Blacks Fear Being Left at the Curb

Our topic is affirmative action in California, and we begin by trying to get a taxicab in New York City.

If you are black, you may already know--or can guess--where this story is headed, and why. Otherwise, you might not.

Which is the point.

Affirmative action today technically encompasses the majority of California residents, including those from a multitude of ethnic minorities and women of all races. But for blacks, there is a special kinship with affirmative action. And many express acute frustration as they face the possibility, even the likelihood, of its partial repeal even as the old goal of social parity remains unrealized.

Proposition 209 on next week’s statewide ballot would outlaw race and gender as considerations in state and local government employment, in government contracting, and in public schools and universities.

Both sides argue fairness. Supporters say it is unjust for the government to provide employment or educational breaks for anyone based on race or gender. The contrary argument is that fairness necessitates affirmative action to open doors of opportunity for minorities and women, who have been excluded by law and practice.

So now, Eva Paterson is trying to get a taxi.

A San Francisco attorney, she has traveled to New York to receive an honor from a large law firm. The setting is a swanky suite of offices, with the usual speeches and congratulations. She is feeling proud. Then she rides down the elevator, holding her crystal award in her arm.

There is a taxi at the curb.

“I reach for the door,” she continues. “The cabby looks up, sees me, locks the door and drives off, leaving me there. . . . I think to myself, God. The cabby drives and picks up two men.”

Paterson, of course, is black. The taxi driver’s passengers are whites.

As black Californians express their feelings about affirmative action time and again, a taxicab story, or a metaphoric tale with a similar punch line, enters the conversation.

If blacks still have trouble getting in the door of a taxi, the argument goes, how can it be justice to close off doors of opportunity?

In downtown Los Angeles, Lewis Green raises the matter of taxis. An architectural designer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, and also black, he recalls a pointed cartoon in Ebony magazine in which taxis passed by black customers in favor of whites.

“In the real world, people still think and act in terms of race. But now with this proposition, oh, they are saying, we don’t want to offer opportunity based on race,” Green says.

Darren Brown, an African American college student from Sylmar, was watching the MTV cable network when the subject of taxis arose. As a hidden camera watched, a well-groomed black man stood on a New York sidewalk with a sign saying, “This man needs a taxi.” One after another, cabs passed him by to pick up a white person down the street, who was part of the MTV demonstration.

“Then they’d come out and ask the driver, why didn’t he pick up the first passenger. They’d say, oh, I didn’t see him. But the man had this big sign,” explains Brown.

“The effect on me when I see this?” Brown continues. “Well, it’s weird. I say to myself, no fooling--this is the real world. But then I say, wait a minute. Damn. This is 1996, and this kind of stuff is still going on. . . . I know people are tired of blacks whining, of Mexican Americans whining. I’m tired of it myself. But discrimination still exists.”

All three of these Californians--Paterson, Green and Brown--support affirmative action and oppose Proposition 209.

But this is not to suggest unanimity of thinking among blacks.

To the contrary, the leader of the campaign for the ballot proposition, a longtime critic of affirmative action, is black businessman and University of California Regent Ward Connerly of Sacramento.

And the latest Los Angeles Times poll showed African Americans split, with 45% opposed but 37% supporting Proposition 209, which is entitled the “California civil rights initiative,” although virtually all established civil rights leaders say the aim is the opposite as far as minorities go.

Proposition 209 aside, for the overwhelming majority of blacks there is a powerful connection expressed between affirmative action and America’s past, between affirmative action and their hopes for America’s future.

Affirmative action arose not for the benefit of women or other minorities, but in the backlash of slavery. Opponents of slavery helped originate black universities for free blacks. After the Civil War came the “40 acres and a mule” for liberated slaves. One hundred years later came the civil rights movement and the laws that gave rise to today’s affirmative action, first with blacks in mind and then women and other underrepresented minorities.

