Affirmative Action and After
Now is the time to reconsider a policy that must eventually change. But simply replacing race with class isn’t the solution.
My white grandfather chose to live and raise his family in a black community in the Jim Crow South and cast a blind eye to traditional racial lines. At that time in Alabama, a citizen’s race was determined by the so-called one-drop rule: anyone with a trace of African ancestry could not be considered Caucasian. Despite the documents identifying them as white, and despite years of census records describing them as Caucasian, the children of Jim and Edna Richardson lived as black people. At the same time, my black grandmother, white grandfather, and their children simply ignored the Jim Crow trappings of state-sanctioned shame and inferiority, and that denial is a source of my strong racial and cultural identity.
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Examining laws and courthouse records, I discovered how severely my family was disadvantaged economically by choosing a black identity. When my grandfather died, my mother and her siblings could not inherit his substantial estate because the state of Alabama did not recognize as legitimate the children of an interracial marriage. Before his death, my grandfather deeded most of his landholdings to his children, but they could not inherit his liquid assets. As a result, the disparity in affluence between middle-class blacks and whites resonates in my family.
Two generations down the line, my grandparents’ great-grandchildren live in an interracial home unencumbered by state-imposed legal restrictions or culturally imposed identities. My children are part of a growing population of individuals who do not fit traditional racial and ethnic pigeonholes, the very categories that are used to determine affirmative-action preferences. Over 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, some seven million people, reported being members of more than one race in the 2000 census, the first to allow participants to “check all that apply” in the category of race. A 2004 estimate from the Census Bureau shows that 46 percent of this multiracial population is younger than 18. When the 2010 census is tabulated, the multiracial category will probably increase as Asians and Hispanics—who intermarry with members of other groups at rates higher than whites and blacks—will make up more of the overall population.
Home for spring break last year, my son Patrick, who attends a New England boarding school, told me that his fellow students told him during a late-night bull session that he “has it made” when it comes to college prospects because of his affirmative-action status. Patrick and I agreed that there is a need for some members of the minority population to continue receiving affirmative-action benefits. And yet, I thought, the one-drop rule endures. What disadvantages had Patrick encountered in his life that would make him a candidate for affirmative action? He couldn’t think of any. Like many other middle-class children of his generation, he and his two siblings have known no impediments comparable to attending segregated schools and using outdated, handed-down textbooks from white schools. In one generation, our family’s middle-class experience has gone from predetermined limits to few limits and even some advantages.
The changes came about in spite of the fact that across three generations my family has fallen under racial classifications based on ancestry, skin color, an ideology of colorblindness, and now what I perceive to be a deepening of the one-drop rule. Like much of our civil rights legislation, affirmative action was conceived in an era when the one-drop rule was the only way for people of mixed race to construct an ethnic identity. My children are constructing social identities outside the traditional racial boundaries by which affirmative-action preferences are determined, yet for affirmative-action status they are considered to be black. And their middle-class African-American peers also have affirmative-action status, as do those from minority groups who may be their family’s first generation to attend college. This doesn’t seem quite right.
As an affirmative-action beneficiary, I feel like a heretic for even contemplating the retooling of a system under which I thrived. I don’t perceive America today as a post-racial society, but I do believe we are well into a post-civil-rights-movement era. Discrimination and racism persist in segments of our society. As the fortunes of the black middle class rise and race becomes more fluid in some segments of American society, the black underclass remains poor, poorly educated, and increasingly separated from the mainstream. More and more, social class, rather than race, determines one’s fortunes. A recent study by the Pew Research Center underscores this change, concluding that “African Americans see a widening gulf between the values of the middle class and poor blacks.”
What can those of us in the black middle class do to narrow the gulf? I endorse the ideals of racial equality fought for during the civil rights movement and believe they must be extended to poor and disadvantaged Americans. As we, the children of the civil rights movement, become middle-aged and mainstream, we seem to have lost sight of these ideals. Somehow we must reclaim them before what we now know as affirmative action is dismantled in a way that is detrimental to all Americans below the poverty line.
Legislation banning affirmative action has already passed in California, Michigan, and Washington State. Michigan’s ban on affirmative action, called Proposal 2, passed largely in response to Grutter v. Bollinger. A referendum to ban affirmative action in Nebraska was just approved in the November 4 election. Affirmative action as we know it is slowly being chipped away, and little is being done to reshape it. For years, conservatives have been calling for a class-based system of affirmative action. Yet given that disadvantaged members of minority groups tend to perform academically at a lower level than disadvantaged whites, a totally class-based system will not work equitably. What is needed is a middle ground that examines where affirmative action has been, what it has achieved, and how we can reshape it for today’s realities, all the while keeping sight of its historic goals. Class alone cannot replace race as the basis for an affirmative-action remedy; we need new criteria to deal with continuing educational and racial inequities in the United States. In places as different from one another as the Mississippi Delta and Anacostia in Washington, D.C., race is still a big factor in educational and social opportunities. And as the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University has noted, schools are resegregating not only on racial lines but also on class lines. In the South, where much of this resegregation is taking place, middle-class African Americans are likely to attend a segregated school that also has a concentration of poverty as well as limited resources. Racial inequities have simply not been replaced by class inequities. The overall equation is far more complex than class alone.
