Diversity in top professions takes a nosedive: Still think we don’t need affirmative action?

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Affirmative action foes such as UCLA law professor Richard Sander claim affirmative action hurts blacks and Latinos by creating a ”mismatch”—placing them in elite universities where they are outmatched in standardized test scores, causing them to underperform and fail.  Scholars have debunked this myth, showing that students of color at elite colleges outperform their counterparts at less competitive institutions, earn advanced degrees at rates comparable to whites, and are more involved in community and civic life.

Affirmative action has been defined as “any measure, beyond simple termination of a discriminatory practice, adopted to correct or compensate for past or present discrimination or to prevent discrimination from recurring in the future.”

As Martin Luther King eloquently said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.”

“We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result,” said President Lyndon Johnson, who signed an executive order codifying affirmative action practices for government contractors.

The case for affirmative action

Johnson laid out the rationale for the affirmative action in 1965 at the Howard University commencement exercises. “Nothing is more freighted with meaning for our own destiny than the revolution of the Negro American,” Johnson said.  “In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope.”

He added: “But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

But over the years, policies that seek diversity have been vilified, tarred and feathered, and mischaracterized as “quota” systems and discrimination against whites.  These programs have attempted to expand the pie, to open up opportunities to those who were traditionally locked out of opportunity.

When you have a nation where well-connected white men predominate and only they are deemed as merit worthy—as has been the case with this country— how do you change the status quo without taking affirmative steps?  Some people are just happy with hoarding the opportunity and limiting it to the few.  They never challenged the worthiness of those who always came up on top, and always assumed that any newcomers who wanted a shot simply didn’t deserve it.

A policy to emulate

Meanwhile Brazil, long plagued by high socioeconomic and racial inequality, is showing us the way with a most sweeping affirmative action system that reserves half of university slots for underprivileged students and allocates seats for black, mixed-race and Amerindian students.

The policy has dramatically boosted the number of Afro-Brazilians and whites in higher education—from 7 percent of young black people and 33 percent of whites in 1999, to 30 percent of blacks and 60 percent of whites 10 years later.  And it has the approval of two-thirds of the Brazilian population.  Now that’s progress.

Although the U.S. has come a long way when it comes to diversity, the job is not finished.  The recent statistics on blacks in the top professions demonstrate that affirmative action is needed now more than ever.

Follow David A. Love on Twitter at @davidalove