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The Affirmative Action Debate
By George E. Curry, Addison Wesley
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INTRODUCTION
A report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights provides the context for today's
contentious debate over affirmative action. It notes: "Historically, discrimination
against minorities and women was not only accepted, but was also governmentally
required. The doctrine of white supremacy, used to support the institution of
slavery, was so much part of American custom and policy that the Supreme Court
of the United States in 1857 [in the Dred Scott decision] approvingly concluded
that both the North and the South regarded slaves 'as beings of an inferior
order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social
or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the
white man was bound to respect.'"
Women, like African-Americans and other racial minorities, were treated as less than full citizens throughout much of American history, though to a different degree. As Justice William J. Brennan observed, neither slaves nor women could hold office, serve on juries, or bring suit in their own names, and married women traditionally were denied the legal capacity to hold or convey property or to serve as legal guardians of their own children.
Over the past three decades, the United States has struggled valiantly to overcome that sordid legacy as it moves toward what Manning Marable, in the opening selection in this book, calls "the ultimate elimination of race and gender inequality, the uprooting of prejudice and discrimination, and the realization of a truly democratic nation." Out of that struggle came the policy of affirmative action.
Although the term "affirmative action" is relatively new, the concept is not. The Civil Rights Commission defines the contemporary term as encompassing any measure, beyond simple termination of a discriminatory practice, which permits the consideration of race, national origin, sex, or disability, along with other criteria, and which is adopted to provide opportunities to a class of qualified individuals who have either historically or actually been denied those opportunities, and to prevent the recurrence of discrimination in the future. But well over a century ago, at the beginning of the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War, the Freedman's Bureau was established to assist newly freed slaves, providing for AfricanAmericans to receive clothing, land, and education. More recently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to avert a march on Washington planned by A. Philip Randolph, president of the powerful Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, signed an executive order in 1941 forbidding federal contractors from discriminating.
However, the pernicious problem of racism still existed two decades later in
1961 when John F. Kennedy, observing that the nation's top defense contractors
employed few blacks, signed Executive Order 10925. It invoked the term "affirmative
action" for the first time and established the Committee on Equal Employment
Opportunity. President Lyndon B. Johnson followed up in 1965 with Executive
Order 11246, which required federal contractors to take affirmative action to
provide equal opportunity without regard to a person's race, religion, or national
origin. Three years later, women were added to the protected groups. In 1969,
under President Richard M. Nixon, "goals and timetables" were added
as yet another component of affirmative action.
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Now, a quarter of a century later, affirmative action is more controversial than ever. It has been credited by supporters with expanding the black middle class and lowering barriers to equal opportunity, while its critics suggest that this tool intended to eliminate discrimination is itself discriminatory. The question has developed into a major wedge issue in the 1996 presidential election. Affirmative action faces the prospect of being sharply curtailed, if not eliminated, by Congress and by voters in California, our largest state.
This collection of twenty-nine essays, most of them published here for the first time, is not likely to end this emotionladen debate. Nor would I want it to do so. Rather, my goal from the outset has been to assemble some of the sharpest minds in the country, provide a forum for them to express their personal views on affirmative action, and hope that in the process we would expand our knowledge of the issue and develop a deeper tolerance for views with which we fervently disagree.
CHAPTER ONEAffirmative action and other race-conscious remedies were created to erase the differences in rights and opportunities defined by that color line. In this chapter, four essays trace how affirmative action has evolved in the twentieth century. While all these authors favor affirmative action, their essays raise important questions: What alternatives to affirmative action did our country's political leaders see? Mat were their aims? How much can rules that prohibit discrimination accomplish? Do affirmative action programs go far enough? In context, we see that the debate over affirmative action is not a simple yes or no issue.
First, Manning Marable, director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University and author of Beyond Black and White: Transforming AfricanAmerican Politics (1995), contrasts the efforts to prohibit discrimination in the 1940s and the triumphs of the civil rights era with the current political atmosphere. He also places affirmative action in the context of a long debate within the African-American community over the value of integration and inclusion.
