A Difficult Endeavor

Harris calls out Brown v Board for failing to, at the very least, address the “de facto white privilege not mandated by law.” She states that although the court ordered the desegregation of schools, they failed to truly recognize the entrenched privilege of the white people still in charge of those schools. She further claims the purpose of affirmative action is to grant people of color the jobs they would have were the playing field fair. Harris puts a much larger burden on the government than it has been willing to take in the past, and it is difficult to judge if the government would be right in making the expansions she calls for.

The problem is made more difficult in the view of the contentious definitions of black and white. Harris contends that race is not an objective, measureable thing, but instead is deeply embedded in history and culture. She condemns the early slavery laws, which attempt to define blackness exactly what makes a person black, from mixed parentage to a “single drop” of black blood. She also denies the title of black to two men who identified themselves as black on an application, due merely to the race of their great-grandfather. On the ruling of a judge which claims a group of Native Americans to not be a tribe due to the mixing of their blood, she asserts that the court failed to recognize the construction of their tribe as anything more than a biological fact. It is plain that Harris does not regard race as solely a biological fact, but as a mixture of culture, background, and history. Unfortunately, this makes even more difficult the discussion of what affirmative action is appropriate. No doubt Harris would feel that a “passing” woman such as her grandmother would be deserving of affirmative action, that her grandmother suffered immeasurably from the pain of hiding her identity. Undoubtedly, Harris would deny to a woman such as Rachel Dorzel, the white leader of a chapter of the NAACP, who passed as black for many years. There are obviously, however, many in between these two cases, and the difficulty lies in determining who, exactly, is deserving of the intervention of affirmative action.

Harris states, quite correctly, that the only reason there is unfair representation of people of color in schools and businesses is because of white privilege. If, she states, one accepts that people are born inherently equal, then there must be little other reason for unequal representation. Therefore, affirmative action is just because of its nature of being distributive justice, that is, it correct wrongs still being perpetuated. It is not, she claims nearly so important for affirmative action to be corrective justice, or justice which seeks to correct harms done to ancestors. Therefore, because Harris believes both that wrongs are still being done, and that whites that overwhelmingly populate positions of power did not fairly earn their positions, Harris is effectively putting a moral burden on the government and those businesses and schools engaged in affirmative action to determine who it is that would have occupied those positions were the playing field equal. These places must not simply give preference to undervalued people of color, but to determine exactly who on the playing field does not belong.