Affirmative Action: The Uniquely American Experiment - The New York Times

Convenient amnesia was an important byproduct of the now dominant view of how to overcome the effects of two hundred years of slavery and one hundred years of legally sanctioned discrimination against African Americans and anyone not "white".  Post World War II people like my family benefited from the "GI Bill" - the comprehensive set of federal benefits that built the suburbs.  Free public colleges, stipends, and government insured VA mortgages for the full purchase price of a newly built single family home.  For whites only due to a Federal Housing Administration requirement of racially harmonious communities.  Patterson aptly labels that as "white affirmative action".  I was a beneficiary of that program, growing up on Long Island in the archetypal post-war 100% white suburb of Levittown, New York.



The United States Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that separate was not equal.  It's directive to dismantle segregation "with all deliberate speed" was met with massive resistance across the south.  Conservative Democrats like Georgia federal appeals judge Griffin Bell opposed "affirmative action", arguing that it was, like prohibition, doomed to fail in the face of cultural resistance.  The Supreme Court. bolstered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, briefly embraced affirmative action, demanding in Green v,. New Kent County (1968) that the dual school system and its effects be eliminated "root and branch".  School busing and other remedies were endorsed by the Supreme Court in Charlotte, N.C. in 1971, when the majority managed to enlist Nixon's Chief Justice Warren Burger.



But that was the high point.  White cultural resistance in the suburbs of Detroit and the City of Boston were fatal to public school integration plans in the "de facto" "voluntarily segregated" northern schools.  Courts could not demand affirmative action if it crossed local school district lines, said Chief Justice Warren Burger in Milliken v. Bradley the 1974 decision voiding a desegregation order encompassing metropolitan Detroit.  So-called "white flight" was treated as a voluntary  cultural phenomenon (viz. soon to be President Jimmy Carter's Attorney General Griffin Bell) beyond the reach of the courts and of the equal protection principles of the Fourteenth Amendment.



Since then affirmative action has hung on by a thread, abjured as a remedy - except for formal legal segregation - a narrow slot remained.  It was carved by the concurring opinion of former railroad lawyer Lewis Powell in Bakke v. Board of Regents. (1977)  "Diversity", he wrote, was a legitimate objective in higher education.  That thin reed is all that has survived the scrutiny of a Supreme Court which repudiates compensation for centuries of slavery and legal apartheid and "white affirmative action".  Even voluntary efforts to achieve integration were repudiated by Chief Justice Roberts for a plurality in Parents Concerned v. Seattle.  The way to stop discrimination by race is to stop discriminating by race, he wrote in a maxim sure to appear in his obituary along with the balls and strikes metaphor that helped him win confirmation by the Senate.



I'll let Melvin Urofsky and his brilliant reviewer Orlando Patterson take it from here. - GWC

Affirmative Action: The Uniquely American Experiment - The New York Times


THE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PUZZLE
A Living History From Reconstruction to Today
By Melvin I. Urofsky

reviewed by Orlando Patterson

For two and a half centuries America enslaved its black population, whose labor was a critical source of the country’s capitalist modernization and prosperity. Upon the abolition of legal, interpersonal slavery, the exploitation and degradation of blacks continued in the neoslavery system of Jim Crow, a domestic terrorist regime fully sanctioned by the state and courts of the nation, and including Nazi-like instruments of ritualized human slaughter. Black harms and losses accrued to all whites, both to those directly exploiting them, and indirectly to all enjoying the enhanced prosperity their social exclusion and depressed earnings made possible. When white affirmative action was first developed on a large scale in the New Deal welfare and social programs, and later in the huge state subsidization of suburban housing — a major source of present white wealth — blacks, as the Columbia political scientist Ira Katznelson has shown, were systematically excluded, to the benefit of the millions of whites whose entitlements would have been less, or whose housing slots would have been given to blacks in any fairly administered system. In this unrelenting history of deprivation, not even the comforting cultural productions of black artists were spared: From Thomas “Daddy” Rice in the early 19th century right down to Elvis Presley, everything of value and beauty that blacks created was promptly appropriated, repackaged and sold to white audiences for the exclusive economic benefit and prestige of white performers, who often added to the injury of cultural confiscation the insult of blackface mockery.

It is this inherited pattern of racial injustice, and its persisting inequities, that the American state and corporate system began to tackle, in a sustained manner, in the middle of the last century. The ambitious aim of Melvin I. Urofsky’s “The Affirmative Action Puzzle: A Living History From Reconstruction to Today” is a comprehensive account of the nonwhite version of affirmative action. This is a complex and challenging historical task, given that “no other issue divides Americans more.” But Urofsky, by and large, has executed it well. Following the United States Commission on Civil Rights, he defines affirmative action as a program that provides remedy for the historical and continuing discrimination suffered by certain groups; that seeks to bring about equal opportunity; and that specifies which groups are to be protected. Urofsky explores nearly all aspects of the program — its legal, educational, economic, electoral and gender dimensions, from its untitled beginnings during Reconstruction to the present. The one major missing part of the puzzle in his otherwise thorough account is the military, which is unfortunate since, as the military sociologist Charles Moskos pointed out, “nowhere else in American society has racial integration gone as far or has black achievement been so pronounced.” This deserved a long chapter.

Urofsky claims not to make the case for or against affirmative action but admits to being “conflicted” on the matter. He distinguishes between what he calls soft and hard affirmative action, the first aimed at removing barriers only, the second attempting positive action that results in the observable betterment of the excluded group. He repeatedly says that he favors soft affirmative action. But, to his credit, the “facts on the ground” that he assiduously marshals indicate that merely providing equal opportunity does not work, for reasons eloquently spelled out by President Lyndon Johnson in his celebrated 1965 commencement address at Howard University: “It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.”


Urofsky reveals that many presidents, administrators and activists, while proclaiming soft affirmative action, have struggled to make it work. Some, like John F. Kennedy, and especially Johnson, as well as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, have publicly voiced their support for colorblind, anti-quota, equal opportunity only, and individualistic rather than group-based approaches, while quietly allowing their administrators to craft pragmatic programs that did just the opposite, to the benefit of the disadvantaged. Some, like Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, have openly attempted to abolish the program but failed. Richard Nixon (who else?) made it the centerpiece of arguably the most Machiavellian strategy in modern American political history: His Philadelphia Plan, with its blatant minority business set-asides and insistence on craft unions’ acceptance of blacks, was the most extreme hard version of the program ever undertaken, resulting in major improvements for blacks at all levels of the economy, to the applause of nearly every black leader. But it was also, deliberately, a key element in his notorious Southern strategy, successfully shattering the traditional bond between white working-class union members and the Democratic Party, and paving the way for the Reagan Democrats and the modern Republican ascendancy.

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