Loading ...Archive for affirmative action
Response to University Race Quotas Row in Brazil
Posted by: | CommentsThe BBC news has a report about pressure to end redressive racial quotas in Brazil. To understand this controversy, it is important to know something about the context of skin color in Brazil.
The color hierarchy in Brazilian society is obvious. With few exceptions, the Brazilian middle class and above is white. Go to any nice restaurant in Rio de Janeiro, for example, where about half of that city’s population is black or mixed-race, and you will be hard-pressed to find a nonwhite person that is not on the staff.
Racial discrimination accounts for much of this inequality. The scholarly evidence is very clear. On average, blacks and people of mixed-racial background earn less than half of what whites earn and poverty or class simply cannot explain the difference. There is lots of evidence by economists and sociologists showing that race differences in income persist even when class origins, levels of education, region, and several other variables are held constant. And that does not even consider the fact that racism affects educational level and class origins in the first place!
Most of the Brazilian population now supports racial quotas though there is strong opposition from sectors of the middle class. Opponents to quotas contend that they are an extreme policy for redressing Brazil’s huge racial inequalities. However, they do not offer viable alternatives. At best, they call for class-based policies, particularly improvements in public education. Waiting for better public schools to overcome these gross inequalities in Brazilian society might help but real change is likely to take generations even if sufficient political will could be mustered. Educational spending exemplifies the gross distortions that would need to be overcome. The Brazilian government spends about 20 times per student in the public university, which is dominated by whites, compared to public K-12, where nonwhites are disproportionately represented.
Finally, the argument about uncertainty in racial classification is overblown in Brazil. A small percentage of the Brazilian population might straddle the white/nonwhite distinction since race is based strictly on appearance in Brazil but for the vast majority, there is no doubt. The presence of some ambiguity shouldn’t be used to invalidate these policies, which are finally putting a dent in Brazil’s severe racial pyramid. Interestingly, Brazil’s anti-quota media has dug very deeply to find a handful of these cases.
~ Edward Telles is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. He is the author of the award-winning book, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil.
[NB from the admin: We're delighted to welcome a new guest blogger to Racism Review.]
Facing the Academic Job Market, Facing Racism
Posted by: | CommentsI’m back from the ASA and SSSP meetings (national conferences) in San Francisco, and just now getting back into the groove of writing here. I saw some good sessions at the meetings. This meeting was auspicious, too, as I felt especially proud moment to see Patrica Hill Collins ascend the dais as President of the ASA, the first African American woman to ever hold that office. I did a post-doc with Pat when she was still at University of Cincinnati, and it was a thrill to see her shine.
But the giddiness over Collins’ considerable accomplishment was overshadowed by the conversations in the hallway where the overwhelming impression I got was one of anxiety about the economic downturn and its impact on academic sociology. Quite understandably, this anxiety was particular pronounced among graduate students. Every year at the ASA, there is a ‘job market’ in which prospective employers meet with prospective job seekers. Last year, there were something like 75 academic jobs listed. This year, that number had dwindled to a mere 30. Now, I’ve never actually known someone to find a job based on this academic job market version of speed-dating, but there’s a great deal of energy focused around it nevertheless. And, this year, there was a lot of distress over the low-low number of 30.
The trauma (and really, there’s no other word for it) of facing the academic job market in sociology is compounded for those sociologists who identify racially or ethnically as people of color, and for anyone who lists “race” as their area of expertise.
Racism in academic institutions can take on some funky twists and turns. There is very little overt racism in the academy, and indeed, most colleges and universities strive to comply with some meager affirmative action policies that claim to “support diversity.” The reality, however, is a transmogrification of diversity.
Here’s just one way that racism in academic hiring works. A given department will decide that one position is designated as “the race position.” The way that this plays out in the hiring process is that the hiring committee has an idea about who the person is that will fill this position, “the ideal candidate.” The ideal candidate for the race position is typically 1) someone that does work that’s ‘interesting’ but not too radical (i.e., makes a small point related to Marx, Weber, Durkheim or, in rare occasions DuBois, but does not call attention to people’s racism) and 2) focuses on the people of color the committee has decided is in vogue at the moment (not the race of the majority group doing the hiring) and 3) the candidate’s race should match the race of the people they study (thus, making the research more “authentic” and filing the designated slot). When this kind of search is “successful,” meaning the department finds a candidate who meets all these criteria (and they will), then this effectively contains and ghettoizes any discussion of race in that department and places an additional burden on that candidate to be the spokesperson for their race. This is really the antithesis of the kind of diversity that, for example, Audre Lorde talked about when she spoke of learning to “recognize, value and accept differences.”
