The Law: What Rights for Whites?

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Thus the Supreme Court had to confront once again the legacy of its 1954 ruling that American society must proceed "with all deliberate speed" toward racial desegregation. The courts spent years enforcing the promise of that ruling against various challenges and obstructions, but it became clear that repeated judicial pronouncements against segregation would never lead to an integrated society. Help arrived from the Executive Branch in the 1960s. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson issued executive orders requiring "affirmative action" by Government contractors to provide more jobs for minorities. Congress soon joined in, more regulations, followed, and affirmative action expanded to include women and to cover most areas of work and education.

To many Americans, affirmative action for the sake of equality seems a threat to the very concept of equality. If two people are equally qualified and one is favored over the other because of race or gender, is that not undemocratic and unfair? Says Martin S. Goldman, New England education director of the B'nai B'rith: "The evil is discrimination. One does not end discrimination by discriminating."

Indeed one does, retort the advocates, of affirmative action. Says Vernon Jordan, executive director of the National Urban League: "Opponents of affirmative-action programs live in some kind of dream world where people truly advance on their merits and all is efficiently governed by a neutral merit system. That world does not exist. Merit is socially defined." Colleges, for example, have traditionally favored not only middle-class males but also sons of alumni. For all the progress in desegregation, blacks still must surmount a crushing residue of two centuries of discrimination in acquiring the tools and attitudes required to compete in U.S. society. Without affirmative action, four California law deans jointly wrote last winter, enrollment in their schools would revert to nearly all-white classes.

Whatever the arguments, affirmative action is the law—or rather, a whole series of laws. Today overlapping state and federal agencies enforce reams of regulations, leading to complaints of wasteful paper work, unrealistic guidelines and interminable delay. The overall expense of affirmative action is incalculable. The University of Utah, for example, estimates its annual cost of maintaining compliance records at $100,000 a year. Yet enforcement is mostly a matter of exhortations or threats. Although the Office of Federal Contract Compliance says it has helped discrimination victims collect $159 million in back pay, only 15 of 30,000 businesses dealing with the Federal Government have ever lost a federal contract because of race or sex discrimination, and no university has lost one.

Indeed, most black leaders feel that affirmative action has only begun to generate significant change. In 1950, 2% of the nation's doctors were black, and this percentage remains unchanged. Similarly, blacks still make up only 3.4% of the nation's lawyers and only 1% of its engineers. And now that most organizations finally accept at least the idea of affirmative action, the limited gains have strengthened demands for outright quotas for the benefit of minorities. That is far more controversial, particularly among Jews, who remember the all too recent days of quotas that excluded them from graduate schools and top jobs.