A History of Affirmative Action, 1619-2000
Philip F. Rubio
University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
$48.00, 288 pages, ISBN 1-57806-354-X (hardback).
$20.00, 327 pages, ISBN 1-57806-355-8 (paperback).
Bernard Cros
Université d'Avignon
The current emotional debates over affirmative action were not born
in the America of the 1960s. As Philip F. Rubio demonstrates, evidence
is to be found
from colonial times throughout the history of the United States: his historical
study which goes back explicitly to the arrival of the first black African
slaves on American soil in 1619, describes the endless roller-coaster struggle
for black equal rights and opportunity: each bridgehead established after
a bitter struggle (as in the Civil War and the ensuing Reconstruction
period,
or in the 1960s with the civil rights movement) to ensure that the disadvantaged
communities would obtain an artificial return for their past and present
hardships was followed by an equally active period of reaction by
pro-white social forces
(including notably, although with various degrees of influence, executive,
legislative and judicial powers) which tended to push back into indifference,
or worse still, to strike down, whatever progress had been made. The whole
book points to the means to ensure compensation for blacks as much as to
the extreme resistance of the “American racial caste system”.
Rubio’s demonstration rests on several key hypotheses which are in due
course examined and vindicated:
(1). It is essential to understand first “the reactionary tenacity of
whiteness” as an ideology which has kept thwarting the attempts by black
activists to obtain a better bargain in America’s social and economic
order since the seventeenth century. The debate centers around power-sharing
and the shaking of the established white order.
(2). Just as the “white race” is a social and historical construction
which can be traced to the early colonies, “whiteness” is an “invented
voluntary social institution”, constantly redefined, designed to justify,
and therefore maintain, the privileges of whites over blacks. Even the Catholic
Irish, once the scum of the earth for the English “natives”, became
co-opted as whites inside a great “Nordic” European group at the
end of the nineteenth century, while the Poles, Italians and Russians were
accepted in the mid-twentieth century.
(3). Affirmative action spreads to all sorts of domains, but is essentially
and historically associated with black discrimination in employment, where
whites have felt the threatening competition of the black man. Actions in
favor of other disadvantaged groups (Hispanics, Native Americans, women,
gays etc.),
as well as in other areas (education, housing, healthcare…), all stem
from the founding black struggle in the workplace. This is all the more important
as the blacks have consistently remained the poorest community, whoever the
newcomers (Irish, North and South Europeans, Asians…) were.
(4). Affirmative action mechanisms were originally designed not to elevate
blacks, but to protect whites from being deprived of their privileges. Turning
the issue upside down, Rubio states that the real issue is not whether African
Americans should be compensated to correct discrimination, but rather why whites
should continue to receive preferential treatment on the basis of their whiteness.
Blacks were often barred from engaging in certain trades, or a minimum number
of white workers were required. Champions of the white cause have always wielded
the danger of unfair advantages given to the blacks at any sign of potential
corrective measure which by definition would be made at their expense.
Rubio illustrates the manipulation and contradictions of the arguments used
by opponents of such mechanisms. For instance, critics attack affirmative
action on the grounds that it allows a category of citizens to stand out
unduly to
benefit from privileges (job reservation or college education), and that
a whole group can thus be sponsored while the Constitution only points to
and
protects the rights of individuals only. Of course, such view points underestimate
the starting point that if blacks should be “picked out” from the
rest for help, it is precisely because the mechanisms of privilege have been
working without interruption in favor of the whites since the beginnings
of the European presence. Polls reveal how a majority of the white population
are ready to recognize past discrimination and accept the need for affirmative
action programs, but refuse the logical outcome of such an admirable position,
namely concrete preferential treatment on the job market, in housing
or education. Opponents to black progress also use the moral myth of “America-as-meritocracy”,
emphasizing its egalitarian appeal, to counter any corrective measure on
the grounds that it corrupts that essential component of the American dream
by
denying worthy individuals a deserved right which they would have enjoyed
had it not been for the less deserving black person who was chosen instead.
Social
conditions being paramount to success in such areas as education, it was
no surprise that standardized admission tests to colleges and universities
were
so easily imposed in the 1940s and 1950s.
The book also sheds light on the ambiguous role played by courts, particularly
the Supreme Court which has often held back the advances of affirmative action.
In 1883, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled in Civil Rights Cases that
blacks were now “mere citizens” and should no longer be “the
special favorite of the laws”. Here again, the “principle of reality” steps
in: it is all very well to call blacks “mere citizens” while
at the same time denying them the actual means of being equal citizens.
