((A . . . forgetting of history has in recent years allowed some persons to argue, and argue persuasively, that affirmative action is reverse racism .''

Stanley Fish

"Opposition to Af firmative Action Among Whites Is Racist"

Affirmative action policies, which were launched in the 1960s to promote the advancement of minorities and women seeking employment and educational opportunities I have been charac-
terized by their opponents as reverse discrimination. In the following viewpoint, Stanley Fish argues that affirmative action was designed to remedy the effects of slavery and segregation
that blacks and others experienced in the past, and that to equate it with reverse discrimination or reverse racism ignores this history. He contends that the growing opposition of whites to affirmative action is a racist attempt to preserve special privileges for themselves. Fish is a professor of English and law at Duke University in North Carolina.

1 take my text from George Bush, who, in an address to the United Nations on September 23, 1991, said this of the U.N. resolution equating Zionism with racism: "Zionism , . . is the idea that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish people. . . . And to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is
to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War I1 and indeed throughout history." What happened in World War I1 was that 6 million Jews were exterminated by persons who regarded them as racially inferior and a danger to Aryan purity. What happened after World War I1 was that the survivors of that Holocaust established a Jewish state, that is, a state centered on Jewish history, Jewish values, and Jewish traditions, in short, a Jewocentric state. What President Bush objects to is the logical sleight of hand by whiqh these two actions are declared equivalent because they are bbth expressions of
racial exclusiveness. Ignored, as Bush says, is the historical difference between them, the difference between a program of genocide and the determination of those who escaped it to establish a community in which they would be the makers, not the victims, of the laws.
It is only by thinking of racism as something that occurs principally in the mind, a falling away from proper notions of universal equality, that the desire of a victimized and terrorized people to band together can be declared to be morally the same as the actions of their would-be executioners. It is only when the actions of the two groups are detached from the historical conditions of their emergence and given a purely abstract description that they can be made interchangeable. What President Bush is saying to the United Nations is, "Look, the Nazis' conviction of racial superiority generated a policy of systematic genocide: the Jewish experience of centuries of persecution in almost every country on earth generated a desire for a homeland of their own: if you manage somehow to convince yourself
that these are the same, it is you, not the Zionists, 'who are morally confused, and the reason you are morally confused is that you have forgotten history."

Forgotten History and Reverse Racism

What I want to say, following Bush's reasoning, is that a similar forgetting of history has in recent years allowed some persons to argue, and argue persuasively, that affirmative action is reverse racism. The very phrase "reverse racism" contains the argument in exactly the form the president objects to: it was
once the case in this countryCthat whites set themselves apart from blacks and claimed privileges for themselves while denying them to others: now, oh the basis of race, blacks are claiming special status and reserving for themselves privileges they deny to others; isn't one as bad as the other? The answer is
"no," and one can see why by imagining that it is not 1991 but 1955 and that we are in a town in the South. No doubt that town would contain two more or less distinct communities, one white and one black, and no doubt in each community there would be a ready store of dismissive epithets, ridiculing stories, self-serving folk myths, and expressions of plain hatred, all directed at the other community, and all based in racial hostility. Yet it would be bizarre to regard their respective racisms-if that is the word-as equivalent, for the hostility of one group stems not from any wrong done to it but from the wrongs it is able to inflict by virtue of its power to deprive citizens of their voting rights, to limit access to an educational institution, to prevent entry into the economy except at the lowest and most menial levels, and to force members of the stigmatized group to ride in the back of the bus; the hostility of the other group is the result of these actions, and while hostility and racial anger are unhappy facts wherever they are found, there is certainly a distinction to be made between the ideological hostility of the oppressor and the experience-based hostility of those who have been oppressed.

A Remedy for Past Injustice

Affirmative action programs were established in the United States to ensure diversity in the work place and at universities. American history is undeniably blemished with racism and sexism. And unless we are encouraged to employ fair hiring and admissions practices, discriminatl"on against women and people of color will continue. Affirmative action seeks to remedy past injustice, while shaping policies that will deter future discrimination. Opponents of affirmative action contend that white males are now the target of discrimination. I guess that's kind of how every monopoly must feel when it gives up 100 percent of its market share.

