Once the principle of compensating minority groups for past discrimination became public policy, legislated by government and validated by the courts, it was inevitable that a struggle would ensue for a share in such compensation. Increasingly over the past few years we have been witnessing an unseemly competition among the various segments of the population for “oppressed” status, with each group putting forth its own credentials as a discriminated-against minority, each arguing for the intensity of its own oppression over that of others, each demanding some form of preferential treatment to make up for past and/or present injustices.
In support of such claims, all sorts of ethnic and religious groups not included in the government’s affirmative-action guidelines have begun sponsoring studies designed to prove that they too have suffered discrimination. One such study by a Polish organization surveyed the staffs of thirty Senators from states with substantial Polish populations, and found that of 853 staff members, only 17 were Poles, and most of them were women in lower-echelon jobs. A second survey by an Asian group came up with the finding that there was only one Asian attorney for every 1,679 people in the San Francisco Bay area, though the area as a whole boasts one attorney for every 250 people. A third, sponsored by the Italian-American Legislators Caucus, found the City University of New York guilty of discrimination since 25 percent of the student body was Italian-American while only 4.5 percent of the faculty was.
One could go on endlessly with other examples—the Franco-American study, which found that though 14 percent of the population of Maine is of French-Canadian descent, there has never been a French governor and only “relatively few” Franco-Americans in management positons; the Catholic study which found that though Eastern and Southern European Catholics represent 12 percent of the total population, they hold only 3.2 percent of federal judgeships; the Hispanic study which found that only 4.8 percent of President Carter’s appointments were Hispanics, though Hispanics were estimated to comprise 9.5 percent of the national population. Far from tapering off, this kind of thing seems destined, by the logic of the situation, to proliferate even further.
The net effect of such studies has been to increase greatly the level of rancor in the country. If step one of the new ethnic consciousness is the discovery that a certain group has been deprived of its proper share, step two seems to be the search for some other group to blame. The result has been a measurable rise in intergroup squabbling which has, incidentally, all but dissolved whatever is left of the old coalition strategy for achieving social reform. Thus, a recent editorial in a black weekly in Boston urged its readers to think twice about the benefits offered by women’s liberation. The paper saw increasing competition ahead between black and white women in a diminishing job market. Since white women had better educational backgrounds and other advantages, the editorial warned that by supporting the women’s movement, black women would come out the losers.
On similar grounds, black organizations have criticized the government’s inclusion of women as a group eligible for “minority” grants, contracts, and employment goals, which they regard as competitive with black needs or as cutting down the amount of help available to blacks. “This society treats its mothers, sisters, and wives far better than its ex-slaves,” said one officer of the National Association of Black Manufacturers. Another black spokesman declared that “Blacks have the feeling that given a choice between a white woman and a black male, an employer might not want either but he’ll be less prejudiced against the white woman.”
Some blacks have gone further, vowing to give up the term “minority” altogether, because other groups were exploiting it. Cenie J. Williams, executive director of the National Association of Black Social Workers, charged that “Other ethnic and religious groups have piggy-backed on our real and conceptual thrusts and . . . walked away with resources . . . allocated to benefit black people. . . . The term minority has been bastardized [and] has caused black people to receive less than an equitable share of available resources.” In a similar vein, the president of Fisk University has characterized as “unadulterated racism” the view that “the status of the black people is ‘just like’ or substantially ‘the same’ as the Italian-American, Polish-American, Irish-American, Jewish-American, . . . and/or Russian-American.”
In the present climate of bitterness, such rebuttals are likely to have little effect on the “other” groups in question. The head of one women’s organization—the Women’s Equity Action League—has argued that women are actually worse off than blacks (“The statistics show that women are making much less than black men”). The new ethnic militants go further. “We are the new minority,” said a white anti-busing demonstrator in Boston. “We are discriminated against because of our ancestry and skin color. . . . We have been scared, threatened, beaten, arrested, prosecuted, and persecuted. We have suffered enough. We intend to get our fair share.”
There was a furor in New York last January when a federal judge ordered that no further appointments to New York City’s police department be made unless half of them were black and Hispanic. A coalition of Italian, Irish, Jewish, and German groups opposed the decision, stating that “most police applicants, white and black, have suffered from the same social and economic disadvantages.” But if the logic of this position would seem to favor the abolition of affirmative-action programs altogether, and the reinstatement of a principle of merit in hiring, the main tendency today is in the opposite direction, toward widening the definition of affirmative action so as to include more and more “oppressed” groups.
“We’re more in favor of affirmative action than blacks are,” declares the director of the Italian American Foundation, “because we are yet to benefit from it, and we need it badly. The fact is that Americans of Eastern and Southern European stock—Italians, Poles, Slavs, Lithuanians, Hungarians, and others—are about as underrepresented in higher education as are blacks.” A Mexican-American member of the Los Angeles School Board recently complained about the success of black colleges in obtaining massive federal aid: “There are 120 black colleges and universities receiving multimillion dollar subsidies from Congress, but there isn’t a single, goddamned Mexican-American institution of higher education.”
Leo Sarkisian, writing in the Armenian Weekly, warned readers to “avoid joining other ‘ethnics’ who oppose affirmative action” and urged them instead to “pursue means of benefiting from affirmative action—i.e., seeking official status as a ‘minority.’ . . .” The American Committee for Cape Verde urged Cape Verdeans to write their Congressmen and the Census Bureau and demand inclusion as a distinct group in the 1980 census to obtain their fair share of federal aid.
_____________
Nor do the demands of contending groups stop at such things as racial and ethnic quotas, proportional representation, preferential treatment, government subsidies, and community control—all of which have already been introduced at various levels of society. If the Mormon call for statehood in the 19th century or the more recent one by Black Muslims sounded farfetched in their time, they seem quite plausible today as ethnic “leaders” demand a total overhaul of the premises on which American society is based. The American-Indian writer Vine Deloria, Jr., for example, has called for a restructuring of our national entity, with groups rather than individuals comprising the basic elements of the nation: “The contemporary interpretation of ‘we the people’ in reality means ‘we the peoples,’ we definable groups, and thus admits minority groups into constitutional protection which they should have received as groups a century ago.”
Along the same lines, the black writer Harold Cruse has complained that the Constitution, with its focus on individual rights, was “conceived and written by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants for a white Anglo-Saxon society.” His solution is to convert individual rights into group ones by amending the Constitution to “reflect the social reality of America as a nation of nations, or a nation of ethnic groups.” Not to be outdone, Hispanic spokesmen too have called for “political, cultural, and language existence,” arguing that both the government and traditional civil-rights advocates have not recognized their unique needs.
_____________
Meanwhile, short of such drastic solutions, government at all levels has been busily funding ethnic projects ranging from street festivals to bilingual education, and increasingly appointments are made on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity. Businesses, private associations, and universities have instituted “benign” quotas; they openly admit to hiring or appointing specific minority-group members even though doing so excludes others because of their race or ethnicity. In 1973, for example, the National Education Association added provisions to its constitution requiring that every delegation of teachers to the national convention reflect the “minority” population of its state, that the association’s national president be from a minority group at least once in every eleven years, and that 20 percent of the association’s executive committee and board of directors be minority-group members.
Individual ethnic and religious groups, too, have begun policing themselves for traces of past or present discrimination. Thus, in 1977, at the 79th annual conference of Jewish communal service workers, the delegates passed a resolution critical of their own profession for practicing sexual discrimination. A committee report presented at the conference pointed out that while 29 percent of the men in communal service work were executives, less than 1 percent of the women were, and that while one in every four male professionals earned a salary of over $30,000 per year, only one woman in five hundred did so.
The American Friends Service Committee has gone even further. In 1976, the AFSC created a committee to “consider oppression and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in addition to race and sex.” Based on this report, the organization has since developed a plan which calls for hiring goals of 20 percent. “Third World” employees, 40 percent women, and at least one “gay person” in each of ten regional offices, five in the national office, and a minimum of two on each of the organization’s sixteen committees.
_____________
Thus, instead of encouraging intergroup compromise and accommodation, measures by government agencies and other institutions have brought about increasing competition and conflict for the benefit of separate groups. If this pattern continues, we will see the creation of de-jure enclaves and political parties in which the appointment and election of individuals will be mandated along racial, religious, and ethnic lines. As this Balkanization of America comes to pass, our nation will be plagued with all the suspicions, resentments, and conflicts which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights sought to avoid and which today characterize so many parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
