Affirmative Action

Racial Preference in Black and White

Tim J. Wise

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136078422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Affirmative Action examines the larger structure of institutional white privilege in education, and compares the magnitude of white racial preference with the policies typically envisioned when the term "racial preference" is used. In doing so, the book demonstrates that the American system of education is both a reflection of and a contributor to a structure of institutionalized racism and racial preference for the dominant majority.

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AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PAST AND PRESENT

Affirmative action is perhaps one of the most misunderstood concepts in American politics today. Critics routinely characterize such efforts as “quotas,” for example, despite the fact that affirmative action almost never involves quotas, and is far more modest than most people realize. Created in the 1960s and early 1970s as a way to ensure opportunity for people of color and white women who had been locked out of full participation in the job market and higher education, affirmative action programs have rarely required much in the way of concrete institutional change. If anything, although they have served as important reforms, affirmative action efforts have not gone nearly far enough, in light of how America's political, economic, and educational hierarchies remain so completely white dominated, as will be seen.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT

When it comes to educational institutions, nearly all college and university affirmative action programs were voluntarily adopted and have been limited in their approach to expanding access to historically underrepresented group members. The most common form of affirmative action in higher education is the deliberate and targeted recruitment of students of color, who otherwise might be overlooked by a particular school, despite their abilities and aptitudes. Additionally, schools often include race as one of many factors to consider when evaluating applicants, in that admissions officers will make note of race so that they might consider how the applicants’ racial identity may have shaped their prior educational opportunities. For example, colleges might take a second look at an applicant of color, even if that applicant has lower test scores than a white applicant, if they can see that the applicant of color worked hard to achieve despite facing inferior educational resources and facilities. Although schools have occasionally set aside slots in an incoming class for students of color, or assigned weighted points to such students to increase the likelihood of obtaining a diverse student body, most efforts with this level of specificity have been eliminated, either by the courts, as with the Michigan undergraduate program, or voluntarily by schools worried that they might invite a lawsuit if they did not alter their existing policies.

In the realm of employment, affirmative action requirements, although more detailed than in higher education, are still far from onerous. As Fred Pincus explains in his recent book, Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth, affirmative action requirements apply only to certain companies, and even then, do not require very much of them. For example, nonconstruction companies with fifty or more employees and at least $ 50,000 in contracts with the government must have an affirmative action plan, but these plans do not have to be filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) or any other agency. Furthermore, all the employers are required to do in the wake of developing such a plan is to make a “good faith effort” to hire members of whatever groups have been significantly underutilized relative to their availability in the qualified labor pool. In other words, affirmative action efforts are tied directly to how many people of color, for example, are available and qualified to do a certain job in a given location or industry. Because the job market for construction work is highly volatile, the requirements for construction companies are even more lax, and place very little emphasis on any kind of numerical goals or targets, even when there has been substantial underutilization of workers of color.

The only time that rigid numerical quotas are used is when a court has ordered them for a specified period, after a finding of discrimination against a particular firm, or after a given company has entered into a consent decree, in which they admit to having engaged in racial bias against persons of color, for example. At any given time, there are no more than a few dozen companies operating under such quota programs in the entire country.¹

Not only are quota systems almost unheard of, but enforcement of the “good faith” efforts required by law is so weak that affirmative action is essentially voluntary in most cases. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), which is charged with monitoring affirmative action efforts, has only enough compliance officers to review about four thousand contractors annually, meaning that, at best, reviews could be done perhaps once every forty-six years for each company Even worse, despite the regular discovery of firms that have violated antidiscrimination laws (both those pertaining to affirmative action and those merely requiring companies not to discriminate actively), fewer than fifty firms have been barred from participating in federal contracts because of failure to comply with affirmative action or antidiscrimination laws. Of those companies violating the law, sixty percent were ultimately reinstated as government contractors. In other words, enforcement is lax, the odds of getting caught discriminating are slim, and punishment, once a company is caught, is a joke, reducing the likelihood that affirmative action programs would operate, in practice, as a significant or even minor handicap to anyone.² This may well explain why discrimination continues to be so rampant, even among those businesses that are technically prohibited from engaging in it. As the OFCCP discovered in the mid-1990s, as many as three-quarters of all employers were in “substantial violation” of existing civil rights laws.³

Although the general public often perceives affirmative action requirements as tantamount to quotas, contractors covered by the requirements rarely see them that way. One 1995 survey of three hundred large federal contractors, for example, found that few viewed goals as quotas or unfair preference programs. Likewise, a 1994 customer satisfaction survey by the OFCCP found that only fourteen of 640 firms complained that they had felt pressured to use racial preference as a result of affirmative action requirements.⁴ Unfortunately, contractors have often been found to have told rejected white male applicants that they were rejected because the contractor was forced to hire a woman or person of color, but no policy actually requires or encourages such an outcome.⁵

Affirmative action in contracting (such as for road construction or professional service contracts at the local, state, or federal level) generally refers to efforts that seek to steer a certain share of contract dollars to disadvantaged business enterprises (also known as DBEs). Companies owned by white men can also qualify as DBEs, so long as they can document some economic hardship or undercapitalization that has prevented them from full participation in private contracting markets. That said, it is certainly true that a disproportionate share of companies classified as DBEs are owned by either white women or men or women of color, in large part because DBE regulations have tended to presume that such businesses are disadvantaged—a reasonable assumption given the miniscule share of contracts and contract dollars going to such firms over the years, and still today. As will be seen, despite the presumption of disadvantage, which theoretically “preferences” contractors of color under DBE programs, only a very small share of public contracts are awarded to such companies, and there are no actual quotas for such contracting programs, but rather goals and timetables, pegged directly to the availability of minority- and women-owned businesses in a given locale.⁶

For the purposes of this volume, I define affirmative action as any race- or gender-conscious effort to identify, recruit, hire, admit, train, or promote qualified women or people of color for employment, educational, and contracting opportunities. Whereas standard antidiscrimination law takes a more passive approach, essentially saying that discrimination against a person on the basis of race, sex, or several other factors is illegal, affirmative action takes a more active stance. Affirmative action is essentially premised on the notion that without deliberate efforts to improve the representation of people of color and women of all colors, those individuals will continue to be overlooked, no matter what their talents and abilities.

