So affirmative action is back in the news because the racist Keebler Elf Attorney General Jeff Sessions wanted to remind America that he wants to take this country back...to times when white men didn’t have to hear minorities whine about little things like justice or rights.
The Department of Justice is now looking for right-wing lawyers to hire so they can use government resources to attack schools’ affirmative action policies for hurting white applicants. This is, of course, ridiculous considering how it goes against the very ethos of these programs. But that’s the whole point, right?
I want to take a moment here to show just how badly the Trump administration wants to intimidate marginalized people—women, poor folk, trans people, people of color, immigrants, etc. It’s not about rhyme or reason because if they want affirmative action to help white people it’s already doing that.
The main beneficiaries of affirmative action are not people of color. It’s white people—white women, to be exact.
From Sally Kohn at TIME magazine:
While people of color, individually and as groups, have been helped by affirmative action in the subsequent years, data and studies suggest women — white women in particular — have benefited disproportionately. According to one study, in 1995, 6 million women, the majority of whom were white, had jobs they wouldn’t have otherwise held but for affirmative action.
That’s a bit of an older op-ed, so let’s check out something more recent from Chloe Angyal at HuffPost (emphasis mine):
[A]ffirmative action has been quite beneficial to women, and disproportionately beneficial to white women. Women are now more likely to graduate with bachelor’s degrees and attend graduate school than men are and outnumber men on many college campuses. In 1970, just 7.6 percent of physicians in America were women; in 2002, that number had risen to 25.2 percent. But — and this is a big but — those benefits are more likely to accrue to white women than they are to women of color, and that imbalance has very real effects on employment and earnings later in life. In other words: affirmative action works, and it works way better for white women than it does for all the other women in America.
So why is the DOJ doing this? Well, racism is never rational—and the reality of affirmative action is just another reminder of that.
This move is yet another crusade in the culture war against social justice. It’s normal for bigots to whine over any perceived diminishment of their power and privilege. The problem is that now some of these bigots are running the country. And they’re using racist stereotypes—the under-qualified Black student getting a spot over a more “deserving” (white) student—to justify their use of government resources to potentially harm many generations of Americans to come as they create less diverse schools.