Divided Self
Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby.
by Stephen L. Carter.
Basic Books. 356 pp. $22.95.
Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, by Professor Stephen L. Carter of the Yale Law School, is a book divided against itself. Carter marshals a compelling set of arguments to show how the costs to blacks of affirmative action outweigh the benefits; yet ultimately he recommends the continuation of affirmative action in colleges and professional schools. This contradiction stands as a reminder of how deeply entrenched expectations of racial entitlement have become in our society.
Despite the ambiguity, however, Reflections, which is written in an informal, conversational style, is an important contribution to a nascent debate within the black community. Carter has two aims: to persuade his fellow blacks that the era of affirmative action is ending and that they would be far wiser to encourage, rather than to fight, its demise; and to effect a truce in the bitter war of words being fought among blacks over preferences and other racial policies. His message is urgent: the hunt for traitors within and racists outside the black community is a misuse of energy that is leading to social stagnation. Rather than crafting elaborate arguments as to why meritocratic standards are racist, blacks should devote themselves to meeting and beating those standards, whatever their original intent.
Carter analyzes affirmative action from the point of view of its intended beneficiaries, having been one himself. Dismissing the concern over the “fairness” of preferences, as well as the question of whether affirmative action results in the lowering of standards, he asks, rather, whether blacks are really better off under an affirmative-action regime. The evidence he presents suggests that they are not. Though Carter distinguishes himself throughout this book from another black critic of affirmative action, Shelby Steele, his argument boils down to Steele’s concept of “stigma”: whatever gains individual blacks can make by taking advantage of racial preferences are far outweighed by the stigma that attaches to all blacks under an affirmative-action regime. Under such a regime, any black in a position of power or privilege is assumed to be the best available black for the position, rather than simply the best.
Another major flaw in affirmative action, in Carter’s view, is its failure to help the most disadvantaged of the black population. Though justified on the ground of providing compensation for slavery and segregation, it is irrelevant to those who continue to suffer the most from that legacy—the inner-city poor. Invariably, the people who are in a position to take advantage of preferences in college admissions and hiring have at least a foot in the middle class.
Carter calls this situation “racial justice on the cheap.” It costs society little up front simply to let into its academic and business institutions a certain number of under-prepared members of a disadvantaged population, whereas to educate that population so that all its members could compete on an equal footing with the majority would require a significant commitment of resources. Carter blames American society, not the civil-rights establishment, for taking the cheap and easy route to racial justice. Yet it must be said that one does not hear much talk of improving education and school performance from mainstream black leaders, perhaps because affirmative action provides a much shorter path into positions of power, and preserves the structure of victim and oppressor.
To illustrate the way affirmative action favors the middle class, Carter presents himself as a case in point. The son of a Cornell professor and a legislative aide, he competed fiercely with other “faculty brats” during high school, and attended Stanford as an undergraduate. Yet he was admitted to Yale Law School as a member of a disadvantaged group. He recounts a discussion with a fellow law student over the propriety of such a classification. The student, sensing impending apostasy, struggled mightily to persuade Carter that he had been a victim of “institutional racism.” Carter was not convinced then, and still is not convinced today. Though he has been the target of individual acts of racial hatred, racism has not disfigured his life.
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In the 70’s, awareness of the gap between the rationale for affirmative action and its practice contributed to the theory of institutional racism espoused by Carter’s law-school classmate: every black has been equally disadvantaged by systemic racism and so is equally deserving of preferential treatment. In the 80’s, a new solution to the problem emerged: “diversity.” Affirmative action is now promoted less as a means of giving opportunities to those who would otherwise not have them than as a way of creating a diversity of “voices” in schools, the professions, and government. Its aim is not so much to help blacks as to help whites, who suffer from their lack of exposure to non-white voices.
This shift in rationale seems to overcome in one stroke all the objections traditionally offered to affirmative action. It no longer matters that recipients are not the neediest of the beneficiary group, since overcoming adversity is no longer the stated goal. The argument that affirmative action unfairly penalizes whites also loses its bite, since in this view diversity benefits whites. Most importantly, the charge that affirmative action results in a lowering of standards becomes irrelevant. In the words of an editor of the Columbia Law Review, “diversity is part of quality.”
Here, too, Carter takes a dissenting position. He vehemently opposes the diversity rationale for affirmative action, because it both presupposes and imposes a uniformity of black opinion. In the name of diversity in the community at large, it stifles black diversity. It makes little sense, he writes, to admit or appoint a black who is supposed to bring the black perspective to an institution unless there is such a perspective, and unless it differs markedly from whatever may be considered the mainstream view. Such a perspective, however, is the creation of the diversity movement, not its cause. Simply by positing its existence, one immediately silences those blacks who do not speak in that voice, a voice remarkably similar to the diversity theorists’ own.
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Given the arguments that Carter has marshaled against affirmative action, his support for its continuation is thoroughly mystifying. In expressing that support he does not even attempt to navigate around the charges, which he himself has raised, that affirmative action helps the wrong people, or stigmatizes the entire race—he simply ignores them.
Carter offers only two reasons why schools should maintain affirmative action. The first is that “the purveying of knowledge, the reason universities exist, is a serious enterprise, and one professors should undertake joyfully, even when it isn’t easy and even when there is a risk of failure.” This is surely a non sequitur. Joy has little to do with racial preferences, and vice versa. And the observation that education is “a serious enterprise” would seem to militate against taking risks.
The second reason harks back to the golden age of affirmative action, when Carter himself was a student:
The dearth of black students in colleges and professional schools . . . was understood to be a vestige of the nation’s odious legacy of racist oppression. The schools, therefore, would reach out to bring into their student bodies highly motivated young people who might not have been admitted under the prevailing criteria but would nevertheless, if all went as planned, benefit from the opportunity for advanced training at a good school. [Emphasis added]
That “therefore” is like a rug draped over the mouth of a large pit: it covers up the lack of an explanation. Carter assumes what must be proven, namely, a connection between the history of discrimination and the duty of institutions of higher learning to compensate for that history. Even if one accepts the not unreasonable premise that the present generation has a responsibility to remedy the legacy of racism, it is not at all clear why colleges and universities should be the locus where that responsibility is discharged. From both a moral perspective and a practical one, it makes much more sense to spend tax money on creating excellent schools in the inner city than to compromise higher education.
Carter simply turns his back on the problem of how the beneficiaries of preferences perform. He relegates the issue to a footnote, where he dismisses concern about it as “bizarre.” His reticence is hardly surprising. The drop-out rate for black students is near 70 percent, a fact that speaks volumes about the real, as opposed to the wished-for, effects of placing students in schools for which they are underprepared.
Carter’s desire to be upbeat about black achievement leads to other blind spots in his arguments. For example, he notes a “perception” or “rumor” that “truly excellent professionals who happen not to be white” are paid higher salaries than their white counterparts. Carter is quite dubious about this “rumor,” though how he could be ignorant of so pervasive a phenomenon is difficult to understand. But, he says, even if true, it is just an example of “natural” market forces exerting pressure on the price of a “more valuable commodity.” This is a classic case of trying to have it both ways: condemning the pressure to diversify, yet treating as natural the end result of that pressure.
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Carter’s message becomes clearer when he steps back from the merits of affirmative action to consider its symbolic role within the black community. Support for racial preferences, he says, has become the shibboleth of black identity: one must pronounce the proper words on affirmative action or lose one’s right to call oneself black.
Carter views the suppression of dissent from civil-rights orthodoxies as inimical to black progress. At a time when the black community is desperately in need of new ideas, its leaders punish anyone who tries to provide them. “Silencing debate,” Carter writes, “solves no problems; it simply limits the range of possible solutions.” Yet Carter also suggests a reason for the intolerance: the enforcers of orthodoxy fear that black dissenters will be exploited by white racists, and this fear he finds wholly justifiable.
On the subject of campus speech codes, which Carter calls the “new grammar of race,” he again adopts a carefully evenhanded approach. These codes, he writes, intend to “make some ideas impossible to express—unless, of course, one wants to be called a racist.” He views the effort to ferret out racism in every corner of the university as misguided. But he also (rightly) castigates the defenders of free speech for their failure to condemn incidents of genuine racial harassment with anywhere near the passion with which they condemn the response to such incidents. He sees unconscious racism at work here: whites underestimate the terror caused by such incidents because they are unable to identify with its victims.
Finally, Carter articulates, but neither confirms nor rebuts, the charges leveled by black activists that academic and professional standards are themselves racist, that there are significant numbers of racists on university faculties, that racism explains the paucity of blacks at higher managerial levels, and that there is a conspiracy against black elected officials. Rather than tackling the allegations head-on, Carter seems to assume them for the sake of argument, while advocating that blacks work twice as hard as their white counterparts, whatever the roadblocks put in their path. This agnosticism concerning the extent of societal racism may be strategic in a book whose aim is to win both black and white readers, but it is intellectually unsatisfactory. The charges are too serious not to be addressed directly.
Carter ends his book with a call for a renewed black solidarity, one based not on a strictly policed conformity but on love, shared history, and reverence for black culture. He believes that such a solidarity is compatible with a tolerance for diversity of opinion. He may or may not be right on that point, depending on how far solidarity is expected to override self-differentiation. What is clear is Carter’s own commitment to his people. His book, written from the heart as well as the mind, shows in its very divisions and contradictions the conflicts tearing at today’s black community.
