Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 17, 1990 TAG: 9006170283
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DON WYCLIFF THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Citing his own experience as a black student in a predominantly white college, he wondered whether affirmative action hadn't had an inadvertent negative effect, because he suspected he wasn't held to the same level of performance and achievement as some of his white fellow students.
Had his educational experience - and his personal achievement - perhaps been compromised by the policy of racial preference?
A member of the seminar panel, Reginald Wilson of the American Council on Education, quickly set the young man straight.
In stern, almost reproving tones, Wilson recited the historical-legal rationales for affirmative action, after which the panel moved on to other matters. But the student's question hung in the air.
It hangs there still, and increasingly is posed in more sophisticated form. Most recently and prominently, Shelby Steele, the essayist and English professor at San Jose State University, posed it in the May 13 issue of The New York Times Magazine.
Thomas Sowell, the conservative economist and longtime critic of affirmative action, has mounted a fresh assault with his new book, "Preferential Policies: An International Perspective." He finds that such policies are, virtually without exception, more hurtful than helpful.
And from the opposite ideological perspective, William Julius Wilson, the University of Chicago sociologist, expressed serious doubts about the practice in an article in the inaugural issue of the new quarterly "The American Prospect."
To be sure, opposition to affirmative action remains a minority view among blacks. And the nation's quarter-century of experience with the practice must be set against three and a half centuries of negative action.
Nevertheless, misgivings about affirmative action are common, and the fact that three such prominent black scholars have gone public with their concerns is significant. All the more so since two of them - Steele and Wilson - couch theirs as concerns over a policy that once may have been useful, or at least hopeful.
Sowell, who expressed opposition as long ago as 1970 (also in the New York Times Magazine), says the new skepticism is "from my point of view a heartening development," but takes no particular delight in saying "I told you so."
He contends that affirmative-action programs on college campuses have failed to benefit poor blacks, in whose interest they were ostensibly created, and are responsible in great measure for the current atmosphere of racial antagonism.
"I predicted back then that when these programs failed, the conclusion would be not that they are half-baked programs, but that blacks just don't have it," he said. Now, he added, that prediction is being borne out.
Wilson's argument is political and strategic: "Race-specific" plans to overcome the educational, employment and other deficits created by slavery and segregation have benefited mainly the best prepared and least disadvantaged.
More important, he says, such policies have alienated some whites from the Democratic Party and become an obstacle to the political coalitions needed to enact "race-neutral" social programs - job training, educational aid and so forth - that would benefit all low-income people.
Steele's is a psychological argument. "Under affirmative action," he wrote in The Times Magazine, "the quality that earns us preferential treatment is an implied inferiority." And its ultimate effect is to put blacks "at war with an expanded realm of debilitating doubt, so that the doubt itself becomes an unrecognized preoccupation that undermines their ability to perform, especially in integrated situations."
Wilson's position is familiar as part of a standard analysis of the decline of the Democrats in presidential elections. He takes pains to distinguish it from "the neo-conservative critique of affirmative action that attacks both racial preference and activist social-welfare policies."
Even so, however, he gently reminds his fellow liberals that "a society without racial preference has, of course, always been the long-term goal of the civil-rights movement."
Steele's argument is newer, and seems to cause more heartburn to those who support policies of preference. Some call him naive; some call him worse. The most thoughtful concede that he is on to something but worry about how he treats it.
"My sense is that he tells part of the story very well," said Drew Days, a law professor at Yale who was assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Carter administration. "But he leaves out a whole lot that would enrich his and his readers' understanding of affirmative action."
That affirmative action has a "corrosive effect" on some of its intended beneficiaries is obvious, said Days. But what Steele leaves out, he said, is the dreadful history of racist oppression and exclusion that initially was the justification for affirmative-action remedies: "It's as though he were writing about Mars."
Steele does not neglect history, however; he only says that in the day-to-day situations in which blacks have to deal with the implication that they need special treatment, the history doesn't matter.
"There are explanations and then there is the fact," he wrote in The Times. "And the fact must be borne by the individual as a condition apart from the explanation."
Julius Chambers, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., contends that Steele and others who share his views are naive about the tenacity of racist resistance. Part of the purpose of affirmative action, he says, is to "change the climate in which decisions are made" about hiring, college admissions and so forth.
Once the gatekeepers see competent blacks, their judgments may change. Better still, once blacks are in decision-making positions, they can enforce fairness.
Steele seems to bristle at the charge of naivete. "Only two days ago I was called `nigger' from a passing car," he said in a recent interview. "I think racism is tenacious, that it's a human instinct. But we can't continue to blame all our troubles on racism."
In a Harvard Law Review article last year, Randall Kennedy, a black professor of law at Harvard, digressed briefly on the issue of "race-conscious affirmative action."
While there might sometimes be "compelling reasons" to support it, he said, "I simply do not want race-conscious decision-making to be naturalized into our general pattern of academic evaluation.
by CNB