By Malik Miah
The United States is the first country on the planet to completely overcome centuries of racial oppression of African Americans and other people of colour. We can now proudly say, "We are a non-racial, colour-blind society".
Sex discrimination is a thing of the past. Jobs and other opportunities are solely based on merit and fairness.
Affirmative action has outlived its usefulness. It has become a tool to discriminate against white males.
This fairy tale is what we are being told by the government, media pundits, pollsters, conservatives and many liberals who once supported affirmative action. President Clinton is reviewing all government affirmative action programs and meeting with prominent civil rights leaders and academics to find a "third way" between defending the modest affirmative action programs now in place and abolishing all race- and sex-based preferences.
Republican presidential hopefuls, including Senate majority leader Bob Dole, are calling for the immediate termination of all affirmative action programs. Dole announced on March 15 that he would introduce legislation barring the federal government from granting preferential treatment to what he called favoured groups.
California's Republican Governor Pete Wilson has endorsed a misnamed ballot measure, the "California Civil Rights Initiative", which would ban all "voluntary" state affirmative action programs.
The majority of whites oppose affirmative action programs and see them as a form of reverse discrimination. Yet whites by a large majority (including those the media describe as "angry white male") say they support racial equality and oppose racism.
Some blacks also oppose affirmative action. They complain of being stigmatised by it. "Discrimination does not justify preferential treatment", writes black author Shelby Steele. "To my mind there is only one way to moral authority for those of us who want affirmative action done away with: to ask that discrimination by race, gender or ethnicity be a criminal offence, not just civil."
White liberals
"A great national debate on affirmative action is about to tear our nation apart", writes self-proclaimed white liberal Arthur Hoppe in a March 6 San Francisco Chronicle column. "We will all be asked to have the courage to take a side. I'm against it ...
"I say this after looking back on my own life. As far as my career goes, I would have had an easier time of it in many respects had I been Black."
"Surely", he continues, "it's unfair to give the son of a Black banker preference over the son of a white sharecropper."
Although the overwhelming majority of blacks are low-wage workers, the often-repeated lie that the black middle class is taking over is perceived as the truth. Hoppe ends his piece, "I can share the anger of my younger white friends. They're as bitter at being discriminated against today as my Black friends have been for the past 400 years."
Really? Thirty years of affirmative action has produced a bitterness equal to that produced by over 200 years of slavery, followed by 100 years of Jim Crow segregation? These white skins must be pretty thin.
Hoppe is not unique. There are many white male workers who believe in their bones that blacks are getting a better shake than whites. They all have at least one example of someone who's black getting ahead over a more qualified white.
A recent government study puts the lie to the theory of "reverse discrimination". Issued on March 15, the "Glass Ceiling Commission" report states that there is a glass ceiling in corporate USA. It found that white men, while constituting about 43% of the work force, hold about 95 of every 100 senior management positions. White women now hold close to 40% of middle management jobs, black women about 5%, and black men 4%.
Working women still earn only 70% of what white males earn.
The real criterion for hiring and promotions is what it has always been: connections. White males prefer to hire and promote "their kind of people". When a white man is passed over for promotion, it's because his white male superiors have to give the job to an "unqualified" woman or non-white man.
The same preferences apply to blue collar jobs. Skilled jobs are generally the private domain of white men. For example, in the airlines, it took legal action initiated by African Americans in the 1970s to force open mechanic and pilot jobs for blacks and women. In the case of United Airlines, the court-ordered consent decree modified the seniority system, making it easier for all workers to upgrade their skills — an example of affirmative action helping white males.
White men still control virtually everything in the US. According to the Urban Institute, 53% of black men aged 25 to 34 are either unemployed or earn too little to lift a family of four from poverty.
Writing in the Nation, Roger Wilkins compares the "denial of racism" to "denials that accompany addictions to alcohol, drugs or gambling. It is probably not stretching the analogy too much to suggest that many racist whites are so addicted to their unwarranted privileges and so threatened by the prospect of losing them that all kinds of defenses become acceptable, including insistent distortions of reality in the form of hypocrisy, lying or the most outrageous political demagogy."
Ruling class concerns
The potential for race conflicts is one reason the editors of the New York Times are opposed to attempts to roll back the modest affirmative action programs. In a February 28 editorial, the editors wrote: "Citizens should not be deceived about the real motivation behind the gathering crusade against affirmative action ... Everyone in American politics knows what is going on, and if three decades of racial progress are to be abandoned, let us at least be candid about it."
