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From: mfs@mhuxr.UUCP (SIMON)
Newsgroups: net.flame,net.politics
Subject: Re: Affirmative action
Message-ID: <253@mhuxr.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 19-Feb-85 09:09:29 EST
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Posted: Tue Feb 19 09:09:29 1985
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In article <731@ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA>, Don Curry provides some
thoughtful comments on affirmative action. I would just like to add
some observations to his.

As Curry says, there has been a tendency among minorities to approach
work with a self-centered attitude, with the job taking a decided second
place to the employee's interests and other obligations. This of course
flies in the face of American corporate culture, resulting in bad
corporate impressions of the minority employee.

However, affirmative action was intended to provide opportunities to
minorities who had ALREADY fought and clawed their way through a
biased educational system, an opportunity to compete fairly in the
business arena. Affirmative action was also intended to provide
opportunities to OTHER minorities to obtain education by increasing
access to same.

The latter has been quite successful. There are more minorities with
college level education than before. However, as Curry observes,
this does not guarantee that all minority college graduates will be
quality players in business and corporation. Why should they be?
After all, is every white college grad an overachieving corporate
soldier? Minorities, because of color and because there are so few of them,
tend to stick out. Any failure tends to be attributed to congenital
racial weakness. As pioneer blacks and women in white male culture
have noted again and again, you have to be twice as good to be considered
half as good.

In my experience, that attitude seems to be on a slow but steady wane.
I believe that affirmative action, by increasing the number of minority
members of the corporate community, has hastened this evolution
by exposing managers to the simple truth that humans are humans,
and that performance is not tied to race, but to desire. If affirmative
action has done nothing else, it has done a lot.

Marcel Simon