15 percent: the national unemployment rate for African Americans (the national rate for all races is 8.9 percent). 5.6 percent: the percentage of the Northwestern University class of 2013 that is African-American (about 13 percent of this nation is African-American).
Some would call these numbers appalling; others would accredit it to “the luck of the draw.” After all, everyone has a fair chance at success in America, regardless of race…right? Of course, this seems hard to believe when you find out that nearly one in four African Americans live below the poverty line.
So why does any of this make the recession racist? Think about it this way: During a recession, poor people are made poorer because their jobs are the first to go. Poorer people tend to be minorities and thus the recession has this unfortunate tendency to lay-off people of color (e.g. African-Americans).
What some people fail to realize is that affirmative action is only worsening the problem. Quite simply, it’s keeping minorities poor, disadvantaged and discriminated against. But to know why affirmative action doesn’t work, we should probably figure out what it actually is.
Affirmative action is simply a collection of policies that aims to promote equal opportunity by taking into account gender, race or ethnicity in areas like employment and education. The goal of affirmative action is to combat the effects of discrimination while proliferating diversity. This all sounds fantastic, except that, sociologically and economically speaking, it’s not helping much.
The first problem with affirmative action is that it unintentionally discriminates against certain minority groups by pretending that there is a cure-all for helping any minority fight de facto discrimination. The truth is, though 25 percent of African Americans live below the poverty line, joining them are the 25 percent of American Indians and 20 percent of Hispanics that also living in poverty. But these groups suffer from socioeconomic disadvantages for reasons that do not apply to the other minority groups (antebellum slavery in the South for Blacks, rampant alcoholism in American Indians, language barrier issues with many Hispanics, etc.).
Similarly, it only seems obvious that women suffer from discrimination not because they were enslaved plantation workers in the South 200 years ago, but rather because deep-rooted patriarchal social tendencies that date back to before the dawn of Western civilization were never forcefully or successfully uprooted in a way that would have prevented gender inequality today. In sum, different minority groups experience different types of discrimination for different reasons, and affirmative action ignores that.
Aside from the movement’s misguided premises, the sociological and psychological impact of affirmative action has cyclically perpetuated the very things it seeks to destroy. By buying into the fact that we need to hire minorities into higher positions to “even the playing field” or accept more minority students into universities to promote diversity, society reinforces ideas of a “racial disadvantage.” It’s essentially letting young minorities know that they don’t have to try hard to gain success, only flaunt their skin color. This also influences others’ perceptions of minorities who may begin to think that a minority only got the promotion or was accepted into an Ivy League school because of his or her skin color and not because of his or her achievements.
What ends up happening is minorities who are objectively unfit to go to a top ten university get accepted because of their ethnicity and then find that they cannot compete with the rest of the student body. Feeling discouraged by their ineffectual performance, they abandon their academic pursuits. Younger minorities seeing this get equally discouraged, and the cycle continues.
When you think about it, affirmative action seems to perpetuate some of the ideas behind “separate but equal;” it upholds the idea that we can hold minorities to a different standard of education or employment because of their skin color or gender. But, as we all know now, separate is inherently unequal, and therefore affirmative action is simply continuing the system of racial inequality.
The current recession looks racist because affirmative action policies have kept the majority of disadvantaged minorities in a disadvantaged condition and in jobs that are prone to lay-offs in tough times. These policies don’t help the minority population as a whole, but a select few who are lucky enough to get picked above the rest. That being said, affirmative action has definitely put a few disadvantaged minorities into positions that they would otherwise have not been able to achieve in face of discrimination, but these policies aren’t helping the problem go away for everyone else.
This is not to say that we should abandon affirmative action motives. We can work to eliminate discrimination, general inter-racial animosity and racial inequality through massive investment on a national scale — in kindergarten classrooms, or more generally, in early childhood education.
Investing in early education has two key benefits in the long run: it helps eliminate racist tendencies and it better prepares students to graduate high school and move on to college. If children (black, white, brown, etc.) are exposed to different cultures and ethnicities early on, the chances that these children form biases later in life are reduced. Observe where that takes the next generation of employers a couple decades down the road, and you see that racial bias in employment can become almost unheard of. Moreover, children who can read, write, and do simple arithmetic at an early age (in other words, have a fruitful early childhood education) end up performing better in secondary and post-secondary education and attain more years of schooling. More schooling means better jobs. Better jobs means better protection from layoffs.
Unlike affirmative action, this initiative is colorblind: anyone and everyone will benefit in the long-run from a smarter populace. People won’t be signing contracts they don’t understand (note the sub-prime mortgage debacle and the subsequent economic meltdown) and won’t be digging themselves deeper into credit card debt without knowing how to get out. But more importantly, you don’t have to be of any specific race to receive the benefits of education.
Affirmative action is essentially a band-aid — it doesn’t heal the wound, but covers it up and hopes it goes away by itself. Investing in education is ultimately more effective than diversity quotas in employment or universities because it not only works to fight against the effects of discrimination, it also helps end discrimination itself. It does more than help prepare the future of America to compete on the global stage; it helps integrate our country (and the world) on a level that goes beyond the color of one’s skin.