RW Johnson: The sad story of Affirmative Action

Key topics:Affirmative action led to racial favouritism and resentmentBlack progress was faster before AA and DEI were introducedCulture, family, and effort matter more than redress or quotas.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up for the BizNews channel here..By RW Johnson.Affirmative action was first introduced in America in the 1960s. Initially it simply meant taking action to end unfair labour practices which discriminated against blacks – re-instating workers who had been fired for seeking to unionize, for example, or breaking down the many informal “Jim Crow” barriers to the employment of blacks in various sectors. The whole push of the civil rights movement of the 1950s had been towards colour blindness: blacks must be allowed exactly the same rights and privileges as anyone else. This was, after all, the American Way and everyone could feel proud of filling out the Constitution’s insistence on equality for all. This enabled the early advocates of affirmative action to insist that the changes they sought would not discriminate against whites – or against anyone. Very quickly, however, this morphed into an active seeking out of black candidates for jobs, scholarships, housing places etc. This followed the American fascination with “role models” and identity politics and it very soon meant an active discrimination in favour of blacks, women or Hispanics. As the sociologist Nathan Glazer remarked, whatever the term’s initial meaning by the 1970s “affirmative action meant quotas and goals and timetables”. So the initial commitment to colour-blindness went out the window: despite all the early promises to the contrary, affirmative action did mean racial favouritism, it did redistribute resources, it did discriminate and it did engender stigma and resentment. One result was that very soon opinion polls picked up the fact that affirmative action (AA) was not popular with grass roots opinion, not even among blacks, for everyone still preferred the gospel of complete equality. As the Wimbledon champion, Arthur Ashe, put it: “I would not want to know that I received a job simply because I’m black. What I and others want is an equal chance under one set of rules, as on a tennis court.” By then, however, the practice was so rooted among decision-making elites that it merrily continued. This bizarre situation was then exploded by Donald Trump, whose anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) campaign has taken aim at AA. Whether it survives is now in question.However, the black American journalist, Jason Riley, clearly hopes it won’t. He points out that the really dramatic period of black advancement was 1940 to 1960, when the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87% to 47%. Similarly, between 1940 and 1970 the number of blacks holding white collar jobs rose from 5% to 22% among men and from 6% to 36% among women. That is to say, the rate of black advancement was far quicker in the era before AA. Similarly, the assumption that AA was responsible for the growth of a black middle class is wrong, for a large part of that class had climbed its way upwards before AA kicked in. Indeed, Riley argues that once AA kicked in the progress towards racial equality slowed, stopped or even reversed..Read more:.BEE, DEI, implicit bias and disparate impact - Chuck Stephens.Clearly, Riley will also not weep for the death of DEI. He points to a 2012 study of 829 companies over 31 years which showed that “diversity training had no positive effects in the average workplace”. Similarly, a 2018 paper shows that “hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that anti-bias training does not reduce bias, alter behaviour or change the workplace”. The fact is that black advancement has been achieved by blacks by their own efforts and that gaining equal treatment has been far more powerful than special treatment.Riley is deeply conscious that all the data shows that the greatest handicap that blacks suffer is the prevalence of single parent father-less families. Yet between 1890 and 1940 black marriage rates were higher than those of whites and until 1960 black men were more likely to be married than their white peers. So all the rhetoric blaming black family dislocation on slavery and racism is wrong: dislocation has increased as racism diminished and the heritage of slavery became ever more distant. Moreover, in the pre-1960 period great stress was laid on black respectability, on self-improvement and on being a good role model – values later derided as “Uncle Tom” traits.Indeed, such values were critical to the civil rights movement. How did Rosa Parks become the symbol of the bus boycott ? She wasn’t the first black to refuse unequal treatment on the buses of Montgomery, Alabama. Here’s what the local civil rights organiser said about choosing Rosa:“The case of Louise Smith. I found her daddy in front of the shack, barefoot, drunk. Always drunk. Couldn’t use her. In the second case, the girl – very brilliant but she’d had an illegitimate baby. Couldn’t use her. The last case before Rosa was the daughter of a preacher. My interview with her convinced me that she wouldn’t stand up to pressure. But when Rosa was arrested, I thought “this is it !” ‘Cause she’s morally clean, she’s reliable, nobody had anything on her and she had the courage of her convictions.”Similarly, by the 1990s black students who got top grades and behaved well in school would be accused of “White behaviour”, but if anyone had said that in the 1950s they’d have been cuffed around the head and told to check into a mental institution. Similarly, Riley regards all the rubbish spouted today about “whiteness” as just that, rubbish. Similarly, he has no patience with those who say that black lack of achievement is just caused by racial prejudice: in that case, he asks, why do black Nigerians and West Indians regularly out-perform American blacks ? In any case, nine million black Americans out-earn average whites: if racial prejudice is so crippling, how to explain that ? The lesson Riley draws is that “upward mobility is more likely to occur when it’s accompanied by attentiveness to self-regard and self-respect. Discouraging acculturation and assimilation in the name of racial solidarity is self-defeating.”Moreover, Riley