The New Yorker unleashed its fierce intellectual firepower on the subject of Affirmative Action this past week—no fewer than four stories. The most important is by the formidable, and almost always reasonable, Louis Menand. It carries this subtitle online: Have We Outgrown the Need for Affirmative Action? It is a topic the author never really confronts head on, but we should.
Menand aims for even-handedness with a progressive lilt until the very last paragraph when he unloads this:
But it is hard to understand the opposition, often diehard, of many white liberals that has persisted since the nineteen-seventies. Did these people really imagine that passing a law against discrimination would reset race relations overnight? Do they really think that white Americans, wherever they work or go to college, do not carry a lifelong advantage because of the color of their skin? Do they really believe that there should be no sacrifice to make or price to pay for the systematic damage done to the lives of millions of American citizens and the men and women who are their ancestors?
Whoa. That’s not at all reasonable; it is, in fact, a vast, prejudicial and not very New-Yorkerly oversimplification. I’ve had mixed feelings, tilting negative, about affirmative action since the 1990s. Anyone who thinks that making distinctions according to race—even positive ones—isn’t problematic just hasn’t been thinking hard enough. Indeed, Menand starts off by admitting that Affirmative Action is a form of prejudice. Prejudice hurts people…it certainly hurt black people when they were enslaved and brutalized and discriminated against by law. And it has hurt white people, and Asians, and others for the past sixty years. A different sort of affirmative action has also hurt—outrageously, I believe—those who are not the fortunate children of past college graduates: “legacy” admissions. (Apparently, 30% of each new Harvard class are legacies.) This structural elitism helped Donald Trump get into the University of Pennsylvania after he nearly flunked out of Fordham. (The Jesuits don’t do grade inflation.) In a just world, if you’re going to get rid of affirmative action, you should get rid of legacies, too—which I doubt is going to happen. But there are several other non-race-based remediations we should be considering now.
This may be our most vexing racial issue; it’s not easy—pace Menand—to untangle. So let me offer some arguments for and against the program, and then make an attempt to answer the question Menand never really confronts in his essay.
The Arguments for Affirmative Action
It’s Only Fair. Best stated by Lyndon Johnson in his 1964 commencement address at Howard University:
You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
It is Reparative Justice. The idea that whites should actually pay reparations to blacks for their servitude, most notably floated by Ta Nehisi Coates, is more a provocation than a proposal. Who would get the money? How many descendants of slaves have married people who weren’t descendants of slaves? Do West Indians count? Do recent African immigrants? And why should a divorced Italian-American woman working three jobs to keep her family afloat be taxed for a sin her family had no part of? Affirmative action was a gentle way to repair some of the damage--even Richard Nixon, who launched the Philadelphia Plan to integrate the construction unions, thought so. As Christopher Caldwell points out in The Age of Entitlement, the end of segregation also meant limits were placed on the First Amendment right of free association—another, entirely worthy (to my mind) form of reparative justice. Restaurateurs in the south were no longer “free” to serve whites only.
It worked. Menand says this flat out but, like most liberals, refuses to consider what that actually means. It means this: there has been tremendous—indeed, unprecedented—civil rights progress. There is a large black middle and professional class that did not exist in this country sixty years ago. It means that black women graduate from college at a greater rate than white men. It means that nearly 50% of black families have incomes in the top three economic quintiles. (That leaves half in poverty or among the working poor, hence the need for continuing forms of reparative justice.) Turn on the television: is it possible to have a news show without black journalists? Indeed, because blacks have seen politics as a a way toward power—as the Irish did in the 19th century—you could argue that they have more than their fair share of elected officials, civil servants, judges, members of the Supreme Court. (They represent 13% of the overall population.)
Diversity is a great thing. All diversity. The great American salad bowl. We learn from each other, strengthen each other, enjoy each other’s music and cuisine and sensibilities. As a native New Yorker—from Queens, the city’s most diverse borough—I actually feel sorry for those poor white folks who haven’t had the interracial and interethnic life I’ve led (or the family that I have, for that matter.) In fact, most of us have become so comfortable with the national melanin-spectrum that we would feel positively uncomfortable in a newsroom or a corporate suite or a television show that only featured white males. We can never go back to the way things were. We’re heading toward more cosmopolitanism, not less. What a blessing!
Arguments Against Affirmative Action
It’s Not Fair. It’s a form of prejudice, as Menand says. It goes against the spirit of our Constitution. Distinctions should not be made by race. I spent years traveling the back roads of America, and I would surmise that the vast majority of people I interviewed would find this rhetorical question posed by Menand a crock: Do they really think that white Americans, wherever they work or go to college, do not carry a lifelong advantage because of the color of their skin? Actually, affirmative action has allowed far too many white people to believe the opposite is true. They are encouraged in this bias by Fox and the other media deplorables, but that doesn’t erase the reality. Some blacks get breaks that whites don’t, especially those who are willing to play the meritocratic achievement game. Menand can ask the rhetorical question because he has lived a life of academic privilege, which has been justified by the quality of his work. But I’m sure he knows dozens of able white colleagues who have not been selected for elite positions in academia, the media, the government and the world of philanthropy, purely on a racial, or identity, basis. Since most of those passed over are liberals, they don’t bitch about it. But they are losing out because of the color of their skin, and that creates unnecessary assumptions and resentments. For the rest of America—the part Menand doesn’t seem to acknowledge—the very idea of “white privilege” is a broad-brush canard floated by the academic leftists. It is an insult to the divorced Italian-American woman I mentioned above and to millions of super-hardworking middle and working-class white people. It has played a significant role in creating the political chasm we face.
