Whites Swim in Racial Preference

By Tim Wise, AlterNet
February 20, 2003

Ask a fish what water is and you'll get no answer. Even if fish were capable
of speech, they would likely have no explanation for the element they swim
in every minute of every day of their lives. Water simply is. Fish take it
for granted.

So too with this thing we hear so much about, "racial preference." While
many whites seem to think the notion originated with affirmative action
programs, intended to expand opportunities for historically marginalized
people of color, racial preference has actually had a long and very white
history.

Affirmative action for whites was embodied in the abolition of European
indentured servitude, which left black (and occasionally indigenous) slaves
as the only unfree labor in the colonies that would become the U.S.

Affirmative action for whites was the essence of the 1790 Naturalization
Act, which allowed virtually any European immigrant to become a full
citizen, even while blacks, Asians and American Indians could not.

Affirmative action for whites was the guiding principle of segregation,
Asian exclusion laws, and the theft of half of Mexico for the fulfillment of
Manifest Destiny.

In recent history, affirmative action for whites motivated racially
restrictive housing policies that helped 15 million white families procure
homes with FHA loans from the 1930s to the '60s, while people of color were
mostly excluded from the same programs.

In other words, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that white America is
the biggest collective recipient of racial preference in the history of the
cosmos. It has skewed our laws, shaped our public policy and helped create
the glaring inequalities with which we still live.

White families, on average, have a net worth that is 11 times the net worth
of black families, according to a recent study; and this gap remains
substantial even when only comparing families of like size, composition,
education and income status.

A full-time black male worker in 2003 makes less in real dollar terms than
similar white men were earning in 1967. Such realities are not merely
indicative of the disadvantages faced by blacks, but indeed are evidence of
the preferences afforded whites û a demarcation of privilege that is the
necessary flipside of discrimination.

Indeed, the value of preferences to whites over the years is so enormous
that the current baby-boomer generation of whites is currently in the
process of inheriting between $7-10 trillion in assets from their parents
and grandparents û property handed down by those who were able to accumulate
assets at a time when people of color by and large could not. To place this
in the proper perspective, we should note that this amount of money is more
than all the outstanding mortgage debt, all the credit card debt, all the
savings account assets, all the money in IRAs and 401k retirement plans, all
the annual profits for U.S. manufacturers, and our entire merchandise trade
deficit combined.

Yet few whites have ever thought of our position as resulting from racial
preferences. Indeed, we pride ourselves on our hard work and ambition, as if
somehow we invented the concepts.

As if we have worked harder than the folks who were forced to pick cotton
and build levies for free; harder than the Latino immigrants who spend 10
hours a day in fields picking strawberries or tomatoes; harder than the
(mostly) women of color who clean hotel rooms or change bedpans in
hospitals, or the (mostly) men of color who collect our garbage.

We strike the pose of self-sufficiency while ignoring the advantages we have
been afforded in every realm of activity: housing, education, employment,
criminal justice, politics, banking and business. We ignore the fact that at
almost every turn, our hard work has been met with access to an opportunity
structure denied to millions of others. Privilege, to us, is like water to
the fish: invisible precisely because we cannot imagine life without it.

It is that context that best explains the duplicity of the President's
recent criticisms of affirmative action at the University of Michigan.
President Bush, himself a lifelong recipient of affirmative action û the
kind set aside for the mediocre rich û recently proclaimed that the school's
policies were examples of unfair racial preference. Yet in doing so he not
only showed a profound ignorance of the Michigan policy, but made clear the
inability of yet another white person to grasp the magnitude of white
privilege still in operation.

The President attacked Michigan's policy of awarding 20 points (on a
150-point evaluation scale) to undergraduate applicants who are members of
underrepresented minorities (which at U of M means blacks, Latinos and
American Indians). To many whites such a "preference" is blatantly
discriminatory.

Bush failed to mention that greater numbers of points are awarded for other
things that amount to preferences for whites to the exclusion of people of
color.

For example, Michigan awards 20 points to any student from a low-income
background, regardless of race. Since these points cannot be combined with
those for minority status (in other words poor blacks don't get 40 points),
in effect this is a preference for poor whites.

Then Michigan awards 16 points to students who hail from the Upper Peninsula
of the state: a rural, largely isolated, and almost completely white area.

Of course both preferences are fair, based as they are on the recognition
that economic status and even geography (as with race) can have a profound
effect on the quality of K-12 schooling that one receives, and that no one
should be punished for things that are beyond their control. But note that
such preferences û though disproportionately awarded to whites û remain
uncriticized, while preferences for people of color become the target for
reactionary anger. Once again, white preference remains hidden because it is
more subtle, more ingrained, and isn't called white preference, even if
that's the effect.

But that's not all. Ten points are awarded to students who attended
top-notch high schools, and another eight points are given to students who
took an especially demanding AP and honors curriculum.

As with points for those from the Upper Peninsula, these preferences may be
race-neutral in theory, but in practice they are anything but. Because of
intense racial isolation (and Michigan's schools are the most segregated in
America for blacks, according to research by the Harvard Civil Rights
Project), students of color will rarely attend the "best" schools, and on
average, schools serving mostly black and Latino students offer only a third
as many AP and honors courses as schools serving mostly whites.

So even truly talented students of color will be unable to access those
extra points simply because of where they live, their economic status and
ultimately their race, which is intertwined with both.

Four more points are awarded to students who have a parent who attended the
U of M: a kind of affirmative action with which the President is intimately
familiar, and which almost exclusively goes to whites. Ironically, while
alumni preference could work toward the interest of diversity if combined
with aggressive race-based affirmative action (by creating a larger number
of black and brown alums), the rollback of the latter, combined with the
almost guaranteed retention of the former, will only further perpetuate
white preference.

So the U of M offers 20 "extra" points to the typical black, Latino or
indigenous applicant, while offering various combinations worth up to 58
extra points for students who will almost all be white. But while the first
of these are seen as examples of racial preferences, the second are not,
hidden as they are behind the structure of social inequities that limit
where people live, where they go to school, and the kinds of opportunities
they have been afforded. White preferences, the result of the normal
workings of a racist society, can remain out of sight and out of mind, while
the power of the state is turned against the paltry preferences meant to
offset them.

Very telling is the oft-heard comment by whites, "If I had only been black I
would have gotten into my first-choice college."

Such a statement not only ignores the fact that whites are more likely than
members of any other group û even with affirmative action in place û to get
into their first-choice school, but it also presumes, as anti-racist
activist Paul Marcus explains, "that if these whites were black, everything
else about their life would have remained the same." In other words, that it
would have made no negative difference as to where they went to school, what
their family income was, or anything else.

The ability to believe that being black would have made no difference (other
than a beneficial one when it came time for college), and that being white
has made no positive difference, is rooted in privilege itself: the
privilege that allows one to not have to think about race on a daily basis;
to not have one's intelligence questioned by best-selling books; to not have
to worry about being viewed as a "out of place" when driving, shopping,
buying a home, or for that matter, attending the University of Michigan.

So long as those privileges remain firmly in place and the preferential
treatment that flows from those privileges continues to work to the benefit
of whites, all talk of ending affirmative action is not only premature but a
slap in the face to those who have fought, and died, for equal opportunity.


Tim Wise is an antiracist activist, essayist and lecturer. Send email to
timjwise@msn.com.