Action still needed

We seem about to dismantle one of the nation's most important, albeit flawed, experiments. Affirmative action policies have been critical in the national effort to compensate for the injustices visited upon African-Americans by centuries of slavery and decades of segregation and Jim Crow laws. In the 1960s, affirmative action was devised to redress the effects of discrimination against blacks by supporting positive efforts to educate, house, hire, and promote men and women, boys and girls, who had been kept from their rightful place in American society.

These measures have always operated under critical scrutiny, sometimes from federal courts, sometimes from social critics, sometimes from the beneficiaries themselves. They have not, as some would claim, provided blacks a free ride. But not until two academics--self-described staunch conservatives--announced their plan to put a referendum to end affirmative action on the 1996 California ballot has anyone seriously acted to do away with it. Now the media treat its demise as a foregone conclusion. The "Contract with America" and a surging conservative agenda may provoke this conclusion, but without evidence that it is sound policy.

Don Wycliff wrote in these pages last issue (May 19) that "people have the nerve to ask whether thirty years of affirmative action isn't enough. Incredible!" Still, even he seems resigned: "The political facts of life suggest to me that thirty years will have to be enough." He may be right. But before the great dismantling begins, let the nation think carefully about what we are doing and how we do it.

There is no doubt that there are problems with affirmative action. One of the most serious has been with us virtually from the start: Many "minorities"--women, Hispanics, and Asians--have benefited from affirmative-action policies, though their claims to compensatory justice do not carry nearly as much weight as do the claims of African-Americans and, arguably, Native Americans. The inclusion of other groups, which once may have seemed an expedient device to garner greater political support for affirmative action, has now become an argument for ending affirmative action, because such inclusion overreaches the primary intent of the policy and dilutes the claims of compensatory justice. Whatever discrimination other minorities" have suffered, it is true that only African-Americans were enslaved and held in bondage by the law of the land, including the Constitution, and only they suffered the discrimination that followed. Furthermore, the interest-group politics organized around "minority" membership impedes our political parties in responding to new issues; the Democratic party, so often torn among competing racial, ethnic, and gender groups, is especially hobbled in its ability even to discuss affirmative action.

Wycliff's article points to another possibly adverse outcome that may prove "detrimental to the efforts of blacks to help themselves." Quota systems, or mandated preferences, may allow blacks, youngsters and adolescents in particular, to believe that they don't have to study or work hard to compete with their white peers, because they've "got an ace up [their] sleeve," while allowing their white peers the misconception that blacks succeed only because of that ace. But quota systems are not a necessary component of affirmative action; the U.S. military, which may be our most racially integrated institution, sets goals but does not change standards. It does help candidates to meet those standards.

And then there is the growing and seemingly explosive anger over what some call "reverse discrimination," the view that affirmative action has resulted in discrimination against white males. If this fuels the conservative drive to end affirmative action, that is unfortunate because there is precious little evidence that reverse discrimination exists. The loss of high-wage manufacturing jobs has made it hard for high school graduates, black or white, to find work and to establish themselves. The answer to that problem is high school educations that make people life-long learners, along with government support for job retraining.

Antidiscrimination legislation and affirmative action have made ours a different society, in significant ways a better society, than it was thirty years ago. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 along with other measures, legislative and judicial, ended legal segregation and made discrimination a civil offense. Affirmative action boosted those antidiscrimination laws by helping qualified blacks get jobs where union practices and lingering bigotry seemed impenetrable despite the law, and where old boy networks, rooted in colleges, channeled white males into high-paying white-collar jobs in the legal, financial, and political establishment. Those walls, and many others, have been breached; workplaces from police departments to newsrooms to law firms now look more like America as a whole. Integration is the rule in most colleges and universities and in many workplaces. But discrimination still exists in housing and neighborhoods and, as a consequence, in the public schools. Racism persists.