And, for whites who list ‘race’ as an area of expertise on their CV (like me), we can be privy to some pretty egregious backdoor racism from other white academics. Let me explain. Once, a long time ago, I was doing a one-year position at a university that shall remain nameless. Another woman, had also done a one-year position at this same institution and applied for the full-time, tenure-track job. She was a Latina, but did not study ‘race.’ When she got the job and I did not, the chair of that department (a white man) made a point of trying to soothe my disappointment by telling me that they “had to” hire the other candidate. The chair in this instance made a classic move to reassert white solidarity with me and diminish the accomplishments and credibility of the Latina woman they’d just hired. I wish I had confronted him about it, but I was still bruised from not getting that job, so I simply said nothing. Since that time, I’ve had too many other opportunities to confront white academics who have made similar backdoor comments to me intended to undermine faculty from under-represented groups.
There are some support mechanisms out there for getting through this process. Professor Kerry Ann Rockemore (University of Chicago-Illinois) is a leader in mentoring new PhD’s who come from under-represented groups in the academy. Her online forum, BlackAcademic.com, is a premier destination for faculty looking for support from graduate school through the tenure process. Professor Rockemore also conducts workshops about surviving the academy for faculty of color, and has a new book with Tracey Laszloffy called The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure—Without Losing Your Soul (Lynne Reinner, 2008). Rockemore has created terrific resources here, and there needs to be much more work done in this area. For example, her work could be expanded to explore what the specific challenges are for faculty from Latin@, Asian American, or Native American backgrounds.
I think the example of Patricia Hill Collins (and, the next president of ASA Evelyn Nakano Glenn), illustrate that it is possible to transform the discipline of sociology and the academy. This is not easy, however. In the words of Frederick Douglass, “There is no progress without struggle.” Courage to all of you on the job market!
Rachel Maddow: Correcting the Record on Pat’s Racist Rant
Posted by: | CommentsRachel Maddow took a few minutes at the end of last night’s show to correct the record on Pat Buchanan’s racist rant about ‘white men built this nation.’ In case you missed it, here’s what she said (6:58):
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
I think she did a pretty good job on this. She gets bonus points from me for the line about affirmative action being necessary “so that we as a country don’t end up sealing in place forever a white supremacist society, created by and defined by segregation and Jim Crow.” What do you think about her rebuttal?
Pat Buchanan’s “Conference”: Welcoming White-Racist Themes
Posted by: | CommentsThinkprogress has a very interesting story on a conference just hosted by far-right, sometime advocate of white-nationalist thinking, Pat Buchanan. He is a former U.S. presidential candidate and now prominent mainstream (MSNBC) commentator, who has previously asserted that
our Judeo Christian values are going to be preserved and our Western heritage is going to be handed down to future generations and not dumped on some landfill called multiculturalism.
He has also in the past made clear his view of immigration:
If we had to take a million immigrants in, say, Zulus next year or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia? There is nothing wrong with us sitting down and arguing that issue that we are a European country, English speaking country. (Citations here)
The main topic at this recent conference was how to get a Republican majority back. At one of the panels, the commentators advocated
supporting English-only initiatives as a prime way of attracting “working class white Democrats.” The discussion ridiculed Judge Sotomayor for the fact that she studied children’s classics to improve her grammar while attending college. The panelists also suggested that, without English as the official language, President Obama would force Americans to speak Spanish.
In their apparently delusional world, President Obama is going force us to speak Spanish. And, of course, mocking Latinos will really help Republicans get more votes in the fastest growing segment of the voting age population. Interestingly, Sotomayor did this extra reading (of books like Huck Finn and Pride and Prejudice) during the summer, not while attending college. She did it to improve her English, and on her own. Odd that these work-ethic, anti-immigrant, English-only folks cannot even credit immigrants and their children for such aggressive hard work and strong self-improvement efforts in English.
