The Ironies of Affirmative Action
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The Ironies of Affirmative Action

Politics, Culture, and Justice in America

John D. Skrentny

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eBook - ePub

The Ironies of Affirmative Action

Politics, Culture, and Justice in America

John D. Skrentny

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Affirmative action has been fiercely debated for more than a quarter of a century, producing much partisan literature, but little serious scholarship and almost nothing on its cultural and political origins. The Ironies of Affirmative Action is the first book-length, comprehensive, historical account of the development of affirmative action.Analyzing both the resistance from the Right and the support from the Left, Skrentny brings to light the unique moral culture that has shaped the affirmative action debate, allowing for starkly different policies for different citizens. He also shows, through an analysis of historical documents and court rulings, the complex and intriguing political circumstances which gave rise to these controversial policies.By exploring the mystery of how it took less than five years for a color-blind policy to give way to one that explicitly took race into account, Skrentny uncovers and explains surprising ironies: that affirmative action was largely created by white males and initially championed during the Nixon administration; that many civil rights leaders at first avoided advocacy of racial preferences; and that though originally a political taboo, almost no one resisted affirmative action.With its focus on the historical and cultural context of policy elites, The Ironies of Affirmative Action challenges dominant views of policymaking and politics.

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Year
2018
ISBN
9780226216423
PART ONE
Understanding Resistance to Affirmative Action
2
The Appeal of Color-Blindness
The purpose of Part 1 is to show why the affirmative action model was taboo in 1964, and why so many on the Right (and in the mainstream) continue to resist it today. In other words, the purpose is to show why there were taken-for-granted boundaries of a moral character that limited employment justice for blacks to the color-blind model. This chapter contains the first step: We must first see the historical sources of the color-blind discrimination law and policy model. The logic of modern institutions of organization and American political culture had been to deny the meanings of some, if not most, differences, to see humans as abstracted individual citizens, of equal dignity as a matter of right. A color-blind (or more generally, difference-blind or abstract individual) logic can be seen in social, political, and economic institutions and intellectual currents of modernization. Prior to affirmative action, discrimination law was an extension of these institutions and ideals, supported by the ideals of the American revolution. Those supporting the Right’s view believe that the historical sources of the color-blind model also directly gave rise to the boundaries that once made (and presumably again should make) affirmative action illegitimate and taboo.
This chapter first reviews arguments against affirmative action and in support of the abstract individualism and meritocracy that forms the basis of the colorblind model. Next, we examine the institutions and ideas characteristic of modernity in general and the United States in particular that provided sources for color-blind approaches. Last, we look at the historical development of the actual difference/color-blind antidiscrimination law, demonstrating the importance of moral boundaries and assumptions that shaped the civil rights movement’s interest in color blindness, and also the grand expectations of those who supported color blindness.
The Case for Resisting Affirmative Action
As previously mentioned, one of the problems of an approach to politics which emphasizes politics as a conflict of interest groups without examining the cultural forces shaping their interests is that one cannot explain the nature of the resistance to affirmative action. Most resistance to affirmative action is centered on its inherent injustice, derived from its incongruity with institutions and ideas considered just. Daniel Bell makes the point forcefully. A color-blind classical liberalism, based on the idea of the freedom and independence of the individual, is at the very foundation of our society, he argues. One of the fundamental tenets of classic liberalism is that “the individual—and not the family, community, or the state—is the singular unit of society, and that the purpose of societal arrangements is to allow the individual the freedom to fulfill his own purposes—by his labor to gain property, by exchange to satisfy his wants, by upward mobility to achieve a place commensurate with his talents.”1 Affirmative action is decried by scholars such as Bell because of its departure from this classic liberal stance. Specifically,
The liberal and radical attack on discrimination was based on its denial of a justly earned place to a person on the basis of an unjust group attribute. That person was not judged as an individual, but was judged—and excluded—because he was a member of particular group. But now it is being demanded that one must have a place primarily because one possesses a particular group attribute. The person himself has disappeared. Only attributes remains (sic; italics in the original).2
Seymour Martin Lipset argues along similar lines, though he relies on the interpretation of public opinion polls to make his point. For example, in explaining the affirmative action debate,3 he maintains that the real issue is the war of core American values: individualism (understood as self-reliant achievement), and egalitarianism. While Americans support both principles, they will give support to individualism over egalitarianism when forced to make a choice, as is the case with affirmative action policies. Thus, poll results show Americans supporting “compensatory action” (such as Headstart programs), which, Lipset argues, is in line with egalitarian values and also makes competition more fair without compromising the basis of competition. Americans will be opposed, however, to the “preferential treatment” of affirmative action, “since such treatment precisely violates the notion of open and fair individual competition.”4 A fair competition, or an equality of opportunity, is part of the American creed, argues Lipset, and affirmative action “clearly involves an effort to guarantee equal results to groups.”5 Though not actually claiming that affirmative action is a bad thing, Lipset suggests that it is controversial in America because it is out of place in America; it violates the American value of individualism and the institution of merit allocation.
Morris Abram sees the distinction between the color-blind model and affirmative action as a distinction between “fair shakers” and “social engineers.” Though active in the early years of the civil rights movement, Abram was alienated by the apparent switch of policy paradigm. Abram continued to support the color-blind, classically liberal approach, “limited to vigilant concern with equal opportunity, procedural regularity, and fair treatment of the individual.” This “fair shake view” is “in keeping with our legal and political traditions”; however, “the social engineers’ advocacy of result-oriented and color-coded group rights is inconsistent with these traditions and violative of other democratic ideals and principles.”6
