This detailed account of actual or real racial preferences should make clear to those who both believe that the days of racial discrimination are over and that past discriminations don’t have any bearing on this country in the here-and-now, that nothing could be farther from the truth.

Sadly, the voices of those who benefit the most from affirmative action are by-and-large silent---white women.  The unadulterated fact is that affirmative action has helped whites more than people of color. Consider that gender is a major component of affirmative action. As a result, no group has benefited more than white women. And given that white women are more likely to be associated with white families, one could reasonably argue that whites (as they are, for the most part, the daughters, sisters and mothers of white men) have been the main beneficiaries of affirmative action. Nevertheless, in 1996 when Proposition 209 came before the people of California, 57% of White women voted in favor of it---even though just the year before, the United States Labor Department confirmed that the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action were indeed white women ("Reverse Discrimination," 1995). It seems to me a betrayal of epic proportions that after accumulating advantages as result of these programs, they now appear to be at best ambivalent or at worst hostile towards them. Tim Wise, white antiracist author and activist, in his essay “Is Sisterhood Conditional? White Women and the Rollback of Affirmative Action,” wondered: “Why would white women increasingly come to view affirmative action in largely the same negative terms as the ‘angry white men’ about whom the media has made such an issue in recent years? Are white women thinking and voting more like white men on this issue because they identify their interests as being largely tied to those of white men--perhaps their husbands, or sons--and as such, are afraid affirmative action might restrict opportunities for loved ones and family members (Ladowsky 1995)? Is their ambivalence due to a false sense of efficacy and opportunity? Since white women have made some impressive gains over the past 30 years, do they now feel affirmative action is no longer needed (Burkett 1998)? Are white women essentially identifying more with their perceived racial interest, than gender or individual interest, and thus responding predictably to the ‘racialization’ of affirmative action in mainstream discourse? In other words, are white women hostile to affirmative action largely because of their own racial prejudice (Frankenberg 1993)? Or, was the failure to convince a majority of white women to vote against 209 simply a failure of resource mobilization? Not enough money? Not enough time? In other words, the message was right, the strategy sound-to target white women and emphasize the gender aspect of affirmative action--but the "good guys" were simply outgunned and outspent?”

The following statistics, to a great degree, can be traced back to affirmative action initiatives. From 1972-1993:

• The percentage of women architects increased from 3% to nearly 19% of the total;
• The percentage of women doctors more than doubled from 10% to 22% of all doctors;
• The percentage of women lawyers grew from 4% to 23% of the national total;
• The percentage of female engineers went from less than 1% to nearly 9%;
• The percentage of female chemists grew from 10% to 30% of all chemists; and,
• The percentage of female college faculty went from 28% to 42% of all faculty.  

The overwhelming majority of the women represented in these statistics are white. The Department of Labor’s statistics also estimated that 6 million women workers are in higher occupational classifications today than they would have been without affirmative action policies---I believe that it is also important to note that Black and Hispanic men, on average, trail White women in earnings.  So once again, why do most white women oppose affirmative action? I believe, as Wise alluded to, it is because it has been racialized in the public discourse. The critics of affirmative action characterize it as a Black issue because this enables them to use the negative racial stereotypes associated with Blacks to portray these policies as undeserved hand-outs to an “underqualified and unmotivated” group of people. The media is often complicit in these portrayals. In this respect, the heavy participation of white women in these programs is obscured by media portrayals which, for the most part, completely ignore the role of affirmative action in promoting equality for women. Furthermore, because affirmative action explicitly states that race can be one consideration (among many others, most whites (and some people of color as well) ignore or reject the more pervasive implicit truth that whiteness plays an integral role in the acquisition of jobs, scholarships, promotions, cars, houses and so on---more so than any group of people. The absence of the word “white” does not connote an absence of its presence, privilege or power. 

Wise, in his aforementioned piece, also goes on to show that “ultimately, white women's views on affirmative action are hardly different from their male counterparts, particularly when the issue is framed as one of preferences. According to National Election Studies since 1986, white women are not substantially different from white men when it comes to their feelings on this issue. Opposition to ‘preferential hiring and promotion’ … [grew] from 86% for white men and 79% for white women in 1986, to 90% for white men and 88% for white women in 1994. Similarly, opposition to admissions preferences in colleges [stood] at around 76% for white men and 70% for white women (Citrin 1996, 43).” This reality played out in Washington (1998) with 51% of white women voting against affirmative action and in the recent defeat of affirmative action programs in Michigan with 59 percent of white women (82 percent of non-white women voted against it) voting to approve Proposal 2---the measure was approved 58 to 42 percent. A consequence of this dynamic that I believe bears mentioning, is that women of color (especially Black & Hispanic women) are not able to work with White women on other issues of concern (sexism, misogyny etc.) when they perceive that the vast majority of them are indifferent or antagonistic to the realities of racial discrimination in their lives and to the mechanisms that they believe would be instrumental in redressing those realities.