Native intelligence: affirmative action in perspective.

We've all heard a lot of talk against "affirmative action." It is depicted as a set of procedures designed to help "ethnic minorities" and women. Let's set the record straight.

Affirmative means "yes" and action means "to do," so we are talking about procedures which are implemented by government to say "yes" to some kind of "doing." This is a big area so let us limit our discussion only to "yes-doings" which have been designed to help a specific group of people. Americans of indigenous ancestry are experts in this area because our East Coast nations were the victims of the first affirmative action program in North America, wherein the English kings and queens gave to their wealthy subjects and to corporations (in which they were investors) huge amounts of American territory. The colonies of Virginia, South Carolina, Massachusetts, and others began with rich Englishmen receiving large blocks of Native American land. This affirmative action program proved to be very popular with rich white males, prompting the United States to continue the idea well after the end of English rule. Massive blocks of land were given to wealthy white land speculators, corporations, railroads, and lumber companies clear into the early twentieth century.

Both the English and U.S. governments used their military force and deceitful diplomacy to obtain Native American land at ridiculously low prices or by seizure and then turned it over to white people. African Americans and Native Americans were almost never able to get any of this land, even after the various homestead acts were implemented. The homestead acts only expanded land owners to include ordinary whites--a political action made necessary by anger at wealthy speculators and corporations getting so much.

This affirmative action program has continued to this day, taking the more recent form of allowing cattle ranchers and mining interests to have cheap and easy access to stolen Native land, and even to reservation land, by means of leases and one-sided contracts engineered by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (as with the giveaway of Black Mesa coal and water).

The second most massive affirmative action program--after the theft of American land--was the use of African, African American, and Native American labor without pay and in conditions of unjustifiable imprisonment. The English introduced what is known as slavery by allowing (in contradiction to established English law and custom) captives from Africa, the West Indies, and Native tribes to be seized, sold, purchased, and held as private prisoners for the duration of their lives and then, incredibly, by allowing that condition of captivity to be imposed upon the children of these captives without any judicial proceedings, charges, or evidence of committing any crime. The only "crime" they committed was that of being captured or born of a captive and being nonwhite.

Hundreds of thousands of Africans and tens of thousands of Native Americans were held illegally as captives and forced to labor their entire lives for the sole benefit of white persons (and a few free persons of color). For two and half centuries, the full powers of the English colonial, state, and federal governments were used to physically allow white persons to privately imprison other human beings for their own profit. That is an affirmative action program if there ever was one!

And we all know that African Americans have never been compensated for their centuries of free labor, while the wealthy Southern white population was allowed to keep its is-gotten land and wealth, even after they rebelled against the U.S. government in a civil war that cost millions of lives and huge amounts of public money.

One of the first affirmative action programs initiated under President George Washington came about when Alexander Hamilton, his secretary of the treasury, decided to redeem all revolutionary war debt at face value. Much of this debt had been acquired by speculators at a fraction of its value, but Hamilton wanted to firmly link the U.S. government with the wealthy classes--and he did. This represented a massive subsidy of speculators--a process which has continued ever since, with especially blatant examples under the Reagan and Clinton administrations.

In the nineteenth century, the U.S. Supreme Court--that citadel of rich white males--decided that joint stock companies (corporations) were "persons" while African Americans and Native Americans were not. Thus, corporations were put on an affirmative action fast-track, while nonwhite Americans were denied First Amendment, Fifth Amendment, and other basic protections as human beings. That still holds true today, insofar as tribal citizens are concerned. There is nothing in the Constitution stating that corporations are persons or that nonwhites are not, of course; the Supreme Court simply "legislated" what it wanted to in order to provide affirmative action for rich white stockholders, slaveholders, and land speculators.

Until the 1930s, U.S. state and federal governments had numerous other affirmative action programs designed almost exclusively for the benefit of wealthy white people. Most of these continue and new ones are added periodically. They include huge subsidies for absentee owners of agricultural properties (a high percentage of whom live in cities or resort areas and have no involvement in actual farming), subsidies of wealthy business people through all kinds of deductions from their tax payments, and even free Caribbean cruises if business is supposedly being conducted onboard. Programs designed to redress the racial and gender imbalances created by centuries of discrimination have only existed since the 1960s, and the amount of money spent on them cannot be compared with the multibillion-dollar subsidies of the rich.

Does all this mean that programs designed to create "a level playing field" or some degree of equity in U.S. society should remain unchanged? No, but first let's start calling racial-ethnic-gender disability programs "fair play" programs rather than "affirmative action" programs; and second, let's make sure that low-income persons of all ancestries are included. Why? Because many kinds of people have suffered from prior discrimination, and members of the working class and poor, in particular, have suffered and will continue to suffer. We need to be sure that all who need a level playing field get one. To do that, fair play programs need to be expanded, not diminished.

Jack D. Forbes is a professor of Native American studies at the University of California at Davis and the author of a monthly column entitled "Native Intelligence" for a number of Native newspapers in the United States and Canada He is also the recipient of the 1997 American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement and has recently had his first novel, Red Blood, published.