Leaving aside the lofty anti-discrimination language of Proposition 209, The Times poll asked about affirmative action and found this: 87% of black Californians support it while only 3% are opposed.

In a string of interviews with blacks, most of them expressed exasperation. Somehow their very own cause, civil rights, is being used against them.

“What brought affirmative action about is alive and well today,” says Green, the Los Angeles school designer.

He expressed two points that, as with the taxi story, arose repeatedly in interviews:

First is his reaction to the argument voiced by Proposition 209 supporters that unqualified minorities are being given opportunities over other deserving people.

As Green sees it, the trouble with this thinking is that blacks are disproportionately denied the fundamental opportunities to compete equally. How, for instance, can inner-city black children be expected to compete for admission to universities against suburban whites when the difference in educational quality is so vast?

“I graduated from Jordan High School in 1953. You go back today and you can’t recognize it. There are so many gates and fences, it looks more like a prison than a school,” Green says.

He contrasts this with the district’s schools in predominantly white neighborhoods. “I go out to the [San Fernando] Valley and it’s a different world.”

The second point: Affirmative action, although conceived to right wrongs for blacks, has instead achieved its greatest success in opening opportunities for white women.

Paterson, the San Francisco attorney and also executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, explains it this way: “White women are 16 times more likely to benefit from affirmative action than black men.”

Talking about being African American, she says: “We are often left out of the mix because we are the most threatening, the most ‘other’ people in society. We are the scariest people in society. We are the scariest of all.”

Proposition 209 comes at an unsettling time for all Californians but particularly blacks. Demographic transformation has meant that blacks are now outnumbered not just by whites but Latinos and Asians. Unless there is a sudden departure from the imperatives of ethnic politics, inevitably these demographic changes will pose a challenge to the political power that blacks have gained during the last three decades.

To forestall rivalry and competition between minorities, some blacks argue that society should not be debating Proposition 209 but how to recalibrate affirmative action to account for its original goals and the changing ethnic landscapes.

“The way you do that is not by eliminating affirmative action, but by instituting sub-goals,” says Paterson. “It’s not one group versus another, it’s all of us. We shouldn’t be fighting over crumbs.”

Or as civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson says as he campaigns across California against Proposition 209: “This has got to be expressed as a majority, not a minority, issue.”

College student Darren Brown, a junior at Cal State Los Angeles, comes to the point differently. Apart from opening opportunities for minorities and women, affirmative action “has been good for all America. It’s raised our conscience. The effect is that we may be viewing each other more objectively.”

But he goes on to say he can “sympathize with those who look at affirmative action and see reverse discrimination.” For his college newspaper, the University Times, he wrote a story about a minority engineering program.

“And I ended up asking myself, is it fair to exclude whites? Some of them come from a disadvantaged socioeconomic situation and don’t have the same advantages as other whites--and that puts them in the same boat as minorities,” he continues.

His answer is to expand outreach, engineer more opportunity against the forces of society that would close the door. If Proposition 209 passes, and polls suggest it will, “I think it will say that society has stripped away its conscience, stripped away its sympathy,” Brown concludes.

That said, of these three Californians, only Paterson allows for sure that affirmative action was instrumental in her life. She was admitted to UC Berkeley law school thanks to affirmative action.

Green first says, no, but then recalls once when affirmative action worked his way, but never strongly enough to overcome the the prejudice he still senses on the job.

Brown says his father once got a job in a close competition in which affirmative action “may” have been a factor. So far, the son says he has not felt any advantage.

As he looks forward to graduate school and employment, he surely may. “If so,” he says, “I know that once I’m there, I’ll have to prove myself along with everyone else.”

To Brown, affirmative action is more than the opportunity. It’s the expression of society’s willingness to offer it as a counter-pressure to the everyday discrimination, like that of the cabdrivers who pick up the whites and pass by blacks.

About Proposition 209, he says: “It is with an utter sense of awe that I look at this. How could something this large and important be twisted and turned around?”