What killing affirmative action means in an economic downturn (Issue #16)
Living on borrowed time, affirmative action limps on.
“I was impacted by the recent round of layoffs.”
Not to kick anyone when they’re down, but that’s a pretty roundabout way to say “I got shitcanned.” Look, I know you want to keep your dignity, but there’s really no shame in being fired. Given the boot. Let go. Laid off, axed, sacked. It’s really no reflection of your worth that you were dumped, bounced, eighty-sixed, given the ol’ heave-ho, pink-slipped, terminated, dismissed, discharged, and kicked to the curb like a bag of garbage.
Really, it happens to the best of us.
A lot of companies use a last-in, first-out policy in which case your ass might be grass, er, rather, your ass might be … impacted by recent layoffs.
In 2020 companies went on a wild, unprecedented spree of DEI hiring. What a time that was for inclusion, belonging, and social responsibility! Or at least for those words. Because what really happened was companies hired for new roles in a mad panic and then quietly right-sized them out of existence in the dead of night.
Artificial gains in DEI
Not to imply that most companies never gave a shit about equity, but if that were the case it would look a lot like what’s happening. Which is that a bunch of minorities were hired and fired. And that most “chief diversity officers” are now white. And by “most” I mean 76%. The percentage of Black folks in these roles? Less than 4%. And, not to blow any possible Amazon-Grinch endorsement deals, but that company absolutely crushed the competition.
Not that I’m some kind of skeptic when it comes to this shit, some kind of “Grinch,” if you will. Wait, yes, that’s exactly what I am. So this is not a surprise (even if those numbers are pretty shocking) but it still deeply sucks because so many women and minorities truly benefitted from that hiring spree, and pandemic remote work created opportunities to break into the tech ecosystem in a safe way that didn’t force them to sacrifice their authentic selves.
But if you recently took a role as Program Manager for Diverse Communication and Enablement for Multicultural Suppliers (a ridiculous-sounding but plausible role, I just made up) at one of these big tech companies, don’t be surprised if your CFO is eyeing your role like this:
Larding your company with DEI hires with no real interest in retaining them to make yourself look good? That probably seemed like a good idea when a low-interest rate environment kept the returns rolling in.
Things have turned though. An economic downturn plus the inevitable backlash that comes whenever the US experiences even a tiny bit of societal progress means Corporate America is no longer interested in carrying the burden of addressing inequity.
Enter the government
So who does the equity hot potato belong to? As per ushz, it’s marginalized folks themselves who are feeling the burden. You could argue that maybe, just maybe, it’s the government’s job to make life better for its citizens. There have been times when the government actually made some efforts toward that whole “justice for all” thing.
One policy currently in the crosshairs that we’re gonna Grinch about today: affirmative action. The Supreme Court looks like it’s about to kill it off. Some schools seem to think its end is pretty much inevitable.
The basic idea of AA is to level the playing field for disadvantaged groups and to correct for the historical discrimination against these groups. It began as Executive Order 10925, issued by JFK in 1961. This order required federal contractors to take affirmative (that is, affirming the truth of something) steps to end discrimination, prevent its recurrence, and create opportunities previously denied to minorities and women. Lots of people had a problem with this from the get-go, and have been trying to stop, vilify, and reverse it ever since.
Just last October, SCOTUS heard arguments in two cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, both of them filed by “Students for Fair Admissions,” whose goal is to disallow colleges from taking race into consideration for admissions.
This discussion wouldn’t be happening if Donald Trump didn’t shoe-horn in the same three “conservative” (the accepted term for abjectly corrupt fucking nutjobs) that reversed Roe v Wade.
Let’s assume the worst
It’s not hard to predict what will happen if (when) the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action: less diversity at colleges and universities and in the workforce. Which will mean less diverse and representative leadership in every sector of society.
That’s not a guess. States that banned AA saw their numbers drop and haven’t been able to get them back up. In Michigan, voters passed a state constitutional amendment restricting the university from considering race in admissions decisions. So they’ve tried AA alternatives—community outreach, special scholarships and programs, etc.—and nothing has worked. The University of Michigan therefore filed an amicus brief in support of Harvard and UNC keeping their AA programs.
The Wolverines have been at the center of this battle for a long-ass time. Take the case Grutter v. Bollinger. Petitioner Barbara Grutter, a white Michigander, applied to the Law School in 1996 with a 3.8 GPA and 161 LSAT score and didn’t get in. Grutter was gutted. She believes she would’ve got into law school if the same criteria that was applied to her was applied to everyone else (AKA the minority students).
