The Cold War, Desegregation, and Affirmative Action

As the US Supreme Court aspires to drive a nail into the coffin of affirmative action, it is important to recognize how the Cold War helped to shape the mid-twentieth-century civil-rights people’s victories and the consequent policy of Affirmative Action in education.

Some may find that connecting the conflict between the US and the USSR to the formal establishment of African American citizen rights is far-fetched. 

But the facts speak otherwise. 

The US ruling class crudely portrayed the Cold War as a contest between those defending freedom and equality versus those imposing tyranny and enslavement. The US launched multiple cultural offensives to reinforce these views, sending books, movies, and diverse artistic figures and athletes throughout the world to signal its commitment to those lofty values.

But as the great postwar wave of decolonization swept the world and the US appeared too often on the side of the colonists, the moral high ground seemed impossible to maintain in the eyes of the critical non-aligned nations.

Even more devastating was the ugly face of racial segregation that existed de jure in the Southern, formerly Confederate states, and de facto in the rest of the US, with its accompanying violent enforcement. To the non-white majority of the world, this inhuman practice negated any proclaimed commitment to freedom or equality.

To meet this Cold War crisis, the US ruling class chose an approach that was both least costly to capital and its minions and most burdensome on the working people. Rather than returning to the unfinished business of post-Civil War Reconstruction, rather than attacking segregated housing patterns (disrupting profits in the finance, insurance, and real estate sector), rather than pressing fair employment (impacting corporate and business profits), rather than guaranteeing voting rights and fair representation (disrupting the political status quo), the US ruling class placed the burden of desegregation on those who were among the most vulnerable in US society: children. It was public schools and not neighborhoods, housing, public accommodations, businesses, government agencies, or corporations that would bear the brunt of desegregation.

With the Supreme Court decision-- Brown versus Board of Education-- US elites offered a “victory” against segregation to place before world public opinion. Because it was a court decision made by lifetime appointees, it had little negative impact on elected officials or the fate of their political parties. 

Of course, the court decision was only symbolic unless backed up with enforcement. It is likely that Brown versus Board of Education would have remained symbolic and another gesture of self-righteousness in the cultural Cold War since officials took little interest in forcing it on the bastions of racial segregation.

But Brown versus Board of Education did elevate racism to a place in the public debate. Also, it energized a growing resistance to segregation, adding a new generation of fighters to the struggle and legitimizing the fight. Without the growth and militancy of the peoples’ struggle, any promise offered by the Supreme Court decision would have faded, however.

For the most part, officialdom and the Civil Rights movement operated on parallel tracks, with Federal policies focused on school desegregation in the South and the movement tackling voting rights and desegregating public spaces. Elites largely sought to confine and retard the struggle for racial justice.

Nonetheless, the movement for racial justice forced a series of civil rights acts in the mid-1960s that addressed the harshest aspects of Southern segregation, supporting voting rights and the use of public accommodations, as well as denying workplace and housing discrimination in the US. 

With the murder of the most influential anti-racist leaders, the suppression of urban risings, and the political backlash of Southern reactionaries, the US ruling class called a halt to the school desegregation project. The landmark Millikin versus Bradley Supreme Court decision of 1974 settled the limits of public education desegregation at the border of wealthier suburbs. Desegregation was meant only for poor and working-class schools, and not for the schools of the elite. For US elites-- Cold War optics be damned-- the costs of racial justice would not be borne by wealth and power. No bus would transport urban Blacks to the rolling hills of suburbia; nor would any children of the petty-bourgeois find seats awaiting in city public schools.

Class critically intersected race at that juncture, a reality that continues to shape the contours of anti-racism going forward.

Of course, despite this setback, the struggle against racism continued, but as affirmative action-- a project to go beyond formal, level-playing field equality and place material support behind the economic mobility necessary for substantial equality. Behind affirmative action was the understanding that racial justice was an active process and not a static state of affairs, i.e. nominal equality. In other words, those disadvantaged by racism needed substantial advantages to continue their journey to equality.
Ideally, the impact of affirmative action would be race-neutral. African Americans could gain “advantages” without disadvantaging anyone else: jobs could be created in workplaces where they were underrepresented without denying jobs to any non-Black worker; mentorships and job-training could be made available to all; subsidized new or existing housing could be established; health care could be universal, etc. To use the term popular with pundits, affirmative action could be “win-win.”

