Let’s Accentuate the Positive, Bill : Bennett’s curious critique of affirmative action

William J. Bennett, former federal drug czar and new chairman of the Republican Party, appears to have drawn his party’s line in the sand on the politically volatile issue of affirmative action. But before he decides to draw it too deeply, Bennett and his party might want to ask themselves just who and what they are opposing. And why.

Bennett told reporters: “I believe that the idea of affirmative action--giving people credit for a job in the absence of a showing of prior discrimination simply on the basis of their race--is wrong . . . It’s wrong to say to somebody in the absence of a showing of prior discrimination: ‘You are black and you get X points, you are white, you don’t.’ ” Hmm. Is that what affirmative action has become in today’s newspeak--simply a race-based policy?

That would be news to the many thousands of white women who have been hired and promoted in the past 20 years by public and private employers responding in no small part to federal and state pressures to open up their doors to more women.

In the past two decades, economic demands and a demographic explosion of baby boomers sent record numbers of American women to work outside the home. So naturally, more women were hired. What much-maligned affirmative action efforts have accomplished--and this is no small achievement--is real growth in occupations that had been all but cordoned off by gender.

For example, in California, apprenticeships in traditionally male-dominated jobs--including building, construction, printing and auto mechanics--had 76 women in a program of 35,000 in 1972. These private programs help provide workers for companies with government contracts that require that they show affirmative action efforts. Last year, there were more than 5,000 women in a program of 50,000, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

So before Bennett--who held these views even before he became GOP chair--follows Sen. Jesse Helms down the affirmative action-bashing road, he will need to ask why the GOP so far has fixated on blacks. There has been nary a mention of other affirmative action beneficiaries: women, Latinos, Asian-Americans and, yes, white men. Although “diversity” in some circles these days gets a bad rap, Bennett would have no problem finding white male corporate managers to freely testify to the strength that a diverse work force brings to the office--new ideas, new approaches and, more often than not, new profits.

Still, if Bennett feels affirmative action goals are fair game for criticism, so be it. But the GOP’s focus on blacks as beneficiaries is, at the least, curious. Surely Bennett will want to demonstrate evenhandedness and spread his criticism to anyone else who may have received a job opportunity through employer affirmative action policies: women, Latinos, Asian Americans, the disabled. But then the new GOP chairman may have a bit of a political problem--all of those beneficiaries happen to add up to be the majority of Americans.