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June 29, 2003
The Empty Set
Brad Delong asks, through a proxy,
...do you support AA for... upper-class blacks whose families have been wealthy for four or more generations?
and answers himself by saying it is not inconsequential that this is almost an empty set. On the one hand it invalidates the question by suggesting that it is not one worth asking. On the other hand nobody has answered directly. Here are two answers.
The first is simple. Should Affirmative Action beneficiaries be means-tested for income? It depends upon whether you see Affirmative Action itself as a means or an end. Some see Affirmative Action is an end: the concession to a political demand which, to the chagrin of its detractors, seems to gather more ossified support as time progresses. If Affirmative Action is an end, then race is not so much a proxy for some objective condition, as a vote for self-enrichment or an expression of political will. If Affirmative Action is an end, then only the premises of its inception are important, and only the partisans for it should be questioned. If Affirmative Action was created by blacks for blacks, then black is the only qualification one requires. This is the general concensus and is often the context in which questions of non-black or rich-black beneficiaries are raised.
If Affirmative Action is seen as a means to achieving integration or economic parity, then it should be means tested to determine if people need those ends which Affirmative Actions deliver. In this case means testing is only rational, but how do you means-test racial integration under the new Supreme Court rules which say numerical methods are unacceptable? I believe it was Bill Clinton who said, "Mend it, don't end it." This is the context through which reformers ask the means-testing question.
I think that Affirmative Action has become overburdened with the wrong kind of support. I do so in recognition of it as a Black Power End, and a Middle Class Integration Means. Which brings up yet another problem with O'Connor's rosy scenario of Affirmative Action being unecessary in '25 years'. When will Black Power Politics, and those like it, cease? When will the Middle Class be racially integrated?
Posted by mbowen at June 29, 2003 03:15 PM
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