EqualOpportunity,EqualResults,andSocialHierarchy

EqualOpportunity,EqualResults,andSocialHierarchy

byWilliamDarityjr.

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:2/1987,pages:174185,onwww.ceeol.com.

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EQUAL

OPPORTUNITY, EQUAL RESULTS, SOCIAL HIERARCHY

William Darity Jr.

AND

Equality of opportunity, so long as it means an equal chance of being selected for advancement by the governing hierarchy in itself apparently becoming more difficult within the higher business ranks of the liberal-capitalistic countries. . . has no more to do with democracy than had the recruiting of the Janissaries by the Turks, or the advancement procedures of an officer-caste army or the Catholic hierarchy.

Robert Brady, Business As A System of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943) p. 265 n. 17.
[The idea of equality of opportunity] whereas it seems to defend equality ... really only defends the equal right to become unequal by competing against ones fellows.

John Schaar Equality of Opportunity, and Beyond in J. Roland Penock and John Chapman (eds.) Equality NOMOS IX (New York: Atherton Press, 1967) p. 241. Introduction The leading spokesman for what is now characterized as black conservative thought, Thomas Sowell, has directed much of his ire against what he terms the Civil Rights vision.1 The vision is a constellation of ideas Sowell attributes to the major civil rights organizations. The policy that crystallizes all the assumptions, premises, and propositions of the Civil Rights vision, according to Sowell, is affirmative action. Affirmative action is the black conservative flashpoint for all Sowell finds wrong with the conventional posture of the major civil rights organizations. Sowell is not merely disturbed about the efficacy of affirmative action. Quite the contrary, he is opposed to affirmative action on philosophical grounds; he disapproves of the type of society which would be produced from the effective enforcement of affirmative action under the premises of the Civil Rights vision. With a libertarians ardour for intense individualism, Sowell sees affirmative action as subversive of the good society. In Sowells good society laws and policies require that individuals be judged on their qualifications as individuals without regard to race, sex, age, etc. while [a]ffirmative action requires that [individuals] be judged with regard to such group membership, receiving preferential or compensatory treatment in some cases to achieve a more proportional representation in various institutions and occupations.2 Redigitized 2004 by Central and Eastern European Online Library C.E.E.O.L. ( www.ceeol.com )

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Sowell labels his preferred society one of equal opportunity, where equality is prospective in the sense that all persons have a fair chance to achieve regardless of race, sex, age, etc. His undesirable society, generated by the Civil Rights vision and its coppingstone, affirmative action, seeks statistical parity of retrospective results.3 For Sowell, equal opportunity means everyone has a fair (equal?) chance to attain societys choice outcomes, whereas the civil rights vision-cum-affirmative action endeavors to guarantee that societys choice outcomes are distributed across all ascriptively different groups in a statistically representative fashion. Equal opportunity means that any individuals life chances are unaffected by his or her racial or ethnic origins, while, according to Sowells understanding, the Civil Rights vision dictates that members of all racial or ethnic groups in the community are assured of the same distribution of lifes outcomes. Sowell recognizes that as a policy instrument affirmative action need not serve inevitably as a prop for the retrospective results notion of racial equality. He acknowledges that its genesis in the United States was linked to removing discriminatory barriers that hindered advancement opportunities for highly educated blacks. He points out himself that prominent participants in the civil rights movement first saw affirmative action as a device to facilitate attainment of an environment of equal opportunity. Affirmative action was seen initially as a mechanism to remove discriminatory limitations on opportunity.4 But, Sowell contends distressfully, that a transformation occurred in the content of affirmative action, largely during the years of the Nixon administration:
. . . Federal administrative agencies and the courts led the change from the prospective concept of individual equal opportunity to the retrospective concept of parity of group representation (or correction of imbalances ) . . . By 1970 . . . new guidelines referred to result-oriented procedures, which hinted more strongly at what was to come. In December 1971, the decisive guidelines were issued, which made it clear that goals and timetables were meant to increase materially the utilization of minorities and women, with underutilization being spelled out as having fewer minorities or women in a particular job classification than would reasonably be expected by their availability. . . . . . The burden of proof and remedy was [now placed] on the employer. Affirmative action was now decisively transformed into a numerical concept, whether called goals or quotas.5