Ironically, those who lament the entitlement and victim mentality in our country are among the first in line to claim they've been cheated of their divinely appointed supremacy.
Jennifer Coburn, The San Diego Union-7hbune, February 26, 1995

Not to make that distinction is, in George Bush's words, to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Afro-Americans, not simply in World War I1 but in the more than two hundred years of this country's existence. Moreover, it is further to twist history to equate the efforts to remedy that plight with the actions that produced it. Those efforts, designed to redress the imbalances caused by long-standing discrimination, are called affirmative action, and it is a travesty of reasoning to argue that affirmative action, which gives preferential treatment to disadvantaged minorities as part of a plan to achieve social equality, is no different from the policies that created the disadvantages in the first place. Reverse racism is a cogent description of affirmative action only if one considers the virus of racism to be morally and medically indistinguishable from the therapy we apply to it. A virus is an invasion of the body's equilibrium, and so is an antibiotic; but we do not equate the two and decline to fight the disease because the medicine we employ is disruptive of normal functionings. Strong illness, strong remedy-the formula is as appropriate to the health of the body politic as it is to the body proper.

The Level Playing Field

At this point someone will always say, "But two wrongs don't make a right; if it was wrong to treat blacks unfairly, it is wrong to give blacks preference and thereby treat whites unfairly." But this objection is just another version of the forgetting and rewriting of history. The work is done by the adverb "unfairly," which suggests two more or less equal parties, one of whom has been unjustly penalized by an incompetent umpire or official scorer. But the initial condition of equality in relation to which the prep-school virtue of fairness might be an appropriate yardstick has never existed. Blacks have not simply been treated unfairly; they have been subjected first to decades of slavery, then
to decades of second-class citizenship, massive legalized discrimination, economic persecution, educational deprivation, and cultural stigmatization; they have been killed, beaten, raped, bought, sold, excluded, exploited, shamed, and scorned for a very long time. The word unfair is hardly an adequate description of their experience, and the belated gift of "fairness" in the form of a resolution no longer to discriminate against them legally is hardly an adequate remedy for the deep disadvantages that a prior and massive discrimination has produced. When the deck is stacked against you in more ways than you can even count, it is small consolation to hear that you are now free to enter the game and take your chances.
The same insincerity and hollowness of promise infect another formula that is popular with the anti-affirmative action crowd, the formula of the level playing field. Here the argument usually takes the form of saying, "It is 'undemocratic to give one class of citizens advantages at the expense of other citizens; the truly democratic way is to have a level playing field to which everyone has access and where everyone has a fair and equal chance to succeed on the basis of his or her merit." Fine words, but they conceal the true facts of the situation as it has been given to us by history: the playing field is already tilted in favor of those by whom and for whom it was constructed in the first place; if the
requirements for entry are tailored to the cultural experiences of the mainstream majority, if the skills that make for success are nurtured by institutions and cultural practices from which the
disadvantaged minority has been systematically excluded, if the language and ways of comporting oneself that identify a player as "one of us" are alien to the lives minorities are forced to live,
then words like "fair" and "equal" are cruel jokes, for what they promote and celebrate is an institutionalized unfairness and a perpetuated inequality. The playing field is already rigged, and
the resistance to altering it by the mechanisms of affirmative action is in fact a determination to make sure that the present imbalances are continued as long as possible. . . .

