Review of The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action

From The Leadership Seminar, Washington D.C., 1996

On the one hand, the opponents of affirmative action are trying to hold on to the colorblind principle, which is an important one, from the 1960s. It remains important today. We have seen in the past 30 years what has happened when we engage in a system of race and gender preferences. Many people would argue that these preferences have not closed the racial gap that if anything our society is more divided by race than ever. On the other hand, the proponents of affirmative action are quite right to point to the history of discrimination in this country, to say that we need to do something proactive to address this history and that we cannot simply declare ourselves to be colorblind and wish away our tragic past.

Anyone who goes into the affluent communities surrounding Washington will know that we do not live in a colorblind society. If one sees African Americans and Latinos, the chances are good that they are not there because they are residents of these neighborhoods but rather because they are helping to mow the lawns and take care of other peoples’ children. And so we are not to the point where we can simply declare ourselves colorblind and move on.

There have been two ways in which people have tried to resolve the competing issues posed by affirmative action, two major sets of compromises. The worst is the one the Clinton administration has embraced. They have essentially said that race may be one factor in deciding who gets into college or who gets a contract or who gets a promotion but that we will not use quotas in our society; those are forsworn.

Some people have called this compromise the "Bakke Straddle" going to Justice Powell’s opinion in the famous case from the 1970s. Justice Powell said that race may be a factor in admission at the University of California at Davis Medical School but that there could be no quotas. In the end, this compromise doesn’t seem to have washed with the American public. If we were to envision the reverse situation where a white employer told a Black or Latin applicant, "Well I’m not going to set aside a number of spots for white people, but I am just going to use race as one factor against you," it would be seen by all of us as intolerable.

So any deviation from the principle that race ought not to matter in who gets ahead is going to be problematic with the American public. The second compromise which is the one which I propose in my book The Remedy is that we base any special help or preferences on class or socio-economic status rather than on race or gender. The roots of this argument are not found in Justice Powell’s opinion in Bakke but rather in the writings of Martin Luther King.

In his book, Why We Can’t Wait, from 1964, he discussed what was then bubbling up as a controversy, the question of compensatory action to address our history of discrimination. He came out against preferential treatment based on race and argued instead to give special help to those who are disadvantaged.

I just want to read a couple of statements that he made in this regard. He argued that clearly we needed to do something to address the history of discrimination.

He then proposed a bill of rights for the disadvantaged rather than a bill of rights for the Negro He says,

“ While Negroes form the vast majority of America’s disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from a bill of rights for the disadvantaged. 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 forgotten white poor."

It is interesting if you just look at the rhetoric he’s using. He’s talking about justice rather than diversity, which has become kind of the new goal. I think that if one were to rank these various values, historically the notion of justice is a much more powerful one than that of diversity, as good as diversity is.

Bayard Rustin, who I consider one of my heroes, made a similar argument several years later. He said,

“Any preferential approach postulated on racial or ethnic or sexual lines will only disrupt a multicultural society and lead to a backlash. However, special treatment can be provided to those who have been exploited or denied opportunities if solutions are predicated on class lines precisely because all religious and racial groups have a depressed class that would benefit."

The argument here is two-fold. It is a matter of fairness. It is hard to justify giving a leg up to an applicant to college who comes from a minority background but also a privileged background. Clarence Thomas used to argue that his son did not deserve a preference in college admissions over the son of a poor white applicant. I hasten to add that there are many areas where I disagree with Clarence Thomas, but, having said that, I thought it was a powerful point particularly given his own background. He is someone, I think, who by all measures of desert and justice should have been given a leg up considering the disadvantaged background he came from. But now that we have a new generation represented by his son, I think it becomes much more problematic.

The second major argument for this type of approach that King cited is, quite frankly, politics. He said that in no way would the white working class accept the idea of providing preferences solely on the basis of race. That would break up the progressive coalition, and it is interesting to note that Richard Nixon who was one of the first proponents, active proponents of affirmative action, much more so than Lyndon Johnson. Nixon saw this potential of breaking up the progressive coalition as an obvious attraction to any program of affirmative action.

In fact, there is evidence from the memoirs of members of his administration that he pushed the Philadelphia plan precisely as a way of pitting labor and civil rights groups against each other and that the antagonism that developed during the 1970s was actually quite pleasing to him.

So I argue in the book that we should provide preferences based on class rather than on race. So, for example, in college admissions, someone who came from a disadvantaged background who had had to overcome obstacles and had done fairly well despite those obstacles, would be given a preference. We would no longer simply do it on race.

Now When I talk about this idea of class-based affirmative action, I usually get two objections, and so I would like to try and address them very briefly. The first says "Doesn’t the notion of shifting to class rather than race assume that our problems of racism and discrimination have been eliminated?"

My response is, "No, we ought to beef up our enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, those laws aimed at achieving color blindness." There are areas where those laws can be strengthened. Certainly we need more funding for enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. However, we do not need to go to the next step of favoritism or preferential treatment based on race.

The second major question I get concerns how such a program would work in practice. In Chapter 5 of my book, I go into some detail about how a class-based affirmative action program would work. There have been many conservative commentators who have argued in theory for replacing race-based with class-based affirmative action. Dinesh Desouza, Clarence Thomas, Justice Scalia, all of these individuals have made the argument, but none have laid out in any detail how it would work. I try to fill that gap. In the university admissions context, it is easy to apply. There are a number of universities that do provide preferences for disadvantaged applicants today. Temple University Law School is one example. Berkeley has now moved towards the system. The University of California system as a whole is likely to move to a form of preferences based on class out of necessity, given that the race-based preferences will no longer be permissible.

In the context of contracting, President Clinton has outlined how we can provide preferences based on class rather than race. He has in his economic plan a system of preference set-asides for businesses that locate in distressed areas. I think it is clear that that is a workable position and one that can be replicated. It bases the decision on disadvantage rather than race.

In the employment context, we can provide preferences based on class in entry level positions. It doesn’t make sense to provide a leg up to someone who many years ago may have come from a disadvantaged background but who now is doing quite well. With entry level positions, there is a strong argument for giving disadvantaged people a leg up, those individuals who don’t go to college but go straight into the work force.

Finally, what is likely to happen in the future? Is this merely a pipe dream or is there a clear interest in both political parties in moving away from race and gender based preferences to what might be called class-based affirmative action. The President, before he started his affirmative action review, said that he wanted to go to programs based on need rather than race because they generate broader public support. Newt Gingrich has talked about replacing affirmative action with something positive rather than simply wiping it out. I think that clearly the addition of Jack Kemp to the Republican ticket increases the chances that we will actually see a form of class-based affirmative action implemented one day.

I’m working on an article now for the New Republic magazine about Jack Kemp and affirmative action, and I think his views about the subject are much more nuanced and interesting than the media has indicated. They play up his reversal on the California Civil Rights initiative. That kind of initiative, which forces a pro or con choice, either you are for race preferences or you are against, is difficult for an individual like Kemp who is looking for a third way. It’s understandable that he would have difficulty with that false choice.

I think what we are likely to see is that the California civil rights initiative will pass, and then we will see progressives who have thus far attacked the notion of class-based affirmative action come around to the view that it is the best alternative that is legally and politically sustainable, and I hope that at that point I hope we will see liberals call the bluff of conservatives on this and develop together a meaningful way of promoting equal opportunity.