Fair360, formerly DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti thinks affirmative action is going to be killed by the Supreme Courtand explains why white people as victims are central to finding a solution.
Question:
I would love to see your response to this article, A New Kind of Affirmative Action Can Ensure Diversity. You always have powerful, well researched insights. My thoughts are these:
I appreciate the author’s efforts to address the reality of economic disadvantage.
Just because racial discrimination, racial disadvantage and affirmative efforts to address those issues make the author uncomfortable, that doesn’t mean ignoring racial disadvantage and eliminating all race-aware selection processes make for good public policy.
Today’s greatest racial disadvantages come not from the type of overt racism that is subject to legal actions and protections, but from micro-inequities, the insult of low expectations and other subtle forms of discrimination. These subtle but very damaging forces cannot be curtailed by enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, as the author suggests.
Answer:
This is an outstanding question, one I’ve been giving a lot of thought to.
I think we need to face the reality that affirmative action as we know it is going away, almost certainly with the pending Supreme Court decision. I’m writing this as a proponent of affirmative action, so bear with me.
There are legal arguments for and against affirmative action, but the emotional argument always has an influence. Since 2004, I’ve perceived a decrease in public support of affirmative action, and polls back up my perception. The Supreme Court in 2004 was arguably more liberalbut most people don’t know that the justice widely perceived as having saved affirmative action, Sandra Day O’Connor, had a horrible (from my perspective) record on decisions based on race. So as good as we thought we had it then (and it wasn’t so good), I think it’s worse now. Further, the Millennial generation is firmly against affirmative action, including well over 40 percent of Black and Latino students.
With that reality, I think those of us who see affirmative action as our chief viable solution to social injustice must adjust. We’re a business publication, so I’m going to make the case why this is a pressing business concern later in this column. But first, let’s address the problem. I have a combined total of 21 years of board experience among Bennett College (historically Black), New Jersey City University (Hispanic serving) and Rutgers University, where I chair the fundraising committee for Rutgers Future Scholars. I focus all of my board work on enabling poor students to attain the education their potential shows they can attain. I’ve endowed scholarships at all three schools and have donated roughly $750,000 since 2006. Here’s what I see:
In my opinion, today’s greatest racial discrimination is economically based. Pew Research Center analysis shows that Black and Latino households were dramatically and disproportionately clobbered in this subprime crisis and subsequent recession. Unemployment rates show the same bias. The prison-industrial complex feeds on poor people and is part of the depressive economic cycle for Blacks and Latinos. Our country imprisons people at by far the highest per-capita rate in the world; 58 percent of prisoners are Black and Latino. Our four-decade-old “war on drugs” is supported by the people who make money off itnobody wages a war for 40 years unless they’re winning it. In my opinion, our president made a huge mistake in ending No Child Left Behind.
I’ve heard Secretary of Education Arne Duncan speak several times and he frankly makes no sense to me; it’s as if he digs up every non-fact and clich and strings them together. (Here’s a transcript of his latest speech.) His position is passivewhat we should doas if he just arrived on the scene. The fact is that our public schools do a criminally poor job. I find it amazing to be asked to speak at dozens of economic-development events where people from cities with shrinking or stagnant economies wring their handsyet are able to segregate their school systems into successful/white and criminally negligent/Black and Latino districts. Then they ask me for advice on how to lure companies to their employee-desert brown fields. Please.
In short, there are economic forces that benefit by crushing Black and Latino households. This is no micro-inequity, unless you would describe being sucker-punched by Sonny Liston in his prime as “subtle.”
But this is impacting more than just Black and Latino households. In today’s New York Times, there is an article about the national declining standard of living. According to the Times, “By last year, family income was 8 percent lower than it had been 11 years earlier, at its peak in 2000, according to inflation-adjusted numbers from the Census Bureau. On average in 11-year periods in the decades just after World War II, inflation-adjusted median income rose by almost 30 percent.” That’s a lot of white people being ground up by the same forces. To quote Frederick Douglass: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”
On to the compelling interest for corporate decision makers: The combination of forces behind economic discrimination is destroying this “recovery.” There are millions of jobs openand many more millions of unemployed people who are incapable of filling these jobs because they are not prepared. The negative cycle of decreasing household wealth, incompetent schools and predation by the prison-industrial complex is attacking our country’s consumer base AND talent pool.
We must wage a war on poverty and we can’t wait for the government to lead the way. Corporations can be convinced to do what’s good for them and take the problem firmly in hand by forcing school systems to stop gerrymandering proper education standards. My experience is that progressive companies are increasingly interested in building their own pipelines, so they can convince the schools they recruit from to start using the Rutgers Future Scholars model (or something like it). The reason is simple: People are created equally, therefore talent is distributed equally, and if you subvert the potential of groups of people, companies cannot possibly recruit the best and brightestmuch less expect to sell to them. The fact that racially based economic discrimination has now ensnared a growing group of white people enables us to build some force behind this effort. It’s distasteful but trueby including white people, you can disarm the bigots who have been whipping up a portion of our electorate for the past six years by appealing to overt bigotry. You also appeal to people of every group, especially the Millennial generation that is far more progressive than older generations but ironically is at the tipping point of ending affirmative action; these people grew up watching injustice on YouTube and are far better connected than my generation could ever hope to be.
Here’s your hope for the future: Undergraduates at Rutgers can apply for a for-credit course to be a mentor in the Rutgers Future Scholars program. There are 10 times the number of students (representationally white, by the way) wanting to be mentors than there are spots availableand we have 1,000 middle- and high-school students in the program to mentor.
Luke Visconti’s Ask the White Guy column is a top draw on Fair360.com. Visconti, the founder and CEO of Fair360, formerly DiversityInc, is a nationally recognized leader in diversity management. In his popular column, readers who ask Visconti tough questions about race/culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and age can expect smart, direct and disarmingly frank answers.
