Originally published in Synapse on December 4, 1996.
I remember the morning after Proposition 187 passed. I was a third-year student in medicine. My team — residents, interns, and students — all sat in Moffitt Cafeteria in stunned silence at the overwhelming victory that spiteful measure had won in California. Schools and health care facilities were to report people they suspected of being illegal immigrants; meanwhile, nothing addressed the employers who benefit from illegal immigrant labor.
Some people talked, only half-joking, of needing to find a new state in which to live if this was the trend in California politics. The trend seems to have continued, though the shock has lessened.
With Proposition 209, I hoped, “Maybe people don’t know what they just voted for; maybe they were confused what ‘yes’ meant on this one.” Unlike 187, which made its target clear, 209 was shrouded in an air of goodwill; it was “the Civil Rights Initiative,” a step forward for equality and against discrimination, goals any reasonable person would want to support.
Even among people who voted for 209, there was a great deal of ambivalence. Many said they recognized inequalities existed but felt that current affirmative action programs were not the right way to rectify them.
Polls showed that in areas where whites live alongside minorities, up to 65% of whites believed that minorities have less opportunity to get ahead, yet those same whites tended to support 209, choosing to end affirmative action in favor of something better. The remarkable thing is this: no “something better” has been proposed, no better system presented or even conceived of.
The only alternative to affirmative action, then, is no action. “Best qualified” will now be the only criterion on which people will advance. This resonates well with the American ideal of the person who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps.
Deeply ingrained in the American psyche is the notion that hard work, ambition and talent open the doors for anyone in the “Land of Opportunity.” People love to tell of the long odds they faced and how they overcame them when they “made it.”
I believed in this ideal, too, believed I was succeeding solely on my own merits and determination. I was wrong. I grew up in a single-parent family; we were on welfare for a time, struggling to find our feet. I got milk and cereal with food stamps at the same store where more well-off friends shopped.
Other food we bought with money from our paper route. In high school I cleaned classrooms to pay for books and tuition and worked multiple jobs in college while my friends hung out and drank beer. With pride I looked at how far I had come. I wanted to believe that hard work and talent was enough for anyone; if I could make it, anyone could.
I did not want to see the luck that enabled me to attend largely white middle class schools and to live in middle class neighborhoods. I ignored the fact that relatives and friends had the means to help us through when finances got especially tight. Most of all, I did not want to acknowledge the benefits of the positive assumptions which accrue to people who look like me.
Poor but white, I was like the kids around me who would be going to college, to professional school. The future projected for them was projected for me as well. Middle class black kids, meanwhile, face daily expectations of lower ideals, lower ambitions, a more limited future; they, as much as poor blacks, must overcome negative stereotypes which are broadly held and, to most whites, readily confirmed.
We deride South Africa, where blacks and minorities were kept down by law, for their lack of freedom. A white man in Johannesburg told me, “Americans don’t understand how it is here. Our blacks are not like your blacks.” Whereas American blacks had proven their abilities, he said, South African blacks were known to be stupid, lazy, prone to criminal behavior.
In truth, South African blacks often spoke four or five languages; worked long hours at backbreaking labor for minimal pay; endured physical as well as social atrocities, almost always without retaliating; still, these stereotypes endured.
Now, as affirmative action programs are put in place in South Africa, even liberal whites feel threatened by reverse discrimination, and feel there must be a “better solution.”
America is supposed to be different. Here, everyone has the same opportunity — a chance to go to school, a chance to improve one’s life. But all schools and all homes are not created equal, and therefore all academic records, or job records, or personal accomplishments, are not equal.
Moreover, many white Americans look at “our blacks” and minorities with the same prejudices revealed halfway around the world, in a social system Americans have made a great show of reviling.
Roadblocks to advancement are everywhere. No matter how much drive and talent one has, each success story relies on a lot more luck than skill. In America, being born a white male is a hell of a lot of luck. Sadly, we’ve replaced this truth with the myth of the bootstrap and voted to hang on to our error.
