In the mid-1970’s, I became increasingly interested in what I assumed were two sociologically compelling questions: (1) how did white males (and their families, coworkers, and friends) respond to reverse discrimination?; and (2) how were the media portraying affirmative action? I conducted the research and later published the results while teaching in temporary faculty positions on the Los Angeles and San Bernardino campuses of the California State University (CSU) system.
Throughout this period, the nineteen-campus CSU empire became caught up in an intensifying affirmative-action crusade involving blatant race, ethnic, and gender preferences in recruiting faculty, staff, and students. Thus, I was engaging in critical studies of policies championed by my own employer (and most alternative academic employers). This was risky business. Scattered reports from critics of affirmative action made it obvious that academic freedom on the topic was fragile even for tenured scholars, and the tight job market for sociologists rendered the kind of research I was doing doubly dangerous. Nevertheless, curiosity ultimately prevailed over fear and anxiety.
For me this research saga illuminated the powerful taboos which have dominated the American intellectual landscape for more than twenty years, and I learned a great deal from the experience. I would, however, never do such a thing again. My career has been badly damaged. Worse, I have watched a political steamroller flatten civil liberties and due process as it has moved through institutions designed to be bastions of traditionally liberal values and forums for the free discussion and rational analysis of ideas. The academic and intellectual communities which once embraced Martin Luther King’s call to judge an individual by the content of his character, not the color of his skin, now do precisely the opposite. They bow reverentially to the gods of tribalism, while also doing almost everything possible to suppress any challenge to their current orthodoxies.
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My interest in affirmative action was whetted in the early 1970’s when I began hearing anecdotes about reverse discrimination. Watching for television and newspaper reports on this remarkable policy, I came upon very few. With the exception of some polemical essays, sociologists also paid relatively little attention to the topic. Throughout the 1970’s, the anecdotes continued to increase as affirmative-action rhetoric became more strident. Certainly this was the case in the CSU system, where I started teaching as a temporary member of the sociology faculty in 1977.
Like most American colleges and universitities, the CSU campuses developed affirmative-action plans, hired affirmative-action officers, and billed themselves as “affirmative-action/equal-opportunity employers.” (It was not until the mid-to-late 1980’s that the term “equality” was eclipsed by the more hard-line vocabulary of “equity,” “diversity,” and “access.”)
In spite of all this, few of my colleagues in the CSU knew much about affirmative-action programs on their own campuses or in the wider society. One reason was that these programs-in the CSU as elsewhere-had been formulated and implemented quietly. Legal ambiguities wrought by Supreme Court vacillation promoted the use of informal pressures and “discretion” rather than codified or systematic measures.
A second reason for lack of concern among my fellow sociologists with affirmative action was the slowdown in hiring that set in during the mid-1970’s. Sociology, the most popular major of the 1960’s, was by now becoming one of the least popular. Indeed, the CSU system lost nearly 90 percent of its sociology majors from the mid-1970’s to the mid-1980’s. In combination with the cuts forced by Proposition 13, the inevitable result was a hiring freeze.
For most of my colleagues, the hiring freeze meant that no white male they personally knew had been denied a job because of his race or gender. If they spoke of affirmative action at all, they did so in vague, simplistic terms. They talked of the policy as the “ideal situation” of an equally qualified white male competing for a position with an equally qualified female or minority candidate—in which case the latter candidate should be given the job. That the realities of affirmative action might involve outright preference of less qualified (or unqualified) women or minorities was dismissed. Nor could these Ph.D.’s in sociology grasp the elementary economic fact that, in a tight labor market, affirmative action must necessarily operate in a zero-sum context: when one person was hired because of race, ethnicity, or gender, others were thereby excluded on the same discriminatory grounds.
Yet to recognize that affirmative action could not help without hurting ran up against an absolute dictum of the Marxist/feminist orthodoxy which had crept into the everyday academic world view of the 1970’s and 1980’s: the idea that only certified minorities—especially blacks and women—could be victims. To suggest that white males were being injured by affirmative action invited righteous scorn and contempt-even among white males themselves.