One obvious irony of the conference was a big banner overhead that had quote marks out of place and the key word conference misspelled as “conferenece.” (Source: Thinkprogress) Perhaps the English-only folks should first focus themselves on learning English well.
Significantly, Buchanan invited the prominent white nationalist of Vdare fame, former Forbes editor Peter Brimelow, to participate. Brimelow came up with this juicy take on U.S. society. He recommends English-only language issues as key for Republicans to get back lost white voters:
I really do recommend the language issue because you know that polls better than immigration and affirmative action. Eighty-five percent of Americans say they would favor official language policy. The wonderful thing about this issue if you look at what’s going to actually happen here is you’re going to find that the Obama administration is going to gradually institute institutional bilingualism in the country.
Brimelow amplified his white-nationalist rant by pressing conference participants to
attack affirmative action in an effort to attract the votes of “young whites” and “yellow people.” After claiming it would be “suicidal” for any “white man” to vote for Obama, Brimelow contended that immigrants should not be eligible for affirmative action because “they weren’t slaves to this country, they’ve never been discriminated against.”
Apparently, many right-wing Republicans cannot count. Do they read demographic analyses of this country’s future? Republican attacks on immigrants and people of color mean that very few of them, or their children and grandchildren, will vote Republican. I think right-wing Republicans must all operate in the same networks where they only talk to people like themselves. They certainly do not pay much attention to the social science and Census data (see here and here) on immigration trends and population composition, or they would know that strong white-nationalist appeals mainly to conservative white (especially male) voters will not get them a majority vote ever again.
And how do these white nationalist thinkers get such major mainstream media participation and coverage these days? Why are they even considered mainstream media types?
Racism, Sexism and The Significance of Sotomayor
Posted by: | CommentsAs
expected, Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court has drawn controversy, media attention, analysis and even some humorous send-ups of right-wing critics (
photo credit: Padraic).
Opponents have alternately claimed that Sotomayor is (a) not smart enough for the Court (despite degrees from Ivy League Universities and an apparent history of exemplary academic performance), (b) racist, and (c) perhaps most bizarrely, saddled with an unpronounceable name
While these conversations themselves warrant another post (and analysis of their racist and sexist assumptions, particularly the one that she’s not smart enough), what strikes me the most about Sotomayor’s nomination is what it suggests for the future of race relations in this country. Not in terms of the “role model” argument (the idea that young people need to see someone like them in positions of power to help them see that their options are plentiful and far-ranging), though I think there is some merit to that claim.
Sotomayor’s presence on the Court, in my opinion, reveals much about the way Obama intends to address racial inequalities in his role as president.
Of late, Obama has not said much about racial matters, particularly issues of racial inequality. Many of his statements about race that I’ve read date back to 2006 or 2007, well before he was a serious candidate for President. In several these statements, he acknowledges the existence and consequences of systemic racism:
“I don’t believe it is possible to transcend race in this country. . . Race is a factor in this society. The legacy of Jim Crow and slavery has not gone away. It is not an accident that African Americans experience high crime rates, are poor, and have less wealth. It is a direct result of our racial history.” (Essence magazine, October 2007)
However, on the campaign trail and while President, Obama mostly remained quiet about the ongoing existence of systemic racism and his plan to put policies into place that remedy it. In fact, he has gone on record talking about the need for class-based policies, using the metaphor that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Of course, President Obama walks a very difficult line, one none of his predecessors have had to balance. If he appears racially conscious, he runs a high risk of upsetting supporters who like to see him as color blind, offering easy ammunition to opponents looking for anything to use as a source of criticism, and maybe most significantly, seeing his support and ability to get things done erode in a wave of racially-tinged suspicion. If we assume that eradicating racial inequality matters to him, how then does Obama put policies into place without sacrificing political capital and losing control of his momentum?
Enter Judge Sotomayor, the first potential Supreme Court justice who will have personally experienced the multiple, overlapping oppressions of racism, sexism, and poverty. Who has observed that dealing with these intersecting factors would likely render her more capable of reaching a wise, sound decision on cases of discrimination than her white male peers who benefit from their race, gender, and class privilege. Who at the same time acknowledged that these intersecting factors do not preclude elite white men from reaching sound, fair decisions on cases of discrimination (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education), but sees the reality that living her life as a woman of color gives her a particular insight into oppression that might escape her white male colleagues.
