AFFIRMATIVE ACTION : President: ‘No Quotas in Theory or Practice’

Here are excerpts from President Clinton’s remarks on affirmative action:

It is in a way ironic that this issue should be divisive today because affirmative action began 25 years ago . . . by a Republican President with bipartisan support; it began simply as a means to an end of enduring national purpose: equal opportunity for all Americans. . . .

Our search to find ways to move more quickly to equal opportunity led to the development of what we now call affirmative action. The purpose of affirmative action is to give our nation a way to finally address the systemic exclusion of individuals of talent, on the basis of their gender or race, from opportunities to develop, perform, achieve and contribute. Affirmative action is an effort to develop a systematic approach to open the doors of education, employment, and business development opportunities to qualified individuals who happen to be members of groups that have experienced longstanding and persistent discrimination.

It is a policy that grew out of many years of trying to navigate between two unacceptable paths. One was to say simply that we declared discrimination illegal, and that’s enough.

We saw that that way still relegated blacks with college degrees to jobs as railroad porters, and kept women with degrees under a glass ceiling, with a lower paycheck. The other path was simply to try to impose change by leveling Draconian penalties on employers who didn’t meet certain imposed, ultimately arbitrary, and sometimes unachievable quotas. That too was rejected out of a sense of fairness.

So a middle ground was developed that would change an inequitable status quo gradually but firmly by building the pool of qualified applicants for college, for contracts, for jobs, and giving more people a chance to learn, work and earn.

When affirmative action is done right, it is flexible, it is fair, and it works. I know some people are honestly concerned about the times affirmative action doesn’t work, when it’s done in the wrong way. And I know there are times when some employers don’t use it in the right way.

They may cut corners and treat a flexible goal as a quota. They may give opportunities to people who are unqualified instead of those who deserve it. They may in so doing, allow a different kind of discrimination. When this happens it is also wrong, but it isn’t affirmative action, and it is not legal. . . .

Let me be clear about what affirmative action must not mean and what I won’t allow it to be. It does not mean--and I don’t favor--the unjustified preference of the unqualified over the qualified of any race or gender. It doesn’t mean--and I don’t favor--numerical quotas. It doesn’t mean--and I don’t favor--rejection or selection of any employee or student solely on the basis of race or gender without regard to merit. . . .

Now, there are those who say, my fellow Americans, that even good affirmative action programs are no longer needed, that it should be enough to resort to the courts or to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in cases of actual provable individual discrimination, because there is no longer any systematic discrimination in our society.

In deciding how to answer that, let us consider the facts. The unemployment rate for African Americans remains about twice that of whites. The Hispanic rate is still much higher. Women have narrowed the earnings gap but still make only 72% as much as men do for comparable jobs. The average income for a Hispanic woman with a college degree is still less than the average income of a white man with a high school diploma.

According to the recently completed glass-ceiling report sponsored by Republican members of Congress, in the nation’s largest companies only six-tenths of 1% of senior management positions are held by African Americans, four-tenths of a percent by Hispanic Americans, three-tenths of a percent by Asian Americans; women hold between 3% and 5% of these positions. White males make up 43% of our work force but hold 95% of these jobs. . . .

There are people who honestly believe that affirmative action always amounts to group preferences over individual merit, that affirmative action always leads to reverse discrimination; that ultimately, therefore, it demeans those who benefit from it and discriminates against those who are not helped by it.

I just have to tell you that all of you have to decide how you feel about that, and all of our fellow countrymen and women have to decide as well. But I believe if there are no quotas, if we give no opportunities to unqualified people, if we have no reverse discrimination, and if, when the problem ends, the program ends, that criticism is wrong--that’s what I believe. But we should have this debate.

. . . This review of all of our affirmative action programs . . . concluded that affirmative action remains a useful tool for widening economic and educational opportunity. . . .

There are those who say, ‘Well, even if we made the jobs available people wouldn’t work. They hadn’t tried.’ Most of the people in disadvantaged communities work today, and most of them who don’t work have a very strong desire to do so.

In central Harlem, 14 people apply for every single minimum-wage job opening. Think how many more would apply if there were good jobs with a good future. . . .

And now I have asked Vice President Gore to develop a proposal to use our contracting to support businesses that locate themselves in these distressed areas or hire a large percentage of their workers from these areas. . . .

Today I am directing all our agencies to comply with the Supreme Court’s Adarand decision [which says affirmative action programs can be used only to correct specific, provable cases of discrimination], and to apply the four standards of fairness to all our affirmative action programs that I have already articulated: no quotas in theory or practice; no illegal discrimination of any kind, including reverse discrimination; no preference for people who are not qualified for any job or opportunity; and as soon as a program has succeeded, it must be retired.

[Affirmative action] should be changed now to take care of those things that are wrong, and it should be retired when its job is done. I am resolved that that day will come, but the evidence suggests, indeed screams, that that day has not come. The job of ending discrimination in this country is not over. . . .