Ignoring the People

who were excluded. Are you aware of this?

19

Seventy-seven percent of respondents were aware that reverse discrimination had occurred. Twenty-three percent were not aware of it.

Question 2(b): To get your response to this question

I am

going to give you four choices. Let me read each one before you

reply.

ONE... It is fair

TWO. .. It is unfair

2%

19%

THREE... It is unfair but it is necessary to make up for the victims of past racial and sexual discrimination

17%

FOUR... It is unfair and the wrong way to make up for past unfairness

62%

These are surprisingly conclusive figures. Only 2 percent regard such programs as simply "fair." A full 81 percent felt that it is "unfair" in some sense to allow the less able minority or female applicant an advantage over the better qualified. Only 19 percent of respondents expressed any support for the idea of remedying the ills wrought by past discrimination if it meant sacrificing the idea of advancement by merit. And 62 percent of respondents condemned such affirmative action programs as both unfair and inexpedient.

Not only do people think that programs resulting in preferential treatment for minorities are unfair and the wrong approach, however, they also believe that such programs could actually harm rather than help attitudes toward minorities. When asked whether such situations reflected badly on all minority groups, or were likely to stir up resentments, nearly three-fourths of the respondents answered in the affirmative.

Question 3: With the situation developing where minority groups have received especially favorable treatment do you regard such programs as likely to stir up resentment against the minorities. That is, does this have a bad reflection on all minority groups?

Yes No

73%
23

Don't know

4

The Sindlinger summary added the interesting comment that

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Policy Review

monitering of the interviews had shown, in addition to the overall 3 to 1 margin, that many members of minority groups had expressed the belief that resentment would be a by-product of especially favorable treatment. Moreover, there is no difference of opinion between women who are among the beneficiaries of special treatment programs, and men on this matter. Yet, despite such an overwhelming margin of agreement on the resentment question, still more people professed that their own attitudes had not been affected. When reminded that government programs had sometimes resulted in less-qualified minorities and women being admitted into professions and schools, overwhelming numbers nevertheless say that minority or female doctors/lawyers are worth as much as others and they would not elect to avoid dealing with them, even if the avoidance could be accomplished without offense.

-

Question 4(a): This is our last question on minority and sexual discrimination: As we said under recent government programs — minority applicants have sometimes been admitted to places of higher learning with lower standards than other applicants and also a fixed number of college entrances and promotions have sometimes been reserved for minorities. For these questions answer as yes or no or maybe . . . Has this affected your own attitude towards minority and women doctors and lawyers?

Question 4(b): Do you think the qualifications of a black lawyer or woman doctor are likely to be worth as much as those of other doctors and lawyers?

Question 4(c): If you could do so with without offense, would you, yourself, avoid dealing with a black doctor or a woman lawyer?

Again, these are remarkable findings. Despite their disapproval of apparent quotas and lower standards for minority admissions to professional school, three out of four Americans claim that their attitudes to minority and women doctors and lawyers have not been affected by these programs. Nearly seven out of eight respondents say that they would not avoid dealing with a black doctor or a woman lawyer.

Does the same favorable attitude extend to the professions themselves? When people were asked whether quota programs would damage the professions either in fact or in the eyes of the public, the majorities exonerating the professions from harm were slightly reduced but still substantial.

Question 4(d): Do you think that these programs will damage the legal and medical professions as a whole?

Question 4(e): Do you think that these programs will damage the reputations of the professions in the eyes of the public?

Perhaps there is no great significance in this comparatively small statistical difference. If we allow ourselves some speculative interpretation of Questions 3 and 4, however, we might guess that the majority of Americans will oppose affirmative action programs provided that they can do so without themselves expressing anything that seems like racial or sexist bias. Thus, more people are ready to criticize such programs as harmful to

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Policy Review

the professions than are willing to express doubts about the minority and women doctors and lawyers.

This brings us back to our starting point namely, that affirmative action can be viewed as a subject not concerned with race. This gains considerable support from the Policy Review survey. Another important finding, which confirms the arguments of Messrs. Lipset and Schneider, is that there is substantial majority support for "catch-up" educational and training programs in sharp contrast to the overwhelming rejection of quotas or preferential treatment through lowered standards. What is less clear from the survey is the exact degree to which the public objects to government programs as such and to what extent its opposition is to the principle of preferential treatment. But this becomes immaterial when we see how strongly people oppose any guarantee of result other than simply opportunity.

