The war on equal opportunity

Black Enterprise, Feb, 1995 by Mark Lowery

SHOULD COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES be allowed to set aside scholarships for minorities? Or adjust admission policies to compensate for past injustices?

Should municipalities be allowed to give minority contractors a competitive edge when it comes to bidding? Or to set aside a certain amount of business for them?

Is embracing the idea of a culturally diverse labor force more important to corporations than ensuring that they actually employ specific percentages of workers of diverse backgrounds?

These questions, seemingly answered during the 1970s and the 1980s, are once again surfacing in the 1990s. The concept of affirmative action--whether the setting is the boardroom or the campus--is as divisive today as it was three decades ago when President Lyndon Johnson formalized it by signing Executive Order 11246.

What had been a constant battle is now an all-out war, with the Republican-controlled 104th Congress and the conservative U.S. Supreme Court positioning themselves to lead the charge against affirmative action.

Affirmative action remains the whipping post and rallying cry of many white males, even though there exists no statistical proof that blacks have taken jobs or lucrative career opportunities away from white men, or even interrupted their dominance in the workplace.

Corporations have quietly abandoned minority employment goals--which some describe unfavorably as "quotas"--in favor of the nebulous concept of cultural diversity,

Without the sanction of law, the goal of cultural diversity is to create a workplace where workers of diverse backgrounds feel appreciated and get along. Meanwhile, several court cases threaten to undermine affirmative-action gains even further.

"It's a real sad day when these are the kinds of programs that are being challenged," says Elaine R. Jones, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. "We had about 10 years of affirmative action and about 15 years of retrenchment."

Jones and others say many of the modest gains made through affirmative action were lost during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, when courts consistently ruled that programs designed to redress racial imbalance in general could only address discrimination in the particular. "The lower courts have been chipping away at affirmative action where public entities are involved," Jones says.

Others blame the vulnerability of affirmative action on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. During the Reagan '80s, the EEOC switched its focus from class-action lawsuits against companies to individual discrimination cases.

The biggest threat to affirmative action may now come from a Republican-controlled Congress attempting to appease an increasingly vocal conservative constituency. "A far right Republican-controlled Congress is an enemy of affirmative action by definition," says Eleanor Holmes Norton, one of the District of Columbia's nonvoting delegates to Congress and a former head of the EEOC under President Jimmy Carter. Norton says GOP members and moderate Democrats could set back affirmative action by curtailing federal employment goals and timetables already in place. Norton warns: "They have the votes to do it."

LAST HIRED, FIRST FIRED

Ironically, while debates rage over continued need for affirmative action, statistics show that the perception that blacks made wholesale gains through affirmative-action programs is just an illusion. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, white males make up 9l.7% of officers in corporate America and 88.1% of directors. Their share of managerial and professional workers declined slightly between 1983 and 1993, from 55% to 47%, but the major benefactors of this decline were white women, who saw their share of such jobs increase from 37% to 42%. During those 10 years, blacks' share of managerial and professional positions rose minutely, from 6% to 7%.

Not only are blacks the last to be hired, but apparently they are still the first workers to be downsized or fired. Blacks make up the only group of employees who suffered a net employment loss during the recession that began in July 1990 and ended in March 1991. During that period, blacks lost a net 59,479 jobs and saw their share of jobs drop for the first time in nearly a decade. They experienced employment drops in 36 states and in six of nine major industry groups, according to the results of a 1993 Wall Street Journal study of EEOC figures.

"There's a deep sourness in corporate America that they had to hire minority professionals," Wesley Poriotis, head of the New York-based minority search firm of Wesley, Brown & Bartle, said in a published report. "Downsizing has been their first opportunity to strike back."

Between 1990 and 1991, black employees represented more than half (54%) of lost jobs at Sears, 42% at Coca-Cola, 43% at Dial, and 36% at McDonald's.

"Black people made their best strides forward during the '60s and the '70s," says Norton, adding that the Reagan years started a reversal of policies that has yet to be fully countered.