Sociologist Nathan Glazer has been perhaps the most outspoken critic of affirmative action. His view mirrors the above, but in his numerous writings, his criticisms have gone far beyond the ideas described above, including assertions that affirmative action is not needed, that it does not work anyway, and that it has many internal logical contradictions. He is perhaps best known, however, for emphasizing another line of argument: the effect of the policy on whites. In titling a book Affirmative Discrimination, Glazer sought judiciously to highlight the insidious effects of a benign race-based hiring policy (otherwise antagonistically termed reverse discrimination), since “the point of setting a [racial hiring] goal is that one will hire more of one group, less of another, simply because individuals are members of one group or another.” The term affirmative discrimination highlighted the idea that discrimination was still occurring. Also, by using the term affirmative discrimination, one could distinguish this policy of making hiring decisions based on race from the original meaning of affirmative action, which involved vigorous promotion of a firm’s policy of equality of opportunity, or programs to recruit or train blacks who could then compete in a fair competition for jobs.7
The above writings have been selected because of their eloquence and high profile in the affirmative action debate. The ideas in them have been expressed by other intellectuals, by other opinion leaders—and by common Americans, as Jonathan Rieder found in his study of middle-class Italians and Jews in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn.8 Similar ideas have also been espoused in the mass media, which has never tired of reporting on the affirmative action controversy. A study of media treatments of the policy from 1969 to 1984 identified changing affirmative action “packages,” or the ways in which the issue is framed or presented by the media.9 Among the negative packages that were identified in television, newsmagazines, political cartoons, and opinion columns are the ideas of No Preferential Treatment (“The consideration of race or ethnicity, however benignly motivated, is not the American way”), Reverse Discrimination (affirmative action excludes individuals on the grounds of race), Undeserving Advantage (“Affirmative action gives minorities something they have not earned and do not deserve”), and Blacks Hurt (racial preferences reinforce stereotypes that minorities cannot do it alone, thus stigmatizing them).10 The reverse discrimination package is shown to be the most dominant, as it
had well-organized and articulate sponsors who actively promoted it. It met the news needs of working journalists for balance and dramatic form. Finally, it had strong positive resonances with larger cultural themes of self-reliance and individualism, and used antiracist and equality symbolism.11
What is important about the above arguments is their similarity. Affirmative action is bad, they say, because difference blindness, legally treating individuals as abstractions, rewarding only achievement or merit in the employment arena, is good. But why do these ideas seem so natural? What are the sources of these ideas, this discourse of abstract individualism that is so clearly legitimate to the national audience?
Institutional and Ideal Sources of the Color-Blind Model in Modern Political Culture
Pillar organizational institutions of the modern West—a money economy, capitalism, citizenship—have no logical place for group differences such as race in their operation. They are based on and construct people as universal abstractions, anonymously, though each individual may be important and special. For example, Georg Simmel, in his classic The Philosophy of Money, argued that money was a “basically democratic levelling social form,”12 was characterized by “complete indifference to individual qualities,”13 and, as it allows us to be dependent on a great number of people (who can be total strangers), money “is conducive to the removal of the personal element from human relationships through its indifferent and objective nature.”14 There is nothing inherent in money that suggests a racial particularism, then, and in fact, the concept of money would discourage it. One person’s money is as good as any other’s.
Like money, another modern organizational institution, bureaucracy, has a democratic leveling effect. This idea was first touched on by Max Weber, but more recently has been developed by sociologist Peter Berger and his colleagues. Their understanding of the “cognitive style” associated with bureaucracy matches a color-blind view of the world. They argue that in modern bureaucracies, a principle of “moralized anonymity” exists as a principle of social relations. This is the case because there is an assumption of equality among all those persons in a particular bureaucratic category.15 Thus, the typical encounter with a bureaucracy occurs in a mode of “explicit abstraction.” A person expects to be treated fairly, that is, as just another case falling within the purview of certain rules.16 The reality of the person will be apprehended by the bureaucratic officials only as the person is relevant to the rules of operation. Therefore, in the rationalized organization system of modern society, the bureaucracy, persons are abstracted from any particular differences about themselves, including, one may not unreasonably expect, racial differences. To the bureaucracy, we are all just so many numbered cases to be dispensed with. The bureaucratized procedure of job application, one might expect, would also be characterized (in the initial stages) by anonymity and abstraction, as employment officers sort applicants on the basis of qualification.
The logic of capitalism also constructs individuals as universal abstractions, and thus is color-blind. This idea has been explicated many times, but perhaps most clearly (and dramatically) by that famous student of capitalism, Karl Marx. The vanguard of capitalism, argued Marx in The Communist Manifesto, had “pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’”17 People in a capitalist system are owners or wage laborers. Thinking of people in any other way would get in the way of profit, and hence, “All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, and all new ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”18 The concept of honor would evaporate, and though Marx had in mind aristocratic honor, there is little reason to think a race-based honor would fit into capitalism any better.19
Ernest Gellner emphasizes different points while coming to the same conclusion in his more general assessment of the organization of modern society. An impersonal, anonymous, abstracting quality of modern life is important, he argues, for modern life to work smoothly. Everyone in a modern society must be mobile, must be able to plug into different parts of the economy, must be able to follow anonymous instruction manuals, must be able to communicate impersonally in “to-whom-it-may-concern” type messages.20 Education becomes a universalizing medium, as the nation becomes a homogenous whole while subgroups erode. Whereas premodern societies may be held together by bonds of loyalty or tradition, modern societies are fluid, relatively disordered, “entropic.”21 In this milieu of constant movement and institutional anonymity, race consciousness has no place.22
modern citizenship is the political institutionalization of this anonymous abstract individual. Citizenship institutionalizes universalism and individualism in the sense that it makes each person an equal member of a community.23 With membership come legal protections in the form of rights, formally inhering in the individual. In the view of sociologist T. H. Marshall, rights are usually understood to be of three types: civil (rights of speech, assembly, due process, and freedom from cruel punishment, for...

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