Despite some
controversy surrounding affirmative action, there is a substantial
endorsement of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun's trenchant
observation: "In order to get beyond racism we must first take
account of race."
The use of
racial identification for inclusionary and benevolent ends, rather
than exclusionary and debasing ends, altered the nature of
antidiscrimination policy. Experience taught, for example, that it
is usually not enough for an employer with a history of excluding
blacks from its work force merely to discard those policies.
Equality of opportunity required that employer to do something
more. One action is to cast the recruitment net more widely by
advertising job openings in minority newspapers or undertaking
special recruitment efforts in the minority community. The employer
might also be required to take positive steps in helping minorities
or women qualify for jobs by providing training opportunities.
Without such steps, it is doubtful that progress toward full
inclusion of all our citizens would have moved as far as it has. I
wonder, for example, whether there would have been as many women
and minorities admitted to our law and medical schools without
numerical measures of compliance. And I wonder whether, absent
group remedies ordered by courts, we would have seen increasing
numbers of women move out of occupationally segregated jobs.
The
Benefits of Affirmative Action
There is a
growing body of statistical evidence demonstrating that minority
and female participation in more desirable jobs increased after
1960, the era during which affirmative action remedies were
expanded. In addition to occupational gains, substantial
improvements have also been made over the last three decades or so
in closing the black-white distance in income, education, health,
life expectancy, and infant death rates. To be sure, much of the
progress is attributable to the higher-than-average economic growth
that marked much of the earlier years. Another part is attributable
to Great Society programs targeted on the neediest. But essential
to this progress have been vigorous applications of all the
antidiscrimination laws and affirmative action remedies. According
to extensive empirical research, firms that have adopted
affirmative action plans show significant improvement in minority
employment and job upgrading.
So, too, in
public employment. Last November Mayor William Hudnut of
Indianapolis told a national audience: "[T]here is a clear
consensus in America... that we should not turn the clock back on
affirmative action, civil rights, and equal opportunity. What we're
talking about in Indianapolis is a pool of well-qualified
applicants for the police and the fire departments, and we're not
talking about passing over whites to get to blacks. We're talking
about everybody who's qualified and hiring among them, using some
discretion, hiring among them as we see fit in order to meet our
goals and our priorities here, and to help mainstream Hispanics and
blacks and women into the life of these departments and the life of
this city...."