Achieving Diversity?
David Simon, recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant, once said, “there are two Americas—separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms.” The hubris of the American people with regard to diversity policies results in a shortsightedness that must be addressed. Regrettably, the fixation of racism and discrimination has dominated the sociopolitical debate surrounding the bigger issue: economic inequality. Economic injustice creates hate, cultural deficiency, and social incoherence in ways that racial injustice cannot. Inevitably, race and economics are intertwined, but focusing on one without the other from a policy-perspective yields vastly different results. American institutions overlook that fact, as they adopt false truisms that support a modern—and inescapably valuable—notion of politically correct politicking.
Federally funded institutions have successfully implemented a new norm of achieving diversity through affirmative action, but this does little to help the Hispanic Americans and African Americans that are roughly two and three times, respectively, more likely to live in poverty than are white Americans. In the past, affirmative action was helpful and bold. Recent economic and social trends show it in another light, as flawed. Although capable of effectuating meaningful change, affirmative action has largely been reduced to an excuse used by institutions and corporations to continue a history of neglecting minority communities at the grassroots level. That neglect is evidenced by drawing comparisons to the rest of society. Minority communities still suffer from various traps like disparate sentencing schemes for drug-related offenses because, confusingly, “designer drugs”—that have the same chemical composition of “street drugs”—are less of an issue. Another troubling system: public school education is funded by the county’s taxpayers instead of receiving a greater share of the federal budget. Fixing systemic economic inequalities like these was the true aim of the Civil Rights Movement and America missed out by settling for less. Policies approximating a socialist agenda of greater redistribution to the poor presented seemingly effective solutions to these issues, but with McCarthyism still fresh in the political memory of the country and Black Panther socialist activists branded as radicals, little was to be expected.
Really, the controversy boils down to this: should Americans vote to implement tax measures that would provide greater funding to disadvantaged communities (higher crime rates, lower educational outcomes, etc.) or should the government implement a policy that merely encourages employers to consider hiring diverse candidates? In an ideal world, I would advocate for both; in today’s world, the latter provides a veneer of moral high ground that prevents the former from ever becoming a reality. The argument proceeds—as any should—by examining the history.
The incessant racism present in most walks of life leading up to the 1960’s mandated change, so the Civil Rights Movement was propagated for the sake of equalizing the sociopolitical playing field for minorities. Yet, the root cause of inequality stemmed from racist business practices. If the lifeblood of American capitalism is profit, then it comes as no surprise that crooked, racist employers paid minorities less than they deserved, sinking their teeth into the jugular of African-American and Hispanic-American welfare. Social protest gave rise to further prejudice, and it was clear that the government had to step in.
To ensure good faith hiring practices and equal treatment under the law, Civil Rights activists campaigned on a platform of economic equality. The real name of the march where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the prolific “Dream” speech eludes most, but the name says it all: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Jobs for minorities was the goal. Jobs for minorities depended on real institutional change. And as one might guess, jobs were not given to as many minorities as those who marched on August 28, 1963, would have liked. All too slowly, bigotry waned and the social climate began to cool.
Thus ensued affirmative action, which has served the dual purpose of sword and shield. The policy was an outright attack on discrimination—rightly so. Unfortunately, it also evolved into an outright defense of discriminatory neglect. Why donate to a certain charity, fund a certain organization, or support a certain tax bill—all with the aim of aiding disadvantaged communities from the bottom-up—when employers can endorse a cheaper, after-the-fact, strategy (namely, tokenism). This eases the corporate conscience by alleviating some of the pressures of social responsibility. I don’t contend that diversity hiring programs or initiatives of that sort were brewed up with malicious intent. But importantly, it’s impossible to deny that carving out a small subsection of the hiring pool for diverse candidates undercuts the greater efforts of diverse communities at large; i.e., keep your diversity internship program and give us back meaningful change. Without the pressure of the entire demographic weighing upon institutional actors, as was seen during the Civil Rights Movement, the status quo will shift toward progression astonishingly slowly.
