FOR STUDENTS WITH LOVE: November 2012

Thursday, November 29, 2012

FILM FESTIVAL: MINSK, 1-10 DECEMBER

http://kinominska.by/news.php?id=51

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

NEW ISSUES

NEW ISSUES

An American Story

Thursday, July 12, 1965, was hot and humid in Chicago. That evening Dessie Mae Williams, a 23-year-old African American woman, stood on the corner near the firehouse at 4000 West Wilcox Street. A firetruck sped out of the firehouse, and the driver lost control. The truck smashed into a stop sign near Williams, and the sign struck and killed her. African Americans had already picketed this firehouse because it was not integrated. Hearing of Williams’s death, 200 neighborhood young people streamed into the street, surrounding the firehouse. For two nights, rioting and disorder reigned. Angry youths threw bricks and bottles at the firehouse and nearby windows. Shouting gangs pelted police with rocks and accosted whites and beat them. Approximately 75 people were injured. African American detectives, clergy, and National Guard members eventually restored order. Mayor Richard Daley then summoned both white and black leaders to discuss the area’s problems. An 18-year-old man who had been in the riot admitted that he had lost his head. “We’re sorry about the bricks and bottles,” he said, “but when you get pushed, you shove back. Man, you don’t like to stand on a corner and be told to get off it when you got nowhere else to go.”

—adapted from Anyplace But Here

Problems Facing Urban African Americans

Civil rights leaders had made great progress in the decade following the Montgomery bus boycott, but full equality still eluded many African Americans. Until 1965 the civil rights movement had focused on ending segregation and restoring the voting rights of African Americans in the South. These were goals that could be achieved through court decisions and by convincing Congress to pass new laws.

Despite the passage of several civil rights laws in the 1950s and 1960s, racism—prejudice or discrimination toward someone because of his or her race— was still common in American society. Changing the law could not change people’s attitudes immediately, nor could it help those African Americans trapped in poverty in the nation’s big cities.

In 1965 nearly 70 percent of African Americans lived in large cities. Many had moved from the South to the big cities of the North and West during the Great Migration of the 1920s and 1940s. There, they often found the same prejudice and discrimination that had plagued them in the South. Many whites refused to live with African Americans in the same neighborhood. When African Americans moved into a neighborhood, whites often moved out. Real estate agents and landlords in white neighborhoods refused to rent or sell to African Americans, who often found it difficult to arrange for mortgages at local banks.

Even if African Americans had been allowed to move into white neighborhoods, poverty trapped many of them in inner cities while whites moved to the suburbs. Many African Americans found themselves channeled into low-paying jobs. They served as custodians and maids, porters and dock workers, with little chance of advancement. Those who did better typically found employment as blue-collar workers in factories, but very few advanced beyond that. In 1965 only 15 percent of African Americans held professional, managerial, or clerical jobs, compared to 44 percent of whites. Almost half of all African American families lived in poverty, and the median income of an African American family was only 55 percent of that of the average white family. African American unemployment was typically twice that of whites.

Poor neighborhoods in the nation’s major cities were overcrowded and dirty, leading to higher rates of illness and infant mortality. At the same time, the crime rate increased in the 1960s, particularly in lowincome neighborhoods. Incidents of juvenile delinquency rose, as did the rate of young people dropping out of school. Complicating matters even more was a rise in the number of single-parent households. All poor neighborhoods suffered from these problems, but because more African Americans lived in poverty, their communities were disproportionately affected.

Many African Americans living in urban poverty knew the civil rights movement had made enormous gains, but when they looked at their own circumstances, nothing seemed to be changing. The movement had raised their hopes, but their everyday problems were economic and social, and therefore harder to address. As a result, their anger and frustration began to rise—until it finally erupted.

The Watts Riot

Just five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, a race riot broke out in Watts, an African American neighborhood in Los Angeles. Allegations of police brutality had served as the catalyst of this uprising, which lasted for six days and required over 14,000 members of the National Guard and 1,500 law officers to restore order. Rioters burned and looted entire neighborhoods and destroyed about $45 million in property. They killed 34 people, and about 900 suffered injuries.

