Next November the citizens of Colorado will vote on the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, a state constitutional amendment that prohibits preferences based on race, gender, national origin, color and ethnicity in state hiring, contracting and education. As this event approaches, Coloradoans will engage the debate over affirmative action that has roiled American politics for more than 40 years.
President Lyndon Johnson introduced affirmative action with the metaphor of a newly unshackled runner who needs help to catch up. Now, the dominant argument is that affirmative action is needed, not to make up for historically ingrained disability but to combat on-going racism. Barak Obama opposed the nearly identical Michigan Civil Rights Initiative with the claim that “there’s still barriers to women and minorities reaching their full potential.”
This shift in emphasis emerges from an admirable distaste for portraying African-Americans as, according to President Johnson, “crippled.” But the “contemporary racism” argument is hard to reconcile with the economic progress of black Americans.
One of the first to take notice of this progress is the (black) Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson who in his 1987 book “The Truly Disadvantaged” noted that “blacks have not only improved their social and economic positions in recent years, but have made those improvements at a relatively faster rate than the reported progress of comparable whites.”
For example, between 1973 and 1982 the number of blacks in professional, technical, managerial, and administrative positions increased by 57 percent while the number of whites in these positions increased by 36 percent.
This progress has continued. In 1970 just 1 percent of America’s engineers were black: in 2000 six percent were. The proportion of black physicians went from two to six percent and black lawyers increased from one to five percent. Between 1967 and 1997 white household income increased 18 percent while black household income increased by 31 percent.
The economic advance of black Americans has been masked by a misleading statistic. When black and white family incomes are compared, the former earn just 66 percent of the latter (up from 60 percent in 1995). However, most of this difference is explained by the higher frequency of single parent families: over 70 percent of black children are born to unmarried women. Marriage makes a huge difference: in 2000 black married couples earned 88 percent of the national average for married couples.
But even these numbers mask the progress of black Americans. When properly analyzed, the racial gap shrinks dramatically. That is, many factors other than race, like education and region (wages are lower in the South), are implicated in income inequality.
When truly comparable blacks and whites are matched income differences are vanishingly small. June O’Neill, economist and former Director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that college educated black men not in the South earned fully 97 percent of their white counterparts.
This remarkable statistic still understates the closing of the racial gap in earnings. In “America in Black and White” Steven and Abigail Thernstrom argued that differences that look like discrimination actually represent unequal cognitive skills. A study of men 26 to 33 years old found that when education was measured as years of schooling, blacks earned 19 percent less than whites.
But when education was measured by tests of cognitive skills: “Black men earned 9 percent more than white men with the same education — as defined by skill.” Earnings gaps thus represent differences in educational quality, not employer discrimination.
George Farkas, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Dallas, similarly found that when controls for differences in cognitive skills are added to controls for education, work experience, etc.: “the finding of race discrimination against Black men is gone!”
Many argue that affirmative action policies contributed to black progress.
But in his recent “Economic Facts and Fallacies” Thomas Sowell notes that black progress preceded passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, long before affirmative action could have played a role. For example, the percentage of black families below the poverty line fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960. The black poverty rate continued to fall from 47 to 30 percent during the sixties but then fell just one percentage point between 1970 and 1980 when affirmative action was in place.
The economic progress of women parallels that of blacks. Again, seeing this requires some statistical complication. When all women are compared with all men in the labor force the former make about 77 percent of the latter. This represents considerable progress from the early days of the women’s movement when activists wore buttons reading “59 cents” representing the earnings of women as a percentage of men. But more finely grained analysis — the “adjusted wage gap” – reveals even greater progress.
For example, women tend to major in lower paid fields, like education, rather than higher paid professions like engineering. Even within the same field, there are differences in earnings that have nothing to do with discrimination. A 1996 study of women physicians published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that after controlling for specialty, hours worked and a few other variables there was no gender gap in earnings.
One of the main reasons for the gender gap is child-bearing, which takes women out of the labor force and reduces hours worked. While men with children tend to earn more than those without, childbearing has the opposite effect on women’s earnings: they earn less.
According to “Women’s Figures” by Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba women between 27 and 33 with no children earn fully 97 percent of similar age men. Indeed, a more worrisome gender gap is the falling percentage of men in college: from 56 percent in 1972 to 44 percent today.
It’s likely that cultural bias plays a role in funneling women into lower paid fields. But this problem is better solved by outreach programs than by mandated quotas.
In fact, biases about jobs that are “suitable” for women are greatly diminished: we have had two female secretaries of state, both California senators are women, and there are many other examples — like Hillary Clinton’s candidacy — of gender stereotypes dissolving.
The movement of women into what were once thought of as “man’s work” is pervasive. In 1959 just three percent of the law students at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall were women. In 1996 fully 51 percent were women. There are now nearly as many women as men in medical school.
Those unimpressed by numbers ought to consider the peculiar logic of affirmative action. It is odd to ask a society to grant special advantages to those it allegedly cannot treat fairly. A society incapable of enforcing the employment discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act would surely be unwilling to institutionalize affirmative action.
Demanding favored treatment with the claim that fairness is unattainable, is like requesting a $200 raise after your boss has refused a request for $100.
Indeed, by asking for special advantage, advocates of affirmative action raise doubts about the seriousness of their claim that America is beset by bias: one who believes that fairness is unattainable would be bound to believe that advantaged treatment would be impossible.
Paradoxically, the demand for affirmative action reveals confidence that America today is in fact highly responsive to the aspirations of minorities and women.
Surely there are problems of bias in American society. But employment discrimination can be treated with rigorous enforcement of existing laws that do not threaten the goal of a gender and color-blind respect for individual merit that was the original aim of the civil rights movement.
Advocates of the CCRI emphatically support such enforcement, as well as outreach programs to increase the participation of minorities and women.
They also support efforts to assist the economically disadvantaged regardless of color or gender.
In light of the progress that blacks and women have made in America, it is no longer possible to use race or gender as markers of disadvantage.
Rather, efforts should be made to help the truly disadvantaged regardless of race or gender.
David Rubinstein of Boulder is Emeritus Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago. EDITOR’S NOTE: This online-only guest commentary has not been edited. Guest commentary submissions of up to 650 words may be sent to openforum@denverpost.com.