But imagine being one of the 37 minority students at the University of Michigan Law School out of a total class of 1140 and hearing Grutter complain about how unfair it is that you’re there. Would she be OK if there were only fifteen minorities? Ten? Three? Eventually, you start to wonder how few of us there need to be to properly honor your entitlement.
But let’s pretend for a moment that opponents of AA are motivated not by entitlement and that they just want things to be fair for everyone, doggone it. Here are some of their Very Serious Arguments.
Argument one: Affirmative action is no longer necessary because the playing field has been leveled
It’s 2023, for gosh sakes! Discrimination is no longer an issue, obviously. The funny thing about this angle is that it’s been popular since at least 1883. Let’s just open up our multi-volume History of Gaslighting of Black Americans for a sec and take a look at civil rights cases for that year. Oh look, here’s Justice Joseph Philo Bradley (“Joe-Phi” to his friends) suggesting that the time had come for Black people to stop being “the special favorite of the laws.” Remember, this is just 18 years after the Civil War.
It’s depressing as shit to have to take the time to counter this argument, especially when you remember Toni Morrison’s teaching us that the purpose of racism is to waste your time, but just take a quick peek at rates of poverty, hunger, and incarceration by race and … yeah. Unless it’s just some crazy coincidence that we lock up, neglect, and allow Black people to die at higher rates, it’s safe to say shit is still bad.
Argument two: Affirmative action creates a permanently dependent underclass
It’s pretty hilarious (in a deeply not-funny-at-all way) that you could survey American history and think the danger is we’re going to help people TOO MUCH, that we’ll take care of them SO WELL that they won’t develop a good old-fashioned work ethic of the kind that built this country, by gum!
It’s so very kind of the people in charge to show such regard for the character of the minorities who literally built this country. The great news for them is that if there is a nefarious program to help vulnerable people, it’s doing a pretty shitty job. Again, just Google any basic health indicators such as maternal mortality rate or food insecurity rate USA 2022 and you’ll be relieved to know that we’re doing a great job of abandoning people—for their own good, of course.
We might have moved on in terms of how we talk about this shit, but that doesn’t mean actual conditions have changed. There’s a difference between equality as a right in theory and equality as an outcome.
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. - President Lyndon B Johnson
Which all by way of saying that policy interventions to date, such as affirmative action, have been, um, insufficient to address discrimination in the United States.
Argument three: But that’s reverse racism!
Another argument against AA: affirmative action policies are unfair because they give preferential treatment to certain groups based on their race or gender. Hey, isn’t that the exact problem we’re trying to solve here? cries the chorus of bad-faith galaxy brains.
The actual legal argument goes like this: The 14th Amendment already prohibits classifying people by race, so affirmative action has been unconstitutional from the start. That amendment reads in part: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This was one of the Reconstruction-era amendments to address America’s history of African American slavery and protect the newly freed slaves, and later became the basis for decisions related to desegregation, abortion rights, and gay marriage.
So what reverse discrimination plaintiffs are doing is using the amendment whose original purpose was to remedy anti-Black discrimination to fortify their own entitlement. One of the most fucked-up things about building a country upon a racist foundation is that it’s actually shitty for everyone, as Heather McGhee shows us. One of the many examples from her book, The Sum of Us is when cities were forced to desegregate their public pools and they filled them in with concrete rather than let Black people use them. Boom. Everyone out of the pool.
To divide us is to deride us
The villain in the affirmative action movie is Edward Bloom. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail about this asshole, but the key facts are he runs Students for Fair Admissions, and loves finding disgruntled students who feel victimized by “reverse discrimination.” On his website there’s a banner of an Asian American student wearing some truly sweet-looking headphones (what brand is that?), studying, and probably jamming out to some Meek Mill.
Edward Bloom hearts Asian students. At least when he can use them as a cudgel against other minorities. In the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard complaint, discrimination against Asian students is mentioned 244 times.
To be clear, Asian Americans are not a monolith. Some have themselves raised concerns about affirmative action, arguing that the “model minority” stereotype is used to justify the exclusion of Asian Americans from affirmative action programs. The argument: Affirmative action programs > preference for underrepresented groups > more competition for spots at top colleges > more barriers for Asian Americans, even those with strong academic qualifications. But with affirmative action, Asian Americans rose from 3% of the class of 1980 to 27.6% of the class of 2026.
