With a growing majority of conservatives eager to see the elimination of racial and gender preferences as guides to federal affirmative-action programs, political leaders are scrambling to refine their stances on an issue that promises to play a key role in next year’s presidential election. But amid liberal and conservative ideologies, will the essential goal of affirmative action (as a means to justice for all people) end up lost in the political hustle?
Affirmative action emerged in the 1960s as a result of efforts by the civil-rights movement to persuade America to honor its original contract of constitutional ideals: that “all [people] are created equal.” President Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964 sought to prohibit racial discrimination in the present and in the future; however, it could not correct the effects of past societal inequities-particularly in the areas of housing, education, and employment. In a nation scarred by a legacy of racial injustices, affirmative action was to be the compensatory medicine that would offer equal opportunities for all individuals regardless of color, race, religion, or gender. While first addressed to the needs of African Americans, later the needs of Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and women were added to the roll.
Today, many look upon the process of affirmative action as being unfair. Unfair to whites and, particularly, to white men. But an urgent question for Christians is this: Should we be more concerned about fairness or justice?
Genuine justice is not based simply on fairness. In fact, a preoccupation with justice as fairness lies at the root of most problems in our society and in the world—whether among individuals, groups, or nations—and is at the center of the affirmative action debate.
LAND OF UNEVEN OPPORTUNITY
The notion of justice as fairness wrongly assumes that everyone is equal. But what is sometimes forgotten is that sociohistorical circumstances often preclude equality. Our history has made the playing field of opportunity uneven from the start.
In some track and field racing events, the starting blocks are staggered so that those beginning from different points on the track will all have an equal opportunity. Similarly, affirmative action is a staggering of society’s “starting blocks” with the aim of creating a level playing field for women and people of color. Why? Because, as Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, “There is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.”
In order to treat all persons equally and provide genuine equality of opportunity, affirmative action says society must give more attention to those born into or placed in less favorable social positions. This “fair share” approach is a particularistic effort and not a universal action, since it is an attempt to place select groups in the equal position that they would have held had there been no barriers in their paths to progress.
But the principles that drive affirmative action also place it in a precarious Catch-22. Created on the idealism that the rights of individuals should be respected without regard to race or gender, affirmative action ends up contradicting this very premise by giving a perceived “advantage” to individuals from underrepresented groups.
How then does one address this supposed dilemma at the heart of the current debate? A good starting place is to go back to God’s concept of justice. God’s justice does not spring simply from what people deserve but more often from what they need. It is not fair play but righteous play, based on individual circumstances (Ezek. 33:20).
This theme of righteous play is the central message of what might be viewed as an affirmative-action parable. In Matthew 20:1-16, Jesus tells the story of a landowner, who goes out to the marketplace to hire workers for his vineyard. He begins at dawn and continues hiring until just one hour before closing time. At the end of the day he pays them all the same agreed-upon wage. The fact that the eleventh-hour laborers had not been hired until late in the day was no fault of theirs. They had been standing in the marketplace all day, looking for work, but as they declared to the landowner, “No one has hired us.”
Were their needs any less because they had not been hired until late in the day? No. Thus, out of a genuine concern for them and their families, the landowner employed them for what little remained of the day and then paid them a wage not commensurate with the work they had done, but commensurate with their needs.
Those who had worked all day, however, did not share the employer’s compassion for the others and therefore raised up voices in complaint: “unfair,” “reverse discrimination,” “preferential treatment.”
Was the landowner’s behavior fair? No; but neither was the father’s treatment of the prodigal son who had misspent his share of the inheritance (Luke 15:11-32) —a fact that did not escape the notice of the elder brother. Here, too, we can glimpse the motivation behind the justice of God—righteousness and compassion, not fairness.
As these two parables reveal, our society’s obsession with strict fairness tends to manifest itself only when there is a danger of someone else getting more than what we think he or she deserves, especially when what they get is precisely what we want.
What is clear today is that affirmative action is still needed. The question is this: Can we approach the issue with the same selflessness and righteous grace reflected in the character of Almighty God?
COLORLESS NEED
One answer to the affirmative-action debate is to base the program not on group conditions, but on individual need. Just because one is black, Latino, or female does not automatically mean that one is at a disadvantage. Many of us within these categories are doing quite well in this country and should not be judged as disadvantaged and automatically deserving of affirmative-action programs simply because of our race or gender. (The need for institutions to increase their cultural diversity is a different matter, which is better handled under policies other than affirmative action.)
On the other hand, there are many whites in this country who live in grinding poverty. But because they are “white,” are they to be deemed undeserving of special treatment? If the measure of equity is need rather than race or gender, then the answer is obvious. Indeed, need has no color or gender.
As we look at affirmative action through the lens of God’s justice, it becomes less a system of quotas, set asides, and preferential treatment and more a compassion-driven program to help the socially disadvantaged of any color-based on individual need. This is what Martin Luther King, Jr., had in mind, as Coretta Scott King reminds us, when “he spoke out sharply for all the poor in all their hues, for he knew if color made them different, misery and oppression made them the same.”
The time has come to change affirmative action: not to get rid of it, but to strip it of all the political barnacles weighing it down, and to streamline it back to its original objective of justice in harmony with the gospel of God’s grace.
Caleb Rosado is professor of sociology at Humboldt State University in California.
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