Two or three years ago we tried to get the county to pass an anti-discrimination resolution. We failed as much because of the serious flaws in the resolution itself which gave the council an excellent reason to turn it down as for its inclusion of homosexuals, transgenders and others. The coalition then formed is still in existence and still working for the passage of this resolution. Michigan, for the sake, the argument goes, of not being discriminatory has ended its affirmative action programs. I've been thinking a bit about the word discrimination and what it really means. I am not one who believes that language should not evolve. The efforts of the French to keep their language pure and unchanged has always seemed to me as wrong-headed as it is unavailing. Nevertheless, when certain useful distinctions are lost, and words are used as if they mean the same thing when they do not, I think it is a great pity. Such has happened to the words discrimination and racism. Somehow we are equating the discrimination practiced in affirmative action with racism. Not only are they not the same, they are actually opposite, both in intention and effect.
It used to be considered a compliment to call someone discriminating. It indicated that the person had taste, intelligence or moral sensibility. Nowadays, however, any kind of discrimination, even if it is not racial seems somehow suspect. It is, I think, a consequence of the therapeutic ideal which had its greatest vogue in the self-help 70s, but which still has a great deal of influence on us all. In this ideal values of good and bad, right and wrong, even better and worse give way to individual mental health. If it makes you feel good, it's good. If it makes you feel bad, it's bad. Those are the only standards, and they can only apply to the individual. What is good or bad for others is their business, not yours. To even attempt to be objectively discriminating is to be seen as self-righteous, arrogant and judgmental. Well, I think we need people who can discriminate among ideas, objects and actions, approving those that are better and rejecting those that are worse.
However, discrimination has become something worse than mere arrogance and self-righteousness these days. It has come to mean something that in many ways is its direct opposite: racism. Racism is amazingly undiscriminating, in fact. To be a racist is to lump all people of a particular ancestry, whatever their personality, education, sex, creed, or moral stature, into one category: worse than mine. It is to assume that people of a different color, religion, or eye-shape are for that reason alone smarter or stupider, more or less moral, harder-working or lazier, more or less violent, more or less talented, and so on. Let me put one issue aside right now: No study which has ever purported to show such differences has ever been validated. Period. Differences in ethnic or religious groups can easily be shown to be cultural. They cannot be shown to be racial.
Some of the things that hang on from governmentally sponsored racism based on such beliefs are almost funny. You are supposed to tell your race when you register to vote or make a police report. (I had to do that when I had a CB radio stolen.) It is obviously not required, since when I refused to do it, there were no evil consequences. So far as I know, I'm white, mostly Celtic and Unitarian Universalist, but it's not easy to know all one's ancestors farther back than one's great-grandparents. It at least used to be the law that the definition of a black person is that he or she has 1/32nd of black ancestry. I suspect there is no such legal definition today, but I have a fantasy that one day someone with 1/32nd white ancestry will declare him or herself white, and sue to prove it.
However, the thing that started all this was the equating of discrimination on the basis of race in affirmative action with racism. It sounds right to begin with. If you give special privileges simply because someone is a member of a particular ethnic group, is that not racism just as surely as it is to deprive people of opportunity for the same reason? However, it is not so simple as that. People were deprived of opportunity on the basis of race because people assumed that all members of whatever race it was - and in this area it has been almost exclusively the black race - were either inadequate or dangerous. This is racism. Affirmative action, on the other hand, says that people are people whatever their race, with the same original potential for accomplishment, and that inadequacies or dangers are based not on racial characteristics, but on a history of oppression, and that to make a special effort to open opportunity to those who have never had it before will ultimately erase the negative differences which have existed because of that history.
There is a problem in using the terms race, racial, racism, which may be one of the reasons we began using the term discrimination instead, since we are all part of the human race. We are all the children, in traditional terms, of father Adam and mother Eve. We ultimately have the same evolutionary history as shown in the obvious fact that we are genetically compatible. We can reproduce together if we are human. In fact, it is the rare "black" person in the United States who has no "white" ancestry which is readily traceable. And, of course, there has been oppression based on other things than ethnic background, such as sexual identity and orientation. Nevertheless, since discrimination on all these bases is sometimes good and useful for the sake of justice, as well as necessary, I will argue against its use as a synonym for oppression and prejudice.
I am in favor of affirmative action on behalf of members of groups whose history includes exclusion and oppression. When I say that I am talking about my idea of what affirmative action should be - not necessarily as it has been practiced or as it is in law, but what it should be. Members of historically excluded groups should be encouraged, and given the opportunity to qualify, for positions which have previously only been available to the favored few. When two equally qualified candidates for a school or a job present themselves, and only one can be chosen, and one is from a group that has suffered from others' prejudice, the one chosen should be the one from that group. If the qualifications for a job have been artificially designed to keep certain people out of it, and are not intrinsic to the job, they should be changed. They should not be changed or lowered to enable people to qualify, if they are necessary to the optimum performance of the job.
