GROUNDS FOR OPPOSITION

What was this “original position” that opposed the development of race preference in a number of fields? I should note to begin that the primary area of affirmative action discussed in Affirmative Discrimination was employment. Employment was the heart of the dispute over affirmative action during the first fifteen or twenty years of its history. The major Supreme Court cases that seemed to punctuate almost every year in the 1970s and 1980s dealt largely with employment policies, by public and private employers. The book did not even discuss race preference in contracts—which became a major battleground of the affirmative action cases of the 1990s, and where some of the first cracks in the series of decisions protecting affirmative action were made.

Nor did Affirmative Discrimination discuss race preference in admissions in higher education, an issue that has dominated the conflict over affirmative action in recent years. That issue was already controversial, but the book dealt only with government action, with what government required, and except for the special case of Black and White public colleges and universities in the South, the federal government and the courts never imposed or required race preference in admissions to institutions of higher education.

The book also dealt with two other areas of public action that are not normally discussed under the rubric of affirmative action: busing under court or federal requirements to achieve certain proportions of the races in public schools, and policies designed to reach certain proportions of Black and White in government-supported housing. Racial targets in schools and housing were needed, it was then argued, both to integrate Black and White pupils and neighborhoods, and because only such numerical targets could demonstrate that discrimination and segregation had been overcome. In time the busing requirements were abandoned in most cities, their ineffectuality—as was argued in Affirmative Discrimination—having been demonstrated; and the policies designed to overcome concentrations of Blacks and Whites in housing never went far. These areas of policy are not generally thought of when one discusses “affirmative action,” though they share two elements in common with the policies affecting employment: They were governmentally required policies, rather than policies voluntarily adopted, and they set the achievement of statistical targets for proportions of White and Black as a test to demonstrate the elimination of discrimination.

To return to that initial book: On what grounds was this assault on affirmative action launched? Arguments against affirmative action can be various. I had four arguments against these policies.

First was the assumption, then almost universally shared, that the aim of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and of all persons of good will, was a color-blind society, the realization of the ideal of the dissent in the Plessy decision—that government should not take account of the race of Americans, and should be color-blind. But here was government acting in direct violation of this objective by setting racial requirements in employment, and moving beyond non-discrimination to the achievement of fixed quotas. Of course much of the discussion of the time tried to distinguish between “goals” and “quotas,” but if the affirmative action requirements were enforced strictly, as they sometimes were, it was hard to see the distinction. If the agents of enforcement were large employers trying to avoid penalties, the simplest thing was indeed to set a “quota” to guide lower-level managers. So the first ground for opposition was that these policies transgressed a general liberal aim.

The second ground for opposition was that Blacks were making good progress, and did not require this crutch. Discrimination had been declining even before the Civil Rights Act. It had not been as thoroughly institutionalized in the North and West as in the South—just as segregation in the North and West was not a publicly mandated policy. Blacks were moving into occupations of higher status and were reducing the large gap in income between Blacks and Whites. Affirmative Discrimination gave evidence of this progress.

A third ground was that affirmative action could not reach the really serious problems of the Black community, the formation of a large underclass with poor educational and work qualifications and weak attachment to the labor force.

A fourth ground was that these policies, which had been instituted to deal with the great problem of American history, the condition of Blacks, threatened to create a society permanently divided by race, ethnicity, or national origin. Affirmative action policies in the 1970s had already gone beyond Blacks to include other minorities that either did not need such policies (Asian Americans, or “Orientals”, as they were first named in affirmative action requirements), and others (Hispanics and American Indians) whose circumstances were very different. Policies of preference once instituted were hard to abandon. And if Hispanics (including persons of Spanish origin!) were eligible, why not Poles, or Eastern Europeans? Even that classic minority, Jews, might be eligible. One could already see proposals for this sort of expansion at the time Affirmative Discrimination was written (Glazer 1975b, p. 75).