More than sixty years after Du Bois wrote about the color line, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a southerner, observed that it remained clearly visible: "In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope." Reprinted here is Johnson's commencement address at Howard University in 1965, which set both the tone and the rationale for affirmative action in the 1960s. The Johnson administration made affirmative action national policy to help open the doors of hope for racial and ethnic minorities (later expanded to include women and other disadvantaged groups).
Appointed in 1969 as the nation's first assistant secretary of labor for employment standards, Arthur A. Fletcher has often been referred to as "the Father of Affirmative Action." He is the author of the Philadelphia Plan to combat racism in the construction industry. His essay is a behind-the-scenes account of the earliest efforts to institutionalize affirmative action. Despite the best intentions, however, the policy quickly became a political orphan, never clearly codified in federal statutes and owing its shaky existence to the generosity of the executive branch.
The chapter concludes with an essay by Dr. Cornel West, whom Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., of Harvard University, calls "the preeminent African-American intellectual
of our generation." Looking at affirmative action in the context of race
relations in the United States, he is surprised that the furor over it is so
intense. Affirmative action, he says, is a "weak response" to the
"legacy of white supremacy." It is interesting to consider what other
corrective measures our society might have tried.
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Staying on the Path to Racial Equality
Manning Marable
Instead of pleasant-sounding but simplistic defenses of "affirmative action as it is," we need to do some hard thinking about the reasons why several significant constituencies that have greatly benefited from affirmative action have done relatively little to defend it. We need to recognize the critical theoretical and strategic differences that separate liberals and progressives on how to achieve a nonracist society. And we urgently need to reframe the context of the political debate, taking the initiative away from the Right. The triumph of "Newtonian Republicanism" is not a temporary aberration: it is the culmination of a thirty-year ideological and political war against the logic of the reforms of the 1960s. Advocates of affirmative action, civil rights, and other policies reflecting left-of-center political values must recognize how and why the context for progressive reform has fundamentally changed.
The first difficulty in developing a more effective progressive model for affirmative action goes back to the concept's complex definition, history, and political evolution. "Affirmative action" per se was never a law, or even a coherently developed set of governmental policies designed to attack institutional racism and societal discrimination. It was instead a series of presidential executive orders, civil rights laws, and governmental programs regarding the awarding of federal contracts and licenses, as well as the enforcement of fair employment practices, with the goal of uprooting the practices of bigotry.
At its origins, it was designed to provide some degree of compensatory justice to the victims of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and institutional racism. This was at the heart of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which stated that "all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens. . . ."
The fundamental idea of taking the proactive steps necessary to dismantle prejudice has been around for more than a century.
During the Great Depression, the role of the federal government in protecting the equal rights of black Americans was expanded again through the direct militancy and agitation of black people. In 1941, socialist and trade union leader A. Philip Randolph mobilized thousands of black workers to participate in the "Negro March on Washington Movement," calling upon the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to carry out a series of reforms favorable to civil rights. To halt this mobilization, Roosevelt agreed to sign Executive Order 8802, which outlawed segregationist hiring policies by defense-related industries that held federal contracts. This executive order not only greatly increased the number of African-Americans who were employed in wartime industries, but expanded the political idea that government could not take a passive role in the dismantling of institutional racism.
This position was reaffirmed in 1953 by President Harry S. Truman's Committee
on Government Contract Compliance, which urged the Bureau of Employment Security"to
act positively and affirmatively to implement the policy of nondiscrimination
in its functions of placement counseling, occupational analysis and industrial
services, labor market information, and community participation in employment
services." Thus, despite the fact that the actual phrase "affirmative
action" was not used by a chief executive until President John F. Kennedy's
Executive Order 10925 in 1961, the fundamental idea of taking the proactive
steps necessary to dismantle prejudice has been around for more than a century.
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PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCES AMONG CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS
What complicates the current discussion of affirmative action is that liberals
and progressives themselves were at odds historically over the guiding social
and cultural philosophy that should inform the implementation of policies on
racial discrimination. Progressives like W E. B. Du Bois were convinced that
the way to achieve a nonracist society was through the development of strong
black institutions and the preservation of African-American cultural identity.
Du Bois's strategy was reflected in his concept of "double consciousness,"
that black American identity was simultaneously African and American, and that
dismantling racism should not require the aesthetic and cultural assimilation
of blackness into white values and social norms.
The alternative to the Du Boisian position was expressed by integrationist leaders and intellectuals like Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Baynard Rustin, and Kenneth B. Clark. They too fought to destroy Jim Crow, but their cultural philosophy for the Negro rested on inclusion rather than pluralism. They deeply believed that the long-term existence of separate, allblack institutions was counterproductive to the goal of a "color-blind" society, in which racial categories would become socially insignificant or even irrelevant to the relations of power. Rustin, for instance, personally looked forward to the day when Harlem would cease to exist as a segregated, identifiably black neighborhood. Blacks should be assimilated or culturally incorporated into the mainstream. My central criticism of the desegregationist strategy of the inclusionists is that they consistently confused "culture" with "race," underestimating the importance of fostering black cultural identity as an essential component of the critique of white supremacy. The existence of separate black institutions or a self-defined, all-black community was not necessarily an impediment to interracial cooperation and multicultural dialogue.
Despite the differences between Du Boisian progressives and inclusionist liberals, both desegregationist positions from the 1930s onward were expressed by the organizations and leadership of the civil rights movement. These divisions were usually obscured by a common language of reform and a common social vision that embraced color blindness as an ultimate goal. For example, both positions are reflected in the main thrust of the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which declared that workplace discrimination should be outlawed on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." However, the inclusionist orientation of Wilkins, Rustin, and company is also apparent in the act's assertion that it should not be interpreted as requiring employers "to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group."
Five years later, after Richard M. Nixon's narrow victory for the presidency, it was the Republicans' turn to interpret and implement civil rights policy. The strategy of Nixon had a profound impact on the political culture of the United States, which continues to have direct consequences within the debates about affirmative action today. Through the Counterintelligence Program of the FBI, the Nixon administration vigorously suppressed the radical wing of the black movement. Second, it appealed to the racial anxieties and grievances of George Wallace voters, recruiting segregationists like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond into the ranks of the Republican Party.
On affirmative action and issues of equal opportunity, however, Nixon's goal was to utilize a liberal reform for conservative objectives: the expansion of the African-American middle class, which might benefit the Republican Party. Under Nixon in 1969, the federal government authorized what became known as the Philadelphia Plan, a program requiring federal contractors to set specific goals for minority hiring. As a result, the portion of racial minorities in the construction industry increased from 1% to 12%. The Nixon administration supported provisions for minority set-asides to promote black and Hispanic entrepreneurship, and it placed Federal Reserve funds in black-owned banks. Nixon himself publicly praised the concept of "Black Power," carefully interpreting it as "black capitalism."
It was under the moderate-conservative aegis of the Nixon and Ford administrations
of 1969-77 that the set of policies which we identify with "affirmative
action" was implemented nationally in both the public and the private sectors.
Even after the 1978 Bakke decision, in which the Supreme Court overturned the
admissions policy of the University of California at Davis which had set aside
sixteen out of one hundred medical school openings for racial minorities, the
political impetus for racial reform was not destroyed. What did occur, even
before the triumph of reaction under Reagan in the early 1980s, was that political
conservatives deliberately usurped the "colorblind" discourse of many
liberals from the desegregation movement.
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As conservatives retreated from the Nixonian strategy of utilizing affirmative action tools to achieve conservative political goals, they began to appeal to the latent racist sentiments within the white population. They cultivated the racist mythology that affirmative action was nothing less than a rigid system of inflexible quotas which rewarded the incompetent and the unqualified, who happened to be nonwhite, at the expense of hardworking, taxpaying Americans, who happened to be white. White conservatives were able to define "merit" in a manner that would reinforce white male privilege, but in an inverted language that would make the real victims of discrimination appear to be the racists. It was, in retrospect, a brilliant political maneuver.
And the liberals were at a loss in fighting back effectively precisely because they lacked a consensus internally about the means and goals for achieving genuine equality. Traditional liberals like Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, who favored an inclusionist, colorblind ideology of reform, often ended up inside the camp of racial reactionaries, who cynically learned to manipulate the discourse of fairness.
