Affirmative Action

Is Affirmative Action Ethical?

This week’s blog focuses on affirmative action and seeks to answer if affirmative action is ethical. To me the answer is easy…yes.

The United States has a history of genocide, slavery, legalized discrimination, and significant racial tension. As LaFollette states in the Practice of Ethics, the US didn’t outlaw racial discrimination until the 1960s. (LaFollette, 2007) This legalized discrimination effectively economically hobbled an entire class of people. This video explains the effects this “hobbling” has had far better than I ever could, and while it may not be academic it certainly offers perspective. Even if we assume that racism has ended (it hasn’t) past racial discrimination has led to underemployment, housing segregation, poor schools, high interest rate loans, and poor healthcare. LaFollette also states that black families were unable to pass along as much accumulated wealth to their children thereby adding to the ever-increasing distance a black child will have to go in order to even be even with a white child.

Affirmative action seeks to remove some of those barriers by allowing minorities to move into roles that they otherwise would not be able to obtain, no matter how qualified they may be. It isn’t enough to say “well if they are qualified they will be selected” as it is often the case a minority doesn’t get the chance to have their qualifications heard.

This past year much has been said about “white privilege” and the backlash to such a concept serves as both a counter-point and a validation for affirmative action. How do you explain to a poor white child from a very rural area that they have privilege? In 1989 a woman by the name of Peggy Macintosh wrote an article for Peace and Freedom Magazine called “Unpacking the Invisible Backback.” This article is published on the National SEED Project’s website and can be accessed here. It is an amazing read but the short version is the “backpack” is a metaphor for the various privileges that are conferred upon whites, and mostly referring to white men. When explaining privilege to the poor, white child we must first move past the idea that privilege is something that is conferred or bestowed. As Macintosh infers, white privilege simply…is.

I am a 37 year old white male. I am heterosexual. I am college educated. I am from an upper-middle class background. I am neither obese nor am I too skinny. Every demographic feature I possess places me in a position to not be followed in a store, to not be immediately disregarded by lenders, and to not be targeted by police. I live in an apartment that is in a low-crime area. I am free from a minutiae of barriers and harassment that occur every day in the life of minority. I will never know what it like to be a black man in the United States (or any other minority) and neither will our hypothetical poor, white child.

It is true that poverty is a barrier and that barrier can be tough to overcome if you live in a disadvantaged area no matter your ethnicity. However, if we place the poor white child and the poor black child on the same starting line, the black child will, speaking from statistics, have many more barriers on their way to prosperity.

Ms. Macintosh makes my argument more eloquently than I ever could. Equal rights are a passion of mine. I firmly believe that we all deserve to live the lives we are capable of; free from persecution. It may be a bit of a pipe dream but regulations such as affirmative action are the tools with which we can begin to level the playing field. So is affirmative action ethical? Yes but more so…it is vital.