Aff. Action

To the Editor:

Errol T. Louis, in his recent editorial piece "The Darker Side," has certainly moderated his anti-American vituperation from the levels reached in some of the articles of his which appeared last year in What Is To Be Done? This time, in an admirable display of self-restraint, he limits himself to the charge that Blacks in this country and elsewhere are "as a group, getting beat in the head by various American institutions, chief among them the United States government." Louis is, of course, being figurative; we Blacks have not been in serious danger of random head-beating for some time, and Louis's use of this analogy in fact belies our tremendous progress since the time when people might, "just for the hell of it, decide to decorate their trees and telephone poles with Black bodies."

Nevertheless, Louis does list what he believes are some concrete examples of current oppression. I would like to concentrate on an example he cites of the federal government's involvement in this oppression: the Reagan Administration's "attack" on affirmative action programs. If this policy is the best Louis can muster to support his assertion that the federal government is the chief oppressor of Black people, then I think we can safely conclude that, in this case as in so many others, Louis's appeals offer more to the emotions than the intellect.

Reagan's opposition to affirmative action, or, more properly, reverse discrimination, is based on the serious moral questions which any policy of favoring one racial group over another must raise in a liberal society. To his credit, Louis does acknowledge these questions, in that he spends several paragraphs discussing some of them. But in the end he fails to be convincing.

Louis's first claim about reverse discrimination is that it is "designed to remedy and redress past wrongs." The validity of other cases of redress is not questioned, he asserts, yet "affirmative action, which is based on the principle of redress, gets singled out for a special, vicious attack." Among such cases of redress he cites lawsuits brought against asbestos manufacturers 20 years after the original exposure to the workers. But in fact, his case points up the important deficiency in Louis's argument. The plaintiffs accuse the asbestos companies of being directly responsible for harming those who were exposed. Those who favor reverse discrimination, however, would require many whites to bear the burden of redressing the wrongs of their great-grandfathers. And the ancestors of other whites (for example recent immigrants) took no part in the subjugation of Blacks, removing even that tenuous link to guilt, yet reverse discrimination punishes them just the same.

The second point about reverse discrimination Louis makes is that those who insist that remedies for past discrimination not injure the rights of whites confuse the "setting up [of] goals and timetables with quotas, presumably preferring that Blacks simply lodge individual lawsuits each time they find themselves victims of racial discrimination." In this assertion, Louis is using the "straw man" technique in double measure. First, no serious participant in the debate objects to increased efforts to recruit more minority applicants. Goals and timetables are acceptable, and even laudable, as long as no applicant's credentials are given special weight because of his or her race. In the event special weight is given, goals and timetables do indeed become indistinguishable from quotas. Second, neither do serious critics of reverse discrimination assert that the bringing of lawsuits by individual Blacks who are victims of discrimination is a complete solution to the problem. Nevertheless, an important principle of liberal society is that social utility--and no one denies the desirability of establishing racial equality--is not a sufficient ground for violating people's rights.

Louis's final contention on reverse discrimination is that "'merit' is usually trumpeted as the supreme good which affirmative action undermines, while in reality, anyone can name a thousand and one instances in which factors other than merit were taken into account in, for example, getting a job." First of all, the fact that many employers often consider criteria unrelated to the performance of the job is no invitation to require the addition of racial status to that list. Second, what is especially odious about reverse discrimination is not that it is just another example of an employer considering "factors other than merit" according to his or her personal preference, but that it includes a government effort to standardize those perferences in a particular way.

Those of us who ardently desire a racially equal society are naturally tempted into calling for radical means to bring about that end as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, some of us don't succumb, because we know that the rights which are violated today for a good cause may be violated tomorrow for a bad one. The safest course is never to violate them at all. James A. Cox '84