Affirmative action is Preferential Treatment

Guests on this show:

DR. LUKE CHARLES HARRIS is the former Chair of the Department of Political Science at Vassar College, where he teaches American Politics and Constitutional Law; and the Co-founder of the African American Policy Forum (Policy Forum). The Policy Forum was developed as part of an ongoing effort to promote women’s rights in the context of struggles for racial justice. It is a media-monitoring think tank and information clearinghouse that works to bridge the gap between scholarly research and public debates on questions of inequality, discrimination and injustice.

Harris earned a B.A. at Saint Joseph’s University, a J.D. and an LL.M at Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton. He clerked for the late A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., the distinguished legal historian and former Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; served for two years as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Warwick, School of Law in Coventry England; for one year as a Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Sociology; and for two years as a junior associate in the Litigation Department at Simpson, Thacher and Bartlett in New York City, before beginning his teaching career at Vassar in 1992.

An expert in the field of Critical Race Theory, Harris has authored a series of important essays on questions of racial and gender equality in contemporary America; and was the co-writer and chief consultant for Kathe Sandler’s 1993 award-winning documentary film A Question of Color. A Question of Color premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and was released theatrically at the Film Forum in New York City before being aired on nationwide TV by PBS in 1994. It is currently being distributed by California NewsReel.

In 2003, Harris supervised and coauthored an amicus curiae brief on behalf of the “Committee of Concerned Black Graduates of Accredited Law Schools” in a landmark Supreme Court case: Grutter v. Bollinger (see “Prologue: Brief of Amici Curiae on Behalf of Concerned Black Graduates of ABA Accredited Law Schools, Michigan Journal of Race and Law 2004). More recently, his ground breaking essay, “Affirmative Action as Equalizing Opportunity: Challenging the Myth of Preferential Treatment,” coauthored with Uma Narayan, was republished in Hugh LaFollette’s, Ethics in Practice, Blackwell Press (Oxford England), 3rd edition, 2006. His next scholarly project will be the completion of a book entitled THE MEANING OF EQUALITY IN “POST-APARTHEID” AMERICA.

To learn more about the myth of “preferential treatment”, read Professor Luke Harris and Professor Uma Narayan’s AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AS EQUALIZING OPPORTUNITY: CHALLENGING THE MYTH OF “PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT”

Janine Jackson: Program Director for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and co-host of Counterspin.

Janine Jackson is FAIR’s program director and a frequent contributor to FAIR’s magazine, Extra!.  She co-edited The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the ’90s (Westview Press). And she co-hosts and produces FAIR’s syndicated radio show, CounterSpin–a weekly program of media criticism airing on more than 130 stations around the country.

Jackson has testified to the Senate Communications Subcommittee on budget reauthorization for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She has appeared on ABC’s Nightline, NBC’s Geraldo, and CNBC’s Inside Business, among other outlets.

Jackson is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and has an M.A. in sociology from the New School for Social Research. In 1997 she married Jim Naureckas, the editor of Extra!.

To learn more about how the media misrepresents affirmative action, read Janine Jackson’s study for FAIR: Affirmative Action Coverage Ignores Women and Discrimination

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MYTH: Affirmative action is preferential treatment

FACT: Affirmative action removes barriers that unfairly exclude women and people of color. In so doing, it promotes equal opportunity for its beneficiaries.

In the United States access to the American Dream is often framed as a fair race in which the swiftest runners win. Critics say we should eliminate affirmative action because it gives some runners an unfair head start in an otherwise fair race. At the same time, many supporters of affirmative action say it is essential because some competitors are disabled and need a head start in order to compete in the race. But what if both of these perspectives miss the point about affirmative action?

Although much of the debate is framed in these stark terms, many people rightly wonder whether there isn’t a better way of thinking about affirmative action. There is. What if we begin with the observation that the lanes on the track used by the runners are fundamentally unequal? Some lanes are unobstructed while others are virtually impassable. From this perspective, we can see that policies that promote inclusion, like affirmative action, are designed to equalize the conditions of a previously unfair race.

