Affirmative action failed black families where it matters most after feminists hijacked it to benefit whites.

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“The gap in wealth between races has not lessened; it’s grown.” -President Barack Obama, August 28, 2013, tribute speech to Martin Luther King.

We’ve all heard about the unintended consequences of government intervention. Hold on to your hat: A program conceived to help the oppressed appears to help the “oppressors” about as much. Who knows — it may lend a hand to more middle- and upper-class white families than to poor black ones.

“In recent years, the affirmative action debate has focused on government-sponsored affirmative action and university admissions, leaving corporate affirmative action relatively unexamined.” —Christopher M. Leporini, “Affirmative Action in the Workplace”

Affirmative action: laws mandating increased numbers of women and minorities, especially in employment. —Abate of Florida, Inc. (a glossary of political terms; emphasis by Male Matters)

To pay-equity feminists and the mainstream liberal media, who believe white women should be included in affirmative action because of the widely discredited “77 cents to men’s dollar for the same work,” an affirmative-action perspective like the one below may be the most threatening of all perspectives on any topic. Hence it will be ignored — or if not ignored, attacked — by both pay-equity feminists and the mainstream liberal media.

How relevant is affirmative action in higher education, if it fails to help blacks narrow the races’ wealth gap?

Black Americans have at least one good reason to persist in demanding affirmative action: their wages, which ought to be the true measure of affirmative action’s success — where the rubber meets the road — continue to gain poorly on whites’.

Between 1985 and 2000, blacks’ median wage advanced on whites’ by a mere 1.2 percent. Why? Because although “affirmative action programs are often described in the press as being based on ‘racial preference,’” says Dr. Manning Marable, Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University, New York City, “the overwhelming majority of those who are the chief beneficiaries of affirmative action are white women.” (See also a June 2016 report at Vox.com.)

Dr. Marable is hardly alone in being aware of this fact. In the 2006 book Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men, the authors write, “Although polls have shown considerable American support for affirmative action, those who advocate equality of opportunity (even in a modified form) have criticized it for…conferring greater benefits on white women than blacks of either sex, for whom affirmative action was originally designed.”

Citing a statistic representative of many employers up and down the country, a March 1998 press release from the State of Washington’s Office of the Governor informs: “Of Washington state workers who have benefited directly from affirmative action, 60 percent are white women….”

“While original feminists portrayed women as equal to men, the 21st-century feminist message is that women cannot succeed without affirmative action.” –How Obama’s Gender Policies Undermine America, published September 16, 2010

Thanks to the myriad mandated affirmative-action programs at public institutions and at employers doing business with or receiving funds from the federal government, and thanks to the voluntary affirmative-action programs of private-sector employers, white women have done quite well. Compare their wage gain from 1985 to 2000 to other groups’. White men’s median wage rose 60 percent, black men’s 65 percent, and black women’s 70 percent: white women came well out on top with a 78 percent gain. White women’s big leap contributed greatly to blacks’ paltry gain on whites.

“While the unemployment rate for white men dropped for the fifth straight month in March to 8.9%, it hit 19% for black men. That’s a sizeable 1.2 percentage point jump in a single month. During this same time, unemployment for black women also grew from 12.1% to 12.4%, even as the jobless rate for white women held fast at 7.3%.” -Dwayne Wickham, USA Today, April 6, 2010, “Obama ignores black joblessness at his own peril” 

“The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade….” -Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, August 30, 2014, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” August 30, 2014, columnist

“When integration came,” writes Joel Kotkin, executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, on August 13, 2020, at The American Mind, many talented African-Americans naturally jettisoned ethnic business, turning largely to corporate and government positions. As they secured their rights, the community bifurcated between a sizable, successful managerial middle class that expanded significantly since 1960, and a vast underclass. Yet in recent decades this progress has slowed, particularly in education, with African-Americans lagging recent arrivals from Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Since 2000, Black median household incomes dropped by five percent while whites grew by six percent.” [Stress by Male Matters USA] Could the racial household income gap have widened mostly because of feminist-hijacked affirmative action?

Ideological feminists in particular strongly support the white female’s inclusion in affirmative action. That’s because most of them apparently believe white women experience an oppression similar to blacks’. White women’s oppression, these feminists say, results primarily from white women’s exclusion, like blacks’, from “white men’s” jobs.

But unlike blacks, says Warren Farrell, author of Why Men Earn More, “Women are the only ‘oppressed’ group…to be born into the middle class and upper class as frequently as the ‘oppressor.’”

Moreover, white women generally have been able to find a well-paid husband to roughly the same degree white men have been able to find a well-paid job. Via marriage, birth, and inheritance, white women have benefited from white men’s jobs as much as white men themselves. When they divorce, they receive, on average, more child support and alimony than blacks. (The term alimony may provoke cynical laughter among the black women who consider alimony a privilege reserved for white women.) Recognizing women’s economic well-being, an Editor & Publisher (now defunct in print form) front page in 1996 touted: “Who controls most of the wealth in the nation? Women.” The headline was not, of course, talking about black women. Says Forbes: “The Federal Reserve reports that women control 51.3 percent of all wealth in the United States. By 2020 that number is projected to grow to two-thirds. A second BCG study showed that one in three high net worth individuals (those with assets over $250,000) are women. And their wealth will grow at 8 percent per year.”

