1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney
Melting Pot to What?
Continued from previous page
Let me give you a brief history of affirmative action in the United States. Although there is currently an emotionally charged and divisive debate raging in the United States over affirmative action, as we begin to approach a Presidential election year, the program actually started as a bipartisan issue supported by both political parties for a number of years.
In the 1960s, the civil rights movement raised the collective consciousness of the United States to the grievous injustices inflicted upon our country's minorities. In addition to being denied the right to vote in some regions, most notably the south, African Americans nationwide were virtually shut out of most opportunities in a predominantly white society. Black Americans were extremely limited in their access to good schools and colleges, to professional jobs, to better neighbourhoods, to public facilities, to social and even civic organisations.
Although most Americans would think of New Jersey, where I live, as part of the more progressive north-east, as late as the 1960s, segregation practices in New Jersey limited the access in some parts of the state to African Americans in movie theatres, restaurants, swimming pools, and other public facilities.
With the dawn of the civil rights movement, we began to see changes in attitudes as well as in official government policy. Recognising the need to open doors, President Lyndon Johnson issued an executive order on September 24, 1965, requiring federal contractors to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed without regard to their race, colour or national origin." Current affirmative action standards were initiated in the late 1960s by several hundred large corporations in the US and were overwhelmingly accepted by then President Richard Nixon, a conservative Republican.
Established business groups like the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers have stated that affirmative action is good business.
A major business publication, Fortune magazine, found that many business leaders believe that affirmative action has had a positive effect in enabling them to compete domestically and internationally. They believe it provides a workforce that reflects the diversity of the markets they serve.
The principle of affirmative action is applied to several major categories of discrimination, particularly employment and education. It also impacts upon government contracting.
As you may know, we have had numerous court cases challenging affirmative action programs. The decisions have been mixed. One of the most widely-covered cases was known as the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. This was a case brought by a white student denied admission to a medical school because it had reserved 16 places for minorities out of the 100 available places for first-year students.
The highest court in our land, the Supreme Court, issued a two-part decision. In the first part, a majority of the justices ruled that the university's special admissions programs was unfair. The second part of the decision stated that schools could consider race or ethnic background as one factor among others in determining admissions.
The feeling of civil rights advocates in the Bakke case was that, after years of blatant discrimination during which no African Americans at all were permitted to attend most public universities, it is appropriate for schools to be taking action to level the playing field. To level it out.
For example, in my home state of New Jersey, we have one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the United States of America, Princeton University. Yet for almost a century after its founding, from 1848 until 1945, Princeton had no African American graduates at all.
Court challenges have also been brought against affirmative action programs which promote diversity in the workforce, after decades of racial discrimination.
I was disappointed that the US Supreme Court last week refused to reinstate an affirmative action plan for promoting minority fire-fighters in Birmingham, Alabama. The Supreme Court justices rejected, without comment, the arguments by the city officials and African American representatives that the plan was a valid effort to remedy past discrimination against blacks. The affirmative action plan, which was implemented in the early 1980s, was initiated because of complaints that African Americans comprised only 2% of the fire department of Birmingham, Alabama yet they were 28% of the population. The city eventually agreed to work towards a 28% goal of trying by promoting African Americans and white firemen to half of the fire lieutenant openings each year.
Despite the unfair advantage that white fire-fighters obviously held for years, they were able to successfully last week argue that the affirmative action plan discriminated against them now. It is discouraging to see the gains we have made in diversity and multiculturalism being reversed. Unfortunately, it is seems politically profitable to pursue the "divide and conquer" strategy. Winning an election is a numbers game.
Since you can't win an election with only the minority vote, the reasoning goes, why not pander to the majority and write off the minority? This is a dangerous and immoral strategy, which abandons the American ideal of fairness. But, sometimes it works.
For example, the distortion of affirmative action was used successfully in a high-profile Senate campaign in the state of North Carolina. The arch-conservative incumbent, Senator Jesse Helms, ran a television ad which depicted a white job applicant crumbling in frustration a letter of rejection for a job, which the commercial implied, was unfairly reserved for a minority. Senator Helms' Democratic opponent, Harvey Gant, was a black man.