UNDERSTANDING THE NEED: PREVENTING DISCRIMINATION, COUNTERING PREFERENCE

To many Americans, making deliberate efforts to include people of color in jobs, contracting, and educational institutions is unnecessary. After all, existing civil rights laws prohibit discrimination against persons of color, and that, they insist, should be enough to ensure equal opportunity. Yet as logical as such a position may seem, the inadequacy of such argumentation was explained by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his classic work, Why We Can't Wait (1963):

Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.⁷

In addition to the accumulated advantages of whites, and similarly accumulated disadvantages of blacks to which King was referring, there was also the reality that discrimination continued to take place, irrespective of the existence of new laws prohibiting it. Even with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, companies and contractors continued to block people of color from opportunities by way of subtle mechanisms, bogus “qualification” requirements, and reliance on “old boys networks” that were nearly all white thanks to decades of discrimination.⁸ There were even companies that established “merit testing” for prospective employees only after the Civil Rights Act was passed, as a way to limit access for blacks artificially, as they could no longer blatantly discriminate against persons of color.⁹ Unless these entities were required to make positive steps toward integrating their workforces, these people of color, no matter how qualified they might be, would continue to be locked out of the best opportunities. By the same token, whites would continue to be favored and preferenced in the job market.

Similarly, there were many subtle and often unintentional practices that also subverted and essentially served to circumvent civil rights legislation. For example, in the early 1960s it was quite common for employers to require referrals from existing employees for anyone seeking a job with their firm. Similarly, unions often restricted membership to family of existing union members. These and other practices had the effect of excluding people of color, whether deliberately or not, simply because of the history of previous exclusion that had restricted who would already be an employee or union member in the first place.¹⁰

Racial Discrimination and White Preference in the Job Market

Despite undisputed progress in opening up the job market to people of color over the past forty years, evidence of ongoing racial bias on the part of employers is clear at a number of levels, including who is interviewed for jobs after applying, who is hired, and how much money they earn, even when other factors like qualifications are the same between whites and job seekers of color.

Often, racial preference for whites in the workplace stems from subtle tendencies to favor those from one's own racial group when making a hiring decision. Studies have found that persons in a position to hire tend to spot merit most quickly in someone who reminds them of themselves,¹¹ and that members of dominant groups (especially in terms of race) have a particularly difficult time fairly evaluating the merit of minority group members, who are often viewed by whites in ways that fit common stereotypes.¹² As such, even if they are not overtly biased against people of color, because most hiring agents are white, they may tend to view other whites as more qualified, even when there is no objective evidence to justify such a belief. Studies have consistently found that people of color who are equally or more qualified than whites are still less likely to be hired because of racial prejudice on the part of employers or because those employers assume, despite evidence to the contrary, that the persons of color are less qualified.¹³

Even without overt bias operating to the advantage of whites and disadvantage of everyone else, white racial preference is also furthered in the job market by the workings of the so-called old boys network, which is often so important to landing the best jobs. More than eighty percent of executives find their jobs through networking, and almost nine in ten jobs in the overall labor market are filled by word of mouth and never advertised.¹⁴ If these networks were race neutral, perhaps racial discrimination would be less of a problem. However, people of color are disproportionately excluded from the best word-of-mouth networks for jobs, due in large part to past inequity in hiring, housing and education, which has resulted in far fewer connections for people of color.¹⁵

There is also substantial evidence of ongoing direct discrimination against job applicants of color. As several studies have found, when discrimination “testers” (blacks and whites who are similarly dressed, are similarly qualified, and have similar demeanors) are sent out to apply for jobs and check for bias, whites receive interviews and job offers far more often than their black counterparts. One such study found that whites were twenty-two percent more likely to receive an interview and forty-five percent more likely to receive a job offer than equally qualified blacks.¹⁶

Another study in the Chicago suburbs, which paired slightly more qualified black women with slightly less qualified white women and had them apply for entry-level management positions with retailers, found similar results.¹⁷ In tests that involved sending résumés only, but with no person-to-person interaction, researchers manipulated the names and home addresses of the applicants to signal that the applicant was either black or white. Overall, whites were twenty-one percent more likely to be granted an interview than their black co-testers, and employers were far more persistent in trying to reach white applicants than black applicants. Whites were almost twice as likely as blacks in the résumé-only tests to be blatantly preferred, despite having less objective experience and fewer credentials. In other words, in cases where one applicant received an interview while another did not, whites were on the winning end of that uneven equation almost twice as often as blacks, even when they were slightly less qualified than their counterparts of color.

In tests involving face-to-face contact with the potential employer, whites received job offers sixteen percent more often than blacks and, on average, were offered eight more hours per week than their black co-testers. Interestingly, although white and black in-person applicants were equally likely to be offered interviews, the kinds of questions asked of the various applicants nonetheless signified substantial if subtle racial preference for whites. For example, black applicants were far more likely to be quizzed by employers about why they wanted the job in question, and why they had left their previous job. Black applicants were four and one-half times more likely to be asked about their record with regard to absenteeism and punctuality, three times more likely to be asked how they had gotten along with previous supervisors, and two and one-half times more likely to be asked how they had gotten along in the past with co-workers. Such questions signify a long-established phenomenon, whereby white employers often view black workers suspiciously in terms of their interpersonal s...