Affirming progressive action

The Supreme Court continues to make a farce of liberal democracy in this country. On Tuesday, this country’s highest legal authority affirmed an attempt by Michigan voters to ban affirmative action in their state.

This might sound like a contradiction. After all, we often call something democratic if the people themselves have chosen it, but I promise you, it’s not. We often place limits on what the people of a democracy can democratically do.
President Lyndon Johnson, advocating for affirmative action in 1965, argued that a man hobbled in chains for years and years cannot merely be set free and fairly compete in a foot race.

For years and years, that man has been unable to prepare himself, held by chains in a limited range of motion. He cannot possibly compete on a level field with those who have been more
fortunate.

Those who oppose affirmative action claim it goes beyond its mandate, that it creates undue advantages for those it applies to and results in inefficiency.
They argue that all minority groups deserve is a level-playing field, not a level range of outcomes.

These people fail to realize that the playing field of the present is the product of the playing field of the past.

Past inequalities do not disappear when individuals have and raise children — often they are perpetuated, sometimes even magnified.

In the absence of intervention, equality of opportunity in the present is influenced, if not dependent upon, equality of outcome in the past.

All this is to say, you cannot randomly select two children in this country and assume they were both offered equal opportunities.

Too many factors dependent on outcomes in the past — like socioeconomic status, access to high-quality education, health care and nutrition, stability — serve to throw the playing field out of proportion.

Inequality of outcomes is an important component of economic efficiency, and I am not arguing for its elimination. Rather, I would seek to create interventions that help equalize opportunity for the generation that follows.

Affirmative action is clearly not a perfect program, and I don’t mean to defend it on its own merits. But clearly something needs to be done.

Affirmative action is doing something, even if it could do more.
The solution is not the elimination of a problematic program that is trying to level the playing field, but rather creating a program empowered to make the playing
field tomorrow more level.

Allowing a simple majority of voters in Michigan to eliminate that process and throw the odds once again in their favor is majority rule, not democracy.

drlreed@indiana.edu
@D_L_Reed