I was born in 1963, little more than a month before shoots rang out in Dealey Plaza ending the life of our 35th President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As I grew up we had the photographs of three men on our mantle. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy. They were like Icons, Super heroes to me, my family and nearly every black person I knew. Part of it was because of the space program and living in Southern California, but also because President Kennedy in a country that was in the midst of being torn apart by battles over segregation and Jim Crow had the courage to established the first committee for Equal Opportunity Employment and implement non-discrimination and Affirmative Action for government employment and contractors with Executive Order 10925.
SECTION 201. The President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity established by this order is directed immediately to scrutinize and study employment practices of the Government of the United States, and to consider and recommend additional affirmative steps which should be taken by executive departments and agencies to realize more fully the national policy of nondiscrimination within the executive branch of the Government.
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"(1) The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. Such action shall include, but not be limited to, the following: employment, upgrading, demotion or transfer; recruitment or recruitment advertising; layoff or termination; rates of pay or other forms of compensation; and selection for training, including apprenticeship. The contractor agrees to post in conspicuous places, available to employees and applicants for employment, notices to be provided by the contracting officer setting forth the provisions of this nondiscrimination clause.
Few issues have been as controversial over the last few decades as Affirmative Action.
The key issue is, can you take positive steps toward non-discrimination in favor a minority group without creating an unfair negative impact on a member of the ethnic and social majority? Can you fill in a massive social hole that was dug for one group without taking from others in the first place, and what happens if you never bother to fill that hole while expecting people to somehow magically climb out of that hole without any help?
Lots of people think they know everything there is to know about Affirmative Action, but most of those people are wrong.
I’ve heard many a story, and I’m sure most of you have heard them too, about some white guy lamenting that he’d been told he could’ve been hired “like that” if only he’d been a minority — or a woman — because of Affirmative Action. Naturally their resentful. Naturally they feel slighted, and naturally they that they’ve been unfairly and unjustly discriminated against, but that isn’t always the case. They should be resentful, they should be angry and they should wants some payback.
Unfortunately, when they claim this is all the fault of “Affirmative Action” they’re pretty much full of shit. That kind of crap isn’t Affirmative Action, that’s some bullshit. In fact, if the story is true, what this person is describing is a crime, and a direct violation of the Civil Rights Act. What they’ve been led to be believe is “Affirmative Action” quite literally isn’t anything of the kind as I shall explain.
First of all Affirmative Action is not “Reverse Discrimination”, it is as Kennedy described taking “affirmative steps” to ensure non-discrimination. It simply asks government agencies and their contractors to improve, to be inclusive and be non-discriminatory not just about issues of race and nationality but also as of 1973, those with a phyisical disability.
Affirmative action is a set of positive steps that employers use to promote equal employment opportunity and to eliminate discrimination. It includes expanded outreach, recruitment, mentoring, training, management development and other programs designed to help employers hire, retain and advance qualified workers from diverse backgrounds, including persons with disabilities. Affirmative action means inclusion, not exclusion. Affirmative action does not mean quotas and is not mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
And Veterans were included in Affirmative Action under the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974.
Affirmative Action is not a “screw the white people” policy because white people can certainly be disabled and also veterans, but also because nothing in Kennedy’s order or subsequent order by President Johnson and President Nixon require any such thing.
It has long been the policy of the United States Government to provide equal opportunity in Federal employment on the basis of merit and fitness and without discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. All recent Presidents have fully supported this policy, and have directed department and agency heads to adopt measures to make it a reality.
As a result, much has been accomplished through positive agency programs to assure equality of opportunity. Additional steps, however, are called for in order to strengthen and assure fully equal employment opportunity in the Federal Government.
Affirmative Action is not a “Quota System” largely because that was never included but also because the Supreme Court has banned it from being one with the Bakke decision of 1978.
Allan Bakke, a thirty-five-year-old white man, had twice applied for admission to the University of California Medical School at Davis. He was rejected both times. The school reserved sixteen places in each entering class of one hundred for "qualified" minorities, as part of the university's affirmative action program, in an effort to redress longstanding, unfair minority exclusions from the medical profession. Bakke's qualifications (college GPA and test scores) exceeded those of any of the minority students admitted in the two years Bakke's applications were rejected. Bakke contended, first in the California courts, then in the Supreme Court, that he was excluded from admission solely on the basis of race.
