Affirmative Action and the Working-Class

In a recent post I criticized the more extreme white progressives for taking up the cause of Mumia Abu Jamal instead of supporting Affirmative Action. I touched on it briefly in the main part of the essay, saying that AA is more popular with people of color than Mumia is. In an addendum at the bottom of that post I went into more detail. In this post I will explain why AA is good and not in conflict with revolutionary politics.

(the addendum links to a Gallup poll which found that in 2018 72% of Blacks supported AA for poeple of color and 66% of Hispanics supported it for people of color (that figure for Hispanics might be higher if white Hispanics were excluded) (the first paragraph of a report here indicates strong support for race-based AA among Asian-Americans around 2000, and says nothing about more recent surveys which are apparently uncommon) (I haven’t heard anything about American Indians being unsupportive of race-based AA and about 1/3 of my major in college was American Indian Studies) (according to the first poll I link to, in 2018 69% of women supported AA for women)) (I’m willing to be bet that about 1/3 of those people of color who don’t support AA are middle-class Republicans, and something similar might be true about women)

(UPDATE 4/16/20 I think the frequent exclusion of Asian-Americans from polls about Affirmative Action might be because of the Model Minority Myth (and to enhance that myth) and because people like implying that Asian-Americans don’t support Affirmative Action and because they want to give as many Asian-Americans as possible the idea that their community doesn’t support it and create a wedge between Asian-Americans and other people of color) (UPDATE 11/4/20 A 2020 opinion survey of voters found that 35% of Asians in CA supported a ballot issue to legalize AA in CA and 42% opposed it,  and 23% weren't sure (in the same survey, Blacks were 53% in favor, 17% against and 30% not sure; Hispanics were 42% in favor, 18% against, and 40% not sure))

I can imagine a lot of the more extreme white progressives, and maybe some of the ones that aren’t white, saying that Affirmative Action is just for the benefit of the middle-class and it’s placing a bandage on Capitalism when we should let it bleed. To one degree or another, that’s largely untrue and AA shouldn’t be seen as obstructing the revolution.

In general AA negates institutional tendencies to replicate themselves- companies where all the people involved with hiring and/or promotions are white and/or male might only hire or promote people who are white and/or male. There’s also the fact that, often (not always of course, but often) people who are female and/or persons of color “bring something different to the table.” Even in a non-professional job that’s sort of relevant. I wouldn’t be surprised if (for example), when, in a moderately diverse area, a person of color finds themselves dining in a restaurant and all the viewable staff people are white, it would be a less enjoyable experience for them than if there were some people of color working outside the kitchen. And such a workforce in such an area could be evidence of discrimination and it also raises the question, what are the racial attitudes of these white employees working at a restaurant where the only people of color are in the kitchen? (I’d say something similar about gender)

There are three kinds of AA:

1. Outreach. Making sure that job openings are well known to those who are female and/or persons of color.
2. Preferences. This is where, for example, if there is a man and a woman who meet the minimum qualifications and the workforce is mostly male, the woman gets the job, even if in some ways the man is better qualified.
3. Quotas for Universities and Colleges, which I’ll get to soon.

Government contracts to companies owned by women and/or people of color

A lot of extreme progressives would say this is just for the middle-class. But working-class people benefit from it as well. As far as people of color go, such employers are (to put it mildly) less likely to discriminate in hiring, pay, and promotions. Some would say the promotions part is bourgeois, but consider this- although it’s a band-aid treatment for poverty among people of color, we want everyone have a middle-class standard of living (or at least lower middle-class, when there is a redistribution of wealth and no one gets more than about 20 times the minimum wage (I’ll go into more detail about my vision for socialism some other time)), and this is a good start. Also, every institution should involve equality- I’m not a fan of the military, but I believe there should be equality in it for people of color, LGBTQ people, and women. Also, today (and after the revolution) there is (might still be) discrimination in the public sector and possibly the employee-owned sector in promotions and maybe hiring as well. Also, a company owned by a person of color is less likely (to put it mildly) to tolerate a racially hostile atmosphere for people of color.

To one very large degree or another, everything I say above applies to AA for women.

Hiring and promotions by businesses owned by white men

Pretty much what I say above, more or less. For Blacks, “Hispanics,” and American Indians it would lessen the unemployment their communities disproportionately experience, and result in the non-white under-class getting better paying jobs (who will do the low-paying jobs? Ideally they would pay better, but that workforce should reflect the nation’s demographics).

(UPDATE 4/23/20 I just remembered that there is greater poverty among women and there's unequal pay for women, so what I said sort of applies to them as well)

Quotas for universities and colleges

This and the contracts and hiring stuff, involve a few more things I haven’t said yet. Diversity. There’s not a bad chance that if it weren’t for AA for people of color, our society would be even more (informally) segregated than it is, and there would be more white people with little or no contact with people of color. And as far as the middle-class nature of most of the third level educated population, A) they’re not all middle-class when they go to college, and B) as far as those who are, they might, in one way or another, interact with working-class people in a significant way. When it’s white working-class people, they might, to one degree or another, discourage the racism that probably a large majority of such people are afflicted by. If it’s working-class people of color, they’re more likely to treat them with respect than they would if they went to a college or university with very few people of color.

