George Frederickson: Affirmative Action Blues
.. Two very different arguments have been advanced for affirmative action. One claims that it is just compensation for historical injustices and disadvantages. In the case of claims by African- Americans the emphasis is usually on the wounds inflicted by centuries of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. President Lyndon Johnson made one of the most elegant and influential statements of this position in his Howard University speech of 1965, which is quoted by Ira Katznelson in When Affirmative Action Was White:
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.... It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.... We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
The other argument, which is reflected in recent Supreme Court decisions and is currently much heard, is based on the assumption that racial and ethnic diversity among "elites"— relatively well-off people who have some degree of responsibility for others, whether private or public—is beneficial to society and its institutions. Prominent among those who defend affirmative action, for example, are spokesmen for the American mili-tary who lent conspicuous support to the University of Michigan's side in the 2003 Supreme Court case. Since the enlisted ranks are disproportionately black and Latino, discipline and morale are presumably inspired by having the same groups represented among the officers, including those of the highest rank. Corporations that deal with a multicultural and multiracial clientele, sometimes on an international scale, find obvious advantages in being represented by people who reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of those with whom they are do-ing business. Many large corporations practice affirmative action voluntarily even when there is no significant pressure from the government.
In higher education the diversity argument takes a slightly different form. Racially and ethnically heterogeneous student bodies are said to create an appropriate educational environment for students who will encounter many different kinds of people when they go out into the world. Faculties, moreover, must be diverse if they are to provide inspiration and suitable "role models" for minority students.
Clearly affirmative action has had its greatest success in producing more diverse elites, particularly in the much-heralded emergence of a substantial African-American middle class, something that never existed before. But as the sociologist William Julius Wilson has argued for many years, this process of embourgeoisement has been accompanied by the equally substantial growth of "the truly disadvantaged," the economically marginal black inhabitants of the urban ghettos. Since the advent of affirmative action in the 1960s, the overall differences between blacks and whites have changed very little with respect to average incomes, property holdings, and levels of educational attainment. What is new is the gulf that has opened in the black community between the middle class and the lower or "under" class.
Affirmative action originated as a pragmatic response by those in the federal government responsible for enforcing the fair employment provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) set up under the act lacked the staff to investigate most individual claims of discrimination in employment. It also lacked legal authority to act effectively on behalf of the complainants. As a result, the only way that the EEOC could begin to do its job was to request government contractors to provide statistics on the racial composition of their labor force. If blacks (and by the 1970s other minorities as well) were underrepresented among the workers relative to their percentage of the local population, the EEOC set numerical goals for minority recruitment sufficient to correct this disproportion. Employers were then required to make "good faith efforts" to meet "quotas" for black workers. If they didn't hire more blacks, they risked losing contracts. The professed aim was equal opportunity, not racial favoritism; but the paradox that bedeviled the program from the start was that it appeared to require preferential means to reach egalitarian ends.
After its fitful beginnings during the Johnson administration, affirmative action took a dramatic turn under Richard Nixon, whose administration put into effect a controversial plan to integrate Philadelphia's construction trades. Historians have concluded that the Philadelphia Plan of 1969–1970, which set firm racial quotas for hiring for one industry in one city, was a political ploy. It was designed by the Nixon Republicans to cause friction between two of the principal consti-tuencies of the Democratic Party— organized labor, which opposed the plan because of the threat it posed to jobs under its control, and African-Americans, who had overwhelmingly supported the Democrats since the New Deal.[3] At the same time, Nixon was trying to appeal to Southern whites by doing little to enforce desegregation, especially in the schools.
When rising opposition to the war in Vietnam became the critical issue for his administration in 1970 and 1971, and hard hats like the construction workers of Philadelphia were in the forefront of those opposing the anti-war protesters, the Philadelphia Plan was quietly shelved. From then on, Republicans were, for the most part, strongly opposed to affirmative action and benefited from the backlash against it, attacking the Democrats as the "party of quotas" because of their continued support for the policy.
Affirmative action was declared constitutional in 1971 when the Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that discrimination in employment could be subject to affirmative action even if it were not intentional or motivated by prejudice. The Court found that the standardized aptitude tests given by the company to employees prevented blacks from moving to higher-paying departments. Such requirements could be "fair in form," the Court said, but they could still be described as "discriminatory in operation" if they had an "adverse impact" on blacks. Hence the EEOC was legally entitled to set goals for increasing minority employment and to require periodic reports on the progress being made on fulfilling such goals by any of the 300,000 firms doing business with the federal government....