We all know that there are numerous obstacles that litter the lanes of disadvantaged runners: people of color find their path blocked by racial discrimination; poverty creates broken lanes filled with potholes and other dangers: women find their lanes filled with impenetrable barriers; and urban youth are derailed far from the finish line by the school to prison pipeline. Meanwhile, those runners who aren’t kept back by race, class, or gender discrimination are privileged to run a race in which their ability to compete is not impeded by any unwarranted arbitrary barriers. Some runners are luckier still. They are benefited by a host of privileges such as family connections, wealth, and an array of other factors that deliver them to the finish line ahead of all the other runners without even to have to break a sweat. Their lane is, in effect, a people-mover, an electrically powered lane that moves them along even when they simply assume the position of a runner while never having to actually lift a foot to propel themselves forward.

Let’s take a closer look at two differentially positioned runners in the race toward the American Dream:In the first lane, riddled with the potholes of poverty and the hurdles of systemic discrimination, Beah, an African American woman, is struggling to make ends meet while competing for public works projects that are rarely advertised and even more seldom awarded to women or people of color. She is no stranger to struggle, isolation or hostility to her participation in fields dominated by white men. Earlier in the race, she grew up in a hyper-segregated Detroit neighborhood and attended a poorly funded public school. Despite these obstacles, however, she went on to attend the largest public university in Michigan. Her family, unable to scale the hurdles of redlining and mortgage discrimination, had no home equity to support her education, so Beah struggled to maintain a full-class load while working full-time. She was the only Black person in her business-oriented field of study and there were no professors of color in her department. After graduating near the top of her class, she continued to be marginalized in her white male-dominated field despite her high quality credentials. Cut out of the old boy network, she has been unable to access the necessary capital to build the business she wants to create.

Meanwhile, over on the people-mover lane, the current Chief Executive of the strongest nation in the world is quickly cruising along without breaking a sweat. Earlier in the race, he was a below average student at Phillips Andover, an elite private school. And yet, the people mover delivered him to Yale, where he paused just long enough to receive a C average before it shuttled him to the Harvard Business School. After graduation, despite the failures of subsequent business ventures, the people-mover continued to deliver him to ever higher levels of responsibility and power — effectively bypassing all the other runners on the track. And now, here he is, standing still, blinking occasionally as he struggles through his second term in office.

Neither critics nor defenders of affirmative action seem to notice the conditions of the lanes, much less the runners relaxing on the people mover. Even would-be competitors on the people mover seem utterly unfazed by the huge differences in the conditions of the lanes on the track. Indeed, the most privileged of the runners seem especially critical of efforts to remove the very obstacles that they have never faced from the lanes of their competitors. George Bush, for example, denounced affirmative action as an unfair benefit distributed solely on the basis of race even as the lane that delivered him to the White House continued to move on its own without great effort on his part.

In both critics’ and defenders’ views, affirmative action is preferential treatment for some runners over others. Neither see affirmative action as equalizing a track wherein the conditions for some runners are fundamentally different from the conditions that others face. In defending affirmative action, a much more accurate and defensible view begins with the recognition that the problems that affirmative action addresses are not with damaged runners, but with damaged tracks in which some lanes favor their runners while other lanes impede them. In this light, affirmative action represents nothing more than a set of policies designed to remove the numerous impediments that litter the lanes of those who are disadvantaged for reasons associated with their racial, gender or class backgrounds.

In order to set affirmative action on a firmer foundation, these policies have to be re-framed as programs that offset discriminatory barriers in American society. The media have been a central source of the misrepresentation of these policies and in creating public perceptions that affirmative action is fundamentally unfair. As Janine Jackson’s excellent study of the media coverage of affirmative action demonstrates, the media rarely link affirmative action programs to the existence of the patterns of discrimination it is meant to address. It is little wonder given the shocking failure of the media to adequately describe these social policies that so few people fully understand their basic purpose. Thus, affirmative action must be reclaimed. That effort must start squarely with an accurate description of the structural inequalities in American society and the role that affirmative action plays in dismantling traditions and practices that might otherwise obscure the promise countless of men and women in American society.