"At Times, the Problem Is Economics, Not Racism"
By JOSE NOVOA
Excerpts from the La Times (September 28, 1997)
...
True, affirmative-action programs have opened the way for
more people of color to join the middle class, and that is a good
thing. But such programs have done little for people of color who
are members of the working and poverty classes.
Certainly, the successes of middle- and upper-class people of
color can benefit poor people of color in indirect ways, like
providing positive role models and weakening negative racial
stereotypes. Furthermore, because middle-class people of color still
face many disadvantages (bigotry, racially biased standardized tests,
etc.) when competing against middle-class whites, some form of
affirmative action is still needed. But the experience of the past three
decades has shown that affirmative-action programs are no
substitute for measures that would more directly address the effects
of racism on poor people of color. In part, it is a story of how
civil-rights organizations were co-opted into losing their focus on
helping poor people.
...
In 1967, corporate interests, led by the Ford
Foundation, became deeply involved in financing almost all major
civil rights organizations. The co-optation of these organizations and
the corporate-financed black-power conferences of 1967 and
1968 were instrumental in redefining "black power" as black
capitalism.
The equation of "black power" with black capitalism forestalled
the possibility of class-based black-liberation struggles and quickly
gained the endorsement of corporate and government leaders. In a
1968 radio broadcast, President Richard M. Nixon expressed his
approval of "black power, in the best, the constructive sense of that
often misapplied term . . . It's no longer enough that white-owned
enterprises employ greater number of Negroes, whether as laborers
or as middle-management personnel. This is needed, yes--but it has
to be accompanied by an expansion of black ownership, of black
capitalism."
The failure of black capitalism to end racism is self-evident, as is
the need to combine a class analysis with an anti-racist one in order
to understand the needs of poor people of color. Even conservative
critics of affirmative action have made this point, arguing for
class-based affirmative-action policies as a better way of helping
"truly needy" people of color. What remains to be seen is if these
critics are sincere in their desire to help poor people of color or are
merely searching for moral high ground from which to attack
race-based affirmative action policies.
Clinton's seven-member advisory panel must recognize that
communities of color are not monolithic, that, like the rest of
America, they are divided into economic classes with different
problems and different needs. From here, the panel could build a
consensus for a more comprehensive approach to fighting racism,
not just defending race-based affirmative-action policies that have
proved to be, at best, tokenistic and, at worst, little more than
pacification efforts designed to prop up a fundamentally racist
system.
What would a more comprehensive approach entail? It might
examine, for example, how de-industrialization has impoverished
inner cities and how attacks on the "liberal interventionist state,"
coupled with the resegregation of the country through "white flight"
to the suburbs, have allowed middle-class white voters to tax
themselves to pay for direct services while shielding their tax dollars
from federal programs that might be used for urban renewal or to
help poor people of color.
Such an analysis might suggest that the problems faced by
people of color who are are forced to attend inferior schools in
underfunded school districts could be eased if school funding was
equalized through state or federal subsidies. This simple change
would go a long way toward establishing the "level playing field"
conservatives profess to champion.
At the very least, a more comprehensive approach to fighting
racism should acknowledge that racism is experienced differently by
members of different economic classes and therefore needs to be
addressed through a variety of strategies. For example, middle- and
working-class African Americans today experience racism most
acutely in the form of racial discrimination and segregation in
employment, housing and education.
These problems were exacerbated by a series of rulings issued
in 1989 by the Rehnquist court that undercut many of the civil rights
protections people of color had gained under the Warren court in
the 1960s and the Burger court in the 1970s and early 1980s. The
rulings combined to make voluntary affirmative-action programs
more difficult to establish and easier to undo, increased the burden
of proving employment discrimination and drastically diminished the
ability of people of color to fight segregation in employment, housing
and education.
Other legal impediments to desegregation include various
loopholes in the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The law is weak not
only because it is not vigorously enforced, but also because some of
its provisions exempt people who own or rent fewer than four
single-family houses, the vast majority.
A more sympathetic Supreme Court, closing legal loopholes and
vigorously enforcing anti-discrimination laws would help address the
problem of racism within the middle and working classes. But legal
changes are not likely to help members of the poverty class, whose
circumstances are the result of structural changes in the economy. In
the latter case, development of a broad-based
employment-opportunity program that would include job creation,
job training and free or subsidized child care is needed, not new
dialogues about race relations. Opponents of government spending
on such measures should consider that alternatives, such as building
more prisons, are not without cost.
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of Affirmative Action Page
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Action and Diversity Page
Carl
Gutierrez-Jones
Department of English
University of California, Santa Barbara
e-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu