What Women Have Gained From Affirmative Action

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Jun 16, 2023 View in browser   By Sophie Gardner Happy Friday! With the Supreme Court’s 2022-2023 term wrapping up, some major cases are still undecided. We’re waiting on the fate of President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan, the federal election process and affirmative action. Here’s more on that last one: In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court stands poised to issue a decision which could further curtail race-based affirmative action in college admissions. While the public discussion of affirmative action usually focuses on race, affirmative action also has another, less discussed and perhaps more successful side: increasing gender representation. Affirmative action is a blanket term for a variety of programs aimed at reducing discrimination in education, employment and government contracting, which can make it difficult to determine which programs have been successful and which demographic groups have reaped the rewards. Some scholars, including sociologist Wendy Leo Moore and racism education professor Robin DiAngelo (in her book White Fragility and in this interview) claim that in general, white women have benefited the most from affirmative action. When it comes to higher education, which is the focus of the Supreme Court case, the numbers appear to back them up: In the roughly 60 years since the Civil Rights Movement kickstarted programs to reduce racial and gender discrimination in higher education, women have surpassed men in earning four-year degrees, while Black and Latino students are still underrepresented. Still, it’s race-based affirmative action that draws the most controversy, and some of the loudest voices opposing it have been white women. So, why is race-based affirmative action not more vehemently supported by a group that’s benefited from similar preferences? I put that question (and others) to DiAngelo, who’s gained notoriety for writing about white women and racism. Here’s the transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity. Given that women benefit from gender-based affirmative action programs, why do you think that there’s not more widespread support for affirmative action among white women? Specifically, it has been white women who have benefitted the most. As long as you frame it as a racial issue, you will have animus towards it. It's been an incredibly effective means to stimulate racial animus. For years, I've been doing anti-racism training, and it's inevitable that someone's going to say, ‘well, I'm all for rights, but not for special rights’ and you know that they're referring to affirmative action. The enduring resentment about this program is intense. There's a lot of misunderstanding. It's been reduced to this really simplistic, ‘you have to hire unqualified Black people.’ If you're really being honest, and boiling it down, those are the assumptions people are making. And that is why they have so much resentment towards it. I have a theory about why it's benefited white women. Because of course, when you benefit white women you benefit white men. White women tend to be white men’s partners, daughters, sisters. They're in their orbit. It has been white men who are in the position to decide to enact affirmative action. So if you have to hire somebody, who are you most likely to hire? Someone who reflects you and your interests. Why do you think that critiques of affirmative action usually focus on the racial aspect and are less likely to mention gender? It's one of many strategies by those who want to undermine racial progress for Blacks. And you can see those strategies now across society in book bans, bans against teaching racial history, against programs intended to address historic injustice. The campaign against affirmative action has been the spearhead of the movement to undo the gains of the Civil Rights movement. You can't manipulate the white populace via racial animus by focusing on how affirmative action has benefited white women. In fact, white women might get behind it. So that aspect is left unsaid. The two cases that the Supreme Court will be deciding focus specifically on race-based affirmative action. So it’s possible that gender-based affirmative action will remain intact. What’s your reaction to that shift? What it does is put a renewed responsibility on white women. We have gotten in, we have gotten entry. How are we going to use our positions? And we are in a really unique position, because we are privileged structurally through systemic racism, but we also are oppressed through patriarchy. So we can use that understanding of patriarchy and misogyny and sexist oppression as a way in to understand racism. That oppression doesn't exempt us from colluding with racism, benefiting from racism and upholding it. So many white women used patriarchy as a way out. “I'm oppressed too, we're all sisters.” Unfortunately, we are not. And we historically don't have a record of standing alongside Black women and other women of color. So we have to use our understanding of oppression to ask ourselves, okay, whose form of oppression am I upholding? How can I take examples that I've experienced and then imagine myself in the oppressor's position, because I am when it comes to racism, so how am I going to use that I am very uniquely positioned to both support women of color and to challenge white men?” You say in White Fragility, that by the time you published the book in 2018, affirmative action was all but dismantled. If the Supreme Court does overturn its previous precedent and throw out race-based affirmative action, how impactful do you think that effect will be? I think that we're going to see even lower rates than we see now. Let's be clear, race-based affirmative action has not been effective. By every measure, it has not been effective. There's so much misunderstanding about it. You are not required to include people of color and in the white mind, Black people. You are simply expected just to try for a diverse group, and to be able to articulate why you didn't include somebody, and it has only ever applied to governmental, federal and state organizations. Private organizations, they may have their own type of affirmative action policies, but they're not required by law. If we think that we can take that away and that people's good intentions, or white people's so-called colorblindness are going to get us better outcomes, we’re delusional. It’s largely expected that the Supreme Court will end affirmative action in college admissions. Are there any other avenues for promoting diversity in the places where affirmative action was being used before? We're going to demand that our organizations and our institutions start changing their outcomes. So when we're sitting at those tables, we need to start asking who's not at this table? Whose interests are not represented? How might the decisions we're making at this table impact those who are not represented here at this table? We have to insist that if those who are going to be impacted by our decisions are not represented here, then we're not ready to make this decision. We have to actually push forward and make it happen. POLITICO Special Report John Minchillo/AP Photo “Judge lets E. Jean Carroll add Trump’s post-verdict remarks to original defamation case,” by Kelly Garrity for POLITICO: “E. 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Two of the expelled churches, Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., and Saddleback Church in Southern California, appealed to the denomination’s annual convention in New Orleans, but their appeals were overwhelmingly rejected in voting whose results were announced Wednesday.” “Inside a conservative confab for young women, where feminism is a lie,” by Kara Voght for The Washington Post.“Paid less for being trans, a woman and a trans woman,” by Chabeli Carrazana and Jasmine Mithani for the 19th: “Trans women were paid 60 cents for every $1 earned by the average American worker in 2021, according to a report released last year by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. It’s one of the only studies of the transgender pay gap conducted in the United States, and while it only compares wages over a short time span, its insight is invaluable. 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She most recently was senior manager of public policy at Samsung Semiconductor and is a NSC alum. (h/t Playbook)   Follow us on Twitter Sophie Gardner @sophie_gardnerj   Follow us

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