2.5 - Darity Jr, William - Equal Opportunity, Equal Results, And Social Hierarchy (en)

7/30/2019 2.5 - Darity Jr, William - Equal Opportunity, Equal Results, And Social Hierarchy (en)

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Equal Opportunity, Equal Results, and Social Hierarchy


by William Darity jr.

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 2 / 1987, pages: 174-185, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=95a45f0d-f2c0-4003-90c1-b55ffe1d4be9http://www.ceeol.com/


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Praxis International174

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

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, EQUAL RESULTS, ANDSOCIAL HIERARCHY

William Darity Jr.

Equality of opportunity, so long as it means an equal chance of being selectedfor advancement by the governing hierarchy in itself apparently becoming moredifficult within the higher business ranks of the liberal-capitalistic countries. . .

has no more to do with democracy than had the recruiting of theJanissaries 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 UniversityPress, 1943) p. 265 n. 17.

[The idea of equality of opportunity] whereas it seems to defend equality ... reallyonly defends the equal right to become unequal by competing against onesfellows.

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 conserva-tive thought, Thomas Sowell, has directed much of his ire against what heterms the Civil Rights vision.1 The vision is a constellation of ideas Sowellattributes to the major civil rights organizations. The policy that crystallizesall 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. Quitethe contrary, he is opposed to affirmative action on philosophical grounds;he disapproves of the type of society which would be produced from theeffective enforcement of affirmative action under the premises of the CivilRights vision.

With a libertarians ardour for intense individualism, Sowell sees affirma-tive action as subversive of the good society. In Sowells good society laws

and policies require that individuals be judged on their qualifications asindividuals without regard to race, sex, age, etc. while [a]ffirmative actionrequires that [individuals] be judged with regard to such group membership,receiving preferential or compensatory treatment in some cases to achieve amore proportional representation in various institutions and occupations.2


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Praxis International 175

Sowell labels his preferred society one of equal opportunity, where equalityis prospective in the sense that all persons have a fair chance to achieveregardless of race, sex, age, etc. His undesirable society, generated by the CivilRights vision and its coppingstone, affirmative action, seeks statistical parityof retrospective results.3 For Sowell, equal opportunity means everyone has afair (equal?) chance to attain societys choice outcomes, whereas the civilrights vision-cum-affirmative action endeavors to guarantee that societys choiceoutcomes are distributed across all ascriptively different groups in a statisticallyrepresentative fashion. Equal opportunity means that any individuals lifechances are unaffected by his or her racial or ethnic origins, while, according toSowells understanding, the Civil Rights vision dictates that members of allracial or ethnic groups in the community are assured of the same distribution oflifes outcomes.

Sowell recognizes that as a policy instrument affirmative action need notserve inevitably as a prop for the retrospective results notion of racial equality.He acknowledges that its genesis in the United States was linked to removingdiscriminatory barriers that hindered advancement opportunities for highlyeducated blacks. He points out himself that prominent participants in the civilrights movement first saw affirmative action as a device to facilitate attainmentof an environment of equal opportunity. Affirmative action was seen initially asa 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 theprospective concept of individual equal opportunity to the retrospective conceptof parity of group representation (or correction of imbalances ) . . .

By 1970 . . . new guidelines referred to result-oriented procedures, which hintedmore strongly at what was to come. In December 1971, the decisive guidelineswere issued, which made it clear that goals and timetables were meant toincrease materially the utilization of minorities and women, with under-utilization 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 thesignificance of discrimination which he does as a barrier to black accom-plishment. Otherwise affirmative action could be seen as a law or policysupportive of the individualism characteristic of nineteenth-century liberalism.6

Second, Sowells objection to affirmative action is now unequivocal. Hisopposition is a consequence of its connection to the Civil Rights vision. For

Sowell purports to desire a world where human achievement can be accom-plished in a color-blind environment, and he finds the Civil Rights vision-cum-affirmative action to be inherently color-conscious.

The task of this paper is to confront both notions of racial equality both theCivil Rights vision and Sowellian equal opportunity. For the fundamental issue

aCEEOL NL Germany


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is not, as Sowell would lead us to believe, statist interventionism versuslaissez-faire individualism. The fundamental issue is the acceptability or non-acceptability of hierarchy and, if there is to be hierarchy, what criteria are used todistribute inequality across the members of a society.

