Revisiting affirmative action,globally

The conundrum of affirmative action

One immediate consequence of the 2008 global financial crisis which numerous analysts saw, perhaps prematurely, as the death knell of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2010; Overbeek and van Apeldoorn, 2012) was the ravages that it visited upon longstanding vulnerable populations worldwide—those in industrialized countries, as well as those in nonindustrialized ones. The palpable effects of neoliberalism’s crisis exposed existing fault-lines in the urban and rural spaces of already racialized populations, from the United States to Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Increasingly vast disparities in living conditions have revealed the fragility of sovereignties. For example, in the United States, the world’s most powerful country, Jacqueline Jones (2013) noted that “(B)etween June 2009 and June 2012, the median annual black household income fell 11 percent, compared to 5.5 percent for white households” and that this reflected “patterns derived in part from a social division of labor that concentrated black men and women in public employment, manufacturing, and low-wage service jobs” (p. 290).

The key point of Jones’ contention is a fact evident in much of the literature on exclusion and rights involving ethnic communities: active discrimination is fundamentally linked to economic vicissitudes, and economic determinants tend to replicate patterns of exclusion and segregation. For example, segregated neighborhoods with poorer educational facilities are a breeding ground for high-school dropouts and poor college attendance. Especially for young men, these conditions lead to disastrous disparities between educational achievement of Blacks and Latinos in contrast to White and Asian students in the United States (Rooks, 2014). In South Africa and Fiji, where the demographics are reversed, one witnesses a similar outcome even though the political elites in these countries tend to be at least nominal members of the disadvantaged majority population. The at-risk populations that constitute the majority continue to perform poorly compared to the minority populations despite the efforts of their political elites in seeking a balance between development and well-being through programs aimed at alleviating disparities between the advantaged and disadvantaged.

First introduced in India in the late 1940s, affirmative action has subsequently been implemented since the early 1960s in heterogeneously populated countries like the United States, Malaysia, Fiji, South Africa, and more recently in South America and Northern Ireland, primarily to redress inter-ethnic inequities, specifically those involving wealth, educational, and income distribution. In all these cases, its mode of implementation involved targeting long marginalized ethnic or religious groups, although with some fundamental differences. In India and the United States, the policy targeted ethnic minorities who had nominal economic and political presence. However, in Malaysia, South Africa, and Fiji, affirmative action was designed to serve the indigenous majority population whose elites had assumed political office, but lacked comparable economic clout. In these instances, shadow governments that more or less front for a White minority, or residual patterns of colonial paternalism, give particular contours to policy. In Northern Ireland, affirmative action-like policy operated with a twist. At the same time that it sought to level the playing field of opportunities between Catholics and Protestants, where the former had been shut out of key socioeconomic and political institutions and sectors, it did so by trying to play fair to both groups. In South America, particularly in Brazil and Ecuador, affirmative action emerged as an attempt to bolster programs that redress long legacies of racial discrimination linked to lack of access to economic opportunity, and reinforced through neoliberal practices that are now deeply critiqued for the socioeconomic injustices that they have wrought. Affirmative action is therefore viewed as an endeavor to create a far more just economic and sociopolitical order, one that entails the need to expose, even stress, the significance of the “idea of race” in colonial and contemporary construction of societies in this region.

When affirmative action was introduced in the United States (1961), Malaysia (1970), Fiji (1987), and South Africa (1998), it was triggered by a defining crisis that the political administrators felt necessitated the deployment of a progressive policy to rectify longstanding social injustices among economically marginalized subject/citizens. However, in all cases, the power to enforce such preferential provisioning lay with hegemonic elites, in politics or in business. In brief, affirmative action was introduced in countries worldwide to address social and economic inequities that had emerged through active processes of colonialism, migration, marginalization, and subordination, inequities that continue in one form or another into the present. Whether these projects emerged after prolonged struggles over civil rights and political liberties, as in the United States and South Africa, or through various forms of social engineering aimed at promoting equity among ethnic groups, as in Malaysia, Fiji, and Sri Lanka, or parity—“fair participation,” in the wake of intra-state conflict as the case in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants —, they raise questions about how to justly govern and accommodate difference. What is clear is that, since affirmative action programs are not implemented in isolation but constitute one component of a range of practices of governance, including economic development, these programs must be considered in relation to a matrix of a highly complex and contested technologies of rule, ideologies, and biopolitics.

Given the shifts in social welfare policies, an interesting paradox emerged in the 1970s. During this decade and particularly since the early 1980s, affirmative action would meet in an unlikely alliance with neoliberalism, the hegemonic development model. Although implemented discriminately, neoliberalism generally places great emphasis on the individual, the market, deregulations, and an active state facilitating the institutional framework for the implementation of these practices whose outcome was the devaluation of the social (Harvey, 2005). Ostensibly then, neoliberal policies appeared to be at odds with the collective or group-oriented goals of affirmative action, specifically those concerned with extra-economic criteria for inclusion, reducing poverty through social welfare provisioning and protecting the hard-earned rights of workers. However, in more recent times, affirmative action has become a policy recommendation among a new group of countries. South American countries that had long opposed neoliberal ideologies, even as they were forced to engage with its policies, would nonetheless adopt affirmative action policies to rectify racial inequities.

A second group consisting of industrialized western states like France, which, at least under President Nicolas Sarkozy, came to see “positive discrimination” (read affirmative action-like projects) as a solution to race-based discrimination. For example, in the wake of the 2005 youth riots in urban France, then presidential candidate Sarkozy declared, “Proclaiming equality before the law is no longer enough: henceforth we also need to promote equality by (using) the law, … [W]e cannot continue to accept that a growing number of individuals are allotted destinies written in advance” (New York Times, 2005). ² Yet, debatably, in both instances, this accommodation of the marginalized minorities through the solution of affirmative action would contribute to racially reinforcing those marginalized positions, leaving the socioeconomic position of elites relatively untouched. In other words, although changes were called for, affirmative action as implemented could hardly unsettle the status quo, and indeed often served as ideological window-dressing for neoliberal policy.

There is no lack of examples of slippage between policy, governance, and racially charged contentions. Anyone following the congressional “wars” of Barack Obama’s two terms as president may often wonder about what political attitudes or agendas underpin the complicated congressional processes. And yet, in the most powerful and one of the most racialized countries in the world, Barack Obama, who openly extolled affirmative action policies for socioeconomic advancement as part of his electoral platform, became the first Black president of the United States. And, then again, Obama has been widely criticized for not taking a more stringent stand on race, particularly in the light of recent events in Ferguson, Missouri. Latest news updates, such as found in the 9 December 2014 edition of the New York Times, proclaim Obama’s intention to reprioritize issues of race for the remainder of his second term.

It is no surprise that a number of analysts have noted sharp divergences occurring between intent and implementation of policies. Certainly, when considering reconfigured states, the privileging and the reconstitution of subject/citizens are crucial factors affecting governance and governmentalities. In her study of neoliberalism’s influences on governance and the economies of Southeast Asia, Aihwa Ong (2006) speaks insightfully about interventions that have resulted in biopolitical investment in different categories of the population, hence her notion of “graduated citizens or sovereignties.” But Ong’s argument about this new fragmentation of the social fails to take into consideration earlier forms of fragmentation, both colonial and postcolonial, that set the stage for the novel spatial fragmentations and graduated sovereignties now extant in this new era of neoliberal, or to use Brenner’s concept, “competition states.” ³ For Bunnell and Coe (2005: 845), the very sites of these new projects may be located on previous sites, thus doubly marking such racialized divisions. As an example of this, they cite Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor located on “old plantation sites, which under colonialism represented different sites of racialised governmentalities.” But more to the point is the issue of the extant fragmentation, the terrain of newer forms of governmentality in this global neoliberal area. Thus, as Bunnell and Coe (2005) conclude,

State development has thus imagined and worked across a singular national political space while at the same time working through (and thereby perpetuating) colonial ethnic or communal differentiation. (p. 843)

Thus, new processes and sites of fragmentation rely on previous rehearsals of these disorders.

Affirmative action and neoliberalism

A core aspect of the joint implementation of affirmative action programs and neoliberal policies is how they lead to the convergence of class interests, along lines that are trans-ethnic in nature at the same time that they congeal racial identitarian markers. William Darity (2013) draws our attention to a key aspect of affirmative action: all over the world, this policy is part of a desegregation project intent not on poverty reduction or reparations but on diversifying an already becoming elite. In other words, affirmative action merely speeds up or stabilizes already emerging social class upward mobility. While affirmative action programs reduce the monopoly of historically advantaged ethno-racial groups, they also lead to the creation or reinforcement of a “creamy layer,” in that the policy disproportionately benefits middle-class members of the stigmatized or relatively deprived group. However, this fact is not generally seen by analysts as a failing since the objective of affirmative action is to produce inter-group—not intra-group—equality. In short, affirmative action generates experiences of access and certain privilege among better off groups of marginals, whose (becoming) privilege wittingly or unwittingly acts to stabilize the status quo. Obviously then, other sets of policies are required to reduce overall social inequality, to equalize opportunities across classes, within gendered ethnic and racialized strata, and to end racism.

As a project of social engineering, responsive in many cases to populist demands, thinking productively about affirmative action’s heterogeneous career certainly necessitates a comparative analysis in the context of a hegemonic ideology and neoliberal practice of globalization. In this respect, Saskia Sassen (2006; 2008) argues that the geography of globalization (or global capital) is lumpy, and no state is monolithic, driven by its own institutional divisions and contradictions. So globalization’s effects and neoliberalism’s practices are hardly uniform, as they come into contact with particular histories and norms.

If the argument about neoliberal globalization is that the social sphere has become (more) marketized, or market-embedded, and states and international financial institutions such as the World Bank have been more or less ‘captured’ by capital, one needs to ask what specific component(s) of state relations and institutions have been mobilized to support affirmative action interventions, and how have these functioned to thwart, enhance, or even facilitate neoliberal projects? In other words, what kind of affirmative action is being mobilized, in light of the contentious debates about its mismanagement/management, ill fit, supersession, or its failures within this new register of global neoliberalism or its palpable challenges by states touting post-neoliberalism policies? In addition, we may well ask what is affirmative action’s gendered public life, given the changed relations of citizen to the state, of citizens/subjects among themselves, and among their various ethnicized, racialized, religious, or other communities, newer circumstances that Nikolas Rose (1996) addresses when speaking of challenging the social.

There is no doubt that neoliberal programs have underscored the need for socially embedded policies aimed at creating greater opportunities for those historically excluded who have been made even more so by the recent market-focused programs. This partly explains the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Sawyer and Gomez, 2012). Given the reconstitution or incapacitation of their state institutions, many NGOs provide social provisioning for vulnerable groups. But NGOs too have their own agendas, some of which include reinforcing aspects of neoliberalism such as the responsibilization of the individual, the centering role of social capital, the denationalization of the social sphere, and the privatization of social policies (Somers, 2008). ⁴

Whichever way you approach the analysis, a basic question remains: How do reconfigured ethno-racial or ethno-national communities exceed, undermine, or affirm earlier forms of affirmative action’s expectations? There are signs that suggest the relative exhaustion of particular racial or ethnic identities, even as economic signs point to enduring inequalities. This is especially witnessed in Fiji and South Africa, countries where affirmative action targets the majority community. Newer iterations of affirmative action programs may have something more equitable to offer than earlier forms. For example, it seems evident that the various responses to affirmative action’s practices have translated the social relations between and among racial and ethnic groupings in a manner that makes it productive to think in terms of a post-raciality and post-ethnicity.

On the other hand, much turns on how we measure these continuities and discontinuities, given the ever-present ghosts of plantation and/or colonial and postcolonial complexes. In this regard, in the case of the United States, what should we make of Thomas Sowell’s (2004) idea that affirmative action’s success or failure not be benchmarked quantitatively, that it not be measured by numbers only, as in the number of minority business people, public leaders versus the rest, and so on. And, relatedly, his idea that the absence of minorities in business in the United States might be due to other factors and not necessarily discrimination, directly or indirectly? Might the emergence of Obama, the Black President of the United States, or the election of Dalits to prominent positions, such as the Speaker of the House, Meirakumar, in India and the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati, be considered equivalent benchmarks of collective ethnic or racial progress generally?

The issues according to our contributors

The conundrum occasioned by the staggered implementation and outcomes of affirmative action globally is part of the puzzle that concerns this Special Issue. The contributors in this volume probe the ways in which the implementation of neoliberal economic policies has willy-nilly left affirmative action bruised but unbowed, speaking to what seems like a doubly paradoxical development. How is it that programs deliberately aimed at reducing socioeconomic disparities end up having little effect, serving as punctuation marks to a relentless process of income, opportunity, and wealth disparities, in an increasingly racialized and post-racialized world? As the contributors here point out, the conception and implementation of policy varies greatly globally, sometimes presenting contradictions only understood with careful attention to local context.

The analyses in this Special Issue arise specifically from the working of such policies in Ecuador, Brazil, Fiji, India, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the United States of America. With these key examples, this volume therefore tackles the more or less changing historical context of affirmative action’s trajectory, critically mapped against structural adjustment of the 1980s, followed by what has come to be known as neoliberal economic policies, which, compounded by the 2008 global financial crisis that sent economies reeling, in effect made risk endemic worldwide, impacting racialized subject/citizens unequally even as states—or nominal concepts of State—are reconfigured.

As analysts and the contributors here argue, critical changes—as well as lessons and more sophisticated caveats of assessment—have emerged in the wake of the implementation of affirmative action. For example, no real evidence exists that suggests gains or losses in actual productivity following the implementation of affirmative action for women and Blacks in the United States particularly in the business sector, although one recent study notes that affirmative action policies have had a motivating influence on minority students and that it can “help narrow achievement gaps across demographic groups.” ⁵ However, the context, given the prevailing concept of meritocracy, is far more complicated. Even though no evidence exists to suggest that affirmative action in the United States violates the rule of meritocracy, according to Lewis R. Gordon (2012), little has actually changed from when the system openly privileged mediocre members of White groups over better qualified members of the stigmatized group. Gordon argues that affirmative action provoked a re-assessment of employment criteria involving a raising of admissions and hiring standards that discriminated against minorities. ⁶

In India, no data exist that show a significant performance gap between affirmative action and non-affirmative action students admitted to universities. But, one sees evidence of a common paradoxical tendency: Affirmative action does facilitate upward mobility, even as it often forecloses opportunities for the most needy members of deserving groups. And while it ostensibly acts to reverse the stereotypes that employers hold, stigmatization of these effects does not automatically disappear. In fact, this “obfuscation” of persistent stigmatization has become the rallying cry of the anti-affirmative action groups, who otherwise support programs to end racial, gender, and other minority inequalities. In some cases, activists find that weighting the issues to center on affirmative action reflects an imposition of foreign models (read United States), calling attention to race in ways that undermine achievements accomplished through other channels, and hampering solutions that would serve their social spaces in a more organic manner as dos Santos mentions in regards to the stance Yvonne Maggie and Peter Fry have taken on the issue of Brazil. ⁷

In brief, what these divergences highlight is that the contexts in which these policies have been implemented matter. In this Special Issue, authors provide a historical evaluation of affirmative action, with specific attention paid to core issues, related to access, implementation, outcomes, challenges, and accompanying discourses, all sharing the view of its intention to suture fragmented socials.

A comparative review of these varied tendencies necessitates, of course, consideration of the historical circumstances of inequities whether tracked along religious lines, as in Northern Ireland, or racialized/ethnic divisions. In India, under colonialism, early attempts at reshaping structured inequities targeted traditional exclusionary practices, such as the exclusion of that sub-continent’s Dalits or untouchables and other scheduled castes. In contrast, in Fiji, affirmative action served the indigenous majority population. It was the instrument deployed to significantly narrow or close the gap between the more economically successful minority populations, notably the Indian-Fijians. In Fiji, as Steven Ratuva in his essay attests, the operation of affirmative action policies created new (and serious) intra-ethnic wealth and income disparities.

As we have stated earlier, the implementation of affirmative action and neoliberalism has actually been one of the underpinnings of a neoliberal and post-neoliberal agenda. In Ecuador, as Catherine Walsh explains in her study, “Affirmative, Affirming, and Decolonial Action(ing)s in South American and the Andes,” affirmative action has become constitutionalized at the same time that the country was grappling with and against neoliberal policies. Similarly, as Walsh notes, even in Colombia, which is seen as an exception in this leftist turn, the implementation of social provisioning policies along with neoliberal economic policies has proceeded along a path (rhetorically at least) that aims to challenge historic conditions of exclusion and racial discrimination. In South America, the so-called leftist political leadership of Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela channels notions of post-neoliberalism ostensibly aimed at subverting projects of neoliberalism. As Walsh argues, Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution embraced affirmative action as a new imperative that would “leave behind the long neoliberal night.” But Victoria Lawson notes the Ecuadorian state’s contradictory shift away from a “territorially defined state to its institutional dispersion among multilateral agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other such agencies operationalizing neoliberal policies.” ⁸

