Affirmative Action: the nation that is not one.
This paper was written in 1999, when the debates and campaigns around Prop. 209 repealing affirmative action were in full swing. It was delivered at a UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies conference that April.
It is worthy that the current defense of affirmative action, in the face of attacks such as prop 209, have for the most part, called upon moral arguments rather than a political counterattack. While its original motivation arose from a political attack on the effects of past discrimination, the dismantling of Jim Crow that drove this changed the situation in which it operated. Where Jim Crow had redefined and reracialized the black-white binary in the 1890s, the civil rights movements and the legislation it called forth diluted that binary through recognition of other modes of discrimination: against Latinos, women, Native Americans, etc. The original binary, however, effected a practical division in affirmative action activity between that for white women, and that for people of color. Among the latter, a degree of competition was structurally inherent because diverse groups sought positionality that fractured the black side of the binary still controlled by whites who only needed a black side through which to reconstituted themselves as white. This took the form of competition for the affirmative action pie, and for what jobs and opportunities were opened up in the process. Thus while the original black-white binary of segregation remained the defining factor behind affirmative action, the institution of affirmative action which emerged from desegregation changed the nature of racialization itself. It broadened its base, but left intact the central binary of white to this now multiple non-white section of society, which changed the nature of whites and whiteness, but did not call its formal hegemony into question. In broadening its base (from a white-black binary to a white-non-white-other binary), it transformed a hierarchy of races (which had included Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians as sub-designations of the social category "black" before the identity-oriented movements that drove desegregation fractured it) into an ethnic multiplicity of minorities.
What I am suggesting here is that the defenders of affirmative action did not fully fathom the depth of this political transformation, and fell back on moral arguments for affirmative action based on history and jobs rather than on an understanding of the new configuration of white power, and the new structure of racialization. For the most part, those arguments simply involved what had brought affirmative action into existence, and enumerated its problems and successes. It is not that we haven't seen what anti-affirmative action was dismantling, but we haven't yet grasped the political necessities posed by the socio-ideological transformation that affirmative action itself had brought about. Nor did we perceive the opportunities that transformation presented to anti-affirmative action , the historical moment and process, with respect to reracialization and the reconstitution of whiteness, in which they were operating.
To speak about affirmative action is not just to speak about jobs and history. It is to speak about jobs and history as tokens of steps toward social inclusion, not as "integration" into a congealed melting pot, but as a non-excluded self-generating cultural entity. But these were the dimensions of the issue. Their problematic, within affirmative action, was that jobs were an issue because of a history of segregation, and history was an issue because of state codification and working class enforcement of that exclusion from jobs. We see what is unsaid immediately. The mainstream assumptions, as a background matrix, of capitalism and property in which all jobs are situated.
What needs to be rearticulated is the structure of re-racialization and the reconstruction of whiteness, property and the mainstream, minoritization and the state, that the transformation wrought by affirmative action brought about. I would argue that the structure and inner dynamic of affirmative action itself was designed to reaffirm whiteness and the state as white.
Ideally, on the face of it, desegregation and its corollary affirmative action, should have evoked class solidarity, since it meant the influx of new workers into mainstream jobs, which would have enhanced the political strength of the working class, which depends upon numbers, size, and an ability to organize itself. Marxist theory, at least, should have made that case about afac. And unions could certainly have used the political strength needed to stop runaway shops and integrate automation in a non-job-threatening manner. But as in the 1800s and 1810s, unity for common struggle was not the response. White workers, and most unionist thinking, saw competition, and felt threatened.
The historical precedent for this goes back to 1800-1830 in the northern states, where a slow abolition of slavery was unfolding. Production slaves (as opposed to domestic) were mostly skilled workers, and deployed by white businesses in competition with white skilled workers. White workers supported abolition, and then immediately ostracized the freed black workers, often boycotting establishments that hired them, while supporting measures of disenfrachisement. In other words, rather than extend their own political strength as a class in the newly founded states, they participated in constructing the prototype forms of Jim Crow. In the post-Jackson era, this political position was articulated as the "free labor" ideology. In both instances, black workers were seen as unfair competition that degraded the honor, conditions, and quality of free (read white) labor. [note] Today, that is the charge levied against afac, and black employment in general, though its terms, and its relation to the state have changed. The terms, for isntance, include intensified criminalization of black people, as a reconstruction of a socio-juridical black-white binary; the criminalization of black people is inseparable from the way white workers understand themselves, and their entitlement to jobs and job opportunities as non-criminal. And the state, through afac, is seen as the power deploying black labor in unfair competition with white workers.
