zero sum: (as if) it's gotta be this type of discrimination or that one

Anglachel's got a new post up about affirmative action. She can't understand why people are so "hostile" to affirmative action.

One of the things that surprised me in the comments was the extreme hostility to affirmative action itself.

The post also perpetrates the notion that the alternative (presumably the only alternative) to affirmative action must be doing nothing at all about discrimination:

My point here is that my personal experience of the institutional effects of affirmative action and other equal opportunity measures has been to encounter some incredibly cool and engaging people who work their butts off, and that operations that did not enforce such things also had cool, engaging and hard working people, but that these companies were far more likely to put people into stereotypical jobs and to not let others in the door.

Well, one reason for the hostility toward affirmative action is that some people don't really believe the only other option to a policy of formal reverse discrimination is to do nothing.

Related to that is understanding why and whether reverse discrimination is really a problem. Affirmative action sounds a lot nicer when nobody really has to pay for it.

There's this myth that says there aren't really any costs - whites are all so affluent and privileged that it's not really any hardship at all to just find a new school, a new job, a different source of funding.

The reality is that you can't add new people to a system without expanding the size of the system. For any new person added to the system, someone else gets knocked out. In affirmative action programs, the costs get bumped downward.

Those who can, simply do just find a new job or a new school. To these people, reverse discrimination is something that might - maybe - happen to them once, or even twice in a lifetime. It's a rare and unlucky thing, like getting struck with lightning.

It isn't the person with the graduate degree who experiences reverse discrimination as painful. Anglachel is experiencing herself the benefits of affirmative action, because she gets to feel better about herself when she works in a multicultural environment. She gets to 'encounter some incredibly cool and engaging people". She gets to feel that she is part of ending discrimination, and that feels nice. That nice feeling has to be counted as a benefit. But let's be clear here - those who experience the nice feelings are mostly free riders, not the ones paying for the benefit. She's got a job and if she lost it, her graduate degree would enable her to find another one. She's well over that point in time and space where affirmative action extracts its payment.

It's the guy who didn't manage to get a college degree (especially galling when his failure isn't because of grades, but rather because he couldn't access adequate need-based financial aid). This is the one who gets to experience the other side of affirmative action - the part that doesn't feel so good.

And at this level, affirmative action is more like a dogpile. This guy is the one who is going to encounter reverse discrimination again - and again and again.

He'll encounter it when he finds out that the job training program and the database and other forms of antipoverty assistance are all 'targeted' (toward a specific demographic - that's code for whites need not apply).

He'll learn that if he were only the right color he'd be eligible for low cost housing/day care/electricity/groceries.

He'll try to get his kid out of the horrible school with the knife problem, only to be told that white kids aren't allowed to transfer out of minority schools (but if you can prove that kid qualifies as a minority, you can go to any school in the district - and we'd be happy to provide full bus service).

When his kid starts to have trouble, he'll learn that white kids don't really need access to all those programs set up to prevent failure - and another generation won't be college educated (at least, not unless he engaging in an activity known as "finding a way" - which is the polar opposite of affirmative action.)

And what is upsetting about reverse discrimination isn't just about benefits. It's also about the mindset that justifies those benefits - the assumptions that must be taken as a given for the system to work. If this guy I'm describing were to suggest that maybe his kid shouldn't have to endure being beaten up regularly, taunted with racial slurs, etc. he'll be dismissed as a racist, lectured on what minorities have had to endure from whites (as if that makes his child deserve to be scapegoated for the sins of mankind) and the same teachers who preach in class about what "every human being" is entitled to will call his kid a whiner and a crybaby for complaining instead of sucking it up like a man.

Then we say "oh but racism is still a big problem in America - poor whites are joining racist hate groups in record numbers!*

Yes, they are. And we should all view that as a real problem. It is proof that we are not on a path to racial harmony**.

Ending discrimination shouldn't suck this much. And there's no reason to believe it has to. What proof do we have that affirmative action is even the most effective way to combat discrimination?