BLACKS IN THE CONTEXT OF AMERICAN ETHNIC GROUPS

Behind these views was a point of view on ethnicity and race in the United States that had been developed in Beyond the Melting Pot (Glazer and Moynihan, 1963) and in other writings (Glazer 1964), particularly in a paper whose origin was in a debate with William Wilson (Glazer 1971b). In Beyond the Melting Pot Blacks—Negroes then—were considered and treated as another ethnic group, parallel to the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Puerto Ricans. This was a distinctly New York City perspective: the book was about New York City. Latecomers for the most part to New York City (there had always been an African American community in New York but massive movement to the city came only after the large Jewish and Italian immigration), Black backwardness economically and educationally could be explained in part by recent arrival from the South. I considered the ethnic and racial groups as forming part of a spectrum of differential achievement which could be explained by a distinctive history, culture, and circumstances at time of arrival, as well as by prejudice and discrimination.

In retrospect, I believe I was wrong. There was a sharp difference between the circumstances of European ethnic groups and Blacks, indeed a gulf, because of the peculiar harshness of Black circumstances in America, and the distinctive American mind-set, which also infected recent European immigrants, that consigned Blacks to the lowest position. But having been born and been raised in the slums of New York City, and familiar with Blacks, Irish, and Italians, from personal experience, I will confess at the time I did not see this difference. Black youths could be dangerous and should be avoided, but no more dangerous than the Irish and less dangerous than the Italians. I was influenced by the crude ethnology of the streets, in which the concentration of people of one ethnicity in distinctive areas seemed normal and understandable to me, as were the varying degrees of hostility and antagonism among them. I found persuasive the demographic argument of Nathan Kantrowitz (Glazer 1973c) that the segregation of Blacks in New York City was only marginally greater than that of other ethnic groups.

RACE PREFERENCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION

With Affirmative Discrimination, I had taken a stand in a liberal academic environment against school busing and race preference, and inevitably became involved in disputes on these issues. I was called upon to debate these issues, and I frequently did, at Harvard and elsewhere, and frequently wrote on the issues in the newspapers (Glazer, 1972b, 1973a). (I have not bothered to include other newspaper writings in the references.) The issue I had not discussed in Affirmative Discrimination, racial preference in admission to colleges and universities, was often the subject of the public debates and newspaper columns, and here my position was more complicated. Primarily I was against governmental imposition of targets and quotas, a policy which seemed to assume that in a nondiscriminatory society one should expect each ethnic and racial group, and men and women, to be distributed roughly equally through the socioeconomic spectrum. This grated against my sociological understanding of the causes of differential occupational distribution. The opposite was rather to be expected—crudely put, that the Irish would be the policemen and the politicians, the Italians the contractors and builders, the Jews the small businessmen, and so on. Once again, this point of view can be criticized as based on a crude street ethnography. But certainly one could find reasons for certain occupational distributions. The distribution of various racial and ethnic groups and women within higher education could not be traced simply to prejudice and discrimination by the most powerful.

The issue of the very small Black presence in elite institutions of higher education, colleges, and professional schools, at a time when these institutions did not discriminate in admissions on the basis of race, raised some problems quite different from that of governmentally required targets for employers who were government contractors, the main area of dispute over affirmative action. By the time Affirmative Discrimination was written, discrimination against Blacks in institutions of higher education was a thing of the past. The issue was now special programs to prepare Black youths for admission to selective academic institutions, and commitments, often adopted under the pressure of Black students, to increase their number by admitting students who would not ordinarily qualify academically for the institution in question. (In the case of the undergraduate institution I had attended in the 1940s, there was no discrimination on grounds of race; admission was entirely on the basis of grades in high school. The graduate institutions I had attended—the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University—had not discriminated against Blacks as far as I was aware for decades.) Few people opposed special programs for high school students in low-income areas to improve their chances of entry. But how far should institutions go in recruiting and admitting students far below their minimal academic requirements?

There were a number of issues here that made it different from the case of affirmative action in employment. One was that these programs were voluntary on the part of the institutions. Of course one could debate just how “voluntary” they were: in some cases they were adopted because of fear of racial disturbances (Karabel 2004), or because Black students and their liberal allies threatened to or did occupy administrative offices or engaged in other acts of disruption. Insofar as these policies were voluntary rather than state imposed, academic freedom should have allowed academic institutions a degree of discretion in selecting their student bodies and their faculties.

