Republican Richard Nixon is remembered for the Watergate scandal, but few know he was partly responsible for it, according to American sociologist John D. Skrenty in a seminal book, The Ironies of Affirmative Action (1996), America’s first affirmative action policies.
However, the ambition of the soon-to-be-deposed president had very little to do with achieving greater social justice: on the contrary, it was about promoting “racial diversity” goals in companies. , to subtract from the Democratic Party part of the votes of the black electorate which had been largely won over to it since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
In the wake of the US Supreme Court’s decision to ban positive discrimination in college admissions, I recall this little historical anecdote to emphasize that positive discrimination, a contentious issue if ever there was one for the American population – but also Canadian, our neighbors having never finished constructing our thoughts – will never have been only black or white, but made up of compromises and political and moral tensions.
From its infancy to Allan Bloom’s loud cries of a new university racial separatism in the 1990s, affirmative action has never tired of unleashing passions, as a flagship commitment of the Democratic election platform or the rallying cry of conservative activists against “racial progressivism”.
Despite the eminently political nature of the issue, its highly divisive nature is not surprising. It is that, whether one is for or against, positive discrimination explicitly violates the credo of individualistic and meritocratic liberalism. At its heart we find the idea – repeatedly invalidated by sociology, but it is not clear that our ideals have to be real to be valid – that the value of an individual is determined solely by the acts for which he is responsible. .
It would not be our family or our social background that would determine our value, but what we do. And only these personal achievements should be taken into account, in particular, in the admission of such or such in a selective college (with some exceptions for students legacy and veterans). In a country such as the United States, which was largely built against the privileges of the blood of the nobility, one can understand the attachment to the liberal creed.
But what does positive discrimination do? It starts from this observation, so simple and so fair, that the environment from which we come disproportionately influences what we will be able to do (notwithstanding these self-made men which are so many exceptions that prove the rule), to demystify the creed and try to counterbalance the effects of a disadvantageous environment.
Only, in the history and the extremely particular racial context of the United States, the indicator of this disadvantageous milieu takes the form of a trait socially conceived as essential, of a color: “race”. It is thus a question of taking (explicitly or implicitly, according to the legislations of the States) account of the “race”, the color, in order to support the admission of certain African-American candidates to the detriment of other candidates (in particular Asian ).
The result ? On the basis of non-chosen characteristics, some obtain social benefits, which obviously strikes a chord with the credo of meritocratic liberalism. Philosophically speaking, positive discrimination is clear discrimination, which does not mean, against the majority justices of the American Supreme Court, that it is illegitimate for all that.
Quite the contrary, considering that American legal racism did not officially end until 1965 (with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act which put an end to the Jim Crow laws of the Southern states), and considering that we do not not undoing centuries of institutionalized racism by shouting scissors, black American populations persist in encountering challenges that white populations encounter much less. Some respected scholars still speak today of a “racial caste” system in the United States, and the statistics tend to prove, all other things being equal, that they are right.
Can we nevertheless commit a wrong to repair another? This is the immensely difficult question posed by positive discrimination since its inception. One will find in the literature a panoply of equally rigorous answers for or against this policy.
For ? Although today’s white populations no longer explicitly commit racism, they nevertheless continue to benefit from centuries of institutional racism: the time has not yet come when the average black and white can be considered truly equal.
Against ? Assuming that it is possible to go beyond race in a post-racialist society, the continued use of the criterion of race in positive discrimination only reinforces its reality and perpetuates it, while tending to favor blacks from the middle classes. well-to-do, rather than those from much more disadvantaged backgrounds. I repeat, against progressive or conservative militancy, positive discrimination is a complicated issue.
Nevertheless, some researchers offer a middle ground and imperfect, but thus promising solution. Defended by several researchers, it would be a matter of proscribing the explicit use of “race” in favor of the use of indicators closer to the real causes of social difficulties such as socio-economic background, income, composition of the household, parents’ level of education, etc.
This solution would have the merit of allowing us to target the material heart of discrimination as well as the most marginalized racialized individuals, while freeing us from the productive use of a race which only exists, in the final analysis, as that word, that social category that lives in social interactions. Because let’s not forget that race has not always existed. Recent creation, we can hope for its disappearance. To do this, it is still necessary that the instruments we use to fight its pangs do not help to keep it alive.
Certainly, this debate will continue in the United States as here, regardless of what the conservative majority of the American Supreme Court thinks. Let’s just hope that we will manage to have it with moderation, fairness, and concern for all parties.