More rioting was yet to come. Race riots broke out in dozens of American cities between 1965 and 1968. It seemed that they could explode at any place and at any time. The worst riot took place in Detroit in 1967. Burning, looting, and skirmishes with police and National Guard members resulted in 43 deaths and over 1,000 wounded. Eventually the U.S. Army sent in tanks and soldiers armed with machine guns to get control of the situation. Nearly 4,000 fires destroyed 1,300 buildings, and the damage in property loss was estimated at $250 million. The governor of Michigan, who viewed the smoldering city from a helicopter, remarked that Detroit looked like “a city that had been bombed.”

GOVERNMENT

The Kerner Commission

In 1967 President Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, headed by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, to study the causes of the urban riots and to make recommendations to prevent them from happening again in the future. The Kerner Commission, as it became known, conducted a detailed study of the problem. The commission blamed white society and white racism for the majority of the problems in the inner city. “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” it concluded.

The commission recommended the creation of 2 million new jobs in the inner city, the construction of 6 million new units of public housing, and a renewed federal commitment to fight de facto segregation. President Johnson’s war on poverty, however, which addressed some of the same concerns for inner-city jobs and housing, was already underway. Saddled with massive spending for the Vietnam War, however, President Johnson never endorsed the recommendations of the commission.

The Shift to Economic Rights

By the mid-1960s, a number of African American leaders were becoming increasingly critical of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent strategy. They felt it had failed to improve the economic position of African Americans. What good was the right to dine at restaurants or stay at hotels if most African Americans could not afford these services anyway? Dr. King became sensitive to this criticism, and in 1965 he began to focus on economic issues.

In 1965 Albert Raby, president of a council of community organizations that worked to improve conditions for Chicago’s poor, invited Dr. King to visit the city. Dr. King and his staff had never conducted a civil rights campaign in the North. By focusing on the problems that African Americans faced in Chicago, Dr. King believed he could call greater attention to poverty and other racial problems that lay beneath the urban race riots.

To call attention to the deplorable housing conditions that many African American families faced, Dr. King and his wife Coretta moved into a slum apartment in an African American neighborhood in Chicago. Dr. King and the SCLC hoped to work with local leaders to improve the economic status of African Americans in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods.

The Chicago Movement, however, made little headway. When Dr. King led a march through the allwhite suburb of Marquette Park to demonstrate the need for open housing, he was met by angry white mobs similar to those in Birmingham and Selma. Mayor Richard Daley ordered the Chicago police to protect the marchers, but he wanted to avoid any repeat of the violence. He met with Dr. King and proposed a new program to clean up the slums. Associations of realtors and bankers also agreed to promote open housing. In theory, mortgages and rental property would be available to everyone, regardless of race. In practice, very little changed.

Black Power

Dr. King’s failure in Chicago seemed to show that nonviolent protests could do little to change economic problems. After 1965 many African Americans, especially young people living in cities, began to turn away from King. Some leaders called for more aggressive forms of protest. Their new strategies ranged from armed self-defense to the suggestion that the government set aside a number of states where African Americans could live free from the presence of whites.

As African Americans became more assertive, they placed less emphasis on cooperation with sympathetic whites in the civil rights movement. Some African American organizations, including CORE and SNCC, voted to expel all whites from leadership positions within their organizations, believing that African Americans alone should determine the course and direction of their struggle.

Many young African Americans called for black power, a term that had many different meanings. A few interpreted black power to mean that physical selfdefense and even violence were acceptable in defense of one’s freedom—a clear rejection of Dr. King’s philosophy. To most, including Stokely Carmichael, the leader of SNCC in 1966, the term meant that African Americans should control the social, political, and economic direction of their struggle:

“This is the significance of black power as a slogan. For once, black people are going to use the words they want to use—not just the words whites want to hear. . . . The need for psychological equality is the reason why SNCC today believes that blacks must organize in the black community. Only black people can . . . create in the community an aroused and continuing black consciousness. . . . Black people must do things for themselves; they must get . . . money they will control and spend themselves; they must conduct tutorial programs themselves so that black children can identify with black people.”

