by Stephen Eric Bronner, 18 July 2023
Affirmative action” has existed in the United States since its birth, but it was white Christian men of money who benefited. For them, it had a material impact in the preference they received with respect to housing, jobs, sports, media, and educational opportunities. What this capitalist class preserved for itself through tightly knit social networks extends far beyond “legacy admissions” for the children of donors at ivy-league schools. In the 1960s, such material “affirmative action” for elites made way for pale and restricted policies that called upon universities to diversify and incentivize accepting women and people of color into the professional-managerial strata of society. Essentially designed for the more talented and better situated among divergent identity formations, nevertheless, affirmative action in our time has generated a bitter, protracted and well publicized debate—and it has now been abolished.
Nostalgia isn’t helpful in dealing with the current situation. It is time to incorporate the needs of the majority among people of color and women into a new “class” stance regarding the opportunities available to them in public life. This makes it necessary to change the discourse.
Conflicts in class society require a class response; it’s as simple as that. This makes it important to understand that affirmative action was never the brainchild of left ideologues who craftily foisted it upon an innocent and unwitting nation. It was instead constructed by moderate politicians and business elites as a relatively inexpensive way of appeasing an increasingly militant black constituency and soothing the conscience of white America. Affirmative action has always spoken more to diversification of the professional-managerial class and the universities than the needs of working people and poverty-stricken indigenous peoples. Civil rights activists, the New Left and progressives in the Democratic Party were actually wary of the policy. They regarded affirmative action as a stunted and risky means for drawing racially excluded groups into the mainstream, and a pallid substitute for a far broader set of interlinked social programs predicated upon the creation of full employment.
Affirmative action was, from the beginning, a policy premised on “removing barriers” rather than dispensing additional aid. Such a program would have proven far more ambitious and inclusive than the short-lived War on Poverty whose funds for the non-elderly poor never came close to 1% of the federal budget. In any case, the refusal of “moderates” from both parties to support a genuinely progressive tax policy left white skilled workers wary of new social programs with their supposed willingness to lavish funds on “others.”
So, how did a compromised. ameliorative, and inexpensive program become elevated to the epitome of progressive political action regarding racial injustice? The most obvious answer is the most persuasive: It came to the forefront because the United States lacked alternative remedies for its racist history. Affirmative action, at least, provided a symbolic response to the past and, in fact, there is no substitute. Progressives now believe themselves on the barricades – and they are. Mass media trumpets the entry of minorities and women into public life and, partially through affirmative action, radical changes have taken place. But the progressive social and cultural achievements were accompanied by economic and political regression. It thus oversimplifies matters to dismiss as racist the criticisms of working class “Reagan Democrats,” who have morphed into “MAGA” Republicans. Admittedly, they remain ideologically tainted by white supremacy and entitlement. But they also have their economic woes and it matters little to them whether affirmative action serves minorities or provides them with access to the white-collar world. The moralizing elements of the Left still need to learn that guilt is an inadequate basis for politics.
That is especially the case given the transformation of the Republicans from the “pragmatic” party of Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller in the 1970s into a saber-toothed reactionary organization in which Christian fundamentalists mingle with billionaires and neo-fascist extremists. Affirmative action provides them with the perfect symbol, even if their critique makes no sense. Republicans can pretend that the policy has had no impact, which is manifestly false, and in the same breath argue that conditions have changed so radically that racism has vanished thereby making affirmative action unnecessary. Identifying affirmative action with the invasion of socialism into American life is also disingenuous. It was never intended to extend economic security for all but, instead, channel minority recruits into the university, public services, and corporate culture. Insofar as its various measures never considered the question of class, and ignored questions pertaining to the business cycle, the general policy enabled conservatives in both parties to conduct duels over the nature of “racism” on advantageously narrow ground.
