E-Racing History: America's Struggle with Diversity, Race, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education

By Walter R. Allen

Affirmative Action in Antidiscrimination Law and Policy: An Overview and Synthesis

Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth

Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court considered two major affirmative action cases from the University of Michigan. One involved law school admissions procedures (Grutter v. Bollinger), and the other, admissions to the undergraduate college (Gratz v. Bollinger). In both cases, white female plaintiffs charged that the University of Michigan discriminated against them and other whites by granting black, Latino, and Native American applicants special consideration under a race-conscious admissions system.

The battle lines were drawn for a struggle that would engage the nation's attention. The cases grew out of a long debate in our national history and had their roots in compelling beliefs, values, and ideals about race and the nature of equity and fairness in America. The Court's decisions (to support the law school in Grutter and to overturn the undergraduate college in Gratz) resolved the debate over affirmative action and race-conscious admissions for the moment. Myriad questions nonetheless remain about race, opportunity, equity, and public policy in higher education and in society generally.

Champions and critics of race-conscious affirmative action in U.S. higher education run the gamut, defying simple categorization. On both sides of the issue are sincere (and some not-so-sincere) people of different race, gender, class, cultural, religious, and regional backgrounds. The arguments are complex, the evidence is often contradictory, and the policy prescriptions are elaborate. At points, the confusion becomes nearly overwhelming, leaving people susceptible to simplistic notions. Three recent publications provide a context for better understanding the affirmative action debate. These books should help readers navigate this complex terrain as they decide or defend their own positions on the matter.

In Affirmative Action in Antidiscrimination Law and Policy: An Overview and Synthesis, Samuel Leiter and William Leiter present an evenhanded, comprehensive review and synthesis of the voluminous literature on affirmative action. The Leiters' goal is to provide a simplified but comprehensive account of the main conceptual, legal, and public policy dimensions of affirmative action, which they describe as "the flash point of America's civil rights agenda."

Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth examines the notion that affirmative action programs constitute "reverse discrimination" against white males. Using published literature, an exploratory study of alleged victims of discrimination, unpublished data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and content analysis of discrimination cases from the U.S. Court of Appeals, Fred Pincus assesses these claims. In the process, he highlights the continued dominance and privileged position of white males relative to that of women and other racial groups in all areas of American life.

In Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society, Michael Brown and his co-authors confront another fundamental tenet of opposition to affirmative action: the belief that America has transcended color prejudice and that racial inequality is fast receding in the rearview mirror. In fact, this volume marshals extensive empirical evidence to demonstrate that "in the post-civil rights era, formal equality before the law coexists with de facto white privilege and whites' resentment of race-conscious remedies." The new "color-blind orthodoxy" thus represents yet another "racial project" concocted to ensure the continued dominance by white males of key power centers in our society.

Leiter and Leiter

Affirmative Action in Antidiscrimination Law and Policy usefully summarizes affirmative action ideology, law, and public policies in higher education, K-12 education, and other areas of American life. I especially appreciated the book's long historical view of equal opportunity programs, dating back to the "ill-fated attempt to make citizens out of slaves after the Civil War." The Leiters suggest that modern equal opportunity and affirmative action programs are best understood as a continuation or revival of post-Civil War Reconstruction goals in the South. The overriding issue in antidiscrimination efforts then was whether "special action" was required to compensate African Americans for historical patterns of racial subjugation. The same issue remains with us today. Moreover, competing interests continue to debate what form such "special actions" should take, their longevity, and the possible costs for whites.

The stated goal of Reconstruction was to "give the Negroes [full citizenship,] civil rights and the ballot and get white men accustomed to treating Negroes as equals, at least politically and legally . . . in effect to revolutionize the relations of the two races." In the end, however, Reconstruction was defeated, and racial subordination became institutionalized through the principle of white supremacy. As an ambivalent federal government stood by, southern whites used "whiteness," economic advantage, political maneuvers, and brute violence to reinforce their racial privilege.

The modern civil rights movement forced this nation-through mass protest and civil disobedience followed by the black urban rebellion and violent uprisings in cities across the country—to reinstitute aggressive federal government programs and policies. These programs aimed to achieve equal opportunity for blacks, other people of color, women, and, eventually, other excluded groups such as gays and the disabled. President Lyndon Johnson paraphrased Civil War Reconstruction goals when he stated in 1965: "This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek . . . not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result. For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society."

