You Decide

… that the data show that the playing field is still far from level and that race and gender remain prominent “markers” in our society?

Study after study shows that our society is far from colorblind, post-racist and gender neutral. There are persistent gaps in income, pervasive discrimination in hiring and continued barriers to education for women and people of color.

Black and Latino children are more likely than white children to live in poor neighborhoods and attend resource-poor schools, more likely to lack health insurance, and more likely to end up in jail or prison. Although the black middle class has swelled and the median household income for black people has been on the rise for decades, in 2007, that income was still only 60 percent of the white median household income. Hispanic households lag at about 70 percent of the level of white households.

Because race and gender still fuel discrimination, being “successful” still isn’t any guarantee of a life and career untouched by bias. Sure, more women go to college now than 40 years ago, but studies show that young women 10 years out of college earn only about 70 percent of what their male counterparts earn. And this is the case more than three decades after the Equal Pay Act was supposed to outlaw pay disparity.

Affirmative action defenders say that in order to remedy these inequities we have to consider ways in which race and gender continue to matter. Accordingly, we have to continue to adjust the system. White males have benefited from discrimination against minorities and women for centuries: In the United States, blacks were chattel for 300 years while white people built this country with slave labor. And women couldn’t even vote in federal elections until 1920. The white patriarchy owes a massive debt to women and minorities, and affirmative action, including explicit preferences, is just one way to attempt to settle that debt.

UCLA law professor and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw writes that it’s helpful to envision a race around a track — call it the equal opportunity race. If we know that the people in the outermost lanes are running a greater distance than the ones in the inner lanes, she says, doesn’t it make sense to stagger where they start?