Two points should be noted here: First Sowell must downplay the significance of discrimination which he does as a barrier to black accomplishment. Otherwise affirmative action could be seen as a law or policy supportive of the individualism characteristic of nineteenth-century liberalism.6 Second, Sowells objection to affirmative action is now unequivocal. His opposition is a consequence of its connection to the Civil Rights vision. For Sowell purports to desire a world where human achievement can be accomplished in a color-blind environment, and he finds the Civil Rights visioncum-affirmative action to be inherently color-conscious. The task of this paper is to confront both notions of racial equality both the Civil Rights vision and Sowellian equal opportunity. For the fundamental issue

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is not, as Sowell would lead us to believe, statist interventionism versus laissez-faire individualism. The fundamental issue is the acceptability or nonacceptability of hierarchy and, if there is to be hierarchy, what criteria are used to distribute inequality across the members of a society. Is Equality Really An Empty Idea? Whereas Sowells criticisms of the Civil Rights vision have brought attention to the ambiguities surrounding the composite concept of racial equality, the more general idea of equality also has come under growing attack from diverse quarters.7 Defining equality as the proposition in law and morals that people who are alike should be treated alike and its correlative, that people who are unalike should be treated unalike, legal scholar Peter Westen recently has argued that this principle is so deeply flawed as to be devoid of meaning. He instead has advocated removal of the concept from policy/legal discourse and has recommended that direct attention be devoted to claims over substantive rights which, according to Westen, lie behind the language of equality.8 Columnist Roger Starr, in a more economic vein, has expressed a curmudgeons discontent with the excessive social costs of pursuing equality. Starr focused specifically on current efforts to provide equality for the physically handicapped.9 Philosopher Robert Nisbet complained in the mid-1970s that the pursuit of equality is subverting what for him is a higher social priority, freedom.10 Although these criticisms may appear distinct and separate, there is a common bond between them. In fact they are intimately bound to the issues that emerge in Sowells worries about the Civil Rights vision. In assessing the social costs of the attempt to achieve equality, Starr argued that there are better uses for some of the scarce resources devoted to equalizing conditions for the disabled. At the bottom of his argument are a host of ethical considerations also manifest in both Westens and Nisbets essays as well as Sowells, Starr asked the following fundamental questions: How extensive an unequal allocation of pecuniary resources is required to create equality between an abnormal person and a normal person? What are the limits of the role of the state, both in principle and in practice, in producing conditions that compensate for the handicaps of the disabled, by giving them a more equal chance? Where should the disabled rank as a group in the nations budget (and, in a sense, moral) priorities? Plainly, these questions can be broadened to apply to the pursuit of equality by any single group racial, ethnic, or otherwise ascriptively distinct. Moreover, the same questions appear in different forms in all the works of all four of these commentators. The Nisbet essay legitimately can be considered a precursor to Westens broader assault on the notion of equality. The essential link between the perspectives of these four commentators is their aversion toward equality in its more radical or revolutionary sense. For what John Schaar called the radical democratic notion of equality provides an ideological base for the erosion of hierarchy.11 In its purest form equality contains the seeds of the most revolutionary visions about the ideal nature of human civilization.

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In a narrowly economic context, the radical democratic concept of equality posits the desirability of absolute equality of income and wealth. This may mean levelling everyone to the position of the poorest, raising everyone to the position of the richest, or moving all to an identical position intermediate between the poorest and richest individual. It is hard virtually impossible to find any modern scholar or political figure who has endorsed complete economic equality; Felix Paukert has observed:
No economist of note, or no sociologist, has advocated an absolutely equal distribution of income among human beings. For the attitude nearest to this ideal we probably have to go back to the French Revolution, to Robespierre, who said that no one ought to have much more or much less than 3,000 francs a year. This rough equality was to be the result of public opinion, of the natural ethics of the community, and not of organized control.12