Did the University of California violate the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by practicing an affirmative action policy that resulted in the repeated rejection of Bakke's application for admission to its medical school?
No and yes. There was no single majority opinion. Four of the justices contended that any racial quota system supported by government violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., agreed, casting the deciding vote ordering the medical school to admit Bakke. However, in his opinion, Powell argued that the rigid use of racial quotas as employed at the school violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The remaining four justices held that the use of race as a criterion in admissions decisions in higher education was constitutionally permissible. Powell joined that opinion as well, contending that the use of race was permissible as one of several admission criteria. So, the Court managed to minimize white opposition to the goal of equality (by finding for Bakke) while extending gains for racial minorities through affirmative action.
Further SCOTUS decisions such as Adarand v Pena (1995) have additionally narrowed any attempted biases toward minority own businesses via Affirmative Action.
Adarand, a contractor specializing in highway guardrail work, submitted the lowest bid as a subcontractor for part of a project funded by the United States Department of Transportation. Under the terms of the federal contract, the prime contractor would receive additional compensation if it hired small businesses controlled by "socially and economically disadvantaged individuals." [The clause declared that "the contractor shall presume that socially and economically disadvantaged individuals include Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, Asian Pacific Americans, and other minorities...." Federal law requires such a subcontracting clause in most federal agency contracts]. Another subcontractor, Gonzales Construction Company, was awarded the work. It was certified as a minority business; Adarand was not.
Overruling Metro Broadcasting (497 US 547), the Court held that all racial classifications, whether imposed by federal, state, or local authorities, must pass strict scrutiny review. In other words, they "must serve a compelling government interest, and must be narrowly tailored to further that interest." The Court added that compensation programs which are truly based on disadvantage, rather than race, would be evaluated under lower equal protection standards. However, since race is not a sufficient condition for a presumption of disadvantage and the award of favored treatment, all race-based classifications must be judged under the strict scrutiny standard. Moreover, even proof of past injury does not in itself establish the suffering of present or future injury.
So that courts have quite literally banned the use of quotas or bonus points in hiring and severally limited the use of special slots set-aside for minority only businesses. Schools and Colleges aren’t required to implement Affirmative Action, it’s only a portion of government hiring and contracting not education. They can do it, anyone can, but there are limits — bolstered by the above SCOTUS decisions — which control what you can and can’t do and legally call it “Affirmative Action”.
They can’t set quotas by saying looking at a community that may be 20-30% minority and mandating that they hire 20-30% minority candidates because of Bakke but what they can do is set goals and monitor their own progress toward that goal. In reaching it they can’t change the rules of who gets hired but they can put some effort in to recruiting from wider pools of candidates outside their current majority. They can also offer training to help those who may not be currently represented become better qualified and able to compete and generally speaking the gender, minority, and disabled mix of person working for the government or contracting with them has been fairly successful.
The Office of Personnel Management released its annual report about the federal workforce, finding the number of minorities employed by the government increased by 2.4 percent in fiscal 2011 over the previous year.
The Federal Equal Opportunity Recruitment Program report, submitted to Congress last Friday, stated the number of minorities grew from 647,588 to 662,991 in fiscal 2011.
The report declared, “A workforce that draws from all corners of America — in filling positions from the Senior Executive Service to the entry level — will create a culture that fosters creativity and benefits from a greater return on investments in the workforce.”
The report also shows more women and minorities attained professional and administrative positions than last year. The number of women represented in these positions increased by 5.1 percent (from 505,111 to 531,062). The representation rate of minorities in professional and administrative positions rose by 7.4 percent (from 332,934 to 357,468).
As a whole, minorities constitute 34.1 percent of the workforce while women and men make up 43.9 percent and 56.1 percent respectively.
But it’s still not totally perfect, at least not for Latinos, yet.
Minority representation in the federal workforce continues to outstrip participation in civilian jobs with one exception: Hispanics, who are significantly underrepresented in federal jobs. But all minority applicants face challenges in government hiring and advancement.
The degree of difficulty varies widely based on a number of factors, as demonstrated by the following statistics. They were summarized from the Federal Equal Opportunity Recruitment Program report (FEORP) for fiscal year 2004 that was released to Congress in May 2005.
