Affirmative Action: Why We should Consider Reform‪.‬

Drawing into sharp relief the negative impacts of racial preferences on motivation, several conservative scholars such as Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele have argued that terminating affirmative action will give African Americans fresh impetus to develop the skills required to enter into an arena of competition with mainstream minorities. By proposing the integration of African Americans into the market economy, however, they obviously fail to explain how they could possibly acquire the requisite skills to grow more competitive in a society where it is difficult to get beyond race as a social marker. Ignoring the persistence of discrimination, they account for poverty and underemployment among blacks as a transient class phenomenon and falls short of providing a convincing analysis of the interconnection between economic performance and the social environment. To borrow Michael K. Brown et al's terminology, this kind of "racial realism" then brings such scholars closer to the sociological tradition which explains racial inequalities by performance "deficits" pertaining to the less advantaged groups themselves (6). Dinesh D'Souza, Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell, among several other scholars of race, believe that the civil rights revolution helped eradicate discrimination, that the US is "rapidly becoming a color-blind society" and that therefore there is little need today for racial preferences (Brown et al. 2). By placing emphasis on skill and education, they exhibit considerable affinity with William J. Wilson's analysis of market mechanisms (see Wilson 1978). But unlike him, they seem considerably less concerned by specific demographic characteristics of the African American community that have proven more decisive than age or geographic distribution, notably the very structure of the family.