November 23, 2005
Martin Luther King and Affirmative Action Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon and I disagree about whether, from a historical perspective, the Fourteenth Amendment allows for race-based quotas, targets, or set-asides. I think he makes a strong case that it does not; I think I also make a strong case that it does. Here is where divining “original intent” becomes an almost futile exercise. Alas, it’s the method in vogue, and it lends itself to a lively debate. On matters of public policy, I think John Steele Gordon and I are more in agreement. He supports class-based affirmative action, because it holds out the prospect of creating a more just society in which more citizens enjoy equal opportunity, and because it offers the promise of an America in which racial divisions cease to be salient. I support it, as well, because I think it’s more politically pragmatic and because I’m concerned about the growing socio-economic divide in America. That said, it’s still worth noting that though Martin Luther King, Jr., called for a color-blind society, he was not, as many pundits have suggested, opposed to affirmative action. As he grew more interested in questions relating to class inequities, he also came to a sophisticated understanding of the intimate relationship between race, public policy and poverty. Thus, in his book Why We Can’t Wait, King wrote that “no amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. . . . I am proposing, therefore, that just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans, America launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial.” Critically, King envisioned these broad-based, public-sector compensatory programs as targeting African Americans and poor whites, whom he labeled the “derivative victims” of slavery and Jim Crow. His reasoning was complex, but essentially he agreed with W. E. B. DuBois, who once argued that the Jim Crow bargain offered nothing to poor and working-class whites but the social and psychological “wages of whiteness.” In return for the social privileges and psychological boost that “whiteness” gave them, these whites—millions of them, from slavery times through the modern age—surrendered political and economic power to elite actors. Jim Crow divided white and black labor against each other, stunting the growth of unions, labor parties, and liberal political coalitions. Jim Crow thus drove down wages across the board and secured a political system (chiefly in the American South) where taxes were regressive, public services were minimal, and political participation was sharply limited. Remember that on the eve of World War II, poll taxes in eight Southern states disenfranchised as many as 64 percent of white citizens and virtually all eligible black voters. It’s hard to say what most working-class whites got from Jim Crow other than the smug satisfaction that they weren’t black. In other words, King embraced affirmative action—if we define affirmative action broadly, as compensatory government programs that benefit only certain categories of citizens—for African Americans and poor whites. He looked toward a future in which America was color blind, but he realized that public policy and politics had long bound the questions of race and class together, and that it was impossible to address one problem without also addressing the other.
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