African Americans make up 17.4 percent of the federal workforce, as compared to 10.1 percent of the civilian labor force. But the percentage of African Americans drops dramatically with each rise in job grade. They hold 27.6 percent of the lowest positions (GS 1-4), 25.8 percent of GS 5-8, 15.7 percent of GS 9-12, 10.9 percent of GS 13-15 and just 6.9 percent of Senior Pay levels.
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders represent 4.9 percent of federal employees and 4 percent of the civilian workforce. They too are underrepresented at Senior Pay levels, representing 5.9 percent of GS 1-4 pay grades but just 2.6 percent at the Senior Pay grade.
American Indians form 1.9 percent of the federal workforce but make up 0.8 percent of the civilian labor force. Job grade participation ranges from 5 percent at GS 1-4 to 2.9 percent at GS 5-8 to only 0.8 percent at the Senior Pay level.
Hispanics make up just 7.3 percent of the federal workforce versus 12.6 percent of the civilian labor force. They hold about 9 percent of the GS 1-4 and 5-8 job grade positions and 3.4 percent of Senior Pay-level jobs.
So this bares further effort, but generally you don’t really hear lots of sob stories about how some “unqualified minority” got a job in government over the obviously more talented white guy. Even without active and deliberate discrimination, some hiring can operate at a certain level of inertia. People are going to be more comfortable, generally, working with people that are more like themselves — people they can relate too and easily understand. It’s natural to be within your comfort zone and unless your asked to push a little harder, and look a little further afield for candidates who are just a good and just as qualified, but might not the most obvious fit right away.
Groups can be misaligned and misrepresented in any area not only because of racism, sexism or bigory, but also be of self-selection or lack of having connection and access into that field.
There’s nothing wrong with putting some reasonable effort into trying to limit that inertia. It doesn’t mean you have to discriminate in order to prevent discrimination but you can put make meaningful progress at diversifying your workforce, obviously to the benefit of women, minorities, the disabled and veterans but also to the benefit of everyone else who have a chance to work side-by-side with people they might not have otherwise have had a opportunity to meet, get to know and strike of friendships and relationships with.
So of course, the GOP is totally completely against this entire idea and have been trying to rip it to shreds for decades.
When it comes to how conservatives think about race in America, no issue provides a clearer picture of their perspective than affirmative action. Conservatives see the issue very differently than liberals. While liberals believe affirmative action programs create opportunities for blacks where they didn't previously exist, conservatives believe these programs actually serve to foster racism by denying opportunities to others who are equally qualified. Further, most affirmative action programs address specific minorities, while alienating others. From a conservative perspective, this creates tension and undermines the ideal of racial equality.
Because they don't hold the same politically correct world view that liberals do, conservatives are much less apt to adopt sympathetic attitudes toward minorities on the basis of their race alone. Conservatives assume racial equality exists to begin with and base their policies on that assumption. Therefore, when it comes to an issue like "hate crimes," for example, conservatives disagree with the notion entirely.
If some unconscionable crime is perpetrated upon someone based on that person's ethnicity, conservatives don't believe the victim should receive "more justice" because of it. The idea of "more" or "less" justice doesn't make sense to conservatives, since they believe there can only be one form of justice, applied equally to everyone. If the same unconscionable crime is perpetrated upon someone based on that person's financial circumstances, for example, that victim should be no less entitled to the same pursuit of justice. A crime is a crime, regardless of the motivation behind it.
No, actually a “crime is not a crime” because we do look exactly a motivations when we contrast manslaughter, 2nd degree murder, 1st degree murder and terrorism. In all these cases the reasons why all matter, the justifications matter, but for some reason Conservatives suddenly say we can’t consider justification when the crime is committed specifically because of race. Rarely do they say that about crimes committed on the basis of religion, or gender.
Funny how that works.
Similarly to their view that Affirmative Action plays favorites and pits one ethnic group against the other which it doesn’t have to do, there is also the paternalistic view that it is demeaning and damaging to the minorities who may be the recipients of it.
The single biggest problem in this system -- a problem documented by a vast and growing array of research -- is the tendency of large preferences to boomerang and harm their intended beneficiaries. Large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively -- even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools.
We refer to this problem as "mismatch," a word that largely explains why, even though blacks are more likely to enter college than are whites with similar backgrounds, they will usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out. Because of mismatch, racial preference policies often stigmatize minorities, reinforce pernicious stereotypes, and undermine the self-confidence of beneficiaries, rather than creating the diverse racial utopias so often advertised in college campus brochures.