—from the New York Review of Books, September 1966

Black power also stressed pride in the African American cultural group. It emphasized racial distinctiveness rather than cultural assimilation—the process by which minority groups adapt to the dominant culture in a society. African Americans showed pride in their racial heritage by adopting new Afro hairstyles and African-style clothing. Many also took on African names. In universities, students demanded that African and African American Studies courses be adopted as part of the standard school curriculum. Dr. King and some other leaders criticized black power as a philosophy of hopelessness and despair. The idea was very popular, however, in the poor urban neighborhoods where many African Americans resided.

Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam

By the early 1960s, a man named Malcolm X had become a symbol of the black power movement that was sweeping the nation. Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, he experienced a difficult childhood and adolescence. He drifted into a life of crime, and in 1946, he was convicted of burglary and sent to prison for six years.

Prison transformed Malcolm. He began to educate himself, and he played an active role in the prison debate society. Eventually he joined the Nation of Islam, commonly known as the Black Muslims, who were led by Elijah Muhammad. Despite their name, the Black Muslims do not hold the same beliefs as mainstream Muslims. The Nation of Islam preached black nationalism. Like Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, Black Muslims believed that African Americans should separate themselves from whites and form their own self-governing communities.

Shortly after joining the Nation of Islam, Malcolm Little changed his name to Malcolm X. The “X” stood as a symbol for the family name of his African ancestors who had been enslaved. Malcolm argued that his true family name had been stolen from him by slavery, and he did not intend to use the name white society had given him.

The Black Muslims viewed themselves as their own nation and attempted to make themselves as economically self-sufficient as possible. They ran their own businesses, organized their own schools, established their own weekly newspaper (Muhammad Speaks), and encouraged their members to respect each other and to strengthen their families. Although the Black Muslims did not advocate violence, they did advocate self-defense. Malcolm X was a powerful and charismatic speaker, and his criticisms of white society and the mainstream civil rights movement gained national attention for the Nation of Islam.

By 1964 Malcolm X had broken with the Black Muslims. Discouraged by scandals involving the Nation of Islam’s leader, he went to the Muslim holy city of Makkah (also called Mecca) in Saudi Arabia. After seeing Muslims from many different races worshipping together, he concluded that an integrated society was possible. In a revealing letter describing his pilgrimage to Makkah, he stated that many whites that he met during the pilgrimage displayed a spirit of brotherhood that gave him a new, positive insight into race relations.

After Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam, he continued to criticize the organization and its leader, Elijah Muhammad. Because of this, three organization members shot and killed him in February 1965 while he was giving a speech in New York. Although Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam before his death, his speeches and ideas from those years with the Black Muslims are those for which he is most remembered. In Malcolm’s view, African Americans may have been victims in the past, but they did not have to allow racism to victimize them in the present. His ideas have influenced African Americans to take pride in their own culture and to believe in their ability to make their way in the world.

The Black Panthers

Malcolm X’s ideas influenced a new generation of militant African American leaders who also preached black power, black nationalism, and economic self-sufficiency. In 1966 in Oakland, California, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver organized the Black Panther Party for Self- Defense, or the Black Panthers, as they were known. They considered themselves the heirs of Malcolm X, and they recruited most of their members from poor urban communities across the nation.

The Black Panthers believed that a revolution was necessary in the United States, and they urged African Americans to arm themselves and confront white society in order to force whites to grant them equal rights. Black Panther leaders adopted a “Ten-Point Program,” which called for black empowerment, an end to racial oppression, and control of major institutions and services in the African American community, such as schools, law enforcement, housing, and medical facilities. Eldridge Cleaver, who served as the minister of culture, articulated many of the organization’s objectives in his 1967 best-selling book, Soul on Ice.