Women also control, according to American Demographic, consumer spending by a wide margin in nearly every consumer category.

“Over the next decade, women will control two thirds of consumer wealth in the United States and be the beneficiaries of the largest transference of wealth in our country’s history. Estimates range from $12 to $40 trillion. Many Boomer women will experience a double inheritance windfall, from both parents and husband.” – Claire Behar, Senior Partner and Director, New Business Development, Fleishman-Hillard New York (She-conomy.com) See also https://archive.is/2CdF0

“I regard affirmative action as pernicious — a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women. And the number one sign of it is in the universities. The elite schools were destroyed by affirmative action for women, not for blacks.” —Author/lecturer Prof. Camille Paglia

Linking white women to affirmative-action goals has produced an unintended consequence of great irony. Just as most white men share their income and assets with white women, most white women reciprocate with white men. More to the point, they share with them their affirmative action gains. This means, possibly, that by virtue of the huge number of white women assisted by affirmative action, white men are the program’s second biggest beneficiaries, despite however often they as individuals may suffer “reverse discrimination.” For every white man hurt by affirmative action, one or more might be obliquely aided. Perhaps even many of those who are hurt are partially or fully compensated — “through the back door,” some blacks could argue — when affirmative action rewards their wives.

On April 26, 2011, Whoopi Goldberg on ABC’s “The View” [four minutes into the video] decried that if anyone actually looks at who benefitted from affirmative action, “it was not black people; it was white women. That is a fact.” It’s too bad that Goldberg apparently didn’t recognize the ironic unintended consequences.

That white men profit in this roundabout fashion is not often realized but it is no secret. “Affirmative action has enabled wives and daughters and mothers and girlfriends to compete in the workplace,” said Ralph G. Neas, former executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, “and that has helped entire families, including white males in those families.” Corretta Scott King, speaking at a Washington County university on Martin Luther King Day, didn’t explicitly say affirmative action helps white men, but implied as much when she said, “So affirmative action benefits all families.” [Why a program to help all families?!]

“Between 1974 and 2004, white and black men in their 30s experienced a decline in income, with the largest decline among black men. However, median family incomes for both racial groups increased, because of large increases in women’s incomes. Income growth was particularly high for white women. The lack of income growth for black men combined with low marriage rates in the black population has had a negative impact on trends in family income for black families.” –Economic Mobility Project

Black women in the U.S. who work full time, year-round are typically paid 62 cents for every dollar paid to white men. Compare that to white women’s 87 cents. Yet white women benefit from affirmative action more than blacks! All thanks to white feminists.

Thus, a program that was conceived to help the oppressed appears to help the “oppressors” about as much. Who knows, it may lend a hand to more middle- and upper-class white families than to poor black ones, since a beneficiary’s economic status isn’t, to my knowledge, a qualifying factor. How many times, I wonder, has the wife or daughter of a well-paid white man been boosted by affirmative action into a well-paid job herself — a job that might otherwise have gone to a poor but qualified black American? This perversion of justice may occur often, and it would at least partly explain why, despite the strides of many individual blacks, blacks as a group have economically progressed so little on whites. And at a appalling 1.2 percent progression every 1.5 decades, black households won’t reach wage parity with whites’ for at least 200 years.

Which group has affirmative action benefited the least?

Answer: black men.

Which group was originally intended to be the sole beneficiary of affirmative action?

Answer: black men.

On September 20, 2016, the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think-tank, reported the following:

Black men’s average hourly wages went from being 22.2% lower [than white’s] in 1979 to 31.0% lower in 2015. The report…shows that the gap between wages of both black and white men and black and white women has widened over the last 36 years.” How long has affirmative action been in existence? About 36 years. “The finding that stands out the most, our major result, is that the racial wage gaps were larger in 2015 than they were in 1979.”(Italics by Male Matters.)

Shhh! Don’t talk about this!

Clearly affirmative action has long needed to be jettisoned or retooled.

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Afterword: A retooling may also be needed for Social Security, which, says historian/economist Thomas Sowell, “is not a racial policy…but economists who have studied it have long described it as a system that transfers money from black men to white women, given the different life expectancies of these two groups.” You can bet a retooling would have been done long ago if Social Security had been shown to be a system that transfers money from white women to black men.

See also: 

“Plight of Black Men Deepens….” at the New York Times.

“The Boy Crisis: A Sobering look at the State of our Boys” – TEDx video by Warren Farrell.

For an in-depth, scholarly analysis of affirmative action for women, see Chapter 5, “Women’s Rights v. Human Rights: The Case of Entitlements,” in Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men, published April 2006.