You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of extremes and balances but of constructiveness. Welcome to a journey into a wondrous land limited only by the mind. Your next stop: the Midmorning Zone.
Rejoin our friends A and B as they discuss their perspectives on affirmative action, what goals it is intended to accomplish, and other possible approaches to those goals. They start their discussion with two different sets of assumptions and priorities.
In the world you’re familiar with, such a conversation would consist of several hours of back-and-forth statistics and dismissals, ultimately leading nowhere. A and B are different, though, and the conversation between our two traveling companions will lead us through… the Midmorning Zone.
A: Hey, B, did you hear about the Supreme Court’s decision that affirmative action in colleges and universities violated anti-discrimination laws?
B: Yeah, I’m glad they finally established that.
A: What?! How can you say that? Don’t you know what it means for people?
B: Ah, I apologize. I didn’t realize you were upset by the ruling. It sounds like it was an emotional blow for you. …Are you okay with discussing why people might support the decision, or would you prefer to talk about the situation with people who are on the same page as you first?
A: No, but thanks–I appreciate the sentiment. I did talk about it earlier with people who agreed with me. You just caught me off guard. Now is a good time to discuss it with someone who doesn’t understand why people are upset.
B: I appreciate that you’re comfortable engaging with me about this. It sounds like you are angry and frustrated about the Supreme Court decision against affirmative action. I feel bad that you feel that way, and I’d like to understand where your feelings come from. Anti-discrimination laws exist because discriminating against people based on their ethnicity is unethical. So how can it be fair for an institution to give groups of people preferential treatment based on their ethnicity?
A: I wouldn’t call it preferential treatment. The lingering impact of historical discrimination still affects many people. If we want to live in a healthy and ethical society, we should work on reversing that impact. How else would you accomplish that goal, other than with affirmative action to get more historically disadvantaged people into educational institutions and key professions?
B: That’s a good question to come back to, because I think there are other ways of doing that. Before we look at those, though, I should learn more about the situation. I agree that we don’t want the effects of historical discrimination to continue; I was just under the impression that those effects would have faded away by now. Why haven’t they? The answer to that question will inform which approaches we may want to use to address the problem for good.
A: Remember when we talked about climate change? I brought up equilibrium states.
B: Oh, yes. If you push a cart over a hill and down the other side, the cart doesn’t return to where it was before all by itself. It takes effort to push the cart back up the hill to the original side.
A: Exactly. Poverty is a very unpleasant stable equilibrium state. When you don’t have enough money, that affects your ability to take care of your physical and mental health, your family, your living space and location, your food, your clothing, your access to communications, your transportation, your ongoing education… and all those things in turn affect your ability to earn the money required to maintain them.
It’s all tied together. You can’t fix one thing without fixing something else first, which often means someone else who isn’t poor has to reach out and offer some resource like money, education, or a job to break the cycle. Poverty is a pit that is very difficult to get out of without help. It’s unreasonable to expect people to simply escape from a state of poverty on their own.
B: Ah, I see. That’s why the effects of racially discriminatory laws persist even after the laws themselves have been abolished. If you push a bunch of people into a giant pit and guard the edges so they can’t get out, that’s obviously bad. But when the guards leave, that doesn’t mean everyone can just climb back out.
A: Bingo. Another aspect of poverty is a lack of personal or professional connections who can help you get set up in more prosperous spaces. When people compete for investments in the form of education and jobs, poor people from minority ethnicities are at a disadvantage in that competition, and that disadvantage is self-perpetuating. Power has a tendency to concentrate in the hands of a relative few, so those who don’t start out with it end up with less and less of it and there’s not much they can do about it.
B: So let me make sure I understand your values. People face scarcity in the form of poverty. They are facing barriers to acquire the resources they need, and they lack the resources to get past those barriers. Those resources aren’t just money, but also physical health, mental energy, education, tools, and connections to people who are willing to help out. It looks like you are concerned about austerity preventing people from getting the resources they need to escape the poverty trap.
Not only that, but conflict shows up in the form of competition. Healthy competition in an economy is one thing, but people in poverty are at a systematic disadvantage. Through no real fault of their own they aren’t able to attain positions with socioeconomic stability or prosperity, from which they might escape poverty. There’s a combination of turmoil and corruption in the form of the free market favoring those who already have wealth and connections.
You want to spend resources to help out groups that are in poverty, and you want to make sure they are well-connected and empowered to compete on level ground, right?
A: That sounds spot on to me. We also want to make sure that people reach leadership positions where they can learn from the experience. Otherwise they and their communities remain susceptible to problems that call for experienced leaders.
There is also the problem of dogma, obviously, when people avoid reconsidering their prejudices that get reinforced by a perceived correlation of skills and influence with people’s ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. People’s implicit assumptions about others influence their evaluations of other people’s character and skills. We want to make sure that people from minority ethnicities have plenty of opportunity to prove other people’s assumptions about them wrong.
