Today’s Agenda

Affirmative action. Minority hiring preferences. A generation after they came into being in the first flush of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the phrases still set some people’s back teeth to grinding. Employees who aren’t minorities feel unfairly passed over for promotion. Contractors resent having to bid against a larger pool of competitors, or having to subcontract a certain percentage of work to minority- subcontractors. But affirmative action has been around long enough now for people on the other side of the fence to say, “Here are the results, and they’re good for everyone.” In today’s Platform, it’s clear that this is not a debate that’s been settled, though the arguments on both sides are more sophisticated.

Sophistication of language is also at issue in Community Essay, where Marta Russell, who has had cerebral palsy from birth, wonders if she’d exist today if prenatal genetic-defect screening had been available to her mother, who had measles early in her pregnancy. After attending a conference of experts on the subject in Irvine, and thinking about the furor over the pregnancy of TV anchorwoman Bree Walker, who has a genetic disability. Russell wonders if we aren’t starting to confuse medicine with eugenics, curing with killing. She reminds us that the Nazis, with the accord of eminent scientists and doctors, began their gas-chamber experiments with the mentally retarded and eventually made all sorts of physical and mental disabilities reason enough for death. How far are today’s well-meaning scientists willing to go?

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Watts, for decades seen as an almost entirely African-American neighborhood, is changing fast. In the 1990 census, about half of its population was Latino and the percentages are rising. In the Neighborhood examines these changes, and the poverty that persists for all who live in this corner of Los Angeles that became a national symbol for urban unrest in 1965. The changes have brought some tensions, but they’re accompanied by efforts to turn the spotlight on Watts’ real enemies--lack of jobs, lack of services, lack of capital.

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In a time when the wrong hat or a shirt of a poorly chosen color can make a teen-ager the target of a drive-by shooting, the issue of required uniforms, even in public schools, has taken on new urgency. But students are far from united on the subject, as the Youth Opinion makes clear. One tentative pattern does emerge, though--students who already wear uniforms tend to like them, because with uniforms, they say, attention shifts from what they’re wearing to who they are.

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W ith Los Angeles’ mayoral primary coming less than a year after the city’s bout of unrest, there’s plenty of concern that the campaign could further divide the city rather than unite it. That’s the subject of an editorial from the daily Spanish-Language newspaper La Opinion, leading off Second Opinion. And in Sermon, the Rev. Robert Smith, looking at the darkness that the city has endured, tells us that light will--must--triumph.