What makes Sotomayor’s nomination especially relevant right now is that Chief Justice Roberts has issued some of his most telling decisions and statements on cases related to racial discrimination and civil rights . Despite his clear intelligence and stellar academic credentials, Roberts is woefully uneducated when it comes to the realities of racial oppression in this nation. Operating from the color blind racist perspective, Roberts is apparently of the opinion that any focus on race—even with the intent of diversifying, correcting ongoing racial inequalities, or addressing systemic racial imbalances—is in and of itself racist. This willful refusal to recognize that racism is built into the very core of the political, economic, and social foundations of this nation, has always worked to disadvantage people of color, and will continue to do so if left unchecked, is an egregious blind spot on the part of our Chief Justice. So too is his inability to distinguish between taking race into consideration when trying to make a school system diverse (in compliance with Brown v. Board) and focusing on race in efforts to create and maintain segregated, unequal social systems.
Right now Sonia Sotomayor is being savaged by people who refuse to respect her intelligence and hard work, and instead seem to think that her status as a Latina signifies a person who is dumb and unqualified. It’s particularly ironic that she may sit on a Court that decides whether affirmative action policies are legal or even remain necessary. It seems to me that Sotomayor’s experience having her qualifications disregarded in a way that evokes common racial/gendered stereotypes would give her a perspective on the necessity of affirmative action that might elude Judges Roberts, Alito, and Scalia.
People often mistakenly assume affirmative action just elevates unqualified minority candidates, but when used wisely and correctly its purpose is to create opportunities for racial minorities who work hard, are eminently qualified, but still face discrimination because of potential employers’ biases (like the automatic, reflexive assumption that people of color are less intelligent). It seems to me that what Sotomayor is facing right now is a prime example of said biases, and this speaks directly to her statements for the value of a diverse bench. These are the types of experiences that can help Sotomayor see aspects of the law that Chief Justice Roberts, with his color blind worldview, will likely miss.
Obama is a smart enough politician to know that a candid focus on policies openly designed to eradicate racism will impair his ability to fulfill his other priorities and will pretty much guarantee him a one-term presidency. But he can select a Supreme Court nominee with stellar credentials, extensive legal experience, and the personal history to allow her to see what her colleagues are comfortable ignoring. She can’t make policy from the bench, but she can make sure the law works for everyone. In doing so, she can be Obama’s voice for racial and gender equality.
Remedying Racism: The Supreme Court and Affirmative Action
Posted by: | Comments
Coming in June 2009 is a Supreme Court decision that is likely to rule, once again, against affirmative action. The case involves white firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut. The city had a conventional (the NY Times says, poorly contstructed) promotion exam on which in 2003 white test takers did better than black or Latino test takers. The city invalidated test results as discriminatory against candidates of color. White firefighters sued, arguing they were discriminated against. The issue of “reverse discrimination” and “reverse racism,” clever white reframing terms, was again raised, with these oxymoronic phrases being widely circulated.
photo credit: Tim Pearce, Los Gatos
In an April 21, 2009 editorial the New York Times called on the Supreme Court to follow the decision of the Second Circuit appeals court in its decision that the city did not discriminate. As the Times noted,
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, and the trial court before it, ruled that the city had acted properly. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires employers to ensure that employment practices are not racially discriminatory. Because New Haven had a reasonable belief that the test discriminated against minority applicants, it had a legitimate basis for discarding the results.
The Times asks why New Haven did not have a better constructed test, and also notes that
If the Fire Department had promoted based on the test, two Hispanics and no blacks would have been eligible for the seven open captain positions. No Hispanics or blacks would have been eligible for the eight lieutenant positions. Faced with a test that had such a strong adverse impact on minority applicants, New Haven decided to throw out the results and leave the supervisory positions open. In their lawsuit, the white firefighters insist that there was nothing wrong with the exam.