B: Got it. I understand your concerns and want to make sure they are addressed to your satisfaction. Your goals make sense to me, but I don’t think affirmative action is a good way to accomplish them.
A: Alright, I’m open to hearing other ways to accomplish these goals. What are your concerns with the affirmative action approach, though?
B: For one thing, the way we currently see affirmative action implemented, it seems that we might be lowering our standards for people’s skills to the point where they can’t deliver the results the role requires. When it comes to college admissions or hiring practices, we can consider a person’s membership in an underrepresented group as long as we don’t ignore their ability to keep up with the coursework or to do the actual job.
For that matter, we should really discuss the education system itself and the general competence of human institutions and organizations, since those are already dysfunctional regardless of affirmative action, and if we don’t figure out how to overhaul those then not much else will matter.
A: I’m with you on that last part. Hang on, though, are you saying that people from underrepresented groups can’t do coursework or jobs they receive through affirmative action?
B: Not necessarily. In ideal cases, affirmative action is just the tiebreaker between equally qualified candidates for a position. However, I am concerned that in practice we are elevating people who could become qualified given the opportunity, but who have not been supplied with a good foundation of skills because the education system that was supposed to serve them is dysfunctional.
The effects of poverty you mentioned earlier are also a problem; a child growing up in an impoverished household will have fewer opportunities to learn and develop advanced skills. With affirmative action, we’re throwing them in the deep end without sufficient preparation. That’s negligent of us, and it can lead to disaster when we use affirmative to fill positions of significant responsibility. Not to mention the waste of resources that could have gone to someone equipped to handle the situation.
I’m also concerned about the temptation to cover up people’s failures to prevent the public from deciding affirmative action is a bad idea. It feels like there’s a dogma forbidding us from honestly evaluating people’s skills if they’re not of a privileged majority. But people can’t learn how to do a job better if we don’t acknowledge ways in which they can improve. If we treat people like they know what they’re doing before they learn it, that tempts them into becoming decadent, coasting by with no challenge or consequences. That, and we invite corruption by people who want to exploit the affirmative action rules to get their way without delivering value and good results to the organizations and institutions they work for.
A: Okay, wow… Alright, let me make sure I understand. You’re not saying that people from underrepresented groups can’t be qualified for attending top colleges or for occupying positions of influence. You’re saying that affirmative action doesn’t seem to make sure they are prepared enough for these positions, given that the effects of poverty probably hurt their foundational education, and that it is very difficult to learn how to fill these roles when you’re already in them. You are also concerned that affirmative action rewards everyone involved for pretending that people already know how to do their jobs perfectly even if they don’t?
B: Right, exactly. If we’re going to help impoverished communities achieve representation in more influential spaces, that’s fine. But transplanting people into those influential spaces without any of the preparation for functioning independently in them is not helpful for anyone.
A: Okay, I can see where you’re coming from now. I do respect those concerns. So what are those other approaches you were thinking of?
B: Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that if we’re aiming to help people escape poverty, we should extend that to all impoverished people regardless of the cause of their poverty. I remember you’ve told me about the problem with wealth inequality in general, about how the rich create oppressive systems to maintain their wealth. It seems to me that if we push affirmative action that only helps people whose ancestors were oppressed, it will only make the distribution of wealth look the same within each ethnic group, with an oppressed lower class, a complacent middle class, and a wealthy and powerful upper class. I’m not sure that’s going to be much comfort to the people who are still poor, regardless of what ethnic group they’re in.
A: That’s a good point. We do want to end poverty anyway. However, affirmative action is still a good intermediate step, because it sets up every cultural group with some members who can share expert knowledge and leadership experience. Those members can adapt what they know to the needs and culture of their community. And we can make sure that we give people support and stable environments to learn these skills, so that if they make a mistake it doesn’t cause any irreversible damage.
B: Fair enough. In that case, when we’re addressing poverty, what if we set up criteria to define communities which lack connections to positions of influence, or which don’t have a cultural reference frame that facilitates communication with influential people and navigation of prosperous spaces? As opposed to defining communities based on what happened to their ancestors?
A: You mean, instead of identifying communities which need help connecting to prosperous spaces and positions of influence based on what happened to them in the past, we identify them based on what’s happening to them in the present?
B: Exactly. That way, if a community becomes more prosperous over time, we don’t have to change the rules of the policy. As the situation changes and the representation and influence of an ethnic group shifts, the methods of the policy can stay exactly the same, because the methods don’t make any assumptions about which ethnic groups are rich or poor. After all, using ethnicity as a proxy variable for making decisions about a person’s abilities and needs is a major factor in how we ended up in this mess in the first place.
