By a vote of 6 – 3, the ultra-conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the precedent of Affirmative Action in considering race for admissions in higher education.
Beginning in 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925 using affirmative action for the first time by instructing federal contractors to take “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are treated equally without regard to race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Kennedy established the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity.
The purpose of Affirmative Action in admissions and employment has from its inception been to level the playing field in a nation founded on the original sin of racism, which created a hierarchy of privilege and social and economic access on the basis of the socially constructed notion of “race.”
Kennedy’s successors on both the Democratic and Republican sides of the aisle, including Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and others strengthened Affirmative Action measures by instituting additional executive orders and by signing Congressional bills into law. President Jimmy Carter issued Executive Order 12138, creating a National Women’s Business Enterprise Policy, which required all agencies to take affirmative action to support women’s businesses.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 912 (1978) upheld the use of race as one factor in choosing among qualified applicants for university admission. The Court simultaneously ruled unlawful the University Medical School’s practice of reserving 18 seats in each entering class of 100 for disadvantaged minority students.
The current Supreme Court, however, found Affirmative Action to be unconstitutional by violating the 14th Amendment’s “equal access” clause.
“The result of today’s decision is that a person’s skin color may play a role in assessing individualized suspicion, but it cannot play a role in assessing that person’s individualized contributions to a diverse learning environment,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote. “That indefensible reading of the Constitution is not grounded in law and subverts the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.”
“But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” said Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the only Black woman on the court, who was joined by the court’s two other liberals. Jackson wrote that the majority had “detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences.”
She argued in terse terms that “No one benefits from ignorance.”
Jackson accused the majority of having a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” in how the ruling announced “‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”
Colorblindness
With the ascendancy of Barack Obama during the primaries and his election twice as the forty-fourth president of the United States, on numerous occasions the media have asserted that the United States can now be considered as a “post-racial” society, where the notion that “race” has lost its significance, and where our country’s long history of racism is now at an end.
For example, National Public Radio Senior News Analyst, Daniel Schorr, during the presidential primaries on January 28, 2008 on All Things Considered noted that with the emergence of Barack Obama, we have entered a new “post-racial” political era, and that Obama “transcends race” and is “race free.”
And according to MSNBC political analyst, Chris Matthews, responding to Obama’s State of the Union message on January 27, 2010: “He is post-racial by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country, and past so much history, in just a year or two. I mean, it’s something we don’t even think about.”
These commentators and others imply a number of claims in their statements: The first is that we have become a “race-blind” or “colorblind” society – that race has become unimportant, that we don’t see “race” anymore. The second implication states that racism (i.e., prejudice along with social power to enact oppression by white people over people of color) is a thing of the past.
Is the United States now a “colorblind” society? Or even more importantly, should the United States be a “colorblind / race-blind” society? The very notion of “race-blindness” is deeply problematic.
Though when we tell another that “I don’t see your race; I just see you as a human being,” may seem as a righteous statement, what are we really telling the person, and how may this come across: “I discount a part of you that I may not want to address,” and “I will not see you in your multiple identities.” This has the tendency of erasing the person’s background and historical legacy, and hides the continuing hierarchical and systemic positionalities among white people and racially minoritized people.
In their book Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society, the authors show how the concept of “colorblindness / race-blindness” attempts to deny and further entrench hierarchical and deeply rooted systemic racial inequities and privileges accorded to white people that permeate throughout our society.
We must as a society get beyond this false and counterproductive notion of “colorblindness / race-blindness” and confront head-on our past history and current realities of racism and transcend, to use Mica Pollock’s term, “colormuteness” by engaging in honest and open conversations on the impact and legacy of race relations in our country.
In addition, the assertion that we have fully addressed and finally concluded the long history of racism in the United States with the election of Barack Obama is simply unfounded.
Anti-racism consultant Valerie Batts discusses what she terms as “new forms of racism.” While the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954), the Civil Right Act (1964), and other judicial and legislative actions have criminalized a number of past realities (for example, slavery, “Jim Crow” laws, lynchings, cross burnings, segregated educational, employment, business, and governmental institutions, and more), many forms of racism continue.
