By their metaphors shall you know them…. And one of the most persistent, and pernicious, metaphors in the debate over racial preferences is that they are needed “to level the playing field” or because “the playing field is still not level.”
Examples are all over the place, but here’s one, from the principal of Waverly High School in Delta Township, Michigan:
“I wish that our society had progressed to the point where this wasn’t going to matter any more,” Principal Susan Land said. However, with the state constitution incorporating Proposal 2, “the playing field just got unleveled.”
How odd that a requirement to treat everyone without regard to race or ethnicity should be regarded by a school principal as “unleveling” the field, but no stranger, really, than the corresponding view that civil rights requires racial discrimination.
Much more sensible were the responses of a counselor and a student:
[a]student approached counselor Leslie Johnson to express concerns that she might not get into college now.
“You need to do what I’ve always told you to do: Get good grades,” Johnson said she told her….
Everett junior Guillermo Peralta wants to attend U-M, where President Mary Sue Coleman has promised that the university will look at every legal option to resist Proposal 2’s negative impact on diversity.
The Hispanic 16-year-old has a 4.0 grade-point average and studies the violin, takes advanced-placement courses, participates in sports and serves on the student council.
“I’m just going to continue what I’m doing,” said Guillermo, who hasn’t been comfortable with affirmative-action endeavors.
But let’s return to the unlevel field. Note what this metaphor assumes: fundamentally, that the game of life is a competition not among individuals but among racial and ethnic teams. And for the field to be “level,” of course, the resources of these competing teams should/must be equal, which they are not so long as one team comes to the field with better equipment, coaches, experience, etc.
The “field,” of course, will never be “level” — radical redistribution of wealth, resources, educational history is not likely or even possible — and so the “level field” metaphor sets out a requirement for eliminating preferential treatment that cannot be met. Not in Justice O’Connor’s wishful-thinking 25 years, not ever.
Some of you will recall that we have encountered (here, here, and here) a preferentialist who at least recognized that it is individuals, not racial or ethnic groups, who apply to college, graduate school, for jobs, etc. — Prof. Michael Bérubé, a Penn State English professor. As I quoted him in the first post linked above, Bérubé abandons the playing field for the golf links:
I’ve heard well-meaning people suggest, for example, that the test be “race-normed”: the average “black” score is 857 and the average “white” score is 1,063, so let’s treat the black kid with an 1,100 the way we’d treat the white kid with a 1,300. This is the kind of suggestion that provokes immediate and justified derision from conservatives — often in the form of sports analogies: if we’re going to spot black students 200 points on the SAT, they say, let’s give white wide receivers a 10-yard head start on black safeties and cornerbacks.
….
But there is a way to “norm” the SAT, not only for race but for sex, income, region and level of parental education. (Every one of these variables is critical. Rural students average 998, while suburban students average 1,066. Boys outscore girls by 43 points. Most important, children of parents who have graduate degrees outscore children with parents who didn’t finish high school by a staggering 272 points.) And the best way to do it is by taking a page from a sport whose country-club associations belie its deep structural commitment to redistributionist justice: golf.
Golf is proud, and rightly so, of the fact that its handicap system allows hackers to play alongside champions. And if only the SAT were as well organized and as egalitarian as the U.S.G.A., every high-school student would be assigned a handicap. We already have all the numbers we need; all we need to do is to combine “region” and “parental education” with the race-gender-class triad, and we can issue remarkably precise handicaps — more precise even than golf handicaps, since the SAT’s permit neither mulligans nor “winter rules.”
….
Take a black girl from rural Alabama whose parents make under $10,000 and did not graduate from high school, and put her up against the wealthy white boy from Lake Success whose parents have Ph.D.’s. Before she sets pen to paper, she could be facing an 848-point SAT deficit. If we assign her only 80 percent of the parental-education gap (217.6 points), 60 percent of the income gap (155.4 points), 30 percent of the racial gap (61.8 points), 20 percent of the regional gap (13.6 points) and 10 percent of the gender gap (4.3 points), the 452.7 point handicap will help us gauge her true talents more accurately. Fair enough, no?
