Action still needed.

We seem about to dismantle one of the nation's most important, albeit flawed, experiments. Affirmative action policies have been critical in the national effort to compensate for the injustices visited upon African-Americans by centuries of slavery and decades of segregation and Jim Crow laws. In the 1960s, affirmative action was devised to redress the effects of discrimination against blacks by supporting positive efforts to educate, house, hire, and promote men and women, boys and girls, who had been kept from their rightful place in American society.

These measures have always operated under critical scrutiny, sometimes from federal courts, sometimes from social critics, sometimes from the beneficiaries themselves. They have not, as some would claim, provided blacks a free ride. But not until two academics--self-described staunch conservatives--announced their plan to put a referendum to end affirmative action on the 1996 California ballot has anyone seriously acted to do away with it. Now the media treat its demise as a foregone conclusion. The "Contract with America" and a surging conservative agenda may provoke this conclusion, but without evidence that it is sound policy.

Don Wycliff wrote in these pages last issue (May 19) that "people have the nerve to ask whether thirty years of affirmative action isn't enough. Incredible!" Still, even he seems resigned: "The political facts of life suggest to me that thirty years will have to be enough." He may be right. But before the great dismantling begins, let the nation think carefully about what we are doing and how we do it.

There is no doubt that there are problems with affirmative action. One of the most serious has been with us virtually from the start: Many "minorities"--women, Hispanics, and Asians--have benefited from affirmative-action policies, though their claims to compensatory justice do not carry nearly as much weight as do the claims of African-Americans and, arguably, Native Americans. The inclusion of other groups, which once may have seemed an expedient device to garner greater political support for affirmative action, has now become an argument for ending affirmative action, because such inclusion overreaches the primary intent of the policy and dilutes the claims of compensatory justice. Whatever discrimination other minorities" have suffered, it is true that only African-Americans were enslaved and held in bondage by the law of the land, including the Constitution, and only they suffered the discrimination that followed. Furthermore, the interest-group politics organized around "minority" membership impedes our political parties in responding to new issues; the Democratic party, so often torn among competing racial, ethnic, and gender groups, is especially hobbled in its ability even to discuss affirmative action.

Wycliff's article points to another possibly adverse outcome that may prove "detrimental to the efforts of blacks to help themselves." Quota systems, or mandated preferences, may allow blacks, youngsters and adolescents in particular, to believe that they don't have to study or work hard to compete with their white peers, because they've "got an ace up [their] sleeve," while allowing their white peers the misconception that blacks succeed only because of that ace. But quota systems are not a necessary component of affirmative action; the U.S. military, which may be our most racially integrated institution, sets goals but does not change standards. It does help candidates to meet those standards.

And then there is the growing and seemingly explosive anger over what some call "reverse discrimination," the view that affirmative action has resulted in discrimination against white males. If this fuels the conservative drive to end affirmative action, that is unfortunate because there is precious little evidence that reverse discrimination exists. The loss of high-wage manufacturing jobs has made it hard for high school graduates, black or white, to find work and to establish themselves. The answer to that problem is high school educations that make people life-long learners, along with government support for job retraining.

Antidiscrimination legislation and affirmative action have made ours a different society, in significant ways a better society, than it was thirty years ago. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 along with other measures, legislative and judicial, ended legal segregation and made discrimination a civil offense. Affirmative action boosted those antidiscrimination laws by helping qualified blacks get jobs where union practices and lingering bigotry seemed impenetrable despite the law, and where old boy networks, rooted in colleges, channeled white males into high-paying white-collar jobs in the legal, financial, and political establishment. Those walls, and many others, have been breached; workplaces from police departments to newsrooms to law firms now look more like America as a whole. Integration is the rule in most colleges and universities and in many workplaces. But discrimination still exists in housing and neighborhoods and, as a consequence, in the public schools. Racism persists.

Even so, Americans--black and white--are better off than we were thirty years ago because of the legal, moral, and social suasion provided by affirmative action. Perhaps such suasion is not needed for another thirty years, but it will be needed for some time to come. Rather than the abrupt termination promoted by the California referendum and the conservative agenda, give the spirit of voluntary affirmative action the kind of strong support that would make it ultimately unnecessary. Reemphasize the primary reason for affirmative action for African-Americans--compensatory justice for slavery; Hispanics, Asians, and women could not claim the benefit of affirmative-action policies, but like blacks remain covered by antidiscrimination laws. To emphasize the seriousness of those laws, add criminal penalties to the civil ones now meted out for discrimination.

Is there an end in sight to affirmative action? Shouldn't that be the day when most African-Americans no longer need it to attain their rightful place in American society? The current debate might usefully set forth a set of measures: guidelines on educational achievement, employment rates, median income, and residential integration that would signal the final redress of a national injustice.

ET CETERA 

IT WASN'T MARX The recently reborn notion that poverty should be tolerated because it spurs effort was rejected by a certain economist in the course of an argument favoring high wages for workers. It "seems not very probable," he wrote, "that men in general should work better when they are ill-fed than when they are well-fed, when they are disheartened than when they are in good spirits, when they are frequently sick than when they are generally in good health." According to a recently published book by Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press), the writer of those lines was Adam Smith. Not the one we see on TV. The one who wrote The Wealth of Nations, died in 1790, and was later canonized by the National Association of Manufacturers.

ADDRESS ENVY There are a number of things the English do with which it is fruitless to compete, don't you think? One is making a statement by asking a question. Another is "Rumpole of the Bailey." But perhaps most impressive of all is the poetic ring given to the most trivial facts of life. Like addresses. Listen to the music in the addresses of our sister publications, the Catholic Herald and the Tablet. The Catholic Herald Ltd., Herald House, Lambs Passage, Bunhill Row, Lonson. (Lambs Passage, Bunhill Row!) And somewhat more ecclesiastical: The Tablet, 1 King Street Cloisters, Clifton Walk, London.

Here on terse Dutch Street we are surrounded by Maiden Lane, Ann, John, Fulton, Liberty, the infamous Wall, and anachronistic Beaver streets. But there is no Bunhill Row or Lambs Passage in sight, and we judge ourselves deprived. Dutch Street has a quaint enough ring for Manhattan, but how much more soothing things might be. Commonweal, Reform House, Ethereal Heights, Pastry Crescent, New York?