Affirmative Action, Round 2: the Backlash

The room clerk saw my name on the registration card. “I was mistaken, we have no rooms,” he said. “There’s another hotel down the street that caters to your kind.” My kind? I was a 20-year-old corporal in the U.S. Army. A white Unitarian. My parents were Methodists, but my father’s parents had practiced Judaism and I had a name ending in “stein.” The year was 1950.

Several years later, still in the Army, I was in New Jersey and heading for a base in Arkansas. Two blacks asked me to ride with them, explaining that they had to go through towns where they weren’t welcome. They would drive straight through, rotating the driving and sleeping in the car, but eating was a problem. Restaurants serving “their kind” were off the main highways. If I went along, I could go into any restaurant and bring food to the car. I rode with them. The year was 1954.

In college, there was one woman in my engineering class and no blacks. After graduation, I worked at a company with very few women or black engineers. One day, my boss asked if I would work with a Negro (the acceptable term). He was well-qualified, but the boss wanted to make sure it was OK. It was. The year was 1962.

By the time I retired, I was working with many black and women engineers. I don’t know if we had the politically correct ratios, but discrimination isn’t proven simply because the ethnic mix doesn’t match the local population. Some blacks and women were competent and I respected them, and some were not and I didn’t. But nobody was asking me anymore whether it was OK to hire blacks or women or if I minded working with them, as it should be. The year was 1995.

Eliminating prejudice between ethnic groups is difficult. But where I have worked, considering the increasing number of women and blacks with whom I have collaborated over the years, I know that things are much better.

How did it improve? Affirmative action helped. So did those white males who grumbled but accepted quotas. But affirmative action is reverse discrimination and discrimination is never a good thing. It was necessary to get things moving, but continuing it after extensive progress clearly has been made is likely to be counterproductive. A backlash can wipe out much of that progress.

The elimination of affirmative action in student admissions by the UC regents and the ruling of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals against the affirmative action student admission policy of the University of Texas may have been the start of such a backlash. If we want equal opportunity, we have to examine our policies against the results, not against our desires. As resistance to affirmative action continues to build, we must seek another approach.