Focus on Affirmative Action

Listen to the show accompanying this myth:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Today's Guests Are:

Cheryl Harris : Professor Harris is the Faculty Director of the Critical Race Studies program at UCLA Law School. She is the author of leading works in Critical Race Theory including the highly influential "Whiteness as Property" (Harvard Law Review). Her work has also taken up the relationship between race, gender and property and most recently has focused on race, equality and the Constitution through the re-examination of Plessy v. Ferguson and Grutter v. Bollinger. As the Co-Chair for the National Conference of Black Lawyers for several years, she developed an expertise in international human rights, particularly concerning South Africa. Professor Harris was a key organizer of several major conferences both in South Africa and in the United States that helped establish a dialogue between U.S. legal scholars and South African lawyers during the development of South Africa's first democratic constitution in 1994. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Bunche Center for African-American Studies and is part of the Executive Council of the American Studies Association. Professor Harris is the recipient of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California 2005 Distinguished Professor Award for Civil Rights Educatio

George Lipsitz: George Lipsitz is a professor of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He studies social movements, urban culture, and inequality. He is the author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics . His other books include American Studies in a Moment of Danger, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition, the biography of Ivory Perry, which examines white supremacy and probes into the ways that race determines life chances and structures experience in the contemporary United States; Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place, and Time Passages. . Lipsitz also serves as editor of the Critical American Studies series at the University of Minnesota Press, and the recently published Singlejack Solidarity, a collection of writings by longtime labor activist Stan Weir.

MYTH: Absent affirmative action race is as empty and meaningless as skin color; it is affirmative action that creates racial differences.

Undergirding the myth that affirmative action creates racial differences is the belief that without affirmative action race is as empty and meaningless as skin color. By this logic, it follows that equality can be brought about by treating everyone the same without any consideration of race at all. Reducing race to something as innocuous as skin color permits critics of color-conscious policies to argue that people are treated equally as long as no one's race is taken into account. But this superficial equality is blind to the reality that race is not primarily skin color. Indeed, race itself is not even a biological category. As Ian Haney Lopez notes, what we have come to think of as race is the cumulative effect of legal rules, social policy and cultural practice. The effects of these cumulative practices are NOT the same for whites and nonwhites. Some find themselves running in lanes on a track cluttered with obstacles, whereas others can find themselves running a race completely free of unwarranted impediments as we discussed in Myth 1. In other words, it is simply not the same thing to be white as it is to be of color. As Professor Lopez shows in his book "White By Law," race is a fluid category that is determined as much by public attitude as it is by any visual indicators that we have come to associate with it. Race is simply a way of keeping benefits in the hands of one group, while leaving everyone else in a systematically subordinated role.

WHITENESS: MEMBERSHIP HAS ITS PRIVILEGES

The creation of white privilege is a process that passes acquired goods and benefits over generations. From America's inception, whiteness has been used to keep certain groups out in order to exploit them. The clearest example of this is slavery, but there have been many lesser examples, such as the use of immigrants as cheap labor by exempting them from the standards and pay that one would reserve for white workers. Over time, many groups that were not originally "white" have been able to become white through assimilation and the accumulation of resources -- this group includes Italians, Irish, and Jews. (Read more about how the Irish and Jews became white) However, whiteness needs an "Other" to define itself by, and those whose skin is most different from the skin color associated with "whiteness" -- that is to say, people of color--are forever shut out from the benefits of white privilege. As a result, people of color are shut out from all the opportunities that whiteness reserves for itself, and instead are damaged by all the ways in which a system that rewards whites and subordinates others maintains the status quo of white domination.

Those who have benefited from white privilege are unaware of it because of the way in which whiteness operates. Whites find themselves reaping the fruit of trees that they never planted, but that were there as long as they can recall -- always just there and to which they have always been entitled. Their ignorance as to who planted, and tended the tree in the first place thwarts the efforts of those who are trying to shake the fruits loose for themselves in the post-civil rights era. The MCRI is an attempt to keep whiteness, and its "serendipitous" fruits above the reach of people of color and to hinder their ability to negotiate for resources and opportunities in the institutions in which they live and work.

Peggy McIntosh introduces a way of thinking about racism that is often ignored. Even those of us who have come to understand that racism manifests itself not only in the the actions of individual, irrational actors, but also in structures and institutions, think of racism as something that puts subordinated others at a disadvantage. Racism, in the form of white privilege, puts whites at an advantage. McIntosh describes white privilege as “an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.” Not only does white privilege put whites at an advantage, there is no mechanism by which their privilege is brought to their attention. Thus, whites often are fully oblivious to the reality of white privilege and come to view disparities in wealth, educational, employment and housing opportunities, and even in health outcomes as normal. click HERE to learn more about the Invisible Knapsack.

