Before white Americans jump to say that Affirmative Action is "racist" or "unfair," here are a few things to consider: "Affirmative Action" means any policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who suffer or have suffered from discrimination within a culture. In other words, the critics are right in saying that it is a form of "discrimination," but it's a positive one. It is a kind of "leveling of the playing field" so a segment of the population doesn't fall behind (or farther behind).
But one fact that most white Americans don't consider is that many of them are direct beneficiaries of one of the largest (and most expensive) affirmative action efforts in our history: the GI Bill. After WWII, the US Government created the GI Bill to help level the playing field for returning veterans. Since most veterans had gone to war and suffered, they had lost several years worth of education, work, and experience at home. Without some program to help them out, they would likely fall behind in society. As President Eisenhower put it, returning veterans "are entitled to definite action to help take care of their special problems." The GI Bill funded veterans to continue their education, provided loan guarantees for veterans to purchase homes, and provided job training/placement. Now was this "unfair" to non-veterans. You could certainly make that argument. But the rationale was that we owed this to veterans to make sure they didn't fall behind. We wanted an equal playing field.
But here's the kicker--the GI Bill primarily benefited whites. Because of concessions made to Southern lawmakers, black veterans benefited almost none at all. African American veterans were denied housing and business loans, were excluded from job training programs, and faced active discrimination in enrolling in colleges. So in effect, the GI Bill was affirmative action for whites.
This in and of itself could be an argument for affirmative action in higher education for minorities today. While white families benefited educationally and financially from the GI Bill, creating a stepping stone up for their children and grandchildren, the children and grandchildren of black families would face an extra obstacle to overcome.
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| Protesters against the Brown v Board of Education decision. |
But sadly, that is not the only obstacle minority families face today. Even if we claim that today's society is a perfectly equal society with no current racism or discrimination (which we are in reality far from), you really cannot argue that everyone has an equal starting point. Our nation was literally built upon the backs of slaves. Racism and discrimination existed in every state and city in our country for over 2 centuries. If a war that lasted less than a decade is enough to warrant affirmative action, shouldn't 2 centuries of discrimination and oppression also warrant it?
You see, here's where I think the challenge is in this debate. We (white Americans) don't really believe that the past has much impact on the present. We think, "I'm not racist and I don't see much discrimination today (especially compared to the past), so minorities have no excuse today not to succeed." We also tend to believe in the American mythos that you can become anything and achieve anything if you just work hard enough. If we buy into this mindset, then of course any "affirmative action" plan will be flawed because we have bought into the idea that the playing field is already equal.
However, the past does impact the present. You success is more than simply the sum of your actions. Who you are today is at least partially the result of your parents' decisions, education, wealth, and success. Much of your path was already determined for you by where you grew up, by the schools you had access to, and by who your neighbors were. And yes, if your skin is not white, then you inevitably (even today) will face unique challenges, if from nowhere else then at least from a few remaining "bad apples."
The point is this is not just about the present realities, whether we make equal opportunities available or not. This is also about starting lines. If certain segments of our population have a starting line 200 meters behind ours, then we have an obligation to take actions to fix that, especially if our own government took actions in the past that set the starting line for others so far back.
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| A St. Louis campaign flyer advocating for housing segregation in 1916. |
And that has happened. In addition to the discrimination faced by blacks and others in the GI Bill, our very housing maps have been largely segregated by government action. Mortgage companies and the federal government refused to give loans to African American families for years. Whenever a black family would move into a white neighborhood, real estate agents would begin "blockbusting" and scaring white homeowners into moving because they believed their home values would begin dropping (even though black homeowners often paid double for the same homes because they could not get mortgages for homes in other neighborhoods).
Similarly, many white neighborhoods had "restrictive covenants" that made it illegal for black families to buy homes in that neighborhood. State and local courts (and not just in the South) upheld evictions of African American families who had legally purchased homes in white neighborhoods.
When it came to schools, our schools were intentionally segregated. Separate schools were built for African Americans, and these schools were usually underfunded. Even after integration took effect, many communities found ways to practically continue segregation. Sometimes district lines were deliberately drawn to irregularly dissect neighborhoods to ensure that black and white students would not attend the same schools. Other times, white families would start up expensive private schools to for their children knowing black families could not afford them (simultaneously draining money from public schools that looked increasingly brown and black). Or, many schools remained segregated as whites continued to move out to suburbs where there were jobs and opportunities and left minorities in an economic vacuum to also deal with an impoverished school district.
This is not even to consider the horrors of ways that the criminal justice system has often been prejudiced against minorities throughout the years, or other ways in which minorities have been harmed and disadvantaged throughout our past. Once you start to consider the extent to which African Americans and other minorities had been oppressed, then you also begin to realize that the starting line is not in fact equal.
Now, none of this is to say that minorities and oppressed populations cannot succeed or overcome these obstacles to become successful. They most certainly can and often do. But contrary to some critics who argue that affirmative action is "insulting" to minorities by assuming that they "can't make it" without a "handout," I don't think that's the intention or mindset of affirmative action programs. I think such programs simply recognize that, even if the current situation is devoid of racism or discrimination, the starting line is not in the same place for everyone. So, the point is to remove some of the obstacles that exist. And, if a non-white individual ends up experiencing more success because they're used to working twice as hard to achieve the same outcome, well, that's not really their fault and that's not really "unfair" to us whites.
So, before you jump to talking about how horrible affirmative action is, consider whether your family is also a recipient of affirmative action and consider the extent to which others who look different from you have experienced hardship and setbacks. Because I suspect that if you jump too quickly to thinking that affirmative action is "unfair" to you that you probably have never actually studied and pondered the full measure of discrimination and racism in our country's history.
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*Another critique of affirmative action is that it supposedly sets "quotas" and a completely unqualified person can get into a school because of the color of their skin while a very qualified person who is white will get denied because of it. Now, while it may be true that some white students may miss out on a particular school because of affirmative action policies, I can assure you that a minority student can't just get into any school they want. Having worked in a community with a poor and academically struggling minority school district for a number of years, I can guarantee you that those students did not just have "free rides" into colleges. It is still arguably much easier for a white, suburban student to get into the college of their choice than for some of those African American or Hispanic students to get into any college.
**If you'd like to read more about our nation's checkered past, a few good reads are America's Original Sin by Jim Wallis, The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.
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