Misunderstanding Affirmative Action

I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun, but in all of the huff-and-puff over the move to amend Executive Order 11246--the cornerstone of federally mandated affirmative action--has anyone actually bothered to read it?

Conservatives see it as a bugbear that mandates racial proportionality for any contractor who even tries to sell matchbooks to the federal government. Nothing could be further from the truth. EO 11246 was not the invention of social engineers in the Department of Proportionality. In fact, it is pretty tepid stuff. Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson “to prohibit discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin,” it simply instructs government contractors to take “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”

I would not deny that the federal government has fostered a huge affirmative-action bureaucracy, but EO 11246 is not the culprit. If conservatives want to go after quotas--and I think that they should--then they ought to target other federal regulations, such as Labor Order No. 4, a 1971 Nixon Administration regulation that mandates “utilization” of minorities in the work force in proportion to their numbers. Why take shots at EO 11246, a policy that is in the best color-blind tradition and speaks the language of nondiscrimination?

Liberals are equally deluded (and some are disingenuous) when it comes to EO 11246. They have managed to spin a myth that, somehow, every President since Johnson has endorsed today’s byzantine system of “numerical goals” and “timetables.” But they are wrong. These words never appear in EO 11246.

The executive director of the NAACP, Benjamin Hooks, also did not get his facts straight when he recently wrote in the New York Times that Johnson’s executive order “mandated that federal contractors promote the hiring and advancement of blacks, Hispanics and women in reasonable proportion to their numbers in each local labor market.” He, too, is wrong. There is no mention in EO 11246 about proportional hiring or advancement of any group. Not a single phrase or word. Those policies came much later--at first under the impetus of the Labor Department in the early 1970s, then under the Office of Contract Compliance during the Carter Administration.

President Johnson issued EO 11246 because it represented a national consensus that certain non-discriminatory steps--specialized recruitment, training and other government-supported “catch-up” programs--were necessary and appropriate ways to help minorities take advantage of non-discrimination laws.

No such consensus exists for the morass of regulations that constitutes today’s affirmative-action bureaucracy. On the contrary, most of our affirmative-action regulations have emerged in different federal agencies, with little White House stimulus and virtually no congressional oversight.

Indeed, if current affirmative practices enjoy the wide support that many in the civil-rights community say they do, then why doesn’t Congress simply enact goals and timetables and race preferences into law? It is perfectly within its legislative powers to do so. Could it be that liberal representatives and senators know that such an affirmative-action bill might not pass? Is this why, instead, they leave affirmative action to the courts and the agencies, support it with all of the high-sounding quotas that they can muster, but never find the courage to back their rhetoric with a simple yea vote on legislation--all the while claiming that they are carrying on in the tradition established by President Johnson?

If we have learned anything from our first Martin Luther King holiday, it is that America’s race problem is still very much with us, and that it will take a long time to rid ourselves of its blight. To do so will require a lot of hard work as well as some careful scrutiny of our civil-rights laws. The place to start is with the Executive Order 11246. Let’s keep it for what it is--a statement of non-discrimination that is neither the nightmare of conservatives nor the holy grail of liberals, but an eloquent expression of our best values.