Affirmative Action or Equal Opportunity?

Always at his best when playing the Supreme Empathizer, President Clinton said a few months ago that he feels the pain of white men. "Psychologically, it's a difficult time for a lot of white males," said the president.

"The Small Business Administration under my administration," boasted the president on a different day, "increased loans to minorities by over two-thirds, to women by over 80 percent, but did not increase loans to white men." The Small Business Administration authorized Asian-Indians for a special slice of federal largess through contract set-asides in 1982. Sri Lankans were added in 1988, Indonesians and Tongans in 1989, followed by Hasidic Jews. The jobless white males in Pittsburgh's rusted river valleys are still waiting.

Clinton appointee Mary Francis Berry, head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, explains that "civil rights laws were not passed to give civil rights to all Americans"—only to "disfavored groups," such as "blacks, Hispanics, and women."

The problem with the government's group focus is that the son of a poor, white, West Virginia coal miner is categorized as more privileged than the daughter of a Manhattan surgeon. That is because it is "pay-back time" in America, according to columnist Tom Wicker—time for white males to take a seat at the rear of the bus, even if their great-grandfathers never set eyes on a cotton plantation. The last of us, collectively defined, shall be first, according to the diversity experts in central planning. The individual counts for nothing.

"We want black businessmen to scream enough to let angry white males understand that we've done something for them," a White House official was quoted in the New York Times at the beginning of the Clinton administration's review of affirmative action.

President Clinton, who only a few years ago was looking for a Cabinet that "looked like America," now defends the concept of affirmative action but wants to "mend it." Programs should not last forever, he says, and no one who is not qualified should be hired. Preferences to correct past injustices are good, states the president, but quotas and reverse discrimination should be illegal. The lawyers will be busy defining the difference between preferences and reverse discrimination.

Early on, the Clinton administration declared that "a white male will not be considered for attorney general." In "An Open Letter to My Fellow Democrats," New York Post columnist Jack Newfield wrote that this exclusion "immediately insulted and alienated millions of young, white workers, and they never came back. No wonder 62 percent of white males voted Republican in November."

With some 70 percent of the nation's population now legally advantaged as "disadvantaged," eligible for federal contracts and affirmative action benefits, the federal planners have institutionalized racism, sexism, and groupthink on a grand scale. "White males are the only growth area for the modern victim movement," says John Leo, a contributing editor at U.S. News and World Report. "Everybody else is already covered."

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Billie Wright Dziech, an English professor at the University of Cincinnati, takes Leo's suggestion seriously. Colleges, says Dziech, "have the responsibility to determine whether white men, like women and members of minority groups, require some special support services." With inclusive victimhood, everyone on campus can be entitled to special compassion and programs. "White male students are acutely aware that their institutions have demonstrated little interest in them as a group," says Dziech, "and this is clearly a source of frustration affecting their behavior and attitudes after they leave academe."

"If existing institutional grievance procedures do not adequately respond to white men who com plain about sexual harassment or racial discrimination, we must devise procedures that do," recommends Dziech. "We need to talk about how white men are viewed today and about how both men and women have been burdened by stereotypes."

At Stanford University, they are less surer about expanding group consciousness and victimhood to everyone. Charles Curran, 25 percent Irish and majoring in economics and African studies, proposed the formation of an Irish-American students association. Jim Hammel, 25 percent Irish, 50 percent Mexican, and a co-organizer with Curran, says, "We have more in common with black Americans than with the English."

Stanford sponsors five graduation theme banquets: Native American, Latino, Catholic, Asian-American, and African-American. After $100,000 in tuition payments, perhaps Hammel and Curran feel that their parents should not have to settle for a Chinese stir fry when what they would really like is some tasty ham and cabbage and a bit of Irish dancing. An editorial in the Stanford Daily states that an Irish student group would set a "dangerous precedent."

Though Italian-Americans have been granted special victim status at the City University of New York, California State University has refused to accept funds from the Sons of Italy for scholarships for needy Italian students. Hardship is defined only collectively at Cal State, and Italians are not one of the three recognized victim groups.

