Even apart from its emotional overtones, affirmative action can mean various things. Some see it as an extra effort to diversify a work-force, either willingly or in response to official pressure. Some companies, such as Coming Glass and Motorola, have hired and promoted minority workers without court orders or investigations by public agencies. But in the view of many people, such programs may entail a lot more. What worries them is that the "action" part demands results, to the point of placing unsuitable people in jobs. Thus they complain that candidates with lesser qualifications are favored over persons who are better prepared. A recurring question in the affirmative action debate is how best to measure merit. A case in point arose in Memphis where several hundred patrolmen took a test required for promotion to sergeant. There were seventy-five openings, ostensibly to be awarded on the basis of scores. However, only a few black officers placed in the top seventy-five, so another nineteen were promoted, even though this meant displacing white candidates who had higher scores.
On first reading, this looks like a classic affirmative action case. One of the issues was that the promotions were originally going to be based on the results of a pencil-and-paper test with multiple-choice questions, an "objective" method, used to prevent political and personal favoritism. Yet another consideration was that Memphis’s population is more than half black, and it is likely that residents of that race make up a high proportion of those in contact with the police. For the city to have effective law enforcement, it would be prudent to have a strong black presence at supervisory levels. But to obtain those officers, the department would have to reduce the importance of multiple-choice test scores. This said, it can and should be argued that what was done in Memphis was not so much affirmative action as an attempt to create a more effective police force.
Ambiguous situations such as this one beset any attempt to ascertain which individuals, and how many, have been aided by affirmative action. Still, some answers can be inferred by analyzing Census records. The table on page 156 gives distributions by race and gender for various occupations in 1970 and 1990. (Only the ten-year counts provide information in this detail.) The most noticeable fact is that white men have lost much of their dominance. They now comprise less than half of the workforce, less than two-thirds of all physicians, barely half of college faculties, and are now a minority among journal-ists. While there are variations among occupations, for the most part, white men have been supplanted by white women, Asians, and black women, essentially in that order. Except for two blue-collar trades— electricians and sheet-metal workers—black men have had smaller tins than members of other groups. In many spheres, black women have moved further and faster than black men. The most depressing reason for this trend is that fewer black men now have jobs of any sort,--and those who do are outnumbered by black women.
Affirmative action has clearly contributed to the growth of a black middle class. While merit has always existed among black workers, but was usually ignored, some professions have been taking extra steps to find people who have it. Yet when the results are tallied, it turns out that the most determined efforts have been made in the public sector, most prominently the military and the postal service, and also health and education and social services. The nonprofit sector has shown a similar vigor. The Ford Foundation has had a black president, as have Planned Parenthood and National Public Radio, the College Board and TIAA-CREF, the last a pension fund for college professors. These organizations have tended toward the liberal side of the political spectrum and have pressed for more diverse staffing on moral grounds. Somewhat more pragmatic, the armed forces have found it prudent to promote black employees to supervisory positions. Here one must be wary when relying on official figures. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 1995 that black men and women made up 7.2 percent of all persons classed as "executives, managers, and administrators." This is an all-time high, and a manifest advance over their 2.3 percent share in 1970. However, the last twenty-five years have seen a surge in title inflation, and more than 17 million Americans are now in this category, which runs all the way from corporate chairmen to night-shift supervisors at Burger King, including a lot of people who don’t oversee anyone at all. The median salary for this group is $35,568—so half make less than that—which is not usually what we regard as executive compensation.
In 1993, the most recent breakdown available at this time, black managers were paid at a ratio of $868 for every $1,000 made by whites. That, too, is an advance over 1970, when the ratio was $672 per $1,000. However, the most striking racial gaps appear at levels carrying more responsibilities and higher pay Among the white managers, 31.1 percent earned over $50,000, and 6 percent exceeded $100,000. However, only 13.5 percent of their black colleagues made more than $50,000, and a scant 2.2 percent earned over $100,000. Most of the black man-agers were considerably below the salary median, suggesting that they were several steps down the chain of command.
While we cannot say precisely to what degree the growth of a black middle class has been due to affirmative action, we do know that the policy’s adoption by government agencies has played an important role. If we look at Americans earning $40,000 or more a year, a decent middle-class income, less than 20 percent of the whites are on public payrolls. So the white middle class is largely a private-sector creation. However, over forty percent of blacks who earn more than $40,000 are employed by government, and the proportion grows to more than half if we add quasipublic positions in health and education and social agencies. This should not be surprising since, as has been noted, these are the areas where affirmative action has been most energetic. In fact, were it not for this commitment, there would not be much of a black middle class. (This also helps to explain why black managers make less than white managers: fewer black managers are in private business, where $50,000 and $100,000 paychecks are more common.)
Of course, business is where the big rewards are. A realistic measure of black promotions comes from the Executive Leadership Council, which says it limits its membership to the "nation’s most senior African-American corporate executives." Its 133 members come from 104 corporations, a ratio that itself tells us that most of the 104 firms have a single black manager in a senior position. Only 5 of the 104 corporations—Sears, Xerox. Mobil, Kraft, and Merrill Lynch—can point to three or more black persons at that level. Currently, hardly a handful of black corporate executives head operating divisions. More commonly they hold positions in charge of "community relations," "corporate diversity," and "market development," the last usually referring to promoting products among black customers. Only in one of the top one thousand corporations does a black executive have a corner suite. He is Richard Parsons, the second-in-command at Time Warner who has responsibility for the music and entertainment divisions.
The Forbes annual roster of the four hundred wealthiest Americans has cited more than a thousand different men and women since it began in 1982. Of this number, five—less than one-half of 1 percent— have been black. Two of the earliest were Berry Gordy of Motown Records and John Harold Johnson of Ebony and Jet magazines. A later addition was the late Reginald Lewis of Beatrice Foods, who was esti-mated to be worth $400 million at the time of his death in 1993. The 1996 listing contained Oprah Gail Winfrey, whose holdings were put at $415 million; William Henry Cosby Jr. was on the 1995 roster with $335 million.
(From Chapter 8 "Outcasts and Immigrants" of Andrew Hacker's "Money: Who Has How Much and Why", Scribner, 1997)
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)