My Opinion
Well-intentioned affirmative action in an unfair world

Sean is a friend of mine. He's one of those people I met almost accidentally freshman year and kept running into him, so we became friends. He and I were both University Scholars, so we had something in common -- we studied a lot, maybe too much. Grades and internships had always been major topics of conversation for us. (I know, it's all kinda pathetic.)

Recently, we noticed we were getting older and scarily close to graduation, so the conversations turned to job hunting. He was a year ahead of me, so I watched him go through the process of interviewing and praying for a job.

Not that he needed to pray. He knew what he wanted to accomplish at Penn State, and he worked for it. As an engineering major, he knew keeping a high grade point average and gaining practical experience would make him most marketable.

He graduated with a 3.8 GPA, he had two internships with different firms.

So I thought he would have little or no trouble getting a job.

I was wrong.

Instead, he watched a very unfair world play some tricks on him.

He went head-to-head with affirmative action policies and lost. He watched women and minority classmates with less experience (or none at all) and lower grade point averages get hired before him.

He couldn't make himself much more qualified, he couldn't change the color of his white skin.

I spent a few nights watching him scream to Metallica jumping around his room in frustration, while I tried to explain why affirmative action is necessary. Western white men have been in a position of power for thousands of years, I said, and women and minorities need the help to break into the system. It'd be too easy to discriminate against us and keep hiring white men rather than dealing with the newness of women or people of color in the workplace.

"Does that justify filling the position with an engineer who can't do the job as well as I could?" he asked. Without hesitation, I said yes.

Yet I kept thinking about what he said. If he could do the work better, doesn't he deserve the job? Isn't that reverse discrimination?

But how do you discriminate against people in power?

I wasn't coming up with a lot of answers. I did see two things very clearly, however: His anger was the embodiment of the white backlash this policy was creating, and the injustices of the past are still hurting certain people today. These wounds needed to be healed.

A year later, I have come to see that the best way to solve the injustice of the past is not to create more injustice in the present, and the mission of the affirmative action program is to counterbalance the inequity of the past with inequity in the present.

Although this may help the disenfranchised get jobs, it does not earn them respect or help them survive in their new situation at work or school.

Can this society afford more anger and racial tension? That is one of the costs of affirmative action. It is creating resentment even among the more open-minded people in white culture.

The other cost, and perhaps the bigger concern, is that this "solution" tries to solve an enormous problem too easily, too quickly.

Affirmative action allows society and our government policy makers to feel good about fixing the problem of discrimination without providing substantive change. We need to raise the quality of education in predominantly minority schools (often in poor, urban centers) and change classroom atmospheres and curricula so everyone can succeed.

I shouldn't have had an Advanced Placement science teacher who wasn't sure women belonged in his class. Minorities shouldn't have to swallow biased American and European history courses; they should learn about their own cultural and intellectual heritages.

Why should women and minorities, who have fought so long for their rights, settle for anything less than true equality? We can create real respect for ourselves, but not if people are wondering if we got the job because of our sex or race rather than our brilliance and creativity. Especially not if we wonder, too.

This policy may not be fair even to the people it should help.

Sean did find a job the summer after he graduated. He stops back here to visit sometimes. He jokes that I should wear short skirts to interviews, and tells me how "a woman with my qualifications" --which are basically the equivalent of his in my field -- will definitely have an easier time than he did.

Will I? Although I'm a woman, I am white and from upper-middle-class suburbia outside Philadelphia. I may not look so good to those law schools or employers who are looking to fill certain quotas.

Thanks to Shelby Steele and Martin Kilson for providing some food for thought for this piece.