Activism and Social Theory: Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals And Affirmative Action
At first, it might seem that the policies and attitude of the grass roots radical activist of the 1960's Saul Alinsky would suggest that Alinsky as a person and Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" would support the institutional practice of modern affirmative action. Affirmative action is a program of racial integration and social advancement of marginalized groups in American society. It attempts to integrate minorities into traditionally all-white or all-male institutions such as the military, academia, business, and the professions of law and medicine to make up for past historical and institutional wrongs and biases.
But ultimately, Alinsky would suggest that such integrative efforts are counter-productive for a truly radical program to change society. Rather than encouraging minorities and other disenfranchised groups to become angry at a society that has ostracized them and made them feel like aliens simply because they look different or have different cultural practices, affirmative action instead encourages minorities to feel grateful to an oppressive culture and societal frameworks. Affirmative action encourages minorities, women, and ethnic groups from the American margins to accept the dominant capitalist paradigm, by virtue of becoming beholden to its institutions through integrative efforts.
Power is not only what a marginalized group has, but also what the target of its destabilizing efforts thinks it has, counsels Alinsky's first rule for radicals. But accepting a Black scholarship to a largely White college becomes an admittance that a Black youth needs help from White institutions, to succeed in White society. This is an admission of a lack of power, rather than acquiring true power for his or her racial group. To achieve such acceptance he or she must succeed in school, and often hold him or herself away from his or her community, to create a resume suitable for an all-White college.
Even more damning to the practice...
Throw off the balance of common corporate America, not by attending Harvard Business School, but by being like rap mogul Russell Simmons and marketing the language of the street to White and Black youths alike, but in Black language, on Black terms. Be like Martha Stewart and sell a feminine product, rather than concealing one's domestic aspirations, if one wishes to be a diva with a corporate empire.
In some ways, of course, affirmative actions is congruent with Alinsky's ideal that an oppressed group should make the target of its attacks live up to its own book of rules, or in Alinsky's terms, if the rule is that every letter or E-mail gets a reply, send thousands. Minority groups through affirmative action are making powerful American social and political institutions; live up to the American credo of liberty and justice for all, and the pursuit of happiness for all its citizens. Of course, this…