Such rough equality would produce racial economic equality if implemented in the United States, by producing general economic equality. Indeed, to guarantee racial equality as a social output might require generating an environment of general equality. This theme will be considered in greater depth below. For now, consider that the presumption of most social thinkers is that differential economic rewards are required to create incentives for achievement and initiative. Need and merit considerations customarily are invoked as obvious justifications for not taking a condition of complete economic equality seriously. But even if one rejects absolute uniformity of income and wealth as an ideal, the impulse of the radical democratic vision of equality still can be advanced insofar as one makes the case for getting much closer to such a state of affairs. Schaar, however, introduced the radical democratic concept of equality to provide a broader concept than a solely economic notion. Schaar was challenging the entire constellation of beliefs that assert that human beings must be rewarded differentially on both a pecuniary and a non-pecuniary basis. Income and wealth differences are only one face of the multifarious ways in which human beings are stratified across a society. Additionally, there are at least differences in status and authority arising out of both inherited and achieved differences among individuals that disturbed Schaar at least as much as the economic differences. Schaars vision is revolutionary in the sense that it is genuinely anti-hierarchical. Rather than merely making the case for greater absolute equality on all dimensions, complete equality should be the social reference point and any departures from it must be justified. This is not the Sowell vision; nor is it the Civil Rights vision. Westen, Starr, and Nisbet all have obscured the revolutionary form of the idea, either to transmute it into more conservative forms or to eliminate it. Westen has gone furthest by taking the latter route in arguing that the concept should be dispensed with altogether. All these commentators in varying degrees, explicitly or implicitly, have accepted the validity of a hierarchical or stratified organization of society the necessity of the existence of superiors and inferiors. Therefore, the concept of equality in its radical sense is unacceptable to them.

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It is not even considered by Westen. It certainly lies outside the domain of either equal opportunity or affirmative action. Equal Opportunity, Equal Results, and Social Hierarchy The issues that Westen, Starr and Nisbet have identified, signaling weaknesses in the general concept of equality, stem from the cumulative effects of previous attempts to reconcile the notion with the presumption that social hierarchy or stratification is inevitable or necessary. But communities that are stratified on the basis of differentials in economic circumstances or political influence, etc., are inherently unequal communities. One would expect there to be no path to reconciliation. Nevertheless the attempt is made continuously. One attempted resolution lies in Sowells preferred vision of the good society the equal opportunity vision. For the equal opportunity vision is compatible with a set of values that idealizes a society that competitively weeds out winners and losers (or stars and ordinary folks). Paradoxically, then, equal opportunity intrinsically embraces unequal outcomes across individuals. It mandates only that everyone should have the chance to play the same game by the same rules. From the standpoint of group equality, equal opportunity promises that all individuals regardless of the characteristics they possess that assign them to ascriptively-differentiated groups will, again, face the same game and the same rules. It does not promise any individual a particular level of achievement that is conceived to be consequent on individual ability, motivation, and perhaps sheer luck. Nor does it promise that the average achievements of members of each group must converge with those of all others. Equal opportunity is procedural equality, dictating uniformity in procedures across all persons, and guaranteeing nothing about the outcomes across individuals or ascriptively differentiated groups. For if equality of outcomes for such groups, for example racial groups, is to accompany procedural equality, the onus is placed on the substantive conditions that must hold before playing the competitive, social game. Not only must the rules be the same, but the participants also must be sufficiently similar in their capacity and motivation to play the game. This is the sense in which Rawls argues that a concept of fairness must be appended to the equal opportunity principle to avoid creation of a callous meritocratic society.13 Rawls suggests that fairness requires compensating individuals for differential disadvantages they face due to birth and natural endowment what he terms undeserved inequalities. Therefore, in his words, to provide genuine equality of opportunity, society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable social positions ... greater resources might be spent on the education of the less than the more intelligent, at least over a certain time of life . . . . 14 Even an individuals personal character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit and may give rise