Then they point to the reason for a possible explosion in race relations if the bigots and hypocrites get their way: "A growing economy once cushioned the impact of such [job] competition. But as high-salaried industrial and government jobs disappear, a sinister national tendency toward scapegoating has resurfaced ...
"Critics of affirmative action would have a strong case if their handful of reverse-discrimination examples represented a vast national problem. But the reality is far different ...
"Among doctors, lawyers, scientists and university teachers, fewer than one in 20 are Black", they add. "The ratio is only slightly higher in the construction trade. The plain truth is that the number of Blacks at the professional or skilled labor levels is simply too slight to produce much competition, let alone discrimination against white men."
The Times cites the example of Richmond, Virginia. It had an affirmative action program for small business, under which minorities received more than 30% of the city's contracts. After the affirmative action program was eliminated, in one short year minorities received only 5% of the contracts. This is in a city that is 55% black.
The main battleground is in California. Initial polls show broad public support to end affirmative action programs. Many blacks and most women accept that preferences based on race and sex are wrong. Yet blacks and women also support punitive damages and special compensation for those who suffer discrimination.
A typical poll question presents the issue as anti-discrimination: "Would you favour or oppose enacting a law in California that would prohibit state agencies, school districts, community colleges as well as public officers from giving preference to applicants based on race, sex, colour, ethnicity or national origin?"
Not surprisingly the majority, 51%, say "yes".
A Los Angeles Times poll reports 58% of blacks opposed to preferential treatment for minorities. The same number, however, felt that affirmative action programs hadn't accomplished enough and only 8% felt such programs had gone too far.
Contradictions
US capitalism cannot offer white workers the same standard of living and security that most of their parents enjoyed. But capitalist politicians and the big-business press will not admit that corporate greed and the unending drive for higher profits are the forces squeezing white workers and their families. Scapegoating affirmative action programs is capitalism's ideological tool for holding the allegiance of white workers.
The wide-ranging confusion over affirmative action among working people reflects the contradictions in US society. Americans (white and black) are opposed to discrimination. But they disagree over whether the past should be forgotten instead of remedied.
Blacks, both wage workers and professionals, have made progress since the 1960s civil rights revolution ended legal segregation. Civil rights laws and presidential executive orders, beginning with President Johnson's 1965 order that mandated affirmative action in government, allowed blacks to break into the construction trades, the skilled trades in auto, steel, airlines and many other industries. Some even got a toehold in the upper reaches of big corporations.
Women, who were included in the first affirmative action programs, now hold jobs from which they were excluded previously.
At the same time, de facto discrimination is alive and well. Most African Americans still live in the worst housing, attend the most run-down schools and are denied the best-paying jobs.
White males are the pawns of the rich and powerful, who reap super-profits by fostering and reinforcing past and existing social conflicts. White men are told to circle the wagons around their ethnic group to protect "their" jobs and security against those perceived as inferior, as threatening their "rightful" privileges.
How to break this insidious circle? It requires action — special forceful steps by the government and employers to level the playing field so objective criteria (related to real "merit") are used to determine who gets what job or promotion, and not "connections" alone.
It would be easy to say that all opponents of affirmative action are racists, or, in the case of racial minorities, self-haters. But this would be a mistake. Just as it would be wrong to deny that some white males lose out when the colour barriers are broken. White privilege is why top management is 95% white male.
We live in a profit-driven society where high unemployment is called "full employment". Competition for jobs is the daily life of workers. Us against them — whites against blacks, men against women, skilled against unskilled — that's our life under the free market system.
The advantage of a society truly based on equality is that objective and not subjective criteria, such as skin colour, are the norm. The US is a better country since the end of slavery and, 100 years later, the end of Jim Crow segregation. Because of those changes, fewer whites believe people of colour are inferior. But progress can be reversed.
White men are angry. African-Americans are angry. Latinos, Asian-Americans and Native Americans are angry. Women are angry. Youth are angry. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Working people are afraid for their future.
Affirmative action does not solve these social conflicts, nor allay the fears and anxieties. But it is a potentially powerful tool that can move society away from racism and sexism. It should be vigorously defended.
[Reprinted, abridged from the forthcoming May/June issue Independent Politics. One year, six issues, for individuals is $12, international $24, institutions $36. PO Box 55247, Hayward, CA 94545-0247, USA. Email indpolitics@igc.apc.org.]
Malik Miah will be a guest speaker at the Marxist Educational Conferences in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne at Easter.]