All that seems very reasonable and just to me. Although what would seem more just on the surface would be to be completely color and sex-blind, it is not. It merely leads to more injustice. Since fewer black people or women are qualified for the more prestigious jobs because of the history of their systematic exclusion from them, sex and color-blindness would mean that a continuing higher percentage of the better-paying, more technical jobs would go to white males. I certainly don't wish to exclude them. In fact, I'd like to see some affirmative action to find more males to go to divinity school to become Unitarian Universalist ministers. But I'm talking more generally than in our own movement which has almost turned affirmative action into a sacred cow, rather than a tool for justice. In our wider society, single women and black people of both sexes clearly have a much higher likelihood than white males of being mired in poverty from which they will never escape. They are the primary population, along with their children, of the welfare programs that have received much recent bashing without any serious ideas of how we are to keep them otherwise from starving on the streets. It is clear that this is not because of lesser abilities but because of lower expectations, lesser training and fewer opportunities. Equal opportunity is not sufficient to make a difference. It requires affirmative action.
It may be asked - I have heard it asked - how hiring qualified people from ethnic minorities or women will help the vast pool of the unqualified, the uneducated, the people who have known nothing but poverty and despair and can expect nothing else. Part of appropriate affirmative action is the encouragement of the unqualified and uneducated to become qualified and educated, to make sure that the opportunities are available for those things for everyone. People are much more likely to take advantage of training and education opportunities if it is clear that they are an advantage, that good consequences will result. That has often not been the case, and there has been therefore little motivation for it. Headstart, one of the most clearly successful of the antipoverty programs, may be the best affirmative action that is available to us, because it begins the process of training and education before the despair of their surroundings can take motivation and hope away from the children of the poor and the oppressed, but affirmative action is needed all along the way, and must be extended as much as possible to everyone who may need it.
One of the reasons affirmative action has received a bad name is that its name has been used to justify actions that are unjust and just plain wrong, that are merely tokenism. I think specifically of the black woman who was named the first woman bishop in the Episcopal Church. There was nothing in her background to justify such an appointment. She hadn't the education or experience. She hadn't even been ordained. It was an insult to the institution of the church to imply that no qualifications are necessary for one of its highest offices. It was an insult to both women and black people to imply that none of them were qualified in the ways that had previously been required. And if they were not, then none of them should have been appointed, but I know that there were many women priests who were far better qualified for the position than she. This is not affirmative action. It is tokenism, and it is extremely undiscriminating. Obviously anyone would do so long as she was both black and female.
Occasionally in the past when I have mentioned the necessity for affirmative action, I have been asked how long I think it will be necessary to practice it. When I was first asked it, I didn't really understand the question, because it seemed so clear to me that affirmative action is the obvious and necessary response to the continuing problem of groups of people who, on the basis of race or sex, have been kept out of the mainstream of economics and power in our society, and as a consequence of that history continue to be kept out of it by the culture of ignorance and despair that it has created. You do it and keep doing it until it isn't needed any more.
Thinking about the question, however, I realized that affirmative action is often seen as a form of reparation, a payback. Sort of: We've kept you out of the mainstream, and now we're going to do just as much to get you into it as we did before to keep you out. When we've done that much, we're through. We won't have to do it anymore. We've paid our debt. Well, in the first place, I don't believe in that kind of reparations. I don't believe in collective guilt, and I don't think I've ever done anything to deprive anyone of anything on the basis of race or sex, so on that basis, I don't think I have any debt to pay. Secondly, I don't see how my practicing affirmative action today is going to make any difference to the people my ancestors enslaved, if in fact they did that, and I suppose they must have. Nor will it make any difference to all the people who over the years have been systematically undereducated, underemployed and mistreated in ways that make me sick even to think about, because they were black, but who cannot today reap any benefits from affirmative action. It does not seem logical or appropriate to me to require reparations for the evil one set of ancestors did to the ancestors of another particular group. On the other hand it seems extremely just and appropriate to see that the evil does not continue. It is also pragmatic. The suffering of any people affects us all. The tragedy of a permanent underclass is an objective danger to our society. That it is filled mostly by people who have been treated by the majority with fear, hatred and disdain is our great shame, because it is the proof of our culture's illdoing. Something must be done for the sake of simple justice, and affirmative action is a sensible tool for doing it. It must be practiced not to make reparations, but in an effort to change the situation. It will be appropriate to stop doing it when there is no identifiable group that is substantially disenfranchised. Should a new one arise, affirmative action would be practiced in that new group's behalf. It is, in fact, the sort of thing that is done almost automatically by anyone who is concerned with issues of fairness and equality. Those who have not had a chance to win the prize need to get their proper turn to try for it.
Prejudice, racism, sexism, have produced groups of people who are poor, uneducated, untrained and hopeless. They have been practiced indiscriminately against people of the wrong religion, the wrong color, the wrong sex, the wrong affections, in the eyes of the powerful. Now to fight the effects of racism we must practice discrimination. We must, however much we dislike it, discriminate even on the basis of race or sex in order to right present wrongs. But we must also be discriminating in another way. We must be discriminating in our use of weapons to fight injustice. We must use them fairly and in a way that helps rather than harms. To use what we call affirmative action to justify tokenism or quotas does more harm than good, offering a platform for those who wish to continue the supremacy of one race over another to call just discrimination racism.