[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 34 (Thursday, February 23, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H2158-H2163]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 1995, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Clyburn] is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. CLYBURN. Mr. Speaker, let me begin by paying homage and respect 
to those who give their lives and sacrifice also at Iwo Jima 50 years 
ago. We all owe them a great deal of debt and gratitude. Of course, as 
I think about all of the sacrifices that were made at Iwo Jima, I think 
that this was four years before the Executive Order, 5 years before the 
Executive Order by President Truman that made it possible for many of 
the men who made sacrifices at Iwo Jima to get some semblance of the 
recognition that they were due.
                              {time}  2130

  Because it was by Executive order of President Harry Truman that the 
Armed Forces were integrated and that men of color were then able to 
take their rightful places in the overall defense of our Nation. And we 
have come a long way from that, all the way up to having recently 
celebrated a person of color to hold the highest military office in our 
land. And we all join tonight with those who have gone before us this 
evening to celebrate those sacrifices.
  Of course, that brings me to the issue that we are here to discuss 
tonight, an issue that we are hearing a lot about today, the issue of 
affirmative action. I am pleased to be joined tonight for this special 
order by my good friend, the Representative from Mississippi, Mr. 
Thompson, Bennie Thompson, and my good friend, the gentleman from 
Alabama, who is Representative Earl Hilliard.
  The three of us tonight are going to spend just a little time, 
hopefully trying to shed some light on a subject that has been the 
object of a lot of heat in the last few days.
  Let me begin by stating what I think is the obvious for all of the 
people of goodwill in our great Nation. And that is the goal that we 
all strive for, and that is a goal of a color-blind society. That is 
what our goal is. I would suspect that that is the goal of most honest, 
right-thinking, reasonable people in America.
  The question becomes, how do we get there? I do not believe that 
anybody would read the recent census figures that arrived in my office 
today over exactly where all of the segments of our society stand; that 
is, where they stand as relates to equality of pay, the relative pay of 
one group as opposed to the other. We all understand that that is 
something that needs to be addressed.
  One of our Supreme Court justices said a few years ago that in order 
to get beyond color in our society, we must first take color into 
account.
  Let me share, Mr. Speaker, with the listeners tonight something that 
I think makes that point very, very vividly. I hold in my hand an 
article from a newspaper in my State, published on February 6. It is 
interesting. This article says that of the 119 occupied seats on boards 
and commissions in a particular county, 77 percent are filled by men 
and 95 percent are filled by whites.
  Now, the interesting thing about this is that the gentleman in charge 
of all of this had this to say, and I quote: ``I do not think anybody 
has ever really paid any attention to it. Women can do the job as well 
as men. But I don't know if we have ever taken a look at it. Maybe we 
should.''
  Then one of the elected officials from that same county had this to 
say about this: ``The racial and gender makeup of commissions is 
something I had really not thought about. Maybe we should commission a 
study of the issue.''
  Now, Mr. Speaker, what we want to talk about here tonight is exactly 
this. This is something that people just do not seem to think about, 
because it is taken for granted. For some reason people just feel that 
things, we have been doing it this way, so there is nothing wrong with 
continuing to do it that way. But the fact of the matter is, for us to 
reach a color-blind society, we must first take color into account. And 
so tonight I am pleased to be joined first by my friend, the gentleman 
from Alabama, Mr. Hilliard, who I am going to refer to at this time, 
for him to sort of set the stage for us as we try to discuss this issue 
to the point that maybe we can get
 some good, high-level intelligent discussion of this rather than all 
the heat that we have had in the last days.

  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Alabama [Mr. Hilliard].
  Mr. HILLIARD. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. 
I would like to say, first of all, that I think perhaps we may want to 
give some type of quick historical analysis of why affirmative action, 
because that is the subject we want to talk about tonight.
  Soon after the Civil War, we had a period in our history that we 
called Reconstruction. And during that period, there were those who 
wanted to make sure that former slaves could participate in the 
political process in every respect and participate fully as Americans 
in our society.
  So we had a great deal of bureaus that were established to do just 
that. They had certain objectives. And, of course, you know that was 
about very close to 150 years ago. And during that time, the 
Reconstruction period, the State of Alabama was represented by three 
different congresspersons who were all black Republicans and they were, 
so to speak, my predecessors.
  After reconstruction, it took about 117 years before Alabama, once 
again, had an African-American to represent the State of Alabama in 
Congress.
  Well, it is interesting to note that during the period of 
Reconstruction, there were a large number of affirmative action 
policies and, in fact, affirmative action laws. And those laws were 
passed by various State legislatures and by the U.S. Congress itself.
  But by 1895, and very close to 1900, none of those laws existed, 
because of all types of problems that occurred from the majority to 
deny participation fully in the American society. Blacks did not and 
were not able to participate in the laws, lawmaking bodies of the State 
of Alabama or any of the former Southern States. And they were not 
allowed to hold Government jobs. They were not allowed to do other 
things that the average citizens took for granted, the average white 
citizen.
  Of course, this went on until about 1954 or earlier, maybe a few 
years earlier in some of the States. But between the period of 1865 and 
1954, about an entire century, there were those that rode the curve, so 
to speak.

                              {time}  2140

  There were periods of times in several States where blacks were able 
to perform according to their capacity, their ability. They received 
certain preferences, and this was for only a short period of time 
during Reconstruction. Then the curve dropped back to where it was 
before the Civil War. All of the programs that had been put in place to 
protect them, to make sure that they were able to participate in the 
American Government society, were terminated.
  During this void from Reconstruction up until 1954, some States 
realized that African-Americans should be able to participate in the 
electoral process, should be able to participate in certain 
governmental activities, so there were a few laws made that were not 
affirmative in nature, but they did state affirmatively that 
segregation or discrimination would not exist in certain areas of our 
society, or in certain industries, or with certain Government 
[[Page H2159]]  jobs. Of course, the real breakthrough was with Harry 
Truman, when he gave that Executive order that in essence was to begin 
what we know as affirmative action, when he gave that directive of the 
Armed Forces to start making changes.
  Many of those soldiers had participated in World War II. They later 
participated in the Korean Conflict, and in other conflicts since that 
time. When they came back after fighting for freedom for other 
countries and for this country, many of those soldiers realized that 
they were not yet free, that they still were denied opportunities. So 
they went to the streets. As a result of their activities, Congress 
decided to make changes. Instead of saying that segregation and 
discrimination were wrong, they decided to state in affirmative terms 
certain things that would take place and that would make a difference. 
They stated it not in the negative sense but in the affirmative sense. 
So affirmative action really became a concept, or a tool, that could be 
used to sort of integrate African-Americans into the political process 
or into the work force. It was made to, I would say, level the playing 
field, because there had been a series of laws, we called them down 
South Jim Crow laws, that had been put in place that tilted the playing 
field in our American society in favor of white males. They were the 
privileged class. Everything possible, every opportunity, every rule 
and every regulation was made to give them an opportunity to maintain 
their privileged status from 1872, after the period of Reconstruction, 
up until that directive that President Truman gave.
  Affirmative action is a concept or a tool that would not tilt the 
field in terms of giving preferences to African-Americans but would 
give preferences only for the purposes of making that playing field 
level.
  I submit that although some of those laws have been on the books for 
perhaps as long as 40 years, the playing field is still not level.
  Mr. CLYBURN. I thank the gentleman very much. Let me say before I go 
to our friend the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Thompson], I am glad 
you pointed out the affirmative nature of the Executive order of 
President Truman as it relates to the Armed Forces. It may be good for 
people to know that in 1961, I think March of that year, President 
Kennedy issued an Executive Order No. 10-924. In that Executive order 
he said something very interesting, that it is the plain and positive 
obligation of the U.S. Government to promote and ensure equal 
opportunity for all qualified persons.
  The question, the two operative words there are to promote and to 
ensure. It did not say to make a statement, but to actively promote, to 
actively go about doing something; and to ensure the equal opportunity.
  I want to point that out, because the Executive order that a lot of 
us talk about that came along later under President Johnson who 
reissued this Executive order but also issued in addition to it 11-246, 
and that is when we first heard the terms being used affirmative 
action, because that Executive order called upon the Government to take 
affirmative steps to ensure, not just to say we will not discriminate, 
that is a passive thing, but to be active and say we are going to go 
out and we are going to recruit where we did not recruit before.
  I remember when I was a student at South Carolina State University, I 
graduated from there back in 1962, when minority people went out 
recruiting people to work in the various industries around the State of 
South Carolina, nobody ever came to South Carolina State University. I 
do not know if they came to Tougaloo. But nobody ever came to South 
Carolina State. I never knew where the jobs were. Nobody in my class 
knew where the jobs were. Nobody ever said
 that this place is open for you and you should feel free to come and 
apply for one of the jobs here that you are qualified for. So like 
everybody else, we felt obliged to go and teach school, or some of my 
friends later on went to law school. But I went out and I taught school 
until such time as things opened up and I could go and apply for one of 
those jobs.