Yet, it can be argued that such South American experiences seek to do more than affirmative action programs implemented in the United States. According to Walsh, in the case of Colombia and Ecuador, their most innovative provision seems to the link to issues of “territorial integrity” as a way to address the massive displacement of Black communities due to extractivist policies of development. Walsh draws attention to an important challenge to governance: If the law has not succeeded in substantively redressing social and economic inequities among the more vulnerable groups, and current market practices have been unable to generate equal playing fields, what other more effective mechanisms can be adopted to bring about higher degrees of parity? This challenge evidently goes beyond contested issues between affirmative action and neoliberalism. It concerns, more broadly, the struggle by various groups over what would or should constitute the social sphere in the wake of its reconfiguration under limited state governance. In much of the Global South, place and belonging considered within nation-state frames, it is true, continues to be propped up by laws and forms of governance where the reconfigured state, struggling to stay relevant, is still being called upon to facilitate the repositioning and/or reconstitution of subjectivities now organized under the dispensation of various re/imagined communities scaled below or even “outside” the nation-state. ⁹ But the heterogeneity of the claims of the various communities make for varied contestation–uneasy coexistences.

Thus, the expansion of various types of affirmative action programs globally should not obscure the raging debates underway in countries where such projects have already had relatively long histories, notably the United States, India, South Africa, and Fiji. The questioning of affirmative action programs has come from a wide political spectrum, including minorities themselves who no doubt have benefited from its openings. ¹⁰ In the United States, for example, as Gerald Early (1997) opined, “[B]lacks strike the white imagination in largely contradictory ways: as huge success stories and as the underclass of criminals and welfare cheats.” ¹¹ Other arguments skeptical of affirmative actions’ efficacy run the gamut from calls for its wholesale dismantling alleging that it has outlived its usefulness since racialisms (certainly of the raw type that spurred its emergence) are now passé; that affirmative action has re-fragmented racial and ethnic divides and monolithized “races;” to arguments calling for its reconfiguration on the grounds that it has helped the better off at the expense of the more socially and economically disadvantaged, thus solidifying the class politics of the social (Rose, 1996).

As Gerald Torres notes here in “Neoliberalism and Affirmative Action,” US affirmative action was diversely interpreted even by those who clamored for its implementation. It was designed to shift the state toward a neutral stance on race, and it certainly was not about ending poverty, a point reiterated by many analysts. According to Torres, in the United States, affirmative action stood on firmest ground “when it was understood as a remedial action designed to eliminate or reduce the results of prior discrimination and to establish the conditions to prevent further discrimination.” But the current neoliberal/liberal moment has witnessed the emergence of arguments that reject group amelioration instead reverting to an invocation of rationalities based on the need for a more individualistic focus and the identification of specific instances of wrong doing and named perpetrators. Torres posits that neoliberalist proponents have been successful in so far as they have managed to shift an argument about a historically racialized state into a racialized contemporary moment that eradicates or overlooks historical process, thus limiting state options.

However, in spite of these debates about affirmative action, there are others who have argued for its emendation or expansion to cover new forms of social inequalities that became frightfully stark, in South America and, as mentioned earlier, France following the riots by the poor of the Parisian suburbs of late 2005. Other voices see such programs as legitimating a politics that undercuts any serious engagement with the “realpolitik.” Such a “realpolitik” would mean substantive changes beyond the simply symbolic level of what Paul Gilroy (1994) in a different context referred to as a “politics of fulfillment” that it has been, to one leading to a “politics of transfiguration” (Gilroy, 1994). The more radical calls for such a politics of real transformation critique affirmative action programs as resulting fundamentally in a stabilization of the status quo. In referring to the US situation, Kimberle Crenshaw (2011) declared that affirmative action projects have led to “the ideological and political legitimation of continuing Black subordination,” leading to gaping democratic—and one could well argue, economic—deficits (p. 280).

Affirmative action, race, and post-raciality

Meanwhile, debates about the applicability of race-based policies, even those implemented over a short duration, have divided academics, politicians, and policy planners, as seen so cogently in Brazil and Ecuador. In “Between Left and Right: are Descendants of Slaves still Black,” Sales Augusto dos Santos argues that affirmative action, implemented because of the decades long agitation and demands by Brazil’s Black movements, highlights the schism between the latter and the Brazilian state. This schism demonstrates the state’s reluctance to grapple substantively with the issue of racial equality. According to dos Santos, the absence of political will persists despite the significant gains made in the field of education, by way of provisional quotas, and underscores similarities between Brazil’s developmental and neoliberal governments. Yet, although efforts to generate equality based on affirmative action policy fell short, dos Santos argues that the Lula government brought in real gains by increasing Afro-Brazilians’ income, creating space for the emergence of the less exclusionary policies that had been featured, or arguably initiated, in the Fernando Cardoso regime.

