Williams, Patricia. "Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC: Regrouping
in Singular Times." Harvard Law Review 104.2 (1990):
542-44.This particular evocation, of a corrupt system of favoritism see sawing between the "deserving" and the "preferred," caters to an assumption that those who are included by the grace of affirmative action systems are therefore undeserving. I want to underscore that I do mean that it "caters to," rather than creates, an assumption of inferiority, for the assumption of inferiority has a life that precedes and, unfortunately, will probably outlive affirmative action programs. The subtlety of this distinction has terrified even some few blacks into distorting historic assumptions of blacks as inferior into the weird acceptance of their exclusion as its cure. Sitting on university admissions committees, for example, I have seen black candidates who write on their applications comments such as, "Don't admit me if you have to lower your standards." I have never seen the same acutely self-conscious disavowals from students who are admitted because they meet some geographical criterion-such as living in Wyoming, or France, or some other underrepresented area-or who are older re-entry students, or football heroes, or alumni children. I think this is so because these latter inclusionary categories are thought to indicate group life experiences, whether we call them cultures or not, that "enrich" rather than "lower." The question, then, becomes not how to undo inclusionary affirmative action programs, but how to undo the stigma of inferiority that resides not merely in the label or designation of race, but that, according to our national symbology, is actually embodied in black presence. If it were truly as simple as erasing labels, then perhaps enough White-Out in our cases and codes would eliminate the problem once and for all. But it is the ferocious mythology of blackness (or otherness) as the embodiment of inferiority that persists whether blacks are inside or outside particular institutions and regardless of how they perform.
The tenacity of this devalued condition is perhaps captured by something I saw not long ago in a five-and-dime store: a huge bin of identically molded-plastic sets of mother and father dolls. Some dolls in the bin were priced at $3.99 a set. Others had been originally priced at $2.99, now marked down to the "Must Sacrifice!" price of $1.99 a set. As a neutral market phenomenon, this obviously makes little sense, and one would assume that a rational vendor would quickly adjust one way or another for the discrepancy. As a less than-neutral observer, however, I should add that although all the dolls were obviously cast from the same mold, they had not been privileged to share the same dye lot. The higher-priced dolls were white; the dolls priced for sacrificial sale were black. I was struck by how central the information about color was to my analysis of this situation: in a color-blind frame, the pricing was so irrational that I might comfortably assume a laissez-faire approach, confident that market pressures would assure a rapid adjustment. Knowing the dolls' color, however, exposed a more grim social reality: the irrationality of racism not only perpetuated, but also made "rational" by market forces. The absolute necessity of a corrective response to the silent tenacity of this status quo is the heart of what affirmative action is all about.
My point is not just an observation about economics. It is a semantic one as well: unlabeling our divisions, as the dissents in Metro Broadcasting insist we do, is not a cure in itself. Courts-and we all-rename even as we unname. It is distressing therefore to observe the extent to which both the majority and the dissents rely on a conception of affirmative action as favoritism. Wrapping affirmative action in this rhetoric diverts attention from the task of affirmative inclusion of those whose presence is consistently devalued in our society and actually validates a specter of more "valuable" yet "disfavored" whites who will be tossed into the wilderness of dispossession that blacks are now said to occupy.
In the same vein, the majority employs the halfhearted ambiguity of a "benign racial classification" in place of what might be more forcefully described as the principle of antidiscrimination. Furthermore, antidiscrimination and diversity are polarized in the dissents, so that it is no longer possible formally to recognize diversity without its being-not merely risking being-discriminatory. The quest for inclusion becomes transformed into the exact equivalent of that which would exclude: the slogan "separate but equal" is called up as the exact equivalent of the newly minted "'unequal but benign.'" In only twenty-five years, blacks and Bull Connor have become relativized in this soupy moral economy. The focused and meaningful inquiry of strict scrutiny has become a needle's eye through which minority interests are too inherently suspect to pass. Racial and ethnic identification as that against which one ought not discriminate has been twisted; now those very same racial and ethnic classifications are what discriminate. The infinite convertibility of terms is, I suppose, what makes the commerce of American rhetoric so very fascinating. But these linguistic flip-flops disguise an immense stasis of power and derail the will to undo it.