Read entire article at NY Review of Books
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.... It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.... We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
The other argument, which is reflected in recent Supreme Court decisions and is currently much heard, is based on the assumption that racial and ethnic diversity among "elites"— relatively well-off people who have some degree of responsibility for others, whether private or public—is beneficial to society and its institutions. Prominent among those who defend affirmative action, for example, are spokesmen for the American mili-tary who lent conspicuous support to the University of Michigan's side in the 2003 Supreme Court case. Since the enlisted ranks are disproportionately black and Latino, discipline and morale are presumably inspired by having the same groups represented among the officers, including those of the highest rank. Corporations that deal with a multicultural and multiracial clientele, sometimes on an international scale, find obvious advantages in being represented by people who reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of those with whom they are do-ing business. Many large corporations practice affirmative action voluntarily even when there is no significant pressure from the government.
In higher education the diversity argument takes a slightly different form. Racially and ethnically heterogeneous student bodies are said to create an appropriate educational environment for students who will encounter many different kinds of people when they go out into the world. Faculties, moreover, must be diverse if they are to provide inspiration and suitable "role models" for minority students.
Clearly affirmative action has had its greatest success in producing more diverse elites, particularly in the much-heralded emergence of a substantial African-American middle class, something that never existed before. But as the sociologist William Julius Wilson has argued for many years, this process of embourgeoisement has been accompanied by the equally substantial growth of "the truly disadvantaged," the economically marginal black inhabitants of the urban ghettos. Since the advent of affirmative action in the 1960s, the overall differences between blacks and whites have changed very little with respect to average incomes, property holdings, and levels of educational attainment. What is new is the gulf that has opened in the black community between the middle class and the lower or "under" class.
Affirmative action originated as a pragmatic response by those in the federal government responsible for enforcing the fair employment provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) set up under the act lacked the staff to investigate most individual claims of discrimination in employment. It also lacked legal authority to act effectively on behalf of the complainants. As a result, the only way that the EEOC could begin to do its job was to request government contractors to provide statistics on the racial composition of their labor force. If blacks (and by the 1970s other minorities as well) were underrepresented among the workers relative to their percentage of the local population, the EEOC set numerical goals for minority recruitment sufficient to correct this disproportion. Employers were then required to make "good faith efforts" to meet "quotas" for black workers. If they didn't hire more blacks, they risked losing contracts. The professed aim was equal opportunity, not racial favoritism; but the paradox that bedeviled the program from the start was that it appeared to require preferential means to reach egalitarian ends.
After its fitful beginnings during the Johnson administration, affirmative action took a dramatic turn under Richard Nixon, whose administration put into effect a controversial plan to integrate Philadelphia's construction trades. Historians have concluded that the Philadelphia Plan of 1969–1970, which set firm racial quotas for hiring for one industry in one city, was a political ploy. It was designed by the Nixon Republicans to cause friction between two of the principal consti-tuencies of the Democratic Party— organized labor, which opposed the plan because of the threat it posed to jobs under its control, and African-Americans, who had overwhelmingly supported the Democrats since the New Deal.[3] At the same time, Nixon was trying to appeal to Southern whites by doing little to enforce desegregation, especially in the schools.
When rising opposition to the war in Vietnam became the critical issue for his administration in 1970 and 1971, and hard hats like the construction workers of Philadelphia were in the forefront of those opposing the anti-war protesters, the Philadelphia Plan was quietly shelved. From then on, Republicans were, for the most part, strongly opposed to affirmative action and benefited from the backlash against it, attacking the Democrats as the "party of quotas" because of their continued support for the policy.
Affirmative action was declared constitutional in 1971 when the Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that discrimination in employment could be subject to affirmative action even if it were not intentional or motivated by prejudice. The Court found that the standardized aptitude tests given by the company to employees prevented blacks from moving to higher-paying departments. Such requirements could be "fair in form," the Court said, but they could still be described as "discriminatory in operation" if they had an "adverse impact" on blacks. Hence the EEOC was legally entitled to set goals for increasing minority employment and to require periodic reports on the progress being made on fulfilling such goals by any of the 300,000 firms doing business with the federal government....