Racial and Socioeconomic Disadvantages

Nevertheless, the case against affirmative action is not yet done; there is at least one more card to play, and it is a strong one. Granted that the playing field is not level and that access to it is reserved for an already advantaged elite, it still remains true that the disadvantages suffered by others are not racial-at
least not in 1991-but socioeconomic; therefore, shouldn't it be the case, as Dinesh D'Souza urges, that "universities should retain their policies of preferential treatment, but alter their criteria of application from race to socioeconomic disadvantage'' and thus avoid the unfairness of current policies that reward middle- class or affluent blacks at the egpense of poor whites? One an-swer to this question is given by D'Souza himself when he acknowledges that the overlap between minority groups and the poor is very large, a point underscored by Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander when he said, in response to a question about funds targeted for black colleges, "98% of race specific scholarships do not involve constitutional problems''-by which he meant, I take it, that in 98 percent of the cases race-specific
scholarships were also scholarships to the economically disadvantaged, to the poor.
Still, there is that other 2 percent, those nonpoor, middle- class, economically favored blacks who are receiving special attention on the basis of disadvantages they do not experience. What about them? The force of the question depends on the assumption that in this day and age race could not possibly be a
seriously disadvantaging fact for those who are otherwise well positioned in the society. But the lie to this assumption was given dramatically in a recent broadcast of the ABC television program Prime Time Live. In a stunning twenty-five-minute seg ment, the reporters and a camera crew followed two young men of equal education, cultural sophistication, level of apparent affluence, etc., around St. Louis, a city where neither was known. The two differed only in a single respect: one was white, the
other black; but that small difference turned out to mean everything. In a series of encounters with shoe salesmen, record store and bank employees, rental agents, landlords, employment agencies, taxicab drivers, and ordinary fellow citizens, the black member of the pair was either ignored or given a special and suspicious attention; was asked to pay more for the same goods or come up with a larger down payment for the same car; was turned away as a prospective tenant; rejected as a prospective
taxicab fare; treated with contempt and irritation by clerks, bureaucrats, and city officials; and in every way possible made to feel second-class, unwanted, and inferior.
The inescapable conclusion was that alike thAugh they may be in every other way, the blackness of one of these young men meant that he would lead a significantly different and lesser life than that of his white counterpart; he would be less well housed and at greater expense; he would pay more for services and products when and if he were given the opportunity to purchase them; he would have difficulty establishing credit; the first emotions he would inspire on the part of those he met would be distrust and fear; his abilities would be discounted even before he had a chance to display them; and, above all, the treatment he received from minute to minute would chip away at his self- esteem and self-confidence with consequences that most of us could not even imagine. As the young man in question said at
the conclusion of the broadcast, "You walk down the street with a suit and tie and it doesn't matter. Someone will make determinations about you that affect the quality of your life.". . .

Newly Respectable Bigotry

Individualism, fairness, merit-these three words are contrwu- ally in the mouths of our up-to-date, newly respectable bigots: who have learned that they need not put on a white hood or bar access to the ballot box in order to secure their ends: rather, they need only clothe themselves in a vocabulary emptied of its
historical content and made into the justification for attitudes and policies they would not acknowledge were they frankly named. So skillful have these new bigots become in appropriating vocabularies and symbols thought to be the property of their natural opponents that they can often represent themselves as
preservers of the values they are subverting. Recently a poster has appeared on a college campus that says in large letters STOP APARTHEID; it is only after you have absorbed the mesage that you find out that the apartheid in question involves affirmative action, minority scholarships, black dormitories and fraternities, etc. The equation of these mild attempts to afford a disadvantaged minority educational opportunities, along with such rights as voluntary association, with the totally repressive mechanisms of the South African state is a particularly egregious instance of the funny-money logic decried by George Bush, the logic by which the victims of racism become accused of racism the moment the tide turns ever so slightly in their favor, I don't know about you, but I prefer my bigotry straight. I would rather hear someone say, "I really don't believe that blacks or women or Arabs or gays should be enfranchised
in every corner of our society. I really am opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment and the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Immigration Act of the following year [which eliminated restrictions based on country of origin], and the various laws against discrimination that are multiplying at this very moment. I believe in the right of Anglo-Saxon American males, or in the right of those who are willing. to comport themselves as Anglo-Saxon American males, to rule and to guide; and I want to institute
policies that ensure the continuation of this natural prerogative." Of course, very few people are saying such things these days; instead they are prating on about fairness, merit, and individuality, and under cover of those once honorable words, they excite the fears of mainstream Americans and assure them that if they act on.those fears, it will only be out of the very highest motives. You are some of those Americans, and it is your fears that are being appealed to. I hope you resist.

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