While some of these conditions continue today on a de facto basis, Batts lists these “new forms” as 1. “Dysfunctional Rescuing” where white people “help” people of color in a condescending way believing they can’t help themselves; 2. “Blaming the Victims” of systematic oppression for the oppression itself; 3. “Avoidance of Contact” where white people self-segregate in their personal and professional lives from people of color, and where white people show little interest in learning about the cultures of communities of color; 4. “Denial of Cultural Differences,” the notion of “color blindness,” which minimizes the cultural and behavioral difference among people, which simply mask discomfort with racialized differences; and 5. “Denial of Political Significance of Differences,” in which white people deny the profound impact regarding the social, political, and economic realities of the lives of people of color.
I add to the list of conditions that perpetuate systemic racism the concept of stereotyping. A stereotype is an oversimplified or misinformed perception, opinion, attitude, judgment, or image of a person or a group of people held in common by members of other groups. Originally referring to the process of making type from a metal mold in printing, social stereotypes can be viewed as molds of regular and invariable patterns of evaluation on others.
With stereotypes, people tend to overlook all other characteristics of the group. Stereotypes of out-group members by in-group members depersonalize them, in effect seeing them largely as members of a group and not as individuals with unique and distinctive qualities and attributes. This often results in the tendency to diminish the humanity of out-group members relegating them to the category of “other,” and as “different.”
Individuals sometimes use stereotypes to justify continued marginalization and subjugation of members of that group. In this sense, stereotypes conform to the literal meaning of the word “prejudice,” which is a prejudgment, derived from the Latin praejudicium.
Restricting Education
The United States has been the only nation to have forbidden education to those it has enslaved. Except for imposing Christian conversion through religious instruction, legislators enacted laws making it a crime in most Southern states.
Following an enslaved people’s uprising led by abolitionist Nat Turner in 1831, some states extended the education ban to free blacks as well.
Slavers identified literacy as a direct threat to the institution of slavery and their economic dependency on the labor it provided. A North Carolina law of 1831 stated in part: “Teaching slaves to read and write, tends to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion.”
The Code of Virginia of 1849 was passed to prevent enslaved persons from assembling for religious or educational purposes as legislators believed that education would lead to uprisings.
If enslaved people developed literacy, they would be able to read the writings of abolitionists, for example, about attempts to help people escape to the North, or about the 1791-1804 slave revolution in Haiti, and the end of slavery in 1833 in the British Empire.
As stated by Washington, D.C. lawyer and clerk of the US Supreme Court, Elias B. Caldwell:
“The more you improve the condition of these people, the more you cultivate their minds, the more miserable you make them, in their present state,” he argued. “You give them a higher relish for those privileges which they can never attain, and turn what we intend for a blessing [slavery] into a curse. No, if they must remain in their present situation, keep them in the lowest state of degradation and ignorance. The nearer you bring them to the condition of brutes, the better chance do you give them of possessing their apathy.”
With the end of slavery, the legal exclusion of education to formerly enslaved people, their children, and their descendants did not come to an end. Throughout the Jim Crow era and during the next several decades up to the current moment, African Americas have faced de jure and then de facto segregation, underfunded schools, implicit bias from educators and school administrators, and public sentiments ripe with myths and stereotypes regarding the intellectual capacities of the African heritage mind. This also applies to Latinx, indigenous, and Asian people in the United States.
Following the Revolutionary War, leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and others called for state-supported and mandated public education, believing that the very survival of the new Republic depended on an educated populace.
Jefferson, for example, advocated for a three-year publicly supported education for all white children, but no such guarantees were to be extended to children of enslaved Africans. In addition, he argued for advanced education provided to a select few white males, and not females.
As Jefferson wrote in 1782, the schools will be “raking a few geniuses from the rubbish.” He included all enslaved Africans as an integral part of that pile of rubbish.
How ironic that today several states are either proposing or have passed laws prohibiting the teaching of slavery and other aspects of U.S. history that are not particularly flattering?
Republican Governor Greg Abbott of Texas signed what many are calling an “anti-Critical Race Theory” act into law, which seriously restricts what educators may teach in history and civics public school courses throughout the state.
These states, largely with Republican-controlled legislatures, are weaponizing the teaching of history to excite their base with the scare tactic that the teaching of “Critical Race Theory” will make white students feel bad about themselves and will result in black students hating the United States.
Cultural and Social Capital
French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu, distinguishes between material wealth and the cultural assets of a particular socioeconomic class. He asserts that the culture adds wealth to the higher classes.