Is Equality Really An Empty Idea?

Whereas Sowells criticisms of the Civil Rights vision have brought attentionto the ambiguities surrounding the composite concept of racial equality, themore general idea of equality also has come under growing attack from diversequarters.7 Defining equality as the proposition in law and morals that peoplewho are alike should be treated alike and its correlative, that people who areunalike should be treated unalike, legal scholar Peter Westen recently hasargued that this principle is so deeply flawed as to be devoid of meaning. Heinstead has advocated removal of the concept from policy/legal discourse and hasrecommended that direct attention be devoted to claims over substantive rightswhich, according to Westen, lie behind the language of equality.8 ColumnistRoger Starr, in a more economic vein, has expressed a curmudgeonsdiscontent with the excessive social costs of pursuing equality. Starr focusedspecifically on current efforts to provide equality for the physically handicap-ped.9 Philosopher Robert Nisbet complained in the mid-1970s that the pursuit ofequality is subverting what for him is a higher social priority, freedom. 10

Although these criticisms may appear distinct and separate, there is a commonbond between them. In fact they are intimately bound to the issues that emergein Sowells worries about the Civil Rights vision. In assessing the social costsof the attempt to achieve equality, Starr argued that there are better uses for someof the scarce resources devoted to equalizing conditions for the disabled. At thebottom of his argument are a host of ethical considerations also manifest in bothWestens and Nisbets essays as well as Sowells,

Starr asked the following fundamental questions: How extensive an unequalallocation of pecuniary resources is required to create equality between anabnormal 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 compensatefor the handicaps of the disabled, by giving them a more equal chance? Whereshould 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 byany single group racial, ethnic, or otherwise ascriptively distinct. Moreover, thesame questions appear in different forms in all the works of all four of thesecommentators. The Nisbet essay legitimately can be considered a precursor toWestens 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 whatJohn Schaar called the radical democratic notion of equality provides anideological base for the erosion of hierarchy.11 In its purest form equality containsthe seeds of the most revolutionary visions about the ideal nature of humancivilization.


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In a narrowly economic context, the radical democratic concept of equalityposits the desirability of absolute equality of income and wealth. This maymean levelling everyone to the position of the poorest, raising everyone to theposition of the richest, or moving all to an identical position intermediatebetween the poorest and richest individual. It is hard virtually impossible tofind any modern scholar or political figure who has endorsed completeeconomic 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 implementedin the United States, by producing general economic equality. Indeed, toguarantee racial equality as a social output might require generating anenvironment of general equality. This theme will be considered in greater depthbelow.

For now, consider that the presumption of most social thinkers is thatdifferential economic rewards are required to create incentives for achievementand initiative. Need and merit considerations customarily are invoked as

obvious justifications for not taking a condition of complete economic equalityseriously. But even if one rejects absolute uniformity of income and wealth asan ideal, the impulse of the radical democratic vision of equality still can beadvanced insofar as one makes the case for getting much closer to such a stateof affairs.

Schaar, however, introduced the radical democratic concept of equality toprovide a broader concept than a solely economic notion. Schaar was challen-ging the entire constellation of beliefs that assert that human beings must berewarded differentially on both a pecuniary and a non-pecuniary basis. Incomeand wealth differences are only one face of the multifarious ways in which

human beings are stratified across a society. Additionally, there are at leastdifferences in status and authority arising out of both inherited and achieveddifferences among individuals that disturbed Schaar at least as much as theeconomic differences. Schaars vision is revolutionary in the sense that it isgenuinely anti-hierarchical. Rather than merely making the case for greaterabsolute equality on all dimensions, complete equality should be the socialreference 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 totransmute it into more conservative forms or to eliminate it. Westen has gone

furthest by taking the latter route in arguing that the concept should bedispensed with altogether. All these commentators in varying degrees, explicitlyor implicitly, have accepted the validity of a hierarchical or stratified organiz-ation 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 ofeither equal opportunity or affirmative action.


The issues that Westen, Starr and Nisbet have identified, signalingweaknesses in the general concept of equality, stem from the cumulativeeffects of previous attempts to reconcile the notion with the presumption thatsocial hierarchy or stratification is inevitable or necessary. But communitiesthat are stratified on the basis of differentials in economic circumstances orpolitical influence, etc., are inherently unequal communities. One wouldexpect there to be no path to reconciliation. Nevertheless the attempt is madecontinuously.

