Students and professors gathered yesterday at Pfahl Hall for a lecture by Elijah Anderson, award-winning author and professor of sociology at Yale University. Anderson’s presentation, “From Affirmative Action to Diversity: The New Black Middle Class,” examined the changes in black society that were brought about by the civil rights movement and continue to this day.
As a child growing up in Indiana, Anderson experienced first-hand the racial turbulence during the civil rights movement. When he was a student at Indiana University, he marched on the university president’s lawn and called for more racial equality at an institution where only about 300 students out of 30,000 were black.
ABIGAIL MINER/THE LANTERNElijah Anderson, sociology professor at Yale University, analyzes schisms within the contemporary black middle class Thursday in Pfahl Hall.“It [wasn’t] about equality, it was about representation,” Anderson said. “It was a kind of petty affirmative action.”
In order to resolve the racial issues brought into focus by the civil rights movement, the corporations, universities and heads of government began to incorporate black people into the system, Anderson said.
“They became tokens, but not in a negative sense,” Anderson said. “Black people who joined and came to the table were symbolic representations of their communities.”
By doing this, the corporations and universities could blame black individuals for not achieving equality, rather than addressing a flawed system, Anderson said.
The inclusion created a new black middle class consisting of people with college educations and jobs at large corporations, Anderson said.
Anderson described affirmative action as a policy that was originally devoted to the inclusion of black people into universities and corporations. However, Anderson said he believes the reason affirmative action has survived is because it has changed and become more diverse by including all races and gender. But he said he thinks the policy has a limited life-span.
“Once the policy has achieved the goal of equality, it will self-destruct and go away,” Anderson said.
Jason Cocca can be reached at [email protected].