Let us unpack this structure, which we can see threads its way through the entire history of the US. It is not a question of the moment, nor is it a contingent tactic by capital to "divide the working class." It has more profound cultural roots then that.
In the face of runaway shops and automation, white workers went to the government to reconstruct the job market for them (as workers in 1810 went to artisan employers). They often went on bended knee, or the embarassingly bent knee of a labor leader. Thus, white workers approach the government through a sense of entitlement, a plea for assistence, and as a hegemonic entity that may just be selling them out. These were, of course, the motifs and dimensions of the populism in the 1890s -- for instance, the People's Party in Georgia, in its struggle against the Democratic Party, a movement which developed through use of the black poulation as its pawn in that struggle, as voting bloc, demonized people, and target of disenfrachisement. And where the seizure of the reconstruction governments by white supremacy in the 1870s set the stage for Jim Crow, so government control of affirmative action set the stage for a general white attack on it, again placing the black population in the role of political football (as economic bloc, criminalized people, and alien).
That is, affirmative action is the way the government structured and institutionalized its relationship with white working and middle classes. In effect, because they did not know how to struggle for their own interests, as an autonomous political force, white workers went to the government for jobs, and government programs to bring black workers up to par with them represented the government turning its back on them. And the reason they had no sense of how to constitute themseslves as an autonomous political force is the primacy of white solidarity over class solidarity that was the cultural core of their earlier participation in proto-Jim Crow and Jim Crow itself. If this white solidarity goes back to the early 1700s, when poor whites were given the role (but not rule) of keeping guard over black slaves, as the ultimate threat of rebellion in the colonies, so in the 19th century, they feel their dignity as workers through their whiteness, and they feel their whiteness as a social structure in which to participate as workers. Class solidarity can only be meaningful through white solidarity, which implies class collaboration.
Thus, white workers became a force against non-white workers through the government under the cover of an assault on the government for assurances that it is white.
The issue of crime in the streets, to which the government, police, and media are dedicated, presents an analogy and an allegory that shows how this works. Crime in the streets is understood as black assailant and white victim (which includes drugs, for which there may not be any victim), all statistics to the contrary notwithstanding. The attack on a person's well-being, health, and property represented by violent crime becomes the arena for white solidarity calling for greater police power and always attacking the law for insufficient severity.
A special political circumstance emerges if the crime is rape. The structure is the same, with the law playing the part of the government, and the woman playing the role of jobs. The spectre of the black rapist attacking a white woman engenders a solidarity of white men with the white woman that extends to all whites, including white rapists. In the context of this solidarity, the victim of a white rapist is considered to have "brought it on herself," to have "gotten what she was asking for." When this victim complains of the rape, she is considered to be attacking all men, who fall back on white solidarity in defense. White male solidarity is accomplished through rape and the mythification of the black rapist. The mythification of the black on white rapist becomes the icon by which affirmative action for white women was rendered a non-issue. But it reified the other sense of entitlement among white men, namely, that they are entitled to a relation with a woman, and entitled to be violent toward women who refuse, or who maintain a sense of autonomy.
The question of entitlement, or property, is thus central to the attack on afac. It is, in the US, its most assured ground. In US history, the protection of property, for those who have it (not the right to property), has always been the unquestionable, as a primary consideration. When, after the revolution, the northern states addressed abolishing slavery, the question that became primary was not human compassion, morality or ethics, the criminality and terror of slavery and the slave trade, or consistency with the Declaration of Indpendence, but how the current slaveholders were going to be compensated for their loss of property.