When the win-win logic is true of society at large, it is the basis for socialism. 

But that is not the logic of capitalism. Capitalism is relentless competition: what the same pundits call “zero-sum.” Someone must win, someone must lose. When someone applies to the best public school, there is room for one more. When someone applies to a private school, some win, some lose.

Consequently, the logic of capitalist society produces smug winners and disgruntled losers. And affirmative action that advantaged African Americans produced many who were or felt they were disadvantaged. Under capitalism, social progress is always the class struggle over who will sacrifice, who will pay.

Nevertheless, well-intentioned, anti-racist liberals pressed affirmative action on US capitalism with some success. Gertrude Ezorsky, a leading theorist of affirmative action, notes that “A dramatic increase in black employment and promotion occurred at specific companies that adopted affirmative action plans. These companies include AT&T, IBM, Levi-Strauss, and Sears Roebuck,” (Racism And Justice, the Case for Affirmative Action) She also noted that by ”...1982, 20,000 black officers had been added to police forces around the nation.” This squares with the ruling class’s determination to make police and military action against the colored peoples not look like white on Black or white on non-white violence.

Ironically, one of the greatest successes of the affirmative action era was Richard Nixon’s Justice Department-initiated Philadelphia plan to integrate the building trades. Blacks in the Philadelphia building trades went from one per cent of all workers to twelve per cent by 1982.

But as Ezorsky concedes, affirmative action declined drastically in the 1980s: “After 1980 there was a dramatic decline in the enforcement of AA [affirmative action] through the federal compliance program. The effectiveness of AA also declined as a result of Supreme Court decisions during the 1980s.”

With the courts, politicians, and the media fleeing affirmative action remedies that would address material class inequality, liberals and social democrats shaped anti-racism into “glass-ceiling” anti-racism. That is, the battle for racial justice became merely an effort to absorb more African Americans into the petty-bourgeoisie and into elite circles. 

Token or role-model representation is sold as an incentive for working class and poor Blacks. This pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap version of anti-racism reached its zenith with the elevation of Barack Obama into the highest seat of political power. The celebration of Obama, and the relatively robust growth of a Black petty-bourgeoisie, left the inner-city impoverished, powerless, and nourished only by symbolic victories.

The gap between white and Black income and wealth remains relatively the same as half-century ago-- worse for most, better for some. Educational inequities, segregated housing, poor infrastructure, and marginal employment remain the fate of many, if not most African Americans. Urban ghettoization-- once a basis for a measure of racial solidarity-- has been shattered, not by emancipation, but by colonization: the brute force of gentrification.

For the “new” anti-racism-- with its rejection of the class dimension-- language, gestures, symbols, and manners are the target of self-satisfied justice warriors and not material deprivation or class exploitation. Where a leader like Martin Luther King found the continuation of the Black struggle in the fight of Memphis garbage workers seeking better pay, today’s NGO-sponsored “organizers” look to call out verbal clumsiness, historical anachronisms, and “microaggressions.” They look to create “safe spaces” where diversity can be smugly celebrated. They can locate the roots of racism in the twisted minds of white racists, but not in a socio-economic system that benefited, and continues to benefit, from the competition that racism generated and from the super-profits that flowed from a racial division of labor.

Accordingly, the “new” anti-racists are less attentive to the macroaggressions of inferior health care, low-paying jobs, substandard housing, and still segregated, poor education. Since exploitation, poverty, and despair have come into existence, privileged reformers have blamed the victims for the evils that exploitation, poverty, and despair spawn. It is no different with today’s liberals who organize marches, seminars, and rallies decrying the violence and drug use plaguing our poorest communities, while overlooking the meager material conditions that are the fertile soil of social self-destruction.

When commentators announce the death of affirmative action, citing the recent decision, Students for Fair Admissions versus Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College, they are profoundly mistaken. Affirmative action has been dead for a long time, eviscerated, ignored, evaded, and demonized since the 1980s.

Racial preference is deemed necessary at elite, ruling-class training academies like the Ivies because their admissions policies are so riddled with legacy, athletic, donor, and faculty admissions. As guardians of ruling-class liberalism and custodians of ruling-class mythology, these largely private institutions hide the unjustifiable privilege shown to those without merit behind a cynical veneer of racial and ethnic sensitivity, hoping that it will mask class privilege. The Supreme Court decision was not a blow to long-abused affirmative action, but to a cynical system of elite privilege; it was a reminder of its hypocrisy. 

Affirmative action in higher education-- offering, affirming, and sustaining opportunities for Black students-- is easily achievable today in community colleges, colleges, and public universities by simply eliminating the huge student-loan debt that burdens those without means now and going forward. The thousands of public institutions of higher learning are eager to accept students.

Free admissions-- a realistic demand for a peoples’ movement-- would be a long step toward restoring the promise of authentic affirmative action. 

Rather than indulging the current class-blind anti-racist fashion of policing speech, humor, body language, books, and statues, an authentic anti-racism can seek to remove the material roadblocks to equality, as King and his predecessors sought. Of course, there is a cost to equality, a cost to real, and not fanciful, formal opportunity. And that burden should be borne by those who have benefited from racism: the rich and powerful.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Beyond Jeremiads: Fighting Racism

It was inevitable that capitalism would commodify anti-racism. That is what capitalism does with everything.

 

Anti-racism had fallen out of fashion with the election of Barack Obama. While our small, radical left continued to see racism as a scourge on an historically oppressed people, the media celebrated the individual successes of some Blacks as a sign that the barriers to progress were largely removed and we were entering what they wanted us to believe was a post-racial era.

The arming of witnesses with high-resolution smartphone cameras forced anti-racism back into the national conversation. Lurid, graphic videos of police violence against Black youth brought disgust into living rooms, as it did over fifty years earlier with television exposure of the horrors of the war in Vietnam. Consequently, anti-racism experienced a revival, with millions of people across the country and across many demographics raising their voices in protest.

Yet, some saw an opportunity to be seized, a chance for a career, for advancement in a newfound industry of antiracism.

Academic lust for attention-- for the “new” -- birthed the concept of “microaggressions,” the notion that the subtlety of manners, body language, and casual speech carry the germ of racism, indeed, foster racism. 

But microaggressions are to the “macroaggressions” of premature death, poor health care outcomes, grinding poverty, and the super-exploitation facing Black people as headaches are to terminal cancer.

The champion of microaggressions, the leading merchant of the commodification of anti-racism, is unquestionably Robin DiAngelo. Despite no outstanding history in the anti-racism movement, DiAngelo exploded on the national scene with her number one New York Times bestseller, White Fragility. Her book got her unlimited invites on the talk show circuit. And she promptly monetized her fame through lectures and consultancies. Her con was a variation on the “we are all sinners” motif of the holy rollers. Like the stolid burgher in the first pew who must be embarrassed into seeing his or her sinful ways, DiAngelo forces the most racially sensitive liberal or progressive to examine his or her record of awkward moments, verbal stumbles, and clumsy locutions to find that “we are all racists.” She is quick to point out that her exorcisms of microaggressions do not lead to redemption, but must be repeated again and again interminably.

I have written about Robin DiAngelo before, unapologetically excoriating her book, her sanctimony, and her vulgar commercialization of her bogus anti-racism. Now she has a new book, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People perpetuate Racial Harm, and is again making the rounds of the talk shows. Her recent interview on CBS This Morning was typically cringeworthy, citing racial social etiquette as though it were on a par with lynching. She recounts a story of a dinner 30 years ago in which she clumsily sought to impress African American guests with her own racial sensitivity, a gambit that she elevates to a major act of white supremacy.

Matt Taibbi tells us (Our Endless Dinner with Robin DiAngelo) that the new book is simply a plagiarizing of White Fragility, though I wouldn’t know since I refuse to add to the DiAngelo phenomenon by buying the book. Taibbi performs a neat piece of gonzo journalism on the book, mocking her self-righteousness and superiority with his usual sarcastic wit.

However, there is a problem with our shared disgust with DiAngelo’s hucksterism.