I’m not sure to what degree this applies to AA for women, but there’s probably a fair number of white people out there who need to be convinced that people of color can graduate from institutions above the level of community colleges and can do jobs that require a lot of intelligence and/or skill, and/or business skills, etc. (I can imagine a lot of racists dismissing degrees received form Historically Black Colleges and Universities- they shouldn’t, but they do, and without quotas at the rest of the universities and colleges, more Black people would go to them)

(Universities and colleges also do outreach and preferences)

Some of what I say above applies to AA for women.

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In general, I think that white extreme progressives who oppose AA are saying that people of color and women are just fucked until the revolution happens, and don’t understand that AFTER the revolution, there will probably still be racist and sexist tendencies in our society. According to this, although Castro was incredibly anti-racist and outlawed racist discrimination, he admitted that racism continued in revolutionary Cuba. And for those anarchists who say that their alternative to capitalism will be racism-free, I say “what about the existence of ORGANIZED National Anarchists, who seem to be tolerated by the rest of the anarchists?” (I have read twice about anarchist book fairs (a popular and major event for anarchists) including a table for National Anarchists). What about the fact that most anarchists think that Federal intervention in the Civil Rights conflict in the American South was a bad thing? What about anarchists who are much less than enthusiastic when they talk about the Union cause in the American Civil War?

I am sort of a Marxist in the sense that about 1/2 of the political books I’ve read are by Marxists and I have a weak grasp of Marxist theory. But I’m also a left-wing social-democrat and I believe that 99% of the time reforms are good. First, I used to nominate myself as the least intellectual socialist by using a term I invented: “building blocks socialism.” I don’t put it that way anymore, but I believe that the accumulation of reforms, especially if they include relatively revolutionary reforms (i.e. empowering unions or shortening the work week with the same amount of pay, or reversing partial or local gov't privitization or a public health insurance option available to anyone who wants it (there was some talk about including that in Obamacare)) would add up to something approaching socialism and then it would be a small step to actual socialism. I believe that AA is one of those blocks.

Here is why I believe in most reforms:

1. As I said, they can be “building blocks” towards socialism.
2. They can alleviate suffering, etc.
3. Sometimes they are empowering.
4. Oppressed people can get a sense of the power they have when they successfully demand reforms, and that will possibly or likely encourage them to demand more.

On a related note, when I think about how we will rid this society of racism, I think one thing that will help is when vocally anti-racist progressives achieve more and more reforms or “revolutionary reforms” that benefit the working-class. Also, unionization will help with that (union households are more likely to vote Democratic than non-union households, and many of the organizers and staff in the labor movement are people of color and most of the whites are anti-racist and most union supporters are people of color or anti-racist whites).

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UPDATE 4/15/20

Some more thoughts about unions and racism.
1. In 2000 in a discussion on the email list of the Young Democratic Socialists (now YDSA) a member who was organizing workers in Indiana said that his competition was the Klan (UPDATE 1/26/22 That is, competition for the hearts and minds of the workers).
2. Eammon McCann is a socialist and anti-Unionist activist in Northern Ireland. He was one of the main leaders of the N. Ireland Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s (he was one of the speakers at the rally/march that was attacked by the British Army on Bloody Sunday in 1972, and he was an organizer of the second Civil Rights march, the one in Derry in Oct. of 1968). He has held several different senior and very senior positions in the Northern Irish TRADE-union movement in the last 40 years. In 2016 he was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly and in 2017 he would have been but they reduced the number of seats returned from each constituency form 6 to 5 so he was basically runner-up. As far as I can tell, in the last 40 years at any given time two mainstream or professional news publication have been publishing his columns. In a column written in the 1980s or 1990s and included in the 1998 anthology of his columns “McCann: War and Peace in Northern Ireland” he wrote:

The trade union movement is better placed than any other to purge the politics of this island of sectarianism. No other institution brings Catholic and Protestant workers together on a regular basis in pursuit of a common purpose which is antipathetic to sectarianism

I think you could easily say the same thing about racism in this country.


Two more thoughts about AA and the working-class
1. In the mid-1990s when I did a lot of activity and writing about AA, I often said that I thought attacks on AA are conservative and right-wing capitalists blaming AA and liberals and people of color for the economic problems their policies cause for working-class white people. It’s scapegoating.
2. It’s true that anti-discrimination measures in a capitalist society mean fewer jobs for white people. Which is why when we defend AA we need to simultaneously advocate for polices that create full employment.  

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In conclusion, AA is a good thing.

(I was not consistent in acknowledging this above, but I know that there are women of color)

(I sometimes think that sexual inequality of the sort this post addresses is a fraction of what it was decades ago, but (among other evidence that I’m wrong) in 2016 close to a majority of voters voted in such a way that the Electoral College placed in the White House a man who made several sexist comments, including one that could be interpreted as bragging about sexually assaulting women)