Assault on affirmative action.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.
• Position: Column

Not long ago I rode on the train back from Detroit within earshot of a white, freelance electrician who works for an international corporate temp agency. In the course of chatting about his work with another white passenger, he complained that his Detroit job had been hampered by the rest of his crow. He knew from the time they showed up that they would be a problem, he said, because, "First of all, one of them was Puerto Rican." Nearly everyone else on the car was black, so he may strained to let the Puerto Rican stand in for other minorities. He then talked disparagingly about how the crew members comported themselves raucously in hotel restaurants and bars - saying nothing at all about the quality of their work.

Later in the conversation, the electrician recounted an incident from a different job, in which a co-worker and buddy locked a donkey in a hotel room as a practical joke. The result was considerable property damage, but he narrated the tale with good humor, as boys-will-be-boys hi-jinks.

This anecdote underscores a problem that permeates American society and has consequences for many public debates - ranging from affirmative action to capital punishment to welfare: the same or comparable actions are judged differently, depending on the racial identities of the actors.

Now that the Republicans and their rightwing Democratic allies have chosen to make affirmative action their racist "wedge" issue of the year, constructing a reasonable, honest, and progressive perspective on affirmative action is particularly important.

Fundamental to the argument against affirmative action is the view that it makes tradeoffs between merit and quotas.

This view rests on two key premises: 1) that it is possible to isolate in the practical world of human choices some pure or absolute notion of merit; and 2) that the criteria that determined access to jobs and schools before the advent of affirmative action depended on such a notion of pure merit.

Of course, there is no idea of merit that is innocent of prejudice. Despite all the blather about "reverse discrimination," the closer we get to real cases, the clearer it is that work, school, and our public spaces are still full of precisely the sorts of exclusionist behavior that civil-rights enforcement seeks to overcome.

Employers and supervisors base their decisions on considerations that include the extent to which they feel comfortable with a given candidate, their sense of how an individual would "fit" in the workplace situation, and on vague feelings and prior assumptions about candidates' general abilities.

As with the electrician, those assumptions are likely to be influenced by racial or gender stereotypes. Not surprisingly, several studies using...