Does Affirmative Action Help or Hurt?

By Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles

For Mignon Williams, 42, a black marketing executive in Rochester, N.Y., affirmative action means opportunity. Recruited by Xerox Corp. in 1977 under a pioneering plan to hire women and minorities, Williams rose from saleswoman to division vice president in just 13 years. While Williams attributes her success mainly to hard work and business savvy, she acknowledges that her race and her sex played a role in her rapid rise. Affirmative action, she says, "opened the door, but it's not a free pass. If anything, you feel like you're under a microscope and have to constantly prove yourself by overachieving and never missing the mark."

For Roy V. Smith, 40, a black 18-year veteran of the Chicago police force, affirmative action means frustration. Since 1973, court-ordered hiring quotas and the aggressive recruitment of minorities have expanded black representation on the 12,004-member force from 16% to 24%. Smith contends, however, that gender and race have not opened doors for him but shut them. He has been denied promotion to sergeant so that Hispanics and females who scored lower on exams could be given the higher-ranking positions set aside for those groups. He worries that even if he is promoted, the achievement may be so tainted by affirmative action that he will be perceived as a "quota sergeant." Last fall he joined a reverse-discrimination lawsuit against the city of Chicago by 313 police officers, mostly white. "I am not anti- affirmative action," he says. "I am just against the way it is being used. It's something that started out good and now has gotten out of hand."

Williams and Smith reflect an increasingly acrimonious debate among African Americans about the effectiveness and desirability of affirmative action. On one side of the argument, a small but widely publicized group of black neoconservatives contends that efforts to combat racial discrimination through quotas, racially weighted tests and other techniques have psychologically handicapped blacks by making them dependent on racial-preference programs rather than their own hard work.

Shelby Steele, an English professor at California's San Jose State University, has emerged as the most eloquent proponent of this view. He asserts that affirmative action has reinforced a self-defeating sense of victimization among blacks by encouraging them to pin their failures on white racism instead of their own shortcomings. Says he: "Blacks now stand to lose more from affirmative action than they gain."

On the other side, the heads of civil rights organizations -- and most African Americans -- insist that racial discrimination is so entrenched at all levels of U.S. society that only affirmative action can overcome it. They charge that Steele and other critics greatly understate white resistance to black progress. To support their view, they note that self-reliance has long been a part of the black gospel for advancement. "There's nothing new in the statement that we can and should do more for ourselves," says John Jacob, president of the National Urban League. "It's not a debatable issue." But, say supporters of affirmative action, expecting blacks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps alone is unrealistic. Argues Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: "It's still the responsibility of the government to provide a good school system for us and fair and equal access to jobs."

Adding irony to the dispute is an often overlooked fact: government efforts to "level the playing field" by giving blacks special treatment were first adopted not by blacks or white liberals, but by conservative Republicans. In 1959 then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon, as head of President Eisenhower's Committee on Contracts, recommended limited "preferential" treatment for qualified blacks seeking jobs with government contractors. Following up that recommendation, John F. Kennedy issued an Executive Order in 1961 calling for "affirmative action" as the means to promote equal opportunity for racial minorities in hiring by federal contractors -- the first official use by the government of the now controversial term.

Eight years later, Nixon, as President, beefed up the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which, along with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, has become one of the government's two main enforcers of affirmative-action policy. It oversees 225,000 companies, with a combined work force of 28 million, that do business with the Federal Government. In 1971 Nixon's Labor Department started the Philadelphia Plan, a quota system & that required federal contractors in Philadelphia, and later Washington, to employ a fixed number of minorities.

Such efforts have vastly expanded job opportunities for blacks. But they have also touched off complaints from many whites that blacks are benefiting from reverse discrimination. Much of the anger is aimed at so-called race norming, in which scores on employment-aptitud e tests are ranked on different racial curves. Whites usually score higher on such examinations than blacks and Hispanics. To be ranked in the top 99% of applicants on one widely used test, for example, a white applicant must score 405 out of a possible 500 points. To get the same ranking, a black would have to achieve a 355.

Even the strongest black advocates of affirmative action concede that it is not a perfect tool. Like Steele, they decry the widespread view among whites that virtually all blacks who are hired, promoted or gain admission to elite colleges are less qualified than their white counterparts. "There have been casualties -- minority kids who are depressed or feeling incompetent because of the stigma," says sociologist Troy Duster of the University of California, Berkeley. Duster tells of a black student who complained to him, "I feel like I have AFFIRMATIVE ACTION stamped on my forehead."

For most blacks, the opportunities that affirmative action affords outweigh any potential psychological threat. Many reason that once they are on the job or in the classroom, their performance can erase negative stereotypes. Moreover, while many barriers to black advancement have been shattered, few African Americans have penetrated the top levels of corporate management. A recent survey by Korn/Ferry International shows that white males still control at least 95% of the real power positions in corporate America.

Faced with white opposition and their own misgivings about affirmative action, a growing number of blacks would prefer to moot the argument by expanding opportunities for all Americans, whatever their color. They believe that instead of fighting for a fair share of the crumbs from a shrinking economic pie, blacks should concentrate their energy on making the pie big enough to guarantee a slice for everyone. That would require improving schools so that every child could obtain the skills needed to be competitive in the labor market, a thriving economy that could provide a job for everyone who wants to work, and more access to capital markets for minorities who want to < start their own businesses. Meeting those tasks is more difficult than parceling out opportunities according to a racial formula, but in the long run more worthwhile.