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by Brian Brasel
06.01.98
How would you describe the work you do?
I guess I would consider myself one-part social critic, one-part anti-racist organizer. My job, as it were, is to educate others—particularly other whites—about the damage done by racism, not only to persons of color, but to whites as well, spiritually, economically, and culturally. By accepting the bargain of white privilege, we've really cut ourselves off from any possibility of building a just society; so until institutionalized racial inequity is destroyed, justice in any real sense is impossible. My role, and the role of other whites, should be to interrupt the dominant discourse on race and racism by any means necessary: the spoken word, art, literature, political essays, media, protest, whatever.
I primarily operate through the mediums of oration and print. In the past three years, I've spoken on about 150 college campuses and to dozens of community groups—maybe 40,000 people in all—about issues ranging from affirmative action, to "welfare reform" and the assault on the poor, to the need to go beyond feel-good diversity trainings, and instead focus on the structural roots of racism. My job is to do everything in my power to resist collaborating with what I consider a truly evil system—nothing more, nothing less. It's really about using my white (and male) privilege—as a weapon against the very system that bestows the privileges to begin with.
You've written a book, Little White Lies: The Truth About Affirmative Action and 'Reverse Discrimination'. Let's start at the beginning: Why do you think we need to defend affirmative action?
If for no other reason than to reaffirm the premise which is inherent to the concept of affirmative action, we have to defend it. That premise is simple: in the absence of formal requirements to ensure greater representation for persons of color and women in the private and public sectors, and institutions of higher learning, those persons will continue to be overlooked, irrespective of qualifications, ambition, or whatever else. Why? Because of ongoing race and gender bias, which has been documented by more sources than I care to recount here, as well as the institutionalized racism and sexism which operates through the old-boys network: a network, or set of networks, which disproportionately excludes people of color and women from the best jobs, schools, and a fair shot at government contracts. By encouraging us to look at the way our history of exclusion has prevented true equal opportunity, affirmative action can serve as an honesty check: it can force us to face our past, and acknowledge the effects of that past on the present. So although any true radical—and I consider myself one—would have to acknowledge the rather limited success of affirmative action over the years, anyone who's intellectually honest would also have to acknowledge the importance of reasserting the principle. Affirmative action as a symbol is critical, and I'm afraid that if we lose it, we'll have an increasingly difficult time defending any of the more thoroughgoing changes which need to take place to bring about true racial and gender justice.
Do you believe affirmative action can be improved?
Well, sure.
How?
First off, really enforcing it would be a start. Affirmative action requirements have become paper tigers in a sense over the past fifteen years or so; first, because of the Reagan-era assaults, and now because the agencies charged with overseeing civil rights compliance have too few resources to make the laws meaningful. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), for example, conducted a review in 1994-1995 which concluded that about 75% of the businesses they investigated were in "substantial violation"—not only of affirmative action mandates, but of the basic premises of the Civil Rights Act of 1964! The real kicker, though, is that the OFCCP only has enough money to conduct about 4000 reviews a year, meaning that they can check up on each workplace under their jurisdiction about once ever 38 years. In addition, only a handful of companies have ever been banned from receiving government contracts for failure to comply with the laws. Until we get serious and treat discrimination like the crime it is, affirmative action will remain somewhat hollow.
There are other things we can do to improve, or supplement, affirmative action. For example, the 1991 Civil Rights Act, says that job qualification requirements—like a standardized test score or educational degree—which disproportionately exclude people of color, are only legitimate if they are absolute business necessities: in other words, having a certain score or credential has to be necessary to performing the job in question, or else the requirement is not allowed. This was originally asserted by the Supreme Court in 1971, but had been weakened in 1989 so that all companies had to do was show a "reasonable" relationship between qualification requirements and ability to perform the job. To the extent the Congress took us back to a more stringent standard, fine.
But what about "qualification requirements" for admission to selective colleges and universities? Why shouldn't such institutions also have the burden of showing that things like the SAT bear a substantial relationship to one's ability to succeed in college? Of course, the evidence is that these tests are bullshit: the SAT, for example has a .32 correlation with freshman grades, meaning that only about 10% of the difference between two students can be traced to their differences on the SAT. Similar evidence exists for graduate level tests. So, to the extent that people of color generally do worse on the tests—thanks to having attended resource-poor schools, or having been tracked into classes that don't prepare you for these exams—and are therefore underrepresented in many colleges, we should apply the same standard that we apply for employment.
Developing alternative admission criteria that wasn't so tilted in favor of those with greater resources would greatly improve affirmative action's effectiveness, and also help thousands of low-and-moderate income whites who, because of inadequate resources, also bomb these tests. For those wanting more information on a number of similar ideas, I would strongly recommend the article by Lani Guinier and Susan Sturm in the July, 1996 California Law Review.
I've heard people argue that fighting for governmental protections like affirmative action serves primarily to legitimize the government's authority and takes energy and focus away from fighting for fundamental social change. How would you respond to those arguments?
Well, I agree, if the persons fighting for such minimalist protections end their analysis there, without linking the fight for affirmative action to the fight for broader social change. To the extent many proponents of affirmative action fail to make those connections, they're not real allies. This is basically where the mainstream of the Democratic Party is: defending affirmative action as an isolated policy concept, without discussing the need to radically transform the society. However, to the extent we make the connections between the need for affirmative action, and full employment, and education as a right rather than a commodity, and workplace democracy, and ending poverty, then I think the fight for affirmative action can be empowering, and actually help demonstrate the overall sickness of the system. The bottom line is this: people don't join the revolution if they can't support their families. They don't have the time. By making it possible to survive, "reformist" policies—be they affirmative action, or income support, or whatever—provide an opportunity for greater participation in the movement, not less. But, and this is a significant but, the only way this is true, is if the analysis is being provided can guarantee the proper focus. Reform can operate as anesthesia or adrenaline, depending on who controls the terms of the debate.
Race has been called the "great American divide," and, referring to whiteness specifically, an influence that "permeates every issue in U.S. society, whether domestic or foreign." Do you think that's true?
