Affirmative Action, Sista Souljah And Obama

Noam Scheiber has a very interesting take on Obama as a politician with an uncommon aversion to, well, politics:

Obama has tended to shun similar stunts when they relate to race. The run-up to South Carolina was rife with talk that post-racial Obama was morphing into a decidedly pre-post-racial candidate. To reverse the slide, blogger Mickey Kaus suggested he give a speech embracing class- rather than race-based affirmative action, something Obama had flirted with in the past. Kaus had a point: The atmospherics would have been irresistible to ambivalent whites. I pushed a milder form of the idea on my own blog. Not long after, I got a response from an Obama adviser: Never gonna happen. Urging Sister Souljah politicking on him was the surest way to provoke a scowl.

Matt quotes the same section in making an argument for an Obama switch from race-based to class-based Affirmative Action. For the most part, I also believe in the class-based approach. First of all, forgive me, but I'm not much concerned about the middle class black kid--and there are a lot of them now--who has to go to a lesser state school because he didn't get his first choice. He should have applied to Howard University, and maybe Hampton, anyway. My greater worry is for poor kids for whom college is simply not an option. The fact is that there are disproportionate number black kids who fit in that box.When Obama said his daughters shouldn't receive Affirmative Action, I think a lot of black folks understood that. I think there are plenty of white folks in this country who certainly won't enjoy the privileges that my very black seven year-old son will enjoy as a child.

But a word on the Kausesque Sista Souljah suggestion. Obama is right to resist this. A switch from race-based Affirmative Action to class-based Affirmative Action is an honorable policy. Embracing that policy in order to demonstrate to whites that you aren't a nigger-lover is loathsome. The fact is that the net African-American population in states like West Virginia and Kentucky is minuscule, and race-based Affirmative Action has almost nothing to do with why those states are economically depressed. I would go so far as to say that if you surveyed the average white voter and asked him to list his concerns, abolish Affirmative Action wouldn't even come up.

I think people often forget that Obama is actually black, and saying to a black man that he should kick the shit out of his own to show he's down with the club is, in the main, insulting. I would submit that Obama finds the Sista Souljah tactic distasteful as human being, but also as an African-American. Using black people as a bogeyman to, quite literally, scare up votes is an old tactic. Let's not marry that vile strategy to something that actually is a decent idea.

Comments

[Cobb]

What's wrong with the black working class? Which is to say do you not recognize how it is that Affirmative Action rubs 'hard working white' people wrongly? It rubs them wrongly not just racially but with the same bias that says you are not a success if you don't go to college. Which is why Affirmative Action smells elitist from the perspective of no black tradesmen. What am I trying to say? I'm trying to say that if black politics were as focused on getting black kids from the hood into middle class careers like plumbing, electrical, painting, roofing, policing, firefighting and all the pickup truck professions, instead of into college, there would be no Affirmative Action controversy for opportunists like Clinton to racialize, furthermore it couldn't be turned into a class war either.

We are suffering from an overproduction at the federal level - as my parents said, making a federal case out of it. Why? Because affirmative actions can be forced on all colleges that accept federal money, and black politicians elected from majority minority jerrymandering can effect change in Congress and override local majorities. But the irony is that this is the same thing that depopulates the hood of gainfully employed black men and women. Because everybody with any talent that can hop aboard the affirmative action train, ships out of town to the federally funded college.

And who is painting the houses in my old neighborhood? Mexicans.

[Pliggett Darcy]

As usual, great post -- right on the money both on the policy issue and the politics.

[Nmaginate]

People need to stop lying on (and for) Obama.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ...Why should your
daughters, when they go to college, get affirmative action?"

OBAMA: Well, first of all, I think that my daughters should
probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged, and I think that there's nothing wrong with us taking that into account as we consider admissions policies at universities.

I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed.

So I don't think those concepts are mutually exclusive. I think what we can say is that in our society, race and class still intersect, that there are a lot of African-American kids who are still struggling, that even those who are in the middle class may be first generation as opposed to fifth or sixth generation college attendees, and that we all have an interest in bringing as many people together to help build this country.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that in 25 years,
affirmative action may no longer be necessary. Is she right?

OBAMA: I would like to think that if we make good decisions and
we invest in early childhood education, improve K-12, if we have done what needs to be done to ensure that kids who are qualified to go to college can afford it, that affirmative action becomes a diminishing tool for us to achieve racial equality in this society.

Beyond that, I say "let's not marry" affirmative action to this misleading idea that it is "race based" or, given the attitudes, Black-based when major beneficiaries are neither Black or non-white. They say WHITE women are the group that have benefited the most. They say that more non-merit based college admissions have occurred at elite schools through legacies than all the "affirmative action" admits of the black and brown.

And let's not miss on connecting the dots... Black poverty and White poverty aren't the same and the sure aggregation turns this class-based notion into the same kind of cruel hoax so-called race-based affirmative action already is. Black people take the rap while White women and even White men are able to benefit from the policy with little or no flak in a society that's still based on White privilege, no matter how much some Whites (elites) benefit more than others.

Funny how instead of directing their angst at White elites and The Price Of Admission, it's Black people who make the convenient scapegoat and some Black people are falling for the Guilt Trip while there is blatant "affirmative action" for Whites at Black colleges the anti-AA crowd had/has been church mouse quiet about.