(Rubio’s study of reactions to and usage of the Fourteenth Amendment is
very instructive.) This is probably the author’s main source of concern
and anger: white America refuses to accept that it has been overtly privileged
and that affirmative action is not some kind of unfair benefit awarded to a
privileged caste, precisely because white Americans have always been the privileged
caste. Being white means having a certain “value”—refusing to
award American citizenship to blacks for so long was a way to avoid civic miscegenation
as “citizenship would be somehow devalued”.
As an overtly Marxist writer, Rubio emphasizes the class dimension of his
subject. Once a blue-collar worker, labor and community activist himself,
he demonstrates
authoritatively that a majority of white workers have always preferred short-term
gains to class solidarity with fellow black workers (even when competition
for jobs is not fierce, race solidarity tends to prevail) and has therefore
always played in the hands of capital—an illustration of Karl Marx’s
own belief that workers’ division is what maintains capitalism alive.
The Great Depression provides crucial examples of white-only unions authorized
to engage in bargaining, so that even the New Deal resulted in a strengthening
of white privilege and blacks faring worse than the other groups. WWII did
nothing to improve the situation as the shortage of manpower in factories was
only marginally compensated by blacks—the race factor was still prevalent
among employers who preferred to take on white women.
The various strands of the black struggle are also examined in critical terms.
Abandoned largely by whites, Rubio explains, blacks understood early that
it was up to them to organize and obtain rights for themselves. The options
have
oscillated between the “uplift ideology” of Booker T. Washington,
who claimed that the black man must earn his way into the white man’s
world through twice as much effort and conformity to white America which will
eventually reward his goodwill with rights (a mirror image of the paternalistic
attitude of some liberal whites ready to bestow a few “tokens” on
a few blacks), and the radical, confrontational ideas of the Black Panthers
and Nation of Islam, which consider that humiliation is not the way and that
the black man need not wait for the patronizing white man to surrender anything
to him. According to the author, the foundation is to be found first in the
lost battles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jim
Crow era, when “new forms of black-led protest and organization against
white privilege” emerged. Harlem was a hotbed of such direct action, which
included strikebreaking, boycotting “(Don’t Buy Where You Can’t
Work” campaigns), picketing of factories and stores (to obtain the right
to work there), while legal battles were also engaged in courts. After WWII,
the context of affluence encouraged blacks to demand a bigger share of the
pie and to challenge the white privileges. Then Southern segregation became
a symbol of America’s race problem and provided the advanced guard of
the struggle.
Interestingly, though unsurprisingly, Rubio claims to dispel the myth that “the
civil rights movement was [purely] a black middle-class phenomenon” when “both
the civil rights and Black Power movements […] had black working-class
origins.” “Affirmative action became the result of the collective—though
not always united—black community struggle against white supremacy, rather
than a victory for the black middle-class at the expense of black workers.” However,
he acknowledges the Black Panthers as the crucial institution, without which “there
would be no such thing as affirmative action today.” This does not mean
that the agenda or the means used by the various anti-discrimination movements
were the same. Rubio insists on the two-fold goal of affirmative action:
(1) ensuring a better bargain in the contemporary world, and (2) obtaining
reparation
for past discrimination. At the same time, the means ranged from non-violence
to extreme violence. Indirectly, their pressure probably resulted in Presidents
Kennedy and Johnson signing executive orders which started to bring down
discrimination in the workplace, although it was the Civil Rights Act which
terminated it
officially in 1964. As time went by, affirmative action programs proved efficient,
but they have had to resist the resilience of white privilege which has kept
fighting back, especially, although not just, in the South. The book sheds
light on the Reagan and Bush administrations which set out to eliminate all
affirmative action programs and sanctions for employers breaching anti-discrimination
legislation, which impeded economic activity and market forces.
However the study sometimes fails to provide enough conceptual tools and
definitions to tackle the issue at large. As a historian and not a philosopher,
Rubio was
probably less interested in a thorough examination of the very expression “affirmative
action” and its synonyms like “positive discrimination”—which
strangely enough is never used. The philosophical origin of the notion is mentioned
(the old English legal concept of “equity” born in the thirteenth
century) but not developed. The same can be said of its first recorded use
in 1871 (in reference “to safeguarding black civil rights from the white
affirmative action of state-sanctioned discrimination and refusal to
stop white supremacist terrorism” at a time of Ku Klux Klan violence in the
South). As a matter of fact, the title does not even allude to the fact that
only America is envisaged, when so many other societies across the world—like
South Africa, Britain and France—could put the lessons of the American
experience to use. Despite these minor reservations, A History of Affirmative
Action, 1619-2000, fraught with details and anecdotes, makes challenging
and enlightening reading about one of the hottest political potatoes in contemporary
America.
