It may be helpful to realize that the debate we are having about affirmative action is not limited to the United States. The following is taken from an Opinion article in a South African newspaper:
Some people regard affirmative action, which is an attempt to redress the imbalances produced by apartheid, as a racist manoeuvre. All I can do here is to reiterate my often-expressed disagreement with this view. It is unfortunate that affirmative action, which is of course a temporary measure, involves taking people’s racial identity into account, but it is difficult to see how that could be avoided. It is true that it is at times applied in a slack and inappropriate way, but bad applications don’t undermine the essential principle.
“Of course” affirmative action is “a temporary measure.” Everyone said it was when it began. Funny, but I don’t recall any prominent supporters of affirmative action saying “time’s up,” or even suggesting a cut-off date in the future.
John–
I will be willing to suggest a cutoff date for affirmative action:
We should end affirmative action when (1) we have eliminated racism (I mean, against black people) in the US
or (2) black Americans have attained financial and other sorts of power to such a degree that anti-black racism on the part of white Americans causes black people no greater economic harm than the economic harm caused white people by anti-white racism on the part of black Americans.
Also, I don’t think we’ve reached that date yet. I don’t even have a projection.
Fair?
Matt – What evidence would persuade you that either conditions 1) or 2) had been met?
A similar debate is also taking place in India. The country recently celebrated fifty years of democracy. A significant tenent of it’s founding was the eradication of the Caste system. Subsequently quotes were put in place from jobs and education. Now the questions are being asked; is it time for the quotes to go?
Would Mr. Rosenberg care to comment on what compensatory mechanisms (if any) are appropriate for post-apartheid South Africa? Or are we confident that notwithstanding the socioeconomic inequalities built up (on purpose) over two generations of deliberate and intense racial discrimination, everything will come out in the wash?
Does Mr. Rosenberg feel that establishment of the Freedmens Bureau that worked only to the benefit of black ex-slaves was a mistake?
Is Mr. Rosenberg an opponent of the various reparations programs aimed to benefit only Holocaust Survivors and their descendants (and their lawyers)?
I’m not even a very strong supporter of USA race-based affirmative action, and, no offense, I wonder what’s going on here.
Andrew – Yours are all very good questions, and I certainly don’t have the answers to them. Even if I knew more about South Africa I’m sure I still wouldn’t have them. For whatever my layman’s opinion may be worth, I will say that I would approach South Africa with these inclinations: some Freedmen’s Bureau-like or other compensation would be justified. This would be at least in part analogous to compensation to the interred Japanese here and to holocaust survivors. Given my view of the U.S. experience, I would suggest beginning any such program with a clear outline of the beneficiaries, and I would fix a definite time limit. Moreover, I would suggest that all compensatory efforts be directed to ensuring that blacks could meet the same standards as whites rather than employing double standards. This would presumably cost a great deal for education etc. (the equivalent here would have been massive spending on K-12 education rather than double standards for college and graduate school). But these are only opinions, and of a country about which I know little and so feel scantly justified to offer advice.
Yes, and I’m sorry about the rude tone of my previous comment, because I thought your comments on class-based AA (X% plan) had a lot going for them. But you and I are probably a little older than the average blogger/commenter, in that if your dissertation is as late as you say, we both remember Jim Crow (barely in my case). And for sure we remember reading about apartheid. These systems were (as we agree) iniquitous, and there’s something about the next generation pretending they didn’t exist (likewise members of the Supreme Court who know better) that’s frustrating. The bitter results of discrimination don’t automatically vanish the moment the discrimination finally ends. In wealth and education, I expect they persist for many generations.
You know, I think one of the great failures of race-based AA in the United States is that it has never had a time limit, while on the other hand if there had been a time limit in advance, I have no doubt that racist bigots (not all of whom–deep sarcasm here–are liberals) would have slowed down integration and specific remedial programs even further until the deadline had passed. And on the third hand, I think that Matt Weiner’s [is that the ex-math-student-double-classmate Weiner of mine??] approach suffers from a related problem, that we can’t really tell when the residual inequality is no longer very responsive to race-based AA programs, or at least to those AA programs that exist on the ground. (I’ve started to wonder if that point be near, quite independent of the constitutionality or morality of the programs.)
