Not Too Young to See an Unlevel Playing Field

Although I am sure we have both benefited from affirmative action, I don’t have much in common with Ward Connerly, the UC Regent. I do, however, remember thinking when I read an interview with him some months back that we share this much: Neither of us can recall meeting anyone opposed to affirmative action who professes to be a bigot.

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Hi there, my name is So-and-So and I think women and minorities ought to get the hell out of the way of white males.

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Nope.

Just doesn’t happen like that.

Discrimination is usually more subtle--networks of friends tipping off friends to jobs and contract bidding opportunities; people promoting people who look most like them and with whom they feel most comfortable; an unwillingness to spend time and money cultivating, in the name of diversity, talent that would otherwise remain dormant.

It’s odd that these nuances, lately so often resisted by adults, are easily grasped by young people barely beyond their teens. This is, I think, why a couple hundred college students have signed on with a cause whose aim is to defeat the anti-affirmative action initiative that will be on the California ballot in November. The students--almost all of whom are women, many of whom are minorities--see what is at stake in a measure that will not only gut affirmative action, but also make it more difficult for California women to sue for sex discrimination.

Coming to California from all over the country and sensing echoes of the civil rights movement, they have volunteered for “Freedom Summer ’96.” They will spend the next few months registering voters, soliciting donations and organizing events to defeat the measure. They were recruited by the Feminist Majority, which is leading a coalition of women’s groups opposed to the ballot measure, including the YWCA, which has for the first time in its 176-year history taken sides in a political campaign.

Last week, I dropped in on one of their training sessions, in an auditorium on Fairfax Avenue.

On that day, 40 students were rehearsing arguments against the measure. They were practicing public speaking, tailoring their remarks to a variety of scenarios: rallies, news conferences, small gatherings, debates. They were, for the most part, still unpolished but deeply earnest.

What the students will try to convey to voters as they fan across the state, is that the measure, which its backers call the “California Civil Rights Initiative” will do more than end affirmative action. It will also, according to a report by the state legislative analyst and finance director, eliminate voluntary desegregation programs in school districts, and kill off counseling, tutoring, financial aid and outreach efforts that target people based on race, sex, ethnicity or national origin.

The students have learned that the measure was created by people who believe that the 30 years that have passed since the 1965 Civil Rights Act was enacted have been long enough to redress 300 years of systematic discrimination, people who believe that the playing fields of government, education and business are level, people who spew anecdotes while insisting that statistics prove discrimination is a thing of the past.

What the statistics support is the argument that reverse discrimination is practically nonexistent:

Between 1990 and 1994, only 3%--or 3,000--of the discrimination complaints received by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were filed by white men. Six cases were found to be valid.

And Bob Dole’s own Glass Ceiling Commission reported last year that while white men constitute only 43% of the work force, they hold 95% of all senior management positions, and that the “fears and prejudices” of white male executives are what account for this disparity.

To get a sense of the emotions driving the measure, the students watched an NBC “Dateline” profile of the initiative’s Bay Area-based authors, philosopher Thomas Wood and anthropology professor Glynn Custred. On the show, which aired in January, Wood dismissed the relevance of anecdotal evidence to the affirmative action debate, then went on to claim (as he has often done) that he was told by a member of a college search committee that he would have received a job offer from a Northern California college had he not been a white male.

When the show investigated, it discovered that five philosophy jobs were advertised during the period in which Wood claimed he was looking. Four went to white males, and one went to a highly qualified, much-published African American woman.

Maybe Wood just doesn’t understand what every Freedom Summer student is clear on: You can benefit from affirmative action and still outshine the competition. But without such programs you might never have been in the race at all.

* Robin Abcarian’s column appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.