One attempted resolution lies in Sowells preferred vision of the goodsociety the equal opportunity vision. For the equal opportunity vision iscompatible with a set of values that idealizes a society that competitivelyweeds out winners and losers (or stars and ordinary folks). Paradoxically,then, equal opportunity intrinsically embraces unequal outcomes acrossindividuals. It mandates only that everyone should have the chance to play thesame game by the same rules.

From the standpoint of group equality, equal opportunity promises that allindividuals regardless of the characteristics they possess that assign them to

ascriptively-differentiated groups will, again, face the same game and thesame rules. It does not promise any individual a particular level ofachievement that is conceived to be consequent on individual ability,motivation, and perhaps sheer luck. Nor does it promise that the averageachievements of members of each group must converge with those of allothers. Equal opportunity is procedural equality, dictating uniformity inprocedures across all persons, and guaranteeing nothing about the outcomesacross individuals or ascriptively differentiated groups.

For if equality of outcomes for such groups, for example racial groups, is toaccompany procedural equality, the onus is placed on the substantive

conditions that must hold before playing the competitive, social game. Notonly must the rules be the same, but the participants also must be sufficientlysimilar in their capacity and motivation to play the game. This is the sense inwhich Rawls argues that a concept of fairness must be appended to theequal opportunity principle to avoid creation of a callous meritocraticsociety.13

Rawls suggests that fairness requires compensating individuals for differ-ential disadvantages they face due to birth and natural endowment whathe terms undeserved inequalities. Therefore, in his words, to providegenuine equality of opportunity, society must give more attention to those

with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable socialpositions ... greater resources might be spent on the education of the less thanthe more intelligent, at least over a certain time of life . . . . 14 Even anindividuals personal character depends in large part upon fortunate familyand 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 stillRawls finds a basis for redress of initial conditions.15 The ex ante changes eachindividual faces in the social game are to be brought to an approximate par whenequal opportunity is fair (or just) in Rawls sense.

A similar argument can be made with respect to observed disparities acrossascriptively-differentiated groups. Suppose ex post outcomes reveal ongoingstatistical disparities across say, blacks and non-blacks; this could imply that exante chances were unfair. This would mean blacks as a group or at least thedisproportionately high percentage of blacks with handicaps of birth and/ornatural endowment should receive greater resources to offset their initialdisadvantages. Of course, fair equality of opportunity in Rawlss sense nowplaces the burden of judgment and justice on the determination of which initialconditions should be altered in favor of those who are less well-endowed withparticular characteristics. Presumably the continued absence of fairness would beidentified with the persistence of unequal outcomes between ascriptively differ-entiated groups. The task then becomes sorting out what policies make the gamefair. Fair equal opportunity could lead toward a desire to adopt affirmativeaction.

Sowell, however, would ascribe precisely such reasoning to the proponents ofthe Civil Rights vision. Since Sowell obviously does not share that vision, thenpresumably he must reject fair equal opportunity in Rawlss sense and adherestrictly 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 thecompetitive game with similar wealth positions; he certainly does not advocate aradical racial redistribution of wealth. He does not mean that familial, health, oreducational credentials must be the same before the game starts, since he seemsto blend these factors into the outcome set. The sufficient conditions for Sowellsbrand 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 otherfactors that relegate blacks to the bottom tier of status, prestige, and influencepositions. Procedural equality is, it appears, enough for Thomas Sowell.

Even if Sowellian equal opportunity prevails and happens to yield similaroutcomes on average for all members of races, it simply means that thedistribution of accomplishments (and failures) becomes identical across all races.Poverty, for instance, would be distributed in a racially neutral fashion. Therewould be the same proportions of black and non-black millionaires and black andnon-black paupers.

Nevertheless, there still would be princes and paupers; their percentages ineach race merely would have become the same. Racially equal opportunity, if itsomehow happened to produce racially equal results, means that the group thatprogresses toward equality mimics the degree of inequality extant in the group

whose achievements constitute the standard. If the standard set by the targetgroup still maintains great intraracial disparities, racial equality, in this sense,preserves those inequalities. Blacks would have their fair share in the elite, butan elite still would continue to be dominant. Only its complexion would havechanged.