Much of the focus on racial issues shifted to universities. The landmark case Bakke v. Board of Regents (1978) set the tone for the public’s reception of anti-racism, inadvertently validating a version of racialism. Notwithstanding my inclination to avoid anachronisms, racialism is best described as misguided woke culture. The manifestation of the idea of diversity into a policy of diversity leads to a paradox that can only be reconciled by a massive undertaking of the project of economic equality, and not by university admissions boards haphazardly factoring race into their calculus. In Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), the Supreme Court demonstrated that affirmative action in the university admissions setting was not the proper means to an egalitarian end. In short, the admissions process could not allocate specific number values to an individual’s skin color because that would maintain an impermissible race quota. Mysteriously yet, race serves an important purpose in hiring/admissions while socioeconomic status (oft more indicative of the struggles one must surmount in their life) takes a subordinate role. Programs like affirmative action serve mostly to ossify the elite class in their position of power by adding more elite individuals—who happen to be racially diverse—into that class.
The lack of intellectual consistency supporting such an argument presents another glaring conundrum. Fighting racism, whether economically motivated or otherwise, requires a rejection of the claim that any person’s skin color is superior to another. A reasoned individual who condemns racism, though, may not condemn racial policies that aim to compensate marginalized groups by addressing past racism. Fair enough, that’s affirmative action. That viewpoint fits squarely within the data, considering racially diverse communities are demonstrably, empirically in need of help by way of reform. Still, there is confusion in deriving a conclusion based on those facts, and it arises from a type 1 type 2 error in the analysis. The hypothesis supporting reform via strengthening and protecting racial groups nullifies the true, viable, and under-exploited hypothesis of reform via improving a group’s economic status. Diversity on campus should be revered as appreciating—in lieu of eliminating—differences among people, and those differences include economic buying power.
As William P. Jones, a historian of the 20th century on race and class, puts it, “we missed the wave” of real economic freedom. To what extent does affirmative action achieve the chief goal of the Civil Rights Movement, and how does it fall short? True economic reform of disadvantaged communities, as opposed to a modern version of numerus clausus, should be remembered as the ultimate goal of equality. True economic freedom, the kind that is compatible with capitalism, was touted endlessly by the quintessential progressive, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but touched upon fruitlessly by 1960’s activists A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. The latter stated in a memo, “integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persists.” The people must not have gotten the memo: racial integration was only the first step in fixing a multi-faceted problem, and we’ve yet to see the follow up.
President Lyndon B. Johnson side-stepped when the window of opportunity was cracked open in the 1950’s and 60’s by large scale social demonstrations and protests. Instead of implementing Rooseveltian economic reforms, LBJ unveiled a façade in his 1964 State of the Union—affirmative action. This half-measure response came as the result of intense legal pressure from a phalanx of union lawyers; unions of the time possessed formidable institutional power despite—or, rather, because of—the prevalence of corruption and crime by Jimma Hoffa and the like. Ultimately affirmative action served as an impermanent, proverbial punching bag for the masses known as institutionalized diversity. Accepting an imperfect solution made sense in light of the epoch’s abhorrent racial discrimination, harrowing the North and utterly engulfing the South. The good folks who fought for universal rights faced against racist whites were temporarily sated after fair hiring practices were implemented and backed by the federal government, but the yearning for equality would ultimately reemerge. The hordes of employers and admissions counselors, glorified by their newfound sense of racial fairness, can now hang their hat on affirmative action. Hiring or accepting just a few more underrepresented (and potentially under-qualified) minorities is a spotty way, at best, to achieve parity between institutional and population-based minority demographics. More needed to be done.
A more acute reading of LBJ’s Executive Order 11246 and Title VII (affirmative action) highlights the drastic incrementalism in the government’s reaction to racism that is measurable by nearly any economic metric. The mere management of economic injustice is not as vital to achieving equality as the effective minimization of economic injustice would be. Creating poorly funded social programs and arbitrarily attributing months dedicated to various minority groups does not generate much money for said groups. Guaranteeing justice for all does not require the preservation of affirmative action, but rather the willingness to step beyond it.