“Well,” as I said in reply, “no.” (Kimberly Swygert said considerably more than that.)
Bérubé later claimed he was only joking, a claim I doubted at some length in the other two of my posts linked above. But whether he was joking or not, the “handicap” system he recommended is a much better metaphor for racial preference than all the talk about playing fields.
Since the St. Louis Cardinals just won this past World Series, in every game they play next year they should start out behind by two runs.
Basketball’s draft order should not begin with the worst and proceed to the best team from the past year, but instead drafts should be based on historical success. We should close the ‘achievement gap’ by having teams that have never won any championships draft first. Therefore, neither the Lakers nor Celtics will draft ahead of the Clippers until the Clippers have won as many championships as the Lakers and the Celtics have.
John writes:
>>>”The “field,” of course, will never be “level” — radical redistribution of wealth, resources, educational history is not likely or even possible — and so the “level field” metaphor sets out a requirement for eliminating preferential treatment that cannot be met. Not in Justice O’Connor’s wishful-thinking 25 years, not ever.”
Radical redistribution of wealth, resources and education was the LAW OF THE LAND in the United States. And the “preferential treatment” was doled out to Whites.
You’re telling me you don’t remember how this country ran for the first hundred years in regards to race?
You’re saying that racism during Reconstruction slipped your mind?
I don’t blame many for not knowing the TRUTH about what happened after WWII and the GI Bill because, well…they just don’t seem to teach this history in high school, but thank God there are authors like Ira Katznelson who sets the story straight about race:
>>>”In a new book, ”When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-century America” (Norton), published this month, Columbia University political scientist and historian Ira Katznelson tries to recast the affirmative action debate by focusing on the discriminatory effect of some of the most sweeping 20th-century social programs: Social Security, New Deal labor laws, the GI Bill–programs that happen to be near-sacred to liberals. The history he is talking about, Katznelson says in an interview, is ”the exclusion from the bounty of those programs of most African Americans of the time, most of whom were Southerners.”
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/08/14/paint_it_white/
>>>”Crucial to Katznelson’s argument is the claim that the decision, by Congress, to exclude farm laborers and domestics from Social Security during the program’s first 19 years was an essentially racist one–an idea defended at greater length in ”Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State” (1998) by his Columbia colleague Robert Lieberman. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security had recommended including all industries, Katznelson writes. But Southern committee chairmen made sure that farmers and maids were excluded. Not coincidentally, he writes, 75 percent of all blacks in the South (and 60 percent of blacks nationwide) fell into those categories.”
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/08/14/paint_it_white/
I recall your argument against Katznelson:
>>>”Here’s an additional thought, provoked by my re-reading Yardley’s review. Katznelson, as Yardley points out, makes the mistake of assuming that discrimination against one group amounts to “affirmative action” for all those not discriminated against. “Affirmative action,” in short, in this view is simply the other side of the coin of discrimination.”
http://www.discriminations.us/2005/08/jonathan_yardley_gets_a_histor.html#ping-368
At the time, commentary was sidetracked to black military combat service and white privilege. Upon further reflection, John, how can you DENY that the ACTIONS of the US Government that created the white middle class as it exists today had a debilatative affect upon African-Americans?
>>>”The GI Bill did what its backers wanted it to do and more. As Michael Bennett wrote in When Dreams Came True, “The GI Bill of Rights painlessly reabsorbed 12 million veterans into the economy, 7.8 million through educational programs and 8.5 million — many of them the same individuals at different times — through the 52-20 club.” While the reabsorbtion of these veterans into the American workforce solved the immediate post-war problem, the lasting effects were greater. The GI Bill created a new American society based on a huge middle class of veterans who began businesses, bought homes, started families, and paid back in taxes far more than the 14 million spent on the GI Bill. The overall effects of this law are almost incalculable. The GI Bill became the engine of the great American economy that has led the world into the 21st Century. ”
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/us_history_1929_1945/93850/3
What kind of argument are you presenting here? If the GI Bill was WRITTEN so that low interest loans would be ONLY available for war veterans from their LOCAL banks, but in the Jim Crow South, (where most black veterans lived) most banks didn’t give loans to blacks at all, even Jennifer Gratz can see the program was preferentially beneficial to WHITES. Low interest loans for colleges worked out great for African-Americans if you could a) find a bank that would loan you money, and b) lived in an area where colleges weren’t SEGREGATED.