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to undeserved inequalities in a society that rewards personal character; here still Rawls finds a basis for redress of initial conditions.15 The ex ante changes each individual faces in the social game are to be brought to an approximate par when equal opportunity is fair (or just) in Rawls sense. A similar argument can be made with respect to observed disparities across ascriptively-differentiated groups. Suppose ex post outcomes reveal ongoing statistical disparities across say, blacks and non-blacks; this could imply that ex ante chances were unfair. This would mean blacks as a group or at least the disproportionately high percentage of blacks with handicaps of birth and/or natural endowment should receive greater resources to offset their initial disadvantages. Of course, fair equality of opportunity in Rawlss sense now places the burden of judgment and justice on the determination of which initial conditions should be altered in favor of those who are less well-endowed with particular characteristics. Presumably the continued absence of fairness would be identified with the persistence of unequal outcomes between ascriptively differentiated groups. The task then becomes sorting out what policies make the game fair. Fair equal opportunity could lead toward a desire to adopt affirmative action. Sowell, however, would ascribe precisely such reasoning to the proponents of the Civil Rights vision. Since Sowell obviously does not share that vision, then presumably he must reject fair equal opportunity in Rawlss sense and adhere strictly to the position that the limits of social policy must be set by making the game uniform for all regardless of the consequences. Apparently, Sowell does not mean that blacks and non-blacks must start the competitive game with similar wealth positions; he certainly does not advocate a radical racial redistribution of wealth. He does not mean that familial, health, or educational credentials must be the same before the game starts, since he seems to blend these factors into the outcome set. The sufficient conditions for Sowells brand of equal opportunity to prevail seem to be no more than an environment where race is not taken into account, even if race is correlated with a host of other factors that relegate blacks to the bottom tier of status, prestige, and influence positions. Procedural equality is, it appears, enough for Thomas Sowell. Even if Sowellian equal opportunity prevails and happens to yield similar outcomes on average for all members of races, it simply means that the distribution of accomplishments (and failures) becomes identical across all races. Poverty, for instance, would be distributed in a racially neutral fashion. There would be the same proportions of black and non-black millionaires and black and non-black paupers. Nevertheless, there still would be princes and paupers; their percentages in each race merely would have become the same. Racially equal opportunity, if it somehow happened to produce racially equal results, means that the group that progresses toward equality mimics the degree of inequality extant in the group whose achievements constitute the standard. If the standard set by the target group still maintains great intraracial disparities, racial equality, in this sense, preserves those inequalities. Blacks would have their fair share in the elite, but an elite still would continue to be dominant. Only its complexion would have changed.

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With stunning accuracy, John Schaar pinpointed the basic stand-patism of this type of racial equality, when he wrote at the height of the victories of the civil rights movement:
. . . the present-day radicals who demand the fullest extension of the equalopportunity principle to all groups within the society, and especially to Negroes and the lower classes, are really more conservative than the conservatives who oppose them. No policy formula is better designed to fortify the dominant institutions, values, and ends of the American social order than the formula of equality of opportunity, for it offers everyone a fair and equal chance to find a place within that order. In principle, it excludes no man from the system if his abilities can be put to use within the system. We have here another example of the repeated tendency of Americas radicals to buttress the existing framework of order even while they think they are undermining it . . . 16

Thus Schaar raises the fundamental criticism of racial equality as equal opportunity: on these terms equality between the races means full acceptance of the general inequality that exists in a given society. It potentially dictates a racial or ethnic recomposition of the elite but not a dissolution of the ruling class in the first place. Equal opportunity as conceived by Sowell is inherently inegalitarian. But is it markedly less so for Rawls? Indeed, if initial differences across individuals are minimized to make the game fair, why have them run a social footrace at all? Is there not even in Rawlss fair equal opportunity, a cloven hoof of inegalitarianism? For running alongside the notion of underserved inequalities there must be deserved inequalities and some agency that must decide which is which. And who will control such an agency? Indeed, the critical problem that troubles Westen, Starr and Nisbet is the ambiguity that arises in attempts to make procedural equality fair. As Starr indicates in his discussion of the disabled, there is a dense fog that surrounds the policymakers capacity to determine when an equal chance exists for all. After all, how does a disabled person ever become like a nondisabled person? Returning to the terrain of race, one can ask again, what exactly must be made the same between blacks and whites, on average, to bring about fair equal opportunity? What are the conditions that apply solely to the start of the game, and not the game itself, that must be made uniform between the races? Moreover, is it possible to determine where the social game begins? These are the same type of questions that render uncertain the directions that Rawlss fairness principle leads us toward. Consider the following related paradox: The more narrow the range of initial conditions that must be equalized before the social game is considered fair, the closer we are to Sowells inegalitarian type of racial or group equality. The wider the band of conditions that must be equalized before the social game is considered fair, the closer we are to a guarantee of equal results from the game. In short if undeserved inequalities are identified in a limited sense fair equal opportunity converges to pure procedural equality; if undeserved inequalities are identified broadly fair equal opportunity converges with uniformity of outcomes. Thus fair equal opportunity, introduced by Rawls as an alternative to the purely procedural or so-called formal concept of equal opportunity

