No
Affirmative Action, No Black Jobs?
by
Larry Elder
Los Angeles Mayor
Richard Riordan recently condemned the California Civil Rights Initiative.
The CCRI seeks to ban race and gender based preferences in the areas
of college admissions, state hiring and public contracting. On the
other hand, he opposes race and gender based preferences. Huh?
His rationale:
The CCRI is "divisive." Sure it's divisive, if you buy the idea that
no affirmative action equals no jobs for minorities and women.
If Affirmative
Action goes down, expect employers to fling their black employees
out on the street. This, at least, describes the vision of Atlanta
Mayor Bill Campbell .
In April, 1996,
Mayor Campbell said, "Everybody who is a person of color in this country
has benefited from affirmative action. There has not been anybody
who has gotten into college on their own, nobody who's gotten a job
on their own, no one who's prospered as a businessman or a businesswoman
on their own without affirmative action."
Geez, all of us?
Michael Jordan? My dad, who successfully ran a cafe for thirty years?
It gets worse.
In urging blacks to vigorously defend affirmative action, columnist
Asadullah Samad, writing in the black weekly "Los Angeles Sentinel",
said "[Affirmative action] is Armageddon. Muslims waiting for Jihad
(the Holy War), this is Jihad. For Nationalists waiting for the revolution.
This is the revolution (and it's being televised everyday). This is
war." Good Lord! War?
Black economist
and ex-Federal Reserve Board member Arthur Brimmer studied the extent
to which blacks owed their jobs to affirmative action. His conclusion:
"I would say that most blacks I know did not get [their jobs] because
of affirmative action, but it's impossible [to determine the exact
number]."
Similarly, Ella
Edmondson Bell, who teaches organizational studies at the MIT Business
school, says that most blacks get hired through "determination [and]
perseverance."
Jonathan Leonard,
who teaches economics at University of California at Berkeley, said
of affirmative action, "There's been some small effect, but certainly
not worth all the rhetoric directed at it."
But hasn't affirmative
action expanded the number of opportunities for blacks? Not really.
Farrell Bloch, author of Anti-discrimination Law And Minority Employment,
notes that affirmative action mostly rearranged the employment furniture.
Pre-affirmative action, blacks tended to work for companies with fewer
than 100 employees. Post-affirmative action, blacks tended to work
for larger companies. Why? Big companies were under the gun to recruit
blacks. Where did they get them? From smaller companies, or from workers
who otherwise would have worked for smaller companies.
Affirmative action
is also a big factor behind the higher than average drop-out rate
among blacks in colleges and universities. In the California UC system,
only 7.2% of minorities admitted under "special criteria" (code for
affirmative action) graduated in four years, and less than 50% in
six years. "White or other" students graduated at rates of 34.1% and
77.6%, respectively. This is the sports equivalent of athletes who
could perform at the AA level, struggling at AAA ball. And those who
could perform well at AAA, failing in the major leagues.
Now, how did black
leaders go from rightfully demanding equal opportunity, to demanding
equal results? After all, nowhere in the writings of Martin Luther
King does one find the expression "affirmative action". In Ending
Affirmative Action, Terry Eastland writes that former national Urban
League head, Whitney Young, sought race based preferences. But his
board resisted. The president of the Urban League in Pittsburgh said
that if blacks push for race based preferences, the public would react
with the following question: "What in blazes are these guys up to?
They tell us for years that we must buy [non-discrimination] and then
they say, 'it isn't what we want.'" A New York Urban League member
flatly objected to a policy of "the business of employing Negroes
'because they are Negroes.'"
Today, South African
President Nelson Mandela speaks out against "a culture of entitlement"
and warns of "false prophets who seek to perpetuate the apartheid
divisions and imbalances of the past, by presenting affirmative action
as a program intended to advantage some and disadvantage others on
the basis of race and color." Significantly, South Africa does not
have public sector affirmative action. South Africa!
A recent article
in "Destiny" magazine, the black conservative monthly, shows that
the black-white income gap narrowed well before affirmative action
took hold. In 1959, among intact families outside the south, a black
family earned 78% of what a white family earned. Ten years later,
black families earned 91% of that of a white family. In 1950, black
college educated women earned 91% of the income of their white counterparts.
By 1970, the earnings of black college educated women exceeded that
of their white counterparts by 25%.
"Ebony" magazine
ran a series called "If I Were Young Today," in which older black
achievers gave advice to black youth. Their advice was straightforward,
their optimism striking. Work hard, get an education, don't blame
others, your time is now. The great civil rights and union leader
A. Phillip Randolph said, "[Black] youth must offer the future the
same things that white youth offer and they must have the faith that
there is no basic racial difference in potential for achievement -moral,
intellectual, or spiritual. The future holds great opportunity for
those who are prepared to meet and face the challenge of this age
of science, technology and industrialism and social, economic and
political change."
Oh, the year of
this "Ebony series"? 1963.
Notice anything?
Mr. Randolph forgot to mention "affirmative action." Maybe he found
it too..."divisive"