The savvy columnist and scholar Earl Ofari Hutchinson has a good article at New America Media on the likely decision against affirmative action:
It’s hardly the first time the Supreme Court has ruled on race related employment and education cases. In each instance the rulings have done much to fuel the notion that a majority of Americans oppose affirmative action.
He also makes clear data that counter a common white myth and show that few whites ever get seriously hurt even by aggressive affirmative action plans:
The other pillar of the Supreme Court’s anti-affirmative argument – and it cropped up again in the New Haven case – is that qualified white males are getting kicked to the curb and are losing ground to unqualified blacks, minorities and women. . . . According to census figures, if every unemployed black worker in the country were to displace a white worker, only a tiny fraction of whites would be affected. Furthermore, affirmative action pertains only to job-qualified applicants, so the actual percentage of affected whites would be minuscule. In New Haven, the number of firefighters allegedly affected was 20. The main sources of job loss among white workers have to do with factory relocations and labor contracting outside the United States, computerization and automation, and corporate downsizing.
I have mulled over these thorny issues in several places before, and let me summarize some general thoughts about racial discrimination and its affirmative action remedies.
First we need to consider where most racial discrimination has occurred in this society. Discrimination, as conceptualized by most scholars of racial-ethnic relations, emphasizes the dominant group–subordinate group context. Racial discrimination usually refers to actions of members of dominant groups—for example, white Americans—taken to harm members of subordinate groups, such as black, Latino, Asian, or Native Americans. Historically and today, systemic white discrimination is not just a matter of occasional white bigotry but involves the dominant white group’s power to enforce its racist prejudices and framing in discriminatory practices across many institutions. On occasion, individual members of subordinated racial groups can be motivated by their prejudices to take action to harm those in the dominant white group. Yet, with modest exceptions, members of racially subordinate groups usually do not have the power or institutional position to express their stereotypes and prejudices they hold about whites in the form of continuing and thus substantial everyday discrimination.
Think about the historical and contemporary US patterns of racial discrimination directed by large numbers of whites against just one major group, black Americans. That mistreatment has meant, and still means, widespread blatant and subtle discrimination by whites against blacks in most organizations in all major institutions in U.S. society—in housing, employment, business, education, health services, and the legal system. Over four centuries, many millions of whites have participated directly in discrimination against many millions of African Americans. Judging from opinion polls and research studies, a majority of whites currently still hold numerous negative stereotypes of African Americans and millions of these will discriminate under some circumstances. And most whites observe anti-black discrimination around them without actively working to stop it. This widespread and systemic discrimination has brought extraordinarily heavy social and economic losses (the latter estimated to be trillions of dollars over nearly 400 years) for African Americans in many institutional sectors of society.
What would the reverse of this centuries-old anti-black discrimination and other oppression look like? The reverse of the institutionalized discrimination by whites against blacks would mean reversing the power and resource inequalities for several hundred years. In the past and today, most organizations in major institutional areas such as housing, education, and employment would be run at the top and middle-levels by a disproportionate number of powerful black managers and officials. These powerful black officials would have aimed much racial discrimination at whites, including many years of slavery and legal segregation. Millions of whites would have suffered—and still suffer—trillions in economic losses such as lower wages, as well as high rates of unemployment and political disenfranchisement, widespread housing segregation, inferior school facilities, and violent lynchings. That societal condition would be something one could reasonably call a condition that significantly “reversed the discrimination” against African Americans.
What is usually termed reverse discrimination is something much different from this fictional anti-white scenario. The usual reference is to affirmative action programs that, for a limited time or in certain places, have used racial screening criteria to overcome a small part of past and present discrimination that targets racially oppressed people. Whatever modest costs a few years of affirmative action have meant for whites (usually white men, for white women have been major beneficiaries of affirmative action), those costs do not add up to anything close to the total cost that inverting the historical and contemporary patterns of discrimination against people of color would involve. Affirmative action plans, as currently set up—and there are now far fewer effective plans than most critics suggest—do not make concrete and devastating a widespread anti-white prejudice or framing on the part of people of color. As implemented, affirmative action plans have mostly involved modest remedial efforts (typically designed by white men!) to bring token-to-modest numbers of people of color and white women into certain areas of our economic, social, and political institutions where they have historically been excluded.
