Reverse Racism,
or How the Pot Got to Call the Kettle Black
by Stanley Fish
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I take my text from George Bush, who, in an address to the United
Nations on September 23, 1991, said this of the UN resolution equating
Zionism with racism: "Zionism . . . is the idea that led to the
creation of a home for the Jewish people. . . . And to equate Zionism
with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the
terrible plight of Jews in World War II and indeed throughout
history." What happened in the Second World War was that six million
Jews were exterminated by people who regarded them as racially
inferior and a danger to Aryan purity. What happened after the Second
World War was that the survivors of that Holocaust established a
Jewish state--that is, a state centered on Jewish history, Jewish
values, and Jewish traditions: in short, a Jewocentric state. What
President Bush objected to was the logical sleight of hand by which
these two actions were declared equivalent because they were both
expressions of racial exclusiveness. Ignored, as Bush said, was the
historical difference between them--the difference between a program
of genocide and the determination of those who escaped it to establish
a community in which they would be the makers, not the victims, of the
laws.
Only if racism is thought of as something that occurs principally in
the mind, a falling-away from proper notions of universal equality,
can the desire of a victimized and terrorized people to band together
be declared morally identical to the actions of their would-be
executioners. Only when the actions of the two groups are detached
from the historical conditions of their emergence and given a purely
abstract description can they be made interchangeable. Bush was saying
to the United Nations, "Look, the Nazis' conviction of racial
superiority generated a policy of systematic genocide; the Jews'
experience of centuries of persecution in almost every country on
earth generated a desire for a homeland of their own. If you manage
somehow to convince yourself that these are the same, it is you, not
the Zionists, who are morally confused, and the reason you are morally
confused is that you have forgotten history."
A KEY DISTINCTION
WHAT I want to say, following Bush's reasoning, is that a similar
forgetting of history has in recent years allowed some people to
argue, and argue persuasively, that affirmative action is reverse
racism. The very phrase [6]Reverse Racism contains the argument in
exactly the form to which Bush objected: In this country whites once
set themselves apart from blacks and claimed privileges for themselves
while denying them to others. Now, on the basis of race, blacks are
claiming special status and reserving for themselves privileges they
deny to others. Isn't one as bad as the other? The answer is no. One
can see why by imagining that it is not 1993 but 1955, and that we are
in a town in the South with two more or less distinct communities, one
white and one black. No doubt each community would have a ready store
of dismissive epithets, ridiculing stories, self-serving folk myths,
and expressions of plain hatred, all directed at the other community,
and all based in racial hostility. Yet to regard their respective
racisms--if that is the word--as equivalent would be bizarre, for the
hostility of one group stems not from any wrong done to it but from
its wish to protect its ability to deprive citizens of their voting
rights, to limit access to educational institutions, to prevent entry
into the economy except at the lowest and most menial levels, and to
force members of the stigmatized group to ride in the back of the bus.
The hostility of the other group is the result of these actions, and
whereas hostility and racial anger are unhappy facts wherever they are
found, a distinction must surely be made between the ideological
hostility of the oppressors and the experience-based hostility of
those who have been oppressed.
Not to make that distinction is, adapting George Bush's words, to
twist history and forget the terrible plight of African-Americans in
the more than 200 years of this country's existence. Moreover, to
equate the efforts to remedy that plight with the actions that
produced it is to twist history even further. Those efforts, designed
to redress the imbalances caused by long-standing discrimination, are
called affirmative action; to argue that affirmative action, which
gives preferential treatment to disadvantaged minorities as part of a
plan to achieve social equality, is no different from the policies
that created the disadvantages in the first place is a travesty of
reasoning. [7]Reverse Racism is a cogent description of affirmative
action only if one considers the cancer of racism to be morally and
medically indistinguishable from the therapy we apply to it. A cancer
is an invasion of the body's equilibrium, and so is chemotherapy; but
we do not decline to fight the disease because the medicine we employ
is also disruptive of normal functioning. Strong illness, strong
remedy: the formula is as appropriate to the health of the body
politic as it is to that of the body proper.
At this point someone will always say, "But two wrongs don't make a
right; if it was wrong to treat blacks unfairly, it is wrong to give
blacks preference and thereby treat whites unfairly." This objection
is just another version of the forgetting and rewriting of history.
