HOW FEMINISTS KEEP BLACKS BEHIND WITH WORKPLACE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

"Affirmative action” means positive steps taken to increase the representation of women and minorities in areas of employment, education, and business from which they have been historically excluded. —Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"In recent years, the affirmative action debate has focused on government-sponsored affirmative action and university admissions, leaving corporate affirmative action relatively unexamined." --Christopher M. Leporini

HOW BLACK HOUSEHOLDS ARE KEPT LAGGING BEHIND BY WORKPLACE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

This perspective on affirmative action may be to gender-wage feminists and the mainstream media the most threatening of all perspectives on any topic. Hence it will be the most ignored.

Black Americans have at least one good reason to persist in demanding affirmative action: their wages, which ought to be the true reflection of affirmative action's success -- where the rubber meets the road -- continue to gain poorly on whites’.

Between 1985 and 2000, blacks’ median wage advanced on whites’ by a mere 1.2 percent. Why? Because although “affirmative action programs are often described in the press as being based on ‘racial preference,’” says Dr. Manning Marable, Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University, New York City, “the overwhelming majority of those who are the chief beneficiaries of affirmative action are white women.”

Dr. Marable is hardly the only person aware of this fact. In the 2006 book Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men, the authors write, "Although polls have shown considerable American support for affirmative action, those who advocate equality of opportunity (even in a modified form) have criticized it for...conferring greater benefits on white women than blacks of either sex, for whom affirmative action was originally designed."

Citing a statistic representative of many employers up and down the country, a March 1998 press release from the State of Washington’s Office of the Governor informs: “Of Washington state workers who have benefited directly from affirmative action, 60 percent are white women….”

Thanks not only to the myriad mandated affirmative-action programs at public institutions and at employers that do business with or receive funds from the federal government, but also to the voluntary affirmative-action programs of private-sector employers, white women have done quite well. Compare their wage gain from 1985 to 2000 to other groups'. White men's median wage rose 60 percent, black men's 65 percent, and black women's 70 percent: white women came well out on top with a 78 percent gain. White women's big leap contributed greatly to blacks’ paltry gain on whites.

Feminists in particular strongly support white women’s inclusion in affirmative action. The Gloria Steinemites believe white women experience an oppression similar to blacks'. White women's oppression, say these feminists, stems primarily from the fact that white women have been excluded, like blacks, from “white men’s” jobs.

But unlike blacks, says Warren Farrell, author of Why Men Earn More (read about the book and watch a Real Video of Farrell with audience participation), “Women are the only ‘oppressed’ group…to be born into the middle class and upper class as frequently as the ‘oppressor.’”

Moreover, white women generally have been able to find a well-paid husband roughly to the same degree that white men have been able to find a well-paid job. Via marriage, birth, and inheritance, white women have benefited from white men’s jobs as much as white men themselves. When they divorce, they receive, on average, more child support and alimony than blacks. (The term alimony may provoke cynical laughter in many black women who consider alimony a privilege reserved for white women.) Recognizing women’s economic well-being, an Editor & Publisher front page in 1996 touted: “Who controls most of the wealth in the nation? Women.” The headline was not, of course, talking about black women. Women also control, according to American Demographic, consumer spending by a wide margin in nearly every consumer category.

"I regard affirmative action as pernicious — a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women. And the number one sign of it is in the universities. The elite schools were destroyed by affirmative action for women, not for blacks." --Author/lecturer Prof. Camille Paglia

Linking white women to affirmative-action goals, right or wrong, has yielded a great irony. Just as most white men share their income and assets with white women, most white women reciprocate with white men. More to the point, they share with them their affirmative action gains. This means, possibly, that by virtue of the huge number of white women assisted by affirmative action, white men are the program’s second biggest beneficiaries, despite however often they as individuals may suffer “reverse” discrimination. For every white man hurt by affirmative action, another might be obliquely aided. Perhaps even many of those who are hurt are partially or fully compensated — "under the table," some blacks could argue — when affirmative action rewards their wives.

That white men profit via this roundabout fashion is no secret. “Affirmative action has enabled wives and daughters and mothers and girlfriends to compete in the workplace,” said Ralph G. Neas, former executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, “and that has helped entire families, including white males in those families.” Corretta Scott King, speaking at a Washington County university on Martin Luther King Day, didn’t explicitly say affirmative action helps white men, but implied as much when she said, “So affirmative action benefits all families.” [Why a program to help all families?!]

Thus, a program that was conceived to help the oppressed appears to help the “oppressors” about as much. Who knows, it may lend a hand to more middle- and upper-class white families than to poor black ones, since a beneficiary’s economic status isn’t a qualifying factor. How many times, I wonder, has the wife or daughter of a well-paid white man been boosted by affirmative action into a well-paid job herself -- a job that might otherwise have gone to a poor but qualified black American? This perversion of justice may occur often, and it would at least partly explain why, despite the strides of many individual blacks, blacks as a group have economically progressed so little on whites. And at a appalling 1.2 percent progression every 1.5 decades, blacks won’t reach wage parity with whites for at least 200 years.

Clearly affirmative action needs a retooling.

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Afterword: A retooling may also be needed for Social Security, which, says historian/economist Thomas Sowell, "is not a racial policy...but economists who have studied it have long described it as a system that transfers money from black men to white women, given the different life expectancies of these two groups.” You can bet a retooling would have been done long ago if Social Security had been shown to be a system that transfers money from white women to black men.

See also "Plight of Black Men Deepens...." at the New York Times (fee charged to view the entire report).

Update May 19, 2006: For an in-depth, scholarly analysis of affirmative action for women, see the chapter “Women's Rights v. Human Rights: The Case of Entitlements,” in Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men, published April 2006.

Update January 26, 2007: "In reality, the #1 beneficiaries of AA since the 1960's have been White women. #2 beneficiaries the White men in their lives." --comment in a discussion in Duke University's Chronicle.

tags: affirmative action  gender wage gap  pay equity  bblack americans  camille paglia  warren farrell  

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