The notion that individuals regularly transcend the accidents of birth is politically incorrect in much of academe. The University of Texas Law School lowers standards for African-Americans and Hispanics. "I've never understood why Hispanic liberals, so sensitive to slights from the racist right," says Hispanic columnist Roger Hernandez, "don't also take offense at the patronizing racists of the left who say that being Hispanic makes you an idiot." "Why should a man named Hernandez," he asks, "be able to pass a police sergeant's test with a lower score than a white man named Henderson?" Coca-Cola chairman Roberto Goizueta, says Hernandez, qualifies for affirmative action programs that are denied to poor whites. "Why should the likes of Michael Jordan, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, and Marge Schott," asks Bruce Fein in USA Today, "qualify for special treatment by the government?"

In Pasadena, California, Armenian-Americans are a protected class, favored with city contracts. Folks of "Appalachian regional origin" go to the front of the line in Cincinnati, and Portuguese immigrants are official victims in Massachusetts. Japanese- and Chinese-Americans, groups with above-average SATs and incomes, are designated as "disadvantaged" in Colorado.

Opposing rollbacks in set-asides and group preferences, Jesse Jackson states: "We have died too young, bled too profusely, been to too many funerals of young mothers, to go back now." A white male veteran of the Vietnam War could say the same words about being excluded from consideration for a government forestry job. "Only unqualified applicants will be considered," stated a help-wanted ad from the U.S. Forest Service. Women filled 179 of the 184 job openings. Someone in central planning must have determined that there were too many white males in America's woods.

The civil-rights bureaucrats have assumed that statistical disparities between groups in incomes, occupations, work discipline, or graduation rates are the result of discrimination, and that such disparities can and should be eliminated through goals, timetables, fines, subsidies, quotas, and lawsuits.

"In the future," states a Defense Department memo, "special permission will be required for the promotion of all white men without disabilities." At the Justice Department, workplace discipline cannot "be initiated against any group of employees at a statistically significant higher rate than any other group." The Energy Department reserved 65 percent of the spaces in its Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program for women and minorities.

One wonders why the central planners at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) never got around to mandating that at least 90 percent of male decorators be practicing heterosexuals, or that professional basketball teams be 51 percent female, 80 percent white, and 25 percent vertically challenged. Cambodians own 80 percent of the doughnut shops in California. Should the EEOC force them to franchise their shops to African-Americans and European-Americans?

We have traveled a long way from the original intent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that created the EEOC. Section 703(j) of that act states: "Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer . . . to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group . . . on account of an imbalance." Section 703(a) forbids employers to "limit, segregate, or classify" employees based on their "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin."

Sen. Hubert Humphrey, a chief author of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, promised to "eat [his] hat" if the law would result in hiring or promoting by group quotas. A colorblind society, less race- and gender-conscious, was the goal—not today's government-mandated group spoils system. The law mirrored Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a society in which children will be judged on the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

Instead, by 1976 a federal judge ordered that 42 percent of all new police and fire department employees in Chicago had to be minorities. A court in Pittsburgh ruled that every other new police officer had to be female or black. In 1991 the California legislature passed a bill, vetoed by the governor, mandating that group graduation rates at all public universities had to match the group graduation rates at California's high schools.

Deval Patrick, the Clinton administration's assistant attorney general for civil rights, ordered Fullerton, California, which has less than a 2 percent African-American population, to have a "black applicant pool" of 9 percent, along with a program to hire minorities who felt discouraged from applying, or applied and were rejected for fire or police positions since 1985, with awards of 10 years back pay for those who allegedly experienced past discrimination.

"There is no gentle way of putting this, but 18- to 45-year-old white males are one ticked-off group," writes Bob Grossfield, head of the Arizona Democratic Leadership Council. "These men believe that every other segment of America has someone standing up for them. They believe, rightly or wrongly, that everyone else has a higher priority while they're left behind paying for it all."