What he terms, “Cultural Capital,” represents the collection of non-economic forces, such as family background, social class, varying investments in and commitments to education, different resources, etc. which influence academic and career success. These include the non-financial social assets that promote social mobility beyond economic means referring to attitudes, knowledge, intellect, values, languages, style of speech and dress, physical appearance, and abilities of primarily the middle classes. Schools often devalue the cultures of the working classes.
Regarding “Social Capital,” Bourdieu identifies these as “the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.”
In other words, it’s not what you know as much as who you know in your “durable networks” that can give you higher or lower standing, depending on your “network,” in attaining success. Again, the upper classes are richer in social capital.
The majority of the Supreme Court certainly did not consider issues of cultural and social capital in its decision to kill Affirmative Action.
The Myth of Meritocracy
From the time of our birth and throughout our lives, society feeds and continually refeeds us the Pablum of meritocracy until it becomes inimically ingrained into our nervous systems.
The story goes something like this: For those of us living in the United States, it matters not from which station of life we came. It matters not about our backgrounds and social or personal identities. We each have been born into a system that guarantees equal and equitable access to opportunities for success.
Success is ours through hard work, study, ambition, and by deferring gratification to later in our lives. We will succeed if we “keep our nose stuck to the grindstone” (ouch!) and “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” (somehow balancing without falling over on our faces).
This concept of “meritocracy” is founded on “personal responsibility,” and those who do not achieve success must accept responsibility for their failures.
Maybe they did not try hard enough. Maybe they failed to scale any barriers that could have been placed in their way because they did not have enough will and self-control, fortitude, intelligence, character, or because they simply made bad choices.
Capitalism stands as a system based on the creation of capital that supports the exponential accumulation of wealth by the capital class generated by the labor of working classes. Those without substantial capital are forced within this system to run throughout their lives on a hamster wheel trying to get ahead, but most never reach a successful conclusion.
Ruling class hegemony dictates that in this “exceptional” nation, everyone can succeed if they possess the qualities of hard work, ambition, and personal responsibility.
This theory of “meritocracy,” however, is a myth, a lie, a fraud, as is the theory and practice of “trickle down economics” in which the owning class trickles down some of its gigantic wealth and compassion to the laborers in their companies. In reality, only the scraps trickle down.
“Success” in financial terms, has more to do with family inheritance, social and cultural capital, and, of course, exhibiting essential social identities in terms of socioeconomic class background and race.
While economic disparities plague all nations across the planet, nowhere are these disparities more extreme than in the United States. While of course, we are all accountable and liable for our actions, what impact do the systemic conditions of our nation have to do with personal success?
While the Supreme Court terminated Affirmative Action, it did not, likewise, end the practice of “legacy admissions” in which many major colleges and universities give preferential treatment in admissions to the children of alumni parents of those universities, especially those who have donated large endowments.
Reparations
Let us first define and deconstruct the term “reparations,” rep·a·ra·tion (repəˈrāSH(ə)n). We can find the trajectory of the word’s development in late Middle English coming from Old French derived from late Latin reparatio(n-), or reparare, “to make ready again.”
The root of the term “reparation” is “repair,” which implies that the concept or thing to “make ready again” initially came in good condition, that it was formerly intact. The noun “reparations” denotes making amends for wrongs or wounds inflicted by paying monetary or other kinds of offerings to injured or otherwise wronged parties.
In the current context, “reparations” means providing African Americans with just compensation for the atrocities inflicted upon their ancestors who were violently stolen by slavers from their native lands in Africa, chained, and packed tightly onto wooden ships for a tormenting and dangerous ocean voyage to the “Americas,” then dumped like inanimate cargo (for those who survived the passage) and sold into slavery.
All rights were stripped from them as were their native languages, cultures, and spiritual traditions. Slavers separated family members from one another, and for the remainder of their lives enslaved Africans were forced into manual labor in extremely harsh conditions.
The white supremacist establishment in most regions forbad them any kind of appropriate and adequate healthcare, housing, formalized education, or the possibility of attaining their freedom.
Contrary to Republican Senator Tim Scott’s rebuttal of President Biden’s address to Congress on Wednesday, April 28, 2021 when Scott argued: “Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country,” Mr. Biden was on point when he acknowledged the long-standing and entrenched systemic racist injustices on which the United States is based.