The work is done by the adverb "unfairly," which suggests two more or
less equal parties, one of whom has been unjustly penalized by an
incompetent umpire. But blacks have not simply been treated unfairly;
they have been subjected first to decades of slavery, and then to
decades of second-class citizenship, widespread legalized
discrimination, economic persecution, educational deprivation, and
cultural stigmatization. They have been bought, sold, killed, beaten,
raped, excluded, exploited, shamed, and scorned for a very long time.
The word "unfair" is hardly an adequate description of their
experience, and the belated gift of "fairness" in the form of a
resolution no longer to discriminate against them legally is hardly an
adequate remedy for the deep disadvantages that the prior
discrimination has produced. When the deck is stacked against you in
more ways than you can even count, it is small consolation to hear
that you are now free to enter the game and take your chances.
A TILTED FIELD
THE same insincerity and hollowness of promise infect another formula
that is popular with the anti-affirmative-action crowd: the formula of
the level playing field. Here the argument usually takes the form of
saying "It is undemocratic to give one class of citizens advantages at
the expense of other citizens; the truly democratic way is to have a
level playing field to which everyone has access and where everyone
has a fair and equal chance to succeed on the basis of his or her
merit." Fine words--but they conceal the facts of the situation as it
has been given to us by history: the playing field is already tilted
in favor of those by whom and for whom it was constructed in the first
place. If mastery of the requirements for entry depends upon immersion
in the cultural experiences of the mainstream majority, if the skills
that make for success are nurtured by institutions and cultural
practices from which the disadvantaged minority has been
systematically excluded, if the language and ways of comporting
oneself that identify a player as "one of us" are alien to the lives
minorities are forced to live, then words like "fair" and "equal" are
cruel jokes, for what they promote and celebrate is an
institutionalized unfairness and a perpetuated inequality. The playing
field is already tilted, and the resistance to altering it by the
mechanisms of affirmative action is in fact a determination to make
sure that the present imbalances persist as long as possible.
One way of tilting the field is the Scholastic Aptitude Test. This
test figures prominently in Dinesh D'Souza's book Illiberal Education
(1991), in which one finds many examples of white or Asian students
denied admission to colleges and universities even though their SAT
scores were higher than the scores of some others--often
African-Americans--who were admitted to the same institution. This,
D'Souza says, is evidence that as a result of affirmative-action
policies colleges and universities tend "to depreciate the importance
of merit criteria in admissions." D'Souza's assumption--and it is one
that many would share--is that the test does in fact measure merit,
with merit understood as a quality objectively determined in the same
way that body temperature can be objectively determined.
In fact, however, the test is nothing of the kind. Statistical studies
have suggested that test scores reflect income and socioeconomic
status. It has been demonstrated again and again that scores vary in
relation to cultural background; the test's questions assume a certain
uniformity in educational experience and lifestyle and penalize those
who, for whatever reason, have had a different experience and lived
different kinds of lives. In short, what is being measured by the SAT
is not absolutes like native ability and merit but accidents like
birth, social position, access to libraries, and the opportunity to
take vacations or to take SAT prep courses.
Furthermore, as David Owen notes in None of the Above: Behind the Myth
of Scholastic Aptitude (1985), the "correlation between SAT scores and
college grades . . . is lower than the correlation between weight and
height; in other words you would have a better chance of predicting a
person's height by looking at his weight than you would of predicting
his freshman grades by looking only at his SAT scores." Everywhere you
look in the SAT story, the claims of fairness, objectivity, and
neutrality fall away, to be replaced by suspicions of specialized
measures and unfair advantages.
Against this background a point that in isolation might have a
questionable force takes on a special and even explanatory resonance:
the principal deviser of the test was an out-and-out racist. In 1923
Carl Campbell Brigham published a book called A Study of American
Intelligence, in which, as Owen notes, he declared, among other
things, that we faced in America "a possibility of racial admixture .
. . infinitely worse than that faced by any European country today,
for we are incorporating the Negro into our racial stock, while all of
Europe is comparatively free of this taint." Brigham had earlier
analyzed the Army Mental Tests using classifications drawn from
another racist text, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race,
which divided American society into four distinct racial strains, with
Nordic, blue-eyed, blond people at the pinnacle and the American Negro
at the bottom. Nevertheless, in 1925 Brigham became a director of
testing for the College Board, and developed the SAT. So here is the
great SAT test, devised by a racist in order to confirm racist
assumptions, measuring not native ability but cultural advantage, an
uncertain indicator of performance, an indicator of very little except
what money and social privilege can buy. And it is in the name of this
mechanism that we are asked to reject affirmative action and reaffirm
"the importance of merit criteria in admissions."
