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STEPHEN STEINBERG is a professor in the Urban Studies Department of Queens College. His book, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy, received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION POLICY WAS FORGED OUT OF THE CAULDRON of black insurgency. It was the mobilization of black protest, beginning with the civil rights movement and the ensuing upsurge of black militancy, that engendered the political pressure for the policy initiatives that came to be known as "affirmative action."
The most important of these initiatives was the Philadelphia Plan which was originally drawn up by Lyndon Johnson's Department of Labor, but shelved after Hubert Humphrey's defeat in 1968. A year later it was resurrected by Arthur Fletcher, the black Assistant Secretary of Labor, with the backing of Charles Shultz and Nixon himself. Why Nixon, who got elected by openly appealing to the racial backlash, backed the Philadelphia Plan has been the subject of much speculation. This is less mystifying when placed in proper historical context. During the summer of 1969 there was an outbreak of highly publicized protests against discrimination in the construction trades. Hugh Davis Graham, author of The Civil Rights Era, provides the following description:
In Chicago, job protests launched by a coalition of black neighborhood organizations shut down twenty-three South Side construction projects involving $85 million in contracts. . . . The demonstrations in Pittsburgh were more violent than in Chicago, but were similarly organized and focused on job discrimination in construction. One clash in Pittsburgh in late August left 50 black protestors and 12 policemen injured. . . . Racial violence over jobs also occurred in Seattle, and black coalitions announced job protest drives for New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Boston (pp. 334-335).
It is true, as Davis and others have claimed, that Nixon had little to lose by "sticking it" to the Democratic unions. But it is also true that, given the war in Vietnam, Nixon had political reason to defuse black protest, lest he find himself confronted with a "second front" at home. Whatever the political calculations that led Nixon to back Fletcher's proposal to resurrect the Philadelphia Plan, one thing is clear: without the pressure from below, the Plan would have remained in the Labor Department's trash bin where it had been deposited by the previous Democratic administration.
No such claim can be made with respect to class-based affirmative action. This proposal did not evolve out of a mobilization of working-class people or their unions to combat the blatant classism that restricts their access to higher education and to many white-collar jobs. Rather, the idea of class-based affirmative action is the brainchild of armchair theorists and political pundits with no political leverage or constituency. Worse still, the suggestion that affirmative action should be class-based rather than race-based was advanced, not for its own sake, but as a second line of defense against the right-wing crusade to gut affirmative action. It provided a rejoinder to the contention that it was unfair to give preference to the child of a black doctor over the child of a white miner or garbage collector. Class-based affirmative action never had a chance of being enacted as policy, but served only as a rhetorical foil in the affirmative action debate.
This explains why the idea of class-based affirmative action has been embraced by the very conservatives who spearheaded the crusade against affirmative action: Clint Bolick, Dinesh D'Souza, Clarence Thomas, Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, and Newt Gingrich.1 Essentially they have used the "class card" to trump the "race card." They feign compassion for the working classes only to provide ideological cover for their assault on affirmative action.
Of course, the "class not race" stance has ideological resonance on the Left. Social democrats, including Bayard Rustin, actively opposed the Philadelphia Plan because it threatened to create a rift between labor unions and the civil rights movement. Forced to choose between "race" and "class," they opted for the latter, even though this meant that the racist unions who were the targets of the Philadelphia Plan would go unchecked.
It was another self-declared social democrat, William Julius Wilson, who introduced the "class not race" position into more recent discourse. In his 1987 book, The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson wrote that "programs of preferential treatment applied merely according to racial or ethnic group membership tend to benefit the relatively advantaged segments of the designated group" (p. 115). No matter that most of these individuals owe their "relative advantage" to affirmative action! Wilson's demurral has been widely quoted by liberals who have capitulated to the escalating racial backlash and have withdrawn support from affirmative action.
IN A SUBSEQUENT ARTICLE ENTITLED "Race-Neutral Programs and the Democratic Coalition," published in the Spring 1990 issue of The American Prospect, Wilson resurrected Rustin's position on "coalition politics." As he wrote:
An emphasis on coalition politics that features progressive, race-neutral policies could have two positive effects. It could help the Democratic Party regain lost political support, and it could lead to programs that would especially benefit the more disadvantaged members of minority groups -- without being minority policies (p. 81).
Alas, political principle and racial justice were to be jettisoned in the name of a coalition that was never more than a chimera and a Democratic Party that rewarded political expediency by conspiring in the dismantling of the welfare state.
The proposal that affirmative action should be based on class instead of race has received renewed attention with the 1996 publication of The Remedy, by journalist Richard Kahlenberg. An excerpt was featured in a cover story of The New Republic (April 3, 1995), under the title "Class Not Race." What purpose, one might ask, did the editors of the New Republic have in featuring Kahlenberg's article? The answer is embedded in the subtitle: "A Liberal Case for Junking Old-Style Affirmative Action in Place of Something that Works."