  I am going to yield now to our good friend the gentleman from 
Mississippi [Mr. Thompson]. Maybe he can shed some additional light on 
this subject.
  Mr. THOMPSON. I thank the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. 
Clyburn], and I applaud him for reserving this time to talk about what 
probably will be the most explosive issue debated during the 104th 
Congress.
  What I would like to do is, believe it or not, to quote a Republican 
on the affirmative action issue before I start. Last Sunday in a ``Meet 
the Press'' program, Jack Kemp said that affirmative action is a dagger 
pointed straight at the heart of America.
  Basically what he is saying is, if this country plays the race card, 
in effect, we are going to split this country right down the middle.
  I submit that we can do better. This is the greatest country in the 
world. We have risen to the occasion in times of adversity in the past, 
and I think before we succumb to what is called the angry white male 
syndrome, we need to take a deep breath and look.
  While we will do that, Mr. Speaker, let me just say that sometimes, 
being from the State of Mississippi, I am convinced that many of the 
affirmative action and civil rights laws that we have on the books came 
because my State did not treat African-Americans properly. Our history 
is a history that is laden with bodies, it is laden with blood, it is 
laden with a lot of things we are embarrassed about.
  Just to give a few indications, my State is one of a few that is yet 
to adopt equal opportunity in employment and other things as a law of 
the land. You, yourself, directed for a number of years the South 
Carolina Human Affairs Commission. We tried unsuccessfully for about 10 
years to get our State to adopt it. The only recourse we had was to go 
to the Federal laws through EEOC and others to get employers and other 
people to do the right thing.
  Clearly there is a need for affirmative action. But taking it along 
with what the gentleman from Alabama [Mr. Hilliard] said earlier, the 
history of it from the standpoint on education and any other 
prerequisite you can look at, all of us went to school systems that 
operated under the dual system, supposedly separate and equal, but, as 
we know, they were separate and unequal. Much of the education and 
experience we received was inadequate. Nonetheless, some of us 
survived. But the point to be made is that if we had not had 
affirmative action, many of the schools that are now integrated would 
not be there.
                              {time}  2100

  For myself, I wanted to be a lawyer. Unlike Mr. Hilliard and most of 
the other Members here, law school was not an option for me in my 
State, but nonetheless some other people went. My State went so far as 
to say we will send you to any school out of State you want to go to as 
long as you do not want to go to a white school. That was unfortunate. 
They paid 3 times the money to send me out of State to school than to 
let me go to a school in that State.
  So there are a number of things that we have to understand. But I 
think we cannot let this color-blind notion fool us. If we think 
America is a color-blind society, we are fooling ourselves. It is a 
good code word but it does not work. It does not work simply because 
all of the Presidents since that initial Executive Order that you 
referred to earlier, every President since Kennedy has renewed that 
Executive Order.
  So, up until now we are operating under executive orders that talk 
about affirmative action being the law of the land. As we go into this 
discussion we will quote some statistics to the people listening to 
show that even with the laws on the books we still have a long way to 
go.
  So what I would like to do is reserve the balance of the time for the 
colloquy that we will enter into to just discuss the whole notion of 
affirmative action and make sure there is some understanding.
  But the last point is, without moving it too far, you really have to 
have been a victim of what we are talking about to really understand 
it. For most of us who are over 45, we never had new textbooks in our 
community, we never had the opportunity to play in a public playground 
or swim in a public swimming pool, and so some of us take very 
[[Page H2160]]  seriously the notion of affirmative action because this 
was the only opportunity that many of us ever received. Many of our 
relatives left our communities because they had no opportunity, they 
had to go north, they had to go west, so affirmative action programs 
allowed me to stay in Mississippi and pursue a career and ultimately 
end up in Congress. But had we not had those programs that allowed that 
opportunity to exist, many of those individuals who are here today 
would not be here because there was no cover or no support for that 
effort.
  So I look forward to the debate and the discussion
   on this, and there are some very startling statistics from the 
employment standpoint and other things that will highlight what we are 
talking about.