The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

By the late 1960s, the civil rights movement had fragmented into dozens of competing organizations with philosophies for reaching equality. At the same time, the emergence of black power and the call by some African Americans for violent action angered many white civil rights supporters. This made further legislation to help blacks economically less likely.

In this atmosphere, Dr. King went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a strike of African American sanitation workers in March 1968. At the time, the SCLC had been planning a national “Poor People’s Campaign” to promote economic advancement for all impoverished Americans. The purpose of this campaign, the most ambitious one that Dr. King would ever lead, was to lobby the federal government to commit billions of dollars to end poverty and unemployment in the United States. People of all races and nationalities were to converge on the nation’s capital, as they had in 1963 during the March on Washington, where they would camp out until both Congress and President Johnson agreed to pass the requested legislation to fund the proposal.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, as he stood on his hotel balcony in Memphis, Dr. King was assassinated by a sniper. Ironically, he had told a gathering at a local African American church just the previous night, “I’ve been to the mountaintop. . . . I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

Dr. King’s assassination touched off both national mourning and riots in more than 100 cities, including Washington, D.C. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who had served as a trusted assistant to Dr. King for many years, led the Poor People’s Campaign in King’s absence. The demonstration, however, did not achieve any of the major objectives that either King or the SCLC had hoped it would.

In the wake of Dr. King’s death, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The act contained a fair housing provision outlawing discrimination in housing sales and rentals and gave the Justice Department authority to bring suits against such discrimination.

Dr. King’s death marked the end of an era in American history. Although the civil rights movement continued, it lacked the unity of purpose and vision that Dr. King had given it. Under his leadership, and with the help of tens of thousands of dedicated African Americans, many of whom were students, the civil rights movement transformed American society. Although many problems remain to be resolved, the achievements of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s dramatically improved life for African Americans, creating new opportunities where none had existed before.

GUIDE

Comment and explain why: ‘Civil right leaders had made a great progress in the decade following the Montgomery bus boycott, but full equality still eluded many African Americans.’

What problems did urban African Americans face?

Key words and names: racism, Great Migration, The Watts Riot, The Kerner Commission, The Chicago Movement, Black Power, the Nation of Islam, The Black Panthers, The Power People’s Campaign; Malcolm X.

What caused a division between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the black power movement?

What happened to the civil rights movement by the late 1960s?

Do you think the civil rights movement is active today? What kind of issues do you think still need to be addressed? Why?

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

AFFIRMING THE PRINCIPLE OF EQUALITY

AFFIRMING THE PRINCIPLE OF

EQUALITY

By Terry Eastland

DURING the second half of the 20th century, the United States has made a historic effort to overcome racial discrimination and secure equality for all its citizens. At the heart of the effort is a process known as "affirmative action." Under U.S. laws all employers in both the public and private sector are required to provide "equal employment opportunity," meaning that they cannot discriminate in their hiring practices on the basis of race or sex. Affirmative action takes employment one step further, requiring that employers take specific actions that work to the benefit of blacks and members of other racial and ethnic minority groups, as well as women.

Implemented in a variety of contexts with different results, affirmative action has stirred controversy when it has allocated benefits solely on the basis of race or gender, and most particularly when it has done so on a strictly numerical basis, setting specific quotas and timetables. Few would deny that affirmative action has given blacks access to areas that previously were closed to them, and has accelerated integration in the workplace. But it has done so at some social and psychic cost.

Whites – especially those who have been shunted aside in the quest for employment or promotion because of the workings of affirmative action – are often stung by what they see as a form of reverse discrimination. Blacks and other minority beneficiaries of affirmative action chafe at the assumption that any job advancements are the result of special treatment rather than hard work. Despite these drawbacks, most Americans would agree that some steps should be taken to assure that minorities have access to jobs and other opportunities on the same basis as all other citizens. The broad societal direction in favor of equality which affirmative action was originally designed to further will undoubtedly continue.

