"Whites swim in racial preference," by Tim Wise

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is an excellent article.  It is useful in thinking about its specific
topic: the question of affirmative action, quotas, and so forth in jobs and
education -- I think it is indispensable reading on that topic.

But  I think this thoughtful and completely accurate view of  how the racial
stratification of society is structured to appear, particularly since the
end of legal or directly enforced Jim Crow, as "equality" and "fairness" to
whites (including many working-class whites as I know from on-the-job
discussions of this topic) will help us to think more objectively and calmly
about the social context in which a question like "racism in the antiwar
movement" arises.

I'm not claiming that this dictates some particular set of answers --
although it surely points in certain broad directions -- but I think without
understanding this social context, the whole debate can dissolve into
name-calling on one side and taking offense on the other.
Fred Feldman

Whites Swim in Racial Preference
By Tim Wise,
February 20, 2003, AlterNet

Ask a fish what water is and you'll get no answer. Even if
fish were capable of speech, they would likely have no
explanation for the element they swim in every minute of
every day of their lives. Water simply is.

Fish take it for granted.

So too with this thing we hear so much about, "racial
preference."

While many whites seem to think the notion originated with
affirmative action programs, intended to expand
opportunities for historically marginalized people of color,
racial preference has actually had a long and very white
history.

Affirmative action for whites was embodied in the abolition
of European indentured servitude, which left black (and
occasionally indigenous) slaves as the only unfree labor in
the colonies that would become the U.S.

Affirmative action for whites was the essence of the 1790
Naturalization Act, which allowed virtually any European
immigrant to become a full citizen, even while blacks,
Asians and American Indians could not.

Affirmative action for whites was the guiding principle of
segregation, Asian exclusion laws, and the theft of half of
Mexico for the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny.

In recent history, affirmative action for whites motivated
racially restrictive housing policies that helped 15 million
white families procure homes with FHA loans from the 1930s
to the '60s, while people of color were mostly excluded from
the same programs.

In other words, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that
white America is the biggest collective recipient of racial
preference in the history of the cosmos. It has skewed our
laws, shaped our public policy and helped create the glaring
inequalities with which we still live.

White families, on average, have a net worth that is 11
times the net worth of black families, according to a recent
study; and this gap remains substantial even when only
comparing families of like size, composition, education and
income status.

A full-time black male worker in 2003 makes less in real
dollar terms than similar white men were earning in 1967.
Such realities are not merely indicative of the
disadvantages faced by blacks, but indeed are evidence of
the preferences afforded whites - a demarcation of privilege
that is the necessary flipside of discrimination.

Indeed, the value of preferences to whites over the years is
so enormous that the current baby-boomer generation of
whites is currently in the process of inheriting between
$7-10 trillion in assets from their parents and grandparents
- property handed down by those who were able to accumulate
assets at a time when people of color by and large could
not.

To place this in the proper perspective, we should note that
this amount of money is more than all the outstanding
mortgage debt, all the credit card debt, all the savings
account assets, all the money in IRAs and 401k retirement
plans, all the annual profits for U.S. manufacturers, and
our entire merchandise trade deficit combined.

Yet few whites have ever thought of our position as
resulting from racial preferences. Indeed, we pride
ourselves on our hard work and ambition, as if somehow we
invented the concepts.

As if we have worked harder than the folks who were forced
to pick cotton and build levies for free; harder than the
Latino immigrants who spend 10 hours a day in fields picking
strawberries or tomatoes; harder than the (mostly) women of
color who clean hotel rooms or change bedpans in hospitals,
or the (mostly) men of color who collect our garbage.

We strike the pose of self-sufficiency while ignoring the
advantages we have been afforded in every realm of activity:
housing, education, employment, criminal justice, politics,
banking and business. We ignore the fact that at almost
every turn, our hard work has been met with access to an
opportunity structure denied to millions of others.
Privilege, to us, is like water to the fish: invisible
precisely because we cannot imagine life without it.

It is that context that best explains the duplicity of the
President's recent criticisms of affirmative action at the
University of Michigan.

