Is affirmative action racist?
I often hear white people complain that affirmative action is a racist practice because it discriminates against white people solely on the basis of race, rejecting whites for jobs or college for no other reason than because they are white. Is this any different, they ask, from the long history of rejecting people of color simply because they aren’t white?
Yes, it is, very different.
It’s different because discrimination against people of color has been and continues to be based not simply on color itself, but on negative cultural beliefs about people of color – what kind of people they are and what they’re capable of – that portray them as inferior to whites, as undeserving, unworthy, and undesirable.
But when affirmative action programs go out of their way to identify and recruit people of color, there is no implied judgement of the white people who are turned away. Universities and employers do not reject white applicants in favor of affirmative action admissions and hires because they think whites are inferior or undeserving. They aren’t saying, “We don’t want you here because you’re white.” Far from it. Whiteness is still the norm almost everywhere in America, the cultural standard of what it is to be a normal human being. And ‘color’ is still the mark of an outsider who can never be entirely sure that they belong.
The whole point of any racist practice is to preserve and enforce the privilege – the dominance and unearned advantage – of the dominant group by systematically excluding and oppressing members of the subordinate group. This has never been the purpose of affirmative action, either in theory or in practice. It has been just the opposite – a modest attempt to shift the odds away from being so heavily loaded in favor of whites in an environment that is still overwhelmingly white dominated, identified, and centered.
The result has been a relatively small number of people of color admitted to college or getting jobs in business or fire and police departments, opportunities that would otherwise be closed to them. Over time, this has helped foster a small middle class among various peoples of color.
At the same time, individual white people are turned away from opportunities because of affirmative action decisions, and this certainly has real consequences for their lives. But one of those is not that they have been discriminated against and rejected because they’re white.
If there is an enemy in the struggle of white families to make a living, it is not the easy target of affirmative action or people of color who are, after all, only trying to do the same thing as best they can. The real problem, as recent history makes painfully clear, is an industrial capitalist economic system in which the interests of working families of all races have always been secondary to the accumulation of wealth and power by the upper classes.
All of this reminds me of the game of musical chairs in which the players are kept so busy worrying about the person on their left or right who might take the chair they need for ourselves, that they never stop to ask, “Why aren’t there enough chairs to go around? Where are all the chairs?”
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This article may be quoted, reprinted, or distributed for noncommercial purposes only and with an attribution to Allan G. Johnson, www.agjohnson.com.
For more about the issues raised in this article, see Allan’s book, Privilege, Power, and Difference and the following:
Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (2 vols.).
Audrey Smedley and Brian D. Smedley, Race in North America: Origins and Evolution of a Worldview.
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics.
Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: The Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America.
Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice.
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (eds), Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow.
1 Comment for Is affirmative action racist?
Debbie | February 7, 2012 at 1:08 pm
As the Affirmative Action officer for my institution, I am often confronted with this question. (Or worse, the question is in the minds of white colleagues, but not asked.) Your answer is so very well stated!