Answering the Critics

Countering Arguments

Opponents of affirmative action advance a number of arguments and myths that should be answered forthrightly. Among the arguments are these:

1. Affirmative action has caused reverse discrimination against whites.
   
   In a recent editorial, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, referring to affirmative action in general, said that "a program to end discrimination in the name of justice became a program to visit injustice on a different set of people" (Zuckerman, 1995).
   
   A 1995 analysis by the U.S. Department of Labor found that affirmative action programs do not lead to widespread reverse discrimination claims by whites, and a high proportion of claims that are filed are found to lack merit. These findings firmly refute the charge that affirmative action has helped minorities at the expense of white males. The analysis found that fewer than 100 out of 3,000 discrimination cases filed involved reverse discrimination, and in only six cases were such claims substantiated. "The paucity of reported cases casts doubt on the dimension of the reverse discrimination problem," the report said (Ross, 1995).
   
   USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll
   March 24, 1995, Section A, Page 3
   Affirmative Action: The Public Reaction
   
   by Julie Stacey
   
   An overwhelming majority of white Americans deny ever having been negatively impacted by affirmative action.
   
   When asked about their personal experiences, the overwhelming majority of white respondents said they had not experienced exclusion in employment or college admissions due to affirmative action in favor of racial minorities.

   98% of respondents said they had never been denied admission to a school as a result of any affirmative action program based on race.
   
   92% of respondents said they had never been passed over for a promotion that went to a member of a racial minority.
   
   88% of respondents said they had never had an experience in which they were not offered a job that went to a member of a racial minority.

   Respondents had even fewer experiences being negatively affected by affirmative action programs that favor women.

   98% of male respondents said they had never been denied admission to a school as a result of any affirmative action program based on gender.
   
   93% of male respondents said they had never been passed over for a promotion that went to a woman.
   
   92% of male respondents said they had never had an experience where they were not offered a job that went to a woman.

2. Persons should be selected for positions based on merit alone.
   
   The question is how "merit" itself is measured. Usually, when people say "merit," they mean scores on a test or an examination or some other standardized assessment. However, as a spokesperson for the University of California Medical School said recently: "Medical school is not a reward for high test scores or grades. Medical schools have to decide who is going to fulfill the most pressing needs of society, and that doesn't correlate extremely well with test results and grades" (Bernstein, 1995). Cultural sensitivity toward persons from different backgrounds, interpersonal skills, strength of character, insight, experience, maturity, judgment, the ability to communicate effectively--all of these are "meritorious" qualifications that relate to an individual's performance on the job.
   
   In stark contrast, in The Bell Curve, authors Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray imply that minorities in the District of Columbia would be better served by well-trained police officers who scored high on selection tests. It is questionable whether the citizens of any city in the nation would feel better served by police officers who were selected only for their high written test scores. "Merit" involves much more than the ability to perform well on paper-and-pencil tests.
   
   Ellis Cose, author of The Rage of a Privileged Class, wrote "The Myth of Meritocracy," in Newsweek (April 3, 1995):

   "Critics of affirmative action have not explained how abolishing it can lead to a meritocracy as long as other forms of favoritism continue to flourish. Nor have they shown any real enthusiasm for attacking preferential treatment in all its guises, as opposed to aiming their animus solely at affirmative action. Nor, for that matter, have they demonstrated much of an appetite for stepping up enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, or pouring resources into (and increasing demands on) inner-city schools. They are not, by and large, proposing anything that, by distributing society's benefits and opportunities more broadly, might eventually move the nation closer to the meritocracy they profess to desire. Instead of solutions, they are merely offering a scapegoat: this awful thing called affirmative action."

3. Affirmative action has not helped minorities.
   
   This statement is repeated often. Citing black unemployment rates, which have remained twice as high as those of whites, economist Farrell Bloch argues that "the evidence demonstrates that affirmative action has not significantly enhanced the employment prospects for the most disadvantaged African Americans" (Bloch, 1995).
   
