Over at Vox, Siobhan McDonough has a lengthy piece about a guaranteed income experiment being done in Georgia. The headline calls it "revolutionary," but I can't say I'm floored by the idea that giving poor people an extra $10,000 per year will vastly improve their lives. Of course it will. The drawback is that it would cost a lot to roll this out across the whole country, something the article doesn't address.
However, because the program is aimed at Black mothers, McDonough does address the racial politics involved:
Racially targeted programs such as affirmative action and reparations tend to be unpopular. Opposition to these programs is largely driven by white Americans; they tend to be far more popular, if not universally, among Black Americans and other Americans of color.
This didn't sound quite right, so I googled a bit and found something interesting if unsurprising. When you ask people if they support affirmative action, most say yes. But if you ask them if employers should take race into account in hiring decisions—which is practically the definition of affirmative action—the vast majority say no:
I'm using Gallup and Pew polls from 2018/19 here, but other polls provide similar results. There are two takeaways from this. First, the Black/white difference in support of "affirmative action" isn't all that big. Second, real-world programs of affirmative action in hiring are indeed unpopular, but they're unpopular with both white and Black respondents. The same is true of affirmative action programs for college admission.
This is not especially surprising. There are loads of things that people support in principle but don't support when they see the price tag. This is just one of them.
The moral of the story is to be careful about generalizing. Affirmative action and reparations break down very differently. Roughly speaking, everyone of all races hates affirmative action in actual practice.
Just another instance of Americans not knowing what names of things mean
“Would you support a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine?” Yes!
“Would you support NATO shooting down Russian planes that enter Ukrainian airspace?” NO! Are you crazy?!
The lack of a huge racial divide on the affirmative action issue does surprise me. Is the later implication that reparations enjoy higher support among African Americans? That’s weird because it’s even more radical than the affirmative action stuff
White guys have been the beneficiaries of affirmative action for 1,000’s of years.
We just happen to think it was due to our hard work.
Kevin, I hope you're OK, because this post is unusually sloppy. I clicked through and looked at the two polls you're discussing:
The Gallop polls on the questions "Do you generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for women? Do you generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities?" So your analysis is fair for that poll.
The Pew asks two questions. The first: "Is it very/somewhat/not too/not at all important for companies and organizations to promote racial and ethnic diversity in their workplace?" Only 25% say it is not too important or not at all important.
The second Pew question: "When it comes to decisions about hiring and promotions, companies and organizations should..." with the two options being "only take qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity" (74% chose this option) or "also take race and ethnicity into account in order to increase diversity" (24%).
On the basis of the second Pew question, you conclude that "[r]oughly speaking, everyone of all races hates affirmative action in actual practice." The question is sloppy and this characterization is like rounding 2.99 up to 4. Nothing in the question involves hatred or indicates how strongly the respondents feel toward the practice as defined by the prompt. But the poll question is terrible on its face because it does not define affirmative action practices fairly.
Of course nobody supports hiring an unqualified candidate for a position on the basis of race and ethnicity. A well-designed affirmative action program would hire a qualified candidate and would consider the diversity of the candidate as a part of their qualifications. If you were hiring lawyers for a 30 person law team that intends to practice criminal and civil law, hiring 30 lawyers from the same law school who all specialize in breach of contract claims on the grounds that those 30 were the "most qualified" would be a terrible idea. You would desperately want a diverse set of skills and expertise, even if one of the criminal lawyers you hired went to a second-tier law school and had lower grades or performance metrics than your contract specialist.
You can perceive affirmative action as completely disconnected from qualifications--whether a candidate is white or black has nothing to do with their ability to perform a job--or you can see it as incorporating qualifications--hiring only white people makes as much sense as exclusively hiring WW II historians to teach world history--or you can see it as correcting for inherent biases in the systems which PRODUCE qualifications--a white male candidate's application gets ranked more highly than it deserves based on actual qualifications, so other applications need to be weighted to correct this bias.
The Pew poll question takes as an assumption that race and ethnicity are not, and cannot be, part of a candidate's qualifications, nor can they lead to a hiring process unfairly comparing qualifications between two candidates. In other words, of the three scenarios above, the Pew poll treats as factual the claim that affirmative action considers factors that have nothing to do with qualifications: that it INTRODUCES a bias that did not previously exist so that a less qualified racial minority candidate would be hired before a more qualified white candidate.
To suggest that the belief that affirmative action programs which introduce unfairness to the hiring system instead of correcting for unfairness proves that Americans of all races "hate" affirmative action in specific even if they support the general idea isn't just a leap, it's a flight of fancy. Americans want hiring to be fair. If you tell them affirmative action programs will make hiring more fair, they support them. If you insist that they will make hiring less fair, they oppose them.
thanks
Well stated.
Surely your argument is with Pew, or with how affirmative action has been defined (by its opponents?). Your argument isn't with Kevin.
Even if the view that affirmative action is unfair is an erroneous one, it might nonetheless be the case that A) a lot of Americans hold said erroneous view, and B) a lot of Americans (of all races) might therefore indeed be opposed to specific affirmative action policies.
So someone is qualified (or perhaps not) on the basis of their race? I suspect you didn't want to do so, but that is what that wording implies.