Affirmative action is historically related to the quest by blacks for equal treatment, a story that begins with the founding of the United States. In the Declaration of Independence, Americans committed themselves to the proposition that man is endowed with certain unalienable rights and that in the possession of these rights "all men are created equal." As a theoretical matter, that proposition included blacks as well as whites – all men. But the United States Constitution, written 11 years later to secure those basic rights, did not fully embrace blacks, who were held as slaves in many Southern states. Not until Americans had fought the Civil War was the United States Constitution changed so that slavery was outlawed and the equal protection of the law was accorded to all citizens.

Still, a new day of equality did not dawn in the latter part of the 19th century. Relevant constitutional amendments and new laws protecting the right of blacks were effectively nullified by Supreme Court decisions in the late 1800s. This contributed to the emergence in the South of a dual society. Blacks were segregated from whites, restricted in their freedom of movement and even denied the vote. They were “separate” – and obviously unequal.

In 1896 the Supreme Court sanctioned the South's dual society in a decision upholding a state law that required "black" and "white" railcars. Only one of the nine Supreme Court Justices – John Harlan – disagreed with the decision. In his famous dissent, Harlan said that the Constitution, as amended after the Civil War, "is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." He continued: "In respect of civil rights all citizens are equal before the law ... The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.

After the turn of the century, the situation for black Americans only worsened as segregation extended into more areas of American life. Yet at the same time several organizations devoted themselves to eradicating racial prejudice and securing equal treatment for all citizens. One of the most important was the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The fund pressed the cause of equal rights for all, finally achieving a landmark victory in 1954 in one of the most famous cases in American constitutional law, Brown v. Board of Education. Segregated public school systems, the Court said, violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

The Brown ruling was interpreted broadly as saying that government may not make distinctions among its citizens on the basis of race. This point became the rallying cry of the growing civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, that was challenging the laws and customs of segregation in the United States.

Ultimately, because of their persistent and consistent appeals to the fundamental moral principle of nondiscrimination, the legal arguments combined with the social movement were able to effect profound change in American laws and attitudes. In 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1965 the Congress of the United States enacted civil rights laws that reflected this principle and strengthened the nation's commitment to equal rights for all.

It was in this context and at this time that the term "affirmative action" first came into general use. Consistent with the colorblind principles urged by civil rights leaders during the 1950s and early '60s, affirmative action was intended to ensure that the laws designed to end discrimination could actually do so. Affirmative action required an employer to take steps to end discriminatory personnel practices and henceforth to make all employment decisions on a race-neutral basis. These steps included dispensing with the quasi-nepotism of "old-boy" recruiting networks, eliminating any racial bias from employment tests, searching for qualified employees in black as well as white communities, and generally making employment and promotion opportunities available and accessible to black applicants. It also required that compensatory measures be taken on behalf of those whom an employer had discriminated against, by awarding jobs or promotions or back pay. Indeed, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act actually mentions reinstatement and back pay as forms of "affirmative action."

It was during the second half of the 1960s that affirmative action began to change meaning, as the issue of equality for black Americans became far more complicated than had originally been thought.

In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a famous commencement speech at Howard University in Washington. Johnson said that it was not enough to give blacks freedom and "legal equity" and "equality as a right." Rather, he said, blacks must have "equality as a fact" and "equality as a result."

In these words Johnson was echoing the sentiments of those civil rights leaders who were worried that the erasure of the color line, accomplished over the previous decade, had not led to swift integration of blacks into the American mainstream. Some found explanation in the special history of American blacks. Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, said that blacks had "serious disabilities resulting from historic handicaps." Another prominent civil rights advocate said that the problems of blacks are rooted in their "systematic exclusion from American society since slavery ended a century ago."

It was precisely because of this past that many black leaders thought race neutrality was inadequate. "Special efforts" were needed in order to achieve "equality as a result." In their view, such efforts had to include admitting and employing blacks on the basis of "numbers." In other words, for integration to occur, there had to be a certain number of blacks actually employed by a company or enrolled in a school. For many civil rights supporters in the middle and late '60s, only numerical results could measure equality.

