VOICES

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Lessons of 209 -- Time to Move Beyond Zero-Sum Approach to Race Relations

By Joan Walsh

Date: 11-06-96

The victory of California's Proposition 209, abolishing affirmative action programs, shows how badly the nation needs to move beyond zero-sum solutions to racial inequity as the next century approaches. PNS associate editor Joan Walsh is a writer specializing on issues of urban poverty.

SAN FRANCISCO -- I'm used to being a minority. I'm a white California voter who opposed Proposition 209, which abolished affirmative action, and most white people didn't vote that way. I didn't oppose 209 because I'm a woman and it would hurt me personally -- which initiative opponents hoped. I opposed it because I'm an old fashioned racial integrationist, and I'm afraid of what the future holds if this racially diverse state is denied its most effective, if controversial, policy tool for promoting equity and inclusion.

Yet for the last two years I've had to stifle my uneasiness with discourse around race in California, and the victory of Proposition 209 confirmed my discomfort. It proved that the nation needs to move beyond zero-sum answers to racial inequity, and outdated racial rhetoric that isolates white people and substitutes retribution for equity.

The defeat of affirmative action is a crisis for California. There is nothing to replace it, and real live people will be denied social and economic opportunities they need and deserve because of it (although the courts will likely postpone full implementation for years). But the current impasse shouldn't be surprising. The zero-sum approach to civil rights, in which one group wins at another's expense, has been doomed for a long time.

A zero-sum strategy was defensible when the issue was getting a privileged white majority to share political power and resources with a small, dispossessed, viciously persecuted black minority. But in a state where soon, no one group will hold majority status, it's predictably unpopular.

Though Proposition 209's opponents emphasized -- correctly -- how much white women have gained from affirmative action policies, the election turned out to be all about race. It showed that the nation has neither language nor policy that makes sense in a multiracial landscape where white people no longer have a monopoly on the impulse to resist change.

Interminority conflict is rising in California, with blacks resenting Latino newcomers in South Central Los Angeles, Latinos attacking the credibility of black political leadership in cities around the state, and Chinese parents suing to scuttle an NAACP-backed school desegregation plan in San Francisco. Black and white Californians may yet find common ground in our discomfort with the state's Asian-Latino future. The writer Richard Rodriguez calls us "the new Native Americans," an edgy people unready to accept the need for new strategies for a mixed race future.

How do we develop these new strategies? First of all, we have to give up our attachment to a black-white paradigm of racial inequality, which can't explain the situation of Asians and Latinos. We must also acknowledge that strategies intended to amass a monolithic "people of color" electoral coalition are doomed. And increasingly we should challenge the more reactionary aspects of multiculturalism, especially its anti-white bias.

There has always been a tinge of payback and retribution in the way affirmative action and other civil rights remedies were defended and implemented, and in the current climate that seems politically if not morally indefensible. Recently a colleague told me about a "people of color" caucus he had formed inside a group that was white-led, but mainly comprised of non-whites. The reason? "We've been excluded for so long-- they should know how it feels."

They -- we -- should. But should that goal drive social policy? Multiculturalism means white people too.

Still, by any measure, white people have a disproportionate share of the nation's bounty and they will for the foreseeable future. But California's mixed up racial politics could make it easier to find fair solutions if the goal of public policy is equity and inclusion, not retribution. As the state becomes more Asian, for instance, there could be a growing white constituency for what we now call affirmative action. Without it, white students would be unable to compete with Asians on grades and test scores alone, and the university, already 40 percent Asian, would be much more so. Policies that encourage diversity are defensible -- a multicultural nation can't have a monocultural elite, whatever its race, and the state should look for criteria that open higher education and leadership opportunities to a racial mix of qualified people.

It's also possible that the scarcity of good public education options at a time of rising Asian achievement and surging Latino enrollment will jolt white voters into lifting Proposition 13, the property tax limit that has strangled public education since the late 1970's. In San Francisco, touting the benefits of diversity, not just harping on the obligations, has paid off for the public schools. Spanish, Chinese and Japanese immersion programs are crowded with families of every race, including whites, who are anxious for the benefits bilingualism provides, and a growing school choice program tries to honor parental preferences while protecting racial integration goals.

It may be that all manner of surprising coalitions will spring into shape if we size up racial politics with an eye toward equity and get beyond zero-sum models of race relations. We have no choice. The victory of Proposition 209 ended the old civil rights order, and we have to build a new one.