A: Alright, I’m on board with a plan that helps all poor people and targets help for people in communities which are isolated and disempowered because of cultural or communication barriers. Are you comfortable with applying the principle of investment to alleviate poverty, though? We just went over how many different factors there are. Health and nutrition, education, transportation, communication, connections… Simply having enough money goes a long way towards making sure people get what they need, but we’ll need to make sure things like good quality education are available.
B: Yeah, education is a whole conversation in itself. A good quality education serves as preparation for dealing responsibly with situations as an adult or as a community. I would expect that as we improve education, people and their communities will be better able to handle problems independently, with less assistance from the federal government. In that sense, I would expect that any assistance that targets specific communities would be like training wheels, or physical therapy to get people ready to compete.
A: I can get on board with that. I’m not sure that the need for individual poverty assistance will ever completely go away, but if we can turn every impoverished community into a healthy one, communities can look after their members to see them through hard times and help them get back on their feet. A community is better equipped than the federal government to give its members the personalized support they need.
B: Excellent! The other thing that we need to make these programs a real investment instead of just endless spending is challenge. We’ll have to discuss this in more detail when we talk about universal basic income, but we need to make sure that people are actually contributing more to society than they’re taking, or the whole program won’t just be unfair to more productive people, it will be unsustainable.
A: I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. When people don’t feel desperate and oppressed, they usually want their lives to mean something. They want to contribute.
B: If they have a concept of a meaningful life, and they don’t get hooked on the various experiences and influences that modern society produces in overflowing abundance, then yes.
A: Fair point. We’ll make sure people have solid cultural foundations and community support inspiring them to strive to contribute towards something greater than themselves.
I also want to make sure we’re setting up ethical socioeconomic dynamics with our poverty alleviation program.
B: Of course. What did you have in mind?
A: Well, again, wealth and power tend to concentrate over time in a free market, which means wealth inequality tends to increase within communities and between them. Unless we want some sort of violent revolution, we should probably work on addressing that. It might be good to put in some sort of catch-up mechanics for resources and connections.
B: As in, giving people more of a boost the bigger of a disadvantage they have? What would that even look like? How would we pull that off ethically?
A: I haven’t worked that out yet, but it’s something to consider. It would mostly be giving them more support for their own efforts, more opportunities to learn under ideal conditions, and more opportunities to prove themselves and have the worth of their contributions be evaluated without bias.
B: Alright, we can probably figure that out. Anything else?
A: Oh, when we help impoverished people establish frameworks for smoother communication with people in wealthy and influential spaces–such as when interviewing for a job, requesting a loan, or pitching a product–we shouldn’t just tell people to conform to the background expectations of the wealthy. The wealthy shouldn’t unilaterally determine the style of communication. I admit that some communication styles are better for business and professional purposes, but each style of communication has some value, even if it’s just part of a community’s identity. People should not feel they have to completely leave that identity behind as they become more professional and influential.
B: I understand. While people may find that the pursuit of success requires that they let go of some habits that hold them back, we should be careful not to force them to change how they speak and act just to participate in more influential levels of society. They deserve to negotiate any such changes from a more solid socioeconomic footing. We can make sure influential people learn and appreciate different styles of communication so that they can meet people somewhere in the middle.
A: I think that wraps up the broad strokes. We’ll have to talk through the concerns about universal basic income and the education system separately.
B: Sounds good. I’m glad we at least have a constructive approach to help impoverished communities and underrepresented groups that accounts for each of our concerns about the situation.
A: Me, too. It’s amazing what problems we can tackle just by listening to each other’s concerns and being willing to consider alternative policy approaches that account for those concerns. I’m not sure how we would be able to maintain a functional democracy without such a basic adult skill.
Your host, the author: This conversation was brought to you by the Visionary Vocabularies Toolbox, a system of basic concepts for framing problems and solutions constructively. A and B have just demonstrated its use here as part of the Visionary Vocabularies project to help people go beyond arguing over tradeoffs and instead work together to build a world we can all be proud of.
These Midmorning Zone conversations do not purport to have all the research or all the answers. They are here to show how you can move a conversation forward. That means you don’t have to know all the answers in order to have one of these conversations yourself. You don’t even have to agree with the approaches you read here. All you have to do is understand your own values, understand other people’s values, and frame the situation constructively.
As you explore new angles together with other people, you will find some solutions which require more effort to bring to fruition, but which are even better than what any of you had in mind.
As the Toolbox becomes more widely used, conversations such as the one you just read will become our reality, and lead the way out of the confused, belligerent, flailing dawn of humanity into a thoughtful, neighborly, confident 9:30 or 10 AM. You, too, can be part of ushering in the end of humanity’s protracted and painful beginning. Tell your friends about your visit here and let them know that the planet Earth is late for brunch… in the Midmorning Zone.
P.S. Message me on LinkedIn if you want to learn how to promote constructive conversations on any topic! (I’m the one in the United States.)
© 2023 Alex Weissenfels
The Ginnungagap Foundation 