Requiring as it did the active use of race, this concept of equality was freighted with irony, since the civil rights movement had aimed at a colorblind law and society, and the legal decisions and legislative acts of the 1950s and '60s enshrined race-neutral principles. Perhaps the most important of these, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was very plainly a colorblind law. One of its parts specified, in fact, that no employer would be required to hire on the basis of race in order to correct some racial imbalance – i.e., an insufficient number of blacks – in the work force.

Nonetheless, because blacks did not appear to be moving ahead as rapidly as had been hoped, by the late 1960s color blindness had yielded to color consciousness, not only among most black leaders but also within the American government. The only way to get beyond race, the new argument went, was to take race into account. This reasoning produced a whole new understanding of affirmative action, a broad-based interpretation which was employed to help not only black Americans, but also members of certain other racial and ethnic minority groups – Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and American Indians – as well as women.

In 1965 President Johnson ordered "affirmative action" for most private employers who did business with the U.S. Government. The Labor Department regulations implementing the order said that an "acceptable affirmative action program must include an analysis of areas within which the contractor is deficient in the utilization of minority groups and women, and, further, goals and timetables to which the contractor's good faith efforts must be directed to correct the deficiencies and thus, to increase materially the utilization of minorities and women, at all levels and in all segments of his work force where deficiencies exist." It was no defense for an employer to say he had not discriminated or would not discriminate; if he had "deficiencies" – i.e., too few minorities or women working for him for whatever reason – he was expected to overcome them through hiring "goals." If a city had a work force that was 20 percent black, for example, an employer was required to hire this percentage of blacks. That was his "goal."

Numerical "goals" – also called "quotas" – became shorthand for affirmative action in the early 1970s. Governments on the federal, state, and local levels began to support this kind of affirmative action. In the private sector, American universities and professional schools adopted hiring goals for faculty members, and then went further to fashion admissions policies that gave minority applicants an extra boost. In the academy it was widely thought, as one prominent university chancellor put it, that "to treat our black students equally, we have to treat them differently."

Affirmative action did not go unchallenged. In 1972 a white Jewish student named Marco DeFunis sued the University of Washington Law School, charging that it had discriminated against him by admitting minority applicants with less distinguished qualifications. It was apparent that the issue would not go away and that at some point the Supreme Court would have to address whether racial preferences violated the Constitution.

That moment came four years later in Regents of the University of California v. Allan Bakke. The issue again was raised in the context of professional school admissions. Bakke, a white student, had been rejected by a University of California medical school. He sued, charging that he was the victim of a special admissions program that set aside 16 of the 100 places in each class for blacks, Asian-Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics. Bakke had excellent credentials – high grades, high achievement test scores. In fact, he had far better credentials than those actually admitted in the special process. Yet the medical school, which had no history of discrimination, had developed the special admissions program in order to help minority individuals overcome the past discrimination which it believed was evidenced in their low test scores.

The case was regarded as so important that it attracted a record number of legal briefs and an extraordinary amount of publicity. In its decision, the Court actually handed down two decisions, both by narrow 5-to-4 counts. On the one hand, the Court said the medical school must admit Allan Bakke. On the other, it said that it was not unlawful for a professional school to take race into account in its admissions practices, so long as it did not use rigid quotas, as the California school had done.

Since Bakke, the Court has had to decide a constant stream of affirmative action cases. Racial preferences have been upheld and struck down, and lay persons, not to mention many lawyers, have a hard time seeing how they cohere.

According to the Supreme Court, a state or local government may not justify an affirmative action goal simply on the basis of generalized past discrimination, and any numerical goal it does adopt must be one that does least damage to the rights of other parties. On the other hand, the Court has allowed affirmative action plans that aim for proportional representation of minorities and women in a company's work force.

What does seem certain is that the Supreme Court will continue to have affirmative action cases on its docket. If any prediction is worth making, it is that the Court will eventually take the law in the direction of race neutrality. This is the only direction consistent with the Constitution and statutory guarantees, and the only one likely to enjoy the support of a diverse people who are united not by race or religion or creed but by a devotion to freedom and equal rights for all.