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either leads back toward the latter or away from equal opportunity altogether. Why bother with fair equal opportunity at all? But what of racially equal outcomes as the relevant notion of equality? If the commitment is made to racial equality on the retrospective grounds of results rather than the prospective grounds of opportunity, Starr will ask in curmudgeonly fashion how much of a financial burden should the state bear to provide so many more blacks a middle-class life-style, or to promote the development of black-owned corporations large enough to constitute 12 percent of the Fortune 500 list? Ironically, racial equality in the explicit retrospective results sense the Civil Rights vision sense is radical in a policy sense. It means a national commitment to engineer socially a condition of racially identical outcomes. But it is no less intrinsically elitist than equal opportunity variant of racial equality. For if the desired results are, again, a representative share of elite slots for the previously under-represented race, then the Civil Rights vision mandates a racial recomposition of the elites rather than an inquiry into the nature and existence of elites, in the first place! Affirmative Action, Racial Equality, and General Inequality Affirmative action in the context of the Civil Rights vision becomes a potential mechanism to effect a recomposition of elites. It is an instrument that ostensibly could select among underrepresented segments of population. Consequently the feminist movement could divert affirmative action away from racial underrepresentation toward gender underrepresentation. Long before its adoption in the United States, affirmative action was adopted in India to benefit members of the lower (scheduled) castes. These measures were a major source of tension in India leading to recurrent caste riots.17 Recomposition of the Indian elite was the basic issue at stake in the conflict over affirmative action (or what was called compensatory discrimination in India). If affirmative action potentially can select among underrepresented segments of the population, it will be perceived as a threat by ethnic or racial groups that are overrepresented. The overrepresented groups will have an incentive to protect their own and resist efforts to produce equal results. The unscheduled castes generally have been openly hostile toward efforts to reserve places for members of the scheduled castes. They have appealed to the courts to limit the scope of compensatory discrimination, arguing that the non-meritocratic selection criteria implicit in reservation (or quota) schemes leads to social inefficiencies. They have pressed the courts over certain ambiguities present in the language of the enabling legislation dating from the late 1940s over whom should be protected by Indias affirmative action laws all members of the scheduled castes or only those who are poor or deprived in some quantifiable sense. Some members of the unscheduled castes even have dissembled their own caste status to benefit from the reservations policy. And, as noted above, caste riots have been precipitated by the pursuit of affirmative action in India.18 The same fundamental source of tension over affirmative action a struggle for elite or preferred positions between ethnic/racial groups is present in the

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United States. This comes into clear focus with the widespread hostility among Jewish Americans toward application of affirmative action on behalf of black Americans. The growing division over this issue boiled completely out of the pot in June 1983, when the black and Jewish factions of the Civil rights movements split over affirmative action.19 The greatest remaining support for affirmative action among Jewish Americans comes from some Jewish womens groups, whose members obviously can benefit from the existence of inclusionary sexual quotas. Racially nonwhite but already relatively successful minorities., such as Japanese Americans, also occasionally can hop on the affirmative action bandwagon at their convenience. As a significantly overrepresented element of the American elite, American Jews are liable to feel endangered by the introduction of selection criteria that would, if pursued actively, reduce their presence in the higher circles of American society. Sociologist W. D. Rubinstein has documented the wholesale movement, since World War II, of Western Jewry . . . into the upper-middle class. He estimates that Jews in the United States constitute 10-15% of what he terms the large elite and perhaps a similar percentage of the small elite, while numbering only 2-3% of the U.S. population.20 Specifically, Marshall Sklare has reported on Jewish numerical overrepresentation in academia. He points out that as early as 1969 a Carnegie Commission survey found that 25% of those who teach law and 22% of those who teach medicine were Jewish, and that Jewish academics especially are placed in disproportion to their groups numbers in the population as a whole at the most prestigious U.S. universities.21 These successes were achieved under the terms of the competitive credentialling process that existed in the post-1920s United States. New rules of selection that reserve places in the elite for blacks or other underrepresented ethnic groups, for instance, could mean a reduction in the Jewish presence. Therefore, Jewish intellectuals who are concerned about maintenance of high Jewish representation in Americas status positions now register the deepest reservations about affirmative action.22 Rubinstein ranks affirmative action and racial quota schemes as major threats to Western Jewry.23 Rubinstein, while advocating an ideological shift toward the right by Jews in the West (in the face of a host of threats he perceives to their current ethnic preeminence), concomitantly expresses fears of socialisms and egalitarianisms leveling effect. Says Rubinstein tersely, What the socialist and equalitarian fail to understand is that for the Jews, equality is not enough. . .. 24 In essence, Rubinstein has turned the screw. He comprehends the revolutionary message of equality and remains dissatisfied because of his beliefs in (a) the desirability of hierarchy and (b) the desirability of his own ethnic groups role within such a hierarchy. But it is the prior existence of general hierarchy (or general inequality) that permits full vent to be given to notions of ethnic supremacy. Even Northern European Anglo-Saxons find their supremacist advocates. Wilmot Robertsons deceptively sophisticated and disturbing right wing tract urging a restoration of the power of Americas true racial majority voices just such a message.25 Black nationalist ideologues provide the Afro-American variant of the same theme. And on and on; this is the rhetoric of ethnic/racial warfare.