  Mr. CLYBURN. I thank the gentleman very much.
  Let me see if I may set the stage here a little bit. When we talk 
about affirmative action it is kind of interesting we hear so many 
people discussing it who seem not to really know what it means.
  As a concept, affirmative action is just a program or policy that is 
in place in order to remove the current and lingering effects of past 
discrimination. That is all it is.
  There are many ways to do that. We look at it in various fields. We 
just had a discussion earlier this week over what we need to do to 
affirmatively make programs possible for people of color, minorities, 
if you please, in this instance blacks and Hispanics, to own radio 
stations. Here we are at the time the policy which we just voted to 
eliminate was put in place, one-half of one percent of all of the radio 
stations in this country were licensed to minorities. Now that is 
blacks who, according to the census I just received, constitute about 
13 percent of our population, Hispanics somewhere around 9 percent, 10 
percent, or 11 percent, depending upon how you categorize it, but fully 
25 percent of our citizens owning one-half of one percent of the radio 
stations. So how do you do about rectifying that?
  We put in place a rule, not a law but a rule, FCC rule, and what we 
said in that rule was that anybody who would agree, nobody is going to 
make you do it, but if you say you will sell your cable or whatever 
your media may be, radio station, to a minority you get a tax credit 
for doing it. And so here we are putting the program in place, a 
program which quadrupled, better than quadrupled that. Today that 
number went to 3 percent.
  So we know that it worked, and so here we are going backwards on 
that, and then the question then becomes why is it that we do not keep 
the program in place to see can we get in the next few years to 10, or 
12 percent or something approximating these people's presence in our 
population.
  Mr. HILLIARD. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield? It is 
interesting that the gentleman stated that no one made anyone do 
anything. It was not a mandate, it was not a preference. The only thing 
it was was an incentive.
  Mr. CLYBURN. Absolutely.
  Mr. HILLIARD. That is one thing about most of the affirmative action 
programs and policies. The language is used to ensure that there is no 
such thing as a mandate or as a preference. Most of the time those 
programs or the language that is used talks of goals, talks of 
incentives, and most of the time the words that are used are words that 
we hear every day, words that today encourage, words that say to the 
extent practicable. It does not say absolutely, it does not say it has 
to be, it does not mandate and it does not grant. It only gives in many 
instances just incentives.
  Mr. CLYBURN. Absolutely.
  Mr. THOMPSON. If the gentleman will yield on that point, I served on 
the board of supervisors in the largest county in the State of 
Mississippi, and one of the notions we looked at was inclusion. When we 
looked at employment, when we looked at contracts, when we looked at 
the whole county government, we saw a void of minorities, both women 
and people of color. We devised a minority preference program, we 
created an affirmative action program for employment, and I am happy to 
report that over a period of 6 years to 7 years we increased our 
contracting from less than 1 percent with minorities to over 25 
percent. We had very little opposition to it.
  We presented this as the right thing to do, that you cannot expect 
people who are taxpayers, who make up a significant portion of a 
community, to just be totally ignored. To ignore it would be in effect 
illegal in my estimation, especially when you know it is wrong, and you 
have to plan the corrective action. We did it, it worked, and I am 
happy to report, as I said to the gentleman, that our county now leads 
the State in contracting as well as employment.
  So, it works if you are committed to it. But if you are not committed 
to making it work, it will not work.
  Mr. HILLIARD. the gentleman is absolutely correct, and there has to 
be a commitment, and in many instances that commitment must be stated 
in terms of some positive manner in which the commitment could be 
carried out, such as a particular program in order to achieve a desired 
objective.
                              {time}  2200