In 1989 the Court handed down several controversial decisions affecting affirmative action. In January the Court held that broad patterns of societal discrimination were not enough to justify affirmative action programs imposed by local governments on private businesses. In June the Court handed down one decision making it harder to prove racial discrimination in hiring practices, and then another making it easier to challenge court imposed affirmative action plans. These rulings, all by narrow 5 to 4 margins, drew criticism in the civil rights community, emphatic evidence of the controversy that still surrounds this subject.

Affirmative action has not only proved legally controversial. Especially in recent years its morality has been challenged. Racial preferences often benefit individuals who may not themselves have been the victims of any actual discrimination. And questions have been raised about the unintended side effects on affirmative action's beneficiaries. Glenn Lowry, a Harvard University professor who is himself black, says that affirmative action can create uncertain perceptions about the qualifications of those minorities who benefit from it even as it undermines their ability "to confidently assert, if only to themselves, that they are as good as their achievements would seem to suggest."

In 1987 three black law students were about to win a spot on the school's law review in the traditional way – through head-to-head competition with all others – when an affirmative action plan was adopted. "Making" law review on the new basis, they weren't thrilled about it. As one of them told The Washington Post's William Raspberry, "Affirmative action was a way to dilute our personal victory. It took the victory out of our hands."

Racial preferences can generate and perpetuate notions of inferiority and demean genuine accomplishments. How can equality be achieved on this basis? The sad truth is that no one has yet designed an affirmative action program that eliminates the very serious costs, especially those borne by its intended beneficiaries.

Theodore Edwards was hired under an affirmative action program by Illinois Bell Telephone, where he is now a division manager. "I think affirmative action is necessary," he said, "but I don't think it should be administered so that we say we have to have X number of minorities regardless of qualifications." His solution is for employers to make stronger recruiting efforts to find qualified minorities, or to have quotas for entry-level jobs, and thereafter promotion purely on a merit basis.

Others would prefer to move away completely from the system of quotas and timetables, and to have government-sponsored integration plans concentrate on equality of education. Scriptwriter Julio Vera calls affirmative action "a handout," and now refuses to apply for minority writing programs. "Martin Luther King's dream was to erase color lines; affirmative action hasn't done that," he said. In his opinion, stressing education for minorities would allow them to compete more effectively in the job market and lessen their dependency on affirmative action programs.

Today there is no consensus on the economic impact of affirmative action. Studies do not yield a simple picture. Some scholars believe that government-required affirmative action has resulted merely in a reshuffling of black jobs in the labor force, with black employment increasing in the "covered" sector and declining in the "non-covered" sector. Affirmative action's impact tends to be felt more strongly by those at the level of the middle classes. The more desperate in the underclass are generally beyond the reach of affirmative action. Individuals hobbled by illiteracy, for example, have a fundamental problem in filling out the employment form that would put them in the hiring line where they have to be in order to benefit from affirmative action, however it is conceived. Affirmative action cannot eliminate the effects of drug abuse, family deterioration, teenage pregnancy, failure in school, and a host of other powerful, self-reinforcing obstacles.

Nonetheless, there is no denying that the anti-discrimination laws, if not affirmative action itself, have had a profound impact on American life. As economic columnist Robert J. Samuelson has pointed out in The Washington Post, many firms have changed their personnel policies. Recruitment has been broadened. Tests unrelated to qualifications have been scrapped. Promotions are less formal. Vacancies are posted publicly. Objective criteria are used in order to make formal evaluations. These changes work to the benefit of all Americans, regardless of race. Furthermore, there is no question that preventing and punishing racial discrimination – a central concern of the anti-discrimination laws – has been accepted by almost all Americans.

The kind and mix of public policies and private programs needed to make even further progress will require more discussion and debate among all of those with a stake in improving the prospects for Americans on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. But there is little doubt that such debate will transpire. Americans are pioneers of opportunity, and it is in the American character to take steps into new territory, even one as uncharted as this.