The question that intrigued me was how these same (or similar) white males would respond when and if they themselves encountered reverse discrimination. Would they protest? Would they accord one another support and understanding?
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In 1984, I obtained a small grant from the Institute for Educational Affairs which enabled me to hire two research assistants. In the ensuing months we found our way to 34 white males in a variety of occupations who had good reason to believe that they had been the victims of reverse discrimination in seeking jobs or promotions. After dropping two of the 34 because it was not clear that affirmative action had been a decisive factor in their cases, we wound up with 32 subjects. The data we got from them were supplemented by background interviews with a dozen personnel or affirmative-action officers, employment counselors, and corporate executives. Many informal interviews with others who learned of the research and wanted to talk added to our sense of what was happening.
By coincidence, our 32 formal interviews equaled the number of college-student participants in a laboratory experiment which had been conducted in 1980 by a sociologist named Stephen Johnson. Johnson discovered that white male students who had lost a puzzle-solving exercise to a fictitious competitor expressed more hostility toward the victor when told that he was black and had been given a bonus score by the experimenter to compensate for his cultural disadvantages. The student subjects, however, expressed less hostility toward black victors than toward white ones when told that they had lost because of the competitor’s superior performance.
Suggestive though they were, Johnson’s laboratory results were simply too limited to predict the real-world effects of reverse discrimination. Practically no one could truly guess at the responses we would find “out there.” Using a semistructured interview format—which let the subjects discuss their experiences in their own words—we discovered a wide and deep spectrum of responses ranging from acquiescence to anger to protest.
The vast majority—20 out of 32—simply endured reverse discrimination without protest, though many were quietly angry. Among the other twelve, six quit the jobs in which they had encountered discrimination; four protested, including three who took legal action-to no avail; and two circumvented barriers through other organizational means.
Our subjects were not angry white racists eager to take to the streets. On the contrary, the mostly middle-class males we interviewed felt bewildered and isolated by what had happened to them. Hardly a one of them was willing to voice any open antagonism toward affirmative action. Why?
First, they feared being labeled “racist” if they complained about programs that purportedly redressed past discrimination. In fact, almost to a man they took pains to explain to the interviewers that they understood and deplored the history of racism in America. Yet many had sustained real career injuries and felt betrayed by the system. Said a middle-management state worker: “A lot of us were sold a bill of goods. We were told if you went to college, you could write your own ticket. . . . But . . . affirmative action has lowered standards to the point where education almost counts against you. . . .”
Unlike minority or female victims of discrimination, white males could not necessarily count on in-group support. Wives aside (“My wife is mad as hell; she’s angrier than I am”), only half reported any such support from friends and coworkers.
This seems to be why teachers selected by computer for transfer in a massive racial-balancing plan by the Los Angeles Unified School district were especially bitter. Commented one: “You found out who your friends were. I found I didn’t have as many as I thought.” Said another: “My friends and co-workers didn’t know how to handle this. They wanted to empathize but [as political liberals] felt cognitive dissonance.” A third stated dryly, “People don’t like victims.”
Deeply ingrained norms regarding silent, “manly” behavior and individual responsibility have crushed any sort of collective awareness and class action by white males. “When it hits you,” a community-college instructor stated, “you don’t want to admit it at first. Instead, you think it must be something in you. You doubt yourself. You repress it, try to forget it.” No one wanted to be accused of “alibiing.”
A Ph.D. in political science and a once aspiring university professor (now a government worker) articulated a common concern: “Why didn’t I say anything about it? . . . Pride, I guess. I didn’t want to make excuses.” Many others feared for the future of their careers if they vented their objections. They felt that if they did not “rock the boat,” things would work out later.
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Another key factor in keeping silent was the fear of not being believed. Reverse discrimination simply sounded too outlandish and incredible without external validation by the mass media—and the mass media were not providing such validation.
