With perhaps too much chutzpah, I shouted, ““The issue, Mr. President, is not affirmative action but racial preferences.” I didn’t have the microphone in my hand at the moment, but the president heard me and wheeled around. ““Abigail,” he asked, "” do you favor the United States Army abolishing the affirmative-action program that produced Colin Powell? Yes or no?”
This is not a question that can be answered with a yes or a no, and the discussion of race requires thoughtfulness, not theater. Most Americans believe in affirmative action as it was originally conceived: as outreach–a nondiscriminatory search fo r the best possible person regardless of race. But the overwhelming majority of Americans are opposed to racial preferences–numerical quotas, goals or timetables that lead to double standards. They do not think America has solved its racial problems. Fe w are so naive as to believe that the country has miraculously become colorblind. But most do not like policies that view people first and foremost as members of racial groups. They also know that in a society already too conscious of race, double standa rds in contracting, employment and admissions (that is, when less is expected of blacks and Hispanics than of whites and Asians) widen the racial divide, heightening rather than reducing race consciousness and racial tension.
The Colin Powell example is instructive. When the president turned to me, I told him that I do not think racial preferences made Powell. And I went on to note that the army does something very right: it prepares recruits to compete on a level playi ng field. But our short exchange ended there.
Preferences ignore and disguise the real problem: a racial gap in cognitive skills, a crisis the military understands and addresses. The armed forces are an equal-opportunity program–or at least as close to one as we can get in an imperfect world. Minorities do well in the services because they are, by and large, treated equally, and rise or fall according to their merits, not their race. And most of the time, the best go far.
At one point in his career, Powell did benefit from the proper kind of affirmative action–not a quota but a widening of the net. The question was promotion to brigadier general. A list of candidates had been sent to the secretary of the army, Clif ford Alexander, and it included no blacks. Alexander sent it back saying, in effect, look again. Powell, who, among other accomplishments, had graduated second in his class from Command and General Staff School, was added. The rest, as they say, was hist ory.
That approach to affirmative action–in the military, in universities, in the corporate world–is right; racial preferences are wrong. The debate often centers on higher education, and I believe that admissions should be colorblind. When, for examp le, the University of California, Berkeley, admitted black and Hispanic students with SAT scores 300 points on average below those of whites and Asians (and with similarly lower grade-point averages), that is a preference. In the short run, abolishing ra cial factors in admissions will mean fewer non-Asian minorities in top colleges, and that is painful.
But in the long run, there is only one genuine solution to the nation’s continuing inequality: close the appalling, unacceptable racial gap in educational performance in the K-12 years. Today, on average, a black 12th grader reads almost four years behind the average white student. And there are similar disparities in other subjects. Shame on us that we set any of our kids up for failure in a world in which only the highly skilled do well. We can do better–and we were doing better just a decade a go, when the gap between whites and blacks in educational performance was closing.
Thankfully, there is emerging agreement on this crucial point. ““The era of dual standards is over,” Hugh Price, president of the National Urban League, said recently. ““We have got to get our kids clearly and unquestionably qualified.” Precisely. Real equality of opportunity is the key to minority advancement, not double standards. Let’s abandon the latter, and get to work on creating the former. That would be real progress.
