Why is the Justice Department now reversing its rejection of quotas?
When the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's achieved its break-through victories, President Johnson, among others, realized that giving African-Americans the right to compete on a free and open basis was not enough. The analogy often used at the time was of someone who had been fettered hand and foot for many years. Simply removing that person's chains would not make him ready to run in a race. But what could be done to help minorities to compete fairly? The answer has been a wide range of programs generally known as "affirmative action." There is very little dispute about some of these programs -- for instance, providing special after-school or summer programs for minorities who need extra help to get to the point where they can compete. Poll after poll shows that Americans realize we must work to undo the discrimination and evils of the past. However, the overwhelming majority of Americans draw the line at quotas -- hiring or firing people or deciding who will be admitted to college on the basis of their race.
Quotas lead to anger and a sense of being unfairly treated among workers who do not benefit from them. If 100 white and 10 black men are interviewed for three positions and all three jobs go to black candidates because of a quota policy, you could have I 00 white candidates bitter and resentful at what they perceive to be an injustice, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of them would have been rejected even if there had been no quotas.
Using quotas as a basis for selection also leads to questions about the qualifications and abilities of minorities. Nowadays, when people see an African-American or Hispanic or woman in a top job, they are apt to wonder: Did that person get the job because he or she was the best qualified or did sex or race account for the decision? Quotas can also have a devastating effect on minority candidates who land the jobs or the spots in selective colleges and professional schools. Many find it difficult to take pride and pleasure in their accomplishments because the suspicion that they were preferred because they were minority or female - not because they were the best -- is always there.
So it was encouraging to see, during the last presidential election, that both parties ran against quotas. Unfortunately, a recent move by the Justice Department to espouse the cause of race-based hiring and firing shows that not everybody in the Clinton Administration has gotten the message.
Several years ago, the Justice Department supported the lawsuit of a New Jersey teacher, Sharon Taxman, who was fired because she was white. The judge found in Taxman' s favor, but now the Justice Department wants to enter the appeal on the side of the school board and use all its prestige and authority to overturn the victory it helped Taxman win. This kind of about-face is practically unheard of Here's the story: In 1989, the Piscataway School Board decided, for budgetary reasons, to lay off a teacher in its business education department, and it made the choice between Taxman and Debra Williams, a black teacher who had equal seniority. Previously, when a situation like this occurred, the layoff decision had been made by drawing lots. In this case, the school board decided on the basis of race, and it got rid of Taxman.
The school board's action can't be explained by a desire to make up for past discrimination in hiring because the district had a very good record of employing minority teachers and administrators. In 197 6, it was found that 10 percent of the Piscataway teaching staff were minority (the state-wide pool was 7.4 percent). And in 1985, 9.5 percent of teachers and administrators were African-American, which compared very favorably with the 5.8 percent of African-Americans "available" in the country in which the school district is located. No discrimination was claimed and none was found --far from it.
The issue was not qualifications, either. Taxman was the more experienced and qualified of the two when she and Williams were hired in 1980.
The board's main argument was that it wished to promote "racial diversity for 'education sake' or as an 'educational goal,"' but it left wide open what was meant by "diversity." Would the "diversity" standard be satisfied when 15 percent of all teachers were minority? Twenty-five percent? Would it be O.K. to use race as a basis for layoffs until that time? And how did it contribute to "diversity" to get rid of Taxman, the school's only Jewish teacher, instead of Williams, who was one of a number of black teachers?
The judge who decided the original case wisely rejected this argument. The question is, why is the Justice Department now reversing its rejection of quotas to take an unjust position in favor of race-based hiring and firing?