If remedies for racial oppression, such as serious affirmative action, are real and successful, they will of course mean some costs to be paid by those who have benefited most from centuries of racial and gender discrimination. Yet, today, a white man who suffers as an individual from remedial programs such as usually modest affirmative action in employment or education suffers in but one area of life (and often only once) and because he is an exception to his privileged racial group. A person of color who suffers from racial discrimination usually suffers in all areas of her or his life and primarily because the whole group has been and still is subordinated, not because he or she is an exception.
In spite of continuing high levels of discrimination targeting Americans of color, over recent decades, most remedy programs have been weakened or phased out as a more conservative white perspective has regained full control in most major public and private institutions. Today, this retrenchment from racial desegregation of U.S. society is quite substantial, and it resembles the white reactionary backtracking in the 19th century that took place after the Reconstruction era. After Reconstruction the white elite replaced slavery with the near-slavery of legal segregation, much to the longterm detriment of the entire society. Are we in a new post-Reconstruction period, in spite of a electing a black president?
Debate on US Foundations: Supporting Racism Studies?
Posted by: | CommentsThe Chronicle of Philanthropy has an interesting debate on studies of systemic (structural) racism funded by a few foundations. In a May 15, 2008 article, “Philanthropy’s Jeremiah Wright Problem,” William A. Schambra argues sensationally thus:
“Many Americans were startled to learn that the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, whose campaign is built on an uplifting message of national unity and racial reconciliation, belongs to a church in Chicago where a very different view of America is preached by its longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Then he adds melodramatically:
Americans might be further surprised to learn that grants from the nation’s largest foundations sustain a similarly harsh view of a nation riven by an unrelenting and deeply oppressive racial divide. America, in this view, is steeped in “structural racism.” This “refers to a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial-group inequity,” according to “Structural Racism and Community Building,” a 2004 report from the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change (supported by the Annie E. Casey, Charles Stewart Mott, W.K. Kellogg, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations, among others).
He is critical of this foundational support for research and perspectives on structural racism, which concept and historical reality he seems to know nothing about. (He could look here and here, for a little education, perhaps.) He concludes his reactionary piece, thus:
Senator Obama ultimately decided that Mr. Wright’s “incendiary language” — language so similar to that thrown about freely by structural-racism theorists — reflected “views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation.” Could the same be said about some grants made by our largest foundations?
Then there is the supportive view of what a few foundations are doing on systemic racism issues, and a critique of Schambra’s white-oriented thinking playing down systemic racism, by Aaron Dorman & Niki Jagpal, “Foundations and ‘Structural Racism’: Take Another Look,” a reply to the reactionary article on May 28, 2008:
But a clearer, more accurate picture of structural racism begs for a comprehensive definition that takes into account the milieu of the analysis. Moreover, Mr. Schambra uses the most seemingly provocative statements from the many reports he cites, but when read in context, the quotes are far less “startling” than Schambra would have readers believe. Andrew Grant-Thomas and John A. Powell offer a simple framework that describes structural racism as emphasizing “the powerful impact of interinstitutional dynamics, institutional resource inequities, and historical legacies on racial inequalities today.”
Then they point out that foundations are not doing all that much in support of critical systemic racism analysis:
Readers are left with the impression that our large national foundations are aggressively funding some radical leftist agenda that the American public is utterly unfamiliar with and, if enlightened, would be unsupportive of. Unfortunately, he fails to take into account key giving trends, resulting in an inaccurate, if not misleading, picture of the current state of philanthropy in the United States. Let’s look at the numbers. In a 2005 report, Independent Sector and the Foundation Center found that social-justice grant making in 1998 and 2002 comprised a meager 11 percent of overall foundation giving, and only a fraction of that was grants for issues identified by the structural-racism framework as barriers to equality. . . . . Is it true that our large foundations are so acutely aware of race and oppression in their grant making that they prioritize racially specific grants? Again, the data suggest otherwise. The 2008 edition of the Foundation Center’s annual Foundation Giving Trends: Update on Funding Priorities notes that in 2006, funding for racial or ethnic minorities increased by only 5.5 percent, while overall grant making rose by 16.4 percent.