Unfazed by the fact that the steady evisceration of race-based affirmative action has brought us no closer to his vision of an even more far-reaching affirmative action based on class, Kahlenberg has recently recycled his argument for the Spring 1998 issue of The New Labor Forum, published by the Labor Resource Center of the City University of New York. Precisely because the invocation of "class" has such visceral appeal to those on the Left, it behooves us to subject his argument to close examination.
Kahlenberg predicates his position on three sets of premises:
The problem is that none of this seductive logic stands up to close scrutiny. Let me attempt to parry each of Kahlenberg's core suppositions.
1) From the standpoint of abstract logic, it may seem contradictory to employ racial classifications and racial preferences in the struggle against racism. In the real world, however, this is a logical and necessary step to counteract the effects of two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow, compounded by an entrenched racism that continues to restrict minority access to jobs and opportunities.
The whole point of affirmative action is to drive a wedge in the structure of occupational segregation that has existed, literally, since slavery. Furthermore, affirmative action is chiefly responsible for most of the "progress" that we celebrate. The black middle class is concentrated precisely in occupations where affirmative action programs have been in place for over two decades -- not only in the professions and in corporate management, but in major blue-collar industries and in government where over one-quarter of all blacks are employed.
Kahlenberg is willing to trade away all of this for the sake of what he considers logical consistency. The problem, though, is that he is unable to grasp the difference between using a racial classification to subjugate an entire people, and using a racial classification for the purpose of remedying some of the lingering effects of that very system.
2) Kahlenberg bemoans the fact that affirmative action is unpopular, and he is all cut up over the split between blacks and labor. He thinks that a class-based affirmative action would restore interracial unity under the umbrella of the labor movement. Kahlenberg turns a blind eye to the long and sorry history of racism within the labor movement. Indeed, affirmative action has its origins with the Philadelphia Plan, which was aimed at the lily-white unions in the construction trades. Instead of calling upon organized labor to break with its racist past, he asks blacks to forgo opportunity for the sake of a non-existent black-labor alliance.
In pressing his case for a class-based affirmative action, Kahlenberg dredges up the hackneyed argument that it is unfair to give preference to "the son of a black doctor over the son of a white garbage collector." Think about it. How often is it that the son of a black doctor finds himself vying with the son of a white garbage collector? Presumably, Kahlenberg has in mind competition for admission to Berkeley or to Yale. But that son of a black doctor is likely to find himself in competition with, not the sons of white garbage collectors, but the sons of white doctors, who have not had to cope with the psychological liabilities and material disadvantages of being black in a white society. This is the rationale for giving a leg up even to the son of a black doctor.
Now let us think about that son of the white garbage collector. Granted, he has many liabilities to cope with in a society highly stratified by class. On the other hand, as a white man in a racially stratified society, he has access to coveted jobs in the blue-collar world that historically were the exclusive domain of white men. Indeed, in cities where garbage collectors were protected by union contracts, blacks could not even get hired as garbage collectors, much less as policemen or plumbers or assembly line workers.
In short, affirmative action is designed to address inequities of caste, not class. It gives recognition to the fact that, as an oppressed minority, blacks have had to deal with the impediments of race in addition to those of class. This is not to deny that there is a dire need to address the inequities of class as well as those of race. Clearly, we need both class-based and race-based affirmative action, but Kahlenberg asks us to substitute the one for the other.
3) Kahlenberg's rejoinder is that blacks will benefit disproportionately from a class-based affirmative action since they are disproportionately poor. But is this really the case? Remember that blacks are only a minority of the poor, and to make matters worse, they are concentrated among the poorest of the poor. The higher one goes up the income ladder, the smaller the proportion of blacks at any given rung of the ladder. Therefore, it is likely that most of the advantages of a class-based affirmative action would go to whites and to other minorities. Andrew Hacker has quipped that the group that would benefit most are the white children of divorced parents.
Besides, Kahlenberg acts as though we have a choice between a race-based or a class-based affirmative action. Fact is that there is no prospect of a significant class-based affirmative action being enacted in the foreseeable future. Indeed, the reason that this "radical" idea has been endorsed by the likes of Newt Gingrich is to provide cover for the retreat from affirmative action, and to stoke the resentments of white backlash by suggesting that it is not "fair" to help only blacks. This is the political equivalent of the "bait and switch" tactics used by sleazy retailers. Make no mistake: the end of affirmative action as we know it will not be replaced by an even more far-reaching class-based affirmative action.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION -- WHETHER RACE-BASED OR CLASS-BASED -- does nothing to attack the structure of class inequality, and in the final analysis, only substitutes minorities and women in places that were once occupied exclusively by white males. Nevertheless, affirmative action addresses one of the most odious aspects of inequality in America -- the segregation of occupations along racial and gender lines. Whatever its limitations, affirmative action counters racism and enhances democracy, and therefore deserves the support of progressives. The alternative is to join the national crusade against affirmative action, and this is no less contemptible when it is done in the name of the working class. Which is to say, the white working class.