The Boston Globe has an article today about growing, er, reservations on the Democratic reservation concerning Joe Lieberman’s and John Kerry’s reliability on the matter of preferences (Link via Howard Bashman).
Both Lieberman and Kerry have embarrassing statements in their pre-presidential-aspirational pasts questioning quotas and quota look-alikes. Lieberman especially had rather a lot of them. In 1995 he said affirmative action programs “must change because they are inconsistent with the law and basic American values of equal treatment and opportunity.” Another time he said “You can’t defend policies that are based on group preferences as opposed to individual opportunities.” Running for president now and not vice president, it may be hard for him to live these down no matter how many times he genuflects to Maxine Waters.
Kerry, too, has a similar skeleton or two. At Yale in 1992 he said that affirmative action “kept America thinking in racial terms” and did not help those who needed it most.
“I think they are going to need to clarify their positions in short order,” harrumphed Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU’s Washington office.
The clarifying has begun. Lieberman says through a spokesman that he’s always supported affirmative action, especially after Clinton’s reforms and after some of the most unfair examples had been ruled unconstitutional. (The spokesman did not specify what reforms the Senator had in mind or which Supreme Court decisions the Senator approved.)
Kerry has been equally clear.
“If you read my speech from 1992, you will see that I stated very clearly that I support affirmative action,” Kerry said. “There was no equivocation. What I objected to then, and still do today, are racial quotas that divide America and create resentment among Americans.”
In a statement issued January 15, Kerry blasted the Bush administration decision “to intervene and try to undermine Michigan’s efforts” at diversity, which he described as another example of its “disturbing pattern of using the rhetoric of diversity as a substitute for real progress on a civil rights agenda.” Kerry believes, he continued,
in an America where we take common sense steps to ensure that our schools and workplaces reflect the full face of America, and that is apparently a very different vision of America than that put forth by the Bush Administration.
During the course of his campaign perhaps we will be fortunate enough to hear from Sen. Kerry exactly why he dislikes quotas (or at least those quotas “that divide America and create resentment among Americans”) even as he approves of Michigan’s 20 bonus points for race and its determination to lower requirements for minority law school applicants enough every year to insure the acceptance of a quota-sized “critical mass” of minority students, since those policies also “divide America and create resentment among Americans.”
it’s quotas today, yesterday it was goals and timetables. if the standard for support of affirmative action is that which will not cause resentment one should truly examine the politics of resentment. after all, we did so in california and that’s why pete wilson was voted out on his ear.
be that as it may, i am curious to know discrimination’s positions on the ‘balanced workforce’ model of affirmative action which is a race and gender conscious model of sucession planning.
quickly described, you measure the number of employees who have proven themselves eligible for promotion and seek proportional representation across the boundry.
for example:
say you have 10 jobs in grade 6. four of those positions are open. all six of the filled positions belong to group w. in grade 5 you have 10 positions. half are group w the other half are group b.
within grade 5 only 6 are eligible for promotion and it just so happens that they are equally split 50/50. if you have 4 spots open in grade 6 the balanced workforce model says you should promote with respect to the balance in the eligible pool. specifically, two from each group.
since the model is self-correcting, it can remain in place indefinitely. but it also has the failure of being objective in that it shows where glass ceilings exist, and exactly (as in exact quotas, goals, numbers) what it takes to achieve balance.
whenever people are hired or fired there’s resentment. are such eggs simply not worth breaking? are we truly that sensitive?
Cobb – I agree that divisiveness is not a fatal criticism. The early civil rights movement, after all, was also divisive, especially in the South, but it was clearly right and should not have packed up and gone home simply because many people were angered by its actions. On the other hand, while not fatal, it is often a relevant criticim. Busing was a bad idea, for example, in large part because of the bitter anger it elicited, which led to “white flight,” which led to increased racial separation. Whatever one thinks about the theory of busing (I don’t like it because of its overt racial classification and assigning students to schools explicitly based on their race), in practice it flopped and did much more harm than good.
As for “balanced workforce,” I must confess that I’m not familiar with it. (You will have discovered I’m not familiar with quite a lot.) But as you describe it, I wouldn’t like it. I don’t like efforts to maintain racial balance any more than I would like efforts to maintain religious balance, and for many of the same reasons. I think we should adopt policies that move toward race irrelevant as a basis for success or failure, reward or punishment, and I think that policies that enshrine race as avenues for advancement (just as I thought policies that made race a barrier to advancement) are wrong and go in the wrong direction. The very least of my objections, but one that I will mention here because it seems relevant to your example, is that attempts at racial balance require organizations to lower their standards — to settle for “qualified” or “eligible” instead of seeking out and promoting the most qualified. Granted, in some areas the only meaningful distinction is between people who do a certain job and people who can’t, but in most areas, I believe, there are degrees of qualification, and institutions (educational, employment, gov’t, whatever) should not only be free but be encouraged to seek out the very best.
to clarify a bit, this is the same program which won accolades from both the national urban league and the national business roundtable, run then by senator bob dole. it borrows heavily from the military model of affirmative action.
as regards ‘eligble for promotion’, i am speaking of the kind of rigid meritocracy the military applies, rather than the squishy types balkin alludes to with respect to supreme court nominations.
specifically at the company with which i am familiar, eligible for promotion meant that one got two ratings of ‘4’ (out of 5) in a row. to the extent that any corporation would have a standardized method of evaluating all of their employees, (especially vis a vis ISO 9000-type guidelines) this is about as objective as it gets in the work world for people who are not line managers or on sales quotas.
obviously there will always be subjective measures, and of course race plays a role subjectively that anyone who recognizes resentment must agree. is it better for race to be objectified into a measureable factor or always subjective and immeasurable?
i have always found balanced workforce to be a useful for estimating where a glass ceiling would be in an organization. again, if the eligibility requirements set by the same organization show a bias when evaluated, why should we not take that seriously? if we are not counting noses, what do we count?