Some participants in the struggle over affirmative action have made sharp distinctions between “forward-looking” and “backward-looking” affirmative action. According to Professor Bernard Boxill, “backward-looking arguments justify preferential treatment considered as compensation for past and present wrongs,” while “forward-looking arguments justify preferential treatment considered as a means to future and present goods.”4 While there is a distinction to be made, there is also a considerable overlap between the categories. Although the aim to rectify past injustice is the key feature of a reparations model of affirmative action, that model need not be indifferent to the present and future status of claimants and payers. Rectifying (or at least attempting to rectify) a past wrong responds to a present need and helps to create the predicate for a just future.
The remedial justification has been central to the actual practice of affirmative action, whether or not it is openly acknowledged. It is the idea that most animated calls for special measures in the 1960s as it became evident that the mere cessation of racial exclusion would fail to redress satisfactorily the continuing effects of past wrongs. It is the justification that figures most prominently in the popular understanding of affirmative action. It is what gives the most weight and urgency to the case for affirmative action, and it explains why blacks are always among the beneficiary groups. The reparations justification does not preclude others—diversity, integration, countering invidious discrimination, social peace, legitimation, etc. But at least in terms of policies directed toward racial minorities, the aim to redress the lingering effects of racial mistreatment in the past is almost always in the background.
Affirmative action as reparations has encountered fierce criticism from a wide array of sources, some of whom eschew positive racial discrimination, whatever the asserted rationale, and some of whom support positive discrimination for certain causes but not for the sake of rectifying past wrongs. Opponents voice several objections. One is that, characteristically, beneficiaries of affirmative action are not themselves actual victims of the past racial wrongs invoked to justify positive racial discrimination. Opponents claim that currently, and increasingly in the future, typical beneficiaries of racial affirmative action are not people who have been enslaved or Jim Crowed. To the contrary, they are people who have reaped the benefits of largely successful efforts to abolish slavery and de jure segregation. They are people armed with antidiscrimination laws and, perhaps more important, an aroused public antipathy to racial prejudice. They are people who, in terms of status and opportunity, occupy a radically better position than their mothers and fathers, not to mention their grandmothers and grandfathers.5
A second objection is that beneficiaries are typically better off than fellow minorities lower down on the socioeconomic ladder who lack the wherewithal to access affirmative action. This is objectionable, so the argument runs, because presumably those lower down on the ladder continue to suffer more than affirmative action beneficiaries from the present effects of past racial oppression. Yet it is precisely those who are suffering less who are reaping the most benefit from affirmative action as reparations. Moreover, they are imposing an opportunity cost on their more disadvantaged peers by siphoning attention and energy that would otherwise be more available to struggles that would more directly benefit lower-class racial minorities.6
A corollary objection is that the whites burdened by affirmative action are not responsible for the wrongs that reparatory affirmative action seeks to rectify. Opponents of affirmative action thus charge that “innocent” whites are being subjected to “reverse discrimination.” Some object, moreover, that there is an unfair tilt regarding the incidence of the white burden. The whites who often lose out, it is claimed, are those on the margin, who hail from poorer, more vulnerable families than their wealthier, more secure white peers.7
WHAT IS TO BE SAID IN THE FACE OF OBJECTIONS?
Begin with recognizing that messy realities often confound the boundaries of received moral and legal doctrine. When that happens—and when there is simultaneously a felt need to address a perceived injustice—accommodations are made, imperfection is accepted, and reforms ensue. There was no legal mechanism in place to provide relief to victims of the horrific violence of the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, there were substantial arguments against providing relief. Why compensate these victims and not the victims of Timothy McVeigh? But because a desire to grant relief was sufficiently strong, reformers succeeded in establishing new laws, doctrines, and understandings to justify the compensatory intervention.8
Yes, the case for reparatory affirmative action would be stronger if all of its direct beneficiaries had themselves been immediately victimized by slavery or segregation, if all of its beneficiaries were the worst off among racial minorities, and if those disadvantaged by affirmative action had themselves perpetrated the wrongs whose remediation is sought. The absence of those precise conditions, however, should not be seen as dispositive. As Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah observes:
The depressing truth is that almost every black person in the US has been the individual victim of racial wrongs.a But even if an exceptionally lucky black person should show up, what moral principle declares it wrong to adopt a policy that occasionally rewards the undeserving, if it normally awards the deserving? And, in any case, if you are worried about the tailoring of remedies to wrongs, why not draw attention to the black people who have suffered undercompensated wrongs? If the problem is the proper distribution of remedies, we should be as worried about under-compensating as about over-compensating.9
If one must choose between being overcompensatory as opposed to being undercompensatory, why not, as Appiah suggests, choose the former?