Then they add this:
The structural-racism framework posits that analyses of racial inequality that ignore the historical decisions that led to institutional barriers to equality of achievement are insufficient in understanding race in the United States. To that end, explicitly identifying deliberate policy decisions that persist as barriers to equality is an integral component of any work that truly seeks to affect change in American racial attitudes.
Then take Schambra to task too for misrepresentations of philanthropic foundations:
In fact, a decade of research by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy shows how conservative foundations have been strategically advancing their agenda by providing sympathetic think tanks and advocacy organizations with flexible and multiyear grants, and supporting programs that specifically target public policy and promote conservative ideas.
And conclude with a pregnant question indeed:
In response, we ask: Why are the small percentage of structural-racism grants a cause for concern among Mr. Schambra and leaders of conservative foundations who have been so successful themselves at actually influencing government and policy decisions? Why should progressive foundations apologize for seeking to effectively address the needs of marginalized communities by funding organizations that seek to transform the institutions that perpetuate social inequities?
Why indeed?
Race-Based Affirmation Action Remains Necessary
Posted by: | CommentsFollowing the recent results in the West Virginia primary, we should be well aware of the continuing significance of race and racism in U.S. society. Exit polling (such as at CNN) shows that 
a significant number of whites who voted there said that race played a role in their decision. This continuing significance is not limited to politics, but also remains salient in other areas of social life, including employment and college/university admissions. (photo credit)
In the last debate on April 16th, Barack Obama made some comments on affirmative action (followed with some more by Hillary Clinton) in which he seemed to suggest his support for ending race-based admissions policies at selective colleges and universities, replacing them with class-based policies. In a recent blog post, Kahlenberg argues that Obama should continue in this vein, that it will help him win over the support of the so-called “Reagan Democrats” (a group of voters who, as recent polls have shown in their head-to-head match-ups with McCain, either of these Democrats would lose in the general election anyway). As he did in his book from 1996, Kahlenberg reiterates in the blog that class-based affirmative action “would be colorblind but not blind to history” and “reinforce the common interests of working-class voters,” thereby assisting Obama in his pursuit of the White House.
Unfortunately Kahlenberg and other proponents of setting the sun on race-based affirmative action fail to recognize the legacy of white racism and the continuing impact of the white racial frame in U.S. society. One simple reason of this is the fact that affirmative action benefits other groups, including veterans, persons with disabilities, and women, yet the focus is on race. As pointed by Bowen and Bok, the reality is that very few students of color benefit from race-sensitive admissions policies at selective colleges and universities, so what we need is more transparency on what exactly affirmative action is, rather than mischaracterize what it does.
Kahlenberg and others also fail to account for exactly WHY we have race-based affirmative action policies to begin with, and argue that our society today is colorblind so we should end these policies. As a variety of studies (here and here and here) have documented, and along with the results from the primary Tuesday night, U.S. society is far from colorblind. Some states have already moved in the direction Kahlenberg has wished for, and the results haven’t been promising: following the passage of Prop 209 in California, for example, black enrollment at UCLA has dropped considerably. A decline in black enrollment has also commenced at the University of Texas at Austin, following then-Governor Bush’s “Texas 10 percent Plan”, as well as brother Jeb’s similar “One Florida Plan” led to a decline in black enrollment at the University of Florida (though through recruitment efforts, black enrollment rebounded). One reason why this has happened is the fact that the majority of poor people are white in this country.
We need to understand why race-based affirmative action remains necessary in dealing with racial inequality and misunderstanding. As Bowen and Bok point out, whites need contact with students of color in order to prepare for interactions within an increasingly globalized society.
And finally, as Kahlenberg and Barack Obama (at least based on his recent statements on this issue) fail to realize is that Barack’s daughters may indeed be in a privileged position in terms of socioeconomic status. However, they remain black in U.S. society, and race can operate independently. For example, research has found that job applicants with “white-sounding names” such as Greg were 50 percent more likely to receive called for interviews than applicants with “black-sounding names” such as Jamal. In addition to future employers, will Barack’s daughters be viewed any differently from police officers, judges, teachers, or salespeople because of their more favorable socioeconomic status? Obama shouldn’t bother to pander to Reagan Democrats on this issue, since (1) they largely won’t vote for him anyway; and (2) it is bad policy.
~ John D. Foster, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences
University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff
