For Immediate Release June 26, 1997

DIVERSITY AND NATIONAL UNITY DON'T MIX

by Charles King

The central goal of the Civil Rights Movement of the early sixties was the equal opportunity for all people regardless of race or ethnicity. Unambiguously the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned all discrimination based on race and ethnicity.

Well and good. No, not quite. Not for long. The liberal establishment--in both political parties--and in government bureaucracies and the courts soon began confusing equal opportunity with equal results. President Nixon, in direct violation of the Civil Rights Act, ordered set-asides for minority businesses. The Supreme Court ruled that employers, public and private, must justify any "racial imbalance" zealous civil rights investigators found in their employment practices.

In time affirmative action programs have stood the anti-discrimination clause in the Civil Rights Act on its head. Using goals and timetables both public and private employers hired and promoted by the numbers. "Goals" evolved into outright quotas. And quotas were approved by the Supreme Court itself, even though the Act explicitly forbade racial preferences in hiring of the anti-discrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act."

Now, decades later, a feature article in the business section of the Boulder Daily Camera (June 9) by Charles Ashby tells us that Boulder County employers "often have difficulty finding qualified minority workers." Not qualified workers, oh no, but "qualified minority workers."

The difference is racial.

Ashby explains that apart from "prohibitions against discrimination in hiring, there are no laws that require private companies to establish diversity or affirmative action plans." Yet, many do so, he adds, "because it makes good business sense or to avoid being accused of discrimination." StorageTek, the only company identified by name, "recruits minority workers because it deals with a worldwide clientele. "As if having a worldwide clientele makes racial preferences in hiring and promotion desirable.

Let's be candid. On the one hand, laws prohibit companies in Boulder and everywhere else from discrimination; on the other hand, many companies, Ashby tells us, have affirmative action plans "because it makes good business sense (to do so) or to avoid being accused of discrimination." These companies are practicing affirmative action discrimination and complaining of "difficulty finding qualified minority workers." They are treating people differently because of their group membership. That's racism, period.

It is hard to understand why StorageTek and other Boulder County employers give more weight to appearing "politically correct" than they do to providing a level playing field for all of their employees.

Which brings me to President Clinton's address in San Diego in which he asked Americans "to act together to build one America." In commenting on Clinton's talk during The News Hour with Jim Lehrer (June 16), Ward Connerly, a University of California regent, said: "The president says that he wants to bring us together as one nation. But he wants us to use race to treat ourselves differently. And the central theme of this whole issue about race has to be a discussion about what we do about affirmative action preferences." Ironically, Clinton embraced affirmative action.

Clinton was right on one thing at least: he recognized the need for unity, something universally ignored by the uncritical advocates of "diversity." "It's the very diversity in California," Ward Connerly said, "that has inspired us (sponsors of the California Civil Rights Initiative) to say: 'We can't go on doing what we've been doing in the past. . . we're trying to build a society in which . . . race will not matter.' And I don't know how we do that if we keep living in the past. And our skin color, and how we spell our last name are not measurements of who we are."

Opponents of affirmative action love the natural diversity in American society; they oppose the artificial 'diversity" in which race matters where it should not matter.

Charles King is a University of Colorado professor emeritus of Spanish and a Senior Fellow at the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank located in Golden, Colorado.

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