Think Differently

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.” Everyone has their inherent flaws, but the hubris of the American people is a short-sightedness that must be addressed.  The political and social focus of racial issues is an erroneous means of avoiding the real problem at hand– economic injustice. In our American Congress, both sides of the aisle employ this furtive method. Fighting against racial tension has now evolved into an issue of ensuring and embracing diversity, which is a twisted outcome of the Civil Rights Movement. On the surface level, the Civil Rights Movement was propagated for the sake of equalizing the socio-politicalplaying field for minorities, but the root cause of inequality stemmed from racist business practices. If the lifeblood of American capitalism is profit, it comes as no surprise that crooked employers prior to affirmative action policies were hiring and paying less to minorities– sinking their teeth into the jugular of African-American welfare.

Bakke v. Board of Regents (1978) set the tone for the public’s reception of anti-racism, but inadvertently validated a notion of racialism. Essentially, diversity should be revered as appreciating–in lieuof eliminating–differences among people. The manifestation of this idea is the paradox at hand. Namely, we missed the wave of the kind of economic freedom that was previously orated by the quintessential progressive, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and touched upon fruitlessly by activists –in large part responsible for the March on Jobs and Freedom– 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.”

In the 1950’s and 60’s the window of opportunity was being cracked open thanks to social movements like demonstrations, protests and rallies, and President Lyndon B. Johnson attempted to seize the moment. However, affirmative action, announced in his 1964 State of the Union, was partly a façade; the half-measure response to intense legal pressure from unions produced an impermanent, proverbial punching bag for the masses– diversity. In light of the abhorrent reign of terror that engulfed American Main Street during the epic battle of universal rights vs. racist whites, biting the bullet made sense opposed to the impossibility of full-on minority-targeted socialism. Government employers could thereby glorify their newfound racial fairness by accepting just a few under qualified, under-represented minorities. The more acute reading of LBJ’s implementation of Executive Order 11246 and Title VII postulates the drastic incrementalism in the government’s reaction to racism that was measurable by nearly any economic metric.

We learned quickly that the management of economic injustice was not as vital to achieving equality as the effective minimization of economic injustice would be. Basically, creating poorly funded social programs and arbitrarily attributing months dedicated to various minority groups does not generate much money for said groups. This notion holds true unless you consider trickle-down the most effective method of generating money for the poor. This question evolves into a much broader theoretical economical debate containing ample empirical evidence on each side. It isn’t so difficult to prove an ideology in its absolute sense since many of these arguments rely upon the submission to an initial, independent clause that makes a strong assumption about human nature. While this is a logical fallacy, it doesn’t nullify the use of normative claims in policymaking. Critiquing existing norms by using that which we know as the foundation will advance the notion of affirmative action running counter to ensuring justice. 

Positivist calculations based on various governmental archives concerning labor in the 20th century indicate that minority labor was overall less skilled. Barring any historiographical disputes, this premise is mutually agreeable and we can move on to the shameful slave history of the United States– mainly the offspring of European nation building and a laissez-faire industrial complex. Years of oppressive marginalization of African-American people and natives was carried out by powerful, Eurocentric empires. This backwards-imperialist mindset was the modus operandi during the creation of these early European states, resulting in the vigorous spread of development through civilizing missions as well as radically reducing the rateof development for the exploited and enslaved. We know as a basic principle in economics that labor efficiency is due to education, technology, and various other considerations; and this efficiency results in higher profit. The American post-industrial labor dynamic was pitted against minorities without suitable training and educational opportunities since their socioeconomic conditions were not nearly as conducive to breeding value as suburbia environments were. So we’ve gone from early colonization slave trade, through industrialization with a high demand for low-skilled workers, and now arrive at affirmative action. The big question in mind is, how do we create and implement policy based upon notions of inalienable rights such as (economic) liberty and (debatably) property, while the means of feeling liberated or owning property are directly related to your value as a worker?

This is to say that history teaches valuable lessons, but never soon enough. To resituate ourselves into the framework of affirmative action starting in the mid 1960’s, we recall that capitalism and free-market ideology are significant factors in the formation of the American identity. The forced integration of highly stereotyped and generally uneducated minority labor must have come as something of a shock to anyone who made money at the time. Now we clearly see the “meta-trade-off” surrounding the issue of affirmative action. Were Americans willing to sacrifice some profit and surplus gained from skilled labor? This would have balanced out the playing field for those whose development was retarded since the outset of colonialism. It isn’t easy to derive the conclusion: victims of ancestral praxis, rife with violence and exploitation, ought to be adequately compensated. A specific type of governance might account for the ills of the past while also allowing for semi-free enterprise capable of growth. However, socialism was smeared, tainted, and branded as taboo because of post-war declines in labor demand as well as overall dismal relations with the U.S.S.R.

The United States has gone through an awful lot to achieve its current status as global hegemon, but often times we fall short of fixing issues at their base because of special interests pouring money and resources into the protection of their sacrosanct ideal. Operating under the auspices of a lobby-dominated government makes problem solving to be just about as good as putting makeup on a pig. President Bush’s poor response to Hurricane Katrina due to the misappropriation of FEMA funds is infamous. This mismanagement of a federal agency resulted in the negligence of the safety concerns of many, mostly disadvantaged, Louisianans. All the while, American taxpayers were helping supply the munitions for a costly war overseas, suiting the interest –primarily- of private military contractors.

This example helps to explain why the guise of race attracts all the attention instead of the underlying issue, which is economic class. The main arguments against Bush’s response to Katrina were similar to those against American schools that were hesitant to adopt diversity policies. The claim was simple: President Bush didn’t care about minorities because of his “racist” dispositions, and his homogenous cabinet is exemplary of his indifference toward true 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 in the Bush administration. Similarly, affirmative action school integration for minorities was a positive step toward impartial inclusiveness, but was also a mere Band-Aid placed upon the gashing wound caused by inequality. The crucial morsel of information to retain from the political discourse surrounding Hurricane Katrina is the administration’s tireless insistence that the hurricane was powerful and difficult to respond to, rather than admitting the lack of preventative warning systems and disaster funds. In order to remedy this type of myopic policymaking, we would have to first see the political focus shift from subjects like hurricanes, race and diversity into objects like emergency preparedness, decreasing income inequality and strengthening the middle class.

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 to the extent of many states adopting right-to-work laws and rejecting higher minimum wages. Ironically, even people in industrial areas who would benefit the most from strengthening labor law in regard to the middle class categorically dismiss this notion. They are deterred by the fear of their employer being forced to pay more, thereby losing his or her economic freedom, and transitively their own; i.e. hire less and offer less internal mechanisms of upward mobility. This is because some people simply don’t see the state, or the public sector in general, as reliable. Granted, corporatocracy in the U.S. allegedly allows for a sturdy, self-equilibrating marketplace for revenue-generating businesses to function in, but the collective will of the people, by the people, and for the people is most readily addressed by republican government. Depicting this dichotomy between worker and labor interests renders any definitive judgments concerning affirmative action polemical.

Workers in unionized industries ought to adopt a bottom-up approach. In other words, tear down the barriers of economic integration not simply by embracing cultural diversity, but 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 asrelevant such as race. Widespread awareness of these ideas is crucial if we hope to reduce the role of reactionary politics, advancing a narrower agenda by marginalizing labor unions. This may be the generation that experiences the resurfacing of the middle class, and we can only hope that minorities will rise concurrently.