One of the Republican Party's presidential candidates, Senator Phil Gramm from Texas, has already proclaimed that, if he is elected to our nation's highest office, his first official act will be to abolish all attempts to promote affirmative action, thus ending the move to promote diversity in the workplace and in American society. Immediately other candidates in his party jumped on the bandwagon.
It is my hope that more rational voices will prevail in this debate, once the American public is more fully educated about what affirmative action really is, and what its true impact has been. We feel strongly the American people will rally towards doing the right thing as they have done in the past.
Much of the problem is rooted in the economic realities in the U.S. today and of the world in general. With countries around the world strengthening their industrial base, with new treaties like NAFTA and GATT being implemented, the job security American workers enjoyed during the booming post-world war expansion has vanished. Family income has stagnated. The days when a worker could join a company or go to work in a factory and be guaranteed a job for life have vanished.
Our best manufacturing jobs have been exported overseas. There is a rising level of anxiety among American workers, and I believe that fear is driving much of the affirmative action debate.
Even though the facts show that there has been no major loss of jobs to whites as a result of affirmative action, just the perception that a minority could cause you to lose your job is an effective scare tactic.
Look at the facts: white men continue to have the highest wages in the workforce. Compared with the salaries of white men, black men in America earn only 74% of that figure; Hispanic men make about 64%, white women make just about 70%; and the lowest paid workers are black women (63%) and Hispanic women, who barely make (53%) of the median salary for white males.
Women in the US make up almost 46% of the work force, yet they represent only 5% of top management at the major industry and service firms. White males, while a third of the population, make up four-fifths of tenured university faculty, over 90% of the
US Senate, and 80% of the US House of Representatives.
In 1991, former President George Bush joined Congress in appointing a 21-member "Glass Ceiling Commission" to study the difficulty women and minorities encounter in trying to climb all the way to the top of the ladder. Glass ceilings are all around.
Ironically, one of the strongest supporters of the effort to form the Glass Ceiling Commission was Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, who as a Republican presidential candidate has demanded a review of all affirmative action programs with an eye towards eliminating them.
The report of the Glass Ceiling Commission, which was released in March, found that efforts to break the "glass ceiling" preventing women and minorities from reaching the highest levels of corporate management are "disappointingly slow." The top overwhelming number of top corporate positions are held by white men.
However, there has been progress in opening up many fields to women and minorities in the United States compared with the limited opportunities that existed thirty years ago.
We have seen a significant increase in women and minorities entering the professional careers, there has been great growth in minorities and women in law, medicine, economics, politics and the media (minorities in the newsrooms of daily newspapers in the United States increased from 4% in 1978 to 10.5% in 1994 which shows a great increase). In 1972, there were 15,000 female lawyers in the United States; today, that number has reached 202,000. In the 1960s, there were only 280 black elected officials in the United States; today, that number has grown to over 8,000.
So there has been progress in areas and what we are saying is that we must continue to progress and we must fight the new syndrome that has been created.
In conclusion, as Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, it is my challenge to help educate Americans about affirmative action, to help allay public fears and counter the false impression that somehow our economic troubles would be over if we eliminate affirmative action.
In the face of anxiety over the economy, it is our challenge to help people of all backgrounds understand that we must move forward together. We cannot allow fear to divide us. We have to remember, as we recited it in our daily classroom when I was a child in school: "My country 'tis of thee sweet land of liberty of thee I sing. Land where our fathers died, land of the pilgrims pride, from every mountainside let freedom ring." I think the United States will come to live up to that creed. That it is a land of freedom and opportunity that under one umbrella, we are many special and unique cultures. We should celebrate our differences as well as the difference as a common bond to bring us together.
I hope that both the United States and Australia will reap the rewards of multiculturalism and keep them moving on. As Dr. King most times completed his speeches: "Whether you have blond fleecy locks or black complexion it does not alternate nature claim. Skin may differ but affection dwells in black and white the same. Were I so tall as to reach the poles, span the oceans with my hands, I must be measured by my soul which is the standard of a man."
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