THE REALITY OF DISCRIMINATION
NEVERTHELESS, there is at least one more card to play against
affirmative action, and it is a strong one. Granted that the playing
field is not level and that access to it is reserved for an already
advantaged elite, the disadvantages suffered by others are less
racial--at least in 1993--than socioeconomic. Therefore shouldn't, as
D'Souza urges, "universities . . . retain their policies of
preferential treatment, but alter their criteria of application from
race to socioeconomic disadvantage," and thus avoid the unfairness of
current policies that reward middle-class or affluent blacks at the
expense of poor whites? One answer to this question is given by
D'Souza himself when he acknowledges that the overlap between minority
groups and the poor is very large--a point underscored by the former
Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, who said, in response to a
question about funds targeted for black students, "Ninety-eight
percent of race-specific scholarships do not involve constitutional
problems." He meant, I take it, that 98 percent of race-specific
scholarships were also scholarships to the economically disadvantaged.
Still, the other two percent--nonpoor, middle-class, economically
favored blacks--are receiving special attention on the basis of
disadvantages they do not experience. What about them? The force of
the question depends on the assumption that in this day and age race
could not possibly be a serious disadvantage to those who are
otherwise well positioned in the society. But the lie was given
dramatically to this assumption in a 1991 broadcast of the ABC program
PrimeTime Live. In a stunning fifteen-minute segment reporters and a
camera crew followed two young men of equal education, cultural
sophistication, level of apparent affluence, and so forth around St.
Louis, a city where neither was known. The two differed in only a
single respect: one was white, the other black. But that small
difference turned out to mean everything. In a series of encounters
with shoe salesmen, record-store employees, rental agents, landlords,
employment agencies, taxicab drivers, and ordinary citizens, the black
member of the pair was either ignored or given a special and
suspicious attention. He was asked to pay more for the same goods or
come up with a larger down payment for the same car, was turned away
as a prospective tenant, was rejected as a prospective taxicab fare,
was treated with contempt and irritation by clerks and bureaucrats,
and in every way possible was made to feel inferior and unwanted.
The inescapable conclusion was that alike though they may have been in
almost all respects, one of these young men, because he was black,
would lead a significantly lesser life than his white counterpart: he
would be housed less well and at greater expense; he would pay more
for services and products when and if he was given the opportunity to
buy them; he would have difficulty establishing credit; the first
emotions he would inspire on the part of many people he met would be
distrust and fear; his abilities would be discounted even before he
had a chance to display them; and, above all, the treatment he
received from minute to minute would chip away at his self-esteem and
self-confidence with consequences that most of us could not even
imagine. As the young man in question said at the conclusion of the
broadcast, "You walk down the street with a suit and tie and it
doesn't matter. Someone will make determinations about you,
determinations that affect the quality of your life."
Of course, the same determinations are being made quite early on by
kindergarten teachers, grade school principals, high school guidance
counselors, and the like, with results that cut across socioeconomic
lines and place young black men and women in the ranks of the
disadvantaged no matter what the bank accounts of their parents happen
to show. Racism is a cultural fact, and although its effects may to
some extent be diminished by socioeconomic variables, those effects
will still be sufficiently great to warrant the nation's attention and
thus the continuation of affirmative-action policies. This is true
even of the field thought to be dominated by blacks and often cited as
evidence of the equal opportunities society now affords them. I refer,
of course, to professional athletics. But national self-congratulation
on this score might pause in the face of a few facts: A minuscule
number of African-Americans ever receive a paycheck from a
professional team. Even though nearly 1,600 daily newspapers report on
the exploits of black athletes, they employ only seven full-time black
sports columnists. Despite repeated pledges and resolutions,
major-league teams have managed to put only a handful of blacks and
Hispanics in executive positions.
WHY ME?
