PLANET OF THE WHITE GUYS

By Barbara Ehrenreich

On the planet inhabited by the anti-affirmative action activists, the only form of discrimination left is the kind that operates against white males. There, in the name of redressing ancient wrongs, white men are routinely shoved aside to make room for less qualified women and minorities. These favored ones have no problems at all-except for that niggling worry that their colleagues see them as underqualified "affirmative-action babies.'' Maybe there was once an evil called racism in this charmed place-30 or 300 years ago, that is-but it's been replaced by affirmative action.

Now I agree that discrimination is an ugly thing no matter who's at the receiving end, and that it may be worth reviewing affirmative action, as President Clinton has proposed, to see whether it's been fairly applied. People should not be made to suffer for the wicked things perpetrated by their ancestors or by those who merely looked like them. Competent white men should be hired over less competent women and minorities, otherwise, sooner or later, the trains won't run on time and the planes will fall down from the sky.

But it would be a shame if Clinton's "review" sidesteps the undeniable persistence of racism in the workplace and just about everywhere else. Consider the recent lesson from Rutgers University. Here we have a perfectly nice liberal fellow, a college president with a record of responsiveness to minority concerns. He opens his mouth to talk about minority test scores, and then-like a Tourette's syndrome victim in the grip of a seizure-he comes out with the words "genetic hereditary background." Translated from the academese: minorities are dumb, and they're dumb because they're born that way.

Can we be honest here? I've been around white folks most of my life-from left-wingers to right-wingers, from crude-mouthed louts to prissy-minded alitists-and I've heard enough to know that The Bell Curve is just a long-winded version of what an awful lot of white people actually believe. Take a look, for example, at a survey reported by the National Opinion Research Center in 1991, which found a majority of whites asserting that minorities are lazier, more violence-prone and less intelligent than whites. Even among the politically correct, the standard praise word for a minority person is "articulate,'' as if to say, "Isn't it amazing how well he can speak!"

Prejudice of the quiet, subliminal kind doesn't flow from the same place as hate. All you have to do to be infected is look around: at the top of the power hierarchy-filling more than 90% of top corporate-leadership slots and a grossly disproportionate share of managerial and professional positions-you see white men. Meanwhile, you tend to find minorities clustered in the kind of menial roles-busing dishes, unloading trucks-that our parents warned were waiting for us too if we didn't get our homework done.

So what is the brain to make of this data? It does what brains are designed to do: it simplifies and serves up the quickie generalizations that are meant to guide us through a complex world. Thus when we see a black colleague, who may be an engineer or a judge, the brain, in its innocence, announces helpfully, "Janitor-type approaching, wearing a suit."

Maybe it's easier for a woman to acknowledge this because subliminal prejudice hurts women too. Studies have shown, for example, that people are more likely to find an article convincing if it is signed by "Bob Someone" instead of, say, "Barbara Someone." It's just the brain's little habit of parceling reality into tidy equations, such as female=probable fluffhead. The truth is that each of us carries around an image of competence in our mind, and its face is neither female nor black. Hence our readiness to believe, whenever we hear of a white male losing out to a minority or a woman, that the white guy was actually more qualified. In Jesse Helms' winning 1990 campaign commercial, a white man crumples up a rejection letter, while the voice-over reminds him that he was "the best-qualified." But was he? Is he always? And why don't we ever hear a white guy worry out loud that his colleagues suspect he got the job-as white men have for centuries-in part because he's male and white?

It's a measure of the ambient racism that we find it so hard to believe that affirmative action may actually be doing something right: ensuring that the best guy gets the job, regardless of that guy's race or sex. Eventually, when the occupational hierarchy is so thoroughly integrated that it no longer makes sense for our subconscious minds to invest the notion of competence with a particular skin color or type of genitalia, affirmative action can indeed be cast aside like training wheels.

Meanwhile, aggrieved white men can console themselves with the gains their wives have made. Numerically speaking, white women are the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action, and because white women tend to marry white men, it follows that white men are, numerically speaking, among the top beneficiaries too. On this planet, Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan may not have been able to figure that out yet, but most white guys, I like to think, are plenty smart enough.