WHITE PRIVILEGE REQUIRES AFFIRMATIVE ACTION TO REMEDY

Our Constitution was built on special rights - for whites: property rights, contract rights, voting rights, and of course the right to own humans during the era of chattel slavery, to "recover" Blacks if they dared steal themselves away, (to escape from slavery would have been considered a theft, of oneself!) and to benefit in the form of tax breaks and increased representation under the 3/5 compromise (allowing whites to have apportioned representation based on their own own numbers plus 3/5 of a person for each slave, but NOT be taxed based on such fractions of humanity).

Since reconstruction, non-whites seeking to assert the same rights as whites have been rebuffed as seeking "special rights." Just 20 years after the abolition of slavery, African Americans seeking federal enforcement of antidiscrimination laws were admonished by the Supreme Court to stop making a federal case out of their predicament and to learn to make do like everyone else. Framing civil rights as preferential treatment, the Supreme Court intoned, "Slavery is over," you can't be the "special favorite of the laws" forever. The court, just one generation after the end of slavery saw the plaintiff's claims for access to the same accommodations, facilities and services as whites, an unwelcome attempt to access those rights that had been reserved for whites. Whites comprised the universe of people who could possess such rights. Thus, whiteness was (and arguably is) the requisite admission ticket to partake in the American Dream. White privilege is guarded carefully, and for non-whites (and even for white women) the path to access to privileges reserved for whites is long and hard. For example, Blacks did not gain the simple emblem of citizenship - the right to vote - until 1865. The franchise was not extended to women until 1920, and Native Americians until 1924!

Once established, the privileges associated with whiteness become the basis for future entitlement and are very difficult to alter. Many whites have responded to political demands and even governmental policies designed to modestly alter these expectations as a violation of their civil rights. Laws promoting school integration, desegregating public accommodations, the protection of voting rights, and even the repeal of miscegenation laws were all met with venomous denunciation (and sometimes violence) and characterized as special rights that unjustly impinged on white rights.

WHITE PRIVILEGE IS NO SECRET

In fact, most Americans are aware that there is a huge advantage in being born white in America. That’s why Andrew Hacker, a prominent sociologist, asked white students what amount of money they felt the would need in order to "compensate" them if they became suddenly and irrevocably black. Many of the students felt that $50 million, or $1 million for every year for the rest of their lives would be required in order to make up for the loss of their whiteness. These students were admitting something the rest of us intuit quite easily: white privilege provides a host of advantages, many of them monetary. To read more about racial wealth disparities caused by the enshrinement of white privilege, read HERE To read about Hacker's study, read his book.

COLORBLINDENESS HAS LONG BEEN USED TO PROTECT WHITE PRIVILEGE

The meaning of whiteness has throughout the history of the United States conferred a host of privileges, benefits and expectations upon some individuals that have been denied to others. These entitlements, once conferred, provide a permanent reservoir of social goods that is automatically passed on and down through the generations. Affirmative action has been a modest effort to negotiate entry into the stream of resources for those who have been stranded upstream of the flow of white entitlement.

The modest successes of people of color in breaking down the exclusive hold that some Americans have on whiteness has prompted a vitriolic backlash. Michigan's Proposal 2 is just one example of a broader effort to place the entitlements of whiteness out of the reach of people of color and their social justice allies. It does not reflect the pursuit of social justice. Rather it represents an effort to shore up and stem the diminishing overrepresentation of those who have historically been racially privileged across our nation's institutions.

WHITENESS AS THE NORMATIVE STANDARD

Colorblindness is a preference. It is preference for the status quo of systemic institutionalized white domination. Colorblindness allows institutional and structural racism to continue, propelled by its own inertial force unless acted upon by a directional force. It takes no action (or intent) to perpetuate it, but directed efforts, in the form of affirmative action policies, are required to stop it. Understanding white privilege reframes the affirmative action debate in two ways. First, once we recognize white privilege -- and the US's history of protecting it at all cost -- it is obvious why the arguments in this debate have been framed in terms of harm to white people. Second, once we understand that white privilege is almost always invisible to its beneficiaries, it is easy to understand why those advantages are taken to be normal. That is, the “invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks,” the unacknowledged regime of white supremacy has come to be accepted as the natural state of things. Affirmative action threatens this perception.

Lastly, standards of "merit" are culturally defined. The markers of a "professional looking" applicant, a "collegial" colleague or a "good student" are centered on whiteness.Given this, white privilege, and racial subordination will continue, swathed in colorblindness, without affirmative action to adjust for a norm that is far from normal.

Mythbusting Homework:

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