It is not enough to simply call her out. Racism is real. DiAngelo’s popular pseudo-anti-racism shields millions of people from an authentic confrontation with the raw ugliness of racism; it leads people to believe that the barriers to racial justice have been overcome, excepting interpersonal relationships; it spotlights feelings, emotions, sensitivities over the hard evidence of racial oppression. In short, Robin DiAngelo deflects attention away from the heavy material burden that racism actually places on Black people.

Unfortunately, Taibbi and others who correctly criticize DiAngelo’s peddling of anti-racism often fail to affirm the actualities of racism, the material consequences of white supremacy.

In the last few weeks, articles have surfaced documenting the scandalous consequences of material racism.

The New York Times ran an article on June 28 with the odd, provocative title Black Workers Stopped Making Progress on Pay. Is It Racism?. The heading was odd because the article actually documents that the gap between Black male and white male earning has actually widened in the last 50 years! When was there progress?

Black men, on average, earned 56 cents for every dollar earned by their white counterparts in 2019 when adjusted for unemployment rates, according to The New York Times. 

The pay gap has persisted for generations, despite the fact that African Americans have dramatically reduced the education gap. Liberal ideologues have long argued that differences in wealth and income are driven by educational differences. But that excuse for racism evaporates in the face of the facts: “While African Americans lag behind whites in educational attainment, that disparity has narrowed substantially over the last 40 years. Still, the wage gap hasn’t budged.”

The seemingly intractable wage gap of 20% for all Black workers when compared to their white counterparts has a name. It is “structural racism.” “Racism,” because it damages its victims profoundly and with long-term consequences. “Structural,” because it super-exploits Black workers, enabling a pattern justifying lower wages for all workers and to the benefit of capitalist enterprises. 

It might be asking too much for a white “progressive” like Robin DiAngelo to bring these facts before the audience that allegedly brings her three-quarters of a million dollars a year in lecture fees. Evidence of decades of cheating Blacks of fair compensation surely deserves as much attention as regretted words over a dinner at a nice restaurant in a nice neighborhood.

Perhaps DiAngelo also overlooked the life expectancy numbers that came out in the wake of the pandemic from both the CDC and The BMJ (associated with the British Medical Association). Not surprisingly, US citizens, in general, lost more life expectancy from our failing, for-profit health care system than did our counterpart countries with national or single-payer systems (“8.5 times the average decrease in 16 comparable countries..”).

But the dramatic difference between whites and Blacks (and Latino y Latinas) is a national disgrace. Where The BMJ claims that the average white person in the US lost 1.4 years of life expectancy at birth between 2018 and 2020, the average life expectancy of Blacks dropped 3.25 years (and Latino y Latinas by 3.9 years)!

Quoted by NBC News, Steven Woolf, who led The BMJ study and is director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, said “What I didn’t anticipate was how badly the U.S. would handle the pandemic… These are numbers we aren’t at all used to seeing in this research; 0.1 years is something that normally gets attention in the field, so 3.9 years and 3.25 years and even 1.4 years is just horrible,” Woolf said. “We haven’t had a decrease of that magnitude since World War II.”

Life expectancy for Black men is now just below 68 years (68.3 in CDC data for 2020). That means that the average Black male will pay into Social Security and Medicare and see little or none of the benefits, a cruel consequence of the racism built into a dysfunctional social welfare and health care system.

The gap in life expectancy between Blacks and whites is now 5.81 years! Whether it is racialized health care or impoverishment or some other inequality that accounts for this gap, the result is a national scandal.

But more significantly, these numbers underscore outcomes that are baked into US institutions and do demonstrable harm to African Americans. The US socio-politico-economic system systematically produces and reproduces material deprivations on Black people, guaranteeing a second-class citizenship for generations to come.

Television interviews, self-help books, book club readings, sermons, and jeremiads have little impact on these obstacles to racial justice. Shaming, cajoling, or sensitivity training will not break the grip of racism on the material condition of Black People in the US.

Instead, we must impose racial justice on our institutions. We must insist upon workplace representation that reflects our multinational, multi-ethnic society. Popular notions of education reform, elevating role models, promoting inspirational talks, or leaving justice to the market have shown that they will not work.

