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Subject: Affirmative action? Whites Swim in Racial Preference

Whites Swim in Racial Preference

By Tim Wise,

February 20, 2003, AlterNet


Ask a fish what water is and you'll get no answer. Even if fish were
capable of speech, they would likely have no explanation for the
element they swim in every minute of every day of their lives. Water
simply is.  Fish take it for granted. So too with this thing we hear so
much about, "racial preference."


While many whites seem to think the notion originated with
affirmative action programs, intended to expand opportunities for
historically marginalized people of color, racial preference has
actually had a long and very white history.  Affirmative action for
whites was embodied in the abolition of European indentured servitude,
which left black (and occasionally indigenous) slaves as the only unfree
labor in the colonies that would become the U.S.


Affirmative action for whites was the essence of the 1790
Naturalization Act, which allowed virtually any European immigrant to
become a full citizen, even while blacks, Asians and American Indians
could not. Affirmative action for whites was the guiding principle of
segregation, Asian exclusion laws, and the theft of half of Mexico for
the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny.


In recent history, affirmative action for whites motivated racially
restrictive housing policies that helped 15 million white families
procure homes with FHA loans from the 1930s to the '60s, while
people of color were mostly excluded from the same programs. In
other words, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that white America
is the biggest collective recipient of racial preference in the history
of the cosmos. It has skewed our laws, shaped our public policy and
helped create the glaring inequalities with which we still live.


White families, on average, have a net worth that is 11 times the net
worth of black families, according to a recent study; and this gap
remains substantial even when only comparing families of like size,
composition, education and income status.  A full-time black male
worker in 2003 makes less in real dollar terms than similar white
men were earning in 1967. Such realities are not merely indicative of
the disadvantages faced by blacks, but indeed are evidence of the
preferences afforded whites - a demarcation of privilege that is the
necessary flipside of discrimination.

Indeed, the value of preferences to whites over the years is so
enormous that the current baby-boomer generation of whites is
currently in the process of inheriting between $7-10 trillion in assets
from their parents and grandparents - property handed down by
those who were able to accumulate assets at a time when people of
color by and large could not. To place this in the proper perspective,
we should note that this amount of money is more than all the
outstanding mortgage debt, all the credit card debt, all the savings
account assets, all the money in IRAs and 401k retirement plans, all
the annual profits for U.S. manufacturers, and our entire
merchandise trade deficit combined.

Yet few whites have ever thought of our position as resulting from
racial preferences. Indeed, we pride ourselves on our hard work and
ambition, as if somehow we invented the concepts. As if we have
worked harder than the folks who were forced to pick cotton and
build levies for free; harder than the Latino immigrants who spend
10 hours a day in fields picking strawberries or tomatoes; harder
than the (mostly) women of color who clean hotel rooms or change
bedpans in hospitals, or the (mostly) men of color who collect our
garbage.

We strike the pose of self-sufficiency, while ignoring the advantages
we have been afforded in every realm of activity: housing, education,
employment, criminal justice, politics, banking and business. We
ignore the fact that at almost every turn, our hard work has been
met with access to an opportunity structure denied to millions of
others.


Privilege, to us, is like water to the fish: invisible precisely because
we cannot imagine life without it. It is that context that best explains
the duplicity of the President's recent criticisms of affirmative
action at the University of Michigan. President Bush, himself a lifelong
recipient of affirmative action - the kind set aside for the mediocre
rich - recently proclaimed that the school's policies were examples of
unfair racial preference. Yet in doing so he not only showed a profound
ignorance of the Michigan policy, but made clear the inability of yet
another white person to grasp the magnitude of white privilege still in
operation.


The President attacked Michigan's policy of awarding 20 points (on
a 150-point evaluation scale) to undergraduate applicants who are
members of underrepresented minorities (which at U of M means
blacks, Latinos and American Indians). To many whites such a
"preference" is blatantly discriminatory. Bush failed to mention
that greater numbers of points are awarded for other things that
amount to preferences for whites to the exclusion of people of
color.

For example, Michigan awards 20 points to any student from a low-
income background, regardless of race. Since these points cannot be
combined with those for minority status (in other words poor blacks
don't get 40 points), in effect this is a preference for poor whites.
Then Michigan awards 16 points to students who hail from the Upper
Peninsula of the state: a rural, largely isolated, and almost
completely white area.

Of course both preferences are fair, based as they are on the
recognition that economic status and even geography (as with race)
can have a profound effect on the quality of K-12 schooling that
one receives, and that no one should be punished for things that
are beyond their control. But note that such preferences - though
disproportionately awarded to whites - remain uncriticized, while
preferences for people of color become the target for reactionary
anger. Once again, white preference remains hidden because it is
more subtle, more ingrained, and isn't called white preference, even
if that's the effect.

But that's not all. Ten points are awarded to students who attended
top-notch high schools, and another eight points are given to
students who took an especially demanding AP and honors curriculum.
As with points for those from the Upper peninsula, these preferences
may be race-neutral in theory, but in practice they are anything but.
Because of intense racial isolation (and Michigan's schools are the
most segregated in America for blacks, according to research by the
Harvard Civil Rights Project), students of color will rarely attend the
"best" schools, and on average, schools serving mostly black and
Latino students offer only a third as many AP and honors courses
as schools serving mostly whites.

So even truly talented students of color will be unable to access
those extra points simply because of where they live, their economic
status and ultimately their race, which is intertwined with both. Four
more points are awarded to students who have a parent who
attended the U of M: a kind of affirmative action with which the
President is intimately familiar, and which almost exclusively goes to
whites. Ironically, while alumni preference could work toward the
interest of diversity, if combined with aggressive race-based
affirmative action (by creating a larger number of black and brown
alums), the rollback of the latter, combined with the almost
guaranteed retention of the former, will only further perpetuate
white preference.

So the U of M offers 20 "extra" points to the typical black, Latino or
indigenous applicant, while offering various combinations worth up to
58 extra points for students who will almost all be white. But while
the first of these are seen as examples of racial preferences, the
second are not, hidden as they are behind the structure of social
inequities that limit where people live, where they go to school, and
the kinds of opportunities they have been afforded. White
preferences, the result of the normal workings of a racist society,
can remain out of sight and out of mind, while the power of the
state is turned against the paltry preferences meant to offset them.


Very telling is the oft-heard comment by whites, "If I had only been
black, I would have gotten into my first-choice college." Such a
statement not only ignores the fact that whites are more likely than
members of any other group - even with affirmative action in place -
to get into their first-choice school, but it also presumes, as anti-
racist activist Paul Marcus explains, "that if these whites were black,
everything else about their life would have remained the same." In
other words, that it would have made no negative difference as to
where they went to school, what their family income was, or anything
else.


The ability to believe that being black would have made no difference,
(other than a beneficial one when it came time for college), and that
being white has made no positive difference, is rooted in privilege
itself: the privilege that allows one to not have to think about race
on a daily basis; to not have one's intelligence questioned by best-
selling books; to not have to worry about being viewed as a "out of
place" when driving, shopping, buying a home, or for that matter,
attending the University of Michigan.

So long as those privileges remain firmly in place, and the preferential
treatment that flows from those privileges continues to work to the
benefit of whites, all talk of ending affirmative action is not only
premature, but a slap in the face to those who have fought, and died,
for equal opportunity. "We used to believe that through deep thinking,
we would arrive at new patterns of action; now we wonder whether it
isn't the other way around  - that through involvement in action we
arrive at new forms of thinking."

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