Americans seem to be notoriously bad at follow through. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. We can get one of the three major parts of how to green our world down (incidentally, it is the one that affects our routine the least), but the other two? Nah. We're already recycling.
That's kind of how I feel about the Affirmative Action fight, and the Race in 2028 editorial by Ross Douthat in Sunday's New York Times a friend of mine highlighted on his blog.
Affirmative Action is the slightly more arduous version of "recycle" in the whole "making America more equitable racially"...
The other steps, the ones we know about and the ones we haven't quite worked out yet, well, we can ignore those because we're already working on this Affirmative Action thing.
Because we've accepted that Affirmative Action has to happen, at least for a little while, we can ignore the fact that the world, our world, the world we live in and play in and work in and are entertained by, still remains pretty damn white - and male. We can talk about how "the senators are yesterday’s men. The America of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is swiftly giving way to the America of Sonia Maria Sotomayor and Barack Hussein Obama" without truly delving into the fact that there is one African American in the whole of the Senate, that he wasn't elected, and that he isn't going to run for an actual election (admittedly, for reasons not stemming from his race). We can ignore these facts:
Because we've accepted that Affirmative Action has to happen, at least for a little while, we can ignore the fact that the world, our world, the world we live in and play in and work in and are entertained by, still remains pretty damn white - and male. We can talk about how "the senators are yesterday’s men. The America of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is swiftly giving way to the America of Sonia Maria Sotomayor and Barack Hussein Obama" without truly delving into the fact that there is one African American in the whole of the Senate, that he wasn't elected, and that he isn't going to run for an actual election (admittedly, for reasons not stemming from his race). We can ignore these facts:
Women – Women of voting age represent 51.6 percent of the voting age population yet are 16.3% of the Congress, putting America below the global average of 17% female representation at parliamentary level. As of 2007, the US ranks 68th in terms of women holding office in the legislature — this puts the US just above Turkmenistan, and just below El Salvador and Panama.
Latinos – Hispanics represent over 14% of the U.S. population, while their Congress representation is 3% in the Senate and about 5% in the House.
African-Americans – The Senate is 1% African American and the House is roughly 9.2% African American compared to the 12.3 percent of American population that are of Black or African-American descent
This is the world in which, as Douthat notes, "The nation’s largest states, Texas and California, already have 'minority' majorities. By 2023, if current demographic trends continue, nonwhites — black, Hispanic and Asian — will constitute a majority of Americans under 18. By 2042, they’ll constitute a national majority." And it is a world in which racism, real and actual and deadly and debilitating and degrading, is still present. In this society, "where the quest for diversity is already as likely to benefit the children of high-achieving recent immigrants as the descendants of slaves", and where those children of the high-achieving recent immigrants are still considered less than, and are still likely to be discriminated against.
I'm not against class-based affirmative action, but I also don't think that we - those of us who have been privileged and still remain privileged - should necessarily be the ones to decide if and when Affirmative Action has done enough. I don't think one African-American elected president and one Hispanic on the Supreme Court is the ushering in of a world in which Affirmative Action is ultimately unnecessary. At some point, I hope that it will be. At some point, I hope that we as a nation learn the follow through. I hope that we as a nation learn to suck it up. I hope that when white America is truly a minority, we recognize that we should probably then be a less of a majority in a majority of the institutions we now, as a race, have a hold over.
But I can understand focusing on the selfish crap. I'm a selfish person. I like knowing how something will help ME. And in truth, Affirmative Action does help me - and not just because I'm a girl and girls are helped. It helps me, because it makes my country better. It gets more viewpoints out in the open. It helps tear down the false belief that there is such a thing as an objective viewpoint. It culls from a wider source. It forces new thoughts and new ways of thinking into spaces that would otherwise be bereft of them. It creates opportunities to interact with and learn from people who have had profoundly different life experiences. It creates different ways of thinking about the very people who have, through the history of our country, been oppressed and discriminated against. And, if we go into Affirmative Action mindful that we as white people were very often not the subjects of a meritocracy and instead had a leg up due to that whole being white thing, it helps reinforce different avenues of viewing fellow citizens.
In a world where a preeminent African-American scholar is arrested after breaking in to his own house and providing identification proving who he was and that the house he was found in was indeed the one he lived in, we as a nation haven't learned all the necessary lessons from Affirmative Action, and we certainly haven't done the necessary follow-through. In a world where latently racist assumptions are made about our president's birth place, in a world where Rosario Dawson - who was born in New York City - was disregarded as the main character in But I'm a Cheerleader because she was Puerto Rican, and thus not "All-American" enough, we haven't fully acknowledged that the only Americans worthy of that title are white Americans. We haven't fully accepted that we aren't the center of our nation's universe.
I agree with my friend's quoting of Andrew Sullivan's "The goal of the gay rights movement should be to cease to exist", and his assertion that should also be the goal of Affirmative Action programs. But I'm not the person who gets to tell the gay rights movement when it has done enough, and when it should declare the ultimate victory by ceasing to exist. And I'm not willing to declare that by 2028, Affirmative Action will have done enough and should cease to exist. White America may not get to be the most central voices in that conversation, and we probably shouldn't be.