argues that AA has often been harmful. The law requiring no racial preferences was quickly re-interpreted to insist that race was all-important and that if any institution had less than 15% black participation, it must definitionally be regarded as racist. So, to ensure colleges avoided that fate many lowered their admissions criteria and their hiring policies, dumbing down those institutions. But also, elite colleges all had to meet their black quotas and that often meant that under-educated black students would go to colleges where they would always be the weakest in their class – a deeply discouraging experience which led to high drop-out rates. They would have been far better off in more average institutions where they could excel, gain confidence – and not drop out. The problem, Riley argues, is that black political activists have a vested interest in a narrative which emphasises black suffering. They should instead be taking pride in a history of black advancement which owes everything to black effort and achievement, often in the face of prejudice. Similarly, in slave states blacks were not taught to read and in 1860 over 90% of blacks were illiterate. Emancipation in 1865 set off a furious effort at self-education. By 1877 40% of black children were in school and by 1910 70% of blacks were literate – an enormous achievement by people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. Or again, between 1940 and 1960 the number of blacks graduating from high school more than tripled. The evidence is that the greatest upswing in black self-improvement came during periods when the whole society was growing fast. Blacks shared in that uplift: no special treatment was required. Between 1940 and 1970 black men went from earning 41% of what white men earned to 59% and black women went from 36% to 73%. But between 1970 and 1995, the first quarter century of AA, black men inched up only another 8% - though black women’s income went up by 16%. That is to say, the rate of improvement actually slowed down once AA was introduced. Moreover, by 2000 black incomes had reached 80% of the white level – but since then there has been no further increase. The age of DEI has seen complete stagnation.Riley has nothing but contempt for the current generation of black activists and their demand for reparations for slavery – “cashing in by exploiting one’s dead ancestors”, as he calls it. Indeed, he regards the whole idea of “redress” as bogus. As Bayard Rustin, the organiser of the 1963 civil rights March on Washington, put it, “The demand for reparations is preposterous. If my great grandfather picked cotton for 50 years, then he may deserve some money, but he’s dead and gone and nobody owes me anything.” He quotes the black scholar, Shelby Steele: “when you trade on the past victimisation of your own people, you trade honour for dollars. And this trading is even uglier when you are a mere descendant of those who suffered”. In any case, who believes that wrongs are collectivised and inheritable ?.Read more:.From redress to reassessment: The evolution of BEE and the legal, political reckoning.Some black activists blame the high rate of black incarceration on racism. Riley is dubious. He points out that American blacks are far more likely than whites to commit crime, especially violent crime – and their victims are mainly black. In 1960 45 per 100,000 young blacks were murdered but by 1990 the rate was 145 per 100,000. But racism was certainly worse in 1960 than in 1990 and all the data suggests the growth of fatherless families is most to blame.It’s worth pointing out that a study of bullying in New York schools showed that the most bullied (ie. the most discriminated against) group were Chinese – who nonetheless also performed best in school for the simple reason that they spent twice as much time on homework as non-Asians. Asians also had the lowest rate of disciplinary infractions – correlating exactly with the fact that Asians had the lowest rate of fatherless families. Note, too, that West Indians in America far out-perform native American blacks (and many American whites) on every index, yet they share the same traumatised history of enslavement. So “black retrogression in areas such as crime, welfare dependency and labour force participation date to the post-1960s era, suggesting that present-day racial inequality is mainly a function of factors other than the legacy of slavery and segregation”.Naturally, Riley is deeply critical of the cultural nihilism of many contemporary young blacks – the craze for “gangsta rap”, the idolization of extremely delinquent, indeed criminal, rap artists and the apparently unending thirst for a victim sub-culture in which the blame for everything is sought in “whiteness”. This means that blacks never question themselves about their own responsibility for things that go wrong in their lives. In fact, Riley points out, black Americans are the wealthiest and most fortunate blacks on the planet who ought to expect more of themselves. Their victim sub-culture and their insistence on their history as one only of suffering rather than of achievement is a huge self-imposed handicap.As may be seen, there are many points of comparison between the phenomena about which Riley writes and contemporary South Africa. Here too we have a huge, enveloping culture of “redress” which creates BEE millionaires as if this is somehow putting right things which went wrong for earlier and long-dead generations of blacks.But the big question one is left with is what exactly went wrong after 1960 ? Why was it that by the 1980s fatherless black families were the norm ? Conservatives might argue that the growth of welfare enabled more people to live out of wedlock, but that is not wholly convincing. Why did it not have that effect on Asians, Hispanics and others ? And it’s not that living on welfare is very attractive. And given that black incomes were rising and the black middle class was growing, why was there such tremendous social dislocation with more illegitimate children, more violent crime, more drugs and so on ? Riley’s book is a welcome stimulus to look beyond the conventional wisdom but it still leaves one with much to ponder on.

RW Johnson: The sad story of Affirmative Action

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