Affirmative Action Gains Often Come at a High Cost : Rights: Preference policy helps foster better lives. But opportunity sometimes has been mixed with fear, doubt.

Jessie Sherrod began picking cotton in the fields of Mississippi when she was 8 years old, earning $1.60 for 12 hours of dirty, sweaty work. She didn’t have much choice: Her father drove a school bus to avoid sharecropping, and with 11 children to feed, her parents needed the money.

When she wasn’t farming, Sherrod was studying--at an all-black elementary school that calibrated its class schedule to the rhythms of the harvest.

Today, at 45, Sherrod is a Harvard-educated pediatrician with a sub-specialty in infectious disease and a masters in public health from UCLA. She wears a business suit and half-moon spectacles to work as an administrator at King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles. But she still refers to herself as “a little black girl . . . a cotton picker from Mississippi.”

The force that helped lift this “little black girl” from the dusty cotton farms of the segregated South to the pristine laboratories of Harvard was a grand and controversial social experiment called affirmative action. This was a contract with America of a different sort, one that promised to reverse the damaging heritage of slavery and segregation through economic opportunity--and, eventually, equality--for all.

But in the eyes of Sherrod and others who have benefited from it, the experiment has fallen short of that initial promise. The contract, they found, had an escape clause.

As the nation engages in what President Clinton euphemistically calls a “national conversation” about race and gender preferences in education and hiring, critics are portraying affirmative action as a free ride for people like Sherrod. But the reality, beneficiaries say, is far more complicated.

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That affirmative action has transformed lives is beyond question. But it has hardly delivered a no-questions-asked ticket to the good life. At best, Sherrod and others say, it has offered an economic and social opportunity that was alloyed with fear and uncertainty, defiance and resentment, sadness and even rage.

“This is not the golden age,” declared an angry Daryl Michael Scott, who teaches black history at Columbia University. “This,” he said acidly, “is a sad reparations program at best.”

Scott once applied for an opening teaching American history at another university--only to be steered to a different job, teaching black history. Jaime Sanchez, a Latino computer programmer, says his company paid him to obtain management training but never made him a manager.

So too, Donald Clark, who broke the color line through affirmative action to become a firefighter, has struggled against the most primitive of racial stereotypes. And Christopher Francis, a black architect who designs schools, has learned it is futile to seek commissions in white neighborhoods.

For these five, as for countless others, the question of whether affirmative action has gone too far has a bitter ring: How could something done so grudgingly, and evaded so cynically and so often, have possibly gone too far?

And why, as polls clearly indicate, are minorities--and in particular African Americans--shouldering the burden of the backlash against affirmative action when statistics show that white women are the major beneficiaries?

And what does the promise of affirmative action mean when, for many, it has offered the symbols of advancement but often not the substance: A title on the door, but not line authority. A vice presidency, perhaps, but only for minority affairs, not finance or production.

Given a Lift

Sherrod began her career with neither the money, the connections nor the grades to get into the most prestigious medical school in the land. She scored 200 points lower on the MCAT--the standardized medical school admissions test--than the average white Harvard student. But she was given special preference because Harvard wanted to boost its enrollment of blacks.

Now, two decades later, she has all the trappings of success: a house in the Ladera Heights section of Los Angeles, a neighborhood of spectacular views that is home to many well-to-do black professionals; a job that comes with a private office and a secretary; a wardrobe of elegant clothes. Many days, she marvels at how far she has come in just one generation.

“I look back,” she says, “at my mother’s plight. She didn’t have an education. She had all these kids to care for. So it’s a great opportunity to have a career and to be able to take care of myself.”

Yet Sherrod’s gratitude is mingled with a darker truth. Every day of her life, she says, she must confront slights and indignities simply for being a black woman in a white man’s world--racism that may be more subtle but no less painful than what she encountered in the South as a child.

There could be other factors at work here, wholly unrelated to race. But this is Sherrod’s reality; she views the world through the prism of her skin color.

There was the time that a local hospital denied her privileges, concocting phony reasons, she suspects, so that a group of white doctors could keep their lock on the infectious disease business.

There was her experience with a medical society whose officials talked a good line about being committed to minority advancement and then brazenly urged a white woman to run against her when she sought a seat on the executive board.

And there are the disturbing stories she hears when she gets together with other black physicians--like her friends who got kicked out of a health maintenance organization they had joined, losing their patients to the white doctors who remained behind.

Now, there is what Sherrod sees as the final indignity: The effort by conservatives to undo the policy that got her where she is today.

