How I Went From ‘Sure’ To ‘Meh’ On Affirmative Action Over 20 Years
What does it mean to oppose discrimination?
The first real political act of my life was volunteering for a pro-affirmative action campaign. It was 1998, and I was a freshman at The Evergreen State College. I signed up for the “No On I-200” campaign, and oh what a coup that must have been for the campaign! They got a know-nothing, 18 year-old Evergreen student with long hair and a wardrobe full of torn-to-shreds Nine Inch Nails t-shirts to represent them to the people of Olympia, Washington!
Why did they accept my help? Why didn’t they say “back to the mosh pit with you, freak”? I’ll never know.
I knocked on doors in support of affirmative action for the same reason I did anything back then: as a reflexive “fuck you” to my conservative, southern high school. Feckless, performative dissent was my stock and trade back then. Here’s some stupid shit that I did: I went to Open Mic Night at Barnes & Noble and read a moody poem about, like...society, ya know? I put the final nail in the coffin of the Third Reich by scrawling “DEATH TO FASCISTS” on my trapper keeper. Without a doubt, my magnum opus of dipshittery was when I took the letters I received for academic performance -- a yellow “GB” for “Great Bridge High” -- colored them black, and hung them on my bedroom wall next to a hand-drawn-sign that said “SUX!!!” What an atomic dumbass I was.
To be fair: Great Bridge High did suck. It was more racist than average; my family moved to Virginia from Washington state when I was 14, and I was shocked by how racist it was. To be fair, it wasn’t quite the four-year-long Klan rally I pretended it was -- I exaggerated the awfulness to justify my campaign of deeply-stupid civil disobedience -- but there was some really bad stuff. That’s when I started thinking about what’s fair and unfair, what’s right and what’s wrong. Racism is a good gateway issue to politics, because even a moron -- and I was the deepest of morons -- can see that it’s wrong.
Those were the two factors that drove my support for affirmative action: A sincere desire to not be racist, and a narcissistic wish to be Jeff Maurer: Justice Crusader and Liberator of the Blacks. It was at once admirable and deeply fucked-up, like a noble lion who tapes his phone to his paw so he can take upskirt pics.
I was still pro-affirmative action when the Supreme Court upheld race-conscious university admission policies in 2003. By that point, I was putting my recently-acquired college degree to use as a temp, pursuing a promising career in stuffing-endless-envelopes-in-a-windowless-room-at-a-nonprofit-in-suburban-DC-until-I-prayed-for-death. I wasn’t alone in that mail-filled crypt; there was a similarly-doomed liberal arts major named Kyle in there with me. Kyle was doubly-cursed: He had to slog through envelope hell and deal with me as I forced a very-awkward Conversation About Race. That poor kid; he must have carjacked a nun in a past life.
“A diverse student body makes everyone’s education better,” I yammered at Kyle, basically taking Sandra Day O’Connor’s argument and pretending I thought it up on my own. I still find this logic -- which forms the legal core of race and gender-based preferences in this country -- somewhat persuasive. College isn’t real life; it’s a weird incubator that attempts to produce adults who can survive the real world instead of being instantly-devoured like so many newly-hatched sea turtles. Spending four years surrounded by Winklevosses (Winklevi?) doesn’t prepare you for real life; meeting people not-like you does. And groups often benefit from having members with diverse characteristics; if your group has a Paul McCartney writing beautifully-melodic instant classics and a John Lennon providing bold experimentation and artistic edge, you might also want a Ringo Starr to be inoffensive dead weight and serve as a food taster for possibly-expired dairy products.
I did not pester Kyle with what I call Bad Affirmative Action Argument Number One. Which is: “Preferences make up for the racial discrimination of the past.” I skipped that argument for one simple reason: Kyle was half Asian. There was a chance he would have shot back with: “The government put my grandparents in an internment camp, but admissions preferences work against me.” Countering that argument would have been...fraught. Remember: There were no windows in this room I could jump out of. My white ass would have had to just sit there and either argue that putting Americans in camps because of race isn't racism or try to slit my jugular vein with an envelope.
I also skipped Bad Affirmative Action Argument Number Two, which is: “Outcomes should match the demographics of the population.” I elided that talking point because Kyle was also half Jewish. Dumb though I was, I wasn’t going to argue that Jewish enrollment at top schools should be capped at two percent, especially since I knew that several Ivy League schools had “Whoa, Too Many Jews!” policies in the early 1900s. Kyle was an interesting audience for this one-sided conversation, seeing as he suffered from the college admissions double-whammy of being Asian and Jewish. It’s possible that his heritage was part of the reason why he ended up at George Washington, a.k.a. Safety School University.
That was where I stayed on the issue for about a decade: I favored preferential treatment -- both in the formal sense (e.g. bonus points for college admissions and government jobs) and the informal sense (e.g. an organization retooling their hiring policies to achieve more diversity) -- as long as those preferences were lightly-applied. The lightly-applied part was important to me, because I never became comfortable with discriminating based on race and gender. I was willing to tolerate some discrimination in service of the before-stated belief that diversity can benefit people inside and outside of an organization. But that tradeoff only works if -- to use some technical jargon -- the discrimination is teeny-weeny and the diversity benefit is big as shit.
I eventually started to wonder why preferences weren't more often based on economic status instead of race. Economic-based preferences would have the likely outcome of increasing diversity while doing more to benefit people who are -- in the eyes of most people -- actually disadvantaged. I started to feel this way largely because I noticed that race and gender-based policies often benefited people who seemed to be the opposite of disadvantaged. I met a guy whose dad was more-or-less Eddie Murphy in Coming to America -- they were stupid rich. He benefited from affirmative action. I met a lady whose parents are a portmanteau-level celebrity couple -- she benefited, too. This is how it often goes; it’s part of the reason why -- after decades of affirmative action policies -- there are more students at “Ivy Plus” colleges from the top one percent of income distribution than from the bottom 50 percent. The concept of “disadvantaged” has become badly scrambled -- it now includes Jaden Smith but not some white kid living in a trailer in Skunkfuck, West Virginia.
I also began to have the creeping feeling that, in many cases, preferences were anything but "lightly applied". When I started to witness hiring processes and -- through my wife, who worked in higher education -- college admissions policies, I often saw an extremely blunt instrument being wielded like a five year-old flailing at a piñata. I was on a committee at the Environmental Protection Agency that awarded a government contract to a minority and veteran-owned business (it was both) even though the company repeatedly misspelled the name of the office they would be working for on their application. It was like if you wrote “I’d love to work for the New Blork Times” on your cover letter, but got hired anyway. Perhaps not surprisingly, the company performed terribly; we had to take the highly-unusual step of terminating the contract. In that case, the societal “benefit” was a negative; we lit some taxpayer money on fire there.
The type of language that contributed to that screwup is still common in government. In the American Rescue Plan -- which I strongly supported -- money for restaurants goes first to “priority groups,” which are defined as small businesses “at least 51 percent owned by one or more individuals who are women, veterans, or socially and economically disadvantaged.” “Socially and economically disadvantaged individuals” is defined as “those who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias because of their identity as a member of a group.” Which creates a somewhat-obvious logical loop: If your race or ethnicity gets you dumped into the “low priority” category, then aren’t you being subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice? In which case...shouldn’t you be “high priority”? I can’t trick my brain into believing that this isn’t discrimination. Nor can I pretend to understand how a category ostensibly for people who “have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice” doesn’t include Jewish people. Couldn’t someone have googled “Jewish history” and read literally anything that came up?
If affirmative action in government is a bit clumsy, then affirmative action in entertainment is -- in my experience -- full-on French-waiter-falling-into-a-huge-plate-of-spaghetti calamitous. The race and gender preferences in entertainment -- where I’ve worked for about a decade -- are ubiquitous and overt. There’s an industry-accepted euphemism for discrimination; just as “checked into a spa with exhaustion” is universally-understood to mean “rehab”, and “should do well in foreign markets” means “won’t offend the Chinese government”, “we’re looking for diversity” means “no white guys, please.” I’ve heard “we’re looking for diversity” many times. Now: I’m no martyr -- I’ve been fortunate in my career, and anyone working in entertainment needs to come to terms with the fact that most decisions will be made for stupid reasons -- you really need to just accept the mystery in that regard. Still: It’s never fun to hear “you’re the wrong race and/or gender.” It sucks, every single time.
It’s also become impossible for me to ignore how tokenizing all of this is. I admit: When I’ve booked people for comedy things, I haven’t always hired the best person for the job. Of course, there were times when a healthy race-and-gender mix happened naturally, and other times when I engineered that mix for good reasons (e.g. to put together a standup show where all audience members felt welcome). But other times, I forced a race and gender mix just so people wouldn’t call me sexist or racist. Did the comics I booked feel tokenized? Did they know that they were just objects in a narrative that was really all about me? What are the psychological effects of being habitually categorized according to ascriptive traits? And what message are we sending when we argue that some groups need preferential treatment, perhaps in perpetuity? That last question is rhetorical: We’re implying that they’re somehow lesser. It’s incredibly fucked up, like a lion who buys kitchen utensils, rubs them on his genitals, and then returns them to Marshall’s.
In a way, my position hasn’t changed; I don’t think it makes sense to be color and gender-blind in all cases. But I’ve come to believe that we obsess over race and gender in a way that’s bordering on fetishism, and it’s causing crass tokenism and obvious discrimination. These costs aren’t worth the sometimes-vague benefits of diversity, and at any rate, the value of diversity can be included within the simple maxim “hire the best person for the job”. At this point, I’m basically in line with the 57 percent of Californians who rejected affirmative action at the ballot box last year (in spite of heavy funding and support from corporations and the Democratic establishment) and the 74 percent of Americans -- including majorities of all racial and ethnic groups -- who think employers shouldn’t take race and ethnicity into account when hiring. It also puts me in line with the 58 percent of Washingtonians who sent I-200 sailing to victory in 1998, many of whom probably voted “yes” just to rub it into my dumb hippie face.
I don’t think racism or sexism are over; not by a long shot. I think we can improve the lack-of-access problems that disproportionately affect Black and brown Americans -- but that also affect that white kid in Skunkfuck, WV -- by: 1) Investing in the working poor, and 2) Adopting hiring practices that greatly expand the applicant pool and evaluate candidates according to a meaningful, blind process. This might not produce five-star diversity numbers in the short term -- although it also might! -- but my response to that is: Give it a minute. Race is bullshit, and gender differences are real but gender superiority is not, so let’s work on making a more-fair society and have confidence that diversity will follow. This artificial, white-savior-engineered diversity isn’t working. After more than 20 years, I’m ready to admit that.
Deep dive into your backlog continues. I'm basically at "the problem with Wikipedia" on your posts right now https://xkcd.com/214/
I had to re-read " I met a lady whose parents are a portmanteau-level celebrity couple" for the lightbulb click and apparently have a Coen brother movie to watch... maybe?