President Bush, himself a lifelong recipient of affirmative
action - the kind set aside for the mediocre rich - recently
proclaimed that the school's policies were examples of
unfair racial preference. Yet in doing so he not only showed
a profound ignorance of the Michigan policy, but made clear
the inability of yet another white person to grasp the
magnitude of white privilege still in operation.

The President attacked Michigan's policy of awarding 20
points (on a 150-point evaluation scale) to undergraduate
applicants who are members of underrepresented minorities
(which at U of M means blacks, Latinos and American
Indians). To many whites such a "preference" is blatantly
discriminatory.

Bush failed to mention that greater numbers of points are
awarded for other things that amount to preferences for
whites to the exclusion of people of color.

For example, Michigan awards 20 points to any student from a
low-income background, regardless of race. Since these
points cannot be combined with those for minority status (in
other words poor blacks don't get 40 points), in effect this
is a preference for poor whites.

Then Michigan awards 16 points to students who hail from the
Upper Peninsula of the state: a rural, largely isolated, and
almost completely white area.

Of course both preferences are fair, based as they are on
the recognition that economic status and even geography (as
with race) can have a profound effect on the quality of K-12
schooling that one receives, and that no one should be
punished for things that are beyond their control. But note
that such preferences - though disproportionately awarded to
whites - remain uncriticized, while preferences for people
of color become the target for reactionary anger. Once
again, white preference remains hidden because it is more
subtle, more ingrained, and isn't called white preference,
even if that's the effect.

But that's not all. Ten points are awarded to students who
attended top-notch high schools, and another eight points
are given to students who took an especially demanding AP
and honors curriculum.

As with points for those from the Upper Peninsula, these
preferences may be race-neutral in theory, but in practice
they are anything but. Because of intense racial isolation
(and Michigan's schools are the most segregated in America
for blacks, according to research by the Harvard Civil
Rights Project), students of color will rarely attend the
"best" schools, and on average, schools serving mostly black
and Latino students offer only a third as many AP and honors
courses as schools serving mostly whites.

So even truly talented students of color will be unable to
access those extra points simply because of where they live,
their economic status and ultimately their race, which is
intertwined with both.

Four more points are awarded to students who have a parent
who attended the U of M: a kind of affirmative action with
which the President is intimately familiar, and which almost
exclusively goes to whites.

Ironically, while alumni preference could work toward the
interest of diversity if combined with aggressive race-based
affirmative action (by creating a larger number of black and
brown alums), the rollback of the latter, combined with the
almost guaranteed retention of the former, will only further
perpetuate white preference.

So the U of M offers 20 "extra" points to the typical black,
Latino or indigenous applicant, while offering various
combinations worth up to 58 extra points for students who
will almost all be white. But while the first of these are
seen as examples of racial preferences, the second are not,
hidden as they are behind the structure of social inequities
that limit where people live, where they go to school, and
the kinds of opportunities they have been afforded. White
preferences, the result of the normal workings of a racist
society, can remain out of sight and out of mind, while the
power of the state is turned against the paltry preferences
meant to offset them.

Very telling is the oft-heard comment by whites, "If I had
only been black I would have gotten into my first-choice
college."

Such a statement not only ignores the fact that whites are
more likely than members of any other group - even with
affirmative action in place - to get into their first-choice
school, but it also presumes, as anti-racist activist Paul
Marcus explains, "that if these whites were black,
everything else about their life would have remained the
same."

In other words, that it would have made no negative
difference as to where they went to school, what their
family income was, or anything else.

The ability to believe that being black would have made no
difference (other than a beneficial one when it came time
for college), and that being white has made no positive
difference, is rooted in privilege itself: the privilege
that allows one to not have to think about race on a daily
basis; to not have one's intelligence questioned by best-
selling books; to not have to worry about being viewed as a
"out of place" when driving, shopping, buying a home, or for
that matter, attending the University of Michigan.

So long as those privileges remain firmly in place and the
preferential treatment that flows from those privileges
continues to work to the benefit of whites, all talk of
ending affirmative action is not only premature but a slap
in the face to those who have fought, and died, for equal
opportunity.

[Tim Wise is an antiracist activist, essayist and lecturer.
Send email to timjwise@m.]





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