Again, however, after a relatively brief period of aggressive federal action that produced significant gains for blacks, women, people of color, and other excluded groups, the national commitment to equal opportunity and affirmative action programs shifted, and public support declined.

Pincus

Pincus demolishes the idea that affirmative action programs have seriously harmed white men, the preeminent status group in American society. White males continue to reign supreme on all important measures: education, income, occupation, wealth, and health. So why is there such a hue and cry over the supposed damaging consequences of "reverse discrimination"? It is this very puzzle that prompted Pincus to undertake his study. The empirical facts persuaded him that declining wages, globalization, corporate greed, downsizing, and cutbacks in government services represent much greater threats to the position of white men than discrimination.

Pincus's evidence shows that few white men have experienced discrimination. In over 300,000 EEOC cases, white plaintiffs represented only 7 percent of all race-discrimination claims, and male plaintiffs accounted for only 4 percent of all sex-discrimination cases. Still, the mythology of reverse discrimination persists. Certainly, the white men Pincus studied did not feel privileged; in fact, they felt tremendous insecurity as their standard of living continued to decline despite hard work and sacrifices.

As these frustrated, angry men sought explanations for this contradiction, they often embraced the convenient fictions provided by opponents of affirmative action. These fictions blamed affirmative action, rather than fundamental shifts in the American economy, for rapid, substantial declines in the status of working men and women of all races. Evocative images, such as a commercial developed for the U.S. senate campaign of Jesse Helms, attributed white job loss in North Carolina to the "taking of our jobs" by unqualified blacks through affirmative action. Attention was thus diverted from the flight of jobs offshore, the growing divide between wealthy elites and workers, and the diminishing purchasing power of workers.

Brown and Colleagues

Whitewashing Race reminds us that, historically, it has been during moments of economic insecurity that racism and racial discrimination have surged in American society. So it was predictable that "the idea that lazy blacks get government handouts" inflamed white men whose real wages barely increased during the 1990s economic boom. This volume is a pointed response to and rejection of America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible, the 1999 book by conservative scholars Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, which criticizes race-conscious affirmative action and codifies the white conservative orthodoxy on race and inequality.

In systematic, persuasive fashion, Brown and his co-authors expose and counter ideological arguments advanced by the Thernstroms, who would have us believe that affirmative action in higher education harms black students and that all U.S. citizens now enjoy full civil rights, racial justice, and equity. The Brown book is especially helpful in articulating the concept of racial preference versus racial privilege. It reveals how white prosperity and accumulation have been built on a history of black deprivation. Most striking, the volume documents how the past is a prologue in racial status: for four centuries, the United States showed a marked racial and gender preference for white males by excluding women, blacks, and other people of color from full participation in the society. The result has been a long-term, cumulative advantage for this protected, privileged group. Opponents of affirmative action insist on ignoring or dismissing this historical reality as they complain about the forty-year history of relatively modest affirmative action programs.

Brown and his co-authors present a thoughtful, empirically grounded consideration of "whiteness" not only as privilege, but also as a powerful form of property in America. They demonstrate the coordinated, systematic way that social norms, position in society, access to resources, occupancy of prime territory, control of political — machinery, and economic clout have combined to reinforce white dominanceand black subordination. The authors elaborate the notion of "durable racial inequality," which recognizes the cumulative, historical, and structural momentum of white racial advantage originating in earlier moments in which whites were free to participate fully in the accumulation and transfer of economic, social, and political capital. President Johnson captured the persistent inequity of this reality with his famous 1965 analogy of a foot race: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair."

After whites had been given a nearly insurmountable head start, blacks were later told they were now free to catch up if they could. Johnson's idea was that "affirmative actions" would be required to make the pretense of fairness in such a stacked competition a reality.

Tough Discussions

Race has always been complicated and confusing in America, shot through with contradictions and silences. The contributions of these three books to the discourse leave us better positioned to consider race, equity, and affirmative action in all their complexity. The Supreme Court's key decisions in the University of Michigan cases raised as many questions as answers. The university was courageous in defending its affirmative action programs. Witness the many other universities that simply folded when threatened with lawsuits aiming to overturn their affirmative action programs. Sadly, albeit with clear-eyed wisdom, the University of Michigan based its defense on the primary necessity for white students to be exposed to racial and cultural diversity. It thus justified its programs not as legitimate compensatory responses to historical racial discrimination and continuing racial (that is, educational, political, and economic) inequities, but rather as the best, most appropriate way to serve the interests of white students. In other words, it argued that white students, faced with an increasingly diverse, global society, would benefit from some exposure to, and practice with, racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity.