SUPPORT FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AT DIFFERENT LEVELS
These shifts and realignments within American political culture about how to
achieve greater fairness and equality for those who have experienced discrimination
had profound consequences by the 1990s. In general, most white Americans have
made a clear break from the overtly racist, Jim Crow segregationist policies
of a generation ago. They want to be perceived as being "fair" toward
racial minorities and women, and they acknowledge that policies like affirmative
action are necessary to foster a more socially just society.
According to a USA Today/ CNN/Gallup poll ( March 1719, 1995), when asked, "Do you favor or oppose affirmative action programs?" 53% of whites polled expressed support, compared to only 36% opposed. Not surprisingly, AfricanAmericans expressed much stronger support, with 72% in favor of affirmative action programs and only 21% against. Despite widespread rhetoric that the vast majority of white males have supposedly lost jobs and opportunities due to affirmative action policies, the poll indicated that only 15% of all white males believe that "they've lost a job because of affirmative action policies."
However, there is severe erosion of white support for affirmative action when one focuses more narrowly on specific steps or remedies for addressing discrimination. For example, the USA Today/ CNN/Gallup poll indicates that only 30% of whites favor the establishment of gender and racial "quotas" in businesses, with 68% opposed. In contrast, two-thirds of all African-Americans expressed support for quotas in business employment, with only 30% opposed.
When asked whether quotas should be created "that require schools to admit a certain number of minorities and women," 61% of the whites were opposed, with 35% in favor. Nearly two-thirds of all whites would also reject policies that "require private businesses to set up specific goals and timetables for hiring women and minorities if there were not government programs that included hiring quotas," whereas two-thirds of all African-Americans strongly favor affirmative action programs with goals and timetables for private businesses. On issues of implementing government-supported initiatives for social equality, most black and white Americans still live in two distinct racial universes.
It is not surprising that "angry white men" form the core of those
who are against affirmative action. What is striking, however, is the general
orientation of white women on this issue. White women have been overwhelmingly
the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action: millions have gained access
to educational and employment opportunities through the implementation and enforcement
of such policies. But most of them clearly do not share the political perspectives
of AfricanAmericans and Hispanics on this issue, nor do they perceive their
own principal interests to be at risk if affirmative action programs are abandoned
by the federal government or outlawed by the courts. In the same USA Today/
CNN/Gallup poll, only 8% of all white women stated that their "colleagues
at work or school privately questioned" their qualifications because of
affirmative action, compared to 19% of black women and 28% of black men. Less
than one in five white women polled defined workplace discrimination as a "major
problem," compared to 41% of blacks and 38% of Latinos. Forty percent of
the white women polled described job discrimination as "not being a problem"
at all. These survey results may help to explain why middle class-oriented,
liberal feminist leaders and constituencies have been less vocal than African-Americans
in the mobilization to defend affirmative action.
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A quarter-century of affirmative action programs, goals, and timetables has been clearly effective in transforming the status of white women in the labor force. It is certainly true that white men still dominate the upper ranks of senior management: while constituting 47% of the nation's total workforce, they make up 95% of all senior managerial positions at the rank of vice president or above. However, women of all races now constitute about 40% of the total workforce overall. As of the 1990 census, white women held nearly 40% of all middle management positions. While their median incomes lag behind those of white men, over the past twenty years white women have gained far greater ground in terms of real earnings than black or Hispanic men in the labor force. Black professional women have also gained ground in recent decades, but blacks overall still remain significantly behind white men in median incomes at all levels. In this context, civil rights advocates and traditional defenders of affirmative action must ask themselves whether the majority of white American women actually perceive their material interests to be tied to the outcome of the battle for income equity and affirmative action that most blacks and Latinos, women and men alike, continue to fight.