  You know, I recall a program that was set out, one they said was an 
affirmative action program, and it would benefit minorities, benefit 
blacks, and, in fact, it benefits more whites than blacks, and I speak 
particularly about a program that was designed so that the first person 
in a family can go to college if no one else in his family has ever 
attended college or ever graduated from college, and that sounded like 
a very good concept. It is a beautiful objective for this country. We 
want to make sure that everyone receives as much education as possible 
in this country, and we want to encourage families to educate members 
of their families.
  And in situations where you have a family where no one has ever been 
to college, you want to give some type of encouragement or you want to 
create some type of positive effort so that those persons will want to 
go out, so they set up what is called the TRIO program.
  The TRIO program was going to be for those persons who in their 
family no one had ever attended college, and it was set up, and most of 
the poor people who participate in TRIO programs across America happen 
to be white, and it is still a good program, but this is an affirmative 
program. It is set up to achieve a desired result, and we should 
continue to promote programs like that, because it helped diversify 
America. It helped educate America, and it helped open America up to 
everyone so that they could participate.
  Let me say the reason why I pointed this out is because today Speaker 
Gingrich stated that he would be in favor of an affirmative action 
policy that promoted people based upon their status or whether they are 
poor, whether they are in poverty, and so forth, and he wanted to erase 
certain categories like gender and race and other things.
  Well, all well and good. I think that perhaps that would be a good 
category. I do not have any problems with it. I think we want to get 
people out of poverty.
  So I suggest that, and I submit that, if he proposed a bill that 
would promote people out of poverty, that would give poor people an 
opportunity to participate fully in American society, I would cosponsor 
that bill with him.
  Mr. CLYBURN. Let us yield just a moment, if we
   might; we have been joined by the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. 
Fields], and I want to go to him in just a minute, because you just 
talked about the TRIO program.

  It was my great honor 2 weeks ago to meet with all of the 
southeastern participants of TRIO, that is, Outward Bound and Talent 
Search. It was my great honor to direct the Talent Search program some 
25 years ago.
  Of course, I know that the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Fields] was 
one of those TRIO students, and is a great success story as to how that 
all works.
  I was looking up some statistics trying to figure out, not an 
affirmative action program, but it was put in place for the express 
purpose of doing affirmative things: 42 percent of all the students in 
the TRIO program are white students, 42 percent. Thirty-four percent 
are black, and the rest are basically Hispanic.
  So my point is you can in fact devise a program that will reach out.
  Mr. HILLIARD. Yes, an affirmative action program.
  [[Page H2161]] Mr. CLYBURN. Affirmative action program, yes, and will 
use race as just one indicator, because now we must remember that no 
one was denied access to public accommodations on the basis of their 
status economically. You were denied access to public accommodations 
based upon color. There was not a water fountain that says ``For lower-
income'' and ``Upper income.'' It says ``For white'' and ``Colored.''
  So let us not lose sight on that.
  With that, let me yield to our good friend, the gentleman from 
Louisiana [Mr. Fields].
  Mr. FIELDS of Louisiana. I thank the gentleman from South Carolina 
for yielding.
  Let me also thank the gentlemen for carrying on this conversation 
tonight. I was sitting in my office, and I saw the gentlemen on the 
floor and decided to come over to just speak to one or two subjects.
  First of all, let me speak to the subject of the TRIO program. The 
gentleman from Alabama stated the need for the TRIO program.
  I stand, Mr. Speaker, tonight as a product of the TRIO program, and 
but for the TRIO program, I probably would not be standing here as a 
Member of this institution, and to have programs such as the TRIO 
program under attack today certainly is not only
 unacceptable but is unconscionable and certainly does not warrant 
merit to have those kinds of programs under attack.

  I thank the gentlemen for talking about the TRIO programs, because 
there are thousands of young people all across the country who need a 
program like this TRIO program. They are not black students, they are 
not white students, they are not Democratic students, they are not 
Republican students, they are just students who need help and students 
who need assistance. They are students who come from single-parent 
households like I was. I was a student who came from a single-parent 
household. I was a student who came from a family of 10. I was a 
student, and the reason why my family was a single-parent household was 
simply because my father died when I was 4 years old, and a program 
like the TRIO program basically just took me in and took other students 
like me all across Louisiana and all across this Nation and gave us 
hope and told us just because we came up by way of the rough side of 
the mountain did not mean we could not reach the top and told us just 
because we started the race late did not mean we could not finish our 
course, because the race was not always won by the swift, but sometimes 
by he who could endure the longest.
  It was the TRIO program, Mr. Speaker, when classes and teachers and 
institutions all across Louisiana called students like me disadvantaged 
and at risk and underprivileged, it was the TRIO program that said when 
they call you disadvantaged and at risk, underprivileged, they are 
talking about your income. You cannot let your income determine your 
outcome, because your mind is not disadvantaged. Your mind is not at 
risk. Your mind is not underprivileged.
  I challenge my colleagues today to keep programs like the TRIO 
program.
  Lastly, the gentleman from South Carolina, when I was watching him in 
my office he was talking about the issue of affirmative action and the 
gentleman from Mississippi stated that the issue of affirmative action 
is going to be a very heated debate this session of Congress.
  Let me, with the remaining seconds that I have, talk a little bit 
about affirmative action and put it in its proper context, because I 
get sick and tired of people talking about affirmative action and 
making people who benefit from any affirmative action or any
 set-aside program in America feel illegitimate for some reason or 
another. As long as people look at affirmative action as two parallel 
lines, then you are not really looking at affirmative action in the 
truest sense, because affirmative action is not two parallel lines 
where you take one person who is less qualified than the other and take 
the person who is less qualified and bring him to the status of a 
person who is more qualified simply because of the law called 
affirmative action.

  The better way to state affirmative action, Mr. Speaker, is a big 
circle where everybody in the circle are qualified, equally qualified, 
as a matter of fact, but the problem is many people do not get a chance 
to participate and be a part of that circle. The only way many people 
in this country get a chance to be a part of that circle and get 
included inside of that circle is through the actions of affirmative 
action.
  No person should even have a thought tonight that affirmative action 
takes people who are less qualified and elevates them to the status of 
people who are more qualified.
  The last point I want to make on the issue of affirmative action, 
even those who talk about affirmative action today, many of them would 
think the 1965 Voting Rights Act is an affirmative action bill, and the 
Voting Rights Act was an act that when there were people in this 
country who worked hard every day, who believed in this country, who 
went to war and fought for this country, but did not have the right to 
vote; in many States in this country, they gave them the right to vote, 
but they had all kinds of impediments so they would not be able to 
vote.
  I recall my own State of Louisiana when a professor who graduated, 
who got a Ph.D. Degree, who wanted to pass the literacy test in 
Louisiana, he could state the Preamble to the Constitution, he knew all 
the facets of the inclusions and the exclusions of the due process 
clause and the 14th amendment of the Constitution, but a registrar of 
voters still had the audacity, tenacity, and gall to ask him how many 
bubbles are in a bar of soap. That was an exam that he could not pass.
  I guess many people today even think that that civil rights 
legislation was affirmative action, just to give a person the right to 
vote is affirmative action.
  And I submit to you today, Mr. Speaker, that that is not affirmative 
action, and if it is, there is nothing wrong with it. There is nothing 
wrong with giving people the opportunity to register to vote and 
participate in democracy, and I say to my colleagues from South 
Carolina and Mississippi and Alabama, this is going to be a very, very 
heated session, because the last thing I want to do as a person who 
believes in fairness, a person who believes in equality, the last thing 
I would want to do is to disadvantage any individual in this country to 
the advantage of another individual in this country.
                              {time}  2210