The consensus from the country studies included in this volume is that wherever affirmative action has been practiced, it has successfully and significantly increased the flow of relatively well-positioned individuals from the vulnerable groups into the middle and upper classes of the society. A key recognition is that affirmative action is not a policy designed to reduce income gaps between classes but to create a similar array of classes among vulnerable social groups as in privileged groups by redressing discrimination and exclusion at each occupational level where they occur, including elite occupations. Thus, it is an integrative device that projects a “politics of fulfillment” and that appeases some constituents as it makes claims on behalf of certain marginalized groups while distancing others. It creates or perpetuates intra-group class differences while also dividing the nation along (seemingly) fixed racial lines and inhibits unified protest against growing power and wealth concentration. In short, it thwarts efforts to even think against race and obscures the creolizing practices, ever present.

Arrangements emphasizing cultural and community autonomy, for example, those of Afro-Colombians, highlight much that is culture specific about affirmative action programs. That is to say, the tenor of history and the nature of demands for inclusion influence the way in which neoliberal practices work on the ground. For example, it is quite feasible for policies of both developmentalism and neoliberalism to coexist. And it is a mix through which community demands and programs are shaped. In his essay, “Participation and the Politics of Legality: Global Affirmative Action in Context,” Colin Harvey traces the genesis of affirmative action in Northern Ireland through its affiliation with other initiatives. Along with fair employment and the promotion of equality, Harvey argues that affirmative action became pivotal to tackling the conflict between two warring communities—the British Loyalist Protestants and the Nationalist Republican Catholics. As such, it became part of the movement for rights and equality, as its architects shunned the notion of “quota regimes,” associated with US affirmative action programs and “reverse discrimination,” preferring the terms “fair participation” and “equality of opportunity” that defined other programs elsewhere. Unlike several of the affirmative action projects discussed in this volume, Northern Ireland’s affirmative action was directed at employers and investors, holding them responsible for “taking positive steps and supporting permissible affirmative action measures.” Aimed at increasing the representation of underrepresented religious groups, Northern Ireland’s group-based programs were applied to Catholics as well as Protestants as a way to eschew the stigmatized notion of quotas. Harvey shows that in Northern Ireland, “there is an interaction between concentrated regulatory dialogue to secure fair participation and strong enforcement tools,” leading to significant successes even in a neoliberal environment that abhors a focus on group rights.

In her essay “Navigating ‘power daemons’ and ‘post race’: anti-racial social justice for South Africa,” Zimitri Erasmus highlights the deleterious and marginalizing effects of policies aimed at redressing social inequalities. Thus, she calls into question the wisdom of sustaining “populations of privilege” and “populations of need” based on organizing principles of categories of race remobilized by the African Nationalist Congress regime. Erasmus argues that the deployment of apartheid-era ethno-racial categories two decades after apartheid’s end and the assertion of Black political power have led to cronyism exacerbating social inequality. “For Erasmus, affirmative action policies based on prototypes that first emerged during apartheid are about “the State’s recalibration of ‘populations of privilege’ and ‘populations of need,’” which, in effect, has led to a “South Africa [that] has emerged even more unequal since 1994, than at the end of apartheid.” Erasmus, therefore, calls for a gradual phasing out of ethno-raciality as an affirmative action target category, in favor of more realistic categories addressing more directly deprivation, such as whether one’s family members could vote before the end of apartheid, whether one’s parents and grandparents had attended university, and how far one had to walk to school.

This idea of rethinking the notion of race beyond phenotype, without jettisoning the recognition of its pernicious effects, is a highly provocative proposition. The Afro-Ecuadorian and African American situations are instances of how the once stigmatized “Black” category has evolved, perhaps much like the term “backwardness” in India. It has seen a more political than cultural recuperation, given that it has been converted into an empowering technology for securing dignity and fair hiring and promotion of those who have been systematically devalued under its earlier application. As mobilized by South American racialized groups, the term “Black” and its counterparts have been reclaimed in a dynamic and attentive fashion, mobilizing social movements, communities, and self-sustaining projects. In other words, the term has become more expansive and somewhat post-racialized in a decolonial deployment without, as Erasmus argues, obscuring historical wrongs. Indeed, such arguments point to the need to consider a “neoliberal post-raciality,” which we believe signals the growing (however incremental) disconnectedness/connectedness between ethnicity, racialization, and social class. Of course, these developments in no way shape or form, herald the end of racism, as post-raciality is popularly grasped.

