Affirmative action debate is a proxy war over American identity, not policy

Evidence

My argument, in brief, is the following: in the current American racial culture, affirmative action is more important to participants in the policy debate as a weapon with which to attack enemies in order to win some other battle than as an issue in and for itself. To be useful as a weapon, affirmative action must remain at the level of moral claims and single-dimensional outrage; the messy and complex realities that are likely to surface in careful empirical analyses do not help much in political and cultural warfare. This phenomenon is as true in the university as in the explicitly political realm, because most scholars do not pursue the traditional objective of scholarly neutrality in the arena of racial politics and policy choices. To put it most succinctly, the debate over affirmative action is predominantly a culture war over who is an American and what it means to be a good American, and only secondarily a dispute between political parties or policy analysts over how best to improve the status of African Americans or women. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1966

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the moral-panic analysis in the reader’s library (Cohen’s concept of moral panic) — both show a policy debate operating as symbolic warfare rather than practical problem-solving. — connects to: Affirmative action controversies expose anxieties about the American dream more than policy mechanics — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1642
• SEED: Angle: the ‘weaponized policy debate’ pattern — where a policy stays vague because its empirical messiness would spoil its usefulness as a political cudgel. Could apply to immigration, gun control, or any recurring stalemate.