An ABC News poll shows that 81 percent of white males oppose employment preferences for women and minorities. A Newsweek survey reports that only 14 percent of whites support racial preferences in hiring or college admissions. The California Civil Rights Initiative that bans group preferences in government contracting and education has the support of 59 percent of women and 42 percent of African-Americans, according to a recent Field Institute survey.

"Ordinary Americans are tired of being sacrificed on the altar so liberals can preen themselves on their 'compassion' toward whatever special group has been made into a sacred cow," writes Thomas Sowell. People of all sorts, he says, "have been verbally transformed into 'victims of ‘society’ with special privileges created in the name of equal rights." We should be more, Sowell states, than "animals lining up for a place at the public trough."

Last year, the federal government allocated $10 billion in contracts under set-aside programs for companies owned by women and minorities. Reflecting the shifts in public opinion, the Supreme Court now takes a dim view of such group preferences and entitlements. The Constitution, says Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, protects "persons, not groups." Justice Antonin Scalia states that "under our Constitution, there can be no such thing as a creditor or a debtor race." "Government cannot make us equal," says Justice Clarence Thomas. "Affirmative action programs stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority" no matter how competent they are or how hard they work. The beneficiaries of special treatment, says Justice Thomas, too often "develop dependencies or adopt an attitude that they are entitled to preferences."

A rollback of affirmative action by the courts, politicians, and public opinion, however, does not leave the nation at a dead end in terms of economic fairness and group equity. Instead, it can open the roads that lead to the real causes of inequality. In the black community, progress in lowering the high dropout rates in schools and raising the proportion of intact families would produce more upward mobility than all of the government's affirmative action programs combined. The out-of-wedlock birthrate today among African-Americans is 68 percent, up from 26 percent in 1965. Children from single-parent families are nearly twice as likely to be expelled from school and 40 percent more likely to repeat a grade. The National Assessment Governing Board reports that 54 percent of black high school seniors have "below basic" reading skills.

The collapse of families and education in the African-American community is a larger obstacle than discrimination in the battle against poverty.

For black Americans who stick with school and marriage, the story is not one of hopelessness and bigotry. "For nearly 20 years, young blacks who manage to stay married have had family incomes almost identical to those of young white couples," reports Jared Taylor in Paved with Good Intentions. Harvard economist Richard Freeman states: "By the 1970s, young black male college graduates attained rough income parity with young white graduates." Joseph Conti reports in Profiles of a New Black Vanguard that "black college-educated females currently earn 125 percent of what white college educated females earn."

The most effective policy the government can pursue to promote economic equity and upward mobility is to provide incentives for growth in the private sector. Discrimination shrinks in a full-employment economy. Affirmative action programs were in place during both the Carter and Reagan terms, but it was the difference in economic policies and growth during those two administrations that had the greatest impact on the economic success of disadvantaged groups. The real median income of black families increased 17 percent during the Reagan administration, after falling 10 percent in the Carter years. By the end of Reagan's two terms, female entrepreneurs employed more people than all of the Fortune 500 companies combined. For the vast majority of those firms, federal set-asides and contract preferences had nothing to do with their business.

The unprecedented 91 months of growth in the 1980s produced 18 million new jobs, pulled 4 million people out of poverty, increased women's earnings 8 percent faster than men's, and doubled the number of black families earning over $50,000 in real terms. From 1981 to 1987, the number of black-owned businesses increased from 300,000 to 425,000. The Federal Reserve reports a 24 percent real increase in wealth among white families from 1983 to 1989. The increase in real wealth, adjusted for inflation, for African-American families and Hispanic families in the same period was 35 percent and 54 percent, respectively.

"Our 1960s success in making demands on government has led us to the mistaken assumption that government can give us what we need for the next major push toward equality," says African-American columnist William Raspberry in the Washington Post. "Unfortunately, that period taught us to see in civil rights terms things that might more properly be addressed in terms of enterprise and exertion rather than in terms of equitable distribution. The emphasis ought to be on finding ways to get more of us into business and thereby creating the jobs we need."

The overregulation of both the economy and compassion has produced the unintended consequences of slow growth, less equity, and a heightening of group resentments. It is time for some deregulation.