The Trump administration is gearing up to go to war against "intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions," according to The New York Times, and for once, it seems like Trump and I agree about something.

I, too, am tired of race-based discrimination. I am also against any additional affirmative action for white people.

Affirmative action is a phrase once used to describe affirmatively redressing harm to minorities by the majority. But affirmative action has become a dog-whistle pejorative dispatched by acolytes of Reagan and Trump to mean, basically, "special things the state and schools and businesses do to give certain types of people an unfair advantage." Consider that description and then look around you. Do you notice affirmative action for White people?

White people, especially white men, are the beneficiaries of more affirmative action than any other group on college campuses, in businesses, and in the United States at large.

I am tired of the academic affirmative action which has made it not just so that white people are overrepresented at elite colleges (and in professorships), but that their "white racial privilege" at these colleges, where black students are nearly invisible, means that they are more overrepresented now than they were in 1994.

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I am tired of the affirmative action for white students at Ivy League universities, where the percentage of students admitted via "legacy admissions" (simply because their parents or ancestors went there) at schools like Harvard is higher than the total percentage of black students.

I am tired of the white affirmative action which means that if a black student can get into college, their job prospects are about as good as those of a white high school dropout. Now that's affirmative action! Similarly, a white high school graduate benefits from affirmative action when he has the same job prospects as a black male college graduate, simply by virtue of having been born into a society which raced them as white.

I am tired of the fact that only 13 percent of journalism jobs go to non-white people because of the enduring white affirmative action of the American media.

I am tired of the racist and gendered affirmative action in American society which means that black women nationally earn only 67 cents for every dollar a white man earns. And I am sick of these affirmative action-beneficiary white men deriding black women as "welfare queens," when black women work more for less than anyone else in the nation and when they showed up in the past two election cycles more than any other race/gender subgroup.

I am tired of the economic affirmative action in American history which has made it so that white families have 10 times the wealth of Hispanic families and 12 times the wealth of black families. The word "merit" has no place in these matters. Merit has very little to do with the racialized structural poverty in American society. Indeed, anthropological economic research has shown in recent years that, "To a striking extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents' status but also from your great-great-great-grandparents." Your economic fate can be predicted in a "process [which] can take 10 to 15 generations (300 to 450 years), much longer than most social scientists have estimated in the past."

Guess where black people were in this country 300 to 400 years ago? And guess how whiteness began to get an economic advantage in America about that time?

It is white affirmative action which obfuscates the reasons why it's relatively economically lucrative to be white, and why slavery, post-Reconstruction retrenchment, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration have kept black people from amassing wealth.

There is a strong case for reparations that the nation has never been able to formally consider. Thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates, the nation discussed reparations a bit more in the Obama years; but Trump takes up so much political oxygen. America isn't hearing about reparations right now.

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And so, with the help of Jeff Sessions, we're back to the old defensive debate about affirmative action, which will harm white people, too. As he is wont to do, Trump will obfuscate his shitshow of a White House by whipping up hysteria about immigrants and black people. Getting white people upset about affirmative action on college campuses (where they're already overrepresented) will obfuscate how Trump is screwing them out of higher ed, too. By relying on the old trope of the black boogeyman people, Trump can distract from how he's handed education over to a Christian theocrat who is ending federal loan forgiveness programs and rolling back regulations on predatory for-profit colleges. And, of course, Trump can deflect about how he personally paid $25 million in a fraud settlement for his own for-profit school, Trump University.

But as we defend affirmative action for black and non-white students in this moment (and we should), we should do it as the first step of an offense for racial justice, not as if it is a final, desperate last move before defeat. As Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas wrote in their book : "The poverty of the liberal imagination is belied by the very fact that liberal theories of affirmative action are framed in such defensive terms, and so clearly shaped by the felt need to justify this perceived departure from purportedly objective findings of 'merit' (or lack thereof)."

But it is not any more for merit that legacy students get into Harvard than it is a matter of merit when a white high school grad and a black male college grad are professional peers.

"Liberals and conservatives who embrace dominant civil rights discourse treat the category of merit itself as neutral and impersonal," the Critical Race Theory authors go on, as if merit is "outside of social power and connected to systems of racial privilege." In this way, our familiar affirmative action debate avoids "engaging in a broad-scale inquiry into why jobs, wealth, education, and power are distributed as they are."

So, as Trump tries to make us defensive in hanging onto whatever gains have been carved in academia, let him not keep us from asking: just why is it that jobs, wealth, education, and power are distributed as they are?

A huge part of that is because of white affirmative action beyond the academy, from centuries of inherited wealth to the redlining of mortgages ... and the kind of affirmative action which makes the zeitgeist assume white people are naturally deserving of everything and everyone else must prove they are deserving of anything.

Steven Thrasher Steven W.

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