Every past effort to rectify the economic inequalities imposed by racist practices-- from forty acres and a mule to workplace affirmative action-- has been met with resistance from wealth and power. When the discussion turns to reparative racial justice, the DiAngelos of the world and their corporate promoters stare at their shoes. They would rather talk about racism than incur the economic costs that would come with restorative change. That might cost their bottom line.

Less of Robin DiAngelo’s hustle, more affirmative action!

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Anti-Racism: Back to Affirmative Action

The situation of blacks in the workplace without AA [Affirmative Action] is not difficult to imagine. The racist impact of irrelevant job requirements will continue, perpetrating the victimizing effects of inferior ghetto education and the racial bias that has denied blacks training and work experience. Unless AA measures reduce the racist impact of seniority-based layoff, blacks will, as always, move down during recessions into unemployment. Should blacks wait until recessions are eliminated (until capitalism is fundamentally restructured) to achieve job security? Without AA, desirable jobs will be distributed through a white pipeline, as an ingrained practice in America’s two segregated societies.

...The aim of AA is to break that racist barrier. Without that pressure, even in an expanding economy, occupational segregation will continue. Blacks will remain second-class citizens. Gertrude Ezorsky, Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action, 1996.

The question of racial oppression in the US against peoples of African origin remains unsettled well over two hundred years after the country’s foundation.

Some would like to believe that the question was substantially solved after the Civil War with the liberation of African slaves from their bondage.

Still others would like to believe that the question was largely solved with the Civil Rights “revolution” of the 1960s when legal segregation was overturned and historical racially-based legal obstacles to voting were abolished.

And still others would like to believe that the final racial barrier was shattered when Barack Obama was elected, breaking the ultimate glass ceiling.

For many well-meaning liberals, only a mopping-up of the vestiges of racism remains: the abusive impact of language, attitudes, individual relations, micro-aggressions, etc. remain problematic. And, of course, these attitudes can fester into collective violence organized by the police or the so-called “alt-right.” From this perspective, the race question can neatly be absorbed into a vast rainbow of worthy causes, an intersection of dozens, if not hundreds, of group grievances for which liberal academics have concocted an umbrella word: “intersectionality.”

The wholly unique history of depredation and alienation experienced by a people forcibly “exported” to foreign lands for slave labor and subsequently scorned because of skin color is cast into a cauldron of -ism’s that range from the most benign to the most harsh, systemic, and unimaginably violent, elevating the slight and trivializing the brutal.

It is the relativizing of oppression that allows vast numbers of otherwise disinterested citizens to remonstrate against second-hand smoke while ignoring the slaughter of hundreds of thousands at the hands of the US military in its imperial campaigns throughout the world.

African Americans today fall behind their white counterparts in every objective, material standard of well-being, from life expectancy to accumulated wealth. Despite the relative successes of an upper stratum (petty bourgeoisie) of US Blacks who have parlayed education, social or political contacts, professional prowess, ethnocentric entrepreneurship, or fealty to power to its advantage, most African Americans occupy the lowest, most precarious rungs of the US working class.

Black citizens often live in bantustan-like neighborhoods, isolated from better housing, better schools, and better human services. Where Northern, urban African Americans have historically been confined to city ghettos, they are now being ethnically cleansed from inner cities by a process of gentrification motivated by young, white professionals enamored with the amenities of urban living. Today, Blacks are herded into declining suburban ghettos where they were formerly denied residence.

It is no exaggeration to say that the segregation of Blacks and whites is as great or even greater than ever, with a consequent disparity of advantage.

The Liberal Moment

The high point of progress against racism and its effects occurred in the 1960s coincident with the growth in breadth, militancy, and unity of many decades of anti-racist activism. New Deal liberals, prodded by a largely Communist left and CIO working-class radicalism laid the foundation for the direct action and broad-based movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Democratic Party, long an unholy alliance of Northern liberals and Southern racists, acutely felt the pressure from this movement. A unique conjuncture of sympathy for an assassinated President’s initiative, the rare audacity of a succeeding President, Lyndon Johnson, obsessed with leaving an historic legacy and repairing the international image of the US, widespread outrage over officially sanctioned violence in the South, and, most importantly, a disruptive mass movement for racial justice culminated in unparalleled legislation expanding civil, political, and human rights for US Blacks. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked the high-water point in the struggle against racism. The history since that juncture has been one of defending, enforcing or, most tragically, witnessing the erosion of those gains.