Furthermore, contrary to what is often suggested, a substantial number of affirmative action beneficiaries have been direct victims of massive racial wrongs. This includes any black person who attended segregated schools prior to Brown v. Board of Education or who attended schools that remained segregated in defiance of Brown. That category alone covers a sizable proportion of those who have benefited from affirmative action since the 1960s. Often in discussions about reparatory affirmative action, slavery is advanced as the all-important historic wrong. As Professor Boris Bittker noted years ago, however, there is good reason to put Jim Crow segregation at the center of the case.b 10 Slavery strikes many as an ancient wrong concerning which the victims and perpetrators are all long dead. By contrast, segregation is part of the lived experience of millions. It persisted full-blown in some locales into the 1960s, and its remnants are still highly visible today.
Then there is the matter of indirect victims. The children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the immediate victims of segregation are indirect victims in that they have been demonstrably injured by the racial injustices visited upon their ancestors. They have lost out in terms of inherited financial wealth, access to education, and access to human capital (e.g., friends or relatives who can convey valuable information or offer useful occupational connections).11
An oft heard complaint against affirmative action is that it typically helps the most privileged among racial minorities, neglecting those most injured by the continuing effects of past discrimination.12 The strength of this complaint depends on the design of the affirmative action program in question. Earlier in the history of affirmative action in higher education, officials appear to have made more of an effort than evident currently to allocate assistance to poorer elements in minority communities.c Recall that the affirmative action program at the University of California–Davis School of Medicine that was struck down by the Supreme Court in its Bakke decision of 1978 was open only to racial minorities who were “disadvantaged.” But even “disadvantaged” racial-minority applicants to medical school are privileged in comparison with peers who fail to graduate from high school, let alone college.
To some extent, affirmative action’s privileging of better-off racial minorities stems from an accommodation between, on th
e one hand, demands for reparatory justice and, on the other hand, the present functional needs of institutions. The former counsels making higher education available to underprepared racial minorities even at the high cost of remedial instruction. The latter counsels making higher education available only to racial minorities already prepared to take advantage of the opportunity. Affirmative action often represents a rough compromise between these two alternatives.d
While this compromise privileges the better-off among people of color, it also often redounds to the betterment of the group as a whole by facilitating the emergence of a vanguard that will promote group uplift. This is a theory that has manifested itself repeatedly—from W. E. B. DuBois’s “talented tenth” to Charles Hamilton Houston’s “social engineers.”13 Under this theory, the enhanced opportunity that relatively privileged racial minorities receive redounds not only, and perhaps not principally, to their own personal benefit, but redounds to the benefit of their group and, more generally, to the benefit of society as a whole.14 Given prevailing social dynamics, the power, wealth, connections, and prestige that accrue to the talented tenth will be shared with non-elite minorities. The success of affirmative action beneficiaries will inspire other people of color and erode damaging stereotypes. This is why it is important to be careful in selecting the beneficiaries of racial affirmative action. Poor performance on their part can be dispiriting and reinforce stereotypes. Thus, the fact that relatively privileged racial minorities frequently enjoy greater access than their racial peers to resources that nurture superior performance in selective institutions should not be seen as a reason for dispreferring them. If racial rectification is the aim, then it may well be that racial elites are the best agents for carrying out the mission. Regardless of their own aims, elite racial beneficiaries of affirmative action will unavoidably serve as closely scrutinized “firsts” or “seconds,” widening the possibilities of a nascent and still vulnerable racial-minority vanguard that is expected to advance the fortunes of racial minorities in general.e
The complaint that affirmative action wrongly benefits blacks who are already privileged tends to misportray the African American middle class, making it seem richer and more secure than it is. Arguing that affirmative action is no longer needed, its enemies refer constantly to black celebrities who are already among the society’s winners. These lucky few, however, constitute an infinitesimal sliver of the black population. Much more characteristic are the people who constitute the great bulk of the black middle class—teachers, social workers, and postal agents on the low end and lawyers, engineers, and physicians on the high end. It is true that this group is better off than blacks further down the socioeconomic totem pole. It is also true, though, that the black middle class continues to suffer from a variety of impediments, rooted in racism, that put members of the black middle class in a position subordinate to their white counterparts. Middle-class black people bear injuries, often hidden, that stem in large part from racial mistreatment, injuries that are passed on from one generation to the next, injuries that warrant redress on a variety of grounds, including that of reparatory justice.15
The fact remains, however, that racial affirmative action plans typically offer more direct benefit to privileged, as opposed to disadvantaged, racial minorities. That differential does not stem solely from the actions of white authorities in higher education, business, and government. It also stems from the actions of racial-minority communities, more specifically the upper strata of those communities, which have greater access to resources—money, organization, connections, education, etc.—that enable them to advance their interests over those of their poorer racial counterparts. Every large affirmative action regime encounters the problem of relatively privileged sectors of beneficiary groups seizing an excessive portion of the affirmative action pie.16
THE LEFT CRITIQUE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
Detractors on the left have long attacked affirmative action for its class bias.f They charge that affirmative action benefits relatively privileged blacks while ignoring or benefiting only tenuously the black poor, that it is a glorified tokenism that buys off talented blacks who might otherwise provide leadership to a grassroots insurgency, and that it ruins the prospects for interracial populism.g Proponents of this critique prefer redistributive reforms framed by socioeconomic class boundaries. Their mantra is “class not race.”
