Has Affirmative Action become a liability for the Left?

Great Debates
1

Judicially I think it’s dead for the time being, rather I was curious if you believe this plank in The Democratic Party is still a viable tool to win votes?

The AI had this to say when I asked it this question:

  • Continued Support for the Principle: A majority of Democrats (54% in a June 2023 poll) approve of considering race and ethnicity in college admissions to increase diversity, with support even higher among liberal Democrats. Progressive figures and groups sharply condemned the Supreme Court’s decision as a major setback to racial justice efforts.
  • Criticism of the Supreme Court Ruling: Leaders from the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, Black Caucus, and Hispanic Caucus, along with President Biden and the EEOC Chair, expressed strong disapproval of the ruling, which they view as a departure from decades of precedent.
  • Shifting Strategies: In response to the legal restrictions in higher education, discussions within the left have shifted towards exploring race-neutral alternatives to foster diversity, such as:
    • Socioeconomic factors: Giving preference to individuals from disadvantaged economic backgrounds, which indirectly benefits some minority groups.
    • Geographic diversity: Considering an applicant’s academic performance within their specific high school or ZIP code to identify talent from under-resourced areas.
    • Targeted recruitment and support programs: Implementing outreach programs for first-generation and low-income students, coupled with financial aid boosts.

Which to me seems like moving the goal posts and the beginning of the tail end of failure for this particular idea in the public sphere. In a two party system, if one party doesn’t want a thing and half of the other party doesn’t want it, it will never happen.

2

I think time spent talking about it is squandering voters’ attention that could be used to discuss policies that are more responsive to their concerns, like how to fix economic mismanagement. It’s been a while since I saw a list of voter priorities, but racial justice wasn’t a trending issue for 2024 and I doubt the list has changed much. You even saw material shifts in voting by racial minorities towards the GOP.

I wouldn’t call it a liability, but it’d be a mistake.

3

Considering that Trump and company are systematically purging non-white-men from the government and pressuring corporations to do the same? The conditions that made Affirmative Action necessary in the first place have been re-created. Is everyone not a white male just supposed to resign themselves to never having a good job because the good jobs are all reserved for white men?

Also, the Democrats are not “the Left”.

4

With enough bad press, unattributed stories and rumors, you could make drinking water seem like a bad idea.

5

IMHO, it began to become a liability for the left when it became clear that affirmative action 1) was based off of race or gender rather than wealth, such that a billionaire black woman would be considered disadvantaged compared to a homeless white man, and 2) never had a clear finish line, a point where its supporters would say “Okay, we’ve reached our goal and we can do away with AA,” and 3) there wasn’t a similar push for men or certain races or whatnot in fields where they were underrepresented. You don’t see AA proponents saying “It’s a problem that the NBA is 85% black,” or that “there are too few men in women-predominant career fields,” etc.

Instead of being seen as a tool for fairness, AA became seen as a one-way street for progressives to get “their” people in where they wanted them to be, but not for ‘other’ folks. That then led to backlash. The fact that AA proponents were okay with Asian students being required to test several hundred points higher on the SAT than some other races to have the same chance of college admission did not help the image either.

6

Agree. The movement seems to have created a strong backlash to AA and DEI initiatives and the like. White suburban and poor rural white kids seeing kids that don’t look like them get the breaks in terms of getting into college and then in hiring seems to have encouraged people not to hide their racism from the public sphere any more. I agree a softer, more indirect approach to get to structural fairness needs to be considered - I fear people now hear the term “Affirmative Action” and think it just a program promoting diversity hiring, quotas, and just generally against white people.

7

Are they actually seeing this, or is this a combination of bad assumptions and dedicated rumor mongering?

8

Yeah, I would suspect it’s more of the latter, or “feelings” reinforced by a racist parent or aunt/uncle. But perception can shape someone’s reality.

9

Actual reality doesn’t seem to work that way, though. You can really believe with all your heart that the brick wall is a trick/optical illusion all you want…but the “Damn it! Ouch!!” is going to happen just the same.

10

Yes, but voters vote based off of feelings, not fact. If they feel things are a certain way, they will vote accordingly. The candidate/party that gets voters to feel the most in line with them wins.

11

As long as White people find Black people in places they think they shouldn’t (such as universities, airplane cockpits, doctor’s offices, C-suite, etc ..) it will be a liability for the Left.

12

Realistically, in a global marketplace, Affirmative Action at this point is largely protecting US Citizens and Caucasians from being largely displaced by Chinese and Indian students. It’s more a mechanism of nativism than it is of liberalization.

I’m also skeptical that at this time and date that there’s any widespread racist ideology that’s preventing people from getting into schools, so extreme that anti-discrimination laws are insufficient.

In general, the Left is currently in a position where they can continue to view themselves as “Left” - e.g. opposed to capitalism, free markets, and wholly in the pocket of people who are at the bottom rung of the social hierarchy - a position that’s being targeted better and more completely by MAGA. Or, they could switch.