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With stunning accuracy, John Schaar pinpointed the basic stand-patism ofthis type of racial equality, when he wrote at the height of the victories of thecivil rights movement:

. . . the present-day radicals who demand the fullest extension of the equal-opportunity principle to all groups within the society, and especially to Negroesand the lower classes, are really more conservative than the conservatives whooppose them. No policy formula is better designed to fortify the dominantinstitutions, values, and ends of the American social order than the formula ofequality of opportunity, for it offers everyone a fair and equal chance to find aplace within that order. In principle, it excludes no man from the system if hisabilities can be put to use within the system. We have here another example ofthe repeated tendency of Americas radicals to buttress the existing framework oforder even while they think they are undermining it . . . 16

Thus Schaar raises the fundamental criticism of racial equality as equalopportunity: on these terms equality between the races means full acceptance ofthe general inequality that exists in a given society. It potentially dictates aracial or ethnic recomposition of the elite but not a dissolution of the rulingclass in the first place. Equal opportunity as conceived by Sowell is inherentlyinegalitarian.

But is it markedly less so for Rawls? Indeed, if initial differences acrossindividuals are minimized to make the game fair, why have them run a socialfootrace at all? Is there not even in Rawlss fair equal opportunity, a cloven hoof

of inegalitarianism? For running alongside the notion of underserved ine-qualities there must be deserved inequalities and some agency that mustdecide which is which. And who will control such an agency?

Indeed, the critical problem that troubles Westen, Starr and Nisbet is theambiguity that arises in attempts to make procedural equality fair. As Starrindicates in his discussion of the disabled, there is a dense fog that surroundsthe 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 bemade 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 arethe same type of questions that render uncertain the directions that Rawlssfairness principle leads us toward.

Consider the following related paradox: The more narrow the range of initialconditions that must be equalized before the social game is considered fair,the closer we are to Sowells inegalitarian type of racial or group equality. Thewider the band of conditions that must be equalized before the social game isconsidered 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 fairequal opportunity converges to pure procedural equality; if undeserved ine-qualities are identified broadly fair equal opportunity converges with uniformityof outcomes. Thus fair equal opportunity, introduced by Rawls as an alterna-tive 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 thecommitment is made to racial equality on the retrospective grounds of resultsrather than the prospective grounds of opportunity, Starr will ask in cur-mudgeonly fashion how much of a financial burden should the state bear toprovide so many more blacks a middle-class life-style, or to promote thedevelopment of black-owned corporations large enough to constitute 12 percentof the Fortune 500 list?

Ironically, racial equality in the explicit retrospective results sense the CivilRights vision sense is radical in a policy sense. It means a national commit-ment to engineer socially a condition of racially identical outcomes. But it is noless intrinsically elitist than equal opportunity variant of racial equality. For if thedesired results are, again, a representative share of elite slots for the previouslyunder-represented race, then the Civil Rights vision mandates a racialrecomposition of the elites rather than an inquiry into the nature and existence ofelites, in the first place!

Affirmative Action, Racial Equality, and General Inequality

Affirmative action in the context of the Civil Rights vision becomes apotential mechanism to effect a recomposition of elites. It is an instrument that

ostensibly could select among underrepresented segments of population. Conse-quently the feminist movement could divert affirmative action away from racialunderrepresentation toward gender underrepresentation. Long before its adop-tion in the United States, affirmative action was adopted in India to benefitmembers of the lower (scheduled) castes. These measures were a major source oftension in India leading to recurrent caste riots.17

Recomposition of the Indian elite was the basic issue at stake in the conflictover affirmative action (or what was called compensatory discrimination inIndia). If affirmative action potentially can select among underrepresentedsegments of the population, it will be perceived as a threat by ethnic or racial

groups that are overrepresented. The overrepresented groups will have anincentive to protect their own and resist efforts to produce equal results.