Your example seems to stray though from something which is, for lack of a better term, an accident of birth, to something which was likely a conscious choice on the part of the freshly-minted lawyers as to which field of study they chose. Unless one assumes only the second-tier school taught criminal law, presumably one would seek criminal-law graduates from a first-tier school.
So someone is qualified (or perhaps not) on the basis of their race? I suspect you didn't want to do so, but that is what that wording implies.
It's not to difficult to imagine situations where race might reasonably be construed to be part of one's "qualifications." Take the example of police forces, for instance. In the past, it wasn't that uncommon in American cities with majority Black populations to have virtually no Black police. Remedying this situation by openly recruiting (and favoring) Black candidates would thus constitute a legitimate public safety initiative. However, such a dynamic surely doesn't apply in the vast majority of hiring situations, so, I think you're basically right: for better or worse "fairness" in most people's minds equates to true neutrality and non-discrimination with respect to hiring.
As we have witnessed many times (Trump v Clinton, a recent gun control initiate at the state level) strong polling does not always translate at the ballet box. Similarly, issue polling often overstates support and fails to capture intensity (will you change your vote or turn out to vote based on this issue). It is my perspective that when you ask folks if they want something and you either don’t mention the cost, or claim someone else will pay, then you gain support: however, support rapidly declines if you someone ‘would you pay X in higher taxes to get Y.’
With the issue at hand, I speculate, many say sure I support affirmative action or even repatriations. However, once you get to the details, many realize their choice is not cost free and they change their point of view.
As David Shor frequently mentions, the vast bulk of issue polling is paid for by entities with a dog in the hunt.
Who is David Shor's master, then?
Or is he just another broken campaign pro like Tad Devine or Peter Daou bottoming out in the anti-#idpol fauxgressive left?
I may find Bob Shrum, another career campaign loser, intolerable, but at least he limits his pathetic displays of self-harm to glib rejoinders on Hardball with Chris Matthews, or since Matthews chose self-cancellation to escape the full fury of the woke mob, prolly something like the Last Word.
When the term ‘affirmative action’ first came into use decades ago, it applied to recruitment practices, not hiring. It included advertising job openings in media targeted at communities of color, sending recruiters to historically-black colleges and universities, seeking minority applicants for internships - in short, changing practices so that the pool of applicants would look like America, instead of being overwhelmingly white.
& as with the Rooney Rule in the NFL, it got them interviews but no jobs.
The hiring pros went from having twenty white, typically man-presenting, faces to fifteen white, four black, & one of either indeterminate racial coding or just a stray Asian, Hispanic, or Indigenous, & they somehow still managed to only hire the white faces.
Too many people who rant on about racial affirmative action in college acceptance have a little to say about affirmative action applied to legacies or to the children of rich donners. Truth is 43% of white students at Harvard benefitted by this type of alternative affirmative action.
This is similar to political appointments where only black supreme court appointees are asked to show their LSAT scores and only black presidential candidates are asked to show their birth certificates.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-percent-white-students-are-legacy-athletes-n1060361
Yup.
I actually liked the way my alma mater -- which did have legacy admits -- looked for student body diversity: recruitment centering on states of origin. It was a small lib arts campus in Central Wisconsin, with enrollment at its nadir when I started (625, but climbing to 903 when I finished, & hitting 1000 two years after that), that had predominated with matriculants from Wisconsin, Minnesota, & Illinois. As the admissions department looked further afield, though, & turned over every rock possible to get to a sustainable enrollment, & looked for more students from the Southeast & California, plus targeting Milwaukee & Chicago in the states of record, the demographics of the campus were much less blanched.
I think Ripon is a success story in that.
There is a framing error here. When you ask people if they would like race to be taken into account when hiring, it is NOT the same thing as affirmative action: it also includes discriminatory intent, not just affirmative action. And that's why at least some people will say no.
I thought that, too, but if you look at the linked Pew Forum report, it shows that the question really did frame the consideration of race as a diversity promotion measure, not a broad license to discriminate:
"When it comes to decisions about hiring and promotions, companies and organizations should…
Only take qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity, [or]
Also take race and ethnicity into account in order to increase diversity."
Not all affirmative is using race to make hiring decisions, if you define this as choosing an applicant in the final pool based on race. I regret we allowed conservatives to define this debate to define Affirmative Action so cartoonishly narrow and in a way that can easily be demagogued. There are all sorts of types of Affirmative Action that seeks to increase participation by neglected populations from targeting recruitment, re-evaluating desired qualifications, developing non-traditional career paths in your industry, partnering with schools that serve largely under represented populations to develop skills, etc. It’s not all about making that final selection about race.
Early opponents of AA understood perfectly well that everyone think they unfairly lost out on a job because of race/nepotism/favoritism etc. and were outraged by it. They successfully used that outrage to mis-characterize AA for generations.
+2 white hands in a Jesse Helms campaign ad
If everyone hates affirmative action in actual practice, something else needs to be done.
Universal Basic Income, if ever implemented, would probably poll in exactly the opposite way, everyone would hate it in theory but love it in practice.
And that would have the benefit of moving a huge part of the population off the edge of desperation, which is what brings about all the anxieties of poverty, which is what causes poor performance in schools and in every other part of life.