But applying the term voluntary to an institutional action is tricky. Preference for race was not governmentally imposed, yes, but was it “voluntary” when the administration adopted it and required faculty to live with what it had adopted? I did not oppose voluntary action taken by academic institutions—or by employers, or by housing developers, or by school authorities—to attain a reasonable degree of integration, or to provide benefits to persons from groups that had been disadvantaged. Whether moved by liberal persuasion, charitable instinct, or the pursuit of the virtues of diversity, such actions should not be opposed; indeed, I supported them. I recall a conversation with Seymour Martin Lipset, long before affirmative action, on how we could get a Black sociologist for the Department at Berkeley. I thought it would be good for the Department, and I never dreamed that such considerations would fall under a ban against discrimination. But once government imposed its rule of no discrimination on account of race, etc., how could such positive voluntary action be distinguished legally from discrimination pure and simple?

The Civil Rights Law, and the Fourteenth Amendment, with their presumption of color blindness, permitted White students to bring suits against institutions on grounds of discrimination. Voluntary action in the interests of those who had been deprived and faced prejudice and discrimination should, I thought, be encouraged and defended rather than attacked on the ground that they transgressed the ideal of a color-blind society. I was not an absolutist on the issue of color blindness. Indeed, in one passage that some noted in Affirmative Discrimination I wrote that if affirmative action had important practical and pragmatic advantages, the ideal of color blindness should not be allowed to stand in the way of its implementation: “For me, no consideration of principle—such as merit should be rewarded, or that governmental programs should not discriminate on grounds of race or ethnic group—would stand in the way of a program of preferential hiring if it made some substantial progress in reducing the severe problems of the lower-income black population and the inner cities” (Glazer 1976, p. 73). This concession was attacked by one Black libertarian sociologist (Wortham 1977), and I am sure was looked at askance by others with whom I was allied at the time in opposing affirmative action.

Despite these considerations, which removed me from the absolutist insistence that there must be no account at all taken of race, on the whole I was a critic of admitting students with markedly lower qualifications than those in use at an institution because of their race. Undoubtedly my position was influenced by the fact that to me, at the time, admission on the basis of academic achievement was the liberal and progressive position since it had replaced previous long-standing discrimination against Jews. It had been only a few decades, if that much, since quotas limiting Jewish students had been prevalent in major selective institutions and in medical and law schools. It was easy to transfer opposition to quotas that limited the number of students of a given ethnic or racial or religious background who could be admitted to an institution to quotas that raised the small numbers of students of a given race who could be admitted.

These considerations affected my response to the complex Bakke decision in 1978. Here a divided court granted Bakke admission to the Medical School of the University of California at Davis because he had been excluded in favor of minority students with inferior test scores. But it also accepted diversity in education as a ground for taking race into consideration in admissions. I supported the decision. It was messy indeed, with four justices on one side and four on the other, and only Justice Powell making the case for diversity, thus joining on this one issue the four justices who favored taking race into account on larger grounds.

In a symposium at the Washington University Law School in 1979, I wrote: “… the Powell compromise is one we should all embrace for a range of reasons, few of which will have much merit to constitutional lawyers…. I want to broaden the discussion beyond the narrow and complex matter of the Supreme Court's judgment, teetering as it does on a razor's edge, … to ask what is best for us as a nation? How do men of good will, concerned for the joint objectives of justice for minorities and harmony among the varied ethnic and racial elements of the nation, now proceed? Most of us who defend individual rights already accept … many programs that do reach out and make special efforts to assist members of given racial and ethnic groups…. Few of us who sit on admissions committees and appointment committees have really applied a rigid colorblind policy. We have leaned over backwards for some applicants, some potential faculty members. That makes us all law-breakers if we were to apply strictly Title VI [of the Civil Rights Law] and the fourteenth amendment” (Glazer 1979, pp. 93, 97–98).

