African Americans Split Over I-200

Friday, October 23, 1998

by Lynne K. Varner
Seattle Times staff reporter

African Americans in this state are statistically invisible - just 3.4 percent of the population. As part of the electorate, their numbers are even smaller.

Yet, much of the debate over Initiative 200, the state ballot measure many view as a referendum on affirmative action, focuses on race. Real or not, many African Americans believe that focus has turned the spotlight on them, but without giving them much of a voice in the discussion.

The result, say black community leaders, business owners and others, is often an uncomfortable tension as the Nov. 3 election approaches. While opposition to the initiative is assumed to be high among blacks, it's neither unanimous nor easy.

In fact, though stereotyped as blind supporters of affirmative action - and therefore as opponents of I-200 - many African Americans find themselves in what they regard as a difficult position of defending a policy they don't wholeheartedly embrace. It's not that they think discrimination isn't a problem any longer, but after that, views vary on the solution.

King County Executive Ron Sims reflects the prevailing view among African Americans that affirmative-action programs remain necessary. The "preferences" targeted by the initiative are a feeble counterweight to the sort of blatant discrimination that even someone as successful as Sims encounters regularly, he says.

Initiative 200, according to its sponsors, would not end affirmative action. But it would drastically weaken it, at least in the public sector.

Specifically, the ballot title reads: "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting."

Economics are a key

Charles Rolland agrees with Sims that affirmative action is necessary, but he dreams of a program that emphasizes economic status in addition to race, even as he wages a fight against I-200.

His ambivalence has formed over decades of experience in business. When Rolland began an energy-consulting business 18 years ago, he gravitated toward the city of Seattle, where 15 percent of all contracts were targeted toward minority- and women-owned firms.

But Rolland's optimism soon changed to frustration as he watched a fellow consultant, an East Indian from a wealthy, politically connected family, develop a lucrative business by bidding on minority contracts while using his connections and those of his largely white-male staff to move beyond the confines of minority set-asides.

"Here I was from the projects of Chicago and a segregated school system, and it burned me to no end that this guy with resources, opportunity and access was able to compete in the same shallow, little end of the pool that I was in," Rolland recalls.

"I don't know if that was how this program was intended to work."

Rolland is not sure exactly how a new affirmative-action plan would look, but he says it should examine the core of racism and how it affects children.

"When they teach on Indian reservations that Christopher Columbus discovered America, what are we teaching?" he asks.

His disappointment is shared by Claudette Hatcher, an African American from Bellevue. But unlike Rolland, she doesn't want to mend the program, she wants to end it.

"Companies have been using affirmative action as a quota system, concentrating mainly on blacks and whites," Hatcher says. "But the top echelon of these companies remain white, while it's mostly the lower-level areas that are diverse."

Series of frustrations

Hatcher, 29, is a stage actress who speaks six languages and once lived and taught in Japan. She was recruited out of high school to attend Pitzer College in Southern California. Yet, her life has been a series of career frustrations.

Hatcher wanted to be a model but was told by a local agency that it already had three black models. A promotion she coveted at a former job was given to an older white woman. The reason: Hatcher, while more experienced in the customer-service field, had not been with the company as long as the other woman. To Hatcher, it seemed she was being blamed for having a short tenure with a company that until recently had employed few blacks.

"I really haven't seen affirmative action work for me," she sums up.

She supports the initiative, preferring alternatives such as mentoring and self-help programs.

Some blacks speak of a quiet rage that grows as they watch the affirmative-action debate. It is often distilled to simplistic terms of black and white, qualified or unqualified. Given the narrow choice of keeping affirmative action or leaving it, some say they have little option but to defend the plan every time.

"The affirmative-action debate is being argued disingenuously. It's not a yes-or-no thing," says Alvin Williams, executive director of Black America's Political Action Committee, a Washington, D.C., group that supports conservative causes.

Ballot measures such as I-200, Williams says, do not reflect the complexity of the issue nor do they highlight the disparities among races in education and employment. Proponents of the initiative "are sending an `I don't give a damn attitude,' " Williams said.

There is some common ground. A Seattle Times poll this year found that most Washington residents believe racial and gender discrimination still exists. Yet, there remains disagreement over affirmative action. Many believe that mandate has led to the displacement of whites in the workplace for the benefit of minority groups.

Certainly, affirmative action has been a factor in the development of a large black middle class. But statistics continue to show a wide disparity between whites and blacks in the workplace.

While African Americans make up 3.4 percent of the state's population, they make up only 2.8 percent of the job force. Most private companies are still headed by white men. On average, white men are still paid more than minorities and white women.

Blacks losing ground

In pay, black men have actually lost ground in relation to white men since 1980, according to statewide research conducted by The Times. And the gap between the proportion of black and white workers employed as managers, which had narrowed considerably in the 1970s, has begun to widen again.

Nationally, blacks, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, are 12.6 percent of the U.S. population, yet just 5.8 percent of all officials and managers and 5.9 percent of all professionals. They are over-represented in low-paying, low-skilled, blue-collar occupations.

Data gathered this year showed black men earning 75 percent of every dollar made by white men in the same jobs, while black women made 87.7 percent of what white women earn.