The unscheduled castes generally have been openly hostile toward efforts toreserve places for members of the scheduled castes. They have appealed to thecourts to limit the scope of compensatory discrimination, arguing that thenon-meritocratic selection criteria implicit in reservation (or quota) schemesleads to social inefficiencies. They have pressed the courts over certain ambiguitiespresent in the language of the enabling legislation dating from the late 1940s overwhom should be protected by Indias affirmative action laws all members of thescheduled castes or only those who are poor or deprived in some quantifiable

sense. Some members of the unscheduled castes even have dissembled their owncaste status to benefit from the reservations policy. And, as noted above, casteriots have been precipitated by the pursuit of affirmative action in India.18

The same fundamental source of tension over affirmative action a strugglefor 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 amongJewish Americans toward application of affirmative action on behalf of blackAmericans. The growing division over this issue boiled completely out of the potin June 1983, when the black and Jewish factions of the Civil rights movementssplit over affirmative action.19 The greatest remaining support for affirmativeaction among Jewish Americans comes from some Jewish womens groups, whosemembers obviously can benefit from the existence of inclusionary sexual quotas.Racially nonwhite but already relatively successful minorities., such as JapaneseAmericans, also occasionally can hop on the affirmative action bandwagon at theirconvenience.

As a significantly overrepresented element of the American elite, AmericanJews are liable to feel endangered by the introduction of selection criteria thatwould, if pursued actively, reduce their presence in the higher circles of Americansociety. Sociologist W. D. Rubinstein has documented the wholesale movement,since World War II, of Western Jewry . . . into the upper-middle class. Heestimates that Jews in the United States constitute 10-15% of what he terms thelarge elite and perhaps a similar percentage of the small elite, while numberingonly 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 as1969 a Carnegie Commission survey found that 25% of those who teach law and22% of those who teach medicine were Jewish, and that Jewish academicsespecially 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 credential-ling process that existed in the post-1920s United States. New rules of selectionthat reserve places in the elite for blacks or other underrepresented ethnic groups,for instance, could mean a reduction in the Jewish presence. Therefore, Jewishintellectuals who are concerned about maintenance of high Jewish representationin Americas status positions now register the deepest reservations aboutaffirmative action.22 Rubinstein ranks affirmative action and racial quotaschemes as major threats to Western Jewry.23 Rubinstein, while advocating anideological 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 expressesfears of socialisms and egalitarianisms leveling effect. Says Rubinstein tersely,What the socialist and equalitarian fail to understand is that for the Jews, equalityis not enough. . . . 24

In essence, Rubinstein has turned the screw. He comprehends the revolu-tionary message of equality and remains dissatisfied because of his beliefs in(a) the desirability of hierarchy and (b) the desirability of his own ethnicgroups role within such a hierarchy. But it is the prior existence of generalhierarchy (or general inequality) that permits full vent to be given to notionsof ethnic supremacy. Even Northern European Anglo-Saxons find their

supremacist advocates. Wilmot Robertsons deceptively sophisticated anddisturbing right wing tract urging a restoration of the power of Americastrue racial majority voices just such a message.25 Black nationalistideologues provide the Afro-American variant of the same theme. And on andon; this is the rhetoric of ethnic/racial warfare.


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Those now winning the American ethnic war have a strong advantage even inthe face of affirmative action and racial quotas. For if the current winners trulypossess the requisite skills and know-how for the positions they hold, in an agewhere technical expertise has become the most valuable asset, those who aregranted slots by government designation unless they somehow happen tohave acquired the skills in a highly stratified educational system still need notbe privy to the important deliberations. Conflict can be eased by expansion ofthe total number of slots with the entry of the previously excluded group, butthe new slots need not carry the same weight or authority. The new entrantswill be no more than spooks who sit by the door, although there will be moreof them at the door. Thus affirmative action, even if pursued to the hilt, neednot provide genuine power for the out groups. It can, however, make thingsfar more difficult for an in group who loses slots as ethnic/racial competitionpersists. But such internecine ethnic/racial warfare means that if a partialrecomposition of the elite is the best that can be hoped for by out groups, it maynot be much of a hope.

In a climate of ethnic/racial conflict, the fundamental tension betweenprospects for general equality and the existence of ethnic/racial over-representation by some groups in positions of authority and influence becomesquite visible. Behind this lies the institutional context of a society divided alongclass lines. Class divisions are the source of positions of status and power andmake them worth winning.26 Only Schaars radical conception of

equality a conception which cannot be given the adjectives racial orethnic by itsvery nature provides a direct ideological offensive against social strati-fication.