  Mr. HILLIARD. Mr. Speaker, I just want to interject something for a 
minute, and it is a quote that appeared today in the Washington Post. 
It was a quote by Speaker Gingrich. His answer was no to a question 
that was asked, and the question that was asked was does he believe 
that affirmative action programs discriminate against white males. And 
he said no.
  So there is no need for any of us to have any problems with 
affirmative action programs, because everyone realizes and recognizes 
the fact that these programs are formative in nature. They are not 
exclusive. They do not exclude anyone, but they just promote and 
encourage.
  Mr. FIELDS of Louisiana. Let me say there is not a person in America 
who received a job because of affirmative action. People in America 
receive jobs because they are qualified. There is not a person in this 
Congress who is in this Congress because of some affirmative action 
program. You are in Congress because people went to the polls and voted 
for you. There is not a person in this country who benefited from any 
affirmative action program simply because they were less qualified. 
They were as qualified as anybody else.
  Let me say this. I wish we would get to the day in this country when 
we need not have affirmative action. I wish one day I could stand up in 
this hall, I wish I could stand up at this very microphone, and say 
there is absolutely, positively no need for any law that even resembles 
affirmative action.
  But until we get to the day of fairness, where people are treated 
because of their content, and not because of their color, and not 
because of the accent of their language, then we are not at that point 
that we ought not have programs that simply give people an opportunity 
not because they are less qualified, but give them the opportunity 
because they may be Hispanic, 
[[Page H2162]]  or they may be black, or they may be a woman, and that 
is what this program that we call affirmative action is all about. Not 
to give a person a job because they are less qualified; just give them 
an opportunity to compete.
  I want to commend the gentleman from each State for talking about the 
need to have programs of fairness, and one day we can all walk into 
this Chamber and say there is no need any longer for any affirmative 
action program because the CEO's in America, they are going to treat 
people fair, they are going to hire women, they are going to hire 
Hispanics, they are going to hire blacks. There is a need for 
affirmative action in the area of voting, because people are going to 
treat people fair. Anyone who wants to register to vote can in fact 
register to vote. There is no need for affirmative action in the area 
of scholarship, because presidents of institutions across America are 
going to grant scholarships to students who deserve them, irregardless 
of their color.
  Mr. CLYBURN. I thank the gentleman for his remarks. Before I go to my 
good friend Mr. Thompson from Mississippi, I want to say I notice that 
Mr. Hillard brought up the Washington Post of today. There is another 
very interesting article in today's Washington Post on the subject of 
affirmative action. You may recall one of the leading contenders for 
the Presidential nomination from the other party requested some 
information from the Congressional Research Department on the question 
of affirmative action. He has received that. I am pleased to have a 
copy of that.
  The Washington Post did an article today on that, and it is kind of 
interesting. The subheading indicated that affirmative action as 
practiced by our Government does not mean quotas.
  But that is not the first study to do that. I remember, I think his 
name was Dr. Leonard, I can't remember his first name at the moment, 
did a study for President Ronald Reagan, a learned professor from 
California
  Mr. HILLIARD. The ultra conservative Dr. Leonard.
  Mr. CLYBURN. Absolutely, His conclusion, affirmative action works. It 
does not mean quotas. It works. He went on to say something else, it 
works for nonblack people as well. And there was even a second study 
done under the Reagan administration by OFCCP, I don't recall the man's 
name now that did the study, but Ellen Schlam was the director of OFCCP 
at the time. The study was done at her direction. That study concluded 
that affirmative action worked and it did not work to the disadvantage 
of white males.
  So what has happened here is that there has been a concerted effort 
on the part of those people in our society who would like to see 
equality of opportunity denied to people who have sort of conjured up 
all kinds of fears, and they have appealed to the worst in many of our 
citizens, and they have turned people against certain segments of our 
society on this question. But every time it is studied, as was recently 
done and published today in the Washington Post, they find out that it 
does not mean what people say it means.
  Now let me, before going to Mr. Thompson, say this: It is kind of 
interesting. You know, if we had a container here with a cross-bones on 
the bottle, nobody would want to touch it because they would say there 
is poison in there. Well, the fact of the matter is, no matter what is 
on the label, we have to examine the contents to know what is there.
  So the point is there are a lot of programs that have had the 
affirmative action label put on them which were in fact not affirmative 
action, and the courts have made that very clear to us.
  I yield to my good friend from Mississippi.
  Mr. THOMPSON. I am glad you made that point, Mr. Clyburn. I think the 
point we have tried to make so far is that affirmative action 
recognizes that this country in its history has not been fair to 
everybody. And what we have done by those various laws is to enact 
opportunities for the affected class so that they can in effect 
compete. But if you look at the statistics, as you talked about the 
studies, we see that of all the physicians in this country, only 2 
percent are minority. Of all the engineers in this country, only 3 
percent are minorities. But as you move forward and look into the 
professional schools, if you look at the law schools in terms of the 
ABA-sanctioned law schools and approved, the majority of them have only 
one African-American faculty member, and a substantial number have 
zero.
  So what we have to do in this country is encourage diversity, we have 
to encourage inclusion. But for the most part we still have a long way 
to go. And in this entire discussion of affirmative action, nobody has 
talked about a remedy to replace it. They are just saying that in 
effect we have to do away with it.
  I submit to you that if we do away with it, and again another quote 
that came up over the weekend says that as we move toward a color-blind 
society, which we do not have, the shock therapy of eliminating all 
preference will defy and destroy our society.
  It is wrong. Another Republican made that statement.
  They recognize that this is political dynamite that you are playing 
with, because all the people that most of us know feel very dear about 
that. You know it is being debated in California. Some of us are 
prepared from a remedy standpoint to encourage our friends and 
associates to look at doing like we did in the State of Arizona. 
Perhaps if they had gone so far as to deny minorities opportunities or 
to take affirmative action laws off the books, then we should perhaps 
look toward going elsewhere and spending our dollars. And that is one 
of the responses to this madness over affirmative action that I think 
you will see more of.
  But clearly we cannot allow in the freest country in the world people 
to start moving backward, taking freedoms and opportunities away from 
many of the people who built this country by the sweat of their brow, 
for slave wages, even though most of us were slaves at the time. And we 
cannot continue to let this go.
  So I submit to you the statistics bear out that there is still a need 
for affirmative action. The statistics bear out the fact that even 
though there are a lot of laws and orders on the book, that we still 
need to work at it. And now is not the time to take those laws off the 
book. Because indeed if we do, we would in fact inflict such a wound on 
this country that I am not sure that it would ever heal.

