Affirmative action is rooted in an uncomfortable reality: that to remedy the effects of past discrimination against blacks and women it is sometimes necessary to discriminate against white men. The Government shied from stating the proposition so boldly, but beginning with the Nixon Administration it put the principle into practice. Throughout the ’70s Washington pressed employers to set explicit goals and timetables for the hiring of minorities, even if that meant tacitly accepting “reverse discrimination.” Ronald Reagan has tried to stage a countermarch. At his first press conference after he took office in 1981, Reagan said that some affirmative action programs had been “distorted” into quota systems. “I’m old enough to remember,” he said, “when quotas existed in the U.S. for the purpose of discrimination, and I don’t want to see that happen again.” Since then, his Justice Department has aggressively attacked the use of racial preference in hiring and promotion. William Bradford Reynolds, the outspoken chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, insists that affirmative action has done more harm than good. “It’s demeaning because it says people are going to get ahead not because of what they can do, but because of their race.” Reversing the momentum built by more than a decade of affirmative action has not been easy. Many judges, educators and personnel directors have come to accept racial preference in hiring and school admissions. “Affirmative action is alive and well in this country,” says Barbara Schlei, a Los Angeles attorney who represents management in employment cases. Nonetheless, the climate that nurtured affirmative action has begun to cool perceptibly. “Most companies in the private sector are providing no more than lip service to affirmative action,” says Milton Vickers, director of minority business development for Dade County, Fla. “There has been little monitoring for the past four or five years, and you can tell.” Since 1970 the Federal Government has required companies that do business with it to submit affirmative action plans. There are about 15,000 such companies, employing 23 million workers. For the past three years the Administration has been trying to ease federal rules that in the past have required employers to set fairly ambitious hiring goals and timetables. When civil rights groups blocked the rule changes by threatening to sue, the Reaganauts resorted to nonenforcement. Under earlier Administrations, 26 companies were barred from doing business with the Federal Government because of affirmative action violations. Under Reagan, none have been so barred. Last summer the Justice Department thought it gained a key ally in its assault on affirmative action. In Firefighters Local Union No. 1784 vs. Stotts, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a lower court judge had no right to force the layoff of white fire fighters in Memphis in order to protect black hiring and promotion gains under a court-ordered affirmative action plan. The language of the court’s opinion appeared to go well beyond the facts of the case. Writing for the majority, Justice Byron White declared that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was intended only to protect individual victims of proven discrimination. Since under most affirmative action plans whole classes of minorities get preference, the court’s ruling seemed to argue against broad remedies.
