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What do you think of when you hear the term “affirmative action”?
When I ask students this question, the replies I get most often include “racial equality,” “racial justice,” “racial discrimination,” “racial preferences,” or “quotas.” Rarely do people mention gender. So it comes as a surprise to many to discover that white women have benefited more from affirmative action programs and policies than any other demographic.
It’s not an accident that conversations about affirmative action tend to center on race as opposed to gender. Instead, it’s a predictable outcome of a campaign by well-funded and organized opponents of race-based civil rights programs in response to legal changes that resulted from the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
As it became clear that these legal changes were imminent, wealthy white conservatives (with famous family names like Coors, DeVos, Scaife, and Hunt) mobilized massive resources to reverse the gains of civil rights initiatives, in general, and affirmative action, specifically. Part of their strategy included a national public media campaign designed to create white opposition to affirmative action policies by associating the term “affirmative action” with quotas or racial preferences that they said favored people of color and discriminated against white people.
But, in fact, few realize that the term affirmative action originated as a benign phrase used by presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to indicate that the government needed to take purposeful action, or act affirmatively, to end discrimination on the basis of race and gender. Eventually, a multitude of policies and practices designed to remedy systematic racist and sexist discrimination came to be referred to under the umbrella term affirmative action.
Affirmative action came to signify policies as diverse as plans to recruit or advertise jobs in communities of color, and programs designed for employers to identify and correct the under-representation of women in particular jobs.
But right-wing opponents of affirmative action focused national attention on race-based, rather than gender-based, affirmative action. And they successfully cultivated widespread white opposition to the core ideas of affirmative action. So we shouldn’t be surprised that white women, who may not even realize how they have benefited from affirmative action policies, are also some of the fiercest opponents of affirmative action.
It can be difficult to measure the extent to which different groups have benefited from affirmative action precisely because it’s an umbrella term that covers a wide range of policies and programs. But there are clear structural indicators that reveal that white women have benefited from these policies more than any other group.
For example, when we look at the progress made in higher education to create more racially inclusive and representative campuses, we see that progress has been quite slow. Statistics reveal that Latinos and African Americans are still underrepresented today in university admissions and graduation rates, especially in four-year colleges.
However, the progress made in achieving greater gender equality in colleges and universities is starkly different: Although women made up only 35.3% of those receiving bachelor of arts degrees in 1960, before affirmative action policies were established, by 1982, women were no longer underrepresented among degree recipients; today women have surpassed men in college admissions and graduation rates. In particular, if we look at white women, we find that by the year 2012, the group's enrollment in colleges and universities outpaced that of white men, with 72% of white women enrolled compared with 62% of white men.
Employment patterns reveal the same trends. Since the 1970s, African American unemployment rates have consistently remained about double those of whites, with even greater disparity for African American teens. But if we look at unemployment rates by gender, we see that in 2019 unemployment rates for men (3.6%) were nearly the same as for women (3.5%). Maybe even more revealing is the fact that in 2019 white women’s weekly earnings ($840) were higher than Black women’s ($704) and Black men’s ($769).
Despite these impressive gains for white women, approximately 70% of them somewhat or strongly oppose affirmative action, according to the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Many scholars, myself included, argue this opposition is clearly related to right-wing anti-affirmative action campaigns that have successfully focused national attention on race-based affirmative action.
In the late 1990s, a network of anti-affirmative action organizations got together to orchestrate a challenge to affirmative action in the courts. These organizations investigated colleges and universities across the country to identify affirmative action policies they could legally challenge. They also actively recruited white students, who they claimed may have been denied college admission because of race-based affirmative action, to participate as plaintiffs in their lawsuits against these schools. It was not a coincidence that the individuals they ultimately chose for their lawsuits were all white women.
By focusing on race-based rather than gender-based policies, anti-affirmative action contingencies were able to ignite a politics of white grievance that allied white women with white men against affirmative action.
This fall, the Supreme Court will hear another case that challenges the legality of affirmative action in cases brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The upcoming case was brought by an organization called Students for Fair Admissions, and once again the focus is exclusively on race. Given the conservative tilt of the current Supreme Court, some have suggested this case will lead to the end of affirmative action.
The home page for Students for Fair Admissions, which seeks to recruit support from people opposed to affirmative action, says:
If the Supreme Court does declare that affirmative action is unconstitutional, it will end race-based affirmative action in higher education and beyond. With this possibility looming before us, we must ask ourselves two important, related questions: Why have opponents of affirmative action focused overwhelmingly on eliminating race-based policies? And why have white women, who have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action, aligned themselves with white grievances instead of aligning themselves with women and men of color?
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