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Those now winning the American ethnic war have a strong advantage even in the face of affirmative action and racial quotas. For if the current winners truly possess the requisite skills and know-how for the positions they hold, in an age where technical expertise has become the most valuable asset, those who are granted slots by government designation unless they somehow happen to have acquired the skills in a highly stratified educational system still need not be privy to the important deliberations. Conflict can be eased by expansion of the total number of slots with the entry of the previously excluded group, but the new slots need not carry the same weight or authority. The new entrants will be no more than spooks who sit by the door, although there will be more of them at the door. Thus affirmative action, even if pursued to the hilt, need not provide genuine power for the out groups. It can, however, make things far more difficult for an in group who loses slots as ethnic/racial competition persists. But such internecine ethnic/racial warfare means that if a partial recomposition of the elite is the best that can be hoped for by out groups, it may not be much of a hope. In a climate of ethnic/racial conflict, the fundamental tension between prospects for general equality and the existence of ethnic/racial overrepresentation by some groups in positions of authority and influence becomes quite visible. Behind this lies the institutional context of a society divided along class lines. Class divisions are the source of positions of status and power and make them worth winning.26 Only Schaars radical conception of equality a conception which cannot be given the adjectives racial or ethnic by its very nature provides a direct ideological offensive against social stratification. For unlike Westens definition of equality as the proposition in law and morals that people who are alike should be treated alike, the radical conception of equality has it that all people should be treated with some minimum degree of dignity. Their alikeness or unalikeness is irrelevant. Their personhood is what is decisive. Schaar describes this type of equality as the antithesis of equal opportunity, involving strong elements of human sympathy:
. . . there is another kind of equality that is blind to all questions of success or failure. This is the equality that obtains in the relations among the members of any genuine community. It is the feeling held by each member that all other members, regardless of function and rank, belong to the community, as fully as he does himself .27

Therefore, this vision of equality permits task differentiation to exist but these conditions coexist with mutual respect. There would be no undue stigma associated with the performance of task A, and no undue glorification of performance of task B. There may be some differences in rewards, but they would be narrowed and the worst prize, in the fashion of another of Rawls arguments for justice, would assure its recipient human decency.28 There would be, simultaneously, uplift and leveling. Nor need this mean descent into anarchy. Schaar further points out that it is misleading to construct the choice as one between hierarchy and orderly progress or anarchy and disorderly stalemate.29 To pose the alternatives in