   Studies show that minorities have made gains in occupations not usually associated with advantaged status--law enforcement, fire fighting, and skilled construction work.
   
   These areas of employment have shown dramatic results through aggressive implementation of affirmative actions plans or their enforcement by the courts. From 1983 to 1992, the representation of African-American police officers in the 50 largest U.S. cities grew from 12.4 to 17.3 percent. Similarly, the number of Hispanic officers rose from 6.8 to 8.3 percent. In 1973, the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) was 100 percent male and 94 percent white. A federal court secured a consent decree from the LAFD with specific affirmative action targets. In 1995, the LAFD was 26 percent Hispanic, 13 percent African American, 6 percent Asian, and 4 percent female (Carter, 1996).
   
   In the private sector, minority- and female-owned construction firms have gained a foothold in this most homogeneous of industries--primarily because of affirmative action. In the past, minority firms often were too small to bid on competitive contracts and white-owned firms seldom took on minority firms as subcontractors. With affirmative action, however, cities and local governments began to set aside a portion of their construction business for minority-owned companies or required large, white-owned firms to subcontract with firms owned by women and minority men. Likewise, large increases in minority and female employment among sheet metal and electrical workers also were recorded.
   
   
4. Affirmative action produces a feeling of inferiority in minority men and women of all races and creates a negative stereotype in the minds of white males.
   
   Both of these statements have been repeated over and over until they have assumed the semblance of fact. However, the fact is that no national survey of affirmative action beneficiaries ever has been done, and the stories bandied about by affirmative action's detractors are mostly anecdotal or speculative.
   
   One black sociology professor, reacting to the anecdotal thesis that affirmative action harms blacks, stated forcefully, "I have never felt stigmatized, nor have I concerned myself with whether or not whites viewed my presence or success as undeserved" (Clayton, 1992). The contention that affirmative action creates a negative stereotype in the minds of white males implies naively that whites had no negative stereotypes of minorities in their minds before. That theory runs decidedly counter to the nation's history. "Any stigma or negative stereotypes associated with race have existed in this country long before affirmative action was ever thought of" (Wilson, 1995). In addition, it is never argued that a stigma is felt by the sons and daughters of alumni or athletes who are admitted to college with less than competitive qualifications.
   
   
5. We should have a color-blind society.
   
   That's what Dr. King wanted. Martin Luther King, Jr., wanted a society in which "people were judged by the content of their character." Unquestionably, he was referring to an ultimate state of race relations in our culture, but he was not talking about the path we would have to take to achieve that goal.
   
   In the Supreme Court's 1978 Bakke case, Justice Harry Blackmun presents the most eloquent argument for affirmative action based on color to eradicate discrimination.

   "I suspect that it would be impossible to arrange an affirmative action program in a racially neutral way and have it successful. To ask that this be so is to demand the impossible. In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot--dare not--let the Equal Protection Clause perpetuate racial supremacy."

   As Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has argued, "angry white males" are venting their frustrations at minorities and women when the real problem they face (along with everyone else) is an increasingly competitive global economy that has produced massive changes in the domestic economy and drastically altered the nature and demands of the job market.

Is Affirmative Action Still Necessary?

Nearly two decades ago, some national higher education leaders wrote:

"We hope that race and other minority status will be much less of a distinguishing feature of American society in the future as we overcome the consequence of past discrimination in education and elsewhere. Race or other minority status would thus become less germane to achieving diversity in student bodies and to ensuring prospective service to the public.... Significant progress has already been made within higher education, but there is still a substantial way to go."

That statement of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education shows how overly optimistic we educators were about the possibility of rapid change in higher education. The following illustrations demonstrate that resistance to such change is characteristic of other areas of society as well.

• A study of faculty hiring practices found that once a minority hiring goal was met, departments stopped seeking minority applicants and, indeed, pulled their ads from minority publications, regardless of the number of vacancies that arose subsequently (Finkelstein, 1984).
• The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education found that an increasing number of blacks were awarded Ph.D.s in the natural sciences in 1992 and 1993. However, these graduates are not being recruited to the faculties of America's highest-ranking universities (see graph below).