My obvious ambivalence (some might say, antipathy) toward such diversity rationales arises from a reading of American history that detects pronounced resistance to any significant advances by blacks that challenge this country's racial hierarchy. In many respects, the diversity rationale defers—or silences—tougher discussions about race, racism, racial subordination, racial oppression, and racial compensation. The aversion to discussions about the debts and compensation owed to African Americans is at variance with the otherwise strongly entrenched ethic in this society that demands full compensation for wrongful injury (whether intentional or unintentional). No doubt attorneys reading this review will take issue with my peculiar application of tort law, even though I refer in this instance to a "peculiar institution." I defer to their professional judgment. However, I remain firm on my general principle: the United States—that is, whites and a nation that enslaved black people for 250 years and restricted us to exploited lower-caste status for another hundred years—owes black people an unpaid debt. This debt flows not only from the wealth white Americans gained at the expense of a tremendously productive, unpaid work force (read: slaves), but also from many other cultural, social, and political dividends owing to the presence of blacks in America.

Brown and his co-authors quote author James Baldwin's view that equity and justice for blacks are required "to make America what America must become." Martin Luther King, Jr., made the same point when he asserted that the true measure of any society's greatness rests in how the people who live in its shadows are treated—the poor, the elderly, the infirm, and blacks. These comments remind us of the need to focus discussions about affirmative action, race, diversity, and equity in higher education unflinchingly on the deep structure of race and racial hierarchy in America. This nation's system of racial stratification has privileged "whiteness," and defined it (or proximity to it) in opposition to blackness—with devastating consequences for African Americans.

Whitewashing Race reminds us that the pivotal racial dimension in American culture is not so much that a person is white but rather that she is not identifiably black. Diversity rationales risk playing into the hands of opponents of affirmative action. Unless we squarely acknowledge and discuss race and this country's racial history, we are helpless to confront racial stereotypes or to detail the elaborate, discriminatory machinery on which black subordination and white supremacy are built. Absent this context, it becomes seductively easy to decide that differences between black-white achievement are intractable, or that no special considerations are due blacks since they are, after all, on equal footing with all the other groups in the society.

I say all this to caution against a growing tendency to avoid references to race, and to African Americans specifically, in discussions about affirmative action and equity. I believe it is best to be explicit on this point, because so much of the discussion's implicit subtext equates blacks to affirmative action, anyway—despite the fact that white women and Asians have been by far the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action programs in higher education over the past four decades. Recognizing this obvious point should not necessarily lead to internecine struggle among different groups (including Latinos, Native Americans, Southeast Asians, and poor whites). In fact, the evidence is nearly indisputable that substantial gains for blacks usually translate to gains for other, more favorably positioned groups in society. Although the "trickle-down theory" and the idea that "a rising tide lifts all boats" are in dispute, an alternative boat analogy is persuasive: "Any tide that lifts the crew's quarters of an ocean liner (which are in the lowest deck) will also certainly, at the same time, lift the cabins stacked above in the higher classes."

Black progress has always helped to fuel the advancement of other groups in this society, because social expectations and norms continue to view blacks as the underclass and to place us at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy. Put another way, American ethics of justice, fairness, and equity require that "what we would do for the least of us, must certainly be done for the rest of us." Despite the hot rhetoric about racial preferences, reverse discrimination, and affirmative action in higher education, little evidence sustains the view that African Americans are somehow privileged in a society that systematically and unremittingly devalues blackness. Certainly, the statistics on enrollment and graduation in top universities and colleges show no such advantage for blacks.

Whitewashing Race is an important statement on racial privilege and affirmative action. Time will tell whether this book—along with the 1996 book Inequality by Design by Claude S. Fischer and others and William G. Bowen and Derek Bok's 2000 book, The Shape of the River—can help to empower advocates for equity and race-conscious affirmative action in higher education. Perhaps it was not ambivalence or timidity that blunted support among so many liberals for these essential programs, but rather their need for definitive texts on which to base their claims and defense of affirmative action? One can only hope. In any case, the three books discussed in this review are vital contributions to the essential counter-discourse against strident, mounting attacks on race-conscious affirmative action programs.

Walter Allen is professor of sociology and designate for the Allan Murray Cartter chair of Higher Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also director of Choices: Access, Equity, and Diversity in California Higher Education, a longitudinal study of the secondary and postsecondary educational opportunities and experiences of African American and Latino students in California.

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