Affirmative Action and After

That’s why black intellectuals and policymakers should reexamine affirmative action, asking how economics might shape the laws and policies that inevitably will replace affirmative action. The writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin, a civil rights activist and strategist, can guide them.
King embraced affirmative action but also believed it should help economically disadvantaged people of both races. He proposed a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, not a Bill of Rights for Blacks, noting that “while Negroes form the vast majority of America’s disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from such a bill. It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor.”

Conservatives quote King’s famous assertion that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin as evidence that he would have been against affirmative action. Yet he believed that affirmative action should benefit African Americans to compensate for past discrimination. “For it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race 300 years after another man,” King wrote, “the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner.” But he also wanted protection for all poor people. He went to Memphis in the spring of 1968 to promote a campaign that would unite low-income people regardless of race.

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The goals of King’s Poor People’s Campaign were never realized, and we’ll never know whether his call for justice would have brought about a bill of rights for the disadvantaged, a measure that he wanted Congress to enact and that he saw as akin to the GI Bill, with grants for education and other opportunities that would achieve “basic psychological and motivational transformation” for the poor. After King’s assassination in April 1968, Rustin, his adviser, continued to write and speak about racial justice and progress until his death in 1987. Rustin was a prominent organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, yet his position in civil rights history is tenuous because of controversial positions he took during his long life and because he was openly gay. One obituary quoted him as saying, “I believe in social dislocation and creative trouble.” His positions, controversial in his time, have aged well.

Rustin witnessed the shift in the status of African Americans from the political margins to a position near the center of power. He foresaw that the transformation would bring some African Americans into the mainstream yet leave others behind. “The prominent racial and ethnic loyalties that divide American society have, together with our democratic creed, obscured a fundamental reality—that we are a class society,” he wrote in a 1971 Harper’s Magazine article titled “Blacks and the Unions.” He recognized that poverty, particularly urban poverty, was tougher to fight than Jim Crow segregation, and that civil rights alone would not address the issues of the African-American community: “Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform.” That holds true today.

By 1974 Rustin believed that affirmative action alone could “do little to help blacks unless it operates in a positive economic framework. An affirmative action program cannot find jobs for the unemployed or help the underemployed into better jobs if those jobs do not exist.” At a congressional hearing, he said he feared that the emphasis on affirmative action would leave poor African Americans behind and could not work to further their economic prospects. It can only succeed, he testified, “when combined with programs which have as their objective a much more fundamental economic transformation than affirmative action could bring about.”

In the 1970s the civil rights establishment marginalized Rustin because he emphasized employment, education, and training for the African-American underclass rather than affirmative action. But his journey into the wilderness gave him time to contemplate the post–civil rights era. Many of his ideas are worth revisiting today to counter those who would dismantle affirmative action and replace it with a colorblind or completely class-based system.

In Rustin’s personal papers, now held by the Library of Congress, I found an undated draft of an article he wrote for The Baltimore Sun on the future of black politics. It could have been written today. Looking beyond the civil rights era, he wondered how the cultural and political change brought about by the movement might evolve. “As in any period of significant social change, the potentials of the new situation cannot be realized until we are liberated from the modes of thought and action of the past. The strategies of the civil rights period were once appropriate, but when outdated they become roadblocks to further progress.” Affirmative action is one of those strategies. We must start working now to assure that it does not become a roadblock.

But how do we approach changing a strategy that has had such success and continue with that success on another level? First of all, an independent presidential commission needs to be put in place to examine what the options might be, with an eye toward an affirmative-action program that would help bring more of the working poor into the middle class. The solution would need to be flexible enough to work in urban as well as rural areas, or in small cities in places as diverse as Alabama, Iowa, and Nebraska, where large numbers of Latino workers have settled to work in factories.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama’s candor about his white mother from Kansas and black father from Kenya signaled a shift in American culture. Early in his campaign for the Democratic nomination, in response to a journalist’s question regarding affirmative action, Obama said that his daughters don’t deserve affirmative-action preferences. He said they “should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged.” Although his view of affirmative action is at odds with prevailing liberal orthodoxy, as an African American of mixed-race heritage, Obama is well positioned to take this position. In his speech on race during the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy, Obama hinted that he understands the impact this shift is having: “We may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction—toward a better future for our grandchildren.”

Liberal or conservative, America must not let affirmative action wither away just because changing it might violate prevailing principles of political orthodoxy. Since the plight of low-income Americans was one of Obama’s campaign themes, he should make retooled affirmative action central to providing a path for people of all races into the middle class.

My generation of African Americans got a better future because of affirmative action, yet we cannot remain focused on the past. None of us can afford to leave another generation behind without any hope of working toward a better future.