The current indictment issued by the woke left is that America is “systemically racist.” I understand the significance of the term to be that ongoing economic underperformance by African Americans must be attributed to fault of members of other races, even if no actual wrongful racist conduct by any individual or group of people can be identified. Instead, since individual wrongdoing can rarely be found, it follows that the racism must somehow have been built into the “system.” Therefore, we are all called upon to change the “system” by becoming “anti-racists.”

The issuance of the systemic racism indictment has brought a stampede of companies and institutions seeking to demonstrate their “anti-racist” credentials by committing to new and/or enhanced affirmative action initiatives for the benefit of African Americans. The New York Times has a roundup just today on “What Companies Are Promising to Do to Fight Racism.” The Times’s list is lengthy (Adidas, Amazon, Apple, Estee Lauder, Facebook, FitBit, NASCAR, PayPal, PepsiCo, Pinterest, Sephora, SoftBank, Target, Trek, Viacom, Walmart, Warner, YouTube, etc.), but at that only scratches the surface, and focuses just in the corporate sector. Hundreds more examples of recent commitments to affirmative action initiatives can be found not only in the corporate sector, but also in academia, entertainment, the media, sports, governments, not-for-profits, and most everything else.

So if “anti-racist” affirmative action was the solution to the economic problems of African Americans, why hasn’t it been tried before now? The answer, of course, is that it not only has been tried, but it has been pervasive in our country in essentially all major institutions for decades. The truly remarkable thing about the recent public discussion of “systemic racism” has been the total lack of acknowledgement of the of the vast amounts of affirmative action efforts that have been undertaken to date, and the further lack of any attempt to try to understand how it is that those very substantial efforts have accomplished so little over a long period of time.

At Law & Liberty on August 12, Professor Amy Wax of Penn Law School has a review that addresses head on the failure to date of affirmative action in the academic arena. Professor Wax traces the history back to Supreme Court cases in the 1970s that approved affirmative actions in public universities (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1978) and corporations (United Steel Workers v. Weber, 1979). Well over forty years into the effort, Professor Wax essentially blames the new cult of “wokeness” substantially on affirmative action:

How has affirmative action contributed to wokeness? By making promises it couldn’t keep. The plain reality is that affirmative action plans, by definition, bring to selective institutions a contingent of minority students who are on average less equipped than fellow students to meet the rigors and demands of elite academia. The high hope was that affirmative action would bring blacks as a group up to speed almost immediately, or at least within a generation or two, allowing them to compete on the same terms as other groups. That hasn’t happened. Instead, these programs have generated frustration, resentment, anger, and self-doubt.

These disappointments and dislocations have generated strenuous efforts to protect minorities and others in the university from acknowledging, confronting, and facing up to the realities of persistent racial disparities in educational performance and ongoing troubles within many black communities. Wokeness can be seen as a culmination as those efforts—an elaborate set of rules, beliefs, demands, taboos, and rhetorical devices designed to obscure, correct for, and deny these realities.

Similar to academia, the industry where I spent my career — large commercial law firms — began a universal practice of affirmative action for the benefit of African Americans no later than the early 1970s. As an associate in the late 70s I participated in strategy meetings and recruitment efforts seeking to increase the numbers of qualified African Americans that we could attract to our firm; and those efforts only increased and intensified as the years went on. Essentially all major law firms have had similar efforts over the same period of time. The results of all these efforts have been very frustratingly slow and incremental.

The tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple were only created long after the 1970s. But they all have been proclaiming commitment to affirmative action for at least a decade. I summarized the very meagre results of those efforts in a post on June 16 titled “The Woke Tech Giants Teach Us How To Deal With Systemic Racism.”

It seems that affirmative action is like socialism. Every time it is tried it fails. But that must be because it just wasn’t done right the last time. This time we finally understand it and it will work.

At this point we have plenty of experience with affirmative action initiatives to know that they do not offer any quick fix to economic underperformance by African Americans. A year or two or three from now, it will be obvious that the latest round of such initiatives has been no more successful than any of the prior rounds.