A CHINK GROWS LARGER

These were pragmatic grounds for taking account of race. But at the same time I was developing a more theoretical ground for affirmative action for Blacks, if not for other racial or ethnic groups in the United States. Looking around the world, one could see divided societies in which groups were sharply distinguished from one another, and in which any hope for peace depended on rights so distributed as to give each group, as a group, a share of power and opportunity. There were the cases of Belgium, Lebanon, Israel, Malaysia, and others. Color blindness, or group blindness, our American objective, was meaningless in such societies. In the United States, there was an agreed-upon national objective of integration, a hope for the reduction of differences, for the making of Americans out of people from many races and ethnic groups, as had happened often in our history. The maintenance of a rigid line of division between groups, while it was accepted if adopted voluntarily, for example, with Mennonites and Hasidic Jews, was seen as inconsistent with the national spirit and ideal. In the United States, we saw the integration of groups in schools, in housing, and in politics, as desirable. Moreover, the maintenance of difference by law for the benefit of the more powerful was illegal—even if differences and lines of division were maintained voluntarily by some groups—was doubtfully acceptable.

In a conference in Jerusalem in the 1970s, I arrived fresh from considerations of how to get a greater degree of racial integration in housing in the United States into a society in which Jews did not want to integrate with Arabs and Arabs did not want to integrate with Jews. The issue of integration in housing was meaningless in such a society: justice there truly meant separate but equal. I saw there was a legitimacy to group rights in a situation where groups were sharply distinguished from each other, and wanted to maintain this distinction. To take the position that all rights were individual rights, and from this perspective to be indifferent to the position of the group as a group, was unrealistic (Glazer 1978b, reprinted in Glazer 1983). Only one group in the United States qualified on the basis of its treatment and history as a sharply distinguished group with a claim to group rights to raise its position in society: Blacks, or African Americans.

Even for Blacks, the ultimate objective was full integration, a situation in which individual rights were sufficient, and in which their exercise in an environment of open opportunity and nondiscrimination would also defend the position of the group. But as matters stood, the line of division was strong because prejudice and discrimination still affected the group, and the deficiencies that were the result of slavery and discrimination were so obvious that some special consideration was legitimate morally and desirable politically.

Not that this perspective did not involve some real problems. What about fixed political representation, as, for example, in Lebanon? The Voting Rights Act had assumed—as had the Civil Rights Act—that individual rights to voting without discrimination would solve the matter of Black political equality. But what if individual rights to voting, even if fully and honestly implemented, meant that there would be no Black representatives in political bodies? The Voting Rights Act of 1965, if one takes its clear language, was distorted in administrative and judicial decisions to guarantee a degree of Black representation, just as the clear language of the Civil Rights Act was distorted in administrative and judicial decisions establishing affirmative action to ensure that Blacks would get better jobs. Color blindness written into the Voting Rights Act, as it had been in the Civil Rights Act, made as great difficulties for the Supreme Court as it pondered the administrative and lower judicial decisions that aimed to guarantee a degree of Black representation as did affirmative action.

In my 1978 article, I wrote: “It would be nice if we could avoid the dilemma, if individual choice in a multiethnic society, in the absence of discrimination, aggregated into a rough proportionality that meant justice satisfying both the individual and the group standard. But it doesn't—or hasn't yet.” I quoted Gordon P. Means, specifying when a case can be made for group privileges: “Where group identity and communal and group prejudices permeate a society, it is naïve if not hypocritical to talk about equality of opportunity based upon individual achievement and universalistic norms” (Means 1974; Glazer 1978b).