The call for action is laid bare when considering how atrocious American’s past practices were. Racial minorities were subjected to low-skilled slave labor for far too long and the slavers are worthy of the harshest opprobrium. The colonizers and slave traders of the era espoused a nation-building model of the world that would support a laissez-faire industrial complex rife with racial inequities. Powerful Eurocentric empires adopted the oppressive marginalization of minorities as their modus operandi, resulting in the forceful spread of culture through civilizing missions. There was an attendant and radical reduction in the rate of development for the exploited individuals and their affected offspring. In economics, it is axiomatic that labor efficiency positively correlates to the quality of education and technology. And greater efficiency invariably yields higher profits. Even in the 20th century the socioeconomic conditions of minority communities were not nearly as conducive to breeding valuable laborers as their counterparts’ environments were in suburbia and such. Without access to suitable training and educational opportunities, they were further entrenched in the American post-industrial labor dynamic, which was already pitted against minorities for racial reasons.
So, the narrative begins with early colonization slave trade, continues through industrialization with a high demand for low-skilled workers, and finally arrives at affirmative action. Seems like a cop out, as the conditions creating inequality are economic in nature, and the attempted solution is race-based. The main concern should be, how can we create and implement smart policies that are based upon inalienable rights such as economic liberty and property (notwithstanding the discrete renunciation, by way of omission, of Lockean natural law property theory in the U.S. Constitution)? Economic liberation for all entails a willingness to create a safety net so that owning property and affording a better education become commonplace even for the poor. That objective is firmly set in my mind, but the question remains as to how best to get there. I echo the response of many on the political left with a few suggestions: raise the capital gains tax, enact a progressive income tax that skews higher, reduce military spending, and lastly, the pièce de résistance, cut down on special interests lobbying so the election cycle rotates less around who can raise the most money and more on whose ideas win the day.
This is to say that history teaches valuable lessons, but never soon enough. In the framework of affirmative action starting in the mid-1960’s, recall that capitalism and free-market ideology were significant factors in the formation of the American identity. The integration of highly stereotyped and generally uneducated minority labor must have come as something of a shock to anyone who was either inherently racist (granted), or internally motivated to employ higher skilled workers. So from an economic perspective there’s a meta-trade-off surrounding the issue of affirmative action. Are Americans willing to sacrifice profit and surplus gained from higher skilled labor? A response including affirmative action would restore the balance for those whose development was retarded since the outset of colonialism. A better response is to reject the premise that Americans must sacrifice efficiency for equality because that distracts from true economic equality. Taken straight out of the original activist playbook, funding disadvantaged communities goes a lot further than feigning interest in a racialized sense of equality. Investing in communities and spending—big spending, like New Deal spending—would ultimately help places like Compton, CA, yield more higher skilled laborers, obviating the dilemma posed by the affirmative action trade-off.
Yet, that may just be a political pipe-dream, based on the current administration. Historically, too, socialist spending was tainted after the New Deal era, branded as taboo because of overall dismal relations with the U.S.S.R. It isn’t without great scrutiny to believe that victims of ancestral praxis ought not be adequately compensated, and the most effective compensation is money in the pockets of the individuals who comprise poor communities.
The United States has endured much to achieve its current status as global hegemon, but often times we fall short of fixing issues at their base. Operating under the auspices of a lobby-dominated government renders problem-solving akin to putting makeup on a pig. Take, for example, president Bush II’s poor response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. His prior misappropriation of FEMA funds exacerbated the infamous, natural catastrophe, and is cautionary tale about the extent of special interests groups’ power. The mismanagement of one federal agency fund resulted in the widespread neglect of many, mostly disadvantaged, Louisianans. All the while, American taxpayers were helping supply the munitions for a costly war overseas, suiting the interest of warmongering demagogues and private military contractors.