And who’s perpetuating the model minority myth to begin with? See, this whole line of argument is based on the oldest, biggest con in the book: dividing us against each other. Can’t go to college? Whatever you do, don’t look at predatory lending, skyrocketing tuition, and the screwing over of the grad students who do most of the actual teaching. Don’t bring up tuition increasing from $3K a year in 1970 to $50K now as we abandon the whole idea of education as a public good. No, just look at all the Black people in college now! See, now THERE’S your problem.
The dominant culture relies on dividing us.
By working together, racial minorities can effectively advocate for their shared interests, promote diversity and inclusion, and create a more equitable society for all. Unless you like diving into pools filled in with concrete.
Argument four: Our ol’ pal meritocracy
Then there’s the argument that affirmative action policies lower the standards or qualifications required for certain positions. This can lead to the perception that those who benefit from affirmative action aren’t as qualified as those who do not, leading to the pernicious term “diversity hire.” Your Grinch covered the meritocracy thing as it pertains to the corporate world.
In the academic world, race can only be considered as only one of many factors among applicants already deemed to be academically qualified. Evidence in that Harvard case revealed that of the 26,000 applicants for the Class of 2019, approximately 3,500 had perfect SAT math scores, 2,700 had perfect SAT verbal scores, more than 8,000 had a perfect converted GPA. Nearly 1,000 had a perfect composite score on the SAT or ACT. There were too many nerds to make it possible to make decisions on GPA and test scores alone.
In other words, you can optimize for equity and still fill your school with a bunch of fucking nerds.
How quota became a dirty word
The 60’s was a tough time to be Black in America, but it was also a time when Black activists successfully influenced institutions to address disparities, and colleges were doing real shit to counter discrimination. By 1969, college enrollment for Black students skyrocketed. Columbia’s Black students more than doubled in number. Tufts’ Black enrollment went up 600%.
Jeez, if we could have kept that trend up, where would we be now?? So what happened?? Among other things, The University of California v. Bakke happened. A white guy named Allan Bakke was denied to medical school multiple times, though considered qualified. (Now as to why Mr. Bakke didn’t simply apply to other medical schools and was so insistent on his right to attend UC Davis, that’s a question *cough cough entitlement cough* for another day.) UC Davis Med School at the time had spots for 100 nerds, and they saved 16 spots for Black, Asian-American, Hispanic, and Native American applicants.
The case went to the Supreme Court, which—striking a blow for white people’s rights—killed the university’s equity program and said they had to take Bakke. But they also said affirmative action was still allowed as long as there were no quotas such as UC Davis’s 16 reserved spots.
Now, America actually has always been fine with quotas as long as they’re unofficial. If it’s 1964 and your medical school enrollment is 100% white, that’s cool as long as the structures that enable it are hidden and it can be regarded as something that just sort of happened. It’s only when you try to fix this super weird coincidence that you have a problem.
Bakke was part of a backlash—one that worked really well. For 50 years Black college enrollment grew, going from 282,000 in 1966 to more than 2.5 million in 2010. But then it started dropping, falling to 1.9 million in 2020.
The missing mission
Even if it’s living on borrowed time, affirmative action limps on. The Bakke ruling allows AA if it’s an essential part of an organization’s mission. For a medical school that’s not a stretch, if taking care of people is their mission, and considering the obstacles to healthcare Black communities faced in the 70s it makes sense to recruit black medical students. Breaking it down into even simpler terms, diversity improves health outcomes, full stop.
But for a corporation, how does equity fit with the mission? It probably doesn’t! And that’s why the diversity systems developed in a panic after George Floyd are weak as shit. And if we don’t digest this information, folks end up accepting roles like Program Manager for Diverse Communication and Enablement for Multicultural Suppliers that get cut when companies are forced to keep only what’s critical.
People who are passionate about this work end up wasting away their talents in companies whose mission doesn’t require DEI. There’s certainly no shame in getting paid, or in doing what you have to do to thrive. But, if possible, let’s protect our peace by spending our energy where it’s needed, appreciated, and effective.
One of the reasons we went through all those anti-AA arguments is that diversity initiatives need to be pressure tested. There needs to be a level of intellectual rigor invested in the design and development for them to be sustainable long term. The latest lay-offs of DEI peeps show us that we need to bring that kind of rigor on behalf of ourselves, so we don’t waste our gifts on those who don’t deserve them.
Until next time, your Grinch will be dreaming of a better world, one you all are free to be yourselves, to be free, and no longer ruled by bullshit corporate decorum—especially after you’ve just been shown the door, escorted off the premises, dumped like yard waste, frog-marched to the exit, and chucked out the window like a chicken bone.