In terms of switching position, I’d view that there’s two alternate positions: 1) Aim for the wealthy and go full pro-Capitlism, or 2) Aim for everyone - top, bottom, and middle and general reasonableness. Like, the opposite of supporting unions doesn’t have to be fighting unions, it can be to support Americans and siding with unions where they’re working towards the general good and fighting them when they’re being corrupt, short-sighted, or impractical. To be sure, MAGA - just as the left used to do - would always interpret any negative actions of a follower of approach #2 as coming from a group devoted to approach #1. Every time that you fight a union or vote against the common man, there will be cries that you’re in the pockets of Big Business, despite that not being the case. But there’s really no help for that. Libs are gonna lib, and MAGAs are gonna MAGA. That shouldn’t stop you from doing the right thing.

Ultimately, 100% of the population are Americans. If you target that whole 100% then, probably, at best you’ll only get 60% of the vote. But, if you a priori target that same 60%, then you’re probably only going to get 33-40% of the vote and balance out the 33-40% that MAGA is getting by targeting who all they’re targeting. Each election is just a crap-shoot.

Personally, I’d advise against being the Left. Just be American. Take every goal and every concern seriously, and make proposals that try to achieve all of those goals while minimizing every concern.

13

Does that go the other way, too?

14

I’d advise everyone against limiting their goals to a subset of the population, who wants to become a representative of the people.

It’s expressly against the exact description of the job. It makes as much sense as a fire marshal saying that he’ll only fight fires on the South side of the river because fuck them northies (and because there’s more votes to be got on the South side, and the South is full of people that hate North shorers). His job is to fight fires and save lives, for the greater common good.

When you vote for a partisan, you’re voting for someone who has already professed an intent to shirk his job.

15

There is a vast difference between what should be your stated goals, and what should be your stated goals if you want to be elected.

16

Traditionally, the Republican party held the position that the long-term issue of protecting people from their bad decisions - e.g. coddling - is that they don’t learn the price of those decisions and they don’t learn to moderate their behavior.

There’s a strong argument to be made that MAGA is exactly the result of creating a world where politics are largely viewed as TV entertainment instead of something with real and practical consequences. You can just pick a side, cheer and wave flags, and it doesn’t really matter what the team’s positions are, just whether they’re getting touchdowns.

Personally, I’d say that there comes a point where saying what you need to say to get elected stops paying its dividends.

Give reasonable, honest recommendations that genuinely work to achieve a best (limited, but practical) outcome for the people, for businesses, for the economy, and for the future. If that doesn’t sell the people then that’s their choice. Sometimes, you just have to allow and then wait for people to hit rock bottom. On that day, suddenly the pitch for sanity will start to work.

The worst possible thing, though, would be that on that day there’s no one offering a pitch for sanity.

17

Sorry, but this is quite false.

18

Then ignore the identification. It’s not worth arguing over versus the central points.

19

They’ve shifted back now, though. Black and Latino support for the Republicans has cratered since the election.

20

All of this is mostly ill-informed “vibes” heavily influenced by anti-AA propaganda.

  1. Yes, there has always been recognition that there are lots of different axes of privilege, and wealthy Black women and homeless white men can both be victims of discrimination in different ways. And indeed, there are economic forms of AA in things like college admission, not just race- and gender-based.

You may argue that AA proponents should have done a better job of leading on message and debunking the propaganda, but that’s not the same thing as arguing that the propaganda is true.

  1. Yes, cohort-specific “clear finish lines” were built into AA from the beginning, because their mechanisms scrutinize for underrepresentation and for other structural factors. That is, if your student body or workforce or whatever has achieved proportional representation, or there’s an evident nondiscriminatory reason for the non-proportional representation, AA procedures are not required.

Again, anti-AA propaganda ignores this because it’s playing on entrenched cultural biases where a lot of people feel they’re entitled to antidiscrimination efforts implemented as a temporary measure, with a visible cutoff point where they’ll be guaranteed never to have to think about societal unfairness again, or be expected to make any effort to redress it. The reality is that as societal discrimination decreases, so does the application of antidiscrimination AA measures. But wanting a near-term assurance that AA is about to be officially “over”, pinky swear, is naive and entitled.

  1. Underrepresentation of majoritized groups in minoritized professions doesn’t work the same way. Look up studies of the so-called “glass escalator” effect for men in teaching or in nursing, for example. Men avoid female-dominated professions because of the “girl cooties” perception of such professions, not because of discriminatory exclusion. In fact, men on average in those “under-manned” professions tend to advance in their careers more quickly (“glass escalator”) than female colleagues, even with less experience and qualifications, which is very different from the discrimination that minoritized groups experience. Expecting “reverse underrepresentation” to get the same AA measures as discrimination-based underrepresentation is, again, naive and entitled.