Authors: Eugene Robinson
Meanwhile there is a widespread sense that the things that knit this country together—our political system, our infrastructure, our sense of community—have fallen into disrepair. The ethic of enlightened self-interest works brilliantly for running a capitalist economic system, but a nation is more than its economy. Nationhood also means shared ideals and values, a shared history, and shared resources.
Among African Americans, the successful have always evinced a determination to reach back and bring along the less fortunate. In my lifetime, I have met very few black professionals who did not feel it was their duty to mentor young African Americans and help advance their careers. I have met few African American professionals who do not try in some way to encourage and uplift the Abandoned, perhaps through mentoring programs at their churches, perhaps through volunteer organizations such as Concerned Black Men or the National Council of Negro Women, perhaps through fraternities or sororities. There is a long tradition in black communities of taking in, and caring for, children whose parents are unable to do so. Before disintegration, these organic, informal efforts might have been enough. But no more—not, at least, for the Abandoned.
A black senior vice president at a Fortune 500 firm might be able to significantly increase diversity by hiring and promoting qualified African Americans. But those qualified job applicants are going to come from the ranks of the Mainstream, not the Abandoned. Volunteer and nonprofit organizations have a tremendously beneficial impact on the lives of underprivileged
young men and women, but are unable to give them all of what they desperately need—good schools, safe streets, positive parental supervision—and unable to erase the damage that has already been done.
The Transcendent and the Mainstream will continue to do whatever they can. But it is time to be realistic. We are winning lots of individual battles, but we are losing the war. And this fact—that we are losing ground with the Abandoned, rather than gaining ground—raises an issue that many Americans understandably wish would just go away: the future of affirmative action.
It is tempting to celebrate the success of the Mainstream, the advent of the Emergent, and the rise of the Transcendent by declaring affirmative action a thing of the past. The goal, after all, is to reach Dr. King’s long-dreamed-of promised land where the legitimate criterion for judging a person is character, not color. It goes against the grain of America’s values—or at least offends America’s self-image—to deliberately and overtly prefer one group over another. The nation learned the rhetoric of the civil rights movement well, and those same stirring words are now recited on behalf of those who believe that affirmative action does harm to whites: Everyone is equal, discrimination is against the law, fairness is fundamental, unfairness is un-American.
The Obama presidency adds an exclamation point to these complaints. An African American is now the most powerful man in the country—in fact, the most powerful man in the world. For some who have long criticized affirmative action on philosophical grounds, the symbolism of seeing the Obama family in the White House provides the perfect visual to underscore their argument. For others, whose objection to preferential
measures is more visceral, Obama’s election suggests a more direct question: What more could you people possibly want?
These critics and complainers are actually right, in the long run. But they are premature.
I am a firm believer in the necessity for continued race-based affirmative action. It needs to be modified and modernized, but it should not be eliminated, not yet. I see three reasons. First, there is the historical injury that African Americans have suffered. Many people would like to put all of that behind us—to say, in effect, “All right, we tore down the legal barriers four decades ago and we gave black Americans a leg up. Now we’re even-steven. Starting here and now, everybody has to compete for everything on an equal basis, with no preference asked for and none given. That’s the American way.” This view is understandable and in many ways attractive, but it is also superficial and wrong. Why would anyone expect forty years of redress, at times grudging and halfhearted, to offset nearly four hundred years of deliberate, comprehensive oppression? That so many African Americans have left poverty and ignorance behind, in spite of all the roadblocks and hurdles, is a miracle. But the miracle is still incomplete.
Second, racism and discrimination are radically diminished but not eliminated. In some studies, researchers have found that white employers often prefer white job applicants over black applicants who have clearly superior credentials. In at least one study, employers even chose a white job-seeker with a criminal record over a black man with no record and better qualifications. Aside from whatever overt prejudice remains, psychologists have done startling research on unconscious bias—for example, a documented tendency of test subjects to
associate white faces with positive concepts and black faces with negative ones. This reflex may be conditioned by societal cues, but there are some researchers who believe, controversially, that a preference for light over dark might somehow be hardwired into the human brain. I find this far-fetched—at least I hope it’s far-fetched—and I think it’s more likely that humans may somehow be programmed to have an affinity with people who look like “us” rather than “them.” This effect has been measured to be relatively small, and given how the definition of “us” has widened during my lifetime—“we who are affluent,” “we who are middle class,” “we who live in the suburbs,” “we who play golf,” “we who work in the same office,” “we who see one another at social events,” and many other “we’s” now include black people—I have to assume that someday unconscious bias will just fade away. But for the present, it can only make the overt racism that remains more difficult to eradicate.
Third, affirmative action is an investment in America’s future. As the nation becomes increasingly diverse, it is in no one’s interest to have historically underprivileged groups feeling left out and resentful. And in a global economy that becomes more competitive by the day, where intellectual firepower is as important as military might, a mind really is a terrible thing to waste.
None of this is meant to deny, however, that indeed there has been a miracle. Proof lies in the existence of the Mainstream and the emergence of the Transcendent. It simply is not possible to defend the position that in a college admissions process incorporating affirmative action, the child of, say, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith should be treated exactly the same as the child of a custodian and a nurse’s aide. Affirmative
action does two things: It compensates for inequality and bias, past and present; and it creates diversity. Transcendent black America should be ruled out for affirmative action except the kind that rich and powerful white Americans have been enjoying all along—“legacy” admission to elite schools, a la George W. Bush, because Daddy went there; plum sinecures in corporate America, like Dick Cheney’s at Halliburton, that only come from spending quality time in the boardroom or on the golf course with the right people; and, of course, the Park Avenue equivalent of Head Start: a lightly taxed inheritance.
