The Mother of All Racial Preferences: Affirmative
Action Meets the System of White Privilege
By Tim Wise
Ask a fish what water is and you'll get no answer, and not
only because fish lack the capacity to speak.
Even if
they were capable of vocalizing a reply they would likely have none for such a
question. When water surrounds one every
minute of every day, explaining what it is becomes difficult if not
impossible. It simply is. It's taken for
granted.
So too with this thing we hear so much about called
"racial preference." While many whites seem to think the notion
originated with affirmative action programs, intended to expand opportunities
for historically marginalized people of color, racial preference has actually
had a long and very white history.
Affirmative action for whites was embodied in the abolition
of European indentured servitude, which left black (and occasionally
indigenous) slaves as the only unfree labor in the colonies that would become
the
Affirmative action for whites was the essence of the 1790
Naturalization Act, which allowed virtually any European immigrant to become a
full citizen, even while blacks, Asians, and American Indians could not.
Affirmative action for whites was the guiding principle of
segregation, Asian exclusion laws, and the theft of half of
In recent history, affirmative action for whites motivated
racially-restrictive housing policies that helped 15 million white families
procure homes with FFIA loans from the 1930s to the '60s, while people of color
were mostly excluded from the same programs.
In other words, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that
white
Like the fact that white families, on average, have a net
worth that is eleven times the net worth of black families according to a
recent study; and this gap remains substantial even when only comparing
families of like size, composition, education and income status.
Or like the fact that a full-time black male worker in 2003, makes less in real dollar terms than similar white men
were earning in 1967. Such realities are not merely indicative of the
disadvantages faced by blacks, but indeed are evidence of the preferences
afforded whites-a demarcation of privilege that is the necessary flipside of
discrimination.
Indeed, the value of preferences to whites over the years
is so enormous that the current baby-boomer generation of whites is currently
in the process of inheriting between $7-10 trillion in assets from their
parents and grandparents--property handed down by those who were able to
accumulate assets at a time when people of color by and large couldn't.
To place this in the proper perspective we should note that
this amount of money is more than all the outstanding mortgage debt, all the
credit card debt, all the savings account assets, all the money in IRAs and
401k retirement plans, all the annual profits for U.S. manufacturers, and our
entire merchandise trade deficit combined.
Yet few whites have ever thought of our position as
resulting from racial preferences. Indeed, we pride ourselves on our hard work
and ambition, as if somehow we invented the concepts.
As if we have worked harder than the folks who were forced
to pick cotton and build levees for free; harder than the Latino immigrants who
spend ten hours a day in fields picking strawberries or tomatoes; harder than
the (mostly) women of color who clean up messy hotel rooms, or change bedpans
in hospitals, or the (mostly) men of color who collect our garbage--a
crucial service without which we would face not only unpleasant smells but the
spread of disease.
We strike the pose of self-sufficiency while ignoring the
advantages we have been afforded in every realm of activity: housing,
education, employment, criminal justice, politics, banking, and business.
We ignore the fact that at most every turn, our hard work
has been met with access to an opportunity structure to which millions of
others have been denied similar access. Privilege, to us, is like water to the
fish: invisible precisely because we cannot imagine life without it.
It is that context that best explains the duplicity of the
President's criticisms of affirmative action at the
Yet in doing so he has not only showed a profound ignorance
of the
To wit, the President has attacked
Yet what Bush fails to mention are the greater numbers of
points awarded for other things, and which have the effect of preferencing
whites to the exclusion of people of color.
For example,
Then
Of course
both preferences are fair, based as they are on the recognition that economic
status and even geography (as with race) can have a profound effect on the
quality ofK-12 schooling that one receives, and that no one should be punished
for such things that are beyond their control. But note that such
preferences-though disproportionately awarded to whites--remain uncriticized,
while preferences for people of color become the target for reactionary anger.
Once again, white preference remains hidden because it is
more subtle, more ingrained, and isn't called white
preference, even if that's the effect.
But that's not all. Ten points are awarded to students who
attended top-notch high schools, and another eight points are given to students
who took an especially demanding AP and Honors curriculum.
As with points for those from the
So even truly talented students of color will be unable to
access those extra points simply because of where they live, their economic
status, and ultimately their race, which is intertwined with both.
Four more points are awarded to students with a parent who attended the U of M: a kind of affirmative action with which the President is intimately familiar, and which at most exclusively goes to whites. Ironically, while alumni preference could work towards the interest of diversity if combined with aggressive race-based affirmative action (by creating a larger number of black and brown alums), the rollback of the latter, combined with the almost guaranteed retention of the former will only further perpetuate white preference.
So the U of M offers twenty "extra" points to the
typical black, Latino or indigenous applicant, while offering various
combinations worth up to 58 extra points for students who will almost all be
white. But while the first of these are seen as examples of racial preferences,
the second are not, hidden as they are behind the structure of social
inequities that limit where people live, where they go to school, and the kinds
of opportunities they have been afforded.
White preferences, by being the result of the normal
workings of a racist society, can remain out of sight and out of mind, while
the power of the state is turned against the paltry preferences meant to offset
them.
Most telling is the oft-heard comment by whites that
"if I had only been black I would have gotten into my first-choice
college."
Such a statement not only ignores the fact that whites are
more likely than members of any other group--even with affirmative action in
place--to get into their first-choice school, but it also presumes, as
antiracist activist Paul Marcus explains, "that if these whites were
black, everything else about their life would have remained the
same." In other words, that it would
have made no negative difference as to where they went to school, what their
family income was, or anything else.
It is to once again miss the reality of white preferences,
which have generally placed these whites in a better position for college or
jobs than any of the persons of color whom they seem to think are taking
"their" slots in school.
The ability to believe that being black would have made no
difference (other than a beneficial one when it came time for college), and
that being white has made no positive difference, is rooted in privilege itself.
The privilege that allows one to
not have to think about race on a daily basis.
The privilege of not having one's intelligence questioned
by best-selling books like The Bell Curve, or one's culture attacked as
"dysfunctional" by politicians and mainstream "scholars."
The privilege of not having to worry about being viewed as
a "problem' or being "out of place" when driving, shopping,
buying a home, or for that matter attending the
The privilege of not being denied
an interview for a job because your name sounds "too black," as a
recent study discovered happens often to African American job seekers.
So long as those privileges remain firmly in place and the
preferential treatment that flows from those privileges continues to work to
the benefit of whites, all talk of ending affirmative action is not only
premature but a slap in the face to those who have fought and died for equal
opportunity.