Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 22, 1995 TAG: 9507240027
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Not long ago, such a speech would generally have been regarded as unexceptionable. The president said he's for affirmative action when it works and against it when it doesn't - most notably, in the current form of federal set-asides, which have invited both abuse and an adverse Supreme Court ruling. The speech was accompanied by a lengthy report assessing the performance of each of various federal affirmative-action initiatives.
Today's hypercharged political environment, however, seems to make it hard for people to deal with empirically driven positions.
Thus, both friend and foe saw Clinton's address as reflective of a great moral divide. By the president's supporters, it was exalted as a welcome example of commitment to principle. By his detractors, including aspirants for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, it was derided as a commitment to a horribly erroneous principle.
This is much how both sides claim to see affirmative action itself. To its defenders, affirmative action is the very embodiment of national principles of equality of opportunity. To its critics, it embodies the defilement of those principles.
Too seldom, unfortunately, is affirmative action understood in a less apocalyptic light: as a problem-solving tool frequently (though not always) useful both for correcting historic injustices and for removing the race and gender blinders that otherwise would impose crippling limits on the quality of the American work force.
Instead, affirmative action is held up by many of its advocates as an end in itself - giving critics cause for their concern that counting by race and sex will be a permanent fixture and their charge that it is to blame for the tribalization of American society.
Similarly, affirmative action is frequently held up by opponents as the source of all manner of ills, ranging from the decline in U.S. after-inflation wages to loss of self-esteem among affirmative action's beneficiaries - giving defenders cause for their fear that, as happened with abandonment of Reconstruction more than a century ago, America is once more ready to blame the victim for the disease.
Affirmative action shouldn't be, and wasn't intended to be, a permanent end unto itself. Neither, however, has America yet managed to erase ethnic and gender bias so utterly that the usefulness of affirmative action has vanished. You need not agree with every detail of Clinton's speech and the accompanying report to appreciate the thrust: Affirmative action shouldn't be accepted uncritically, but the time has hardly come to junk it.
by CNB