designed long before blacks could even own property in many parts of this country. The prosperity afforded many white people today is a direct result of government interventions during war years that made home ownership affordable--but explicitly excluded blacks. As mounting evidence reveals blacks are still discriminated against in mortgage lending, many banks defend their practices by arguing they didn’t make the rules. Fannie Mae did.

Of course, all this--the considerations in hiring, admitting, promoting, contracting and lending--bisects issues of class status, because affirmative action is ultimately concerned with economic justice. The redistributive effects of race- and gender-based preferences are critical to its success. Yet, they are precisely why liberal and conservative calls for a class-based system of benefits demonstrate an unworkable naivete and hypocrisy, respectively. Nothing in U.S. history is so violently repelled as class consciousness. Repeated attempts to ban, as unconstitutional, discrimination on the basis of socioeconomic status have failed. Thus, there is no enforcement mechanism.

If Republicans were truly sympathetic to economic disadvantage, they would not impose welfare reform through character assassinations of the poor and they would increase, rather than decrease, funding for homeless shelters. Besides, most institutions have been using socioeconomic status as a factor in affirmative action for years--as they should.

The problem with affirmative action is the failure of leadership to articulate its meanings so that it may be more effectively and creatively applied. Debating it is necessary, refining it is due. But scrapping it to appease some mythical malcontent gains us nothing.