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The 1997 SPSSI presidential address: affirmative action: a compelling state interest - Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues President Dalmas Taylor - Transcript
Journal of Social Issues, Spring, 1998
My Newsletter column identified the rebirth of 19th-century theories and research on eugenics and race purity in the conservative politics of recent Republican administrations and think tanks operated by individuals from those administrations. In the past 30 years, there has been a concerted effort to position America in a conservative direction on the politics of affirmative action. In the foreword to No Mercy, a book that reviews the role the foundations have played, Mark Tushnet (1996) makes the distinction between political "wars of maneuver" and "wars of position." The former, for example, is a face off in elections and other confrontations, whereas the latter occurs as actors develop their ideological stances. According to this distinction, the war position is critical to success in the war of maneuver. The point of this observation, in the last decade or so, is that conservatives have conducted a successful war of position, and it is paying dividends in the anti-affirmative action arena.
While liberals have been successful in the academy, we have been unable to translate these successes, in general, into victories in the policy arena. By primarily writing for and to our colleagues, we have not fully engaged the discourse of the policy makers. Further, our intellectual conventions are not as attractive as they once were to the action-oriented foundations. There has been a paradigm shift here.
Elsewhere, I have observed that it has been said that we live at a level of abstraction that obscures our ability to discern fundamental meaning and values. And through our legal system and psychometric tradition, we have the ability to assign value and ownership to absolutely everything. This is precisely what we have done with education. We need to remember that in preliterate society, human knowledge belonged to everyone, and everyone was equally entitled to have a right of accumulated knowledge. We have made education a form of property, and through our credentials and arbitrary conventions, we have decided who shall and who shall not own that property. And so it is with jobs and a number of other commodities that we have a right to access. Every individual has a right to his or her own mind and body and may come to any institution, any institutional setting, to develop his or her productive capacity, contribute to human knowledge, and otherwise benefit from society largesse.
Those of us who are degreed or otherwise privileged are only custodians, trustees if you will, who hold knowledge in trust for humanity and are obliged to pursue equitable arrangements in the allocation of resources and commodities. The increasing diversity in our culture, and its implications for the workforce for the future, make it imperative that we promote standards that are inclusive and predictive of ability to perform. As psychologists, we have the capacity to do this and to do so within the boundaries of our mission to promote human welfare. Some have argued that affirmative action is justified as a form of reparation for evils of the past, whereas others have argued that it leads to stigmatization. The conservatives have beat us at the game of labeling by the usage of the pejorative nomenclature "preferences" and "quotas."
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