The context through which these post-racial practices occur might be related to the spaces created (given the state of state and non-state institutional flux that have emerged) especially in the Global South, where the gap between those conditions which defined the developmental state and those currently ushering in constitutive neoliberal economic dynamic is at once distinct and yet retains some of the fuzziness of the earlier period. If we may be allowed to generalize, given the excessive marketization of the social sphere, countries of the Global South long accustomed to political rule by populist regimes struggle with the wholesale adoption of neoliberal economic policies that severely reduce or exclude social welfare, defang, and reconfigure state institutions. In fact, we wish to argue that the very survival of Global South states oftentimes depends upon maintaining the hyphenated relationship with heterogeneous citizen/subjects who have traditions of governance/governing through patron–client relationships that afford “care” and protection to them in times of need.

This has certainly been the case in India, where Partha Chatterjee (2005, 2008) refers to such vulnerable groups as occupying the margins of society as “political society.” ¹² Indeed, it was that earlier pact through which political independence was forged that created avenues for subject/citizens to hold such governing regimes accountable. And so in the case of India, as Niraja Gopal Jayal writes in “Affirmative Action in India, before and after the Neoliberal Turn,” there has been no real significant departure from earlier forms of affirmative action to such programs since the 1990s. If anything, the quota regimes attending affirmative action in India have expanded precisely because of the marketization characteristic to neoliberal economic policies. Such marketization has, according to Gopal Jayal, led to the manipulation of citizenship, attesting to the ways in which citizenship has emerged as “an ensemble of elements that can be delinked and relinked to market-based rationalities” (Ong, 2006: 9), with contradictory “Catch 22s.” As she put it,

Citizens now belong to boxes whose labels separate them from one another. To be citizens in substantive terms, members of these groups need the markers of citizenship. However, the markers themselves stigmatize their citizenship in ways that render it qualitatively different from, and even less than, the real citizenship of the unmarked citizen.

It is important to note that this neoliberal turn, one of the consequences of the turn to the right for India, and those other states under consideration here, attaches and articulates with still vibrant liberal governing practices, making for diverse technologies of governing “experiences.” In this context, citizen/subjects simply have little choice but to reposition themselves within these intertwined institutional spaces to establish “their capacities to be present,” while staking their claims for affirmative action. And so, defining oneself as “backward” in India pays off, even as it permits a competitive environment pitting one deserved group against another. Brazil’s policy of racial self-identification is another case in point.

In Fiji, enduring contestations over place between Indo-Fijians and native Fijians, since its colonial subjugation in the 19th century, prevailed in the postcolonial period and have been reconstituted in the neoliberal era. In his essay, “Fiji’s Interface between Affirmative Action and Neoliberalism,” Steven Ratuva argues that what has changed since the 1980s in that era of structural adjustment has been a careful balancing of neoliberal policies with continued support for affirmative action policies. As Ratuva explains, the drive toward privatization and corporatization, rather than undermining affirmative action, actually was a fillip to its expansion and development. As he puts it,

The corporatization and privatization processes was seen by supporters of affirmative action as a welcome move to enable indigenous Fijians to enter into the higher echelons of the corporate world though purchase of shares or appointment into directorship and managerial positions.

Ratuva posits that the military governments in the wake of successive coups since 1987 have reinforced indigenous political rule, through ethno-nationalist biopolitics. Since 1970, all governments of Fiji have reinforced affirmative action policies that emerged even during colonial rule, given the realization that Fijians needed to be brought within the ambit of capitalist development. In Fiji, ironically, and perhaps expectedly given the reinforcing tendencies of affirmative action projects to neoliberalism policies, Ratuva concludes that communal investment which was a pivotal plank of affirmative action “ended up relying on neoliberal entrepreneurship for its ultimate survival.”

These examples underscore the point of several analysts regarding the varying effects of neoliberal policies and indeed the opportunities that arise in their wake. Certainly, neoliberalism is not a project where one size fits all. Neither is it rationally administered wholesale by states that are supremely sovereign. Governance implies contestation, and sovereignty has a more decentralized form. As Timothy Mitchell (1994) said of government,

It is not the totalistic implementation of the programme derived from a rationality, but an operation that is more clearly thought in terms of tactics and strategies of power, of specific, conflictual and changing aims, ideals and objectives, and varying degrees of success and failure, with a range of consequences situated across the spectrum between the intentional and the unintentional. (p. 187)

Thus, tactics and strategies are overlaid upon and engage with the historical specificities from earlier, colonial projects, all of whose technologies of rule involved the carving up of populations into “different mixes of disciplinary, caring and punitive technologies” (Ong, 1999: 215). Indeed, affirmative action’s implementation in all these countries attests to these postcolonial entanglements of temporalities—the social/Keynesian/developmental state effects and their articulations with neoliberal or competitive governance in this global era.