“You can’t make up for 400 years of slavery and mistreatment and unequal opportunities in 20 years,” she says angrily. “We had to ride the school bus five miles to school and pass by a white school to get to our black elementary school. Our books were used books. Our instructors were not as good. We didn’t have the proper equipment. How do you make up for that?”

Shouting Match

Not everyone sees it this way, which is precisely why Clinton’s “national conversation” is fast turning into a shouting match. Critics of affirmative action argue that the policy has more than made up for America’s history of slavery and civil rights abuses, that it has gone too far the other way.

As Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said in a television interview last month: “The people of America are now paying a price for things that were done before they were born.”

Affirmative action has its roots in an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, which simply barred federal contractors--including universities--from discriminating.

While initial programs were aimed at African Americans, affirmative action has since evolved into a broad effort by universities and employers to assure opportunities for women and minorities of all ethnic backgrounds. So sweeping has this social engineering program been that it is difficult for some people today--particularly those in their 20s and 30s--to tell whether affirmative action has benefited them directly or not.

“I’ve never felt that I’ve ever gotten anything because of my race,” said one 30-year-old black lawyer who studied law at Harvard and went to college at Yale. “I’ve done it all on my own, with what I’ve brought to the table.”

Nonetheless, he said: “But for affirmative action, there wouldn’t be African Americans at Harvard and Yale. My father’s a lawyer. He’s a sole practitioner. He probably couldn’t have even worked as a messenger at the firm where I work.”

Yet if the goal of affirmative action was to throw open the doors of America’s institutions to those who had not previously been privileged to walk through them, the reality--especially for African Americans--is that the doors have opened, but they have scarcely opened wide. And somehow, many of those who pass through do not quite find themselves inside.

The numbers tell part of the story.

In 1960, 4.4% of all doctors in the United States were black; the current figure is 3.7%, based on 1993 numbers, the most recent available. In 1960, 4.4% of college teachers were black; today it is 4.8%. Lawyers have made greater strides--from 1.3% in 1960 to 2.7% today--but considering that blacks make up 10% of the work force, the percentage is startlingly small.

“In certain fields, for example police departments, affirmative action has definitely worked,” says political scientist Andrew Hacker, who wrote “Two Nations,” a book about race relations in America. “But generally it has been in public employment--education, health welfare, that sort of thing. In the business world, very few blacks have real executive jobs. A number of them have show executive jobs, vice president for diversity or community relations. . . . Generally speaking, it’s been tokenism.”

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The winners, if there have been any, have been women. And even there, the gains have been slim.

A recent survey found that while 4% of corporate executive vice presidents were women in 1982, the figure more than doubled to 9% by 1992. In the same period, the percentage of senior vice presidents who were women grew from 13% to 23%. By comparison, blacks at the vice president level or above accounted for 1% in 1982 and 2.3% a decade later. Latinos accounted for 1.3% and then 2%.

Those figures come from the Glass Ceiling Commission, a 20-member panel appointed by former President George Bush. It recently released a report concluding that while affirmative action has enabled minorities and women to enter the workplace, it has done little to help them advance once they got there.

It also is clear that affirmative action has not erased deep-rooted prejudices. It just may have reinforced them.

Fred Lynch is a sociologist at Claremont McKenna College and the author of one of the few studies on how white men feel about affirmative action. He says the policy has created dishonesty in the workplace, enabling managers to blame affirmative action for decisions made for other reasons.

“The old criteria may not have been perfect, but when you open the door to holding out opportunities to people on the basis of race and gender, it makes a mess of trust,” Lynch says. “What affirmative action does is muddy the waters. It creates doubt and suspicion in everybody’s mind.”

What follows are the stories of four who, like Sherrod, have charted their own courses through these muddy waters. Their voices reveal sorrow, anger and frustration, as well as the fear that the doors that took so many years to open may soon be clanging shut.

The Engineer

Some days, Jaime Sanchez feels as though he is living the Glass Ceiling Commission’s report.

The Latino engineer has spent the last 13 years working as a computer programmer for Hughes Aircraft--a job he got as part of the firm’s effort to diversify its work force. Hughes even paid for him to obtain a masters degree in business administration from UCLA, presumably so that he could qualify for a management job.

He got the degree in 1986 and the raise that went with it. But the promotion never came. When Sanchez looks around, he cannot help but notice that he is not the only Latino engineer cooling his heels in line for a management slot. Something tells Sanchez that he has been pigeonholed--viewed by his superiors as a token, an affirmative action hire who is good enough to get in the door but not good enough to advance.

There is no one person he can blame, no single incident he can point to. But he suspects things might be different if there were more Latino managers at Hughes. He does not sound angry or resentful. He has simply accepted it, acknowledging that if he wants a better job, he will have to look someplace else.