With the institution of afac, Black people and women were given the opportunity to overcome past discrimination, but through a state that operates through enforcement rather than dialogue, judicial review rather than social interaction, obedience rather than personal dignity; that is, an enforcement state that took on the enforcement of non-discrimination. It was never an attempt to bring people into dialogue, so they could tell each other their stories, let alone discuss them. Contracts and institutional rules are enforced; relations and human groups can only talk their way into existence dialogically. Prisons operate through incapacitation rather than reconciliation, containment rather than socialization. In other words, there is a dichotomy between a property relation and a human relation, and for the state, it is the former that is the operative relation. In being an act of the state, affirmative action was implemented on the basis of property.
For the supporters of afac, it was an ethos, a question of participation, and thus of community. For those who opposed it, it was, and still is, a question of entitlement, something taken away, a confiscation. But what the property amounted to was itself jobs and history, their being as white workers (both working and middle class). affirmative action was a way of attacking the property aspects of whiteness, the idea that whites owned those jobs. The attack on affirmative action cannot be understood without understanding that property aspect of whiteness. (Cf. Cheryl Harris) It operates as a way of preserving this aspect of social property, seeing any incursion of black people upon a white domain as "taking over". It is similar to the disputes that arose between the colonial settlers, who had a concept of land as property, and the Native Americans, who didn't, and who got killed when they walked across land that a white man had staked out. In fostering the inclusion of black workers in the job pool, the state was seen by white workers as betraying a property right.
What the defense of affirmative action would have to do, to make its case, is attack the ethos of entitlement as false property, that is, the property constituted by whiteness, which would mean raising the question of whiteness as property openly in a political manner. To do this, it would have to socially contest the notion of the mainstream. This is not a programmatic idea, but an ideational context in which to make effective other more material moves or approaches.
Mainstream society in the US is white. Whites constitute the central "imagined community" of the US, in the sense that white solidarity constitutes its nationalism. What is not white is looked at as other, not included as of unequal worth, exotic, subordinate. While the ideology of integration that governed affirmative action sought to extend the notion of mainstream society beyond the boundaries of whiteness, neither the arguments for it or against it could help but reify the distinction between mainstream and other, between the exclusive and the excluded.
On this score, equal opportunity is a misnomer; it refers to people who have no parity within the system that offers it. In general, racialization, ethnic or minority status, gender hierarchy (or indeed gender itself) etc. do not name aspects of people, or essences, or inherencies. They all name something that someone does to someone else. When de Beauvoir says that one is not born a woman, one is made one, this is what she is referring to. Similarly, black or white people are not born black or white; they are given this as their social categorization. The "something" that someone does to someone else always contains hierarchy and domination, a condition of non-parity. The incommensurability of this disparity lies between defining another and being defined as other. But in the ideology or ethos of the "colorblind" society, the law claims not to recognize color diffeences. In saying so, it is looking at skin color, and considering it real, though the colors proclaimed by racialization are not physical attributes but social categories, a social color. In confusing the two, the law displaces social category through a chromatic slight of hand. The color it thereby establishes thorugh non-recognition of differences is white. As usual, it is black people who are supposed to stop seeing themselves as black, while whites don't have to do that.
Nevertheless, affirmative action is one of the ways in which anti-racism sought to be mainstream. It accepted the gov's proposal for a structure that worked through EEOCs and the courts. Anti-racism thus became white anti-racism within a governmental structure that had always been white, and governed a white mainstream. As white anti-racism, it too approached those designated as non-white as the other, the excluded, and became another mode by which the government and the mainstream preserved its character as white. It raises the question, can an anti-racist movement be both mainstream and anti-racist?
All this comes to gether in another transformation that desegregation and affirmative action brought about, the necessity to re-enfranchise, and the effect this had on the mainstream's whiteness. To accept the re-enfranchised (Black, Latino, Native, etc.) and not admit or integrate them into the mainstream, the concept of race (the black-white binary) had to be transformed into something appropriate to the new arena. It was transformed into athnicity, and the exclusive/excluded hierarchy was transported from the socio-political realm of segregation to the cultural politics of minority status. The demand by non-white groups for inclusion as cultural identities induced the white mainstream to take itself as cultural, proclaim a white-defined multiculturalism, and constitute a white-multicultural binary, which then valorized the minority status of the enfranchised. The second, the transportation of non-white groups (white here taken as national) into the form of minorities highlighted the control mechanism that underlay governmental institutionalization of affirmative action in the first place.
