Matthew Yglesias, responding to Ross Douthat‘s column yesterday on affirmative action and “white Christians”:
But in terms of “roots of white anxiety” I think it’d be a stretch to understand this anxiety as somehow primarily about the Jews and Asians who power Buchanan’s cute statistical point. Douthat writes about “racially tinged conspiracy theories […] Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.” But these are conspiracy theories about blacks and Latinos who likewise experience “alienation from the American meritocracy.” So I think Douthat raises some real issues in his column—as opposed to Pat Buchanan, who was at best making fun of liberals and at worst engaging in his signature anti-semitism—but I don’t think these issues have much to do with racialized sentiments in today’s politics.
I’m not sure how much “affirmative action” as policy and “affirmative action” as a conservative concept affect racialized sentiments in today’s politics, but it’s important to understand the distinction between the two. Among conservative commentators, “affirmative action” often doesn’t really refer to actual government policy but roughly translates to “people of color being successful.”
As for Douthat, even the original post he links to acknowledges that many of the black students on college campuses are the children of elite families from countries in Africa and the Caribbean, not the African-American community that is likewise “alienated from the American meritocracy.” Yet for some reason Douthat rather unquestioningly cites this as an example for the motivation of lower-class whites against people of color, even though they’re plainly not benefiting as much as it might appear at first glance. A more appropriate question might be how a population with unemployment almost double the national average manages to arouse so much resentment about how much easier they have it than everyone else.
As I said yesterday, Douthat’s column comes close to endorsing a calculus that reinforces the sort of racial resentment that benefits Republicans politically and often undermines liberal attempts to expand the social safety net (attempts to extend health insurance to an uninsured population that is almost half white is “reparations”). I don’t disagree with Douthat’s conclusion that colleges would be better off admitting “a few more R.O.T.C. cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers,” I just think they’d be better off admitting more African-Americans too–something say, a more aggressive form of class-based affirmative action in college admissions might provide. I’m not entirely sure why we’re supposed to see those things as being in conflict with each other, except that we’re all really used to being in conflict with each other.
