RACE VI: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, A.K.A. NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO TALK ABOUT: That’s the most important thing about affirmative action: It isn’t the most important thing. It may not operate very well even on the basic level of getting black people jobs (scroll, scroll, scroll like the wind! to the last paragraph); but even if it does do that, it manifestly isn’t going to be the way that most black people who succeed do so, and it somewhat less manifestly doesn’t do very much at all in reducing racism, and thus, really, it is not the most important thing to talk about when we’re talking about race and racism in the US.

Nonetheless, there it is, this big obvious target-issue that everyone talks about because whether you like it or hate it, it’s easy to see. It’s a named policy (really a spectrum of policies, but whatever), and it’s something that people have already done, thus it’s easier to defend/attack it than to talk about new projects or new understandings of your own. So here I am, talking about it, even though, like I said, it is neither super-helpful nor super-horrible. I think its harms outweigh its benefits, blah blah blah, but again, the most important thing to keep in mind is how marginal affirmative action is in the greater scheme of things.

What’s wrong with it? Well, isn’t this one kind of obvious? Even most people who support affirmative action view it as a necessary evil (or, at least, necessary thing-with-lots-and-lots-of-obvious-problems). Affirmative action calls for us to judge people as racial group members rather than as individuals. This is the reason that so many people who oppose it oppose it so passionately–they’re prompted not by racism, but by a deep belief in the colorblind ideal. That’s why the pro- and con- forces tend to talk past each other–anti-aff. action people talk about the colorblind ideal, judging people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Pro-aff. action people get irritated and say, “Yes, of course, content of character, but.” There are a few different places to take the pro-AA argument after the “but”: “But because there are lots of racists out there, we’re not judging people by the content of their character unless we assume that they’ve suffered/benefited from racial discrimination, thus extra points for the discriminated-against and fewer points for the discriminated-for”; “But since many people won’t judge us by the content of our characters, those who want a roughly just, character-content-based eventual outcome will have to make up for the racists by fighting fire with fire”; etc.

There’s a parallel dispute about the nature of “colorblindness”–people who support it generally mean the notion that people should be judged as individuals rather than as members of a race, while people who oppose the language of colorblindness generally think that people should be judged as individuals who are also and importantly members of a race and who suffer/benefit from discrimination on that basis.

The difference between the two sides is really a difference in emphasis–but that difference has major real-world consequences. I don’t think most people who passionately support immediate implementation of the colorblind ideal would deny that there are still white racists out there; and I don’t think most people who passionately support affirmative action would deny that people should be judged as individuals. But the difference in emphasis matters.

Affirmative action, postponing the colorblind ideal until somewhere in the future (but never with a firm deadline, of course), is a problem because of what it emphasizes and the ways it conditions us to respond to people. It emphasizes race, obviously, over and against individual achievement. (This is true even in the defenses of AA I outlined above–blacks’ and Hispanics’ achievements are treated as measures of greater talent than equal or comparable achievements by whites, solely on the basis of race. In other words, we assume Kristin Walsh’s Harvard degree means less because her path was smoothed by racism, whereas Jamal Jones’s Harvard degree means more; and this is assumed whether or not we know Kristin and Jamal’s particular, individual backgrounds, challenges, etc.)

Affirmative action, unlike the early civil rights movement (“I Am a Man“), does not emphasize the “view people as individuals” side of the coin. It instead emphasizes the “…who belong to historically discriminated against/for groups” side. That leads us to treat one another as group representatives rather than as complex individuals with particular, intriguing, divergent family and personal histories. This really doesn’t seem very different to me from the “numinous Negro” mentality I described here.

Affirmative action keeps us stuck in the racial framework that my last post argued was increasingly irrelevant. It doesn’t track prejudice especially well–for example, a lot of people are much less prejudiced against Caribbean or African immigrants as employees than they are against native-born black Americans, yet all three groups are considered “black” for AA purposes. It hardens our racial categories and confirms us in our bad habit of treating race like it’s real.

AA also turns blacks and (to a much lesser extent, because they generally seem less personally and culturally invested in AA and in “racial” identity) Hispanics into interest groups with turf to protect… like farmers. There’s a difference in how one approaches the world if one speaks in terms of “At last, we’re getting the respect we deserve!” as vs. “At least we’re getting the things we deserve”–even if both respect and things are deserved. This is probably my weakest point against AA, or the one that’s hardest for me to defend, but I do think that it’s psychologically accurate.

AA emphasizes the ways black people are dependent on the majority. Instead of winning out on their own, black people who fight for AA are fighting for a helping hand, an extra boost, training wheels. Now, again, this is a matter of emphasis–obviously in a lot of important respects minorities’ lives are entangled with the lives of the majority, whether the minority is lawyers, Laotians, or lesbians. But I think you can see how this particular emphasis is problematic.

And, as everybody and his mom has argued, AA sets up a victimization contest–you get bennies if you can prove that you’re oppressed. This is a recipe for a resentful, suspicious, self-interested, and racially hostile polity.

The most striking thing for me–and this is an impression, not an argument, but I think it’s true–is that defenses of AA lack a spirit of hope. I was thinking the other day about the people who went on the Freedom Rides, who sat at the lunch counters, who stood on the Mall while King spoke, in their heady youth. And the thing that comes through so strongly when those people talk about their experiences in the 1960s is the sense of hope, of possibility–a new era was breaking through, people really felt like things were changing for the better. This is precisely what I don’t hear in defenses of affirmative action, which tend to sound wearied, hanging on by the fingernails, exasperated, or disillusioned to find that, thirty years later, we’re still at this particular point on the long road of American race obsession. Now, defenses of AA also tend to sound practical, even grimly realist (not necessarily realistic, but realist, in the foreign-policy-type sense), rather than idealistic. But there’s gotta be a way to combine practicality and hope.

That’s what I’m going to write about tomorrow. It’s fitting to start the new year on a note of hope.