As economic downturns occurred, in this vein, affirmative action kindled resentment about “favoritism” among working people — a quarter of whom earn full-time wages very near the poverty line. Thus, the conservative war cry of “reverse racism” hit a nerve. If your wages stagnate, your firm skips the country, your potential employer chooses someone else for a promotion, or your taxes rise, affirmative action or else immigrants are easy targets. There are enough citizens who know no other way to frame their problems in the current political climate.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose transformation into a “moderate” by conservatives is the height of hypocrisy, spoke in Why We Can’t Wait (1964) about a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” that would focus on the unaddressed grievances of the “forgotten white poor” as well as disadvantaged minorities. The Reverend William Barber’s “Poor People’s Campaign” remains committed to the spirit of that enterprise. Such programs are class-oriented. They would serve all working people by shielding them from the whip of the market and downturns in the business cycle. A new Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, however, would prove far more expensive than affirmative action insofar as it would supplant formal concerns over “admissions” to the upper strata with substantive matters pertaining to the needs of working people such as income, taxation, health care and housing. Whether the United States is ready for a bold alternative to affirmative action remains an open question. It is incumbent upon rational radicals to provide the right answer for the roughly 80% of wage earners who have lost ground over the last decades.
Economic progress has had a positive impact on people of color mostly regarding their access to universities and white -collar jobs. Affirmative action deserves part of the credit for bringing this about. The idea has also benefitted the activism of women and, with lesser success, other marginalized communities. White collar advances spurred by affirmative action also strengthened general attitudes concerning the inclusion of the excluded into the public sphere, media, and the cultural mainstream. Affirmative action brought white America face to face with an issue it had studiously ignored. In lieu of an alternative approach, which conservatives have never forwarded, it is hard to imagine how minorities have gained any access to any strata in white society? Given the nation’s history of race-relations, it would simply be absurd to think that “good faith” and “color-blindness” among the elites would suffice.
Within limits, then, affirmative action has made positive contributions. But these produced rising expectations that have not been met. Black unemployment still averages twice the rate of whites and black family median income today is still about three-fifths of white income. Some ten million blacks live in poverty, 31% overall, and half of all black children. Black youth unemployment has soared to six times that of whites. One black male in three in his twenties is either in jail, on parole or under court supervision. However, conservatives are unwilling to face that reality; in fact, they now wish to suppress even the ability to talk about it through attempts to censor not only critical race theory, but all critical approaches to American history in the spirit of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980).
Many see an expanding set of cumulative claims by identity formations as creating an “overload” on the system even though military expenditures, business subsidies, and tax loopholes miraculously remain largely intact and unchallenged. The debate over affirmative action and social policy begins only after these budgetary expenses are tactfully factored out or taken as given. With the playing field deemed level by fiat, especially when labor markets are tight, any edge will matter desperately. Thus, the scramble for scarce resources among increasingly atomized constituencies with competing claims of more-sinned-against-than-thou occurs among the marginalized, but naturally intensifies among white as against other elements of the working class.
The reality is that unless class is factored skillfully into the debate, multiracial support for programs of socio-economic reform falls by the wayside. This does not necessarily call for tossing affirmative action into the dustbin of history. But it does call for configuring ameliorative policies in such a way that they can heal divisions, promote coalition-building, and foster support for policy measures that in our deficit-obsessed discourse are treated as taboo.
Concluding remarks: Affirmative action is not unique in targeting particular constituencies. Responses to specified grievances exist in the most universalistic of plans and, by focusing on them, civil rights abuses are confronted and the current system is forced to address its own ideals of fairness. Gays wishing to operate openly in the military, LBGTQ persons seeking to adopt children, ethnic citizens wishing to study their cultures, the disabled seeking sloping curves for their wheel chairs, are also the domain for affirmative action committees. Universal demands for equal opportunity exhibit a critical character. Especially given the concern with symbolic identity ideologies, however, critical reliance on universal values has little resonance. by lobbies and mainstream media. Consequently, the broader Left has been stuck in the untenable position of defending ameliorative programs that split their own constituencies.
