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From: mfs@mhuxr.UUCP (SIMON)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Affirmative action
Message-ID: <265@mhuxr.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 4-Mar-85 13:26:46 EST
Article-I.D.: mhuxr.265
Posted: Mon Mar  4 13:26:46 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 5-Mar-85 02:48:16 EST
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Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
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> : David Canzi
>>: Me (Marcel Simon)
> What I have been assuming [AA] to mean is a system of percentage
> quotas to be met by employers in their hiring. ... But what you seem
> to be talking about is AA as a tie-breaking rule for the personnel
> department to use instead of the ol' coin toss.

Affirmative Action (read the statute) was never intended to be a system of
percentage quotas. It has unfortunately been applied that way, mainly
by those who applied it in bad faith, i.e. did not search for qualified
job/promotion applicants who happened to be minority/female.

> >As you notice, it takes a certain amount of education to attain certain
> >levels of employment. ... Since education *also* takes significant amounts
> >of $$, the young children of discrimated against poor cannot
> >just pick up an education to reach equal employment qualifications. In the
> >absence of other measures, the process must then be incremental, ... [mfs]
> 
> Your comments above mainly apply to blacks, not to women.  Women, for
> most of the centuries of discrimination, tended to marry men and have
> children of both sexes.  If the parents were poor, then their children
> of *both* sexes were poor too.  On the other hand, interracial marriages
> have been rare, and two parents of the same race *do* tend to have children
> of the same race.

My posting did concentrate on economic reasons. However, women were often not
able to obtain the necessary education because they were barred from the
institution and barred from the occupation itself. For example, a woman could
not become an apprentice to a master craftsman. You are right that women
did not as a group have the ecnonomic disadvantages of minorities. This
is one of the reasons why women have made further inroads toward acceptance
than blacks in American society in about the same amount of time.

> The passing on of the disadvantages of poverty does not imply that the 
> effects of centuries of discrimination accumulate.  In fact, the blacks
> provide an excellent counterexample.  Somebody said that the blacks were
> slaves for 3 centuries.  If the effects of discrimination were
> cumulative, one would expect the situation of blacks to worsen as long
> as discrimination existed.  Blacks were no worse off after 3 centuries
> of slavery than they were after one.  You can't get poorer when you have
> nothing.  Ever since slavery ended, blacks have faced discrimination. 
> In spite of over a century of discrimination, that continues today, blacks
> are now better off!  It seems that *recent* discrimination has more
> effect on the present than those centuries of slavery.

You are ignoring the psychological effects of discrimation, which are
cumulative. What is worse, a law that says blacks slaves are not human
or one that says blacks are free citizens, but in a million fine print
amendments, says that they are far less equal than whites?
It is not enough to allow a group previously denied priviledges.
The group must also convince itself that it is worthy of said
priviledge, a process which can occur only as members of the group
are able to compete on equal terms and expect equal results.
For a much more precise reasoning than mine, I recommend reading
James Bladwin and especially Malcolm X.

> You are probably overestimating the importance of affirmative action to
> the number of women who are working.  The expanding economy you mentioned
> is a much stronger factor than affirmative action is.  If there aren't
> enough men to fill all the job openings, employers *have* to hire women.  

Not necessarily or it would have happened in previous expansions. Women
entered the workforce in WW2 because there were no other men around.
In other expansion periods prior to the late 60s, the salaries for the men-only
occupation in question went up, thereby attracting more men
from other occupations.

Marcel Simon