This neglect by the news and entertainment industry—especially in the 1970’s-was quickly confirmed even before we began interviewing. I simply counted the number of articles on affirmative action indexed in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature from 1968 to 1980, and the number of minutes on the network newscasts as tabulated in the Vanderbilt Television News Index and Abstracts (from its inception in 1972 through 1980). What I discovered was that, until the Bakke case moved to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1977, there was about one article per year in each of the major newsweeklies and about twelve to fifteen minutes per year (and sometimes much less) on the networks on topics related to affirmative action. There was a slight fall-off after Bakke.
Qualitative evidence reinforced quantitative data. In comparison with other race-related issues, especially the school-busing battles, affirmative action was not box-office. It was treated as a non-issue and rarely, if ever, mentioned in press coverage of the 1980, 1984, and 1988 presidential campaigns, not even in cover stories by major news magazines about Jesse Jackson. As for commercial television, on those few occasions when affirmative action was dealt with—such as a 1975 episode of All in the Family—it was portrayed in its “ideal” form and in highly sympathetic terms.
There were also several issues to which affirmative action seemed “naturally” related, but where it remained the other shoe that never dropped. For example, very few reporters or commentators noted the clash between the egalitarian thrust of affirmative action and the drive for higher standards in education and business. And, until the late 1980’s, few journalists ever pointed to the role of affirmative action in promoting discord in the Democratic party.
Yet by the mid-1980’s, the emergence of blue-collar, white, male “Reagan Democrats” compelled the guarded attention of political analysts and pollsters. Thus, after the 1984 Reagan landslide, Michigan Democrats commissioned Stanley Greenberg to study “Democratic defection” in their state. Greenberg and his associates gathered discussion groups of white, working-class Democrats and posed a series of questions designed to assess their political mood. Asked, “Who do you think gets the raw deal?” they responded:
We do.
The middle-class white guy.
The working middle class.
Cause women get advantages, the Hispanics get advantages, Orientals get advantages. Everybody but the white male race gets advantages now.
and:
I have been here all my life working, paying taxes and the whole shot, and I can’t start my own business unless I have 30 percent down on whatever I want to buy. I have the experience on the job, I have put in for openings, and they have come right out and told me in personnel that the government has come down and said that I can’t have the job because they have to give it to the minorities.
Greenberg and his sponsors were stunned and chagrined by this fury over affirmative action among working-class whites. Clearly preferential treatment had poisoned traditional Democratic appeals to “fairness” and “justice,” and it also seemed that racial preferences were turning white working-class males against government programs in general. Similar data were obtained in a 1985 “Democrats Listening to America” poll of 5,500 voters, as well as in a replication of the Michigan study in 1987.
The response of the Democratic party to findings such as Greenberg’s was instructive: it tried to suppress the reports. As the social critic Charles Murray observed of the ill effects of affirmative action: “Hardly a policy-maker or academic anywhere wants to examine these results and fewer still want to speak of them.”
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In discussing the hostile reception accorded in the 1970’s to his work on school busing (which demonstrated that it was causing white flight and other problems), the eminent sociologist James Coleman suggested that when senior scholars act as a lightning rod for controversial research, it makes the world safer for their less secure juniors laboring in the same field. As I have good reason to know, Coleman was right. For it took a number of books and articles by well-known scholars to pave the way for my own work.
Nathan Glazer was the first important sociologist to break the ice, with Affirmative Discrimination in 1975. Nearly a decade later came Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, which appeared just as I was launching my interviews. During these same years, articles criticizing affirmative action also began to appear here and there, making it easier for me to publish two of my own articles and to edit a special issue of The American Behavioral Scientist on the subject.
But then, in a deeply ironic twist, I began discovering that I myself had joined the subjects of my own study as a victim of reverse discrimination. Which is to say that while my résumé continued to grow with more publications and references, I was unable to move beyond temporary faculty status to a tenure-track position.
No doubt my career struggles were in part linked to the huge surplus of baby-boomer Ph.D.’s. Furthermore, I had a Ph.D. from the University of California at Riverside, not the more prestigious UC-Berkeley. And I was growing older. But there could be little doubt that reverse discrimination was a major cause of my stalled career.
