In the ’90s, affirmative action recast itself as “diversity,” the colorless, apparently unassailable euphemism for racial, gender and ethnic preferences. Ironically, however, diversity may be turning into the enemy of African-American progress–and African-American progress was the justification for affirmative action in the first place.
On Tuesday, for example, the Clinton administration announced that the minority business program of the Small Business Administration will be opened up to white women. Of the 6,000 firms that received the $6.4 billion in SBA contracts last year, only nine were owned by white women. Nearly all the rest went to people with an ethnic or racial claim to special preferences.
Not all African-American businessmen are happy about this. “When you have a finite pie and add more people carving up that pie, some won’t get as much,” Sam Carradine, executive director of the National Association of Minority Contractors, told The Washington Post.
Affirmative action was born in the ’60s as a way to give historically discriminated-against blacks an edge. Since then, however, more and more groups–Hispanics, Asians, women–have come knocking at the door demanding the same edge. They are getting it.
Carradine is, of course, right. As the number of preferred classes increases, the black portion of the pie shrinks. Even before SBA’s proposed change in regulation, it was giving less than half its contracts to blacks. A full quarter go to Hispanics and a fifth to Asians. Now with white women, the numbers are sure to shrink even more.
More Top Picks Best Dj Controllers For Beginners
Expanding affirmative action (for blacks) to diversity (for all) seemed, at first, a good idea to civil rights advocates: As other groups gained a stake in the ethnic spoils system, it would create more political allies for the very idea of group preferences. Indeed, the administration’s expansion of SBA to include white women is a fairly transparent attempt to broaden the political constituency of a program that has been under increasing attack as unfair and fraud-ridden.
But this search for allies has not quite worked. In California, for example, a majority of white women voted for Proposition 209 banning all affirmative action. When Asians and Hispanics are asked to choose between diversity or merit as the basis for hiring, promotion or college admission, diversity loses–by huge margins. Affirmative action is, accordingly, in general political retreat. Even the courts are relentlessly narrowing its scope.
From the African-American perspective, diversity has diluted the impact of affirmative action without securing its political viability, yielding the worst of both worlds: a smaller piece of the pie and shrinking national support.
Not surprisingly, some African-American intellectuals are seriously rethinking the whole transformation of affirmative action into diversity. In the current New Republic, for example, Glenn Loury points out the absurdity of a “diversity” that gives preferences to such groups as Hispanics and Asians who are so rapidly assimilating into the American mainstream. (Among native-born, married Americans 25-34 years old, the intermarriage rate for Asians is more than 50 percent; for Hispanics, over 40).
The real problem, Loury argues, is not Asians or Hispanics or even the rising black middle class, but the black underclass: “The race problem that deserves national attention concerns the bottom third of the black population, which is locked in ghettos at the center of our great cities and remains shut out from access to the engines of social mobility.”
Loury favors retaining affirmative action for this one destitute and marginalized group, the remnants of the “rural, Southern, low-caste peasantry that originated with the importation of enslaved Africans . . . that has presented us with an historically unprecedented problem of assimilation.”
Opponents of affirmative action might prefer a plan that did not violate the principle of government treating citizens as individuals rather than as members of a group. I would prefer, say, a massive program to reform and rescue the disgraceful inner-city schools. (Clinton is instead showering easy education money on a largely white population of college students.)
But even opponents of affirmative action should not protest too loudly if the whole structure of preferences that has metastasized into mindless “diversity” were dismantled and replaced with a simple single preference for the black underclass, the most bereft and isolated minority in America.
The Clinton administration will have neither of these approaches. It is too busy raining tuition money on the college-bound and government contracts on white women.