Key features of the Left Critique have long been voiced by figures on the right.17 Sheer opportunism, however, frequently explains right-wing objections on these grounds. Figures who typically evince little or no constructive sympathy whatsoever for the black poor all of a sudden become their putative champions for the limited purpose of discrediting affirmative action. My suspicion is that when that mission is accomplished, they will renege on their promise to support nonracial, class-based reform and instead adopt their more usual posture: defending the current maldistribution of wealth, opportunity, and power in America. Even if that suspicion is correct, however, it does not address those who propound the Left Critique in good faith. It is to that task that I now turn.
I begin with a concession: the Left Critique contains strong points. Racial affirmative action is limited in that it often directly assists only those who are already positioned to take advantage of enlarged opportunities. To be sure, affirmative action is not solely a vehicle for elites. Tens of thousands of racial-minority firefighters, police officers, corrections personnel, craft workers, and lower-level office workers owe their positions to affirmative action.18 But even these beneficiaries are situated in the higher ranks of the working class. Rarely does affirmative action directly embrace the lower ranks of the working class or those who have lost a grip on employment altogether.
Furthermore, there is considerable power to the claim that the campaign to promote and defend affirmative action has absorbed an inordinate amount of limited resources. Consider the remarkable amount of ink, attention, money, and energy that has been spent on racial affirmative action in higher education, even though the people who directly benefit reside in the most privileged strata of racial minorities. To be a candidate for admission to medical school or law school or merely college, one must first be a high school graduate. But large numbers of minority youth do not finish high school. And among those who do, large numbers fail to receive educations that enable them to be plausible candidates for selective colleges or universities. Racial affirmative action in higher education, in short, has little direct bearing on the fate of most minority youth, even though it has consumed much of the energy available for dealing with problems confronting racial-minority youth. The plight of minority youth, particularly those trapped in black ghettos, is pointed to for the purposes of initiating or defending affirmative action. Yet the truly disadvantaged are not the primary beneficiaries of positive racial selectivity in higher education.
Another argument of the left critique of affirmative action is that the struggle to protect it not only absorbs excessive resources but, perhaps even worse, facilitates acquiescence to an inadequate response to ongoing inequities. “So long as the Band-Aid of affirmative action dominates the debate,” Anne Hudson-Price observes, “policy makers are excused from confronting the wound underneath.”19 Defenders of affirmative action, she charges, tend to exaggerate its benefits to justify its existence. Moreover, their fear of losing affirmative action dissuades them from being sufficiently open to the experimentation that will be required to uncover better alternatives. “[R]eliance on old solutions may be handicapping us from developing new methodologies.” To critics on the left, die-hard defenders of affirmative action have become all too conservative.
The complaint about excessive caution should be taken to heart. Affirmative action does have important drawbacks that can only be minimized or avoided by a process of experimentation. Experiments entail risks. Not only is it possible that envisioned improvements will prove to be mistaken. It is also possible that in the process one will lose the existing benefit one was
seeking to enhance. Many proponents of affirmative action are especially sensitive to such risks in an environment in which affirmative action is surrounded by powerful enemies.
Sensible experiments that address weaknesses of conventional racial affirmative action ought to be tried so long as they pose no undue threat to the underlying program. Hence, no alarm should be triggered by efforts to supplement conventional racial affirmative action with efforts to extend it to poorer sectors of minority communities and to the disadvantaged generally, regardless of race. Proponents of racial equity should enthusiastically support initiatives aimed at securing more equity along the class divide. “Race and class” is thus a suitable banner for affirmative action reform.
There are, however, several reasons to eschew the “class not race” position.h Any solely class-based affirmative action program that is likely to be enacted in the current political environment will likely fail to meet adequately the requirements of racial justice. One problem stems from the fact that, in many contexts, blacks of modest means are not only outnumbered by whites of modest means but also far surpassed by them in terms of education, skills, and overall preparedness to take advantage of widened opportunities for schooling and employment. This is so in part because of observable (though oft neglected) differences in the circumstances of whites and blacks of the same income level. Frequently there is a large difference in wealth that distinguishes blacks and whites whose incomes are similar. A white family earning $50,000 per year may seem at first blush to be the socioeconomic peers of a black family earning the same income. When other considerations—value of housing, equity in housing, character of neighborhood, familial experience with higher education, access to valuable social networks, etc.—are taken into account, however, it becomes clear that, typically, whites of a given income level are considerably wealthier than blacks of that same level.20 Blacks, moreover, are also often afflicted by a variety of hidden injuries that lead to circumstances in which, contrary to the usual socioeconomic pattern, whites who are poor outperform middle-class or even affluent blacks.21
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