Were we too excited for #BeckyWithTheBadGrades?
Advocates for racial justice should doubletake before celebrating too hard — affirmative action ain’t what it used to be.
Last month when the Supreme Court voted to uphold affirmative action, Black Twitter and advocates for racial justice quickly claimed this as a victory. But, they might have celebrated too soon, because the program isn’t what it used to be.
Many casual supporters of affirmative action imagine it still enforces the original mandate of restorative justice, or what legal scholars call “Remedying the Present Effects of Past Discrimination.” But, after years of controversial revisions from a conservative Supreme Court, modern affirmative action has dropped the mission of correcting past injustice for the goal recruiting talented and valuable minorities.
In academia, this allows “universities to take race into account for admissions only for the sake of “educational diversity.” And, In the private sector, this means companies can “meet their need for skilled minority employees” to create a diverse workforce. So don’t be fooled. Today’s affirmative action initiatives are not altruistic. They are strategic.
Read for yourself, how institutions explain their reasoning on diversity:
“We realize that, in order to achieve our vision for Georgia Tech as a leader in influencing the major technological, social, and policy decisions in the twenty-first century, we must recruit and retain faculty, staff, and students from a wide array of backgrounds, perspectives, interests, and talents.”
“It makes good business sense that Twitter employees are representative of the vast and varied backgrounds of our users around the world. We also know that it makes good business sense to be more diverse as a workforce.”
“Embracing diversity only enhances our work culture, it also drives our business success. It is the inclusion of these diverse experiences and perspectives that create a culture of empowerment, one that fosters innovation, economic growth, and new ideas.”
These claims linking diversity to “economic growth” aren’t hollow. Mountains of data prove, that more diverse teams make better decisions, and diverse companies produce better financial results. Today affirmative action isn’t social justice. It is competitive advantage. Recruiters have followed this theory for decades, drafting select minorities to bolster their bottom line. But this narrow interpretation of affirmative action has come at the expense of those who need it most.
The vast majority of black people, particularly poor and working class black people, don’t meet the strict requirements set by “educational diversity”. Most are deemed too underskilled, too uneducated, and/or too untalented to help white institutions achieve their goals of “innovation” or “twenty-first century leadership”. In turn, most black people don’t benefit from affirmative action. This elitism helps to explain why poor blacks have progressed very little since the 1960s, and it is also a drastic shift away from civil rights activists original goal — integration.
Integration is a word with a heavy history. It’s mention conjures images of Ruby Bridges escorted by state troopers and parents picketing against segregated schools. The access to equal opportunity these activists envisioned wasn’t limited to black lawyers, doctors, engineers, and athletes. For them, integration wasn’t a mission to incorporate only the top ten percent of black people into America. It was a commitment to incorporate all black people into America, and it was a mandate that held the moral weight of correcting historic injustice.
But accomplishing this — correcting historic injustice, is much harder than recruiting a few talented minorities. It requires that we acknowledge and reconcile our racial history. That is difficult to do with a past as unflattering as ours. So instead, we have chosen to practice a willful amnesia. And it is in this effort to forget, that we do things like erase any reference of past injustice from our modern affirmative action programs and then replace them with obscure, self-serving goals of diversity.
Yes, last month racial justice advocates celebrated the ruling. But the affirmative action that the court upheld only provides equal opportunity for the few blacks who are extremely skilled, extremely smart, or extremely lucky — it is affirmative action for those who are “twice as good.” And as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes “an equality that requires blacks to be twice as good is not equality — it’s a double standard.”
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