Minoritization is, after all, the form of exclusion relevant to the structure of electoral democracy. A minority is a voting bloc that always loses; it is always wrong because it gets outvoted as a group. If it has special interests which set it aside as a cultural or ethnic minority, one of those is always its attempt to overcome its political exclusion, though as a culturally autonomous group, and to gain parity and equality with the mainstream. Thus, its special interests are generated by the mainstream claim that it has special interests. A minority is the form that racial or ethnic hierarchy and exclusion takes on the political plane, within the logic of representational democracy.
To end minority status (without losing cultural autonomy), a minority has, in the logic of democracy, only the mainstream to turn to. With only the mainstream to extricate them, the logic of democracy not only traps blacks, latinos and women in minoritization. it continues the structure of racialization on the political plane.
And to the extent that minority persons break into the mainstream through jobs or elected positions, they do not end their being enmeshed in the two party system; they participate in its being hegemonic toward the groups still minoritized; that is, they take on its character as white.
The structure that renders the logic of democracy in the US as a trap is the two party system. The two party system functions on a binary principle of majority rule, of winner take all. This principle guarentees that all third party efforts will be structurally impotent and vacuous. Third party efforts only split the side they are ostensibly on and remain inherently counter-productive. But it is not just that voters feel constrained to play the lesser of two evils game. No significant third party presence in office would be permitted in a legislative body, because that would automatically give it power as the tie-breaker and the alliance maker. Secondly, winner-take-all also guarentees that a mainstream will always be given precedence over minority interests and defined by the two parties of representation. Because winner takes all in each district, the representative elected ends up representing the whole district, ignoring of necessity to an extent contradictory class or cultural interests, and different social necessities. Differences become amalgamated at the governmental level, covered over through the structure of representation itself. Thus, the two party operations, the white mainstream, a tacit disenfranchisement of third party or minority interests, and a racial hierarchy are all maintained by the same structure, the same logic of democracy.
The problem, then, is not how to reconstitute a movement for affirmative action, but how to change the system of representation so that the opposition to affirmative action by majoritarian processes of racialization and property ethics no longer finds itself structurally supported. To contest the proprietary ethos of whiteness, the ability of racist hierarchy to shape-shift at will, and to oppose anti-affirmative action which relies on both, the structure of representation, and the logic of democracy as it exists and expresses all this, presents itself as a political necessity. Furthermore, a transformation of the political structure to proportional representation would stop the process of re-racialization, because it would undermine the ethos of minoritization from which it is reconstituting itself at this moment in history. The question is not how the system of representation needs to be changed, but in making the call for its change, a movement would already have changed the political landscape. And the logic of this argument is that a defense of affirmative action and such an assault on the winner-take-all system are inextricable.
But the name will need to be changed; aff-act is no longer a name that can be deployed. A new name, and a new kind of movement that targets the police, biased judiciary, and the two-party system, to stave off reracialization, will have to be developed.
The attacks on affirmative action represent a campaign to reestablish a racialized hierarchy in the US, after that hierarchy had been called in question by the civil rights movements. The shift of race to the political relations of ethnicity and minoritization (where black people had some allies) can amount to a holding action until white hegemony can be reconstructed, or it can be held onto, and the structure of representation changed. For the reconstruction of white racial hegemony, the black minority would have to be reracialized, and devested of its ethnicity. The criminalization of black people, and the ideology of judicial colorblindness are beginning to accomplish these two tasks. The actual arguments used against affirmative action are immaterial as long as they attack it on a racialized basis, thus reracializing the minority structurally, implying that it occurs within a structure valorizing whiteness (colorlessness). It is for this reason that history and morality, which deal with content, don't defend afac; it can be defended only through an attack on the structure, on form.
