Thread by @RosesPaintedRed

More people should read Walter Benn-Michael’s book the Trouble with Diversity and discover how little the form of racial diversity achieved by affirmative action as it is currently practiced actually accomplishes. 🧵1

https://twitter.com/elienyc/status/1587150832667172865

Benn-Michaels pointed out that while on paper elite institutions had "diversified" through affirmative action, the socio-economic status of their student bodies had not changed significantly. To the extent that elite educational institutions are gatekeepers to 🧵2

access to state and corporate power, Affirmative Action and the underlying notion of “diversity” as a race-neutral value in its own right (which is what Affirmative Action was reduced to after Bakke) does nothing to alter the prospects of a young person who is living in a🧵3

community that is impoverished as a result of the historical de jure racism against people of their anceatry. Rather, as Benn-Michaels & his some time collaborator Adolph Reed Jr. have argued conclusively, the form of "antiracism" embodied by affirmative action & other 🧵☺️4

identitarian policies is in fact a reactionary class politics that forms the left wing of the neoliberal project. That this is true is revealed by the fact that--as the lawyers for these institutions well know--schools wishing to "diversify" their student bodies through 🧵5

admissions policy have a more than viable proxy for race which is prohibited from use in a discriminatory law by the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Equal protection jurisprudence uses a system of heightened scrutiny for state action that targets 🧵6

race and a few other categories of ascriptive identity that have historically been directly used to discrimate against whole categories of people in US law. Laws & policies that discrimate but do not do so on the basis of those "suspect classifications" are subject to a much 🧵7

lower standard for passing muster. Specifically, socioeconomic status, aka class & wealth, is not subject to the same level of scrutiny. Should elite institutions really want to diversify (they don't, but assume they do) they can and should use actual conditions of poverty & 🧵8

socioeconomic disadvantage as a proxy for the socially constructed, ahistorical, immaterial categories they want to use for affirmative action. That will result in real equality of opportunity, real diversity, & really disrupt the reproduction of disadvantage in racially 🧵9

marginalized people. But rather than doing so, the elite institutions on the left flank of neoliberalism keeo defending the affirmative action programs that have proven over their 40+ years in operation to have no real impact on the immiseration of racialized communities. At🧵10

most they will benefit a few individuals who would otherwise not have had as easy access to elite educational institutions and the elite commercial and political institutions power those institutions are gatekeepers for. It does nothing to address the historical causes of 🧵11

racist inequality. And it has been obvious for decades now. Which, incidentally, is how we know thar reparations for slavery will not work. Affirmative Action was initially supposed to be a form of reparations, but it has not accomplished any actual repair🧵12

of the damages inherited by the Black community as a result of the historical injustices inflicted by the racist institutions of chattel slavery & jim crow. Given this, there is a live question about why characters like @ElieNYC and his fellow liberals have been so content 🧵13

for so long to merely fight a rearguard action in defense of Affirmative Action? Why us this the hair on fire moment? why not push the politicians who "represent" black comminities to do more than topple shitty statues of confederate war dead & call for congress to "study" 🧵14

the issue of reparations? guys like Mystal and his elitist ilk have channeled black politics away from any goal that would provide disproportionate benefit to racially marginalized people in favor of this weak tea idpol, and centrist democrats who aren't even interested in 🧵15

undoing the damage done to Black Communities by Bill Clinton's DLC neoliberalization of the great society programs that had stalled out during the Reagan and Bush administration. Given that history, and the failure of media figures like Mystal to elevate the voices of the 🧵16

many black critics, political scientists, historians, and activists who I am cribbing most of this thread from, it's difficult to believe that people like Mystal are not well aware of the self-serving nature of the policies they support. or the hatm they do the Black working 🧵17

class by overvaluing sloganeering and purely symbolic direct action (see afformentioned statue/flag campaigns, BLM chicanery, and fantastical ad hoc misdirection from the shenanigans against the Sanders 🧵18

insurgency in South Carolina like Mystal's laughably incoherent piece here: thenation.com/article/politi…) while concealing from view contrary and better sourced analyses of how the DNC establishment uses idpol to suppress radicalism while paying lip service to "antiracism."🧵19

Mystal and those like him are highly literate and educated by elite institutions thanks to Affirmative Action, remember, and that's a sign of how elite they are. So i know for a fact that if a guy like me with my lowly public university education can find this stuff in my🧵20

free time while working jobs that have nothing to do with racialized politics, then Mystal et al who get paid to write about this stuff for a living have no excuse for ignoring it in their work. Unless they are doing it intentionally. in which case perhaps losing a policy 🧵21

tool the neoliberal beltway elites champion in willful incoherence isn't such a bad thing? If Elie Mystal is what affirmative action delivers Afro American political journalism, don't Afro Americans deserve something better than affirmative action? socialized medicine, 🧵22

fully funded childcare, an end to means testing for SNAP & section 8, and free public college education for all high school graduates without having to join the military for example? That's a real, doable program. So why should we worry about preserving the dead letter of 🧵23

Affirmative Action instead? What is it that the neoliberals are really trying to save with that program, particularly when its at the expense of those other ideas? Because from where i stand, it looks like what they want is to reinstate racial categories in law. 🧵24

which is the way racism came to exist in the first place. funny how the elites keep doing that. 🧵end.

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