Arthur Fletcher, now 78, was Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Nixon Administration (George Shultz was Secretary) and one of the leading architects of the “Philadelphia Plan,” the forerunner of modern affirmative action. A Knight-Ridder article about him today reveals how far we’ve come, and haven’t. (Link thanks to Howard Bashman)
Social Justice? Diversity? Nope.
“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.
Fletcher thinks “diversity” provides too weak a foundation for his version of affirmative action, but his displeasure with the implications of racial preferences strikes me as misdirected.
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 Michigan cases this month.
That would be Justice Antonin Scalia’s question to Michigan 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 with 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.
Of course one does not have to argue that minorities “are forever and always incapable of competing with white America” in order to believe they should be asked to meet the same standards as everyone else. It is not Justice Scalia’s question that is insulting; it is the implication of inferiority that is at the core of the argument for racial preferences.
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.
Abandoning the non-discrimination principle thus results in the belief that the absence of racial preference amounts to racial exclusion. This is not what Arthur Fletcher believed at the beginning of his career in civil rights, but the turn he took with the “Philadelphia Plan,” small though it seems by today’s standards, led inexorably to the rough road we’re now on.
Let’s hope the Supremes end this costly and troubling detour around the principle of equal treatment.
