A subtle shift has occurred in the national debate on race. Slowly but surely, the language is getting more specific.
You can hear the change in major news broadcasts and read it on the pages of major news media, where “affirmative action” is slowly but steadily being displaced by more specific terms like “racial preferences” and “racial outreach.”
You can hear it in the language of Ward Connerly, the University of California regent who led the fight to pass Proposition 209, which bans racial and gender “preferences” in state hiring, contracts and college admissions. You could hear it in the nuances of President Clinton’s televised town hall meeting on race in Akron. When Clinton, working the floor like Oprah Winfrey, asked how many in the audience support “affirmative action in higher education,” affirmative-action critic Abigail Thernstrom piped in, “The issue, Mr. President is not affirmative action but racial preferences.”
She was making a good point. But, the president stuck to his language. He whirled around and asked, “Abigail, do you favor the United States Army abolishing the affirmative-action program that produced Colin Powell? Yes or no?”
Thernstrom responded that she did not think “racial preferences” made Powell. She also praised the Army’s efforts to upgrade the achievement levels of recruits of all races.
Clinton, beaming with the moment’s triumph, moved on. I thought the subject deserved more comment. I called former Secretary of the Army Clifford L. Alexander Jr., the man once at the center of what Clinton called “the affirmative-action program that produced Colin Powell.”
“Clinton got it wrong,” Alexander told me. Then he explained. When President Jimmy Carter appointed Alexander to be the first black secretary of any military branch in 1977, he received a list of colonels recommended for promotion to general that included “few or none of us (blacks) on it.”
Alexander told the review board to look again, to re-examine any factors that might have held back the performance ratings of any candidates. When he received a new list it had several new black names on it, including Powell, who, among other accomplishments, had graduated second in his class from Command and General Staff School.
Powell has since become a national icon of leadership whose popularity across racial lines borders on a national hysteria. It sounds almost sacrilegious to some ears to suggest Powell got ahead by anything more than “merit,” another tricky word.
But was it affirmative action? Yes, Alexander said, but with a light touch. He simply broadened the review board’s preconceptions about “merit.”
“When I started, there were no more than 10 black general officers,” he said. “When I left there were 30. Colin and 29 others were beneficiaries, if you want to call them that. They got nothing extra.”
Thernstrom, in an essay in the Dec. 15 Newsweek, says that’s okay. Powell benefited from “the proper kind of affirmative action,” she writes, “not a quota but a widening of the net.”
Powell, in his autobiography, agrees: “I benefited from equal opportunity and affirmative action in the Army, but I was not shown preference. . . . If a history of discrimination has made it difficult for certain Americans to meet standards, it is only fair to provide temporary means to help them catch up and compete on equal terms. Affirmative action in the best sense promotes equal consideration, not reverse discrimination.”
Affirmative action “in the best sense,” then, is outreach, not preferences. It is what Thernstrom called a “widening of the net,” not quotas or separate standards for women and minorities.
I suggest, then, that President Clinton and other advocates of affirmative action become more candid in their language. After all, it is not “affirmative action” that divides Americans, including the Democratic Party. It is “preferences.”
Yet, preferences do have their place. Martin Luther King, Jr., defended “preferential treatment” as a remedy for past discrimination. The Supreme Court has upheld them in specific instances and only under “strict scrutiny.” The high court has been rolling back its support of preferences, but, maybe that’s OK. Preferences were never intended to be permanent.
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But, even the most conservative justices support outreach. Clarence Thomas, for one, owes his seat to it.
Which also raises an interesting question: Was President George Bush’s nomination of the comparatively young and inexperienced Thomas an “outreach” or a “preference?”
Hmmmm. Now, that’s the kind of question that should be at center stage of a truly candid dialogue on race, if it’s not biting off more than even Clinton, our “national dialogue” president, cares to chew.