There is the possibility that less students from less affluent schools may not have been adequately prepared to compete as this “mismatch” argument states but it seems to me one solution should be to identify the schools with the lowest rate of producing college ready students and establish the sharing of best practices between their state colleges and more successful schools so that they can have better results and better prepare their students. THAT would be a true Affirmative Action program rather than just admitting minority students as “tokens” to prove the school is diverse and without discrimination, where those students who haven’t been properly prepared subsequently get frustrated and drop out.
Interestingly they never bring up this argument when it comes affirmative action efforts for the disabled or for veterans, somehow this only comes up when “race” is at issue.
There is of course another side to this argument, which is the possibility that just as their may be a certain amount of inertia to hiring choices as I describe above due to the natural comfort zone of most people, there can also be a lot of discomfort for minority students who may be entering for the first time an environment where they are vastly outnumbered by people from different backgrounds and with different perspectives.
It can be jarring, off putting and stressful which itself can lead to weaker performance.
At the core of this argument is the idea that schools with race-conscious admissions policies give preference to students of color over white students even though they are objectively less qualified, as evidenced by lower average pre-college test scores and grades. That achievement gaps persist in college is often cited as proof that this idea is correct. In other words, if black students with lower SAT scores than their white peers also receive worse grades in college, or more often switch into “easier” majors, then surely they were less college-ready to begin with. However, the underlying assumption that poorer academic outcomes indicate lower ability ignores a large piece of the puzzle: the taxing psychological environment faced by students of groups historically marginalized in academics.
In the abstract, it can be challenging to separate these two explanations—psychological environment versus lower ability—because they both result in the same outcomes: lower scores and greater attrition from challenging majors. However, social psychology offers a window into this otherwise black box through the use of experimental design. In the randomized controlled experiments that we (and many other social psychologists across the country) conduct in schools, we can directly measure the impact of the taxing psychological environment on students’ academic achievement by observing what happens when we remove psychological strain as a factor.
One psychological strain faced by students of color that we study in our experiments is stereotype threat. Decades of science has shown that pervasive stereotypes of certain identity groups as less intelligent or less capable in academics often lead students of these groups to worry that they could be judged through the lens of these negative stereotypes. This threat is stressful and can undermine these students’ learning, performance, and engagement. Few of us can perform at our best in an environment we perceive as judgmental or skeptical—this is no different, except that the judgmental environment is chronic.
So maybe being just a tad “politically correct” and offering a safe, open and welcoming environment to students who are at the greatest social disadvantage and are may be under increased ethnic stress isn’t a completely hair-brained idea after all.
This is also clearly proven when the person in the social minority within the social educational structure are Conservatives.
Even though we are conservative professors, we've argued publicly that conservative attacks on universities are too often overheated and counterproductive. Nonetheless, liberals shouldn't pretend that academia is untouched by political prejudices. Conservatives do face some bias and are wildly underrepresented in the social sciences; enough, perhaps, to warrant new affirmative efforts to increase political pluralism in academia.
According to a recent study, only 6.6% of professors in the social sciences self-identify as Republicans (compared with 24.2% in business, 23.3% in engineering, and 22.9% in the health sciences). In sociology, Marxists outnumber Republicans by 4 to 1. Conservative professors are, then, less well represented in the social sciences than women and people of color.
Yes, that’s right — Conservatives who’ve long argued that we shouldn’t care what the gender and ethnic makeup of a school is, that it’s political correctness to complain when a particular ethnicity is under-respresented and wrong-headed and counter productive to attempt to do anything about it, completely reverse their argument when the minority being under-represented is themselves.
No longer is non-discrimination determined to be the natural state. Suddenly the lack of certain numbers of Conservatives alone — is evidence of bias.
Ain’t that something’?
The irony of this is often lost on them. Conservatives have argued Affirmative Action is inherently and un-retrievably bad, that we should seek to be “colorblind”, that simply paying any attention to race at all is by definition harmful. It’s “Racism” to simply talk about the fact we have racially different points of view and perspectives. It’s “Racism” to attempt to recognize racism and even worse if you try and do something about it.