But as we are discussing reparations today, we are not simply referring to the era of slavery from 1619 through the end of the Civil War. The legacy of slavery and the patriarchal Christian white supremacist racist foundation on which the U.S. is built – the “original sin” – has carried to the present day continuing to marginalize, disenfranchise, and oppress people of African descent in this country. Reparations, then, must address that long and brutal legacy up to the present moment.
Historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries, in his TED Talk, “We Must Confront the Painful Part of U.S. History” tells the story of his trip to the historic home of James Madison, a designer of the U.S. Constitution and the chief architect of the Bill of Rights.
At Madison’s famous home, Montpelier, situated on thousands of beautiful acres with the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance, Jeffries was honored with a private tour of the mansion. Upon entering Madison’s library, Jeffries was overtaken by the realization that it was here that Madison crafted the immortal words of the great Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments of our Constitution.
Breaking his reverie, however, the tour guide then took Jeffries to the building’s cellar in which the guide asked him to gently run his hand over the bricks holding up the walls. He felt and saw ridges and impressions on the bricks that looked to him like tiny handprints. The guide told him that those impressions were of the little hands of the enslaved children “who were never compensated for the bricks they made.”
This legacy of slavery has been handed down through the 400+ years after the institution was introduced on these shores. For example, researchers William Darity and Kirsten Mullen, in their 2020 Brookings Institute report “Black Reparations and the Racial Wealth Gap” found that,
“African Americans were not compensated for their economic contribution, leading to decades of financial struggle. The most recent data available shows that black Americans held about 2.6% of U.S. wealth while being 13% of the population. On average, white households had a net worth of $80,000 more than black households.”
Because African heritage people in a racist nation faced insurmountable obstacles in owning property – a primary means of increasing their wealth – they, therefore, had limited options to hand down their resources to their descendants.
For example, in a 2020 U.S. government report, white people own 80% of the nation’s accumulated wealth while comprising 60% of the population. A 2016 report by the Brookings Institute showed a $171,000 net worth for a typical white family. This is almost ten times that a black family of $17,150.
Gaps in wealth between black and white households show the impact of uninterrupted systemic inequality and discrimination beginning at the nation’s inception. And no, this gap is not the result of some defective lowered intelligence among African heritage bodies, or a diminished sense of motivation, talent, or ingenuity.
These charges are used as a justification for those enamored by the lie, the myth that the U.S. functions as a meritocracy, and by so doing, blames the victims of inequality for that inequality.
Enslaved Africans literally constructed the foundations of not only James Madison’s home, but they formulated the very foundations of our nation with their blood, sweat, and tears mixing with the connecting mortar without just compensation then and throughout the next 400 years.
This continued following the Civil War into the Jim Crow era and beyond in the areas of employment discrimination, segregated education, housing redlining, poor or no health care, higher loan rates, gentrification forcing them from their neighborhoods, unequal treatment in the “justice” system, over incarceration, and the list continues.
While the U.S. government promised reparations of a sort to those formerly enslaved with “40 acres and a mule,” those promises went unmet soon following President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865 when the newly inaugurated President Andrew Johnson rescinded the order and restored the land back to its white owners.
The national government established the practice of Affirmative Action to level the employment and educational processes and practices for people of color and women in institutions in which they have been underrepresented and have faced discrimination.
Affirmative Action has never truly addressed the longstanding inequities as institutions have consistently undermined its purposes by employing and promoting a few token employees of color and women as mere “window dressing” to present a diverse image.
In addition, legislators have passed laws and courts have handed down rulings to diminish Affirmative Action’s effectiveness. Therefore, Affirmative Action cannot be viewed as an adequate or equitable form of reparations.
Reparations to groups of individuals have precedence, however, in U.S. history. The government allotted meager payments of approximately $20 thousand dollars to surviving Japanese Americans who it interned in the United States during World War II after forcing them, many of whom were U.S. citizens either by birth or naturalization, to leave their homes and communities and shipping them to crowded barbed-wire enclosed camps in interior regions of the U.S.
In addition, victims of the inhumane and highly unethical Tuskegee Study, which infected 399 black men with syphilis and left them untreated, the U.S. government eventually paid $10 million in reparations, and they and their families were provided lifelong medical care.
The United States should make reparations, to be determined, to African Americans, whether they can or cannot show direct lineage to an enslaved ancestor. And reparations can come in different forms. For example, progressive politicians have advocated that all people should have the option of attending state colleges and universities tuition free. Until the government grants this universally, African heritage people should have this option today.
