Affirmative action should be about class, not race

Today’s Guests Are:

Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, has written widely on jazz, hip hop, electronic music, musicians’ unions and technological displacement, and is currently completing a book entitled Misterioso: The Art of Thelonious Monk and his book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination will be published by Beacon Press in June. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990); Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class (1994); Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970 (1996); co-editor (with Sidney J. Lemelle) of Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (1994); co-editor (with Earl Lewis), To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 2000); general editor (with Earl Lewis) of the eleven volume Young Oxford History of African Americans (Oxford University Press); and co-author of Three Strikes ( with Howard Zinn and Dana Frank). His collection of essays, Yo Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997) was selected as one of the top ten books of 1998 by the Village Voice. His essays have appeared in several anthologies and journals, including Black Music Research Journal, The Voice Literary Supplement, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Callaloo, Rolling Stone, The American Historical Review, American Visions, Journal of American History, Utne Reader, Fashion Theory, Social Text, and Frieze: Contemporary Art and Culture, to name a few.

George E. Curry is editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service and BlackPressUSA.com. His weekly column is syndicated by NNPA to more than 200 African-American newspapers, with a combined readership of 15 million. Prior to joining the NNPA, Curry was editor-in-chief of Emerge: Black America’s Newsmagazine from 1993 until June 2000. He is past president of the American Society of Magazine Editors, the first African-American and non-New York based editor to hold the association’s top office. Before taking over as editor of Emerge, Curry served as New York bureau chief and as a Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Prior to joining the Tribune in 1983, Curry worked for 11 years as a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and for two years as a reporter for Sports Illustrated. To read more about George Curry, please click here.

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Myth: Affirmative action should be about class, not race.

FACT: While class remains an extraordinarily significant factor in the lives of many Americans, the fact is that racial bias affects minorities of all backgrounds and cannot be addressed solely through class-based measures. Race-conscious affirmative action remains necessary to address race-based obstacles that block the path to success of countless people of color of all classes.

One of the most common criticisms of affirmative action programs is that they don’t address “the real cause” of racial inequality, class. Such critics argue that the most significant social problems facing people of color derive from poverty, not racism. People of color, they argue, are disproportionately poor and have less access to jobs and education. Thus, class-based programs will disproportionately benefit people of color, and constitute a far more defensible and productive social policy.

To any one concerned about social justice and the plight of the poor, the belief that lifting all boats together is the best way to address racial inequality seems hardly controversial. But, this superficially appealing claim is based on a host of false assumptions about affirmative action and a wholesale denial of the continuing significance of race.

In a society that has only recently moved away from formal apartheid, the claim that race no longer matters simply fails to square with the lived reality of most people of color. Whether they are privileged, working class or living in conditions of poverty, race remains a significant factor that shapes access to everything from social networking to jobs to health care to housing. Not only does the “class not race” position fail to reflect the role that race plays across class lines, it also fails to reflect the role of racism in creating a racialized underclass.

Moreover, the cumulative consequences of intergenerational discrimination are exacerbated by contemporary forms of racial bias in education, housing, employment and many other spheres of life. The fact that today’s poor are disproportionately Black and Latino is no accident. Because the contributing factors to the disparate rates of impoverishment are race-based, so must be the remedies. After all, affirmative action actually played a significant role in the creation of a new middle class by removing unwarranted racial barriers that would otherwise seriously limit opportunities for people of color from all class backgrounds.

WHAT’S CLASS GOT TO DO WITH IT?

To really unpack this myth, let’s examine the basic assumptions being made by the proponents of class-based affirmative action.

The class argument assumes that individuals experience discrimination based on their class status, but not based on their racial backgrounds. Thus, middle class people of color are “undeserving” beneficiaries of race-based affirmative action programs.

There is substantial evidence that people of color experience racial discrimination regardless of their class backgrounds. It is clear that racial bias is not neatly compartmentalized into class containers such that middle class people of color are not exposed to it, while their poorer brethren labor continuously under the heavy weight of racial and class disadvantage. It is helpful here to consider the case of sexism: no one would argue that a privileged class status shields women from gender-based discrimination. In a similar fashion, it is wrong to assume that middle-class status shields people of color from racism.

How Do People of Color Experience Racial Discrimination?

As you will see below, the burden of racism is not a problem that affects only poor people of color. In short, the experiences of relatively privileged people of color in this country are quite different from those of their white counterparts. Disparities in health, education, employment and housing travel across class boundaries within communities of color. Such disparities demonstrate just how far this country must go to eliminate the vestiges of racial discrimination.

Employment:

* A study conducted in California found that temporary employment agencies presented with resumes of comparable quality but with “ethnic” names attached to some, and Anglo names to others, frequently screened out resumes from applicants from nonwhite ethnic or cultural backgrounds, and favored the resumes of their white counterparts. The 2004 study found that Arab/South Asian Americans, particularly men, were the least likely to be contacted by temporary employment agencies.

* Even when highly educated women of color secure well-paying positions in fields such as law, they often find themselves forced to leave their workplaces due to pervasive patterns of discrimination and hostile working environments. A 2006 survey conducted by the Commission on Women in the Profession of the American Bar Association (ABA) indicates that the women of color face systemic discrimination in the work environment, leaving them so isolated and alienated that they leave private law firms at a rate higher than any other group.

