When Racial Fairness Became Good Business : Civil Rights: In the ‘70s, the message was that discrimination is bad for business. Now the court says bias has no costs.

“You know, I thought it would be a total disaster--but it’s turned out great.”

The man who spoke those words was a white, middle-aged owner of a small chain of clothing stores along the border with Mexico. He was a hard-working, rather irascible guy, and like most of the other store owners in the room, a guy with very little social consciousness. He just wanted to run his stores with the greatest amount of profit and the least amount of hassle.

Another store owner, very much like the first man, agreed. “Yeah, we thought there’d be a lot of problems, but instead it’s solved a lot for us.”

And the others in the meeting were agreeing, too. There were about a dozen of us there, employers and managers of store chains. At this time I was the vice president (and later president) of a 150-store chain of low-cost clothing shops of which about one-third were located along the United States border just across from Mexico. Most of our customers were Mexican or Mexican American.

What were we agreeing about? Well, this was 1973, and we were discussing the new anti-discrimination policies being put through by the government and the new decisions by the Supreme Court, which was rolling back for the first time in a century the powerful and disastrous laws and policies that kept minorities and women in permanently subservient positions.

The store owners didn’t care about social policy. They wanted to avoid problems. Avoidance of problems is one of the first rules of making a profit. You can’t afford to alienate customers in areas where there is prejudice, and you can’t afford to go against the law. But you also can’t afford to hire attorneys to fight discrimination cases--and the way to avoid all of that is to determine the tenor of current laws. Especially law as interpreted by Supreme Court decisions.

You see, before these decisions, store owners believed that to promote women or minorities would lead to problems--and therefore less profits. So they wouldn’t promote even some of their best, most loyal employees. They had to bring down people from New York, people who often didn’t understand the local ways.

But when changes in the law began to force these store owners to promote women and minorities, an amazing thing happened: They found that the barriers had actually been counterproductive.

A network of Latino women executives, dedicated and intelligent, quickly sprang up and proved to be fabulously effective. The employers were surprised--and pleased. It was “good business.”

I’m writing about this today because of a new shift taking place. In the past few months, the court has made a series of decisions that have drastically damaged all of the hard-won civil rights advances of those years. The court decisions are based on interpretations of the intent of Congress; therefore a statement by Congress can reverse their effects.

Recently, about 60 organizations formed the still-expanding Southern California Civil Rights Coalition to alert our community to the issues and build support for a reaffirmation of the principle that “the accident of birth must not affect the quality of life.” Bills have just been drafted in Congress to reverse the impact of the court’s decisions. Our coalition hopes that Californians and the California congressional delegation will be among the leaders of a bipartisan effort to support these bills.

The decisions by the new court majority are being watched by employers everywhere. Again, they don’t want problems. And their policies will, in almost every case, follow the signals given by the court and by similar government actions.

There were several new signals in the last court term. But let me tell you about just one--Patterson vs. McLean Credit Union. The credit union hired a black teller, Brenda Patterson. But they also required her, unlike the white tellers, to sweep and clean the bank. And they subjected her to constant racial slurs.

The court, taking a “strict construction” of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, held that it covered discrimination in hiring but did not cover discriminatory treatment once a person was on the job. They ruled that Mrs. Patterson was not entitled to damages.

This case and several like it sent a signal to employers. It told them this: You don’t have to worry any more about discriminatory practices on the job!

The signs of the ‘70s said it was better business not to discriminate. The sign of the new court majority is that you can discriminate without repercussions.