Whether Mainstream black America should continue to benefit from affirmative action is a subtler and more difficult question. On the merits alone, I would argue that it should. The Mainstream’s gains are historic, but they are precarious; it will take at least another generation, and perhaps more, to significantly close the wealth gap that leaves Mainstream black Americans, in tough economic times, far too likely to fall and crash. But this is not a question that will be resolved solely on merit. Politics, resources, and priorities demand to be taken into account.
Politically, it is increasingly untenable to tell a middle-class white family that a middle-class black family across town, with an identical income, is going to be given advantages because of race. Demographic changes—the fact that in some of our biggest states, including California and Texas, whites are no longer a majority—makes affirmative action programs that are based solely on race vulnerable to attacks that they do nothing more than favor one minority over another. Realistically, a political consensus for blunt-instrument affirmative action no longer exists. President Obama dabbled with this idea during the campaign, saying that his daughters, Sasha and Malia,
wouldn’t deserve any special help when it was time for them to apply to college. But he didn’t quite finish the thought. Sooner or later, I believe, he will have to. The fact is that whether the issue is jobs, college admissions, government contracts, or whatever, there will only be so much largesse to go around. Given that context, the big question is one of priorities.
I am convinced that affirmative action must be narrowed and intensified to be used as a tool to uplift the Abandoned. That means eliminating its benefits for African Americans above some specified income level.
This would be a real change. The biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action over the past four decades have been women—mostly white women—who occupy a place in the workforce and the academy that previous generations could not have imagined. (When the feminist revolution came, black women already worked for a living.) Second, in terms of gains, have been middle-class African Americans.
When affirmative action programs were launched—goals to diversify college admissions, minority hiring and training programs in many industries, set-aside programs to make sure that minority-owned firms won government contracts, and other such initiatives—opportunities naturally went to those who were best prepared to seize them. In pre-disintegration black America, families with relatively more money and relatively more education—the proto-Mainstream—rushed through the newly opened doors of admissions quotas and minority training programs. The poorest and least educated—the proto-Abandoned—were largely beyond the reach of affirmative action. As disintegration progressed, Abandoned neighborhoods fell apart, public school systems were allowed to collapse, and families with resources decided to move away.
All this just reinforced the pattern in which affirmative action favored the Mainstream. Black suburban enclaves, like Country Club Hills south of Chicago or the affluent neighborhoods northeast of St. Louis, were born—and affirmative action, to this day, helps sustain them. While most programs based on numerical quotas are no longer allowed, governments still have initiatives in place to ensure that minority firms participate in contracts; universities work around Supreme Court decisions to continue ensuring diversity in admissions; and most large corporations have made explicit commitments to increase diversity in hiring and promotions.
Meanwhile, Abandoned black America slid beyond a state of crisis to a condition of literal hopelessness. What is needed now is true affirmative action—policies and programs that reach those who need it most. These new initiatives will have to go far beyond the efforts that universities and employers now make to promote diversity; smart CEOs and university presidents, with an eye toward the demographic future, will continue these efforts anyway. What is needed is a kind of Marshall Plan for the Abandoned—massive intervention in education, public safety, health, and other aspects of life, with the aim being to arrest the downward spiral. Otherwise, that phrase I detest—permanent underclass—will become our permanent reality.
Taking the Mainstream out of the affirmative action equation would inevitably call attention to the competition that is already taking place between the Abandoned and the immigrant Emergent, who—like my friend Sentayu, the gym attendant with the brilliant daughter—would qualify for means-tested assistance. There is already friction between the two groups. Some advocates for the Abandoned say that
immigrants should not qualify for affirmative action at all, since they have suffered no historical oppression—on American soil, at least—that merits redress. Meanwhile, immigrants have groused to me that the native-born Abandoned have all the power they need to take charge of their own lives and futures, but that they choose not to do so. The immigrants argue that if their children live in the same troubled neighborhoods, attend the same failed schools, overcome language and cultural barriers, and still end up as their class valedictorians and win scholarships to attend exclusive universities, their achievements should not be marginalized or in any sense diminished with an asterisk—that black immigrant success should be celebrated as an example of how to climb out of dysfunctional surroundings and vault into the Mainstream and beyond.
My view is that affirmative action programs are, by their nature, fairly blunt instruments, and that to try to add national origin as a criterion would be unwieldy at best and probably unworkable. I also believe it would be more trouble than it is worth. If the success of families from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Barbados, and elsewhere at climbing out of poverty suggests that the Abandoned are doing something wrong, or that they are doing many things wrong, the constructive reaction should be to evaluate and process the message, not punish the messenger. As the immigrant Emergent rise in income and status, they, too, would move beyond eligibility for any special assistance.
The problems of the Abandoned have to be attacked on every level, all at once. It can’t be an either-or proposition—either we set up enterprise zones, with tax breaks, to encourage the formation of small businesses, or we intervene directly with government-sponsored jobs programs. We have to do both.
We have to accelerate the process of tearing down dangerous, decrepit housing projects and replacing them with units that are less Stalinist in scale and easier to make secure. We have to intervene directly with families to break daisy-chain cycles of teen pregnancy; we have to rebuild and re-staff the schools; we have to give young men and women something to dream about beyond the confines of the neighborhoods where they live.
And speaking of neighborhoods, one part of the solution to the all-but-intractable problems of the Abandoned has to be a wholesale embrace of gentrification. Both the Abandoned and their advocates need to see this wrenching process as both desirable and necessary.