It worked. Menand writes: Do they really believe that there should be no sacrifice to make or price to pay for the systematic damage done to the lives of millions of American citizens and the men and women who are their ancestors? But isn’t there a statute of limitations on that? Does Menand truly believe that blacks should get special, race-based advantages in perpetuity? If so, there’s a subtle tinge of liberal condescension involved: maybe blacks will never achieve equality on their own. That’s kind of, well, racist, isn’t it? It would mean an America with different values from those enshrined in our Constitution—an America where race means more rather than less. We’ve had sixty years of Affirmative Action, a nice long run, a quarter of our nation’s history. Why are liberals unwilling to explore the possibility that the headline raises: that affirmative action’s time has passed?
It’s divisive and destructive. It’s divisive by definition. It’s destructive in ways that are subtle and obvious. It hurts black people, too. One evening, when my wife and I were living in Brooklyn forty years ago, I had a long, well-lubricated Saturday night conversation with a black neighbor who was a bank executive. He said that everyone assumed that he was an affirmative action hire and it was hard to break that impression; he feared that he’d filled his token role and would have a hard time getting promoted. I’m pretty sure his fears were unfounded. In my experience, the black colleagues and friends and neighbors I’ve had were plenty talented. But they lived with a burden that others didn’t—they had to prove they weren’t just affirmative action hires. We have to move past that.
It’s justice on the cheap. And all too often it comes equipped with an unwillingness to deal with the more intractable legacies of enslavement. American slavery was barbaric beyond imagining. Slaves were a crop, more lucrative than cotton. They were, in some cases, harvested for profit. Their humanity was desecrated—they could be bought and sold, raped or murdered with impunity, their families could be broken up. Their focus was limited to short-term pleasures; there was no long-term planning when you were enslaved. This created cultural distortions and unique social problems that exist to this day. Democrats in general, and leftists in particular, simply do not want to face these problems. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan—one of the sharpest liberal minds of the twentieth century—pointed out the sociological facts in his famous report on the fractured structure of the black family, he was ostracized, called a racist by the left. The willful blindness continues. The only Black Lives that Matter to Black Lives Matter activists are those taken by police brutality—a terrible problem, but minuscule compared to the scourge of black-on-black murders in our poorest communities. But it’s impolitic to deal with the actual causes of that scourge. When you don’t have an intact family, it’s a lot more alluring to find family in a street gang. It’s near impossible to change a culture, especially from the outside. But it is a moral and intellectual failing among civil rights activists to deny that a Culture of Poverty exists (and, indeed, has spread to the white underclass).
It’s terrible politics. It empowers the racist demagogues who want white people to believe that blacks get all the breaks. It perpetuates a fundamentally odious assumption: that race should be a meaningful distinction in American life. It provides oxygen to extremists on both sides, but particularly to white people whose only experience of blacks is watching them run riot on Fox News. It thereby diminishes the possibility of binding our wounds and creating a more perfect union. It hampers our ability to rid ourselves of the populist-authoritarian threat to democracy. It is good for Donald Trump.
Conclusions
It shouldn’t have to be noted here that the vast majority of black people are law-abiding—indeed, they’re more concerned about crime than white liberals are, according to the polls. The vast majority graduate from high school and more, increasingly, from college. They are loving parents and, in my experience, wonderful neighbors. They take “the early bus,” in Jesse Jackson’s gorgeous phrase, and work hard to get ahead. Their wealth, as opposed to income, is scandalously low compared to white people, but that’s mostly a lagging indicator, a function of real estate—and there are growing swaths of the black community who are homeowners. I believe the racism they’ve experienced makes them better citizens than the casual bigots who’ve inflicted suffering upon them. The progress they’ve made since their social liberation sixty years ago is real, and significant, and should be celebrated; Democrats, in particular, make a terrible mistake when they seem more intent on airing grievances than celebrating these triumphs. There is more to be done, though—particularly for the 50% of black families who are poor or working poor. That work should be seen through an economic lens, not a racial one. Future affirmative action programs should give a leg up to poor whites, browns and Asians, too.
The Supreme Court will probably abolish affirmative action this term; it is up to the rest of us to find strategies to replace it in ways that are more inclusive—strategies that include poor people of all races and ethnicities. We can not ignore the children of that divorced Italian-American mom. There is no escaping the conundrum posed by race-based affirmative action, no way to gild this particular lily. There is, in the end, only a fundamental truth: it is wrong to make distinctions according to race.
If you have a friend who might like Sanity Clause, send them a free subscription:
If you haven’t yet subscribed yourself, press this button. It’s free, for now:
Good stuff, as usual. One point you mention is the unhappy state of the Black family, which you suggest arises from the legacy of slavery. I'm neither a sociologist nor a historian, but I'm your age and grew up in the South, and I'd say that race-based family pathology was far less ubiquitous 50-60 years ago than it is today. It seems to me that one major factor is the poorly conceived "War on Drugs," which has wreaked social havoc by imprisoning large numbers of young Black males.