In exchange for accepting a painful double standard, what do we really get?

And how do we know? How do we measure?

How do we know that the free handouts (and the resulting sense of entitlement) isn't causing more hardship than it creates for those it intends to help? What if today's prominent blacks would have succeeded under any scenario that gives them half a chance to do so - what if this scenario isn't even among the better possible scenarios?

How do we know that the entire premise of robbing the poor whites so that rich whites can feel good isn't causing as much or more racism than it undoes? Has anyone ever seriously set out to do a truly objective study of whether it causes harm to force employers to hire people for reasons that override the employer's own preferences? Has anyone ever found a way to map the costs against the benefits, or do we just take it on faith that the benefits are worthwhile?

Because one of the biggest problems with affirmative action is that poverty seems to be getting worse, or at least not getting any better. Why is poverty still such a problem, after this many years of affirmative action?

I have written before about how Democrats can take almost anything and turn it into a zero-sum game. (And how it's always the working class that takes it in the shorts.)

We talk about discrimination as if it were a seesaw - either discrimination or reverse discrimination, which do you choose? As if it were inevitable that someone has got to discriminate against someone.

What's odd about that is that is that ongoing discrimination, the uninterrupted continuation of old-style discrimination, was the one option that was never an option. Nobody gave blacks affirmative action because white America just decided to be nice. White America gave blacks affirmative action because blacks demanded inclusion and whites had little choice but to respond.

The question was always, what kind of inclusion?

The option that would have shared the costs more equitably would have involved actually tackling the tough and resource-consuming questions of how best to accommodate new and expanding needs.

But affluent people aren't interested in sharing anything. Redistribution of existing resources not only solves the problem without actually requiring anything like an investment - it also offers up secondary bonuses; for instance, it keeps the lower classes divided, with white and nonwhite each given strong incentive to blame the other for the poverty and lack of opportunity that naturally comes with a divided, politically impotent working class.

But white poverty in America is too big a problem to continue to sustain the myth that white equals privilege, and the "white trash" of this country just can't afford to keep subsidizing the grandsons of bank veeps. Nor can we tolerate the crummy feeling we get when Ivy Leaguers lecture us on what we owe them.

We are no longer willing to accept the double standard that says we are responsible for our outcomes, that we're just poor because we're losers, "trash", because we didn't play the game well, we didn't make the right choices with the options (however narrow) we had - but then at the same time we're to be held responsible for their outcomes: they're just poor because they haven't been treated fairly, because they were born into a situation that didn't have as many options as they would have liked, and that is why we must make way for them and we can have what is left over.

And the words that end up getting emphasized there are us and them.

The worldview that says we are each of us responsible for what we make of ourselves in this world is harsh, but that's what being a peasant means. Nobody gets a free pass because being a peasant sucks. The only logical response to such a suggestion is to beat the crap out of the guy who doesn't get it. All the arguments upon which affirmative action are based require us to believe in the universality and abundance of white affluence, or else they lose their legitimacy.

The worldview that says we as a nation should look at what is fair, correct injustice, and give each citizen a fighting chance at an education and a middle class (or better) lifestyle - that is only sustainable over the long haul when it corrects for injustice and inequality equally. Otherwise it stops being moral and starts just being a special interest group, and there's no logical argument against those who form in reaction against to a special interest group. (Those who want to keep this all about race are not going to get very far unless they stop using the word "white" to describe blacks who refuse to cooperate with the agenda.)

To assume that working class white people can and should fend for themselves, no matter how harsh the environment, while also making them pay on behalf ethnic minorities who claim to be crippled by oppression ("my schoolmates didn't respect my blackness") is just obviously not fair. Those who care about fair need to understand that fair has rules and we can look and see, is this or isn't this inside the rules of fair? And affirmative action, it passes the fair test as long as you ignore the people who are the ones actually paying the price.

