5/27/2011: Interesting story in the Chronicle by Richard Kahlenberg reporting that LBJ’s 1965 AA proposals were explicitly based on class, not the race and ethnicity that are its current focus, and the focus of UO’s Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity. Perhaps the new OIED director will have a view more consistent with LBJ, but it seems unlikely.
But as I outline in my book, The Remedy, Johnson’s speech, written by Richard Goodwin and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, never mentioned the idea of using racial preferences, and media reports at the time explicitly noted the omission. Instead the speech called for a number of race-neutral class-based programs to provide better jobs, housing, education, and health care. Johnson’s subsequent executive order (11246) called for federal contractors to take “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.” In an interview, Moynihan told me, “It always seemed to me that you would take care of this race problem in the context of a class problem.”
Likewise, Chace cites large gaps in math and verbal SAT scores between blacks and whites as a rationale for continued affirmative-action programs. On average, black students scored 209 points lower on the critical reading and math sections than white students in 2008. But Chace never probes the question of why blacks score lower than whites on average. Research that does examine this issue points primarily to the role of economic disadvantage. In a 2010 Century Foundation study, for example, Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl found that controlling for socioeconomic factors, the black/white gap on the combined math and verbal sections of the SAT shrinks to 56 points, while the gap between rich and poor is seven times larger, at 399 points.
Here’s the speech, Howard University, 1965: “My fellow Americans …”
Do you recall seeing: poor ass drinking fountains or no poor ass allowed or poor ass entrance? Or being told “you poor ass go around to the back door? If you do then call it a class issue. Yuou have been educated, don’t go back down that road, even though you may not be an economist. Ignorance is one thing. Now you know, so that means you are choosing to be ….
I remember seeing “colored” signs on motels and drinking fountains. Just barely, but I remember. And I remember being told why the courthouse had three bathrooms. The third had been for colored – male and female. And I remember hearing John Lewis saying, “Don’t let anybody tell you America hasn’t changed. It has changed.”
I also remember seeing second class facilities for poor people. In fact, this is still the general rule in our country, everywhere I look, starting with public schools. So open your own eyes.