- Position‹2 of 2
- Yes, white people can be victims of racism
Affirmative action - a system that favours non-whites across College admissions, company boards, "diversity" initiatives and many more facets of public life - is blatantly racist. It is a type of reverse racism that has no place in our society. Of course, we should acknowledge historical wrongs. But, there is no justifiable basis to move on from discrimination by introducing a new form, in which another racial group (whites) face prejudice. For example, it is absurd that young people today, who have grown up into a society that recognises racism and actively works to dismantle prejudice, are having opportunities made unavailable to them by virtue of their skin colour.
The argument
The argument accepts the stated purpose of affirmative action and objects to the mechanism by which it pursues it. Affirmative action is a set of procedures meant to end illegal discrimination, prevent future discrimination, and remedy the effects of prior discrimination — aims proponents of this position do not dispute. What they dispute is that those aims can be pursued as affirmative action pursues them without themselves becoming discrimination. The objection is structural. Remedying past disadvantage is done by benefiting minorities, and in a competition for a fixed number of places — university admissions, appointments, promotions — benefiting one group necessarily puts non-minorities at a disadvantage. There is no way to advance some applicants relative to others without setting others back relative to them. The disadvantage is therefore not an unintended side effect that better implementation could remove; it is how the remedy operates. What makes this racism rather than merely unfairness, on this account, is the basis of the allocation. Affirmative action is applied on a scale relative to how disadvantaged a group was or is, which means an individual's treatment is determined by the racial category they belong to rather than by anything they have personally done or suffered. The weaker end of that scale discriminates weakly against so-called new minorities, mainly young white males; the stronger end discriminates strongly. Either way the differential is assigned by race. The conclusion drawn is about the original question rather than about policy alone. If a young white man is passed over on the basis of his race, he has been treated worse on racial grounds, and proponents argue that this is what racism means whichever group it is applied to. A definition excluding it would make the wrongness of racial allocation depend on which race was allocated against — so on this reasoning white people in the USA can be victims of racism, and affirmative action is where it is institutionalised.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Affirmative Action can not be racist against white people. While White people may not be the direct beneficiaries of Affirmative Action programs, this is because they do not need to be. The reason we need Affirmative action in the first place is to allow equal opportunity to everyone. White people do not need to benefit from special programs to have an equal opportunity relative to people of color, because they are the majority in both population and leadership positions therefore are not discriminated against.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The zero-sum framing is assumed. Where selection is from a fixed number of places, any consideration of any factor disadvantages someone relative to a counterfactual, and the premise treats an unsuccessful applicant's position as a deliberate imposition rather than an effect of scarcity. [Rejecting P2] The premise adopts one contested definition of racism — differential treatment by race — and rules the alternative out by stipulation. Critics hold that racism involves systematic subordination, on which measures intended to counteract an existing disadvantage differ in kind from those that create one; that is a disagreement to be argued, not settled by definition. [Rejecting C] The conclusion also rests on a description of the policy that the courts have rejected. Quotas have been unlawful in the United States for decades, and the schemes that operated lawfully treated race as one factor among many — not the sliding scale of penalties the argument describes.