Katrina’s repercussions attracted the guise of race instead of the underlying issue, which is economic class. The main arguments against Bush’s response to Katrina are similar in form to the critique of affirmative action. The claim is simple: Bush didn’t care about Louisianan minorities because he recklessly de-funded FEMA prior to the disaster and and carelessly mismanaged FEMA during, leaving the state in shambles. Further, critics noted that his homogeneous cabinet was exemplary of his indifference toward racial equality. This accusation floating through the mainstream was easily countered when the President hired an African-American Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, among many other high-ranking black members of his administration. Likewise, affirmative action school and workplace measures were a positive step toward the inclusion of minorities in various institutions, but only on a surface level. The crucial morsel to retain from the political discourse surrounding Katrina is the administration’s insistence that the hurricane was powerful and difficult to respond to, rather than admitting there was a lack of preventative warning systems and disaster funds; both are true, but that is the nature of myopic spin doctors. That contrives the same type myopic policy-making that is brought about by affirmative action. The discourse should shift from focusing on atomized incidents of hurricanes and racism into all-encompassing goals like emergency preparedness and greater income equality.
Since FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights Speech in 1944, the idea of economic security and independence has scarcely reappeared in the dialogue of elected political leaders. Indeed, the concept of socialist redistribution of wealth instilled fear, or more accurately a Red Scare, in the American public, but soon the stifled zeitgeist of American exceptionalism will evolve. For now, we’re left with plodding strategies to weed out racism. These are typically met by muddled responses, such as states affecting right-to-work laws and refusing to increase the minimum wage. Ironically, even workers in industrial areas who would benefit the most from strengthening labor law in regard to the middle class categorically dismiss the view that individualized, economic freedom is paramount. Those workers are deterred by the fear of their employers losing the economic freedom to hire responsibly and pay reasonable wages, transitively losing their own freedom to get hired and earn reasonable wages. But that theory is contingent upon adopting a view of trickle-down economics, which is something to be highly skeptical of given the intricacies and avarice of the human condition.
Other people simply don’t see the state, or the public sector in general, as reliable. Why should they have to pay up so that the impoverished other can get a fair shake? Granted, corporatocracy in the U.S. supposedly allows for a sturdy, self-equilibrating marketplace for revenue-generating businesses to function in. That structure aligns with the boot strap mentality of personal growth and outward development, but there’s more to it. The collective will of the people, by the people, and for the people is most readily addressed by a republican form government—not a private entity beholden to quarterly profit reports. This dichotomy between public and private interests depicts affirmative action in its polemical light, as critics maintain that institutional hiring and university admissions practices are less impressive than government-led, long-term measures that would sew a deeper fabric of society. The grand debate on competing interests is emblematic of the main differences between liberals and conservatives. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized the irreconcilable fissure between the two camps by orating one year before his death, “communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social.” While there are many common threads spanning the ideological spectrum and how they relate to affirmative action, it’s unlikely that one side will capitulate without a major restructuring of the mainstream message.
Workers in unionized industries ought to adopt a bottom-up approach. In other words, tear down the barriers of economic integration by embracing cultural diversity as an ethical standard and by raising wages and offering incentives to those in need. This would gradually reduce the rhetorical masking of economic inequality with issues that aren’t necessarily as relevant such as race.
In the past, exploited groups overcame structural sociopolitical coercion by organizing around economic objectives. Perhaps in the future, underrepresented groups will collaborate and reignite the spark that once fueled those large-scale social movements. Overlooking the primacy of economic equality runs the risk of advancing a narrower agenda that is reactionary and not preventative. The widespread awareness of these ideas is vital if we hope to reduce the role of identity politics and desert the notion that an individual’s physical appearance has any bearing on their potential to contribute to society. This may be the generation that experiences the resurfacing of the middle class, and one can only hope that minorities will rise concurrently.