So the government can find little encouragement in public opinion to embark on further activity which seems to conflict or interfere with meritocratic values. The results of the Policy Review survey confirm a public willingness to provide minoritics with a starting point on the inside lane, but a belief that ultimately the race must go to the swift.

[Form the New York Times Magazine, Apr. 25, 1982]

SUMMING UP—A CHRONICLE OF Two Decades of Social EXPERIMENT

AND THE

DISILLUSIONment That SWEPT Ronald Reagan inTO THE WHITE HOUSE

(By Theodore H. White)

I had made myself a promise; the election of 1980 was to be the last in the series of stories about American politics that I had begun in 1960. But when the election was over, I found this story to be essentially different from the others. What I had been seeing in 1980 was not just a single campaign; it could be viewed only as a climactic episode in a stretch of history that went back for 20 years or more.

The election of 1980 was about that explosion of ideas which, over the past two decades, had torn American life apart and transformed its politics. I had watched the ideas take shape in the streets in riot and bloodshed, with horrors broadcast into every home. Then the ideas moved off the streets, toppling old walls; and, as the occupiers moved in, the occupation spread farther than anyone could understand. Of all the ideas, however, the most unsettling was the renascence of the oldest political idea in American history-equality before the law.

Old phrases only vaguely trace the hopes and turmoil of the storm decades: “liberation," "participation," "affirmative action," "outreach." And they were to add up finally to a paradox: What began as a quest to enlarge freedom and equality would ultimately require enlargement of Federal controls on a scale never envisioned by those who dreamed the dreams of the early 60's. New phrases like "quotas," "entitlements," "goals and timetables," "the protected classes" were to signal the change in the nature of American government. Those who cheered the changes and those who were horrified slowly hardened into two antagonistic camps; and, by 1980, two men-Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan-had emerged as their champions.

In all this, the original and most powerful motor drive was the revolt of the blacks. Memory flecks that drive with episode:

It is spring 1964, the mood of the time still settled by the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the visions he left behind. The Civil Rights Act, which Kennedy had brought before Congress in 1963, is now moving through Congress. If it passes, it will change American society. But as the debate boils on Capitol Hill, the action is elsewhere, so, as a political reporter, I am off to Mississippi, where the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.) is mobilizing for the bloody adventure that will be remembered as the Mississippi Summer.

In Jackson, the capital, I pass through the black district. Parched lawns littered with trash; shack houses with peeling paint, boards cracked and broken; raggedy children sitting on porches, peering out on nothing. I pass a black cemetery, pillars of the gates leaning toward each other, the scraggly grass already very high in springtime, but unmowed and unkempt, sad, Faulknerian. It does its own mourning. And there, next to the Streamline Bar, is 1017 Lynch Street, S.N.C.C. storefront headquarters. It is unmarked but instantly recognizable-two students, one black and one white, are standing outside playing catch, and in the windows are those black and green stickers that say: One Man-One Vote.

Inside, the dominant presence is Bob Moses, the field marshal of the adventure drawing hundreds of students from all over the country. He talks with the lilt that New York schoolteachers have indelibly pressed on Harlem children for a generation, but he has a master's degree from Harvard. Blinking, soft-spoken, gentle, Moses has been here in Mississippi for three years, trying to rouse his black people to their rights. They must be taught to vote; they must be taught to do things for themselves; they must be taught to be unafraid. He is sweet and stubborn and strong, the stuff of martyrs; he will not kill but will not hesitate to die. Five blacks here in Mississippi have been killed by unknown men since the first of the year; Moses has spent 17 days in solitary confinement in jail; his people are organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the all-white political structure of the state; his people demand their constitutional right to vote. And there is no one in authority to whom Moses can talk, no contact. No white official in Mississippi dares have contact with the blacks. More people will die this summer as they seek the right of blacks to vote.

It is a few weeks later, in New York, the evening before the opening of the 1964 World's Fair. The papers and television have been churning out the story of impending disaster. The blacks are threatening to drive in and stall their cars on all the highways feeding to the fair, blocking all traffic. I drive out to the storefront headquarters of the "stall-in" organizers, deep in the Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto of Brooklyn. The storefront lies between a Chinese hand laundry and a meat market; its broken glass windows are boarded over. Inside, the blacks glower at the coming