Conclusion

The studies undertaken here agree that early affirmative action did emerge in an era of a fracturing social sphere, defined by group demands for equality and the recognition of need to expand the bases for the wider accommodation of peripheral citizen/subjects. Such programs at best seemed effective as remedies for resolving certain ethno-racial inequalities, but they were no panaceas for ending group-specific poverty and socioeconomic lags caused by centuries of marginalization. Little wonder then, they did not or rather could not and cannot rescue those on the margins of socioeconomic spaces. In fact, they may even have reinforced those tendencies. Consider the extremes of wealth in places like the United States and the patterns of incarceration particularly among minorities.

Those who believed that affirmative action was such a palliative obviously “mistook the map for the territory,” to coin Sylvia Wynter’s (2006) phrase used in a different context. ¹³ As contributors here assert, social class, racial inequalities, and other inequities persist, becoming even more entrenched after the 1980s with the commencement of a market-based approach to development along with a reduction in social provisioning undertaken by states. With the social sphere now embedded in the economic, with loud mantras broadcasting messages of individualistic well-being, the need for social capital development, and the deliberate retreat of the ideology of collective responsibility, the deep and wide cracks are now more exposed than ever, making Nikolas Rose’s point about the ‘death of the social’ a provocative and productive analytic perspective. ¹⁴

Even though it is generally difficult to assess and evaluate affirmative action because it operates within a matrix of policies, laws, and initiatives, and not least the changing nature of employment patterns, migrations, and so on, analysts here have drawn some compelling conclusions. For example, the attempts to establish parity have allegedly resulted in the lowering of standards in Fiji and South Africa. However, in the United States, others have argued that, to the contrary, standards for inclusion have been raised in order to keep minorities out. In fact, the argument is that minorities mostly from the “creamy layer” are as qualified, or better qualified, than White privileged citizens who occupy similar occupational positions and that the deliberate desegregation of work places through affirmative action actually disrupts the employment monopoly of mediocre members of the privileged group. Such has been Lewis Gordon’s argument. The fact that the outcomes are different when affirmative action targets ethno-racial groups that are the majority population (Fiji and South Africa) and minorities (the United States and India) is an important difference when evaluating the trajectories and outcomes of these programs.

Despite its mixed outcomes in the United States, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Fiji, Northern Ireland, and South Africa, contributors in this volume do not anticipate a decline in racialization or inequality sufficient to justify the end of affirmative action-type programs in the near future. They tout the incomplete success of affirmative action as diversifying the class and professional attainments of underrepresented minorities, integration of education, residential neighborhoods, and so on, but reiterate that the task of the struggle for (economic) parity (ceteris paribus) is far from finished. They also argue that, given the generally low esteem in which underrepresented groups are held by dominant groups, and the continuing stagnation and the further vulnerabilization of marginal populations, the wholesale elimination of affirmative action would most likely reverse certain economic progress.

In addition, although most studies recognized the need to target ethno-racial and gender inequalities for specific redress, to empower these groups that have been underrepresented in the higher echelons of mainly economic but other sectors as well, all studies favor programs that target the poor as a group, thus favoring projects that also incorporate social class considerations. Neither one should proceed without the other. As we complete this introduction, we note the widespread stir and consternation among the left, center, and right that have attended the recent publication of Thomas Picketty’s book, Capitalism in the 21^st Century. Picketty’s thesis based on the longue dureé firmly and compellingly demonstrates the historical nature of inequality, and its endurance into the foreseeable future; in other words, a future marked by “one percenters” relentlessly accumulating, and removed from the rest of the planet, just as in the days of nobility (Leonhardt, 2014). If we add to this inequality, issues of race, persistent coloniality, and therefore further fragmentation of social spaces, the current neoliberal moment makes abundantly clear “the fierce urgency of the now” —for states and citizens to act decisively to forestall such developments. ¹⁵ And efforts aimed at the sorts of social engineering prevalent in programs such as affirmative action, discussed here, appear rather weak and narrow in their reach and substance, calling forth the need for alternative ways of thinking beyond the present social and political.