20 Years ago Conservative gadfly, author and convicted criminal Dinesh D’Sousa wrote a best seller called “The End of Racism” — in response to which I then wrote a lengthy rebuttal that has since been archived — which was essentially as extended screed against all Liberal policies concerning race, including Affirmative Action. He argued in his book that Slavery wasn’t inherently racist because there were a handful of slave owners who were also African-American.
He argued that White people aren’t inherently racist because they don’t demonstrably gain anything from “The Ghetto”.
"Most whites have no economic stake in the ghetto. They have almost nothing to gain from oppressing poor blacks. Indeed the only concern that whites seem to have about the underclass is its potential for crime and it's reliance on the public purse. p 554.
But in the end, his final ultimately solution to solve all racism was quite literally to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That bill is the problem, not actual racist people or racist policies. As I wrote back then:
In the final chapters of his book D'souza claims that the solution to racism in this country is to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and replace it with a new law that expressly prohibits ANY recognition of race within the government, but allows ABSOLUTE freedom of use of race by private industry in determining how it should operate (pg. 544). He claims that the only racists of any worth any serious danger in America today are black (pg. 412) - this contrary to the evidence that racial violence against blacks and other minorities persons is increasing, and he continues to absolve all (what I tend to call "unconscious" bigots) such as cab drivers from any and all responsibility to even OBEY the law (they are specifically prohibited from discriminating against their fares), let alone curb their discrimination against blacks (pg. 252) when they refuse to serve them for fear that they will be "robbed" by "young black thugs". This is considered "acceptable" to D'souza even though these people are criminals for this behavior. D'souza would make anyone who attempted to stop this activity - a criminal.
In support of this idea an effort was put forward to ban the use of Affirmative Action by the University of California, which was followed Proposition 209 — which passed.
(a) The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
Let’s just do nothing, including doing absolutely nothing to identify and stop ongoing deliberate bias — let alone inertial bias or ethnic stigmatization — and everything will just happily work out fine all by itself and the magical, mystical, invisible hand of the market.
Yeah, that’s not how it’s worked out.
This year [2014], the university offered admission to more than 22,000 students who are Asian American, more than 17,000 who are Hispanic/Latino, more than 16,000 who are non-Hispanic white and more than 2,500 who are African American.
Behind these figures, UC officials say, is a problem: The share of black and Latino students at the university as a whole, and especially at its most prestigious campuses, does not reflect the racial and ethnic profile of the state.
“It’s not as if those numbers represent a success story,” Nina Robinson, associate president and chief policy adviser for the UC system, said Wednesday.
In 1995, according to a UC fact sheet, 4.3 percent of roughly 22,000 new UC freshmen from California were African American. Last year, the share was 4 percent of roughly 33,000. On that measure, the Latino/Hispanic share rose from 15.6 percent in 1995 to 28.1 percent last year.
However, Robinson said, the share of Latino students statewide who are graduating from high school has risen at a faster clip. Latinos now account for nearly half of the state’s annual output of high school graduates and will soon be a majority.
In addition, the black share of new students at the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses, the most prestigious in the system, plummeted after the affirmative action ban and has not recovered.
Predictably blocking the UC system from being able to do anything to help minority students who were clearly in need of greater help and support simply because they were minority students accomplished exactly what conservatives clearly wanted. It’s driven out and slowed the participation of minority students. Even though their participation in the UC system is grown slightly it has lagged far behind their representative proportion in the state as a whole, which means that higher education has become even less accessible to these students than it had been previously and really there’s basically nothing the UC system can be allowed to do about. Not directly.
They have attempted indirect corrections, such such as focusing support on an economic basis rather than race but these have essentially failed.
Robinson said UC has tried just about everything to narrow the gap. Among its initiatives: “dozens of programs” for outreach to disadvantaged students in the K-12 school system; an admission guarantee for students in the top nine percent of their high school class; revising admission criteria to boost the chances of applicants who have overcome obstacles in life; and deemphasizing standardized test scores.
“Our policies help,” Robinson said. “It’s not that they’re useless.”
Asked whether there are significant ideas left to try, Robinson said: “We can’t think of anything, no. We are always looking.”
When the Affirmative Action ban at the University of California was initially proposed there was plan. similar to what I describe above, to have a mentoring system between the UC System and the schools producing the lowest percentage of college ready students in order to help bring them up to spend and hence increase the pool of qualified applicant without necessarily implementing race based selections.
As far as I’m aware that program, which at least theory would have been race-neutral, was never implemented.