                              {time}  2220

  Mr. CLYBURN. Thank you very much, Mr. Thompson. I do not know how 
many minutes we have left, but let me go to Mr. Hilliard for his 
closing remarks and hopefully he will save a couple of minutes for me 
to close.
  Mr. HILLIARD. Mr. Speaker, let me again thank the gentleman from 
South Carolina [Mr. Clyburn] for putting this program together. I 
wanted to say that Monday night I understand that we will have an 
opportunity to talk to the American people about affirmative action as 
a policy, as a national policy, and we want to talk about the 
objectives that we hope to achieve. Because we want people to 
understand and to realize that we desire, like everyone else in 
America, to have a color-blind society. And hopefully we will be able 
to reach that status sometime in the 21st century. But as it is now, we 
do not live in a color-blind society. And for us to ignore it or to not 
believe it means that we wish to remain blind to racial problems in our 
society and that we wish to accept things as they are instead of making 
positive or making affirmative changes.
  I am glad that the Speaker recognized and said to
   the American public that affirmative action does not discriminate 
against white males. In fact, it does not discriminate against anyone. 
There is no discrimination with affirmative action programs, no quotas, 
no mandates, no preferences. The only thing we have are goals and 
incentives, opportunities. All of this is just set up as an attempt to 
make the playing field level.

  It is still tilted because of centuries and decades of laws that 
mandated discrimination in this country. And it is going to take us 
some time to get away from that.
  I want to help America move away from that, but I know that you 
cannot have a situation, a fair situation, with the field tilted away 
from the players unless it is tilted in a direction where all the 
players are. But if the field is 
[[Page H2163]]  tilted and some of the players are on one side of the 
field and some of the players are on the other side of the field, then 
the field is not level, the game would not be fair. I do not see any 
reason why we should continue to let Americans say and think that the 
field is level when, in fact, it actually is not.
  Finally, let me say that I wish and I want America to understand that 
whereas we have been talking about affirmative actions giving 
incentives and opportunities for us and for other African-Americans, 
the fact is that most of the people who have profited from affirmative 
action programs have been white females as well as children, the 
handicapped, Indians, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and other minorities 
in this country. So when you hear affirmative action, you think of 
something in terms of an objective to be achieved that is set up in a 
program that would benefit the least of those in our society.
  I guess the best ways of closing is for me to say that last night I 
spoke about a man by the name of Booker T. Washington. I talked about 
his goals and what he wanted to do in terms of education for America 
and how he achieved that by establishing Tuskegee University. But I 
ended with a quote that he made. I wish to make that quote now, because 
it really fits this conversation.
  He stated, ``There are two ways of asserting one's strength. One is 
pushing down and the other is pulling up.''
  I just wish to say that affirmative action is just pulling up, 
pulling up everyone.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Clyburn]. 
And I thank the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Thompson] for his 
participation.
  Mr. CLYBURN. Mr. Speaker, let me just close this special order 
tonight by thanking the two of you for participating and to say that 
affirmative action is, in fact, an experiment. We are experimenting 
with ways to try to level the playing field, ways to try and bring 
people into the mainstream of our society. But America is an 
experiment. We are experimenting with something we call democracy. 
There is no religion that can be called American. There is no culture 
that can be called American. America is just a place where many 
cultures, many religions are all here trying to work together, trying 
to find common ground and in all of that, hopefully, doing so while 
recognizing and respecting the diversity that exists in all of us.
  On March 17, when I get up in the morning, I am going to put on 
something green, a tie or jacket or something, because I want to join 
with my Irish American friends in celebrating St. Patrick's Day. It 
does not take anything away from me to do that. In fact, I feel bigger 
and better when I do that. And I would hope that the day will soon come 
when all others can join me in celebrating those things about my 
culture that I hold near and dear.
  When we can do that, I believe we will have reached that goal that 
all of us would like to have achieved, that is, a color-blind society.


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