opinion | Reflections on ‘Reflections of a Positive Action Baby’

In 1991, Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, began his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” with a disturbing anecdote. A fellow professor had criticized one of Carter’s papers for showing “a lack of sensitivity to the experiences of black people in America.” When the professor, who was white, learned that Carter was black, he retracted the comment rather than defend his claim. It reminded Carter that many people, especially among his peers’ elites, had certain expectations of him as a black man.

“I live in a box,” he wrote, one with all sorts of labels, including “Beware: discuss civil rights, law or law, and race.” Only‘ and ‘Warning! Positive action baby! Don’t assume this person is qualified!”

This was a book that refused to dance around its subject.

Weaving a personal story with a broader discussion of the successes and limitations of affirmative action, “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” offered a nuanced assessment. A graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School, Carter was a proud beneficiary of affirmative action. Still, he acknowledged the personal toll it took (“a decidedly mixed blessing”), as well as the sometimes troubling effects of affirmative action on black people as the programs evolved over time.

I first read “Reflections” to a Brown University urban politics class shortly after it came out, and shortly after Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Supreme Court to fill the seat formerly held by Thurgood Marshall, for whom Carter had served as clerk served. . The fact that Thomas was most likely nominated because he was black And because he opposed affirmative action, it puzzled many supporters of racial preferences. Was being black enough? Or did you have to be “the right kind” of black person? It’s a question Carter openly grapples with in his book.

In anticipation of what many expect will be the end of affirmative action when the Supreme Court makes decisions in two college admissions cases at the end of its current term, I thought I’d go back to the book that first brought me to life. seriously thinking about the subject. What immediately struck me upon rereading it was how prescient Carter was about these debates 32 years ago. What role affirmative action should play then played out in ways that continue to reverberate.

The end of affirmative action, according to Carter, was both necessary and inevitable. “We must reject the common claim that an end to preferences would be ‘a disastrous situation, amounting to a virtual overturning of the 1954 desegregation ruling,'” he wrote, quoting activist and academic Robert Allen. “The prospect of its end should be a challenge and an opportunity.”

For Carter, affirmative action was a necessary emergency measure to counter historic discrimination. Like many people these days – both proponents And opponents of affirmative action – he expressed reservations about relying on diversity as the constitutional basis for racial preferences.

The diversity argument implies that people of different races benefit from each other’s presence, which sounds desirable at first glance. But the implication of recruiting for diversity, Carter explained, had less to do with allowing black students to redress past discrimination and more to do with supporting and reinforcing essentialist beliefs about black people.

Carter, an early critic of groupthink, warned against “the idea that black people who attain positions of authority or influence have a special responsibility to articulate the supposed views of other people who are black—in effect, to think and act and to speak in a certain way, the Black way — and that there’s something quirky about black people insisting on doing something different.

In the past, such ideas may have been seen as “downright racist,” Carter noted. “However, now they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.” This belies the reality that black people, he said, “fairly shine with a diversity of views.”

Given statements like these, it’s hard to imagine that Carter would welcome the current fashion for white “alliance,” with its reductive assumption that all black people share the same interests and values. He decried what he called “the peculiar relationship between black intellectuals and the whites who don’t like to criticize us for fear of being labeled as racists – which in itself is a sign of a kind of racism.”

At the same time, Carter was shocked by the judgment of many of his black colleagues, describing several situations in which he was accused of being “inauthentically” black, as if people of a certain race were a monolith and those who deviated from it shied away from the somehow to their duty. He said he did not want to be restricted in what he could say by “an ancient and cruel form of silencing”.

In an interview with The Times in 1991, Carter emphasized this point: “No weight is added to a position just because someone is black. One should judge an argument on its own merits, not the race of the person making it.”

Carter disagreed with the belief, now practically gospel in academic, cultural and media circles, that heightened race awareness would be central to overcoming racism. However well-intentioned, if you reduce people to their race-based identities rather than seeing them as individuals in their full, complex humanity, you run the risk of making sweeping assumptions about who they are. It used to be called stereotyping or racism. As Carter noted, “There has always been something disturbing about the advocacy of a continuation of racial consciousness in the name of eradicating it.”

Carter’s arguments were controversial at the time, but the book was nevertheless widely praised. In a cover review in The New York Times Book Review, David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the civil rights movement, called “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” “powerfully written and compelling.” The Los Angeles Times said it “an essential text in the public debate about racial preferences.” The New Yorker called Carter”smart, subtle and funny.”

Although consistent majority of Americans Today, racial biases in college admissions—including majorities of black and Hispanic people, as well as majorities of Democrats—affirmative action advocates too often dismiss affirmative action beneficiaries who publicly express reservations about the policy. These defenders often make knee-jerk assumptions about the political agendas of liberal black writers such as Thomas Chatterton Williams and my colleague at The Times, John McWhorter, who falsely portrayed them as conservatives or “traitors” to their race.

Some people came to the same conclusions about Carter in 1991. But he rejected all attempts to label him, insisting that intellectuals should be “politically unpredictable.” As the Washington Monthly noted, “Critics who try to push (or pull) Carter into the ranks of the black right wing will make a mistake. He’s not a conservative, neo or otherwise. He is an honest black scholar – the product of the pre-politically correct era – who hates debate being suppressed by a wing or by people of any color.

This strikes me as the biggest difference between reading the book today and reading it as a student at a liberal Ivy League college: the attitude toward debating controversial views. “Reflections” offers a powerful and unflinching examination of ideas, something that academia, the media and the arts still appreciated in 1991. Carter’s arguments were deemed worth discussing, misleading as his critics found them. And Carter was ready and willing to defend them.

Today, a kind of magical thinking has taken hold of ideologues, both left and right, who seem to believe that stifling debate on difficult issues will make them disappear. But if affirmative action itself disappears, America—which Carter viewed as “a society that cheapens its racial justice”—will no longer be able to grapple with the real and persistent inequalities what it was needed in the first place.