Solutions cannot usefully be cast as race-based versus class-based policies. Resorting; to the mantra whereby race and class are mechanically linked with one another in what Chantal Mouffe termed a “chain of equivalence”—race+gender+class –is an intellectual short-cut that leads to disaster. Realizing the material conditions for equal opportunity, and a genuinely level playing field, requires nothing less than an integrated set of social democratic policies. Invoking “diversity” solves nothing if each group aims to justify the resources it seeks so that its oppression must take precedence over that of others: Albert Camus called this the “algebra of blood.”
Accepting the logic of affirmative action in its narrow form creates a situation in which progressives wind up apportioning austerity among the have-nots and hangers-on; each group can thereby become targeted in different ways by right-wing groups that thrive on anxieties about quotas and “reverse racism.” The task is to break the momentum of this pernicious particularistic logic. Rational radicals need to highlight their humanism while garnering support from the bulk of the working class. They should not dismiss affirmative action but integrate its best aspects into a policy vision that raises the availability of training, jobs, housing standards, environmentally habitable communities and the like. This would diminish material motives for discrimination, and simultaneously pump funds and new demand into the economy, raise general wages and begin to break down resistance to programs targeted against ghetto barriers.
Targeted programs become politically questionable when not packaged in universal terms. There is no reason why such programs should not create good jobs for ghetto men and women at good wages and it is certainly arguable that the efficacy of such programs is greater than the far more “convoluted” attempts to aid black families.[4] The real problem is that such programs lack the symbolic character required by the proponents of identity politics. Proponents need to execute their own rhetorical move and, raise the class interest of policies like day care, child support, job training, single payer health care, and a federal labor market guaranteeing good jobs at good wages. The life chances of minorities have more to do with economic class position than their day-to-day encounters with white exploitation, segregation and discrimination. Nevertheless, class does not “explain” everything; universal programs are inadequate without targeted and regional programs embedded within them as well.
How to pay for full employment policies and guaranteed incomes calls for changes in rates of taxation; indeed, these are expressive of the real class struggle in our times. Still too few Americans understand that in the last decade the income of the wealthiest 1% doubled and that virtually all income gains went to the top 20%. Affirmative action has served important functions in the past by helping bring the excluded into the mainstream of economic life. But that mainstream is increasingly suffering drastic class and income divisions. Affirmative action can only fulfill its latent goals with the redistribution of political and economic power, which calls for closing tax loopholes, raising rather than lowering marginal tax rates, and cutting rather than raising a military budget that is larger than that of the rest of the world combined. These ideas are nothing new, but that does not invalidate their salience. They remain our policy taboos. Soaking the poor is pragmatic everyday politics. Trying to introduce fair taxation is reprehensible class warfare.
Martin Luther King saw “two concentric circles” of poverty and race within which blacks were caught. He believed it impossible to confront racism without beginning at the wider concentric circle of poverty and picking up needed allies along the way. In this spirit, rational radicals must invent new ways of connecting affirmative action to the larger class struggles for political power and economic distribution To put it another way: affirmative action must be reconfigured in the context of a wider social democratic project, and perhaps the first step in getting around race, while incorporating it as a criterion, is to target hard-core neglected regions and cities that require special attention as a consequence of capital flight, red-lining, and other systemic forms of discrimination.
Looking backwards is a mistake. The abolition of affirmative action by the Supreme Court in June 2023 has made the need for an alternative more necessary than ever. But that means shifting the terms of discussion. As long as debate targets the division of a shrinking pie, and not how the bakery operates, racism will appeal to people grasping for easy explanations to difficult problems. Neo-fascism has made that clear and its opponents require not only symbolic responses but a new commitment to imagine the possible.
**Stephen Eric Bronner is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Rutgers University and Co-Director of the International Council for Diplomacy and Dialogue.
[1] This article is drawn from a longer and more detailed review essay that I co-authored with Alba Alexander and Kurt Jacobsen, “The Angst of affirmative Action” in Critical Sociology #23 (1998), pgs. 85-102; its arguments, I think, are as sound today as they were then.