C’mon John.
You want it both ways. Denial of the history and the reality of white privilege in America is not going to win you points on this one among the fair-minded. You’re absolutely correct, however about the playing field not being level. America’s “White Stadium” was designed by whites, for whites, and certainly maintains an pronounced “homefield advantage.”
–Cobra
What Berube is proposing is similar to the College Boards “Strivers” proposal, of which they had both a race-blind and race-sensitive version. As far as I recall, it failed to capture the imagination of university officials.
What a tiresome litany, the usual from you, of a demand for racial revenge.
There is no history of “white privilege” in America, at least in my family.
What I do know for certain is that you’ve had the preference for 50 years… almost my lifetime.
You owe me. You’ve been getting over for five decades. And, black men, in particular, have done remarkably little with that five decade advantage… except to continue the sad history of failure in school, the continuance of a culture of violence and irresponsibility, and the march to prison.
Your mentality is the problem, Cobra. The failures of the black community will continue so long as the black revenge mongers, like you, continue to hold sway.
When will you ever learn?
Yeah, Cobra. There was legalized racial discrimination and segregation in education in the southern United States until 1954. And it took some 20 years to remedy that situation, and since then, there has been considerable affirmative action taken to remove effects of this pernicious practice.
But there was not such institutional or legalized discrimination in the rest of the country (including Michigan and California) over that period of time.
The problem with racial discrimination to redress these practices is that it violates the very provisions of the Constitution which the Supreme Court and Congress used to outlaw racially segregated society in the country.
I suspect if affirmative points were awarded to the non-racial categories identified in the Berube article, you would get little criticism from John or other critics of racial discrimination disguised as affirmative action.
Re cobra’s invocation of Katznelson’s book: been there; done that.
Re his question: John, how can you DENY that the ACTIONS of the US Government that created the white middle class as it exists today had a debilatative affect upon African-Americans?
I don’t deny that altogether. What I deny is that racial discrimination today is an acceptable remedy for whatever discrimination occurred in the past. Aside from not being acceptable, it’s often not even a remedy at all (giving preferential admission to college, graduate, and professional school to blacks with lower qualifications than those who are not admitted to make room for them does nothing to redress whatever you find wrong with the GI Bill or discrimination by Dept. of Agriculture agents, etc.
Re anon’s mention of the “striver” research at the College Board, there’s also this, from a recent editorial in the San Jose Mercury::
But let’s return to the unlevel field. Note what this metaphor assumes: fundamentally, that the game of life is a competition not among individuals but among racial and ethnic teams.
You’re right that the assumption that we’re on racial teams is a problem, but the metaphor is more problematic than that; the “game of life” is not a “competition” at all, in the sense that those words are usually used, for one fundamental reason: there’s no winning and losing. If you get to the finish line of the 100-meter dash first, game over, you win, and I lose. If you score more touchdowns+field goals, game over, you win, and I lose.
But if you get the job at Goldman Sachs and I don’t, you may well be better off than I am, but there’s no “game over,” and I haven’t “lost.” While we may both contend for the same job or college admission, we’re not competing with each other in “life.” The old joke about “He who dies with the most toys, wins,” just isn’t true.
In other words, the metaphor is flawed and misleading. Blacks who were the victims of Jim Crow do have a justifiable grievance, of course, but it’s not the one identified by LBJ about a recently de-hobbled person being put at the starting line of a race, because there isn’t a race. It’s just life. Not a “game.”
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