* A recent United States Census Bureau report confirmed what most people of color know from their lived experiences: Blacks and Latinos at every income level live in racially segregated neighborhoods. This experience of hyper-segregated neighborhoods is attributable to racial discrimination in the real estate markets, and stereotypical perceptions of Black and Latino communities which contribute to “white flight.”

* As a result of “white flight” and divestment within minority communities, relatively privileged and working class people of color are exposed to dramatically different circumstances than their white counterparts. Because of this phenomenon, as compared to the children of middle class whites, the children of middle class Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be exposed to poverty, drugs and violence in their residential neighborhoods. Click HERE to read the study.

* Middle class Asian Americans face housing discrimination as well. A recent HUD study found that Asian American home buyers experienced consistent discrimination relative to whites 21% of the time. Click HERE to view the report.

Health:

* People of color, particularly African Americans and Latinos, confront higher rates of disease than their white counterparts. Although socio-economic status accounts for some of this disparity, significant racial disparities persist even when one is comparing middle class people of color with their white counterparts.

* In a Detroit study of African American women, researchers found that 81 percent of the respondents reported having faced everyday types of discrimination on a routine basis — with 62 percent reporting moderate to high levels of this sort of mundane mistreatment, regardless of their class backgrounds. This treatment included verbal insults, disrespectful behavior, and poor service from whites. This sort of racism has serious health consequences, and it is related to the health disparities referenced above.

In sum, people of color and whites face different constraints regardless of their class backgrounds. Race matters. Although relatively privileged people of color are not in the same boat as there poorer brethren, they are in no sense similarly situated to their white counterparts.

Assumption #2

The class argument further assumes that affirmative action is based on race only — and not class, gender, race and the intersection of other characteristics that offset discriminatory practices.

In reality, many affirmative action programs take both race and class into account. For instance, many academic institutions consider the race and class backgrounds of applicants so as to assess the particular obstacles faced by Blacks, Latinos, Filipinos, low-income whites, and other groups that face problems of structural exclusion in the domain of education. In other arenas, such as employment and public contracting the same is also true.

Sophisticated affirmative action programs do not pit race against class or gender. They don’t operate on the basis of a framework consisting of a single axis of disadvantage. Instead they consider a wide range of interconnected characteristics that serve to unfairly marginalize some Americans.

Not only does racism reach people of color without regard to class borders, it also crosses international borders. Consider Oprah Winfrey, who was refused entry into a Paris boutique, even after seeing white women shopping undisturbed.

In police and fire departments, for example, poor whites have not faced racial discrimination, while minorities and women have historically been denied access to such job opportunities as a function of outright racial and gender exclusion, and tokenistic forms of employment which limited their career mobility even in those cases where they were hired. As a result, many police and fire departments have instituted affirmative action programs to dismantle the hurdles that in the past have severely marginalized women and people of color.

Assumption #3

Only middle class or privileged people of color benefit from affirmative action, at the expense of those who are the poorest and the most disadvantaged members of their communities.

Among the most common objections to affirmative action is that it only benefits the Black middle class. In fact, affirmative action is responsible for the creation of the Black middle class. Affirmative action opened the door to educational opportunity for an entire generation of poor and working class Blacks, who had previously been locked out and excluded from the “American Dream.” Once affirmative action opened these doors, all people of color, regardless of class, benefited.

* It is clear that all people of color benefit from affirmative action programs based on the contemporary socioeconomic diversity of students of color. The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Colleges and Universities, a study of 3,924 Black and Latino freshmen at 28 selective institutions, found that such students reflect remarkably diverse socio-economic backgrounds. For example:

* One Third of Latinos and One Fourth of Blacks came from homes with incomes over 100K.

* One Third or fewer of Blacks and Latinos had a father with an advance degree.

* Almost half the mothers of Black and Latino students were not college graduates.

* 40% of the parents of Black and Latino students did not have professional or managerial jobs.

* 12% of Latinos and 17% of Blacks came from a welfare background, compared to just 4% of whites.

* 40 % of Latinos and 50% blacks grew up on a household without father, compared to 20% of whites.

* 40% of Latinos and 20% of blacks grew up in segregated neighborhood circumstances with little or no exposure to other races or ethnicities.

Lastly, class based affirmative action arguments assume that the elimination of race based programs will allow us to focus on “real problems” without the distraction of race.

It is useful to remember that the only time that conservative critics promote class based programs is when they use it as a wedge against affirmative action. This is a classic “divide and conquer” strategy. Conservatives have not routinely demonstrated interest in the plight of the working poor; there has been little evidence that they are prepared to develop any new programs to assist working-class and poor folks after they uproot race-based opportunity policies. The class-based attack on affirmative action has not opened up new connections between economically marginal people across racial lines. Far from building interracial community between low income whites and people-of-color, the attack on affirmative action both distracts white Americans from the serious issues that have undermined their economic fortunes and scapegoats minorities for the declining fortunes of the working class.

Race- and class-based affirmative action are not at odds, in fact, they are two facets of the same project: both aid in dismantling the pervasive inequities that plague American life. All affirmative action programs are created in order to correct patterns of exclusion, and the beneficiaries of these programs are determined by the type of discrimination (whether class, gender, or race-based) that leads to unequal Outcomes.

Banning race based affirmative action will not advance equality nor will it lead to a renewed commitment to addressing the interests of the poor and working class people of color. In fact, continued support of race and gender conscious polices is the most promising way to advance equality along race, gender and class lines.

Bottom Line: Once we look at the hidden assumptions of the class argument, the notion that all American inequality can be explained as class discrimination just doesn’t make sense.