Anti-Affirmative Action Bake Sale is Misguided, Half Baked Idea
The University of California-Berkeley Republicans held an anti-affirmative action bake sale on September 27th. The sale tried to satirically draw attention to affirmative action policies by charging white male students two dollars a brownie, Asians 1.50, Hispanics 1.00 and blacks 75 cents. Females paid a quarter less per brownie. While the Republican students may have thought this was a clever and humorous event, the fundraiser drew protests, with opponents calling the sale racist and demeaning to minorities. What Republicans seem to overlook is that the history of de facto affirmative action in this country has favored whites and that current attempts to narrow racial disparities in higher education are not reverse racism, so much as efforts to combat that history of white racial preferences and prevent contemporary discrimination from persisting.
Affirmative Action: Necessary Remedy or Reverse Racism?
Opponents of affirmative action see it as reverse racism and appeal to the notion that we should be "colorblind". Preferences for selected racial groups in this view are discriminatory and constitute a form of racism. Intellectually, the argument has some merit, at least on the surface. Race is a biological fiction, after all, that is socially constructed. In addition, race is an imperfect measure of opportunity. Race-based affirmative action might give an advantage to an affluent suburban black kid from an upscale neighborhood when no such preference was given to a white child from a hardscrabble neighborhood in Appalachia or the Ozark Mountains. Arguably, this white child may have had fewer opportunities, racial discrimination notwithstanding.
In addition, affirmative action categories can be seemingly arbitrary. Preferences might be given to a "disadvantaged" African-American or Latino, but be denied to a Hmong immigrant or a discriminated against Arab-American who is classified as white. These arbitrary decisions come from assigning racial and ethnic categories to people that are social constructions rather than biological facts. Nevertheless, the argument for a "colorblind" admissions process ignores the fact that even though race is not a biological reality, race as it has been historically defined and constructed has social consequences that cannot be ignored.
Misunderstanding the Goals of Affirmative Action
Affirmative action is fundamentally misunderstood. Critics believe it is a product of white guilt used to atone for past acts of racism. This line of reasoning presumes that the only purpose for affirmative action is to rectify past wrongs. However, affirmative action's primary purpose is to prevent contemporary discrimination, and to "level" the playing field. While some will argue that such action is no longer necessary, studies show that race-based discrimination is much more widespread than commonly believed. While employers will deny racist hiring practices, a blind academic study showed that employers were much more likely to interview job candidates with "white sounding" names over candidates with "black sounding" names and equivalent qualifications. These employers were not overt racists, but they acted in a racially discriminatory fashion just the same.
Affirmative Action for Whites by Another Name
What is also overlooked in discussions of affirmative action is that white privilege is the unspoken affirmative action that White Americans have benefited from throughout American history. Affirmative action for whites included racial slavery and the policy of Manifest Destiny that shaped the nation, with whites benefitting from privileges that were denied non-whites. Later, segregation and racially discriminatory housing policies perpetuated the disparities in opportunities for whites and non-whites. The main reason white household wealth is still nearly twenty times as high as black household wealth is the legacy left behind by housing policies that enabled whites to build household wealth during the twentieth century. While millions of white families were able to secure FHA housing loans from the 1930s to the 1970s, the same loans were denied to black Amerians. Other practices like red-lining exacerbated housing disparities and further entrenched the system of affirmative action for whites. Differential treatment in the criminal justice system continues to be an unspoken form of affirmative action that favors whites at the expense of minority citizens.
A More Appropriate Bake Sale Would be Contextualized
A modest proposal to make the bake sale more accurate would be to make the sale reflect the history of racial preferences in America, so that the discounted prices are placed in context. If we take the nation's history back to European settlement and the importation of the first slaves into the Americas in the seventeenth century, we can condense around four hundred years of history into a parallel eight hour day. So if the campus Republicans choose to sell brownies from 9 AM to 5 PM, a historically and sociologically relevant bake sale would begin with kidnapping African-American students from their dorms and forcing them to bake the brownies without any compensation. Any Native Americans near the bake sale booth would be shot or infected with small pox laced blankets.
The kidnapping of slaves would stop around 12:30 PM but slaves would still be forced to bake brownies until an emancipation proclamation set them free around 1:30 PM. Still blacks would be forbidden from buying the brownies they made even after being freed. Any blacks that attempted to buy brownies would be savagely beaten, and any black man found sharing a brownie with a white woman would be publicly lynched from one of the campus trees.
Sometime around 3:40 PM blacks would finally be allowed to purchase brownies, but they would be three times as likely to be searched by campus police looking for marijuana in the brownies than their white counterparts. At about 4:00 when most of the brownies had already been eaten, affirmative action would kick in and permit blacks to buy the brownies at the reduced price. This would be repealed at 4:30. At 4:57 PM the booth would assign its first black President (though to be safe he would have one white parent) to man the booth for three minutes, showing the campus to be "post-racial". However, many students would insist that this interloper was not actually a legitimate student admitted to the University of California, but rather a foreign born Muslim who faked his admissions, and whose student ID was fabricated to hide his past.
Meanwhile, the white students could complain that although black students were enslaved, beaten, lynched and murdered all morning and well into the afternoon, the sale was unfair to whites, because black students got a discount during the final hour. In this context, the bake sale could go on and actually make sense, but understandably the campus probably would not approve of this contextualized bake sale.
Keith Darling-Brekhus - Keith Darling-Brekhus is a political and social analyst. He has an MA in Sociology from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
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