“What bothers me,” he says, “is that the automatic perception is that you were hired for that reason (race) and you are not qualified.”

It also bothers him to work in an environment where people like him are tracked by the affirmative action bean counters, their hiring and promotion chalked up like points in some kind of game that nobody wants to admit to playing.

Were he to do it all over again, Sanchez says, he would never have listed himself as Latino on his job application. He doesn’t want to be counted that way. He doesn’t believe it has done him any good.

The Academic

In his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby,” Yale law professor Stephen Carter explores the notion that affirmative action has stigmatized minorities by depriving them of the ability to say they have achieved success on merit alone.

This debate is the current rage among some black intellectuals. It is a thesis that Daryl Michael Scott, the Columbia University historian who declared affirmative action “a sad reparations program,” would find downright laughable if he were not so disgusted by it.

“Somebody ought to give Stephen Carter a hug,” he says sarcastically, “and tell him it’s all going to be all right.”

If anyone is an “affirmative action baby,” it is Scott. He grew up poor, on the South Side of Chicago. Today, he teaches history at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities.

“I’ve been hired in part because I’m black,” the 36-year-old professor says, “and I’ve been denied jobs because I’m black.”

He is referring to an incident two years ago, when he applied for a job at Ohio State University. The opening was to teach post-World War II history. But when he got to the interview, Scott was asked if he would consider teaching black history instead.

He refused.

“It was wrong, it was discriminatory, it was anti-black and indeed patently racist,” he fumes.

“The fellow that they hired, I’m told, is a very good historian. But I guarantee you my book will be more important than his. . . . Some people say affirmative action marks you as inferior. . . . Hell, I’m not God’s gift to historians, but I’m better than most of these folks who think I shouldn’t have a job.”

Longshoreman

The first fire was the worst.

It was in 1972. Donald Clark was 30 years old, and one of the first black men to become a firefighter in Tacoma, Wash., under a plan that forced the integration of the department.

What would happen, he worried, when his life was on the line with only white people there to save him? The white guys didn’t want to eat the same food he did. They didn’t want to sleep in the same room with him. They didn’t want to ride on the same truck. And in a job where “the buddy system” is your ticket to survival, nobody wanted to be Clark’s buddy.

For that first fire, Clark was the hose man. His buddy was the nozzle man. If either let go, the other could have been killed.

“Once I got in that fire,” Clark recalls, “it didn’t matter. Fire burns blacks, whites. But what was really important was that you needed one another for your existence. He changed how he treated me after that because I was right there . . . with him in flames, and I stood by him.”

Clark spent five years fighting fires in Tacoma. “In that five years, things made a big change,” he says. “They found out that sleeping with a black, you wouldn’t turn black, you wouldn’t get no disease. They began to find out that a black was just another human being.”

Clark eventually left the fire department for more lucrative--and equally dangerous--work as a longshoreman. Today, at 43, he is a heavy equipment driver at the Port of Los Angeles, where he is fighting to help blacks advance within his union, Local 13 of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.

The union local was forced to integrate in the late 1960s. Today, as a result of what Clark likes to call “the nudge from the judge,” 13% of the members--including the foremen--are black.

But African Americans are noticeably absent from certain key positions; the local has never had a black officer, and currently has no black dispatchers.

“There was a time when they said blacks could never be anything here, that we could never drive any equipment,” Clark says. “No, we have not arrived and we’re not where we want to be. But thank God we’re not where we used to be, either. Today, I have a boss and he’s black. And he’s letting me talk to you.”

The Architect

Christopher Francis has learned the hard way that it doesn’t pay to go after work in a white neighborhood if you are a black architect.

Francis, 36, makes his living designing schools. In 1991, with 13 years of experience and several design awards under his belt, he founded his own company. The idea was to cash in on so-called “minority business enterprise” programs, designed by the federal government and the state of California to encourage public agencies to hire firms owned by minorities and women.

“It hasn’t worked,” Francis declares. “And we don’t see it ever working.”

In the four years since he set out on his own, Francis has been commissioned for 12 major projects. Just two came through MBE programs, both from school districts with large African American populations. His wake-up call, he says, came in 1993, when he bid on a job in Orange County.

The officials of this district--he declines to name it--told him that the job would likely go to one of his local white competitors, since that firm “was due” for an assignment. Francis wouldn’t give up. He hooked up with one of the best-known school design firms in the nation and submitted a bid.

But he didn’t even get called for an interview. The local competitor got the job.

“There’s a notion out there that everything is fine, that there’s parity,” Francis says. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Times researcher D’Jamila Salem in Washington contributed to this story.