Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 14, 1995 TAG: 9506140069
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Such a trip, wrote syndicated columnist William Raspberry a few years ago, is much like America and affirmative action. At what point in the endeavor to ensure equality of opportunity should we say enough? What kinds of affirmative-action efforts go farther than they should - so race-conscious in themselves, for example, that they undermine the goal of making ethnicity irrelevant to opportunity?
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a couple of navigational aids. On 5-4 votes, the court invalidated a Kansas City, Mo., school-desegregation program and refused to uphold a federal affirmative-action policy. Both, the court said in effect, are too far down the road, are beyond where the nation must constitutionally get off.
Neither ruling is outrageous; both are eminently defensible. But neither the two programs nor the two court decisions are identical - which should serve as a reminder of an important point about affirmative action.
The Kansas City case is about public education. The federal-policy case, involving a Colorado highway project, is about doing business with minority-owned firms.
The minority in the Kansas City case is African Americans. The minority in the Colorado case is Hispanic Americans.
In the Kansas City case, at issue was a court order that entailed the pouring of state money into mostly black city schools to try to attract students from the mostly white suburbs, and the monitoring of city students' academic progress as a measure of the quality of desegregation efforts. In the Colorado case, at issue were policies of the Small Business Administration that reflected not a court order but acts of Congress.
In the Kansas City case, five of the nine Supreme Court justices agreed that the de facto segregation of mostly black city schools and mostly white suburban schools was too far removed from the de jure segregation of an earlier era to warrant the extensiveness and intrusiveness of the remedies ordered and upheld by lower courts. In the Colorado case, the majority of justices questioned the constitutionality of - though they did not overturn outright - financial incentives for contractors on federal projects to subcontract with minority-owned firms. The case was returned to a lower court to review against a stricter standard of what would be acceptable.
These distinctions suggest the important point about affirmative action: The term has come to encompass a wide variety of initiatives, each with its own twists and peculiarities and levels of justification.
Also on the high court's docket this term, for instance, is the constitutionality of districts drawn to increase the representation of minorities in Congress. This involves an issue absent from either the Kansas City or the Colorado case: the degree to which Congress can intrude, via the Voting Rights Act, on the states' power to define their congressional districts. (Virginia has fallen under the Voting Rights Act since its inception.) This also entails the irony of resegregating minorities in the name of affirmative action, and of doing so with the embrace both of the minorities themselves and of white conservatives who benefit electorally from the removal of minority voters from adjacent districts.
Which, in turn, is not the same as a college or university seeking diversity in its student body. Or the same as efforts to counter gender as well as ethnic bias. Or the same as the voluntary, necessary efforts of countless private businesses trying to expand the diversity of available employee talent, so as to become better businesses. There's still plenty that's worthwhile on the affirmative-action highway before it's time to exit.
by CNB