To a great extent, the gains of the 1960s reached the limits of bourgeois democratic, rights-based reform. Unlike a revolutionary change brought on by the US Civil War, a war that overturned an entire politico-socio-economic system (while leaving the deplorable material conditions of Blacks largely intact), liberal reformism promises opportunity but does not promise the delivery of outcomes. In other words, liberal reformism may open closed doors without providing the means to pass through those doors.

The legislation of the mid-1960s opened many doors for African Americans, but failed to offer most of them the material essentials-- the education, the jobs, the living conditions, etc.-- to successfully pass through those doors toward real equality.

Just as the promise of 40 acres and a mule never materialized to liberate former slaves, liberal reformism fails to offer Blacks the socio-economic foundation that would liberate the African American working class in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To grant that foundation would challenge the most sacred values of capitalism and open further doors to the emancipation of the entire working class.

The aftermath of the Civil Rights era brought two promising developments: a movement to desegregate public schools in both the South and the North and an emerging commitment to affirmative action.

Beyond the Limits of Reformism?

School Desegregation

Of all of the potential reforms targeting racism, desegregating public schools and forcing children to bear the burden of social change was the least likely to come at a cost to capitalism or disrupt existing power relations. Nonetheless, there was great promise in dramatically improving the education available to Black youth by putting them in the same classroom with white youth, where the quality of teaching, resources, facilities, and options are consistently higher.

While minimalist in economic sacrifice, public school integration met intense opposition from highly organized racists who rallied many under the bogus banners of “forced busing,” “school choice,” and “neighborhood schools.” It made no difference that elites had embraced publicly subsidized busing and travel out of neighborhoods for their children’s attendance at private and parochial schools. The hypocrisy was only underscored by the use of busing and the abandonment of neighborhoods to avoid attendance at integrated schools.

Nonetheless integration of city schools persisted. Of course the problem of better education for Blacks remained unsolved because of the even greater class disparity between urban and suburban schools. To achieve some parity for Blacks would necessarily involve consolidating school districts across this class line at some additional material cost and with social and political cost to the existing racial barriers.

This dramatic step for parity education for African Americans was quashed with the Burger Supreme Court decision of 1974, Milliken v. Bradley.

The Burger majority effectively removed any legal obligation of suburban school districts to participate in school desegregation unless they could be shown to be intentionally racist, placing an untenable onus upon reformers. The urban Detroit school district was 75% Black when it originally appealed for judicial relief. With the Supreme Court denying relief, it was 90% Black by 1987.

Dissenting Justice Douglas caustically noted: “...the task of equity is to provide a unitary system for the affected area where, as here, the State washes its hands of its own creations.” One should clarify: the capitalist state washes its hands of its own creation.

With a substantial legal obstacle placed before it, the reformist desegregation movement collapsed well before it achieved any real educational parity for African Americans. Liberal reformist leaders surrendered without a further fight. Since Milliken v Bradley, it has been a persistent battle to protect the limited gains made from opportunist politicians.

Beyond the Limits of Reformism?

Affirmative Action

The other promising reform stoked by the Civil Rights movement-- and potentially the most significant-- was the policy of affirmative action, a policy designed to move beyond allowing participation in the US economy to actually leveling the employment playing field for US Blacks. Marxist political economist, Victor Perlo, calls affirmative action “...the principal mechanism designed to reduce discrimination against African Americans.”

Among the most thoughtful, passionate advocates for affirmative action is the liberal philosopher Gertrude Ezorsky. Her brief, concise book, Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action, is the classic on the policy. From first reading her book many years ago, I remember well her central datum that jobs are acquired overwhelming through contacts or personal networks. It caused me to reflect on my own work history from digging a basement for a neighbor when I was thirteen through the rest of my employments. Without exception, every job was gotten through family, friend, or other acquaintance. Every thoughtful person, except for the mythical “self-made man/woman,” will concede this datum.

Of course this means that those limited to the worst jobs through racism will only produce and reproduce, through their limited networks, still others locked into bad jobs.