Trying to resolve this conundrum is why I browse your blog.
Andrew – I appreciate your last comment (as I did your first), and not just for its tone. Tone, we’ve all noticed, is difficult enough to manage online, with people you don’t know, even where the subject matter does not generate such strong feelings. Where it does, as here, it’s of course even harder.
Not only am I old enough to remember segregation; I grew up with it and under it (in Alabama). And thus I hate it much more than someone could whose only exposure to it is abstract. Excuse me for lapsing into autobiography, but I’m sure that the centrality of the civil rights movement — especially its arguments about equality — in my coming of age is also why I so intensely dislike the current liberal endorsement of discrimination as long as it’s in a good cause.
Part of the difficulty is figuring out exactly what we mean by “discrimination.” Compensation to actual victims — freed slaves, Japanese internees, holocause survivors, etc. — does not strike most people as discrimination. Benefits continued over generations to people whose only connection to actual victims is racial or ethnic does. (It does as a matter of fact, whether it should or not.) Similarly, affirmative action does not strike most liberals as discrimination because it’s not “invidious,” to use the common term. It is not intended to exclude or degrade. On the other hand, as I’ve often pointed out on blog, many liberals, inconsistently, continue to be committed to a “disparate impact” view of discrimination that disregards intent and looks only to effects. They dislike profiling on highways or in airports but approve of it by admissions offices. Conservatives, of course, often have their own, parallel inconsistencies, arguing that race/ethnicity is never a proxy for anything relevant — except where it is.
These issues are difficult. I certainly have not figured them out. I hope you will keep browsing, and keep commenting.
Discrimination (the good kind!) ought to continue until mandatory racial classification has taught us all to be race-blind. Obviously.
Matt Weiner: what about “or (3) the program is found to hinder progress toward its nominal goals”?
Anton, why didn’t you just say AA should continue for eternity? Surely you know that your criteria will never achieved.
Someday I’ll learn not to try to use sarcasm on the Net.
Why is racism only considered when it’s white on black and not vice versa? If a white man stands up and says “I hate blacks” he is racist but if a black guy does it, he’s just being honest? Why must the white people always forever help those people that aren’t willing to help themselves? It’s easier to blame everything on the white man and forever claim “previously disadvantaged” than work for your own goals. Did the white people call on Africa and India when they were struggling? No, we got off our backsides and did it ourselves!
Well well… i live in South Africa. I live with a crime rate which grows quicker than most countries, in a place with incredible beauty littered by junk cans and plastic bottles. I live with type one diabetes, one of the most expensive diseases in this world, and i watch the countless thousands of “underprivileged” getting free medication while my Medical Aid bill grows into the thousands each month.
I am the middle-class man. The man who breaks his back trying to make a living and at the same time support those people who get “free” medication, housing, and education.
So don’t tell me when I go looking for a job that I have to be black. Tell that to the fat white apartheid guys who ran the show and are now living off their wealth. Don’t tell it to the middle man who works no less than he did in the Apartheid era.
Do you really believe that the people who were responsible for creating Apartheid and who ran it are looking for jobs?
The man looking for a job is the same man who supplies this country and has supplied it for many years. So punish the “racist white man!” punish him until he breaks…but when he does don’t ask “where is my free electricity, water, education, house and medication?” because living in south africa you would be suprised at how many black people rip their own brothers off while white people are meant to pay for things they didn’t do.
I am not racist. But the people who run this country are, and the saddest thing is no one reading this will understand the extent to which its grown. I can no longer protect my family because if the man i stop with my fists or my body or a pole trying to attack me and my family is black…all he says is “that white man is a racist!” and i’ll go to jail, not him.
matt can you ask your four fathers when did apartheaid started in this counrty and then we as black africans can tell you the date when the affrimative action will end.Yes it is killing our economy but 10 years is not enough we need more years to celebrate our freedom and you as white person to follow the orders as we also did for many thousand years
Wow, I’m returning to this late, but I would concur with Anton’s suggested (3); and I don’t think I’m Andrew Lazarus’s classmate. How to determine that these conditions have been met is a toughie, but the thing is I don’t think that we can say with confidence that they will be met within N years for any realistic N.