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR BLACKS ONLY

In the introduction to a new paperback edition of Affirmative Discrimination in 1987, I indicated the end of my opposition to affirmative action for Blacks, which had already been foreshadowed since 1978. I pointed to the fact that despite apparent opposition to racial preference by the great majority of Americans, there seemed to be no way of making headway against it. Formalized by one Republican president (Nixon), opposed by another (Gerald Ford), opposed even more strongly by the popular two-term Republican Ronald Regan, affirmative action, which could in theory have been eliminated by the stroke of a presidential pen, remained in force. Attempted changes in the executive order under Reagan collapsed in the face of the opposition of big business, which had been living with affirmative action a long time and feared the disruption involved in abandoning it. Nor could I envisage a whole-hog elimination of affirmative action by the Supreme Court: I could not imagine that this apparatus of government agencies, judicial orders, affirmative action officers, and departments in every government agency, corporation, and university, etc., would simply be swept away. That affirmative action was here to stay was one ground for examining more closely the weakness in the anti-affirmative action position.

I argued that “the underlying force that keeps the system of numerical quotas and goals strong is the actual condition of blacks. It is the unrealized hope for black improvement, a hope that could have been with reason entertained a dozen years ago, that sustains affirmative action in employment and promotion, minority preference in admission to institutions of higher education, and busing in a number of major cities.”

“It is thus the condition of the black population … , not the state of their rights, nor the practices that affect them, that is the strongest support for affirmative action. Other racial and minority groups are covered by affirmative action, but it is not their fate nor their power nor their claim on the American conscience that motivates this massive machinery” (Glazer 1987, p. xviii).

I argued we should if possible end affirmative action, which went so much against the grain of American ideals, for Asian Americans—it hardly applied to them any more. Perhaps we could end it for the mixed bag we called Hispanics. But the strongest claim for the maintenance of affirmative action was made by Blacks, and for pragmatic and historically powerful reasons. And while I hoped affirmative action would in time end, I did not oppose its maintenance.

This position was refined in subsequent writing. In the 1990s, the conflict over affirmative action more and more centered on admissions to selective institutions of higher education. (Important cases also dealt with preference in contracting for government services: that form of affirmative action I continued to oppose, primarily because it was an invitation to fraud, and because I did not believe government could do much to create entrepreneurs).

I could see the force of some degree of preference for Blacks. Clearly some institutions went too far and admitted too many students who would flunk out or who would require too many concessions in institutional practice to graduate. But as institutions of higher education became more and more the gateway to better positions and to important professions, I did not see how a large segment of the population, one which also had good claim to redress for victimization, could be denied because of performance on academic tests participation in key segments of the society. We were in the situation—only for a limited time we hoped—of the divided societies I had pondered in 1978 in which, regardless of how a universalistic norm affected each group, all had a claim to participation.

In 1995, the Wall Street Journal asked me to comment on the widespread proposal that class and economic condition should replace race and ethnic group identification in determining preference for the less academically qualified. It was hoped that the use of less controversial economic criteria would also enable the enrollment of larger proportions of Black students. But I had been impressed by studies at the University of California in Berkeley, where the conflict was severe, which showed that to replace race by economic criteria would do little to maintain the number of Black students at the university. Race, not class, was the reason we had affirmative action. There was no easy way to push the problem away by application of some apparently less sensitive norm (Glazer 1995).

For a long time, I had not been debating the issue of affirmative action in public; others had taken over my role at Harvard as critics of affirmative action. This article forced me back into the debate, but now on the side of racial preference in the specific area of college and university and professional school admissions (Glazer 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 1998d, 1998e, 1999).

When the issue of affirmative action reached the Supreme Court again in 2003, I was asked by the economist and one-time Black conservative Glenn Loury—who had also shifted from a position opposing affirmative action in some respects to defending it in some respects, though I do not suggest his position was the same as mine—to join a group of social scientists who were preparing an amicus brief on the side of the University of Michigan in its long-standing case defending its affirmative action procedures. In its important decision (in Grutter v. Bollinger, and Gratz v. Bollinger), the Supreme Court expanded the limited “diversity” defense of affirmative action to embrace—in Justice Sandra O'Connor's opinion—the larger social interest in a broader representation of minorities in the key institutions of society. I defended the decision in Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars (2003, pp. 12–17) whose primary raison d'être is the fight against affirmative action in higher education. The other contributors to the symposium on the decision looked forward to further litigation to eliminate any consideration for race in college and university admissions.