It is this cycle that affirmative action promises to break by guaranteeing Black representation in workplaces proportional to African American representation in the population.

While ‘60s liberals acknowledged both the necessity and promise of affirmative action (Title 7, Civil Rights Act 1964), they were slow to devise plans or seek implementation of the policy. Ezorsky notes that, ironically, two of the more effective plans were enacted during the Nixon Administration. The 1969 Labor Department Philadelphia Plan saw the representation of Blacks in the construction trades go from 1% to 12% in Philadelphia. And Nixon’s 1971 Executive order 11246 required “that dated numerical targets for hiring, training, and promoting minorities be set by firms that hold government contracts but have underutilized minorities…” (Ezorsky, p.37)

Affirmative action got as much attention in the 1976 Democratic Party platform as did fisheries. When mentioned, it was conflated with the Black unemployment rate. Even less attention was given by the Carter Administration, in practice.

Ezorsky concedes that “[t]he affirmative action programs begun in the 1960s have been diminished in the 1980s in response to a different political climate.”

The Democratic National Committee’s 1986 83-page statement of principles, New Choices in a Changing America, written and endorsed by the Party’s luminaries, contains not one endorsement (or mention) of affirmative action. In its place were vague policies directed at unemployment and job training.

Affirmative action was dead.

Racial Justice

Because Ezorsky grasps the historical specificity of US racial oppression, she recognizes a strong need for restorative justice, a justice that must go beyond merely establishing opportunity. The liberal conception of justice as fairness-- everyone playing by the same rules-- professes a distance, a willful blindness to outcomes. But blindness to outcomes fails to acknowledge that inequality of means determines outcomes even when equality of opportunity is assured.

Thus, an equal opportunity to apply for acceptance from Harvard means little to the gifted African American student saddled with a third-rate education; an “equal opportunity” job-training program in the suburbs means nothing to a motivated potential employee lacking the financial resources to travel to the suburbs; and the right to stay at the Greenbrier resort counts for little to the vacationer who would have to devote an entire paycheck for a visit.

Of course it is the class dimension that arises with these examples, an “intersection” with racism that academics and “middle class” liberals seldom recognize.

Consequently, restorative justice-- like affirmative action, but unlike merely establishing civil rights-- depends on a redistribution of society’s resources. For Blacks to finally enjoy justice, they must acquire a material foundation beyond newly minted rights in order to participate productively in society and enjoy its benefits.

Obviously capitalism opposes any redistribution of assets or any reordering of power relations, unless it comes at the expense of the working class. And that opposition explains the stillbirth of affirmative action. It has disappeared almost entirely from the mainstream conversation.

Could affirmative action succeed in bringing racial justice to African Americans under capitalism?

Probably not, but the struggle for affirmative action would bring Blacks closer, and would attack racism at its core.

Anti-racism for the Twenty-first Century

The shallow and patronizing anti-racism that occupies much of the left-- the language-scolding, the tokenism, the guilt-driven deference-- leaves the structure of racial oppression untouched.

Nor does the idea of “reparations” attack that structure. Reparations draw upon hollow legalisms: the notion that a retributive settlement can be negotiated with a guilty party and magically restore justice to a people kept back for centuries. It fundamentally looks to the past, promising to repair damages incurred, but with no promise of delivering future justice. Further, reparations fail to explain how any settlement would be distributed in a way that benefits those most aggrieved. Like other liberal answers to racism, it fails to recognize the fact of class.

Any attack on the structure of US racism must recognize that eliminating the racial ghettos of poverty, inferior education, poor housing, mass incarceration, poor health care etc. must attack the economic ghetto of centuries of super exploitation, unemployment, underemployment, and inadequate jobs.

In his classic reprise on the subject, Economics of Racism II, Victor Perlo writes:

A program to achieve economic equality [for Blacks] has two main requirements:

1. Affirmative action; that is, specific measures to improve the economic conditions of African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and sections of the Asian population;
2. Measures to advance the conditions of the entire working class. (Perlo, p. 281)

Any anti-racist reforms must, therefore, revisit affirmative action. An authentic People's anti-racist strategy must place restorative measures at the center of our efforts-- measures that afford African Americans the minimal means to march through the doors of opportunity won in the great Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com