The city of Evanston, Illinois can serve as a nation model. It gives black residents who were specifically targeted with racist housing policies money for home repairs, down payments, or mortgage payments. In this way, Evanston has directed a bright light on actual racist housing policies while searching for equitable ways of at least beginning to make restitution.
Other suggested forms of reparations include giving black people the option of taking out a loan at zero interest rates, erasure of student debt, education scholarships given directly to young people in zip codes with underperforming school systems.
Or the government could give reparations for those employed in fields with verified unfair hiring practices. In this case, the government could provide a matching program with corporations, giving extra money with each paycheck instead of one lump sum.
Or the government can tax inherited wealth at a higher rate while setting aside a portion of this sum to give black people what should have been their share of inherited wealth?
Historian Jeffries stated in his TED Talk:
“History reminds us that we stand on the shoulders of greats like James Madison. But hard history reminds us that we as a nation also stand on the shoulders of enslaved children, little boys and little girls who with their bare hands made the bricks to serve as the foundation for this nation, and if we are serious about creating a fair and just society, then we would do well to remember them.”
Jeffries asserts that we must teach and “disrupt the continuum of hard history” and seek the truth, that reparations must begin with lifting the rug and sweep away the diseased dust mites of white supremacist racism, nativism, neo-fascism, and all the diseased oppressive mutations.
And maybe this could be one of the reasons why many white people shut down and refuse to even consider giving reparations to people whom our government — with the consent of “we the people” — have marginalized, harassed, violated, committed violence against, and have oppressed in every sense of the term.
By European heritage citizens acknowledging the possibility that members of specific groups deserve compensation for suffering past atrocities brings to consciousness that the country to which they identify has oppressed its own people. This acknowledgment hammers a sharp blow to many European heritage citizens’ identity and potentially poses a grave narcissistic injury.
But reparations must cover more than past atrocities, for the past serves as the antecedent to the continuing legacy of racism up to the present day. Reparations must include a commitment by our government, by our institutions, and by the people to look at ourselves, to look at our implicit biases implanted into our consciousness by our socialization.
Reverend Mark Thompson, a member of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, grounded his definition in repair and government backing:
“For many of us, reparations means spiritual repair, cultural repair, repair through the means of education, health, economics, society, all of those things together. So it’s obviously more than individual checks, but helping to build institutions so that at least African Americans can catch up with white Americans.”
Any form of reparations can never approach repairing the past – the terror, torture, rape, family dislocation and separation, brutality, denial of culture, education, healthcare, housing, sense of community, and murder.
The three counts of murder in the Derrick Chauvin trial and the monetary settlement by the Minneapolis city government, for example, can never right the wrongs perpetrated against George Floyd, and they can never return Mr. Floyd to his loved ones.
Reparations can, however, expose some of the nation’s recent “hard history” and the legacy that has followed us from the past, and provide a chance for a better and freer tomorrow.
Colonialism stands as the very foundation of Capitalism in which the accumulation of capital is gained from the commodification of Africa and from black bodies. It is more than symbolic that in 1711, slavers sold African bodies in slave markets on Wall Street in New York City (named in 1644 after King George III of England gave the lands to his brother, the Duke of York).
The murder and destruction of black people and property in towns like Tulsa, Rosewood, St. Petersburg, St. Louis, and others resulted from white resentment toward black people’s accumulation of wealth.
The 1921 white assault of black people in Tulsa, Oklahoma resulted in the death and injury of hundreds and the looting of approximately $22.5 million dollars of wealth, which today would be many times that amount. This stolen heritage of black wealth has been repeated in an endless cycle.
The Freedmen’s Bank, with accounts of black people across the country, reached $64 million. Largely due to fraud and mismanagement of senior leaders and the board of directors, the bank failed, taking with it the deposits of black people in 1874.
For example, white businessman and politician Henry D. Cooks who sat on the bank’s board approved unsecured loans to his own quarry operation. Following a stock market crash in 1873, the quarry went bankrupt, and soon thereafter, so did the bank.
The Reparations Legacy Project Conference organizers estimated that $14 trillion is owed to black people in the United States in stolen wealth. Reparations amounts to restoration of stolen resources.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ultra-conservative majority, by terminating Affirmative Action in higher education, has turned back the clock in our nation’s fight to come to terms with the legacy of racism in the United States. But we the people, with collective action through progressive coalitions can lead the way toward real justice without the “justices.”
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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