The Significance of Affirmative Action for the Souls of White Folk: Further Implications of a Helping Model

Journal of Social Issues, Winter, 1999 by Anthony R. Pratkanis, Marlene E. Turner

The Material Effects of Racism on African Americans

There is good reason to pay so much attention to the effects of discrimination on the souls of Black folk: racism, whether it be in the form of slavery, Jim Crow laws, or today's more modem forms, materially affects the lives of African Americans. Some statistics should make this point clear (see Jones, 1988, 1997). Today, African Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as Whites. If employed, the Black person living in America will make about half as much as the White person will. Further, African Americans are overrepresented in blue-collar and service occupations and underrepresented in managerial, professional, and technical positions. The life expectancy of an African American is 5.5 years shorter than that of a White American. Infant mortality for Blacks is about double the rate for Whites. Black folks are less likely to graduate from high school and 50% less likely to graduate from college than White folks. Although they make up less than 6% of the U.S. population, African American men represen t 48% of those confined to prisons; Blacks are 7.5 times more likely to go to prison than Whites (Haney & Zimbardo, 1998). In searching for a home to purchase, Blacks (with a loan profile the same as a White control group) were shown 25% fewer houses, were two times more likely to be denied a loan, were typically shown homes in only certain areas, and, as a result, paid, on average, $3,000 more to search for a home (Yinger, 1995). In a survey of White New Englanders, the majority of respondents endorsed at least one stereotypic belief that Blacks are born inferior (PIous & Williams, 1995). Other studies have shown that Whites are less likely to help Blacks in casual social settings, less likely to want to follow the directions of a Black leader, and more likely to use inadmissible testimony in court cases to convict Black (as opposed to White) defendants (Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986).

The Helping Model of Affirmative Action

We have also written about the effects of racism on the targets of prejudice or at least one aspect of this prejudice: when a majority group member attempts to provide affirmative action to help prevent and eliminate the material effects of racism (see Pratkanis & Turner, 1996b; Turner & Pratkanis, 1994). The term "affirmative action" has come to mean many things to many people. For some, affirmative action has mistakenly become synonymous with a quota system. Legally, affirmative action refers to policies and procedures taken to implement the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Executive Order 11246, which forbid discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, or national origin and require federal contractors to take affirmative action to ensure fairness in selection decisions. Practically, business, governmental, and educational organizations implement affirmation action by adopting such practices as setting employment targets based on the proportion of qualified female or minority applicants, outreac h to encourage minority applications, and monitoring promotion procedures for fairness, among other procedures (see Pratkanis & Turner, 1996b, Table 1, for other common methods). The foundation of affirmative action is the social relationship of help: The majority group member attempts to help the target of prejudice or to help remove the discriminatory barriers faced by that individual.