That is why the same people who support affirmative action must ignore or belittle poor whites. Affirmative action proponents' attitudes and statements are at sharp odds with their rude comments about trash and people who live in trailers because the very existence of 'trailer trash' threatens the comfortable narrative that white = privilege. Therefore poor white people must be demonized, because otherwise affirmative action starts to look cruel as well as hypocritical.

The double standard in how we judge who is responsible for what - for how we hold people responsible - has grown intolerable.
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*recipe for a hate group: (rage+helplessness)+(shame+injustice)

Affirmative action is based on denying equal access to opportunities and resources to a class of people categorized by their skin color - a behavior that is normally considered intolerable, but is considered justified in this case because whites are (a) guilty and (b) deserve shame. This is what really fuels white identity movements - it really is about the search for an acceptable "identity". Attempting to strip whites of their pride in their heritage and ancestry is politically stupid and philosophically/morally questionable. And this is what the civil rights movement wants - as becomes quite clear in any argument about confederate flags: the confederate flag debate is over whether Southern whites are entitled to a heritage that includes pride and remembrance, or whether they should be nothing but ashamed of who and what they are. And that's a stupid, stupid strategy.

**I've been to poor black schools. The real problem there isn't lack of funding. The real problem there is that doing well in school is what they call "acting white" - and that's an insult. In other words, these kids aren't rewarded for excellence - they're punished.

The real problem there is that the political agenda is prioritized over the kids' actual needs. It is so taboo to criticize the civil rights movement that political activist educators can do anything they like - for whatever reason they like - as long as they dedicate the project to St. Martin. The plain truth is, kids in the so-called "black community" spend too many singing "We Shall Overcome" and too few hours learning math. That doesn't mean it's bad or wrong to sing "We Shall Overcome" - but if they want to ever actually overcome anything, they might want to consider what it would take to do so, and singing ain't enough. They look cute carrying their little signs, but is it really what they need? Or is it merely what the Al Sharptons of the community need from them? Whose interests are really being served here? What's the real end goal - to see these kids get good jobs? Is this the sort of education that prepares them for the job they want to end up having?

Is it really the kids' best interests we're thinking about when kids that young are learning about George Wallace - and kids that old can't name a single President?

What does it do to an elementary school kids' psyche, to have his teachers constantly bombarding him with stories about discrimination, hate, injustice, lynchings?

Any school that has that many illiterate fifth graders has no business teaching them to have more "self esteem". If you want them to have "self esteem", teach them the joys of hard work and the values of achieving difficult goals (like getting into college on their own merits).

*** in fact, the real consequences are far more serious than people realize. There are entire counties where distrust of the government has reached terrifying heights.

Liberals underestimate exactly how bad the trust problem really is.

These people see the government as a hostile entity (imagine all the hostility liberals have for conservatives and then imagine what it feels like to be on the other end of that). They view government as a powerful entity that has adopted the belief that it is good to take money away from the hard-working people with an honest job, and give that money to groups like the one led by Reverend Wright (who, if you will recall, uses the word enemy to describe whites, and who uses the rhetoric of war).

This is so illogical and so incomprehensible to them that they think there must be some sort of conspiracy afoot, because it just makes no sense that anyone would want to steal from hard working people and give it to the sort of people whose values they assume must be the values expressed in rap music.

And when these people try to air their grievances, instead of being listened to, they are attacked with ad homs instead of with logic. They are called names for having the wrong feelings and opinions. There is no way to engage in reasoned discourse with their ideological opponents.

This is some nasty, nasty feedback loop action. This is polarization of the sort that ends in violence. These people expect it to end in violence - they are buying assault rifles and turning their homes into fortresses. Politically, they support religious extremists who want to overthrow the Constitution. Is this really something we want to keep feeding?

We really need to restore the idea that America is a place that is fair, where effort is rewarded, and that the American government is trustworthy. We can't afford to be playing these games. We can't afford to just choose to not look at the end result just because we don't like what we see.