Bill Clinton’s outburst last week at women’s groups who were "playing quota games" by carping about the number of women in his Cabinet was a welcome gesture of independence from the parochial agendas of Democratic interest groups. But it was also vaguely reminiscent of Lord Byron’s line about a conflicted maiden:
A little she strove, and much repented.
And whispering "I will ne’er consent"-consented.
Even as he denounced "quota games, Clinton was accommodating the quota psychology by giving assurances that his ”look like America" Cabinet would have at least four women (it does), and by suggesting that one or more prime candidates had been nudged aside on grounds of white maleness. Indeed, the Clinton transition team had signaled for weeks that no males-at least, no white males-would even be considered for attorney general.
The scuffling over the Clinton Cabinet’s chromosome count is a harbinger of a far more consequential, if less visible, struggle that will rage inside the Clinton coalition in 1993 and beyond, over how hard civil-rights enforcers should push the nation’s employers to pursue diversity through use of preferences for women and, especially, minorities.
Striking the right balance in this area will be exceedingly difficult even for one so adroit as Clinton at tempering his commendable pursuit of diversity with a well-timed shot at quota-minded "bean counters." The greatest danger to Clinton, and to this multiracial nation’s future, is that his administration will quietly succumb to unrelenting pressure from civil-rights and women’s groups to adopt their legal agenda wholesale. This would not merely give employers a healthy incentive to seek diversity; it would institutionalize something very like quotas throughout the American work force.
That would amount to both a betrayal of the Reagan Democrats who supported Clinton as an anti-quota candidate and a formula for accelerating the nation’s bal kanization into racial and ethnic tribes more intent on fighting over slices of the national pie than on working together to make it bigger and better.
Of course, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and other civil-rights groups vehemently deny seeking "quotas," while denouncing the charge that they do so as a "smokescreen" created by those who would "turn back the clock on civil rights."
Such pronouncements border on intellectual dishonesty. If you read the fine print, you will find that the Leadership Conference has been able to pose as-anti-quota only by redefining the word in an absurdly narrow way, as encompassing only rigid numerical requirements forcing employers to hire unqualified minority group members or women.
Liberal interest groups like the Leadership Conference have, in fact, become addicted to quotas in the sense of pressuring employers to use racial and gender preferences to achieve statistical proportionality in their work forces, Originally devised as a last-ditch remedy for discrimination, preferences have become a tool of civil-rights groups seeking to redress social inequalities by forcing even unbiased employers to hire by the numbers.
Some legal pressure on employers to pursue diversity is justified by the benefits in enlarging opportunities for racial minorities. But overdoing this pressure imposes high costs, which include bumping an arguably better qualified white (or Asian) person for each black person who benefits, the social divisiveness that this entails, and an unquantifiable reduction in productivity. Another, increasingly serious, cost is the dishonesty and unfairness inherent in branding as discriminators employers whose only sin is hiring the best employees they can find.
The Proportionality Chimera
One major thrust by civil-rights groups next year will be to push the Clinton administration to construe the ambiguously worded Civil, Rights Act of 1991 as creating an almost insuperable presumption that unlawful discrimination must be afoot whenever an employer’s hiring or promotions fail to achieve statistical proportionality.
Some such presumption would be reasonable enough if members of each racial group and gender were equally likely, on average, to possess the skills needed by employers. But that is manifestly not so. Most black people, for example, have grown up in poorer families and attended worse schools than most whites, and, therefore, have fewer marketable skills; this (and not "cultural bias") is what produces such dramatic racial disparities in "standardized test scores. While this inequality is a tragic legacy of slavery and past discrimination, the resulting under-representation of black people in many job categories is not necessarily evidence of current discrimination; in many cases it is the logical outcome of a colorblind process designed solely to choose the best qualified applicants.
The hard fact, which civil-rights groups have labored with considerable success to obscure, is that given the unequal distribution of marketable skills in our society, most large employers can assemble racially proportionate work forces in skilled jobs only if they discriminate in favor of blacks and Hispanics, by preferentially hiring them ahead of equally or better qualified whites and Asians.
Employers can defend against statistically based "disparate impact" suits under the 1991 act by showing their selection criteria to be "job related" and "consistent with business necessity." But if the Clinton administration and the courts adopt the approach to such cases espoused by the civil-rights groups, even employers who have rigorously purged their selection processes of racial bias may have to adopt quotas to avoid liability.
To pre-empt employer efforts to prove they are only seeking the best-qualified applicants, the civil-rights groups seek to classify as "qualified" a far larger pool of potential job candidates than would an employer seeking the most productive possible work force; they also seek to discredit as insufficiently job-related and/ or culturally biased virtually every objective test ever devised for measuring and ranking candidates’ relative qualifications; and they tar as presumptively discriminatory all subjective criteria that fail to produce racially proportionate numbers.
In short, in their commendable zeal to create more opportunities for minorities, the groups are chipping away at the very idea that employers-or at least those whose numbers don’t come out right-have the ability to identify, or the fight to choose, the candidates most likely to do the job well.
Consider the American Civil Liberties Union’s Dec. 21 "Blueprint for Action for the Clinton Administration." It urged a "stringent" interpretation of the 1991 act as a mandate for proportionality. The ACLU also, remarkably, urged Clinton to bring back an Orwellian practice that Congress outlawed last year: "score norming" of written tests used in screening applicants. Also known as "race norming," this involves rigging test scoring to give members of each racial group its proportionate share of the highest scores regardless of actual performance, by reporting not the raw scores but the test-takers’ percentile rankings within racial groups. As reported to employers and candidates, race-normed scores rank black and Hispanic candidates far above many whites and Asians who in fact had higher raw scores.
Quota Psychology
A similar quota psychology appears to animate at least one member of Clinton’s Justice Department transition team, Profesor Emma Coleman Jordan of the Georgetown University Law Center. In the November 1992 newsletter of the Association of American Law Schools, of which she is president, Jordan champions something very like blatant quotas in admissions, and suggests that because blacks don’t do as well as whites on standardized admissions tests, law schools should consider abandoning such tests to avoid "the stigmatizing effect of equating merit and high test scores."
In the name of racial justice, in other words, Jordan seems inclined to make it harder for admissions offices (and, perhaps, for employers as well) not only to rank candidates in order of their apparent abilities, but also to measure their apparent abilities at all.
It’s true, as Jordan suggests, that standardized tests are a rough and not always a fair measure of potential for educational (or job) performance, especially in the case of people from disadvantaged backgrounds. But preferences premised on membership in a racial group do as much to compound as to correct this unfairness when, for example, a white coal-miner’s daughter is rejected to make room for a black lawyer’s son with lower test scores and grades.
The liberal groups’ addiction to preferences is not hard to understand, given the nation’s heartbreaking lack of progress in bringing many blacks into the economic mainstream, with the accompanying descent of the inner cities and their schools into despondency and disorder. But contemporary discrimination-while still a virulent force that the Clinton administration should attack with renewed vigor-is not the principal cause of these maladies. And the strong and socially divisive medicine of racial preference will not cure them.
Bill Clinton knows this. What remains to be seen is whether he can find a way to move us away from the zero-sum game of redistributing opportunities through racial preferences, while sustaining the hopes of poor blacks and other minorities by revitalizing their neighborhoods and schools, offering job training to those whom the schools have already failed, and creating new jobs.