We should also recognize that although all people of color suffer in varying degrees from the stigma of racism and economic disadvantage within American society, they do not have the same material interests or identify themselves with the same politics as the vast majority of African-Americans. For example, here are mean on-the-job earnings, according to the 1990 census:
All American adults $15,105
Blacks $10,912
Native Americans $11,949
Hispanics $11,219
It is crucial to disaggregate social categories like "Hispanics" and
"Asian-Americans" to gain a true picture of the real material and
social conditions of significant populations of color. About half of all Hispanics,
according to the Bureau of the Census, identify themselves as white, regardless
of their actual physical appearance. Puerto Ricans in New York City have lower
median incomes than African-Americans, while Argentines, a Hispanic group that
claims benefits from affirmative action programs, have mean on-the-job incomes
of $15,956 a year. The Hmong, immigrants from southeast Asia, have mean on-the-job
incomes of $3,194; by striking contrast, the Japanese have annual incomes higher
than those of whites.
None of these statistics negate the reality of racial domination and discrimination in terms of social relations, access to employment opportunities, or job advancement. But they do tell us part of the reason why no broad coalition of people of color has coalesced behind the political demand for affirmative action. Various groups interpret their interests narrowly and in divergent ways, looking out primarily for themselves rather than addressing the structural inequalities within the fabric of American society as a whole.
A DU BOISIAN STRATEGY TOWARD AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
So where do progressives and liberals go from here, given that the Right has
seized the political initiative in dismantling affirmative action, minority
economic set-asides, and the entire spectrum of civil rights reforms? We must
return to the theoretical perspectives of Du Bois to begin some honest dialogue
about why race relations have soured so profoundly in recent years.
Affirmative action was largely responsible for a significant increase in the size of the black middle class; it opened many professional and managerial positions to blacks, Latinos, and women for the first time. But in many other respects, affirmative action can and should be criticized from the Left, not because it was too liberal in its pursuit and implementation of measures to achieve equality, but because it was too conservative. It sought to increase representative numbers of minorities and women within the existing structure and arrangements of power, rather than challenging or redefining the institutions of authority and privilege. As implemented under a series of presidential administrations, liberal and conservative alike, affirmative action was always more concerned with advancing remedies for unequal racial outcomes than with uprooting racism as a system of white power.
Rethinking progressive and liberal strategies on affirmative action would require sympathetic whites to acknowledge that much of the anti-affirmative action rhetoric is really a retreat from a meaningful engagement on issues of race, and that the vast majority of Americans who have benefited materially from affirmative action have not been black at all. A Du Boisian strategy toward affirmative action would argue that despite the death of legal segregation a generation ago, we have not yet reached the point where a color-blind society is possible, especially in terms of the actual organization and structure of white power and privilege. Institutional racism is real, and the central focus of affirmative action must deal with the continuing burden of racial inequality and discrimination in American life.
There are many ways to measure the powerful reality of contemporary racism. For example, a 1994 study of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management found that African-American federal employees are more than twice as likely to be dismissed as their white counterparts. Blacks are especially likely to be fired at much higher rates than whites in jobs where they constitute a significant share of the labor force: for example, black clerk-typists are 4.7 times more likely to be dismissed than whites, and black custodians 4.1 times more likely to be fired.
Discrimination is also rampant in capital markets. Banks continue policies of "redlining," denying loans in neighborhoods that are largely black and Hispanic. In New York City in 1992, for instance, blacks were turned down for mortgage applications by banks, savings and loans, and other financial institutions about twice as often as whites. And even after years of affirmative action programs, blacks and Latinos remain grossly underrepresented in a wide number of professions.
As Jesse Jackson observed in a speech before the National Press Club, while
native-born white males make up only 41% of the U.S. population, they are 80%
of all tenured professors, 92% of the Forbes 400 chief executive officers, and
97% of all school superintendents.
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If affirmative action should be criticized, it might be on the grounds that it didn't go far enough in transforming the actual power relations between black and white within our society. More evidence for this is addressed by the sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro in Black Wealth/White Wealth (1995). The authors point out that "the typical black family has eleven cents of wealth for every dollar owned by the typical white family." Even middle-class African-Americans, people who often benefited from affirmative action, are significantly poorer than whites who earn identical incomes. If housing and vehicles owned are included in the definition of "net wealth," the median middle-class African-American family has only $8,300 in total assets, as against $56,000 for the comparable white family.
Why are blacks at all income levels much poorer than whites in terms of wealth? African-American families not only inherit much less wealth; they are hit daily by institutional inequality and discrimination. For years, they were denied life insurance policies by white firms. They are still de