Whites Swim in Racial Preference
by Tim Wise,
http://www.alternet.org/, February 20, 2003
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Ask a fish what water is and you'll get no answer. Even if fish
were capable of speech, they would likely have no explanation
for the element they swim in every minute of every day of their
lives. Water simply is. Fish take it for granted.
So too with this
thing we hear so much about, "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 U.S. 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 Mexico for the
fulfillment of Manifest Destiny.
In recent
history, affirmative action for whites motivated racially
restrictive housing policies that helped 15 million white
families procure homes with FHA 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 America is the
biggest collective recipient of racial preference in the history
of the cosmos. It has skewed our laws, shaped our public policy
and helped create the glaring inequalities with which we still
live.
White families,
on average, have a net worth that is 11 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.
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 and 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 and property handed down by
those who were able to accumulate assets at a time when people
of color by and large could not. 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 levies for free; harder than the Latino immigrants who
spend 10 hours a day in fields picking strawberries or tomatoes;
harder than the (mostly) women of color who clean hotel rooms or
change bedpans in hospitals, or the (mostly) men of color who
collect our garbage.
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 almost every turn, our hard work has
been met with access to an opportunity structure denied to
millions of others. 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
recent criticisms of affirmative action at the University of
Michigan. President Bush, himself a lifelong recipient of
affirmative action and the kind set aside for the mediocre rich
and recently proclaimed that the school's policies were examples
of unfair racial preference. Yet in doing so he not only showed
a profound ignorance of the Michigan policy, but made clear the
inability of yet another white person to grasp the magnitude of
white privilege still in operation.
The President
attacked Michigan's policy of awarding 20 points (on a 150-point
evaluation scale) to undergraduate applicants who are members of
underrepresented minorities (which at U of M means blacks,
Latinos and American Indians). To many whites such a
"preference" is blatantly discriminatory. Bush failed to mention
that greater numbers of points are awarded for other things that
amount to preferences for whites to the exclusion of people of
color.
For example,
Michigan awards 20 points to any student from a low-income
background, regardless of race. Since these points cannot be
combined with those for minority status (in other words poor
blacks don't get 40 points), in effect this is a preference for
poor whites.
Then Michigan
awards 16 points to students who hail from the Upper Peninsula
of the state: a rural, largely isolated, and almost completely
white area.
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 of K-12 schooling that one
receives, and that no one should be punished for things that are
beyond their control. But note that such preferences and though
disproportionately awarded to whites and 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 Upper Peninsula, these preferences may be
race-neutral in theory, but in practice they are anything but.
Because of intense racial isolation (and Michigan's schools are
the most segregated in America for blacks, according to research
by the Harvard Civil Rights Project), students of color will
rarely attend the "best" schools, and on average, schools
serving mostly black and Latino students offer only a third as
many AP and honors courses as schools serving mostly whites.
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 who have a parent who attended the U of
M: a kind of affirmative action with which the President is
intimately familiar, and which almost exclusively goes to
whites. Ironically, while alumni preference could work toward
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 20 "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, 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.
Very telling is
the oft-heard comment by whites, "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 and even with affirmative
action in place and to get into their first-choice school, but
it also presumes, as anti- racist 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.
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; to not have one's
intelligence questioned by best-selling books; to not have to
worry about being viewed as a "out of place" when driving,
shopping, buying a home, or for that matter, attending the
University of Michigan.
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. |