Once, for example, I was informed by a plainly discomfited chairman that I had lost a position at Sweet Briar College strictly because I was male. On another occasion the department chairman at Pomona College told me that the only sociologist he could hire was a black. On yet a third occasion, Occidental College abruptly canceled an interview, later notifying me (and several other candidates) that it had hired a female “native of Jamaica.”
Making matters even worse, there was my research on affirmative action. Job nibbles usually ceased the moment I mentioned it. When I was interviewed at a seven-sisters college in the early 1980’s, the chairman pleaded with me: “Please, I want you to get this job. Don’t talk about your affirmative-action research.” A scheduled interview at a Southwestern university was suddenly canceled in 1987 after the dean learned of the topic of my research. In 1990, the political implications of my research sabotaged an otherwise successful interview at a large Midwestern state university.
To keep my research afloat, I needed financial support, but initial queries to such major foundations as Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie met with bewilderment or contempt. Fortunately, smaller, less ideologically orthodox foundations like Earhart and Sarah Scaife were more responsive. Help from Earhart made it possible for me to complete the project and analyze its results in a book, Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action. The editors at Greenwood Press were more willing to take a risk with such a manuscript than several larger publishers who hinted or admitted outright that their firms subscribed to a “party line” on this issue.
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At first, my colleagues treated my complaints about reverse discrimination exactly as the few complaints made by the subjects of my research project were treated by the people around them: as a form of “alibiing.” But by the late 1980’s, acknowledgment of race-and-gender pressures became more explicit. Universities openly began to advertise “targets of diversity” and other set-aside positions for minorities and women.
Then, in the late 1980’s, limited hiring began again in sociology and related fields at both CSU Los Angeles and San Bernardino. Suddenly, colleagues who had once dismissed complaints about reverse discrimination were now instructed to implement such practices.
In 1986, 19.2 percent of newly-hired, tenure-track CSU faculty were minorities and 34.8 percent were women. By 1988, 23.4 percent of new hires were minorities and 38.4 percent were women. Since there have been few female, black, or Hispanic Ph.D.’s in the high-demand fields of physical science, business, engineering, and math, most female, non-Asian minority faculty were likely to be hired in education and in the glutted, low-demand humanities and social sciences. It is reasonable to assume that administrative prompting to hire females and minorities created pressures—however subtle—against hiring white males.
Less subtle were pools of set-aside faculty positions reserved for minorities and females established at San Bernardino and some other CSU campuses. In 1989, a black female (sans Ph.D.) was hired by the sociology department to fill such a set-aside position, with a high salary and reduced teaching load which included classes I had taught for several years. Since I was directly affected, I was able to check out the futility of legal redress as reported by some of my interview subjects. Their accounts were grimly confirmed. The representative of the State Fair Housing and Employment Commission rationalized the CSU set-asides as a legally acceptable attempt to bring its work force into “balance” and I was informed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Cal State’s use of set-asides was “voluntary affirmative action.” Unless I had direct, “smoking-gun” evidence that I had been denied employment because I was a white male, nothing could be done.
Interestingly, both of these defenses of CSU’s set-asides were offered after the Supreme Court, in Richmond v. Croson, specifically limited the use of voluntary set-asides by state or local government agencies. No wonder, then, that Cal State Northridge saw no risk in running a large ad in the Chronicle of Higher Education announcing that it was “setting aside a pool of faculty positions to allocate to those departments that identify well-qualified minority candidates for either full-time tenure track or lecturer appointments.” The CSU system has also provided 200 minority and female Ph.D. aspirants with up to $30,000 each through a set-aside forgivable loan program.
My subjects’ accounts of union paralysis on reverse discrimination were also confirmed by my own experience. Our fledgling faculty union was even more strident than the CSU in its calls for “diversity, equity, and affirmative action.” The union was content that the CSU’s programs be merely “legally defensible.” Publicly, it would take no stand on reverse discrimination; privately, there was recognition of the problem, a little anguish, and no action.
“People still can’t deal with this issue,” a UCLA sociologist recently told me, “they don’t want to be critical.” Indeed they don’t, as I and so many others have learned from bitter personal experience.
