For April 16

Affirmative Action, R.I.P. by Salim Muwakkil, In These Times, March 20, 1995

Affirmative action, as we have known it, is probably dead. Good riddance. For the past quarter of a century, many blacks have looked to affirmative action, despite its shortcomings, as a symbol of America’s long-denied promise of racial equity.

But its original purpose, as a means to help compensate African-Americans for slavery and its racist legacy, has long since been lost. With affirmative action's racial aspects toned down for the consumption of white voters, it has become less a hand-up for poor blacks than a stepladder to the middle class for many white American families. The policy is disingenuous, black conservative Shelby Steele wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed column, because "middle- class white women have benefited from it far more than any other group, and 46 percent of all black children live in poverty.” Steele is correct, but for the wrong reasons. His purpose is to discredit the notion of preferential treatment; his insight is that affirmative action has served the wrong people. The original purpose of affirmative action policies was to chip away at race-specific disparities between black and white Americans. But according to most studies, as Steele noted in his column, the major beneficiaries of these policies have been white women.

This increasing feminization of the workplace has provided many white couples with two incomes. So although preferential policies did help enlarge the black middle class, according to studies by sociologist Bart Landry, wealth disparities between blacks and whites remained virtually the same. After a brief gain in economic status during the late '60s and early '70s, African-Americans have been on a steady downward slide.

Steele concludes that affirmative action "has always been what might be called iconographic public policy--.policy that ostensibly exists to solve a social problem but actually functions as an icon for the self-image people hope to gain by supporting the policy.

By de-emphasizing affirmative action's racial aspects, liberals succeeded in making' the programs more palatable but less effective. . .

Since the days of the Reagan administration, conservative Republicans have been taking potshots at the very idea of affirmative action. For them, the beneficial effects of affirmative action on white women are less an issue than its preferential treatment of black people. And so criticism of the concept has focused on its unfair racial preferences.

T'he notion of legislative recompense for racial injustice was never wildly popular in a. land so steeped in traditions of white supremacy, but national leaders 30 years ago at least understood the need for compensatory justice. Of course, their motiyes were not entirely pure. During the -,'60s, when federal programs were first designed to "take affirmative action to overcome the effects of prior discrimination,” American cities were going up in smoke. From 1964 to' 1969, some 65 U.S. cities exploded in violent upheavals. Aside from the toll in lives and property, the situation. was bad for business. Studies assessing the violence found that racist hiring policies had been a precipitating factor. Affirmative action was born in that smoke-charred climate

The policy's Democratic architects were praised for devising a relatively innocuous way to redistribute some of the United States' maldistributed wealth. Support for the policies was bipartisan; during a time of economic expansion, most Americans thought the measures deserved a try.

Moreover, there were clear successes. In The New Black Middle Class, sociologist Bart Landry notes that before 1960, the black middle class represented barely 13 percent of all black workers. In one decade that number more than doubled. Landry, like many other analysts, attributes much of that jump to affirmative action policies. Although the numbers have been failing since the early '70s, the black middle class still comprised nearly one-third of all workers in 1994.

If affirmative action policies are reversed, many analysts believe, these numbers will drop precipitously. But the tactic of using preferential treatment to remedy past injustices has lost such credibility that many of its former Democratic champions have joined in the attack. It's a mercy killing, they say. . .

…The concept of affirmative action essentially is a euphemism for reparations, and this point is lost when its advocates urge its expansion across race lines. African-Americans were deeply damaged by the institution of slavery; indeed, they were created by slavery.

Until this society understands the need to devote itself to repairing that damage, it seems certain that we will contiue to drift from crisis to crisis, until we reach one too many.