WHEN all is said and done, however, one objection to affirmative
action is unanswerable on its own terms, and that is the objection of
the individual who says, "Why me? Sure, discrimination has persisted
for many years, and I acknowledge that the damage done has not been
removed by changes in the law. But why me? I didn't own slaves; I
didn't vote to keep people on the back of the bus; I didn't turn water
hoses on civil-rights marchers. Why, then, should I be the one who
doesn't get the job or who doesn't get the scholarship or who gets
bumped back to the waiting list?"
I sympathize with this feeling, if only because in a small way I have
had the experience that produces it. I was recently nominated for an
administrative post at a large university. Early signs were
encouraging, but after an interval I received official notice that I
would not be included at the next level of consideration, and
subsequently I was told unofficially that at some point a decision had
been made to look only in the direction of women and minorities.
Although I was disappointed, I did not conclude that the situation was
"unfair," because the policy was obviously not directed at me--at no
point in the proceedings did someone say, "Let's find a way to rule
out Stanley Fish." Nor was it directed even at persons of my race and
sex--the policy was not intended to disenfranchise white males.
Rather, the policy was driven by other considerations, and it was only
as a by-product of those considerations--not as the main goal--that
white males like me were rejected. Given that the institution in
question has a high percentage of minority students, a very low
percentage of minority faculty, and an even lower percentage of
minority administrators, it made perfect sense to focus on women and
minority candidates, and within that sense, not as the result of
prejudice, my whiteness and maleness became disqualifications.
I can hear the objection in advance: "What's the difference? Unfair is
unfair: you didn't get the job; you didn't even get on the short
list." The difference is not in the outcome but in the ways of
thinking that led up to the outcome. It is the difference between an
unfairness that befalls one as the unintended effect of a policy
rationally conceived and an unfairness that is pursued as an end in
itself. It is the difference between the awful unfairness of Nazi
extermination camps and the unfairness to Palestinian Arabs that arose
from, but was not the chief purpose of, the founding of a Jewish
state.
THE NEW BIGOTRY
THE point is not a difficult one, but it is difficult to see when the
unfairness scenarios are presented as simple contrasts between two
decontextualized persons who emerge from nowhere to contend for a job
or a place in a freshman class. Here is student A; he has a board
score of 1,300. And here is student B; her board score is only 1,200,
yet she is admitted and A is rejected. Is that fair? Given the minimal
information provided, the answer is of course no. But if we expand our
horizons and consider fairness in relation to the cultural and
institutional histories that have brought the two students to this
point, histories that weigh on them even if they are not the
histories' authors, then both the question and the answer suddenly
grow more complicated.
The sleight-of-hand logic that first abstracts events from history and
then assesses them from behind a veil of willed ignorance gains some
of its plausibility from another key word in the
anti-affirmative-action lexicon. That word is "individual," as in "The
American way is to focus on the rights of individuals rather than
groups." Now, "individual" and "individualism" have been honorable
words in the American political vocabulary, and they have often been
well employed in the fight against various tyrannies. But like any
other word or concept, individualism can be perverted to serve ends
the opposite of those it originally served, and this is what has
happened when in the name of individual rights, millions of
individuals are enjoined from redressing historically documented
wrongs. How is this managed? Largely in the same way that the
invocation of fairness is used to legitimize an institutionalized
inequality. First one says, in the most solemn of tones, that the
protection of individual rights is the chief obligation of society.
Then one defines individuals as souls sent into the world with equal
entitlements as guaranteed either by their Creator or by the
Constitution. Then one pretends that nothing has happened to them
since they stepped onto the world's stage. And then one says of these
carefully denatured souls that they will all be treated in the same
way, irrespective of any of the differences that history has produced.
Bizarre as it may seem, individualism in this argument turns out to
mean that everyone is or should be the same. This dismissal of
individual difference in the name of the individual would be funny
were its consequences not so serious: it is the mechanism by which
imbalances and inequities suffered by millions of people through no
fault of their own can be sanitized and even celebrated as the natural
workings of unfettered democracy.
"Individualism," "fairness," "merit"--these three words are
continually misappropriated by bigots who have learned that they need
not put on a white hood or bar access to the ballot box in order to
secure their ends. Rather, they need only clothe themselves in a
vocabulary plucked from its historical context and made into the
justification for attitudes and policies they would not acknowledge if
frankly named.
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Copyright © 1993 by Stanley Fish. All rights reserved.