Stacking “Race Cards” August 10, 2008

Newsweek’s Anna Quindlen’s article, “The Caucasian Card” finally says so many things which I believe needed to be said in this election.

Using the term “race card” as a pejorative is almost always meant to promulgate the big lie that takes hold everywhere from the workplace to the classroom: that black men and women commonly use race as a bludgeon and an excuse, and that they will always blame failures or disagreements on racism…

The fallacy at the heart of most discussions of affirmative action is twofold: that it replaced a true meritocracy, and that it means promoting the second-rate. The meritocracy theory requires us to believe that for decades no women and no people of color were as qualified as white men, who essentially had every field locked up.

Belief in the ascendancy of the second-rate requires us to demean the qualifications of countless writers, jurists, doctors, academics and other professionals who gained entry and then performed superlatively. Part of the tacit deal for most of them was not that they be as good as their lackluster white male counterparts, but as good as the best of them.

One hears this type of drivvel constantly — that affirmative action is an obstacle to a color-blind utopian meritocracy where rewards are only based on hard work, blood, sweat and tears, and where, in the words of Martin Luther King, “content of character” is paramount.

It is not affirmative action that stops such a world from taking shape — it is prejudice. Period. As Quindlen says, one does not find the squeaky black wheel getting all the grease from the American populace, on the contrary — most minority members have long ago, perhaps in long gone generations, to simply remain silent so as to not rock the boat:

To hear tell, you would believe that the world is chockablock with minority lawyers, teachers, construction workers and police officers who spend all their time complaining about institutional racism, calling others out on offensive jokes and assumed stereotypes. But most of us encounter the opposite, the silence of people who learned a long time ago that to get along it’s imperative to go along.

In part this is because they’re carrying a load on their shoulders. When one of the white guys blows an account, the office line is that he’s a loser. But when a black guy does it, it means that they—that’s the all-purpose “they,” sometimes used interchangeably with “those people”—don’t seem to be able to close the deal.

Same goes for women, which is one reason the Clinton-Obama rivalry got so pitched during the primaries. Our piece of the pie is small, and often there’s only one fork. When someone like Senator McCain says he’s opposed to quotas, it sounds like country-club code for “We liked the pie the old way.”

One must remember that a black child born after 1975 is the first generation of blacks in his family to be born with full rights equivalent to any other American citizen. Not inhuman property, not 3/5ths of a human, not a human without voting rights, not a human who has to enter buildings through the service entrance — a full human American citizen — a legacy shared by not many, if any, ethnic groups extant in America today.

If people make assumptions about you simply on the basis of your appearance all your life, assumptions ranging from criminality to sloth to unearned opportunity, it can make you bitter and hard and cynical.

As Quindlen says, when examined under the same critical lens, nepotism, fraternity social networks, and many other things which have historically benefitted WASP men have also been guilty of “advancing the second-rate” and standing in the way of true meritocracy.

Should affirmative action be broadened to include class? Most definitely. Poor whites are often more disadvantaged than their inner-city minority counterparts, and certainly more so than Obama’s “privileged” daughters. However, anti-white racism also exists, and addressing this can not be honestly seen as a departure from affirmative action’s “emphasis on race and gender.”

Affirmative action must, in light of the omni-directional prejudices that America is plagued with, continue to exist in some form or another. Perhaps “quotas” aren’t the way to go, perhaps flat base-line numbers of worked hours do more to hurt than help. But something must be there to counteract the pervasive prejudices. There must be some type of trump card to make the racist boss hire the hard working black or Latino man who he referred to as “lazy” the day before. There must be something that, in a company with racist or sexist overtones, turns the “chick with the rack” or the “dirty Arab” or the “cracker redneck” into the “director of operations”.

To deny this is to give carte blanche to prejudice to continue eternally and to have jurisdiction over all hiring practices. This is unacceptable for any country which would like to consider itself as existing in the same era as the rest of the world.