Affirmative Action Means Equal Opportunity for All

The recent 6^th Circuit Court of Appeal decision striking down 2006′s anti-civil rights Proposal 2 constitutional amendment gives Michigan governments and universities the opportunity to run its operations like a business.

 All over the nation, businesses large and small are recognizing the value of diversity and inclusion. GM, Ford, General Electric – almost the entire Fortune 100 – have in place affirmative action policies that have been prohibited in Michigan. So do leading private universities around the state and nation.

 Those organizations have adopted those policies for two reasons:

 

1. They work. They make them better, more efficient, and more able to operate in today’s increasingly diverse global communities.
2. They are realists. Corporate and university leaders use affirmative action as a tool to ensure that all aspects of potential hires and enrollees are considered – so the outcomes of their businesses will be maximized.

 Let’s look at the first point.

 When I visit with businesses and schools, I often ask “Do you have all the talent you need? Do you have all of the best and the brightest?”

       Of course, the answer is, “No.”  Casting a wider net for the best and brightest only makes our businesses and schools recruit, hire and retain the most creative, talented folks. 

University of Michigan Professor Scott Page has written a rigorously researched book, “The Difference,” that shows how progress and innovation depends less on lone thinkers with big IQs or good test scores than on having a group of qualified but diverse people working together and using their experiences and backgrounds to come up with superior outcomes.

 That’s the reason corporations and most major private universities around the nation use affirmative action to help ensure that from the large pool of highly qualified candidates for key jobs they select people with a diversity of experiences and viewpoints to operate their companies and fill their student bodies.

 They know they have to do this because they understand the real nature of the world we live in. They know that racial and gender discrimination is still a daily fact of life in America and in Michigan. Indeed, the Michigan Roundtable’s annual poll about attitudes toward discrimination in 2010 showed that only 10 percent of voters say that racial discrimination is a “thing of the past,” while 57 percent of African American voters say racial discrimination continues all of the time or frequently.

 Affirmative action programs are the most powerful tool yet developed to overcome discrimination in America. Proposal 2 took that tool away from state and local governments in Michigan.

Supporters of Proposal 2, like Attorney General Bill Schuette, overlook discrimination. In quickly announcing plans to appeal the federal court decision, Schuette stated that Proposal 2 “embodies the fundamental premise of what America is all about: equal opportunity under the law.”

“Under the law” is very different than “in the real world.” “Under the law” means words, like the words written by slave owners in 1776, “All men are created equal.” Just because someone said those words didn’t mean all women and men WERE equal. And just because those who wish to overlook discrimination want to use the words “equal opportunity under law” doesn’t mean we have equal opportunity in the real world.

It’s no surprise that white and black attitudes toward racial discrimination are so different, or that women view gender discrimination as more prevalent than do men. When many of our overwhelmingly white, male political leaders look at the issue of affirmative action, they look at through a lens of ignorance. They are not venial; they just choose to remain blind to the racism and gender discrimination that runs through our world today. If you look at discrimination through the eyes of a person of color, or a woman, you see a very different world.

A rational affirmative action program – not any kind of quota, but an insistence that we look past test scores to look at all of the value applicants for a university, a job or a contract can bring to the position at hand – is a smart way to help bring us closer to creating equal opportunity for all.

 It’s so smart that many of our most profitable businesses use affirmative action every day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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