To Be EQUAL

Deeply Desiring Denial

by Marc H. Morial

President and CEO, National Urban League

Marc H. Morial, President of the National Urban League, is the former two-term Mayor of New Orleans, former President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and author of the weekly column in MaximsNews.com,  TO BE EQUAL

             NEW YORK - 10 March 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / -  Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year involving the University of Michigan that upheld affirmative action in higher education, no one really expected affirmative action’s opponents to give up their battle to return America to the era of racial tokenism.

That philosophy ruled higher education in the north (southern white colleges and universities being all but completely closed to African Americans) in the years before the victories of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.  

It held that admitting just a very few black students to the region’s most prestigious white colleges and universities was all that was necessary to prove America’s declared allegiance to equality.

That belief was a denial of reality then—and it is still so today.  

But affirmative action’s opponents are deeply mired in the denial of reality on many levels—and there’s no better illustration of it than the current petition drive to place on the Michigan ballot a referendum designed to block the use of affirmative action in state university admissions and state hiring and contracting procedures.

The anti-affirmative action bloc, led by Californian Ward Connerly, who has devoted himself to trying to hold back the force of racial progress, are trying to secure the necessary signatures by July 6 in order to get the referendum on the November ballot.  

In response, a coalition of business, education and civic groups has formed to oppose such a referendum.  

A recent poll by the Detroit News found that 64 percent of residents in the state said they oppose racial preferences.

Of course, referendum drive is an attempt to effectively block the Supreme Court ruling from being implemented within the state.  

Supporters of the petition artfully declare that the issue should be put before the electorate because this is a democracy and majority opinion should rule. 

This is being disingenuous.  

Elementary-school civics teaches that the American system’s foundation is not just majority rule but a web of checks and balances in which the judiciary has always played a crucial role. 

To declare that only the electorate should decide the validity of affirmative action, as its opponents in Michigan have done, is to raise the question of whether they would have made similar claims about the 1954 landmark Brown school-desegregation decision, or the lower-court orders which desegregated Little Rock (Arkansas) High School in 1957, or the University of Mississippi, the University of Georgia, and the University of Alabama in the early 1960s.

The claim of “racial favoritism” of blacks over whites can’t stand up to the accounting of who populates the prestigious colleges and universities opponents of affirmative action target for criticism. 

For example, according to statistics recently compiled by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the undergraduate student population at the University of Michigan is 8-percent black, 4.5-percent Latinos, and 64.3-percent white.  

The remaining 23.2 percent of undergraduates are of Asian and other backgrounds.

In fact, the University’s percentage of black undergraduates puts it near the top of the nation’s top-ranked colleges and universities in that category.  

But at only two of this cohort of prestigious institutions does the percentage of black undergraduates hit double digits:  at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (11.1 percent), and at Duke University (10.4 percent).

On the other hand, it’s revealing that at the flagship campuses of Texas and California—the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Los Angeles—where officials have been barred from, using affirmative-action procedures, the black undergraduate populations are 3.5 percent, 3.7 percent, and 3.7 percent, respectively.

These statistics alone, not to mention many others, raise searching questions about the claim that affirmative-action policies unfairly penalize white applicants to higher education.  

They underscore the point that it takes a willful denial of reality to argue that African Americans are being “favored” over white Americans in any arena of American life.

Indeed, the new Equality Index the National Urban League will release later this month in the 2004 edition of its signature publication, The State of Black America, shows that, nearly 150 years after the end of the Civil War, black Americans still have a long way to go to reach parity with their white counterparts. 

Our Equality Index determined that African Americans, once defined in the Constitution as three-fifths of a white person, now stand as a group at less than three-quarters—at 0.73, to be exact—of where White America stands.

That statistic, drawn from plumbing statistics in the five areas of education, economics, health, social justice and civic engagement, measures the “equality gap,”—the progress yet to be made before one can declare that black Americans and white Americans live in a society of equal opportunity.

In that regard, the National Urban League Equality Index is further evidence that affirmative action is a compelling and effective tool to pare the racial disparities created by past discrimination and extend opportunity to more and more Americans.

That’s the message Michigan voters must heed.