As white opposition to affirmative action grows, and gradually seizes the modes of covert segregation that have never been absent from the economic landscape, to implement re-racialization, opposition will not occur or develop on the basis of its content of its arguments (though that cannot be ignored, and must be answered), but on the structure of social property and its political representation. Class discourses will not help, here, because the new segregation is being brought into existence through class entitlement, and entitlement to the very means by which black people would enter the working class: jobs. If black workers are to engage in a struggle for jobs, it will position white workers on the side of capital, in defense of their "proprietary" rights. For black workers, the question becomes contesting property right itself, and the social ethos that extends this to the realm of employment.
Racialization will remain unassailable in the US as long as the
structure of representation picks up the slack from the assaults on
racism and white hegemony, and leads it back into the enforcement
state, which provides (through minoritization) the false truce during
which the forces of reracialization can reorganize and remarshall their
forces. The two party system is essential to this process because it
provides the interregnum by grounding it upon an all or nothing
condition in which the minority always loses. The alternative to this
is proportional representation.
So far, we have traced the transformation of the black-white racial hierarchy of Jim Crow to the multiculture-white binary of affirmative action minoritization with a hierarchy now ethnicized rather than racialized. If, as minorities, different groups become actual voting blocs, and begin to generate a form of political self-awareness for themselves, to actually define modes of operating and manipulating their "special" interests in the political arena, within the two party system, they create a different instability for the white structure, from which it can escape only through re-racialization. And this now brings us to a consideration of the structure of anti-affirmative action , as it is determined by the structure of affirmative action itself.
There is a solidarity that inhabits the group that finds itself empowered by its past performance to continue it ever again within new socio-political circumstances. On a class level, there is a white solidarity that has always transcended class unity and class necessity. What this white solidarity has produced in class terms is an economy divided not by relations to the means of production, as Marx described it for Europe, but divided according to administrative positions within a corporate structure. In a corporate society, the primary relation between people is between administrative positions and task fulfillment. That is, the economic differentiation between people was primarily a product of their role in that administrative structure, and only secondarily their relation to the means of production. The white social structure is a social system that sets all whites in a structural relation to each other; and class distinctions were made within the matrix of white solidarity. And the term "labor" then functions as an honorific within the corporate structure.
What this corporate structure demands for itself first and foremost is allegiance (both industrial and anti-war organizers have been called "traitors") around social profitability and the prioritization of profits vs. people. Allegiance to this administrative structure is allegiance to whiteness. The real role of the democratic machinery is protect the priority of administrative structure over traditional class relations. At the state and national level, the two-party-system forms the administrative intermediary between popular expression and the machinery of administration of labor and profitability. And at the same time, it prioritizes non-responsibility. While an individual is responsible to those above, in diverse hierarchies, one is not responsible for what one does to those below, unless it threatens to disrupt the system. Welfare reform, downsizing lay-offs, redlining, the use of stun-belts, and many forms of victimization or assault are honored, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly by blaming the victim.
White society, as a white (corporate) social machine thus ends up in a class relation to all non-white (non-mainstream) labor. The white social machine, dedicated to its own social profitability, and with its own internal class structure, politically sets all non-white people into a racialized class, as the machine's cultural raw material (labor, cultural marker, threat, etc.), and incorporates white immigrants into its administrative structure through by giving them white identity. The real exploitative class relation in corporate society is between corporate society and those outside it. And the white working class plays a mediating and controlling role, as exploited within the corporate society, and guarenteeing the central class relation between white corporate society and its real (and internationalized) working class.
It is in this sense that a black person competing for a job is a black person competing, and not a competitor who is black. A white person becomes a skilled worker, while a black becomes a skilled black worker. These are not only social designations, but real class differentiations, the boundaries or glass ceilings of which are only slightly porous, and broken through only with great effort.
It is within this double class structure that the structure of anti-affirmative action can be understood.
note - After the civil war, when unions were first appearing, and were white, the NLU called on black workers to organize, but in separate locals. Outsider status and competition were assumed, to be avoided only be keeping black workers in separate industries. That is, they included black labor in their thinking, but as segregated, outsiders, alien presences who had to toe the white labor line to be recognized.