   

  An Increasing Number of New Black Ph.D.s Are Being Awarded in the Natural Sciences but these Graduates Are not Being Recruited to the Faculties of America's Highest-Ranked Universities
  Source: Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 1995

   

• Minorities--particularly minority females--typically are clustered at the lower levels of the professoriate as assistant professors and non-tenure-track lecturers, and their continued presence is tenuous at best. The possibility of their developing a critical mass and thereby becoming a permanent presence can be ensured only with the continuation of some form of affirmative action.
• Youth of color represent an increasing share of the college-age population. However, despite substantial enrollment growth, minorities are severely underrepresented in college enrollments on predominantly white four-year campuses. Approximately 30 percent of all 18- to 24-year-old high school graduates are American Indian, Hispanic, or African American, compared with only 16 percent of all four-year college students.
• In 1990, an Urban Institute study utilizing pairs of black and white job applicants with identical credentials found that in 476 hirings in Washington, DC, and Chicago, "unequal treatment of black job seekers was entrenched and widespread, contradicting claims that hiring practices today either favor blacks or are effectively color blind. In 20 percent of the audits, whites were able to advance further through the hiring process than equally qualified blacks... [A] similar study using Hispanic job applicants found them discriminated against 29 percent of the time in San Diego and 33 percent of the time in Chicago" (Turner, 1991).
• In 1994, the Chevy Chase Federal Savings Bank agreed to an $11 million settlement of a lawsuit in which it was charged with "redlining" in mortgage lending by refusing to serve minority neighborhoods in Maryland (Wilson, 1995).
• In 1992, New York's Manufacturers Hanover Trust rejected 18 percent of loan applications from high-income whites, but more than twice as many--43 percent and 45 percent--from high-income African Americans and Hispanics (Malveaux, 1992).

These examples illustrate how institutions slip into old practices even when those practices are strictly forbidden by law (for example, redlining). In spite of affirmative action, employers tend to favor whites, particularly white males, over equally qualified African-American or Hispanic applicants. As Crosby and Clayton have pointed out:

"Much white male resistance to affirmative action may spring from an unwillingness on the part of any given white man to recognize the true extent to which his gender and his ethnicity, and not simply his own individual merit, have won him rungs on the ladder of success" (Clayton, 1990).

References

Bernstein, Richard. "Move Under Way in California to Overturn Higher Education's Affirmative Action Policy," The New York Times, January 25, 1995, p. B7.

Bloch, Farrell. "Affirmative Action Hasn't Helped Blacks," The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 1995, p. A15.

Carter, Deborah J., and Reginald Wilson. Fourteenth Annual Status Report on Minorities in Higher Education. Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1995.

Clayton, Susan D., and Faye J. Crosby. "Affirmative Action and the Issue of Expectancies," Journal of Social Issues 1990, 46, pp. 61-79.

Clayton, Susan D., and Faye J. Crosby. Justice, Gender and Affirmative Action. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992, p. 16.

"Exploding the Big Lie--The Truth About Affirmative Action." Minority Business Enterprise Legal Defense and Education Fund, March 14, 1995, pp. 4, 6.

Finkelstein, Martin. The American Academic Profession. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984, p. 193.

Johnson v. Transportation Agency, 480 U.S. 616 (1987).

Malveaux, Julianne. "The Parity Imperative." The State of Black America. Washington, DC: National Urban League, 1992, p. 283.

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978).

Ross, Sonya. "Affirmative Action." Associated Press, March 31, 1995.

Turner, Margery Austin, et al. Opportunities Denied, Opportunities Diminished: Discrimination in Hiring. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, September 1991, pp. 91-99.

Wilson, Reginald. "Affirmative Action: Yesterday, Today and Beyond." Unpublished, May 1995.

Zuckerman, Mortimer B. "Fixing Affirmative Action." U.S. News & World Report, March 20, 1995, p 112.