For unlike Westens definition of equality as the proposition in law andmorals that people who are alike should be treated alike, the radicalconception of equality has it that all people should be treated with someminimum degree of dignity. Their alikeness or unalikeness is irrelevant. Theirpersonhood is what is decisive. Schaar describes this type of equality as theantithesis of equal opportunity, involving strong elements of human sympathy:

. . . there is another kind of equality that is blind to all questions of success orfailure. This is the equality that obtains in the relations among the members ofany genuine community. It is the feeling held by each member that all othermembers, regardless of function and rank, belong to the community, as fully ashe does himself.27

Therefore, this vision of equality permits task differentiation to exist butthese conditions coexist with mutual respect. There would be no undue stigmaassociated with the performance of task A, and no undue glorification ofperformance of task B. There may be some differences in rewards, but theywould be narrowed and the worst prize, in the fashion of another of Rawls

arguments for justice, would assure its recipient human decency.28 Therewould be, simultaneously, uplift and leveling.

Nor need this mean descent into anarchy. Schaar further points out that it ismisleading to construct the choice as one between hierarchy and orderlyprogress 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 massesconception of social organization.

The concept of equality is not empty, as Westen would have us believe. Itssubstance is the idea that all people are at the same level not in terms ofattributes, abilities, talents, or aspirations but in terms of intrinsic worth. Thepeerage is not exclusive but all-inclusive; either all sit in the House ofCommons or all sit in the House of Lords or all sit on the outside of bothhouses. Equalitys guiding principle is not that all have the same skills orshould have the same skills, but that all have the same inherent merit. To adoptreligious metaphors none should be elect at the expense of the un-elect, norshould any be the chosen few at the expense of the rest.

Therefore what Schaar terms the radical democratic conception of equalityis incompatible with racial equality if the latter means racially equal or fairshares in inequality. Equality in its revolutionary sense broaches no com-promise with the inegalitarians, who fear its overtures and implications. It isonly in this sense that equality potentially becomes a full-bodied and dynamicidea.

The central difficulty that remains is how to get from here to there,circumnavigating both concrete and ideological obstacles. Racial equality in itscustomary senses equal opportunity or equal results constitutes detours thatsustain the hierarchical foundation that motivate the desire of dominant groupsto preserve racial difference. The challenge is to crack the foundation. Oth-

erwise the superstructure will continue to stand. Racial equality in its radicalsense only becomes a realistic possibility once general equality becomes a majorobjective for society.

NOTES

The authors research was supported by the Southern Center for Public Policy Studies at Clark College inAtlanta. I am grateful to Robert Gooding-Williams for extensive and helpful critical comments on an earlierdraft.

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. 39-405. Ibid., p. 41.6. For instance, Sowell devotes a substantial portion of his work to make the peculiar claim that

discrimination does notexplain the disadvantageous economic position of native blacks in the UnitedStates, see Ibid., pp. 73-90.

7. With considerably less notoriety than Sowell, the author has endeavored to subject the idea of racialequality to careful inspection. See William Darity Jr. The Goal of Racial Economic Equality: ACritique Journal of Ethnic StudiesVol. 10: No. 4 (Winter 1983), pp. 51-7 and William Darity Jr. TheTheory 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. 100-

120.

11. John Schaar Equality of Opportunity and Beyond in J. Roland Pennock and John Chapman (eds.)


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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.

12. Felix Paukert Income Distribution at Different Levels of Development: A Survey of Evidence

International Labour Review (August-September 1973), p. 98.13. Rawls, op. cit., p. 100.

14. Ibid., pp. 100-101.

15. Ibid., pp. 101-102.

16. Schaar, op. cit., p. 230.

17. 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.

18. 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. 1-

15.19. Juan Williams Civil Rights Groups Split Over Nominees and Quotas The Washington Post (June

18, 1983), p. A2.

20. W. D. Rubinstein The Left, the Right, and the Jews (New York: Universe Books, 1982), p. 9.

21. Marshall Sklare The Jew in American Sociological Thought Ethnicity (Vol. 1, 1974), pp. 151-

2.

22. 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.

23. Rubinstein, op. cit., p. 222.

24. Ibid., p. 227.

25. Wilmot Robertson The Dispossessed Majority (Cape Canaveral: Howard Allen 1972).26. 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.

27. Schaar, op. cit., p. 245.

28. Rawls, op. cit., on the maximin principle pp. 150-66.

29. Ibid., p. 240, emphasis in original.

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2.5 - Darity Jr, William - Equal Opportunity, Equal Results, And Social Hierarchy (en)