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such a fashion is to be stuck in the first place with the elite versus masses conception of social organization. The concept of equality is not empty, as Westen would have us believe. Its substance is the idea that all people are at the same level not in terms of attributes, abilities, talents, or aspirations but in terms of intrinsic worth. The peerage is not exclusive but all-inclusive; either all sit in the House of Commons or all sit in the House of Lords or all sit on the outside of both houses. Equalitys guiding principle is not that all have the same skills or should have the same skills, but that all have the same inherent merit. To adopt religious metaphors none should be elect at the expense of the un-elect, nor should any be the chosen few at the expense of the rest. Therefore what Schaar terms the radical democratic conception of equality is incompatible with racial equality if the latter means racially equal or fair shares in inequality. Equality in its revolutionary sense broaches no compromise with the inegalitarians, who fear its overtures and implications. It is only in this sense that equality potentially becomes a full-bodied and dynamic idea. The central difficulty that remains is how to get from here to there, circumnavigating both concrete and ideological obstacles. Racial equality in its customary senses equal opportunity or equal results constitutes detours that sustain the hierarchical foundation that motivate the desire of dominant groups to preserve racial difference. The challenge is to crack the foundation. Otherwise the superstructure will continue to stand. Racial equality in its radical sense only becomes a realistic possibility once general equality becomes a major objective for society.
NOTES
The authors research was supported by the Southern Center for Public Policy Studies at Clark College in Atlanta. I am grateful to Robert Gooding-Williams for extensive and helpful critical comments on an earlier draft. 1. Thomas Sowell Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? New York: William Morrow and Company Inc. 1984), pp. 13-35. 2. Ibid., p. 38. 3. Ibid., p. 39. 4. Ibid., pp. 39-40 5. Ibid., p. 41. 6. For instance, Sowell devotes a substantial portion of his work to make the peculiar claim that discrimination does not explain the disadvantageous economic position of native blacks in the United States, see Ibid., pp. 73-90. 7. With considerably less notoriety than Sowell, the author has endeavored to subject the idea of racial equality to careful inspection. See William Darity Jr. The Goal of Racial Economic Equality: A Critique Journal of Ethnic Studies Vol. 10: No. 4 (Winter 1983), pp. 51-7 and William Darity Jr. The Theory of Racial Discrimination Revisited: Beyond the Ideology of Equality Adherent, Vol. 7: No. 3 (December 1980), pp. 91-119. 8. Peter Westen The Empty Idea of Equality Harvard Law Review, Vol. 95: No. 3 (January 1982), pp. 539-40. 9. Roger Starr Wheels of Misfortune: The Crippling Costs of Equality Harpers, Vol. 264: 1580 (January 1982), pp. 7-15. 10. Robert Nisbet The Pursuit of Equality The Public Interest, No. 35 (Spring 1974), pp. 100120. 11. John Schaar Equality of Opportunity and Beyond in J. Roland Pennock and John Chapman (eds.)

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

Equality NOMOS IX (New York: Atherton Press, 1967), pp. 228-49. Also see John Rawls discussion in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 106-7. Felix Paukert Income Distribution at Different Levels of Development: A Survey of Evidence International Labour Review (August-September 1973), p. 98. Rawls, op. cit., p. 100. Ibid., pp. 100-101. Ibid., pp. 101-102. Schaar, op. cit., p. 230. Pradip Kumar Bose, Social Mobility and Caste Violence: A Study of the Gujarat Riots Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 16 (April 18, 1981), pp. 713-6. It is noteworthy that negligible attention was devoted to the tortured Indian experience when affirmative action was contemplated in the United States. See, e.g., Samuel M. Witten Compensatory Discrimination in India: Affirmative Action as a Means of Combatting Class Inequality Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Vol. 21 (1983), pp. 115. Juan Williams Civil Rights Groups Split Over Nominees and Quotas The Washington Post (June 18, 1983), p. A2. W. D. Rubinstein The Left, the Right, and the Jews (New York: Universe Books, 1982), p. 9. Marshall Sklare The Jew in American Sociological Thought Ethnicity (Vol. 1, 1974), pp. 1512. Nathan Glazer American Jews: Three Conflicts of Loyalties in Seymour Lipset (ed.) The Third Century: American As A Post-Industrial Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 229-30. Rubinstein, op. cit., p. 222. Ibid., p. 227. Wilmot Robertson The Dispossessed Majority (Cape Canaveral: Howard Allen 1972). I do not accept the simplistic view of Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, On Democracy (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 146-83 that the United States can be viewed as a capitalist democracy with two major classes, capitalists and workers. My position is that the United States has moved into a post-capitalist phase, dominated by a social managerial class, and is no less hierarchical. The nature of the hierarchical structure has changed, however, e.g., William Darity Jr. The Managerial Class and Industrial Policy Industrial Relations (Spring 1986), pp. 212-27. Schaar, op. cit., p. 245. Rawls, op. cit., on the maximin principle pp. 150-66. Ibid., p. 240, emphasis in original.

Redigitized 2004 by Central and Eastern European Online Library C.E.E.O.L. ( www.ceeol.com )