Introduction
For more than a quarter century, controversy about affirmative action has tormented American politics. It still arouses intense passions, spawns litigation, and frustrates public dialogue. Some commentators explain the fierceness of the debate by noting the conflicting interests of groups competing for a limited number of coveted jobs and educational opportunities. Others point to the symbolic importance that affirmative action has assumed for each side in the debate.
"Proponents regard the continuation of affirmative action as a litmus test of our nation's commitment to racial justice," Glenn Loury has written. "Opponents see it as an unacceptable violation of the ideal of equality of opportunity, and the principle that government should treat its citizens in a color-blind fashion." Both these ways of framing the issue, Loury suggests, are "mired in confusion." And both have at times preempted a broader discussion of strategies to address the problem of racial inequality.
A variety of rationales has been put forward to justify affirmative action programs. The single most important, writes Robert K. Fullinwider in an essay for this special Report, grew out of a recognition that abolishing facially discriminatory policies would leave in place a complex of long-established attitudes and informal practices that were likely to thwart rapid progress toward equal opportunity. In the years following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this recognition gave rise to a new legal concept of discrimination, and provided a limited justification for racial preferences in hiring and admissions.
William A. Galston, in his "status report" on affirmative action, looks at how the resulting policies have affected a range of institutions, from the military to public universities. He also analyzes the judicial and political constraints that have recently been placed on preferential programs, and suggests alternative strategies for promoting equal opportunity as certain forms of affirmative action are dismantled.
Opponents of affirmative action have long argued that color-conscious selection procedures can only undermine meritocratic standards. In their essay for this issue, Judith Lichtenberg and David Luban consider the role that merit plays in modern economic life, and the role that it ought to play. Without accepting the view that judgments of merit are merely subjective, they identify imperfections in the usual processes by which institutions define and detect it. They explore the fate of the merit principle in a "winner-take-all" society. And they argue that a just society, in its allocation of posts and rewards, would make considered trade-offs between merit and other important values.
In recent years, many employers and university officials have placed the idea of diversity, rather than the moral imperative of antidiscrimination, at the center of their arguments for affirmative action. For some, achieving greater diversity is a way of enabling organizations such as police departments, colleges, and corporations to perform their missions better. For others, diversity is a good to be promoted in the service of ideals such as community solidarity and integration. In his second essay, Robert Fullinwider examines a standard argument for diversity in higher education, and assesses its adequacy as a justification for affirmation action in admissions and faculty recruitment. David Wasserman, in his essay on diversity and stereotyping, addresses some of the more stringent objections to the pursuit of institutional diversity. Finally, Owen M. Fiss argues that the only sustainable basis for affirmative action is a commitment to dismantling the "caste structure" of American society; the diversity rationale, he writes, seems "shallow" when compared with appeals to distributive justice.
Some of the contributors to this special Report engage their colleagues' arguments directly, while in other cases areas of agreement or dissension are implicit. Against Owen Fiss's call for a "transcendent" commitment to social justice, one might set William Galston's reminder that some means to an acknowledged good may be "effective but nonetheless unacceptable." Robert Fullinwider's analysis of discrimination as a "de-moralized concept" converges with Judith Lichtenberg and David Luban's account of institutional racism: "the view that discrimination does not always disappear when personal bias does." Like the two papers on diversity, the essay on merit addresses important questions of stereotyping and group identity. By exploring basic issues of law, social policy, and institutional practice, this Report, we hope, will bring some clarity to what has often been a misguided and bitter debate.
BACK