Affirmative Action: Truths and Lies

Notes from America with Kai Wright

WNYC Studios

News Commentary, Politics, History, News

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2021

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Originally Aired: 11/23/2020 “Reverse racism” has haunted the fight for job equity for generations. How’d this bizarre idea become such a bugbear? One Supreme Court case, 50 years ago helps explain. This week, our reporter Marianne McCune tells the story of that case -- and its aftermath -- to help explain why the American workplace is still so segregated. It’s the story of an affirmative action program at an aluminum plant on the banks of the Mississippi River. Marianne introduces us to a Black family that finally found economic opportunity through the plant’s affirmative action program -- and to a white man who argued that the program violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and took his case all the way to the Supreme Court. The outcome will surprise you. Companion listening from our archives: Two Schools In Marin County (02/06/2020) and A Secret Meeting in South Bend (02/27/2020) “The United States of Anxiety” airs live on Sunday evenings at 6pm ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts. To catch all the action, tune into the show on Sunday nights via the stream on WNYC.org/anxiety or tell your smart speakers to play WNYC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the United States of Anxiety, a show about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future.
0:08.7	Adidas has pledged that at least 30% of new employees hired in the US will be black or Latino.
0:14.5	But now you're looking to fill those open positions with a black person to now show everyone
0:21.2	that your organization is not racist.
0:24.0	There are the times where I think affirmative action has been viewed as a shortcut to solving some of these broader long-term structural problems.
0:31.0	It kind of seems like it's about making affluent white people feel good about themselves,
0:35.4	much more so than it really is a project of justice.
0:38.2	You know, we can't get to a society that is post-racial before we get to a post racist society.
0:45.6	It's not about taking someone's job that they are old.
0:49.4	These are not white jobs. These are jobs. Welcome to the show. I'm Kai Wright. I grew up in the 80s, which was this period in America
1:01.6	when it felt like the hottest thing for people to sit around
1:05.2	in debate was this notion of so-called reverse racism. It seemed like white people,
1:10.9	in particular middle class, quite comfortable white people.
1:14.7	We're just obsessed with the idea that it's possible to go too far with racial equality.
1:20.6	And that there were all these underqualified black people out there taking opportunities away from more talented white people.
1:26.0	And there was that word quotas. People spat it out like an obscenity, racial quotas.
1:31.0	Even people who supported affirmative action.
1:34.0	They would be careful to say, of course, I don't mean quotas or anything like that.
1:38.6	Honestly, it was all confusing to me both emotionally and intellectually because these just felt like deliberately oblivious arguments even as a kid. I couldn't figure out what white people were actually so worried about.
1:51.0	Affirmative action has never been a policy we've fully embraced in this country.
1:56.9	And yet, very soon, it's highly likely that the Supreme Court will do away with even the small provisions we do have.
2:05.4	The current case centers around how Harvard University uses race as a factor in admissions.
	...

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