While I-200 would not affect hiring practices at private companies or those that contract with the federal government, the status of African Americans and other within those arenas is relevant to the discussion about equal opportunity.

The Federal Glass Ceiling Commission found in a 1995 report that "many judgments on hiring and promotion are made on the basis of a look, the shape of a body, or the color of skin."

The Commission's findings are the very reason County Executive Sims opposes I-200.

He says society is far from color-blind and recalls a trip months ago to Washington, D.C., where he entered a hotel accompanied by a top aide. The hotel clerk walked up to the aide, a white man, and handed him a message addressed to the county executive. Sims tried to get the clerk's attention but was told to wait until the county executive had gotten his message.

A frustrated Sims tried again, and the clerk turned around impatiently. "I am talking to Mr. Sims, I'll be with you in a moment!"

"I am Mr. Sims!" Sims replied.

"He never assumed that I could be the county executive," Sims recounted later. "That's how far we are from being a color-blind society."

Nate Miles, a marketing manager at Eli Lilly & Co., does not try to hide his frustration as he describes the everyday problems that confound his life but not those of his white co-workers.

When Miles goes on frequent business trips through Eastern Washington to Montana and Idaho, he exercises extreme caution. Driving down the rural roads invites stares, he says, because blacks are few in those areas. He worries about hate crimes, avoids the streets after dark and rarely dines alone with white female colleagues.

"Do you realize that we're in a region of the country where the Freemen held off the government of the United States?" Miles says, referring to an anti-government group that in 1996 engaged in an armed standoff with the FBI.

"If they didn't care about shooting federal officers, you think they'd give a damn about shooting me?"

Miles and his wife, Lesley Harper-Miles, spend much of their personal time working to defeat I-200. Both attended the University of Washington under its Equal Opportunity Program (EOP). Both are in professional jobs they say they earned on their own merit. But it was affirmative action that gave them the opportunity to earn graduate degrees and qualify for employment.

"If the government or someone doesn't step in and say, `You know what, we have some Hispanics and black people who are qualified and looking for a job,' they won't hire any people of color," Miles says.

The Mileses' story, when related to older African Americans, resonates deeply. They remember the birth of affirmative action as an event designed to counter the fact that businesses 35 years ago hired few minorities.

Equal treatment sought

Affirmative action emerged as one solution to the clamor in the 1950s and '60s, when blacks collectively sought voting rights and equal opportunity in housing, education and employment.

"Blacks weren't looking for special treatment, they wanted the same opportunity to earn money from tax-supported projects as anyone else," says Don Alexander, a retired construction worker and member of the Seattle Human Rights Commission.

Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson and fine-tuned by the Nixon administration, created federal affirmative-action mandates and with it goals and timetables for the hiring of minority and women workers.

However, the federal program's enforcement has depended entirely on a presidential administration's stance on affirmative action. Throughout its history, the policy has been haphazardly enforced, and its primary sanction - debarment from federal contracts - has rarely happened, according to the American Sociological Association in its recent report, "The Realities of Affirmative Action in Employment."

Now, with the vote on I-200 looming, many African Americans are questioning where to go from here.

King County Department of Transportation head Paul Toliver, who supports affirmative-action programs, says the absence of a government push toward equality would give black Americans no other choice but to create their own economic renaissance.

That was the stance taken by the Rev. Jesse Jackson on a recent visit to Seattle. Jackson announced an Operation Push plan to purchase $50,000 worth of stock in Northwest companies as a way of acquiring clout through ownership.

He also urged African Americans to protest with their money, even if it meant ending business relationships with companies that discriminate.

Louise Daw is a Seattle woman offering a similar but more old-fashioned alternative to affirmative action: a return to self-reliance. That is what has seen her through since she decided affirmative action wasn't the answer.

Daw speaks of the lean days when she supported her children with welfare and selling homemade jams so that she could stay home and rear them. While home-schooling her sons, she took them to see former President Bush during his campaign swing through the Northwest. Now her son, David, works for Rep. Linda Smith, R-Hazel Dell.

Daw taught herself to make turbans for cancer patients and pounded the pavement selling them to stores. One large department store turned her away, saying they had already met their minority vending goals for the year.

Even now, when money is tight, Daw turns inward. She picks onions, green beans and tomatoes from her garden to toss in stir-fry and picks up part-time jobs where she can.

"The system is unjust when it comes to equal distribution of the wealth, but we have to find another way," Daw says. "You can't go around thinking that people owe you something."

Affirmative action is more than a government mandate and won't end without such mandates, people interviewed for this story agreed. It refers to any positive step that ensures diversity. That includes aeronautical-engineering firms funding minority scholarships, schools using extra money to start up girls sports or mathematics clubs, even the government allowing small businesses to compete in an arena separate from larger firms that otherwise would outbid them every time.

But Sen. Rosa Franklin, the lone black woman in the state Senate, said such initiatives are minor when compared to the strength and breadth of government-mandated affirmative-action plans.

"I don't want to be a fatalist," the Tacoma Democrat said. "But if we as a country had wanted to do the right thing by minorities, we wouldn't have had to have affirmative action in the first place."

Return to the I-200 page.
Return to the Affirmative Action and Diversity Page

Carl Gutiérrez-Jones
Department of English
University of California, Santa Barbara
e-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu