AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ON TRIAL: A door for women, minorities AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ON TRIAL: A door for women, minorities
Keep a tight focus on opportunity, not diversity
April 24, 2003
BY MARY SANCHEZ
Arthur Fletcher is awaiting the Supreme Court's decision on the University of Michigan's affirmative-action policies from a unique, well-earned vantage point. Fletcher's is the peaceful perspective of an aging man, content with how he lived his life. We should all be so lucky at 78. Fletcher is the grandfather of affirmative action. As the assistant secretary of labor under Richard Nixon in 1969, Fletcher issued an order known as the Revised Philadelphia Plan.
The plan called for a good-faith effort to hire women and minorities as part of bid specifications for government contracts in naval shipping yards. It became the blueprint for affirmative-action programs. Not that Fletcher would claim ownership of the many ways his plan has been co-opted and distorted to get away from his original concept -- ensuring bias didn't close access to jobs that benefited from government subsidies. "Affirmative action as I perceived it didn't have a darn thing to do with social justice," Fletcher said recently from his Washington home.
Affirmative action for the sake of diversity or multiculturalism came much later. Their mention brings a scoff from Fletcher. "I would be wasting my time trying to pursue some la-la land where discrimination doesn't exist," Fletcher said. "I'm more concerned with how do we go over it, around it and through it." It isn't that Fletcher doesn't see the value of the social arguments. He knows that bringing together different types of thinking and backgrounds generally contributes to sound decisions.
Top business executives know this, too. That's why so many blue-chip companies filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the University of Michigan cases arguing they needed the ability to use race as one in a wide range of criteria. Fletcher argues America can ill afford to limit large segments of its citizenry and expect to maintain national security or economic strength.
He also believes social arguments for diversity are difficult to measure, and therefore, enforce. Fletcher scorns what was the saddest and most telling of comments from the Supreme Court justices as lawyers argued the U-M cases this month. That would be Justice Antonin Scalia's question to U-M lawyers that if adding minorities to the rolls was so important, why not just lower your standards?
Implicit in the question was the idea that blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans or any people who might be considered "of color" are automatically going to be inferior to the white students admitted. Even giving a nod to disparate test scores and rates of high school dropouts among black and Hispanic students, that doesn't mean that these students are forever and always incapable of competing with white America.
Take the story of Fletcher. He is the son of a Buffalo Soldier and was raised mostly in Junction City, Kan. Fletcher was in college before his dyslexia was discovered. Fletcher attended Washburn University in Topeka, Kan., through one of the greatest affirmative-action programs ever -- the GI Bill, which exchanged a college education for military service.
A kind professor worked with Fletcher, teaching him to write as well as he thought. She didn't lower standards for him. She added to his skills. Even though Fletcher disagrees with the Michigan stand of arguing diversity in its rationale, he shudders at the idea of the court ruling in a way that might stymie efforts to get minorities into the mix. "If they can keep us out of undergraduate and graduate schools, then they have robbed us of the one thing we need to make the system work for us, the opportunity to get an equal and advanced education," Fletcher said.
Fletcher likes to say he is "kicking, but not too high." He said his generation's challenge was to "lay the strategies and tactics." Retool affirmative action, sure. Rename it, since the term itself has become so vile for so many. Figure out what works best for educational admissions, for the military, for government programs, for business. But keep Fletcher's legacy -- one of inclusion -- intact
. MARY SANCHEZ is an opinion-page columnist for the Kansas City Star. Write to her at msanchezkcstar.com or at Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413. MORE COLUMNS FREEP FRONT | VOICES FRONT
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