From Unequal Opportunity
to Equal Results
By Linda Chavez
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, August 18, 1996
Shortly after Republicans swept the congressional election in 1994, gaining control of the House of Representatives for the first time in more than 40 years, pundits began attributing the victory to a backlash of angry white male voters. Indeed, GOP candidates out-polled their Democratic opponents 62 percent to 38 percent among white men nationally, winning an even higher percentage among Southern whites. Within weeks, affirmative action -- a perennial sore point among white males -- became a hot topic again, with newspaper, magazine and television features dissecting the new national resentment of racial preferences in employment, college admissions and set-aside programs.
The intensity of interest in this new look at an old issue is no doubt responsible for the recent plethora of books on the subject. While some, like Charles Murray's and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve and Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism, were years in preparation and dealt with issues well beyond affirmative action, others appear to be timed specifically to the current policy debate. Backfire: A Reporter's Look at Affirmative Action, by ABC News correspondent Bob Zelnick, certainly fits this latter category.
Zelnick, a lawyer as well as a journalist, has written a lively polemic against affirmative action. With a reporter's flair for stories and a lawyer's understanding of the intricacies of civil rights law, Zelnick dissects affirmative action programs in education, employment, contracting and voting. In these areas, he is covering subjects already thoroughly explored by previous writers, most succinctly by former Reagan Justice Department spokesman Terry Eastland in his short but comprehensive book Ending Affirmative Action: The Case for Color-blind Justice. Nonetheless, Zelnick introduces some new material, notably recent attempts to extend affirmative action into new arenas, such as determining who gets bank loans or mortgage insurance. He also pulls no punches in assessing the Clinton administration's record on affirmative action, which couples moderate presidential rhetoric with sweeping executive actions to expand affirmative action in government programs.
Zelnick's definition of affirmative action is sure to rankle proponents: "Affirmative action is the practice of racial discrimination against whites or other nonfavored ethnic groups," he boldly asserts in his opening chapter. "It favors the less qualified over the more qualified," he argues, and "is a systematic attack upon objective merit selection criteria." What is more, Zelnick insists, "the dirty little secret is that affirmative action doesn't work." Zelnick begins his case with this conclusion. Citing statistics showing little progress in earnings and poverty and unemployment rates among blacks between 1969 and 1993, Zelnick claims "the statistical evidence is overwhelming that affirmative action has barely touched, let alone helped, the vast majority of blacks." Notwithstanding the failure of affirmative action programs to benefit most blacks, he maintains, they have wreaked havoc with principles of fairness and merit. Zelnick describes the effect of affirmative action programs -- and, more important, court decisions -- in transforming employee and student selection procedures from ways to predict success on the job or in school to the means to ensure racial and ethnic balance.
"At this point the game is no longer nondiscrimination or outreach but social engineering writ large," he says. He details the decades-long assault on employment testing generated when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971), which enshrined the principle that an objective test administered with no intent to discriminate could still be judged discriminatory if blacks or other disadvantaged minorities failed the test at higher rates than whites. Although employers could still use such tests -- as long as they could demonstrate a "business necessity" to do so and could show that the tests were valid under guidelines established by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission -- many employers simply gave up testing prospective employees rather than go through the elaborate procedures established in the wake of Griggs to guard against any "disparate impact" on minorities. Griggs was the turning point in civil rights law, replacing the guarantee of equal opportunity with the demand for equal results.
Police and fire departments were particularly hard-hit in what Zelnick calls "the thirty-year war over testing," being forced to abandon traditional promotion procedures that relied on competitive test results. After years of costly litigation and extensive efforts, to little avail, to improve the scores of blacks and Hispanics taking the tests, most major city police and fire departments simply created separate pools of white and minority candidates, choosing the "best qualified" from each. Thus in 1983 in Birmingham, Ala., Zelnick relates, the fire department picked the two highest-scoring whites to promote to lieutenant and passed over the next 76 highest-scoring candidates, all of whom were white, to choose the three top-scoring blacks.
Such practices have become common, not just in fire and police departments but in colleges and professional schools as well. While proponents claim that affirmative action never requires that "unqualified" candidates be picked over "qualified" ones, they have managed to rig the rules so that different standards of qualification apply according to race. Zelnick cites large differences in standardized test scores between blacks and whites admitted to the most competitive private colleges and state universities. Although black students scored, on average, from 82 to 271 points lower than whites admitted to elite colleges, their rate of acceptance was significantly greater than whites'. And the practice continues from undergraduate through graduate and professional schools, where, Zelnick warns, the consequences could be dangerous because "this society consciously and deliberately graduates doctors who are less qualified to treat the sick than would be the case if admission to medical school were based purely on ability and not on race."
Although Backfire marshals its case with statistics and scholarly studies, the book lacks proper footnotes. No doubt the book's publisher felt that the general bibliographical notes for each chapter were sufficient for the general reader. As someone who generally agrees with Zelnick's criticism of affirmative action, I would still have liked to check some of his original sources. Without proper footnotes, I couldn't. Heightening my concern were several minor, but annoying, errors: Zelnick incorrectly identifies Charles Canady, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, as John, and Albert Shanker as president of National Federation of Teachers rather than the American Federation of Teachers. He also gets the title wrong for Abigail Thernstrom's path-breaking book Whose Votes Count?: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights, to which his own analysis of the issue owes much. Though well-written and persuasively argued, Backfire suffers from too little original reporting on a topic already much covered.
Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington, D.C., was director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the Reagan administration.
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