Affirmative action and "white resentment"

Publius at Obsidian Wings writes:

[W]e need to address our more complex world where the structural legacies of racism are arguably a bigger problem than actual racism proper...I’m a child of the rural South. But you know what? Actual racism is a lot less common there — we have a ways to go, but there has been real progress on that front.

The more serious problem is white resentment. A lot of white people honestly think they have been significantly deprived of various things because of minorities. And it’s hard to overstate how deeply these feelings run. It’s not so much animosity toward people who are different — it’s the animosity of the aggrieved. They feel like they are the victims.

That’s why race is a losing issue for Obama — it’s not so much that people are racist, but that they feel they are being punished because they’re white (yes, I know how completely absurd this must sound to the black community).

Andrew Sullivan comments: "This is the poisoned fruit of that poisonous, if well-intentioned, policy of affirmative action."

Ezra Klein weighs in:

The end of privilege -- though of course, white privilege didn't end, it was only somewhat reduced -- hurts. Ending slavery meant destroying a lot of privilege, and it created a war. Reconstruction disrupted a lot of privilege and it produced countless lynchings and murders. Ending segregation destroyed a hefty amount of privilege, and it spurred societal tumult and vicious violence. By contrast, affirmative action was a relatively modest policy with fairly minimal effects on privilege, and it merely resulted in a potent political issue for conservatives. But to call white resentment the "poisoned fruit" of affirmative action is extremely strange. White resentment has been around a lot longer, and stems from people's desire to protect the fruits of a gross and grave injustice.

I think Ezra is mostly right here. The white resentment of blacks that Publius talks about is very real (as I can attest, being another child of the rural South), and didn't begin or even get much worse with affirmative action. Ezra points to the loss of historic white privilege as the root cause of the resentment, but I also think desegregation played a big role. White Southerners were used to living in a very racially and culturally homogeneous society, and they probably felt that that society was harmonious and stable. When they suddenly found themselves living alongside a bunch of black people (who had actually been living in a parallel society right nextdoor the whole time), it felt like their warm bubble of cultural sameness had been popped. I imagine Japanese people would feel similar if 60 million Koreans suddenly burst into their schools and cafes.

But this is the 21st century, and white Southerners are just going to have to get over it. Segregation was evil, but more importantly it was unsustainable. With immigration set to stay at high levels, the South is set to be as much a melting pot as the North has always been. So in the meantime, Southerners may not vote for Obama, but so be it.

As for affirmative action, though, I'm not letting it off the hook. I think it has created a lot of racism - not in the South, but in the industrial Midwest, where dozens of immigrant groups traditionally jostled for jobs. Affirmative action looked an awful lot like the government intervening to favor one group in that labor market. Maybe that's why states like Ohio, Missouri, Indiana, and even Michigan and Pennsylvania are starting to vote a little more like Southern states - and why Obama did so badly in the primaries there.

Affirmative action helped build a black middle class, but it also threw up a social barrier between whites and blacks that I believe has increased racism among many whites in this country. History will be the judge of whether that tradeoff was worth it. But in the future, when designing policies to help black people, I'd focus on programs that set up no legal distinction between blacks and others. Legal separation of blacks and nonblacks got our country into the racial mess it's in, and I just don't think it's going to get us out of it.